Ch. 27
Imported from SF2 with no description.
It had been three days since we were attacked at camp. Three days since Claire had evolved. Three days and we couldn’t spend more than three minutes together, in all of it. She couldn’t control it, couldn’t hold it back. The pressure between our minds was too much for me to bear. I couldn’t protect myself at all. All that time I thought I’d been doing well. But things had changed. In an instant, things had changed.
Mira had to act as an intermediary, and even she came out of it much worse for the wear. I had to watch from a distance as she shuddered, dry heaved, all but blacked out as she forced Claire back into the pokeball. We were all at a loss.
Tempest hated it. Hated all of it. That was her lover, her closest friend. A prisoner of circumstance. Of her own power. Sullen, moody, irritable. But even she knew it was necessary. She’d been on the receiving end of more than a few psychic attacks. She knew first hand we weren’t exaggerating.
Cocoa tried her best to keep things positive. Took up all the usual camp work everyone else would have done. Kept out of Tempest’s way, and kept Mira company. Even spent some late nights up with me, just letting me hold her and cry.
It had been three days. It felt like an eternity.
Mira finally managed to get something meaningful out of the painful moments she endured with Claire. Somewhere in the midst of that awful psychic feedback loop, maybe the answer to our problems. Or at least, a place to start.
A pokemon sanctuary, a catch-free area. Not terribly far from where my journey began. Which… meant one hell of a long walk back. Too long. There was nothing for it, but that didn’t mean I liked it any better.
I didn’t bother explaining it to any of them. I didn’t even have the words to. Just that it was something I had to do. I didn’t want to watch them suffer through all of the trip back. I didn’t want to have to talk. Or explain how I felt. Maybe it was cruel, maybe it was unfair, but the promise of “for a little bit” as I called them back to their pokeballs was really “for as long as it was going to take”.
I hung a sign on the back of my bag, asking for a ride, and started the long walk back. I hated every step of it, but there was nothing else I could think of to do. Out of the grassy plains, and back into the scrub brush and desert. The days all seemed to blend together. I walked until there wasn’t a single step left in me, and slept where I all but collapsed in the dirt. Got up, pulled a can of whatever my hand touched first out of my bag, and ate as I carried on. It could have been low grade meowth chow for all I really tasted it.
I realized after the first two days, maybe three, that my cast had cracked in the fight, a long, jagged line down the side where I’d battered the nidoking as hard as I could manage. Despite myself, I found my hand idly picking at the edges. It was probably too soon, but I didn’t want it slowing me down anymore.
Five minutes with my pocket knife saw me at least mostly free of it. I wasn’t going to leave it where it fell in the dirt, but the weight disappeared in my pack, and my atrophied arm tasted sunlight for the first time in ages.
By the end of the first week I’d all but marched back to the desert town. I didn’t bother wearing a shirt anymore. They were all filthy, anyway. My greasy, dirt flecked hair hung in my face, and people did their best to pretend they didn’t see me, or openly gawped. But it didn’t matter. They didn’t matter. None of it mattered.
Not the people. Not the gym, not the badges, not the sunshine, not the whispers and pointing. It was nothing. They were nothing.
I didn’t remember leaving the town, but as I let myself sink down into the dirt again, in the twilight hours before sunrise, I saw the lights, distant toward the horizon behind me. Everything that had hurt was all but numb. I’d bled through my sock, somewhere along the way. I could feel it tugging inside my boot.
It didn’t matter. I was asleep before I even managed to lean back against my bag.
My dreams were a muddled mix of everything that happened since I left home. A sense of confusion, of being lost. A feeling like I’d broken every promise I ever made. Of not knowing left from right. And of voices calling to me that I couldn’t quite hear. Couldn’t quite reach.
I snapped awake to the sound of an actual voice calling to me.
I couldn’t make anything out, it was muddled, my head was pounding. I tried to push myself upright and couldn’t manage it. The voice called out again, and as my vision began to clear, I found the source.
She was about my age, all but scrambling towards me, pokemon at her side. A growlithe who managed to get between us, barking up at her in warning as I tried to find my feet. She shook her head, and stepped past her partner, despite it.
“You stop that. It’s obvious he needs help, Penance!” She all but barked back, reaching down, her hands keeping me on the ground. “No, now now, you stop that. Just relax, can you tell me your name? Tell me what happened?”
“I fell asleep. I have to get moving. I … I can’t stay. Thanks, but I really need to go.” I said, trying to get up again. Trying, but everything felt leaden. I was sluggish as I managed to get to my knees.
She snapped at me, but I didn’t really hear it. Something about getting myself killed running around in the desert like that. But when she realized I wasn’t going to be dissuaded, she walked beside me. Penance took a place between the two of us, glowering up at me.
“I have to get back. She needs me to. I have to get back.” I repeated myself, and tried to wave her off, but she moved in front of me, her hands on my shoulders, and I didn’t have the strength to brush her off.
“Killing yourself isn’t getting you back there. Look at me. Look.” She sighed. “What’s going on that’s so important that it’s worth this? Look at what you’ve done to yourself. You’re bleeding. You're bleeding." She repeated, her hands holding me still, forcing that to sink in. "Talk to me. Maybe I can help.”
I realized, as my senses slowly crept awake after the rough start, that she was right. I was a walking calamity. I wasn’t helping Claire like this. I wasn’t helping anyone.
I was too tired to even cry, for all that I wanted to. Instead I just sat in the dirt, and recounted it. I didn’t even know what I was saying, I was halfway delirious from the fatigue.
She sat a little bit away from me, and smiled. “See, Penance?” She admonished her pokemon. “All of this because he loves his pokemon. Stop glaring at him.”
Penance offered a whine, but relented at last as the trainer spoke up again. “My name is Wendy, and you’re coming with me.” I tried to object, but she just shook her head, waving a finger at me. “No, you don’t. I know how important this is to you, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to do things, mister!”
Damn it all, she was right. I was being mother henned by a girl who probably wasn’t a day older than I was.
It was a couple hours later, with the nurse rubbing a lotion into my sunburned back that Wendy spoke up about the next steps.
“Trainers have to stick together, when things are rough. We might be competitors, but we’re not enemies.” She said, extending her hand to me. “I was looking forward to the gym here, but I think we need to put that on hold. Penny… Penance,” She corrected, tapping the pokeball on her hip. “Might sulk about it, but I’m calling the shots. So where is this sanctuary?”
It took a little doing, going over the map, tracing all of my steps back and then figuring out where it was. As it happened, “near” was an awfully relative term, but we finally pinned it down, and she stepped out to make some calls.
I should have done the same, but I didn’t have it in me. I didn’t want to have to explain, I didn’t want to have to think about it. I just wanted to deal with this and maybe go on vacation afterward. I’d had enough. Suddenly, the idea of going out to see a concert with Tempest, or playing in the park with Mira looked like a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.
And the situation I found myself in was a hundred miles of big, empty, and sad.
Two steps forward… one tremendous leap back.