(This is TOO MANY WORDS oh god I'm so sorry)
Nighttime visits to the roof were beginning to become something of a ritual, much to Rasputin's chagrin: the Skulltula huddled miserably at Char's side, trying to soak up as much body head as possible and uttering the occasional surly rustly-clicky noise. Char responded with an idle pat on the spider's head, his attention on the cellphone nestled behind one horn.
"There been anything in the news about Route 10 lately?"
"No, nothing. Even with the Power Plant, it's not exactly an exciting area, Kerosene." Aiden answered, the faint sound of shuffling paper in the background. Probably hunting for the sudoku, not headlines about gaggles of wild Charizards. Something like that would probably be more likely to appear in an issue of National Geographic, anyway. "Mackenzie -- the kid across the street -- was saying something about how there are black ninja were-Charizards living in the Rock Tunnel, but you know how kids are. Just last week she was telling me that if she fed it enough poffins, her pokedoll would turn into a real Clefairy. Heck, I used to think breeding a Venusaur and a Blastoise would give you a Venustoise."
Char let out a quiet snort of laughter, though his tail gave an annoyed twitch. Dammit, Sasha.
"Speaking of, though... did I tell you that I'm planning on breeding Torrent?"
"Who?"
A sigh. "Torrent, Kerosene. She’s my Blastoise, remember? I know somebody with a Meganium, so I'm bringing her over to Johto next month. I've got to visit Johto's Safari Zone on business in the first week of March, so might as well get it done while I'm in the area."
"Plannin' on a baby Squirtle? Havin' three Pokemon around ain't headache enough for you?"
"No, three's definitely plenty. Alkaline shorted out the blender last week, and I think Adrenaline's been sneaking out of the house lately. Not that anyone in this house tells me anything, of course. No, once this Squirtle hatches, I'm going to donate it to Professor Oak's lab. It's the least I could do. "
The least he could do. 'Sorry I ended up wasting one of your starters, here's another one, we're all cool, right?' Was that what he was thinking? That Squirtle would probably end up happy with whatever kid picked it, and it was true that old man Oak would probably be glad for another starter. It was a nice thought, really: Aiden was just trying to make up for a mistake. It shouldn't have bothered him at all, and he couldn't even say exactly why it did. Char opened his mouth to say some stupid line about Gramps appreciating the gene pool getting widened, but a strange, cold feeling seized his throat, and no words came out.
He recovered his voice before the silence could linger long enough to be significant, smoothly changed the subject. "Might be headin' over to Kanto sometime soon. Not for long, just a day or so. Mind if I stop by?"
"Addie and Alkaline would love to see you again. I've been putting in extra hours at work, so I might not see you, but I'll leave you a bag of chocolate almonds."
"Yeah, that'd be nice. Listen, Aiden, I gotta go. I'll talk to you later, alright?"
"Sure thing, Kerosene. Take care." Click.
--
He hadn't budged from the rooftop since that call. Rasputin was given the benefit of a wing and an arm draped over him, Char's tailtip shining a safe distance away. Truth be told, the brief call had all but killed any urge he might have had to visit Aiden, but said visit wasn't much more than an excuse to tend to other business, anyway.
"How the hell," he asked Rasputin, "did I end up bein' babysitter to a shitload of idiots, anyway?" Actually, no, stupid question. He knew exactly how it had happened. It was all stupid Sasha's stupid fault. All he'd wanted to do was sit around in his own territory. Now suddenly he had a bunch of formerly exploited Charizards with no survival skills to speak of on his hands. He couldn't let other Charizards go edging in on his turf, of course. Even utterly useless ones who knew nothing of the wild. Route 10 held the promise of inexperienced trainers carrying lots of easy food, but if a bunch of Charizards suddenly showed up on a public route like that, it'd be pandemonium, anyway. Either they'd be strong enough that all the poor little idiot trainer kids would be frightened off of venturing past Cerulean City, or everyone would go wild over the idea of getting a Charizard without all the hassle of raising a Charmander or Charmeleon and the route would be swamped with trainers preying on that hapless gaggle.
That, of course, was the only reason he was bothering. Protecting his turf from someone else snatching it. Never mind that a certain runty Charmander had once been in a similar position, alone, starving, thrust into a strange new situation without a single soul to show him how to get by. That was entirely unrelated to those Charizards' plight. Empathy did not live here. "S'all thanks to Charitard," Char grumbled. "She goes on about how she's gonna find other Charizards and connect with them or some shit. So she finds other Charizards -- other Charizards just like her, too stupid to know how to be Charizards -- and what does she do? She tells me she don't wanna go back, because they're all apparently so goddamn bewitched by her and she's too dumb to say no to any of 'em." An irritated huff of smoke. Typical Red team egocentrism. She'd helped ~liberate the oppressed~. That was her Hero Act for the day, she could strut around feeling accomplished and leave it there. Who cared what happened to the other Charizards after that? She had a morally superior glow to bask in!
Char was starting to get a little used to clashing with shady Pokemon-abusing types, too, though the cleanup afterward was never something he'd wanted to bother with. Not like he had a choice, though: if Sasha’d already washed her hands of them, then someone had to check in on them. He'd managed to visit once already. A hurried, secretive flight to Kanto, only to find that (surprise surprise) the bunch of them were still hapless as ever. They were hunting down a few meals on their own, but a Charizard took a lot of feeding, and several Charizards even moreso - with their clumsy skills, they frightened away far more than they managed to catch. Which of course meant Char had to scrounge up dinner, or those dumbasses would starve. RIP, various Pidgeottos, Raticates, and Raichus. Your sacrifice won't be forgotten. More exasperated flying lessons -- that was the root of it, really, a Charizard needed to be at home in the air if he was gonna have any hope of snatching up any prey. The second obstacle: plain and simple lack of resources. He'd told them to stop living so close together, spread further out -- yes, it was oh-so-scary to leave the pack behind, but they weren't Charmanders, they were men, deal with it. If they could begin to establish their own territory, to give themselves more space, that meant less overcrowding, more available prey. The kind of jaw-droppingly obvious shit that even he could think of, but was apparently too mystifying for these morons.
Really, Char couldn't help but be so amazed that he was the expert here. Sasha had been a Charizard for ages before he'd evolved. Hell, so had all those ex-slaves. He wasn't even a real wild specimen -- he could be considered feral, at best. He hadn't studied any ancient secret Charizard texts. He had no Ph.D in Being a Charizard. Nobody had taught him a damn thing. It was all just whatever came as naturally to him as breathing. So why were all these other Charizards so... neutered? What made Sasha hate what she was supposed to be so much? Was the fact he'd spent his final Charmander years away from a human the only thing that had kept his pride from evaporating away?
...Maybe that was another reason he kept going back to the ex-slaves. For a long time after his evolution, Char had resented everything about it. He’d always been a weak little runt. Bad at being a Charmander, bad at being a Charmeleon. The idea that he was good at being a Charizard was something totally novel. Justification for the being so proud of what he was, no matter how poorly it fit into humanity's standards. Maybe some tiny little whisper in the back of his head wanted to see other members of his kind be proud of what they were too, learn to stop cringing under someone else's heel and live on their own strength. It had occurred to him a few days after the fact that he could have arranged for the Charizards to all be taken into legal custody -- in the case of Pokemon exploitation, rehabilitation and rehoming was the general procedure. He'd discarded the option almost as soon as it had entered his mind, though. Who would want to deal with a creature that was nearly six feet tall, short-tempered, violent, prone to causing fires, and already carrying a big, neon "DAMAGED GOODS" sign on their record? Not exactly a tempting housepet.
He, admittedly, had yet to tell Green or any of his teammates about his little survival lessons. That would mean admitting he had worked together, however briefly, with Charitard. Besides... him? Ol' Damaged Goods McDickbag? Teaching others? Helping out strangers? There was a very good reason why Charitard had such a hard time imagining him as a parent. He owned the douchebag title like it was some kind of achievement: Char was not somebody who helped people, and that was common knowledge. Anything that counted on Char for survival wasn’t going to last more than a few days. “Ain't that right, boy?" Char mumbled, half to himself, rubbing a hand absently over Rasputin's abdomen.
Still, he'd probably have to say something sooner or later. He couldn't sneak out forever before someone noticed and began to fret that he was falling back into the runaway habit, or Max came over to punch him again. Still... it was only until the other Charizards got the hang of things they'd known how to do all along, things that were wired right into them. Couldn't be that long. Not much more than a couple visits. He'd just tell Green that he was going to visit Aiden -- technically true, as he had just planned a visit.
...He hoped it'd be alright.
Things had been turbulent in the team again. He'd clashed with Bulba. Ran away. Green and Max had both let him know how they felt about it, loudly and physically. He, in turn, had come back to Bulba in much the same manner. But things were okay now. Or they were going to be.
It was kind of strange. Maybe he'd just been so fucked up for so long that he'd completely lost sight of what it was to be normal, but "slightly less fucked up" or "on the way to okay" or "Green Team's own dysfunctional version of sorta alright" felt like a startlingly comfortable place to be. They weren't anywhere near being in the clear just yet, of course. He still couldn't say that he was totally chill with the concept of dudes banging dudes just yet. The pale gray ghost of Bulba's insecurities, the realization that he, too, feared that the threads connecting them all could snap at any moment... it lingered over Char's shoulder like an overcast day. Three guys who loved each other so boundlessly, all terrified that one false step would shatter any worth they'd ever had in each other's eyes, and poor Nyx just gazing on at the collection of irrational doubts that was her team.
It was horribly disconcerting to think about. Like being lead blindfolded across a rickety bridge and discovering halfway that the person guiding you was blindfolded too. It shook him up to think that the pillars of stability he'd turned to had just as many cracks as he did. It shook him up even worse to know that those precious bonds could sour that quickly. Char ordering Bulba to get out, then vanishing without a word. The same Green who had followed Char to Fuchsia, snarling and seizing his shirt like a predator going for the throat.
But on the other hand... no matter how many times he’d tested those bonds, they’d held. And he'd definitely tested them. He'd put his team through a trial by fire that lasted nearly ten years, gone well beyond the point where any rational person would give up on an obiously hopeless cause. Despite all the disobedience, the fuckups, the fights and the heartache, though, his team had held fest around him. They'd faced the league, faced a war, faced separations and fears, and not one of them had been powerful enough to pry them apart. Nothing had been easy -- nothing ever was, was it? All along, Char had viewed their bonds as trembling, fragile. A precarious collection of broken and bent things, held together by little more than duct tape and prayers.
It took a brush with death for Char to see those bonds for what they were. From the second he'd drifted into consciousness on that Pokecenter bed and saw Green waiting at his side, everything just fell into place. All the hardship, all the lashing out at each other -- it hadn't corroded away their bonds. It had tempered them. One fight at a time, Char had bared all his darknesses to his teammates. They knew the ugliest, angriest parts of him. He could hate them or love them as deeply and wildly as he pleased, and they'd get it. Char had always believed that flourishing in spite of was a thousand times stronger than flourishing because of: that anything built in the face of storms and hellfire could withstand adversity that would crumble its fair-weather counterpart. His team was no different. No matter how battered and scratched up the ties between them were, the scars were something to be proud of.
A hesitant here-then-gone touch, a thousand unsaid words hiding behind a casual remark, a head nudging his shoulder... they weren't the same thing as a hug or an openhearted confession. But those rare, split-second moments when guards were dropped and hearts allowed to peek through for just a little bit... those held more meaning than all the carelessly-given embraces in the world to Char.
As blindingly obvious as it had been, Char had taken another step forward: not only admitting how much he loved them, but finally accepting the idea that they really did love him, too.
"There been anything in the news about Route 10 lately?"
"No, nothing. Even with the Power Plant, it's not exactly an exciting area, Kerosene." Aiden answered, the faint sound of shuffling paper in the background. Probably hunting for the sudoku, not headlines about gaggles of wild Charizards. Something like that would probably be more likely to appear in an issue of National Geographic, anyway. "Mackenzie -- the kid across the street -- was saying something about how there are black ninja were-Charizards living in the Rock Tunnel, but you know how kids are. Just last week she was telling me that if she fed it enough poffins, her pokedoll would turn into a real Clefairy. Heck, I used to think breeding a Venusaur and a Blastoise would give you a Venustoise."
Char let out a quiet snort of laughter, though his tail gave an annoyed twitch. Dammit, Sasha.
"Speaking of, though... did I tell you that I'm planning on breeding Torrent?"
"Who?"
A sigh. "Torrent, Kerosene. She’s my Blastoise, remember? I know somebody with a Meganium, so I'm bringing her over to Johto next month. I've got to visit Johto's Safari Zone on business in the first week of March, so might as well get it done while I'm in the area."
"Plannin' on a baby Squirtle? Havin' three Pokemon around ain't headache enough for you?"
"No, three's definitely plenty. Alkaline shorted out the blender last week, and I think Adrenaline's been sneaking out of the house lately. Not that anyone in this house tells me anything, of course. No, once this Squirtle hatches, I'm going to donate it to Professor Oak's lab. It's the least I could do. "
The least he could do. 'Sorry I ended up wasting one of your starters, here's another one, we're all cool, right?' Was that what he was thinking? That Squirtle would probably end up happy with whatever kid picked it, and it was true that old man Oak would probably be glad for another starter. It was a nice thought, really: Aiden was just trying to make up for a mistake. It shouldn't have bothered him at all, and he couldn't even say exactly why it did. Char opened his mouth to say some stupid line about Gramps appreciating the gene pool getting widened, but a strange, cold feeling seized his throat, and no words came out.
He recovered his voice before the silence could linger long enough to be significant, smoothly changed the subject. "Might be headin' over to Kanto sometime soon. Not for long, just a day or so. Mind if I stop by?"
"Addie and Alkaline would love to see you again. I've been putting in extra hours at work, so I might not see you, but I'll leave you a bag of chocolate almonds."
"Yeah, that'd be nice. Listen, Aiden, I gotta go. I'll talk to you later, alright?"
"Sure thing, Kerosene. Take care." Click.
--
He hadn't budged from the rooftop since that call. Rasputin was given the benefit of a wing and an arm draped over him, Char's tailtip shining a safe distance away. Truth be told, the brief call had all but killed any urge he might have had to visit Aiden, but said visit wasn't much more than an excuse to tend to other business, anyway.
"How the hell," he asked Rasputin, "did I end up bein' babysitter to a shitload of idiots, anyway?" Actually, no, stupid question. He knew exactly how it had happened. It was all stupid Sasha's stupid fault. All he'd wanted to do was sit around in his own territory. Now suddenly he had a bunch of formerly exploited Charizards with no survival skills to speak of on his hands. He couldn't let other Charizards go edging in on his turf, of course. Even utterly useless ones who knew nothing of the wild. Route 10 held the promise of inexperienced trainers carrying lots of easy food, but if a bunch of Charizards suddenly showed up on a public route like that, it'd be pandemonium, anyway. Either they'd be strong enough that all the poor little idiot trainer kids would be frightened off of venturing past Cerulean City, or everyone would go wild over the idea of getting a Charizard without all the hassle of raising a Charmander or Charmeleon and the route would be swamped with trainers preying on that hapless gaggle.
That, of course, was the only reason he was bothering. Protecting his turf from someone else snatching it. Never mind that a certain runty Charmander had once been in a similar position, alone, starving, thrust into a strange new situation without a single soul to show him how to get by. That was entirely unrelated to those Charizards' plight. Empathy did not live here. "S'all thanks to Charitard," Char grumbled. "She goes on about how she's gonna find other Charizards and connect with them or some shit. So she finds other Charizards -- other Charizards just like her, too stupid to know how to be Charizards -- and what does she do? She tells me she don't wanna go back, because they're all apparently so goddamn bewitched by her and she's too dumb to say no to any of 'em." An irritated huff of smoke. Typical Red team egocentrism. She'd helped ~liberate the oppressed~. That was her Hero Act for the day, she could strut around feeling accomplished and leave it there. Who cared what happened to the other Charizards after that? She had a morally superior glow to bask in!
Char was starting to get a little used to clashing with shady Pokemon-abusing types, too, though the cleanup afterward was never something he'd wanted to bother with. Not like he had a choice, though: if Sasha’d already washed her hands of them, then someone had to check in on them. He'd managed to visit once already. A hurried, secretive flight to Kanto, only to find that (surprise surprise) the bunch of them were still hapless as ever. They were hunting down a few meals on their own, but a Charizard took a lot of feeding, and several Charizards even moreso - with their clumsy skills, they frightened away far more than they managed to catch. Which of course meant Char had to scrounge up dinner, or those dumbasses would starve. RIP, various Pidgeottos, Raticates, and Raichus. Your sacrifice won't be forgotten. More exasperated flying lessons -- that was the root of it, really, a Charizard needed to be at home in the air if he was gonna have any hope of snatching up any prey. The second obstacle: plain and simple lack of resources. He'd told them to stop living so close together, spread further out -- yes, it was oh-so-scary to leave the pack behind, but they weren't Charmanders, they were men, deal with it. If they could begin to establish their own territory, to give themselves more space, that meant less overcrowding, more available prey. The kind of jaw-droppingly obvious shit that even he could think of, but was apparently too mystifying for these morons.
Really, Char couldn't help but be so amazed that he was the expert here. Sasha had been a Charizard for ages before he'd evolved. Hell, so had all those ex-slaves. He wasn't even a real wild specimen -- he could be considered feral, at best. He hadn't studied any ancient secret Charizard texts. He had no Ph.D in Being a Charizard. Nobody had taught him a damn thing. It was all just whatever came as naturally to him as breathing. So why were all these other Charizards so... neutered? What made Sasha hate what she was supposed to be so much? Was the fact he'd spent his final Charmander years away from a human the only thing that had kept his pride from evaporating away?
...Maybe that was another reason he kept going back to the ex-slaves. For a long time after his evolution, Char had resented everything about it. He’d always been a weak little runt. Bad at being a Charmander, bad at being a Charmeleon. The idea that he was good at being a Charizard was something totally novel. Justification for the being so proud of what he was, no matter how poorly it fit into humanity's standards. Maybe some tiny little whisper in the back of his head wanted to see other members of his kind be proud of what they were too, learn to stop cringing under someone else's heel and live on their own strength. It had occurred to him a few days after the fact that he could have arranged for the Charizards to all be taken into legal custody -- in the case of Pokemon exploitation, rehabilitation and rehoming was the general procedure. He'd discarded the option almost as soon as it had entered his mind, though. Who would want to deal with a creature that was nearly six feet tall, short-tempered, violent, prone to causing fires, and already carrying a big, neon "DAMAGED GOODS" sign on their record? Not exactly a tempting housepet.
He, admittedly, had yet to tell Green or any of his teammates about his little survival lessons. That would mean admitting he had worked together, however briefly, with Charitard. Besides... him? Ol' Damaged Goods McDickbag? Teaching others? Helping out strangers? There was a very good reason why Charitard had such a hard time imagining him as a parent. He owned the douchebag title like it was some kind of achievement: Char was not somebody who helped people, and that was common knowledge. Anything that counted on Char for survival wasn’t going to last more than a few days. “Ain't that right, boy?" Char mumbled, half to himself, rubbing a hand absently over Rasputin's abdomen.
Still, he'd probably have to say something sooner or later. He couldn't sneak out forever before someone noticed and began to fret that he was falling back into the runaway habit, or Max came over to punch him again. Still... it was only until the other Charizards got the hang of things they'd known how to do all along, things that were wired right into them. Couldn't be that long. Not much more than a couple visits. He'd just tell Green that he was going to visit Aiden -- technically true, as he had just planned a visit.
...He hoped it'd be alright.
Things had been turbulent in the team again. He'd clashed with Bulba. Ran away. Green and Max had both let him know how they felt about it, loudly and physically. He, in turn, had come back to Bulba in much the same manner. But things were okay now. Or they were going to be.
It was kind of strange. Maybe he'd just been so fucked up for so long that he'd completely lost sight of what it was to be normal, but "slightly less fucked up" or "on the way to okay" or "Green Team's own dysfunctional version of sorta alright" felt like a startlingly comfortable place to be. They weren't anywhere near being in the clear just yet, of course. He still couldn't say that he was totally chill with the concept of dudes banging dudes just yet. The pale gray ghost of Bulba's insecurities, the realization that he, too, feared that the threads connecting them all could snap at any moment... it lingered over Char's shoulder like an overcast day. Three guys who loved each other so boundlessly, all terrified that one false step would shatter any worth they'd ever had in each other's eyes, and poor Nyx just gazing on at the collection of irrational doubts that was her team.
It was horribly disconcerting to think about. Like being lead blindfolded across a rickety bridge and discovering halfway that the person guiding you was blindfolded too. It shook him up to think that the pillars of stability he'd turned to had just as many cracks as he did. It shook him up even worse to know that those precious bonds could sour that quickly. Char ordering Bulba to get out, then vanishing without a word. The same Green who had followed Char to Fuchsia, snarling and seizing his shirt like a predator going for the throat.
But on the other hand... no matter how many times he’d tested those bonds, they’d held. And he'd definitely tested them. He'd put his team through a trial by fire that lasted nearly ten years, gone well beyond the point where any rational person would give up on an obiously hopeless cause. Despite all the disobedience, the fuckups, the fights and the heartache, though, his team had held fest around him. They'd faced the league, faced a war, faced separations and fears, and not one of them had been powerful enough to pry them apart. Nothing had been easy -- nothing ever was, was it? All along, Char had viewed their bonds as trembling, fragile. A precarious collection of broken and bent things, held together by little more than duct tape and prayers.
It took a brush with death for Char to see those bonds for what they were. From the second he'd drifted into consciousness on that Pokecenter bed and saw Green waiting at his side, everything just fell into place. All the hardship, all the lashing out at each other -- it hadn't corroded away their bonds. It had tempered them. One fight at a time, Char had bared all his darknesses to his teammates. They knew the ugliest, angriest parts of him. He could hate them or love them as deeply and wildly as he pleased, and they'd get it. Char had always believed that flourishing in spite of was a thousand times stronger than flourishing because of: that anything built in the face of storms and hellfire could withstand adversity that would crumble its fair-weather counterpart. His team was no different. No matter how battered and scratched up the ties between them were, the scars were something to be proud of.
A hesitant here-then-gone touch, a thousand unsaid words hiding behind a casual remark, a head nudging his shoulder... they weren't the same thing as a hug or an openhearted confession. But those rare, split-second moments when guards were dropped and hearts allowed to peek through for just a little bit... those held more meaning than all the carelessly-given embraces in the world to Char.
As blindingly obvious as it had been, Char had taken another step forward: not only admitting how much he loved them, but finally accepting the idea that they really did love him, too.