(CW: depression)

*tiptoes in after 3 months*

Hey I'm back. I'll explain later. Here's the chapter:

"This will be a three-on-three battle between the challenger, Evelyn Meyers of Twinleaf Town, and the gym leader, Crasher Wake! Substitutions will be permitted between rounds. The match will be over when all three pokemon on one side are unable to battle. Battlers, are you ready?"

In the corner of my vision, I saw Thomas take his seat in the spectator stands. "Ready," I said.

"Sure am!" piped Crasher Wake, the most enthusiastic man in the Sinnoh League (Flint being a close second).

"Battle, begin!"

"Hope, it's yours!"

"Gyarados, I choose you!"

Full disclosure: I still wasn't feeling it. I barely managed to force myself out of bed that morning, meaning I was only marginally better than I'd been before. This was going to be a rough battle.

"Start it off with dragon rage!"

"Hope," I said through Definite, "Dodge and use shockwave."

Hope swooped around the bright purple beam of dragon energy and let out a jolt of electricity. Wake's gyarados hissed as it hit him.

"Hmm… Gyarados, use swagger!"

Can Hope dodge that?

"Dodge?"

Hope kept swooping around, blithely oblivious to the gyarados's display of sheer arrogance. Which, frankly, is all that the move swagger is.

"Uh… shockwave. Just keep using shockwave and dodging."

…I mean, that's all it came down to. It was a short round… Well, not really, but it was a one-sided round. Hope's shockwave wasn't especially strong, but between the type advantage and the fact that none of Gyarados's moves hit, we had a clear upper hand.

"Gyarados is unable to battle! The round goes to the challenger!"

"Nice one, Hope."

"Prrrri~" I heard from above. I smiled and pulled her back into her pokeball.

"Not bad, not bad… Let's see how you do against my quagsire!" crowed Wake.

"Def, your go." Def landed on one of the pool's floating platforms.

"Quagsire, use surf!"

The entire pool moved. A massive wave of water traveled toward Def. "Teleport into the air," I said to him. "Magical leaf."

Def followed my directions and ended up above the wave. He sent down a flurry of leaves that I think (I couldn't see) cut into the quagsire wallowing in the water. He started to fall, and I realized the platforms had been wiped out by the surf.

"Um… Keep teleporting into the air."

As Def was about to hit the water, he vanished and reappeared thirty feet up. He did this a few more times. This was the day I learned that while teleportation alters your position, it does not reduce your velocity.

"Def!" I shouted out loud when he fell too fast to stop himself from plunging into the pool.

"Water pulse!" called Crasher Wake.

"Get out of the water!"

Maybe Crasher Wake's quagsire was atypically fast. More likely he was just ready for this. By the time Def made it into the air, sopping wet, there was already an orb of water on its way to him.

It knocked him back into the water. We were floundering. I was floundering. "Def… um… magical leaf."

"Quagsire, use surf!"

I'd completely forgotten that water made leaves useless. It was a lump of psychic plant pulp versus an entire pool of water crashing down. You can guess what happened.

"Kirlia is unable to battle! The round goes to the gym leader!"

"Nicely done, Quagsire!"

"Sorry about that, Def," I said, recalling him from the water. I exhaled. Okay. Hope could handle this. "Hope, you're up!" I called, letting her out. She just needed to dodge. And she was flying, and Quagsire was ground. And she had magical leaf. We could do this.

"All right, let's go with mud bomb!"

"Dodge and use magical leaf!"

Hope dodged but didn't attack. "Hope, magical leaf! You can do it!"

"Mud bomb again!"

She swerved around the bubble of mud, but still didn't attack. "Hope, are you all right?" I asked her telepathically except mother of Arceus my telepathic pokemon had been knocked out.

"Mud shot, Quagsire!"

It skimmed her wing, but freaked her out enough that she stopped her normal erratic flight pattern. "Magical leaf!" I shouted quickly.

"Water pulse!"

Hope was still flapping, trying to regain her position in the sky, when the water pulse hit her. She tumbled from the sky, flopping into the water with a big splash.

"Hope!" I looked around for a solution. Quagsire in the water. Hope in the water too. Shockwa– no, that would hurt her more than him. There was a bubble swelling in my chest, like a headache rising but in the wrong place. Focus, dammit.

"Magical leaf!"

This one was uninhibited by waves. Quagsire barely flinched at the attack, retaliating with a mud shot that pushed Hope underwater. When she surfaced, she was unconscious.

"Togekiss is unable to battle! The round goes to the gym leader!"

"Thanks, Hope," I said, pulling her back.

Arceus, this was going so badly. My hand faltered on its way to Promise's pokeball.

I was too tired for this shit.

What if I just forfeited now? Quit while I was ahead?

I knew I couldn't.

I forced myself to pull out my last pokeball.

"Promise!"

"Floatzel is unable to battle! The match goes to Evelyn of Twinleaf Town!"

I blinked a few times. What?

The pool was still sloshing angrily from the match. Prom climbed out of the pool and came up to me.

"What's going on?" I said out loud, starting to freak out a little. "Prom, go back, you've got a battle…?"

Prom looked puzzled. "Bui?"

"What happened?" I breathed. "Prom, what happened? Def–" No, Def hadn't seen that. "Did… How? Did you fight? You couldn't have fought already?"

"Everything all right?" Wake had walked around the pool in this time.

"I… Did we win?"

He chuckled. "Sure did. That's one fast buizel you've got there."

"What's going on?" I jumped; Thomas had come up from behind, a concerned frown on his face.

"I don't… remember anything? I don't remember Promise's battle."

The grin slid off Wake's face. This was by far the most somber I'd ever seen him. "Hm. One more thing to check up on, then."

"One more?"

"The first being your buizel."

Thomas stayed with me while Wake brought Promise in for examination. "Do you remember Prom's battle?" I asked Thomas.

"Yeah. Prom did well."

"Did I do anything?"

"I thought you did. It's always hard to tell, with you communicating things telepathically now," he joked.

"Thomas, Def was unconscious. That's the whole reason I fucked up Hope's battle."

He looked taken aback. "I didn't realize."

"So Prom did okay?"

"Prom was great! He and the floatzel were evenly matched in both speed and strength, but he sort of… moved in the right ways? He knew how to deal with it."

"Sounds like Prom." I wasn't sure I could've commanded Prom at all. He might've just been too fast.

"So you don't remember it at all?"

"No. I just… I remember sending him out, and then the battle being over, but that's it."

"Has anything like this happened before?"

"I don't… wait… maybe. I think I was teleporting somewhere…" I remembered. "Yeah, I was teleporting to Eterna, and Looker said it took a long time, but it was only a few seconds for me."

"Was it a long time for Def too?"

"Def didn't teleport me there… Although I can still ask if he noticed."

I stared at the tile floor. In a minute I felt Thomas pat my shoulder. "Don't worry too much. You'll make it worse."

I laughed dryly. "Well, now I'm not worried," I said. "Worked like a charm. All better."

Thomas shook his head.

Wake returned to the waiting room, Promise at his feet. "Your buizel is healthy, for the most part," Wake said.

Prom jumped onto my lap; I scratched his head. Wake continued, "The reason I was concerned is because he has yet to evolve. He's skilled in battle, he's not especially young… frankly, he should have evolved a while ago."

I glanced at my buizel, who'd curled up happily on my leg. "Any idea why he hasn't?"

"There's a few things it could be." He took a seat diagonal from us. "Sometimes a pokemon doesn't want to evolve, so they find a way to dodge evolution every time it rolls around. You'll usually have seen your pokemon glow from time to time, if this is the case."

"I haven't seen that at all."

"Didn't think so. Another possibility is that he's gotten a piece of an everstone lodged in him somehow. We did a quick scan for everstone radiation, and your buizel came up clean."

I nodded. "Okay. What else?"

"A third inhibitor of evolution is trauma. PTSD in pokemon can sometimes stunt evolution. Has anything happened to him while he's been with you?"

"Not… not that I can think of?" There'd been a few mishaps, but I didn't think anything extreme had happened to Promise directly.

"Okay. Where did you first find that buizel?"

"Around the Valley Windworks…"

"So you haven't known him for his whole life."

"No. He was living there for at least a few years prior," I said, thinking of the little girl from Floaroma who'd grown up with him.

"Something may've happened in that time, then."

I looked down at Prom, who was asleep on… Pretending to sleep. There was an anxious crease in his forehead that gave him away.

"The doctor here found damage to your buizel's air sac inflator, which backs up that theory. You might have noticed in battle, your buizel wasn't really floating so much as treading water constantly."

"I–"

"Oh, that's right!" Wake slapped his forehead comically. "We needed to check up on you, too! Right this way."

"Wait – my buizel…?"

"…Ah. There's not much we can do," said Wake. "At least, not without a lot of time. I'd send a human with PTSD to therapy, cause I'm no expert. But there aren't counselors for pokemon, even though there should be. And getting proper healthcare to trainers and trainer pokemon is always an issue, since they travel all over the place." Wake gave a smile, but there was something sad behind it. "Anyways! A rant for another time. At any rate, there's a limit to what we know about your buizel. In cases of trauma, sometimes the pokemon will recover enough to be able to evolve; sometimes not. Your buizel may evolve eventually."

I still had concerns, but they had more to do with Promise's past and less to do with his evolution. "I'll look out for him."

"All right. If you like, you can find a professional elsewhere to get help. It's a system we gotta fix. As for you…"

Thomas stayed behind with Prom (who, surprise, was awake) while I went in. A nurse took my vitals and sat me in an examination room.

"Take a second to fill these out," said the nurse, handing me a clipboard.

I scanned what looked like a questionnaire. "What's this for?"

"Just some standard adolescent health tests. The doctor will be here in a few minutes." The nurse closed the door behind her.

With a shrug, I set out filling in the questionnaire. It was pretty clearly a mental health screening. Ranking statements on a scale from "I never do this shit" to "This is basically part of my daily routine."

And um

"Little interest or pleasure in doing things"

"Feeling tired or having little energy"

"Feeling down, depressed, or hopeless"

Some of the items were inapplicable. Others were difficult to determine just because of trainer life – have I had a low appetite, or have I gotten used to eating less on the road? When is the last time I needed to concentrate on something like reading? But the majority of the statements fell into the "Sometimes this shit happens" range.

Someone knocked on the door. A woman with pink hair poked her head inside. "Hello. You must be Evelyn."

"Yeah."

She came in and shut the door behind her. "I hear you experienced some memory loss just recently?"

"Yeah. I think."

"Okay. Did you finish with the form?"

"Oh, yeah." I handed her the clipboard. She glanced at it.

"Interesting. Okay."

"Wait, so…? What does it mean?" I asked desperately.

"It does look like you're a bit depressed. I can refer you to…"

My head was spinning. Depression. That was something that happened to other people, not me. Not me… And especially if I was Azelf's soulmate? How did that happen, if depression meant I lacked the will to get out of bed or fight a battle? How was I supposed to help the Being of Willpower himself? And depression?

"…would you like to do?"

Uh. Referrals. "I… I'm a trainer. I can't stay."

The doctor nodded. "Okay… I can also set you up with an online counselor."

I thought about it. "I… I mean, I've only had problems sporadically? Most of the time I'm fine. It's inconsistent. It's just been the last week or so."

"Do you have a strong support network?"

"I'd say so."

The doctor pulled a card out of her coat pocket and handed it to me. "I won't push you to take therapy, but it's available to you if you need it. You can call or send a message."

"Okay."

I guess in retrospect… I didn't want to need it. I figured whatever I had was probably not bad enough to warrant therapy. I figured I could go to Megan and Thomas and maybe even Looker for help, anyways. I didn't think I had time for formal therapy, either.

Whatever the reason really was, I didn't opt in. That's all.

So here's why the update took so long:

Winter quarter was complete shit in so many ways. My social and romantic lives went poorly, which made the on-and-off depression I get a lot worse (usually it's PMS related, but this quarter the timing was completely unrelated to my cycle), which made my grades drop, which made everything worse. I was doubting who I was and who my friends are left and right. And writing was affected by my depression-induced disinterest in everything. So I haven't written much at all this quarter. I felt super rusty writing this chapter.

Spring break has been good for me – I've been around people I've known for years, and who laugh at my jokes, and who know me best because they've shaped who I've become. It's helped me remember who I am. I made up with a friend I was mad at for too long. And overall it's been a relief not to worry about schoolwork and working to stay friends with people and trying to get over a boy I should've been over for *checks calendar* going on three months now.

Anyways. The next two weeks will be busy af, but after that, I think things will calm down. I do need to finish up my ML story. One thing I can promise you is that I'm never going to give up on Chance.