Intellectual Tango (Revamp), Beta: Pokémon, Bill/Lanette
In the process of moving, I completely forgot about several things, the least of which is, "Oh right! Weekly update!" So that's coming atcha later on this week, but in the meantime, have another dose of prodigyshipping.
Title: Intellectual Tango
Chapter: (Set) Beta
Fandom: Pokémon
Characters/Pairings: Bill/Lanette
Genre: Romance, drama
Rating: PG-13 to R (the latter for brief flashes of sex)
Summary: "Their relationship, like every other in the history of romance, was far from simple." One-sentence stories about a boy, a girl, and all the ways one can avoid saying three simple words.
Author's Note: Originally written for the 1sentence community on LJ. Liberties taken with sentence structure. Lots of liberties. Also, #37 is indeed a reference to Pablo Neruda.
#01 - Walking
They don't hold hands because that would complicate things.
#02 - Waltz
Bill, the more poetic of the two, would sometimes describe their work as a waltz, one mind dancing in tune with another to produce something beautiful; Lanette, the more down-to-earth of the two, would jokingly ask which one of them was leading.
#03 - Wishes
Johtonians did not have legends about creatures that granted wishes (or, in hindsight, any legend that didn't end with pokémon dragging humans to unpleasant fates), so when she explained to him why she was folding down the flaps of a pinwheel, he couldn't help but be transfixed by her every word.
#04 - Wonder
Sometimes, Lanette would find herself watching Bill instead of working alongside him; as his hands carefully explored each fossil, she compared the way he worked - a mixture of childlike awe and scientific thoroughness - to an artist in motion.
#05 - Worry
Bill swears to Bebe that he doesn't care what kind of company Lanette keeps, but when five hours pass since his partner left for a date with that arrogant ace trainer, what Bill told Bebe doesn't stop him from checking his pokégear every time he thinks she isn't looking.
#06 - Whimsy
Contrary to popular belief regarding his sanity, Bill has a perfectly logical reason behind everything he does, but Lanette, who over the years learned how to decipher her partner's actions, still needs to ask why he has a ho-oh costume that "doesn't even look like a ho-oh, and anyway, aren't you studying tirtouga now?"
#07 - Waste/Wasteland
After Groudon was summoned and most of the planet died in a blaze of never-ending sunlight, they wandered the country after the end of the world, helping other survivors here and there but mostly just looking for the Garden of Eden - their Garden of Eden.
#08 - Whiskey and rum
Bill, completely drunk on whiskey and rum and other terrible decisions he can't quite remember, asks Bebe one question concerning Lanette that, unbeknownst to him, tears his best friend apart inside.
#09 - War
Team Rocket wanted a war, and the two gave them one - by feigning surrender and subsequently disappearing in the confusion while their virus crippled the organization from the inside out.
#10 - Weddings
If anyone asked Lanette if she and Bill ever considered getting married, she would respond with an icy "no"; if anyone asked Bill the same question, he would calmly reply, "Lanette hates wedding gowns, and I sincerely doubt anyone would want to see me in one, either."
#11 - Birthday
Lanette's birthday, unlike her partner's, does not fall on any day of importance in their culture and is therefore easy to forget if she doesn't mention it, but every year without fail, there is an eevee holding a new doll in her storage system account… even if she nearly forgot what day it was herself.
#12 - Blessing
"You know, Bill, Lanette's been a lot happier since the two of you began… whatever you call your relationship," Brigette says, and Bill knows that underneath that are implied meanings like "you have my consent to be this close to my sister" and "please take care of her or I'll kill you."
#13 - Bias
"If, hypothetically speaking, Jirachi appeared to you and said that it could either give you the opportunity to make the discovery that revolutionizes pokéology as we know it or allow you to meet the one person who will love you unconditionally but that you can't have both, which would you choose?" Bill asked one day, and to that, Lanette glanced at him with a bored expression, told him that was a rather silly question, but pointedly failed to give him an answer at all.
#14 - Burning
Although Bill would always jokingly call her the fiery one in their relationship (because Lanette never could hide her temper), Lanette saw in him an intensity of emotions and passions that could - as cliché as it was - be best described as a brilliant blaze; some nights she worried that it might burn up everything inside him and leave him empty and soulless.
#15 - Breathing
Her favorite sound was the one of his breathing as he slept; the nights she spent with him, she lay her head on his chest and let it remind her that they were both absolutely human.
#16 - Breaking
When Lanette walked out on him the next morning, he broke apart their prototype, took out the parts she had worked on, and reassembled it by himself using his own designs; Bill didn't particularly care that the act was childish… or that he knew the device would never run as perfectly as it did a day ago.
#17 - Belief
Between the logical, science-backed theories floating through his head, Bill believed in aliens, in yeti, in ghosts, in fairies, in Ho-oh and Mew, in a million things Lanette thought were impossible, yet the way he talked about them - with just about as much enthusiasm as he put in everything else - she almost wanted to believe in them too.
#18 - Balloon
By the time Lanette found Bill, the jigglypuff he had previously been watching was just finishing up the masterpiece it was leaving in permanent marker across his face; as it bounced away (too angry to notice Lanette), she thought briefly about waking him up but found the scene too cute to disturb.
#19 - Balcony
Regardless of how much time she spent there, Lanette knew she would never feel at home in the Sea Cottage, what with its isolation and the old, creaky atmosphere throughout the house, but on the other hand, she couldn't imagine a more beautiful view than the sight of the moon and sparkling, black ocean from the lighthouse tower.
#20 - Bane
"Oh, honestly, Bill," Lanette said, "we're only attending the gala for an hour, and you don't look that bad in a kilt."
#21 - Quiet
There were times when Brigette, Bebe, or Celio would walk into the lab to find Bill and Lanette communicating in a language of gestures and facial expressions, and not a single one of them could figure out how one understood the other perfectly.
#22 - Quirks
Bill maintained a happily flippant attitude towards all the rumors about his sexual habits, his psychological stability, and a thousand other things about what he did in his spare time; after all, what did any of it matter if Lanette had no trouble accepting him as her friend and partner, despite all of his real oddities?
#23 - Question
Many of Bill's odd questions ("I'm bored; will you help me invent a time machine," "it's three in the morning; would you like to go with me to a fantastic coffee place," "I want to try a psychological experiment; do you know where I put the drill") Lanette could answer with a simple "yes" or "no," but there was one question he asked after he kissed her one day that she couldn't answer right away.
#24 - Quarrel
There was a day when Bill, in one of his more egotistical moments, went as far as implying that he could do a better job at Lanette's half of the project than she could, but from the moment she declared she needed a break and slammed the door behind her, Bill dropped everything and waited for her to come back so he could apologize.
#25 - Quitting
There wasn't a moment when they could quit being scientists: over coffee, walking through town, exploring each other in bed - they were always analyzing, always experimenting, always toying with their reality.
#26 - Jump
"Imagine a jump through time and space: a machine that can propel matter instantaneously wherever you want to send it. From here to Hoenn, from here to Mars… just one little jump through our machine! Just think about what this will do to the world as we know it, Lanette! And all we have to do is figure out how to make it work for a poké ball," he said, and as his gestures became wilder and wilder with each new sentence, she smirked and realized she just couldn't say no to him, no matter how crazy his ideas might be.
#27 - Jester
Brigette looked up abruptly from her work thanks to the sound of her sister's laughter; because she knew that Lanette had spent an entire lifetime serious and nearly humorless, she had to sit in quiet surprise when it took just one line from an e-mail sent by her quirky partner to undo all of that.
#28 - Jousting
Their game of questions ended, once again, with Bill stumbling over his words and failing to respond to Lanette's latest riposte; to that, she smirked at him and said, "You're letting me win, aren't you?"
#29 - Jewel
In the other lifetime, he took her to Mt. Moon to meet his friends; that night, as she sat beside him at the fire, she held the moon stone to the light and examined it with her wide, citrine-orange eyes, all while failing to notice how he smiled at her through his explanations.
#30 - Just
"It has crossed your mind that you can pick the lock with just a bobby pin, hasn't it?" she asked as she watched him assemble a small device (out of a tin of sardines, a safety pin, batteries, and chewed bubblegum) to blow out the lock on the door, and to that, he replied that he thought the easy way would be boring.
#31 - Smirk
When Lanette battles, her expression is normally cold and stoic, so when her mouth twists into a smirk - just like at that moment when she faces Team Rocket to protect both him and their research - Bill isn't entirely sure if he should feel relieved that she's that confident or terrified of all the things that would most likely come afterwards.
#32 - Sorrow
Although Bill is by no means an optimist, Lanette can tell by the way he looks at the thousands of problems he sees in this world that he would rather kill himself trying to fix them than break down and accept the things that are just beyond his power, and just watching him silently struggle for an answer to everything nearly breaks her heart.
#33 - Stupidity
Unfortunately, there was no such thing as a stupid idea to Bill; that's why Lanette frequently sighed and stood by, ready to patch him up, dust him off, and sweep up the broken bits of glass and metal when yet another instance of Bill's apparent lack of reasonable judgment tried her patience.
#34 - Serenade
Bill adores music of all kinds, but he realizes that there's just something special about the way Lanette plays the violin.
#35 - Sarcasm
As Lanette pulled one pin after another from her partner's back (put there by a hive of beedrill who were rather unappreciative of Bill's overzealousness in following a pokémon through their territory), Bill thanked her for her patience and kindness, to which she responded, "Oh, think nothing of it, Bill. You know I adore how colorful and exciting you make my life by doing things before you even bother to think them through."
#36 - Sordid
Brigette swore she would never touch a thing in Bill's laboratory again after she walked in on her sister and her colleague finding creative uses for half his toolbox and the spare roll of electrical tape.
#37 - Soliloquy
"…Someone else's. She will be someone else's. As she once belonged to my kisses. Her voice, her light body. Her infinite eyes. I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her. Love is so short and oblivion so long. Because on nights like this I held her in my arms, my soul is lost without her. Although this may be the last pain she causes me, and this," Bill read, just before snapping the book closed (and shoving it right back where it belonged on Lanette's shelves), "is silly."
#38 - Sojourn
"I know a place you need to see. Come on," she said, and she led him to a place deep within the caves of Meteor Falls, where the solrock and lunatone danced in slow, sweeping paths near the cavern's sparkling, golden ceiling and where, for once, she saw him take a rest from analyzing everything and just stand there in speechless awe.
#39 - Share
Their first time studying together had been rather awkward from her perspective in that Lanette still wasn't sure whether or not to see him as a friend… until he pulled a box from his backpack, pushed it across the table, and said, "Here. You look hungry, and I heard you like blueberry scones."
#40 - Solitary
A lot of people mistakenly assumed that just because Bill lived in a lighthouse far from civilization that it meant he lived completely alone, while in truth, he had plenty of companions to think about: his pokémon, his sisters, his colleagues, and most definitely his partner.
#41 - Nowhere
One day, Bill simply disappeared without a trace; months later, after the police scoured everything and found nothing to point to where he might have gone, Lanette stepped into his lab to look for her own clues, stopped when she felt a hand brush hers, and whispered into the seemingly empty room, "…You're still here, aren't you?"
#42 - Neutral
Quite often, Bebe (a fiery, impulsive creature) and Lanette (calm and hard as ice) clashed in opinions, and equally as often, Bill (their middle ground - Bebe's best friend and Lanette's partner) had to lock himself in his laboratory and pretend he was working in order to avoid being dragged into another catfight.
#43 - Nuance
Lanette had a habit of maintaining a cold, rigid politeness about her at all times, but Bill, who knew her just as well as she knew him, could hear the tenseness in her voice, could see the quiver of the corners of her mouth, could know from a thousand tiny details what she was really feeling at any given moment.
#44 - Near
It wasn't unusual for Bill to be far from her - in Kanto while she was in Hoenn, traveling to one part of the globe while she traveled to the other, a million other possibilities - but the distance seemed to close every time he spotted her e-mail address in his inbox.
#45 - Natural
One day, after a period of not seeing him for several months, Lanette found out Bill dyed his hair, and as a result, she spent half an hour in bed that night running her fingers through his curls, staring at the way the vivid, grassy color darkened gradually into a deep forest green just before it abruptly turned into a mousy brown at the roots - until, of course, he realized she wasn't just petting him out of affection and self-consciously buried his head under his pillow.
#46 - Horizon
In a rush of gray and blue, the sun rose above the horizon; huddled close to each other (because he thought she was trembling because of the cold), the two of them watched it and the sea pokémon breaking the surface of the dark waves to greet the new day.
#47 - Valiant
A journalist once asked her, in an attempt to unearth whatever secrets her partner held, who she was to him, Lanette grinned as her eyes flashed an icy glare at the reporter and his recorder, and in one breath, she replied, "Everything. A partner. A colleague. A friend. A caretaker. But most importantly, a guard, and I will put everything I have into protecting him, not because it's right but instead because it's him. So you can either accept that Bill has no dark secrets and publish an article that will in no way hurt him... or you could make a very, very relentless enemy right now."
#48 - Virtuous
Bill was her knight - ever faithful, honest, and sweet to her; Lanette was his princess… except less the kind that needed to be saved and more the kind who would lead armies into battle to protect her sheltered Don Quixote.
#49 - Victory
Lanette had patiently waited for most of her life to say three simple words to Bill, so when he ignored her advice and wound up taking a full face of an oddish's Stun Spore, the first words she had to tell him (after she had rushed to his side and shoved cheri berries into his mouth) were, "Told you so."
#50 - Defeat
Bill was normally so careful, the kind of person who not only plotted his own moves out several turns in advance but also analyzed every action his opponent took to pick out patterns, see into their minds, and use it against them at every opportunity, but when Lanette, in her first game against him, placed her knight near his king and declared checkmate, he didn't feel at all angry at himself as he smiled and admitted defeat.
This entry was cross-posted from http://mercoledi.dreamwidth.org/104727.html.
Title: Intellectual Tango
Chapter: (Set) Beta
Fandom: Pokémon
Characters/Pairings: Bill/Lanette
Genre: Romance, drama
Rating: PG-13 to R (the latter for brief flashes of sex)
Summary: "Their relationship, like every other in the history of romance, was far from simple." One-sentence stories about a boy, a girl, and all the ways one can avoid saying three simple words.
Author's Note: Originally written for the 1sentence community on LJ. Liberties taken with sentence structure. Lots of liberties. Also, #37 is indeed a reference to Pablo Neruda.
#01 - Walking
They don't hold hands because that would complicate things.
#02 - Waltz
Bill, the more poetic of the two, would sometimes describe their work as a waltz, one mind dancing in tune with another to produce something beautiful; Lanette, the more down-to-earth of the two, would jokingly ask which one of them was leading.
#03 - Wishes
Johtonians did not have legends about creatures that granted wishes (or, in hindsight, any legend that didn't end with pokémon dragging humans to unpleasant fates), so when she explained to him why she was folding down the flaps of a pinwheel, he couldn't help but be transfixed by her every word.
#04 - Wonder
Sometimes, Lanette would find herself watching Bill instead of working alongside him; as his hands carefully explored each fossil, she compared the way he worked - a mixture of childlike awe and scientific thoroughness - to an artist in motion.
#05 - Worry
Bill swears to Bebe that he doesn't care what kind of company Lanette keeps, but when five hours pass since his partner left for a date with that arrogant ace trainer, what Bill told Bebe doesn't stop him from checking his pokégear every time he thinks she isn't looking.
#06 - Whimsy
Contrary to popular belief regarding his sanity, Bill has a perfectly logical reason behind everything he does, but Lanette, who over the years learned how to decipher her partner's actions, still needs to ask why he has a ho-oh costume that "doesn't even look like a ho-oh, and anyway, aren't you studying tirtouga now?"
#07 - Waste/Wasteland
After Groudon was summoned and most of the planet died in a blaze of never-ending sunlight, they wandered the country after the end of the world, helping other survivors here and there but mostly just looking for the Garden of Eden - their Garden of Eden.
#08 - Whiskey and rum
Bill, completely drunk on whiskey and rum and other terrible decisions he can't quite remember, asks Bebe one question concerning Lanette that, unbeknownst to him, tears his best friend apart inside.
#09 - War
Team Rocket wanted a war, and the two gave them one - by feigning surrender and subsequently disappearing in the confusion while their virus crippled the organization from the inside out.
#10 - Weddings
If anyone asked Lanette if she and Bill ever considered getting married, she would respond with an icy "no"; if anyone asked Bill the same question, he would calmly reply, "Lanette hates wedding gowns, and I sincerely doubt anyone would want to see me in one, either."
#11 - Birthday
Lanette's birthday, unlike her partner's, does not fall on any day of importance in their culture and is therefore easy to forget if she doesn't mention it, but every year without fail, there is an eevee holding a new doll in her storage system account… even if she nearly forgot what day it was herself.
#12 - Blessing
"You know, Bill, Lanette's been a lot happier since the two of you began… whatever you call your relationship," Brigette says, and Bill knows that underneath that are implied meanings like "you have my consent to be this close to my sister" and "please take care of her or I'll kill you."
#13 - Bias
"If, hypothetically speaking, Jirachi appeared to you and said that it could either give you the opportunity to make the discovery that revolutionizes pokéology as we know it or allow you to meet the one person who will love you unconditionally but that you can't have both, which would you choose?" Bill asked one day, and to that, Lanette glanced at him with a bored expression, told him that was a rather silly question, but pointedly failed to give him an answer at all.
#14 - Burning
Although Bill would always jokingly call her the fiery one in their relationship (because Lanette never could hide her temper), Lanette saw in him an intensity of emotions and passions that could - as cliché as it was - be best described as a brilliant blaze; some nights she worried that it might burn up everything inside him and leave him empty and soulless.
#15 - Breathing
Her favorite sound was the one of his breathing as he slept; the nights she spent with him, she lay her head on his chest and let it remind her that they were both absolutely human.
#16 - Breaking
When Lanette walked out on him the next morning, he broke apart their prototype, took out the parts she had worked on, and reassembled it by himself using his own designs; Bill didn't particularly care that the act was childish… or that he knew the device would never run as perfectly as it did a day ago.
#17 - Belief
Between the logical, science-backed theories floating through his head, Bill believed in aliens, in yeti, in ghosts, in fairies, in Ho-oh and Mew, in a million things Lanette thought were impossible, yet the way he talked about them - with just about as much enthusiasm as he put in everything else - she almost wanted to believe in them too.
#18 - Balloon
By the time Lanette found Bill, the jigglypuff he had previously been watching was just finishing up the masterpiece it was leaving in permanent marker across his face; as it bounced away (too angry to notice Lanette), she thought briefly about waking him up but found the scene too cute to disturb.
#19 - Balcony
Regardless of how much time she spent there, Lanette knew she would never feel at home in the Sea Cottage, what with its isolation and the old, creaky atmosphere throughout the house, but on the other hand, she couldn't imagine a more beautiful view than the sight of the moon and sparkling, black ocean from the lighthouse tower.
#20 - Bane
"Oh, honestly, Bill," Lanette said, "we're only attending the gala for an hour, and you don't look that bad in a kilt."
#21 - Quiet
There were times when Brigette, Bebe, or Celio would walk into the lab to find Bill and Lanette communicating in a language of gestures and facial expressions, and not a single one of them could figure out how one understood the other perfectly.
#22 - Quirks
Bill maintained a happily flippant attitude towards all the rumors about his sexual habits, his psychological stability, and a thousand other things about what he did in his spare time; after all, what did any of it matter if Lanette had no trouble accepting him as her friend and partner, despite all of his real oddities?
#23 - Question
Many of Bill's odd questions ("I'm bored; will you help me invent a time machine," "it's three in the morning; would you like to go with me to a fantastic coffee place," "I want to try a psychological experiment; do you know where I put the drill") Lanette could answer with a simple "yes" or "no," but there was one question he asked after he kissed her one day that she couldn't answer right away.
#24 - Quarrel
There was a day when Bill, in one of his more egotistical moments, went as far as implying that he could do a better job at Lanette's half of the project than she could, but from the moment she declared she needed a break and slammed the door behind her, Bill dropped everything and waited for her to come back so he could apologize.
#25 - Quitting
There wasn't a moment when they could quit being scientists: over coffee, walking through town, exploring each other in bed - they were always analyzing, always experimenting, always toying with their reality.
#26 - Jump
"Imagine a jump through time and space: a machine that can propel matter instantaneously wherever you want to send it. From here to Hoenn, from here to Mars… just one little jump through our machine! Just think about what this will do to the world as we know it, Lanette! And all we have to do is figure out how to make it work for a poké ball," he said, and as his gestures became wilder and wilder with each new sentence, she smirked and realized she just couldn't say no to him, no matter how crazy his ideas might be.
#27 - Jester
Brigette looked up abruptly from her work thanks to the sound of her sister's laughter; because she knew that Lanette had spent an entire lifetime serious and nearly humorless, she had to sit in quiet surprise when it took just one line from an e-mail sent by her quirky partner to undo all of that.
#28 - Jousting
Their game of questions ended, once again, with Bill stumbling over his words and failing to respond to Lanette's latest riposte; to that, she smirked at him and said, "You're letting me win, aren't you?"
#29 - Jewel
In the other lifetime, he took her to Mt. Moon to meet his friends; that night, as she sat beside him at the fire, she held the moon stone to the light and examined it with her wide, citrine-orange eyes, all while failing to notice how he smiled at her through his explanations.
#30 - Just
"It has crossed your mind that you can pick the lock with just a bobby pin, hasn't it?" she asked as she watched him assemble a small device (out of a tin of sardines, a safety pin, batteries, and chewed bubblegum) to blow out the lock on the door, and to that, he replied that he thought the easy way would be boring.
#31 - Smirk
When Lanette battles, her expression is normally cold and stoic, so when her mouth twists into a smirk - just like at that moment when she faces Team Rocket to protect both him and their research - Bill isn't entirely sure if he should feel relieved that she's that confident or terrified of all the things that would most likely come afterwards.
#32 - Sorrow
Although Bill is by no means an optimist, Lanette can tell by the way he looks at the thousands of problems he sees in this world that he would rather kill himself trying to fix them than break down and accept the things that are just beyond his power, and just watching him silently struggle for an answer to everything nearly breaks her heart.
#33 - Stupidity
Unfortunately, there was no such thing as a stupid idea to Bill; that's why Lanette frequently sighed and stood by, ready to patch him up, dust him off, and sweep up the broken bits of glass and metal when yet another instance of Bill's apparent lack of reasonable judgment tried her patience.
#34 - Serenade
Bill adores music of all kinds, but he realizes that there's just something special about the way Lanette plays the violin.
#35 - Sarcasm
As Lanette pulled one pin after another from her partner's back (put there by a hive of beedrill who were rather unappreciative of Bill's overzealousness in following a pokémon through their territory), Bill thanked her for her patience and kindness, to which she responded, "Oh, think nothing of it, Bill. You know I adore how colorful and exciting you make my life by doing things before you even bother to think them through."
#36 - Sordid
Brigette swore she would never touch a thing in Bill's laboratory again after she walked in on her sister and her colleague finding creative uses for half his toolbox and the spare roll of electrical tape.
#37 - Soliloquy
"…Someone else's. She will be someone else's. As she once belonged to my kisses. Her voice, her light body. Her infinite eyes. I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her. Love is so short and oblivion so long. Because on nights like this I held her in my arms, my soul is lost without her. Although this may be the last pain she causes me, and this," Bill read, just before snapping the book closed (and shoving it right back where it belonged on Lanette's shelves), "is silly."
#38 - Sojourn
"I know a place you need to see. Come on," she said, and she led him to a place deep within the caves of Meteor Falls, where the solrock and lunatone danced in slow, sweeping paths near the cavern's sparkling, golden ceiling and where, for once, she saw him take a rest from analyzing everything and just stand there in speechless awe.
#39 - Share
Their first time studying together had been rather awkward from her perspective in that Lanette still wasn't sure whether or not to see him as a friend… until he pulled a box from his backpack, pushed it across the table, and said, "Here. You look hungry, and I heard you like blueberry scones."
#40 - Solitary
A lot of people mistakenly assumed that just because Bill lived in a lighthouse far from civilization that it meant he lived completely alone, while in truth, he had plenty of companions to think about: his pokémon, his sisters, his colleagues, and most definitely his partner.
#41 - Nowhere
One day, Bill simply disappeared without a trace; months later, after the police scoured everything and found nothing to point to where he might have gone, Lanette stepped into his lab to look for her own clues, stopped when she felt a hand brush hers, and whispered into the seemingly empty room, "…You're still here, aren't you?"
#42 - Neutral
Quite often, Bebe (a fiery, impulsive creature) and Lanette (calm and hard as ice) clashed in opinions, and equally as often, Bill (their middle ground - Bebe's best friend and Lanette's partner) had to lock himself in his laboratory and pretend he was working in order to avoid being dragged into another catfight.
#43 - Nuance
Lanette had a habit of maintaining a cold, rigid politeness about her at all times, but Bill, who knew her just as well as she knew him, could hear the tenseness in her voice, could see the quiver of the corners of her mouth, could know from a thousand tiny details what she was really feeling at any given moment.
#44 - Near
It wasn't unusual for Bill to be far from her - in Kanto while she was in Hoenn, traveling to one part of the globe while she traveled to the other, a million other possibilities - but the distance seemed to close every time he spotted her e-mail address in his inbox.
#45 - Natural
One day, after a period of not seeing him for several months, Lanette found out Bill dyed his hair, and as a result, she spent half an hour in bed that night running her fingers through his curls, staring at the way the vivid, grassy color darkened gradually into a deep forest green just before it abruptly turned into a mousy brown at the roots - until, of course, he realized she wasn't just petting him out of affection and self-consciously buried his head under his pillow.
#46 - Horizon
In a rush of gray and blue, the sun rose above the horizon; huddled close to each other (because he thought she was trembling because of the cold), the two of them watched it and the sea pokémon breaking the surface of the dark waves to greet the new day.
#47 - Valiant
A journalist once asked her, in an attempt to unearth whatever secrets her partner held, who she was to him, Lanette grinned as her eyes flashed an icy glare at the reporter and his recorder, and in one breath, she replied, "Everything. A partner. A colleague. A friend. A caretaker. But most importantly, a guard, and I will put everything I have into protecting him, not because it's right but instead because it's him. So you can either accept that Bill has no dark secrets and publish an article that will in no way hurt him... or you could make a very, very relentless enemy right now."
#48 - Virtuous
Bill was her knight - ever faithful, honest, and sweet to her; Lanette was his princess… except less the kind that needed to be saved and more the kind who would lead armies into battle to protect her sheltered Don Quixote.
#49 - Victory
Lanette had patiently waited for most of her life to say three simple words to Bill, so when he ignored her advice and wound up taking a full face of an oddish's Stun Spore, the first words she had to tell him (after she had rushed to his side and shoved cheri berries into his mouth) were, "Told you so."
#50 - Defeat
Bill was normally so careful, the kind of person who not only plotted his own moves out several turns in advance but also analyzed every action his opponent took to pick out patterns, see into their minds, and use it against them at every opportunity, but when Lanette, in her first game against him, placed her knight near his king and declared checkmate, he didn't feel at all angry at himself as he smiled and admitted defeat.
This entry was cross-posted from http://mercoledi.dreamwidth.org/104727.html.