Book of the Hermit, Story Two: Pokémon
Title: Book of the Hermit
Chapter: Two: The Stars Call For You
Fandom: Pokémon
Characters/Pairings: Bill, Abra
Genre: Drama
Rating: G
Summary: Bill hadn't really seen the stars before he left Goldenrod City.
Bill hadn’t really seen stars before he left Goldenrod City. He knew what they were of course. Ever since he was a toddler, he read about them in books and memorized star charts when he could find one. But he lived all his life until he became a trainer under the lights of Goldenrod, and the lights of Goldenrod, even in the darkest parts of the night, were so bright they obscured everything except the moon and the most brilliant stars in the sky. Before then, he never really minded much. Sure, he was curious; he wanted to see what the Milky Way and all the other stars looked like. However, this want never really burned hot enough in his mind to drive him into doing something about it. So he never ventured out of the reach of Goldenrod's lights, and he didn't know what the sky looked like when it was full of stars.
He didn’t know a lot of things. That was why he left. He was tired of people expecting him to know things when he didn’t. He was tired of his teachers wondering why he couldn’t spell or why he was deliberately giving them the wrong answers. He was tired of his parents wondering why they would send him off to school earlier and earlier in the morning, only to get calls from his teachers asking them why he was late again. He was tired of his teachers’ rules, his parents’ expectations…
…The way his classmates looked uncomfortable when they were in the same room with him.
Was it really weird to want to do something a normal kid would do for once?
Yes, he was running away. He freely admitted that, and he didn’t have a problem with it. Why would he? He didn’t belong in Goldenrod City. He wasn’t sure where he belonged instead, but it wasn’t there. The trainer’s journey just happened to be a convenient way out. A legal way to skip school and escape the confines of the city. A means of obtaining his freedom.
The funny thing was, he actually didn’t care about pokémon back then. He knew what they were; his father was a walking encyclopedia for pokémon knowledge. It was just that Bill didn’t care. Why should he care about something his father was obsessed with? Besides, he took a mildly sadistic pleasure in the surprised looks he would receive every time he dashed someone else’s assumption that he was just as great a pokémaniac as his father. Anything to stop everyone else from defining who and what he was.
Unfortunately, taking an active disinterest in a subject that ties closely to one’s chosen occupation was generally considered a bad move. In Bill’s case, it meant that he was a terrible trainer because he had no idea what he was doing. For the first nine days of his journey, he faced loss after loss, with his bulbasaur partner being beaten into the ground by the local wild pidgey and nidoran, and it took half of the tenth day for him to gain enough of an understanding into Bulbasaur’s moves to catch his first pokémon.
He just wished he knew that wild abra could only use Teleport before he caught one.
That was why, late that afternoon, he sat at his makeshift campsite staring at his pokédex and the ball containing his new catch. No matter how many times he pressed any of the buttons on the encyclopedia, it still chirped the same thing at him.
“ABRA, the psi pokémon. Known moves: Teleport. Abra cannot learn any other move naturally until it evolves. Evolves into kadabra after a moderate amount of battling experience. See KADABRA.”
Sixteen attempts later, Bill sighed in exasperation and stuffed the pokédex back into his backpack. He kept abra’s poké ball in hand, and as he propped his chin on his other hand, he studied the orb’s plastic surface with narrowed eyes.
Okay, so Abra was a dud. He had two choices then: he could either train it somehow until it evolved or release it and find a new pokémon. Then again, he had only a limited number of spare poké balls, and at the rate that he was going in terms of training, it was unlikely he would make enough money from trainer battles to restock. He literally couldn’t afford to waste a single ball.
Not to mention he only caught Abra because it was the weakest thing he had come across. Bulbasaur couldn’t handle the pidgey or the nidoran that also lurked in those woods; how could Bill possibly hope to capture anything besides wild abra?
On the other hand, if he kept Abra, that meant he would need to rely on Bulbasaur to help train the psychic, and although the seed pokémon adored battling for him, it wasn’t fair to keep relying on her. Besides, Bill had enough sense to do a little research into where he was going to earn his first badge, and the gym in the next city would tear a grass-type to shreds. He needed another pokémon - one that could battle.
He sighed for a second time. “Maybe I should just ask it what it wants to do.”
It was a note of sarcasm, but the more he thought about it, the more it made sense. Besides, it wasn’t as if he had better things to do. He wasn’t about to test whether or not Bulbasaur could hold her own against nocturnal pokémon, after all. So he pointed Abra’s ball away from his body and waited as the object cracked open and released his very first catch.
The fox-like creature sat a few feet away from his master with his head bowed and his eyes tightly shut. Bill didn’t need the pokédex to tell that it was asleep, and he already reviewed everything it had to say about Abra to know that this was perfectly and unfortunately normal.
He would have mentally kicked himself again for the catch, but his psychological foot was already bruised enough over that. So instead, he got up and bent over his pokémon with his hands on his knees and his mouth stretching into a thin, straight line.
“Abra?” he said. “We need to talk.”
In response, the psychic-type slightly parted one set of eyelids - just enough to allow Bill to see the sliver of one of Abra’s glistening dark eyes.
“I’m sorry I caught you. Honestly, I have no idea what to do with you. You can only use Teleport, right? Well… I’m a trainer. I’ll work hard to teach you other moves, but you’ll have to be able to battle first.” Bill straightened his back. Up until that point, his voice had been nervous and shaky, but now, it was strong and as assertive as he could pull off. “If you don’t want to be trained, now is your time to leave. Otherwise, we’ll-”
Abra winked out of sight. For a few brief seconds, Bill thought he had just solved his biggest problem of the moment… until he heard a rustling behind him. Whirling around, he was just in time to catch Abra pulling his pokédex from his pack and then vanishing once again.
“Hey!” Bill shouted.
“Abraaaa…”
Following the sound of the growl, Bill glanced up into a tree at the edge of the campsite, and he was horrified to find Abra sitting calmly in one of its branches with the pokédex in his lap.
“Give that back!” Bill demanded as he dashed at the tree. “I don’t care if you decide to go, but you can’t take that with you! I need that!”
The psychic opened one eye again and continued to growl. He watched as his trainer jumped for the branch but fall several feet short of touching its bark. Not to be bested, Bill turned his attention to the tree and attempted to grab onto its trunk to climb it instead.
Unfortunately, among Bill’s inventory of things he didn’t know then was how to climb a tree. Almost immediately after he started up, he fell backwards onto the ground with a thud. This process repeated itself a four more times before Bill switched to attempts at coaxing Abra to teleport back to him.
“I’m sincerely sorry,” he cooed. “Why don’t we start over? Let’s be friends, okay?”
He also didn’t know how to talk to pokémon either. That lesson would come years later, but for right then, Abra merely regarded his attempts to coax him down with another growl. As soon as Bill realized that the psychic saw right through his attempts not only because they were insincere but also because the fox was psychic, he slapped his forehead and gave up.
Sighing for a third time that day, Bill crossed his arms and glanced back at his backpack. He couldn’t use Bulbasaur to attack Abra. The creature was psychic, and besides, he kept himself out-of-reach and nestled between branches. Bulbasaur would never be able to land a hit. Bill squinted at the campsite with that thought in mind, his brain scrambling to come up with something he could do as Abra’s trainer to get the fox down.
Eventually, another thought came to him - a thought so simple he was almost ashamed he didn’t think of it in the first place. With a smirk, he walked back to the campsite and picked up Abra’s poké ball and his backpack. Stepping carefully towards the tree, he pointed the ball at the psychic and recalled his pokémon. To his surprise, the psychic, with the pokédex firmly clutched in his claws, went inside without much protest at all.
“Great,” he said to himself. “Now all I have to do is release him and…”
As soon as Abra reentered the outside world for a second time, he dodged Bill’s fingers by teleporting into the tree’s branches again. This prompted Bill to cry out in frustration once again, to which Abra responded with another low growl.
“Okay, fine, plan C,” Bill muttered as he stuffed the ball into his backpack.
He didn’t quite know what plan C was until his fingers closed around another object jammed into his satchel. Pulling it free, he realized it was one of his bags of rations - trail mix, to be specific. Smiling, he tore open the bag, placed it on the ground, and took a few steps backwards. As he predicted, his pokémon teleported to the ground and dug a set of claws into the bag.
This plan would have worked, of course, if Abra wasn’t faster. By the time Bill finished his dive face-first into the ground (which he originally intended on being face-first into Abra), the psychic was back in the tree, plucking nuts and dried berries from the bag with the pokédex nestled in his lap. Bill sat up and rubbed his nose as he shot an angry glare up the tree.
“Fine! Take it! I don’t care! In fact, I release you as well! Go on! Be free!”
Standing, he pulled his backpack onto his back. Just as he was about to walk away from the tree, something hit him on the back of the head. It bounced and spilled to the forest floor, sending nuts and dried berries all over the dirt. Whirling around, Bill shot another glare at the pokémon and opened his mouth to shout something.
He stopped when he noticed that the abra was standing on the branch and staring at him expectantly. He couldn’t explain what it was about that expression, but the pokémon almost looked older, wiser - as if he stared into the depths of eons.
Abra pointed to the sky. Then he pointed to Bill’s backpack. After that, he teleported to another branch and waited.
Bill blinked and stared at the pokémon for a minute before setting his bag down. What did the gesture mean? He had no idea where to begin analyzing it at first until he unzipped his bag and opened it wide. Crammed against the back was Bulbasaur’s poké ball and a coiled length of rope.
Seconds later, Bulbasaur was by his side; her vines flicked outward, twisted into a loose braid, and wrapped around the lowest branch to form a net. While Bill had no experience climbing trees, he had plenty experience in scaling chain-link fences, so Bulbasaur’s braided vines were beyond easy for him. It took no time at all for Bill to reach the first branch, pull Bulbasaur up, and order her to create another ladder. All the while, Abra teleported out of his reach, further and further up the tree. Bill still couldn’t tell what the psychic wanted from him, but he knew for certain that as soon as he reached the top of the tree, Abra wasn’t going to run. He wasn’t sure how he knew that; he just had a feeling that was what would happen.
Eventually, Bill reached branches that wouldn’t hold both his and Bulbasaur’s weight, so he switched to the rope, wrapping it around the trunk and pulling back until he could use his own weight to scale the rest of the tree. He furrowed his eyebrows as he stared skyward. The sky was no longer the pinkish red of sunset; it was the dark blue of early night. All around him, the temperature was quickly dropping, and he could see his breath in the moonlight that filtered through the tree branches.
Yet he wouldn’t give up. Suddenly, the climb became less about reaching Abra and more about getting to the top. All he could think about was pushing upward and staying in that tree until he curled his fingers around the highest branches. He no longer thought about Goldenrod or how terrible of a trainer he was or of all the things he was leaving behind. The journey was just about his now, his future, and everything inside him right then.
He wanted to see the stars. And right then, that want was burning hot.
It felt like hours passed between the moment he first started the climb and the one where he yanked himself onto the last branch. Abra sat there patiently, his legs crossed and the pokédex sitting in his paws. When his master swung up beside him and sat down nestled in the joint where the trunk met the branch, Abra opened one glowing blue eye and glanced at the human. He could almost feel the way his master’s arms ached and the way the winter air burned his throat each time he panted.
“There,” Bill gasped. “Now will you give me back my pokédex?”
Calmly, Abra pointed skyward. Bill cast another annoyed glance at the fox but stopped short of telling him off. Instead, he followed the creature’s finger and looked up.
Bill didn’t know how much color the night sky had until then. He always assumed that stars were just white on black, but they weren’t. Above him, he saw twinkling reds, glittering pinks, faint cyans, warm yellows, and entire clusters of different shades of white and silver crowding out almost every bit of the deep black-blue void space could afford them. The hazy arm of the Milky Way stretched a glowing, bottle-green cloud from horizon to horizon, and the fat, pale-yellow gibbous moon dominated the night sky.
A few moments passed before Bill wrapped an arm around the trunk of the tree to steady himself. His lungs sighed once again, this time to release a breath he didn’t realize he was holding.
“Oh,” he breathed. “Oh.”
He nearly jumped and fell off the branch when he heard a voice in his head.
The stars were calling you. I did not want them to be disappointed.
Bill looked around for the source of the voice until his eyes settled on his pokémon companion. The fox smiled knowingly as he held the pokédex out for his master to take.
Yes. I am the one speaking to you. Now you are willing to listen.
Shakily, Bill took his pokédex from the creature and sat there in wonder. For once, he couldn’t find the words to say in response. It was as if this pokémon and the stars above them had struck him mute.
Journeys are not about running away, Master, Abra told him. They are about much, much more. How do you feel, reaching this branch? Your journey will be like the climb. It will be difficult for you at first, and you will face many painful things…
Abra paused to look up. Bill followed his gaze and found himself staring at the North Star.
…But it will end with wonderful possibilities. This is your world, Master, and indeed, it is filled with things that are beyond your imagination now. Things that you will begin to understand someday. I cannot wait to watch you do great things yourself for the sake of them.
“Does that mean you’ll let me be your trainer?” Bill asked quietly. “Even if…”
Abra chuckled. Your place in this world will reveal itself in due time, and you may be surprised with what it is. In the meantime, do not worry. You will be all right.
“Is that… is that so?”
That is what the stars say, yes.
“Oh…”
Abra rested himself against his trainer’s side, and together, they watched the night sky until the moon finally set. Only then, albeit reluctantly, Bill recalled Abra and climbed back down to the ground. Although he didn’t sleep much that night, he lay awake in his sleeping bag and stared up at the sky through the branches of the tree, watching the stars twinkle until the gray dawn forced them to fade away one by one.
When he broke camp, he was tired and sore, but he still pressed onward that day. He didn’t know why, but something felt new about his journey. While he didn’t particularly care for clichés, he knew it felt exactly like a weight was lifted from his shoulders. He no longer cared about whether or not he was a good trainer or whether or not he could possibly meet anyone else’s expectations. All he cared about was pushing forward, inching day by day to the purpose Abra told him about that night.
And every part of him was ready to meet it.
This entry was cross-posted from http://mercoledi.dreamwidth.org/111104.html.
Chapter: Two: The Stars Call For You
Fandom: Pokémon
Characters/Pairings: Bill, Abra
Genre: Drama
Rating: G
Summary: Bill hadn't really seen the stars before he left Goldenrod City.
Bill hadn’t really seen stars before he left Goldenrod City. He knew what they were of course. Ever since he was a toddler, he read about them in books and memorized star charts when he could find one. But he lived all his life until he became a trainer under the lights of Goldenrod, and the lights of Goldenrod, even in the darkest parts of the night, were so bright they obscured everything except the moon and the most brilliant stars in the sky. Before then, he never really minded much. Sure, he was curious; he wanted to see what the Milky Way and all the other stars looked like. However, this want never really burned hot enough in his mind to drive him into doing something about it. So he never ventured out of the reach of Goldenrod's lights, and he didn't know what the sky looked like when it was full of stars.
He didn’t know a lot of things. That was why he left. He was tired of people expecting him to know things when he didn’t. He was tired of his teachers wondering why he couldn’t spell or why he was deliberately giving them the wrong answers. He was tired of his parents wondering why they would send him off to school earlier and earlier in the morning, only to get calls from his teachers asking them why he was late again. He was tired of his teachers’ rules, his parents’ expectations…
…The way his classmates looked uncomfortable when they were in the same room with him.
Was it really weird to want to do something a normal kid would do for once?
Yes, he was running away. He freely admitted that, and he didn’t have a problem with it. Why would he? He didn’t belong in Goldenrod City. He wasn’t sure where he belonged instead, but it wasn’t there. The trainer’s journey just happened to be a convenient way out. A legal way to skip school and escape the confines of the city. A means of obtaining his freedom.
The funny thing was, he actually didn’t care about pokémon back then. He knew what they were; his father was a walking encyclopedia for pokémon knowledge. It was just that Bill didn’t care. Why should he care about something his father was obsessed with? Besides, he took a mildly sadistic pleasure in the surprised looks he would receive every time he dashed someone else’s assumption that he was just as great a pokémaniac as his father. Anything to stop everyone else from defining who and what he was.
Unfortunately, taking an active disinterest in a subject that ties closely to one’s chosen occupation was generally considered a bad move. In Bill’s case, it meant that he was a terrible trainer because he had no idea what he was doing. For the first nine days of his journey, he faced loss after loss, with his bulbasaur partner being beaten into the ground by the local wild pidgey and nidoran, and it took half of the tenth day for him to gain enough of an understanding into Bulbasaur’s moves to catch his first pokémon.
He just wished he knew that wild abra could only use Teleport before he caught one.
That was why, late that afternoon, he sat at his makeshift campsite staring at his pokédex and the ball containing his new catch. No matter how many times he pressed any of the buttons on the encyclopedia, it still chirped the same thing at him.
“ABRA, the psi pokémon. Known moves: Teleport. Abra cannot learn any other move naturally until it evolves. Evolves into kadabra after a moderate amount of battling experience. See KADABRA.”
Sixteen attempts later, Bill sighed in exasperation and stuffed the pokédex back into his backpack. He kept abra’s poké ball in hand, and as he propped his chin on his other hand, he studied the orb’s plastic surface with narrowed eyes.
Okay, so Abra was a dud. He had two choices then: he could either train it somehow until it evolved or release it and find a new pokémon. Then again, he had only a limited number of spare poké balls, and at the rate that he was going in terms of training, it was unlikely he would make enough money from trainer battles to restock. He literally couldn’t afford to waste a single ball.
Not to mention he only caught Abra because it was the weakest thing he had come across. Bulbasaur couldn’t handle the pidgey or the nidoran that also lurked in those woods; how could Bill possibly hope to capture anything besides wild abra?
On the other hand, if he kept Abra, that meant he would need to rely on Bulbasaur to help train the psychic, and although the seed pokémon adored battling for him, it wasn’t fair to keep relying on her. Besides, Bill had enough sense to do a little research into where he was going to earn his first badge, and the gym in the next city would tear a grass-type to shreds. He needed another pokémon - one that could battle.
He sighed for a second time. “Maybe I should just ask it what it wants to do.”
It was a note of sarcasm, but the more he thought about it, the more it made sense. Besides, it wasn’t as if he had better things to do. He wasn’t about to test whether or not Bulbasaur could hold her own against nocturnal pokémon, after all. So he pointed Abra’s ball away from his body and waited as the object cracked open and released his very first catch.
The fox-like creature sat a few feet away from his master with his head bowed and his eyes tightly shut. Bill didn’t need the pokédex to tell that it was asleep, and he already reviewed everything it had to say about Abra to know that this was perfectly and unfortunately normal.
He would have mentally kicked himself again for the catch, but his psychological foot was already bruised enough over that. So instead, he got up and bent over his pokémon with his hands on his knees and his mouth stretching into a thin, straight line.
“Abra?” he said. “We need to talk.”
In response, the psychic-type slightly parted one set of eyelids - just enough to allow Bill to see the sliver of one of Abra’s glistening dark eyes.
“I’m sorry I caught you. Honestly, I have no idea what to do with you. You can only use Teleport, right? Well… I’m a trainer. I’ll work hard to teach you other moves, but you’ll have to be able to battle first.” Bill straightened his back. Up until that point, his voice had been nervous and shaky, but now, it was strong and as assertive as he could pull off. “If you don’t want to be trained, now is your time to leave. Otherwise, we’ll-”
Abra winked out of sight. For a few brief seconds, Bill thought he had just solved his biggest problem of the moment… until he heard a rustling behind him. Whirling around, he was just in time to catch Abra pulling his pokédex from his pack and then vanishing once again.
“Hey!” Bill shouted.
“Abraaaa…”
Following the sound of the growl, Bill glanced up into a tree at the edge of the campsite, and he was horrified to find Abra sitting calmly in one of its branches with the pokédex in his lap.
“Give that back!” Bill demanded as he dashed at the tree. “I don’t care if you decide to go, but you can’t take that with you! I need that!”
The psychic opened one eye again and continued to growl. He watched as his trainer jumped for the branch but fall several feet short of touching its bark. Not to be bested, Bill turned his attention to the tree and attempted to grab onto its trunk to climb it instead.
Unfortunately, among Bill’s inventory of things he didn’t know then was how to climb a tree. Almost immediately after he started up, he fell backwards onto the ground with a thud. This process repeated itself a four more times before Bill switched to attempts at coaxing Abra to teleport back to him.
“I’m sincerely sorry,” he cooed. “Why don’t we start over? Let’s be friends, okay?”
He also didn’t know how to talk to pokémon either. That lesson would come years later, but for right then, Abra merely regarded his attempts to coax him down with another growl. As soon as Bill realized that the psychic saw right through his attempts not only because they were insincere but also because the fox was psychic, he slapped his forehead and gave up.
Sighing for a third time that day, Bill crossed his arms and glanced back at his backpack. He couldn’t use Bulbasaur to attack Abra. The creature was psychic, and besides, he kept himself out-of-reach and nestled between branches. Bulbasaur would never be able to land a hit. Bill squinted at the campsite with that thought in mind, his brain scrambling to come up with something he could do as Abra’s trainer to get the fox down.
Eventually, another thought came to him - a thought so simple he was almost ashamed he didn’t think of it in the first place. With a smirk, he walked back to the campsite and picked up Abra’s poké ball and his backpack. Stepping carefully towards the tree, he pointed the ball at the psychic and recalled his pokémon. To his surprise, the psychic, with the pokédex firmly clutched in his claws, went inside without much protest at all.
“Great,” he said to himself. “Now all I have to do is release him and…”
As soon as Abra reentered the outside world for a second time, he dodged Bill’s fingers by teleporting into the tree’s branches again. This prompted Bill to cry out in frustration once again, to which Abra responded with another low growl.
“Okay, fine, plan C,” Bill muttered as he stuffed the ball into his backpack.
He didn’t quite know what plan C was until his fingers closed around another object jammed into his satchel. Pulling it free, he realized it was one of his bags of rations - trail mix, to be specific. Smiling, he tore open the bag, placed it on the ground, and took a few steps backwards. As he predicted, his pokémon teleported to the ground and dug a set of claws into the bag.
This plan would have worked, of course, if Abra wasn’t faster. By the time Bill finished his dive face-first into the ground (which he originally intended on being face-first into Abra), the psychic was back in the tree, plucking nuts and dried berries from the bag with the pokédex nestled in his lap. Bill sat up and rubbed his nose as he shot an angry glare up the tree.
“Fine! Take it! I don’t care! In fact, I release you as well! Go on! Be free!”
Standing, he pulled his backpack onto his back. Just as he was about to walk away from the tree, something hit him on the back of the head. It bounced and spilled to the forest floor, sending nuts and dried berries all over the dirt. Whirling around, Bill shot another glare at the pokémon and opened his mouth to shout something.
He stopped when he noticed that the abra was standing on the branch and staring at him expectantly. He couldn’t explain what it was about that expression, but the pokémon almost looked older, wiser - as if he stared into the depths of eons.
Abra pointed to the sky. Then he pointed to Bill’s backpack. After that, he teleported to another branch and waited.
Bill blinked and stared at the pokémon for a minute before setting his bag down. What did the gesture mean? He had no idea where to begin analyzing it at first until he unzipped his bag and opened it wide. Crammed against the back was Bulbasaur’s poké ball and a coiled length of rope.
Seconds later, Bulbasaur was by his side; her vines flicked outward, twisted into a loose braid, and wrapped around the lowest branch to form a net. While Bill had no experience climbing trees, he had plenty experience in scaling chain-link fences, so Bulbasaur’s braided vines were beyond easy for him. It took no time at all for Bill to reach the first branch, pull Bulbasaur up, and order her to create another ladder. All the while, Abra teleported out of his reach, further and further up the tree. Bill still couldn’t tell what the psychic wanted from him, but he knew for certain that as soon as he reached the top of the tree, Abra wasn’t going to run. He wasn’t sure how he knew that; he just had a feeling that was what would happen.
Eventually, Bill reached branches that wouldn’t hold both his and Bulbasaur’s weight, so he switched to the rope, wrapping it around the trunk and pulling back until he could use his own weight to scale the rest of the tree. He furrowed his eyebrows as he stared skyward. The sky was no longer the pinkish red of sunset; it was the dark blue of early night. All around him, the temperature was quickly dropping, and he could see his breath in the moonlight that filtered through the tree branches.
Yet he wouldn’t give up. Suddenly, the climb became less about reaching Abra and more about getting to the top. All he could think about was pushing upward and staying in that tree until he curled his fingers around the highest branches. He no longer thought about Goldenrod or how terrible of a trainer he was or of all the things he was leaving behind. The journey was just about his now, his future, and everything inside him right then.
He wanted to see the stars. And right then, that want was burning hot.
It felt like hours passed between the moment he first started the climb and the one where he yanked himself onto the last branch. Abra sat there patiently, his legs crossed and the pokédex sitting in his paws. When his master swung up beside him and sat down nestled in the joint where the trunk met the branch, Abra opened one glowing blue eye and glanced at the human. He could almost feel the way his master’s arms ached and the way the winter air burned his throat each time he panted.
“There,” Bill gasped. “Now will you give me back my pokédex?”
Calmly, Abra pointed skyward. Bill cast another annoyed glance at the fox but stopped short of telling him off. Instead, he followed the creature’s finger and looked up.
Bill didn’t know how much color the night sky had until then. He always assumed that stars were just white on black, but they weren’t. Above him, he saw twinkling reds, glittering pinks, faint cyans, warm yellows, and entire clusters of different shades of white and silver crowding out almost every bit of the deep black-blue void space could afford them. The hazy arm of the Milky Way stretched a glowing, bottle-green cloud from horizon to horizon, and the fat, pale-yellow gibbous moon dominated the night sky.
A few moments passed before Bill wrapped an arm around the trunk of the tree to steady himself. His lungs sighed once again, this time to release a breath he didn’t realize he was holding.
“Oh,” he breathed. “Oh.”
He nearly jumped and fell off the branch when he heard a voice in his head.
The stars were calling you. I did not want them to be disappointed.
Bill looked around for the source of the voice until his eyes settled on his pokémon companion. The fox smiled knowingly as he held the pokédex out for his master to take.
Yes. I am the one speaking to you. Now you are willing to listen.
Shakily, Bill took his pokédex from the creature and sat there in wonder. For once, he couldn’t find the words to say in response. It was as if this pokémon and the stars above them had struck him mute.
Journeys are not about running away, Master, Abra told him. They are about much, much more. How do you feel, reaching this branch? Your journey will be like the climb. It will be difficult for you at first, and you will face many painful things…
Abra paused to look up. Bill followed his gaze and found himself staring at the North Star.
…But it will end with wonderful possibilities. This is your world, Master, and indeed, it is filled with things that are beyond your imagination now. Things that you will begin to understand someday. I cannot wait to watch you do great things yourself for the sake of them.
“Does that mean you’ll let me be your trainer?” Bill asked quietly. “Even if…”
Abra chuckled. Your place in this world will reveal itself in due time, and you may be surprised with what it is. In the meantime, do not worry. You will be all right.
“Is that… is that so?”
That is what the stars say, yes.
“Oh…”
Abra rested himself against his trainer’s side, and together, they watched the night sky until the moon finally set. Only then, albeit reluctantly, Bill recalled Abra and climbed back down to the ground. Although he didn’t sleep much that night, he lay awake in his sleeping bag and stared up at the sky through the branches of the tree, watching the stars twinkle until the gray dawn forced them to fade away one by one.
When he broke camp, he was tired and sore, but he still pressed onward that day. He didn’t know why, but something felt new about his journey. While he didn’t particularly care for clichés, he knew it felt exactly like a weight was lifted from his shoulders. He no longer cared about whether or not he was a good trainer or whether or not he could possibly meet anyone else’s expectations. All he cared about was pushing forward, inching day by day to the purpose Abra told him about that night.
And every part of him was ready to meet it.
This entry was cross-posted from http://mercoledi.dreamwidth.org/111104.html.