Fic: Once a Donphan Starts Rolling, Pokemon
Title: Once a Donphan Starts Rolling
Fandom: Pokemon (Anna gameverse) -- Ranger, Gold, Silver, Crystal, and Sapphire
Word Count: ~15,000
The Alfa family tree can be found here. I include it for reference. All names in green are the children of the Alfa family, listed in order of birth.
******
Using its massive strength, Donphan helps clear rock and mud slides that block mountain trails. An ordinary sort of attack won't even leave a scratch.
He's the first one home, he can tell by the lack of a Stantler in the front yard and the empty key rack above the phone with its blinking message button. He drops one bag of groceries there by the shoes, all neatly lined up according to size, and takes the other into the kitchen, not bothering to flick on the light as he tilted the bag over so that the contents spilled out in some gaudy array. He snatches at the Hair For Men bottle, tilting it up to the light so he could read the directions.
Then he notices that, while the overhead light is off, the soft yellow lamp above the sink is on, and there's a mountain of strawberries at his elbow, neatly sliced, adjacent to the small little lump of a towel, stained pink with juice.
Zach spins around, and his sister sits at the table.
"I think I've done something stupid," Marina whispers.
***
Okay, so. He's a Champion; beaten the Elite Four, went out into the wilderness with an amazing team and lived off the land, collected Pokedex information like a druggie collects STDs.
He's also the sixth child of eighteen. He acts as legal guardian for six of his siblings and his niece; signs their field trip permission slips and lets them know what a clean room looks like and that is so not it. He thinks he's going bald on top (and he is, just not as much as he thinks he does.) He likes to think he's a good man, giving up blue skies and silver mountains and endless summers for the banality of this mansion home, groceries on Wednesdays and Sundays and the younger kids in bed by eight and the older ones at least home by midnight. He never asked for this. It defines him.
He can construct the building blocks of life. He can take his squalling baby sister from the nurse all in green and form a good, strong foundation for her to stand on, good, strong earth for her to grow from, good, strong sunlight to shape her, and a shield for all weather that might destroy her. He's built a family from the stones on his mother's grave.
Marina fits nowhere in this picture.
She's dead. She and Raymond and Suzie Mary -- the sacred trinity nobody in their family ever talks about.
There are so many things their family doesn't talk about, it's a surprise any of them manage to communicate at all.
She's asleep on his bed, his boxers stretched across the cavern between her hips and Cassie's tube top is shedding glitter all over his sheets. Her fist is curled loosely by her cheek and her blue hair is wet. The color of his pillows offsets it and makes it appear translucent, and his eyes keep on going back to it because it's just one of those shades of blue that can't exist in nature except when it does, but he was nine when she ran away, and he's certain her hair was as red as an Octillery with a fondness for tomatoes, not this unsettling shade of blue that makes her name almost make sense.
He takes her clothes, and when Xanthus comes home, 30 seconds after the clock strikes midnight and eyes daring him to make something of it, he demands his Flareon burn them.
"You finally get a girlfriend, and you want to burn her clothes?" the seventeen-year-old snarks, and at the kitchen table Sarah eats a handful of sliced strawberries with her head tilted in their direction and her pearl-glass eyes staring right ahead, intuitive and eerie. "Somehow I think you're missing the point."
"Just do it. And find out what a Pokemon Ranger is. Maybe Cassie will know."
At this, sarcastic words fail Xanthus, and he simply stares at Zach like he's a Lickitung with two heads, only breaking his gaze when the infant Eevee in his arm mewls, and he lets him escape to go pawing all across the kitchen counter without a thought to spare for hygiene. "I think you're the only one who doesn't."
Zach grabs a washcloth and follows the Eevee's path. "What do you mean?"
"The Rangers. They've only been all over the news lately," Xanthus leans forward, elbows braced on the sink, and when his tongue flickers out it swipes over his lip ring. "Basically, they're Pokemon extremists. They used to be pretty few and far between; only used to run into them in the highland regions of Hoenn, where nobody gets an education. They've started popping up local, though. All gung-ho about being a Trainer is nothing more than being a cruel and heartless dictator, about Pokemon being our slaves. They've even started developing these things that can snatch a Pokemon straight away from their Trainer!"
Watching Zach's face, his expression grows incredulous. "Where have you been?"
"Why are they on the news?" the man asks, but he's shrewdly watching the Eevee approach Sarah, who seems to feel the former coming and holds perfectly still, because a baby Eevee can and will walk right over a blind girl and scare the living gastlies out of all of them.
Xanthus shrugs. "The usual. Somebody important dies, blame's all on the Rangers because pfft, who else is dumb enough to do that, suspect disappears off the face of the earth. We had one local about two weeks back around the Clefairy moon; I can't believe you've missed this. Anyway, they rooted her out and shaved her head and carved 'anarchist' into her back with Sneasal claws."
He tries to remember how to breathe. "Xanthus... burn the clothes. Burn them now. Don't ask any questions. Just go."
Amazingly, he does.
***
When Zach wakes up the next morning, his alarm clock glibly tries to trick him by telling him it's eight o clock, in its cheery, can-do tin voice. There's no possible way it could be eight; the baby would have woken him up by now.
But the clock wasn't lying, which lead to the only possible conclusion; something was wrong with the baby.
He rockets out of bed, sheets tangling around his ankles and near causing him to fall flat on his face, but he manages to do some little kicking maneuver mid-air that rids him of them, and dressed in nothing but yesterday's jeans and one tube sock, he dashes down the hall to the baby's room, only to find the crib rail lowered and the infant missing.
In full-fledged panic mode now, Zach lunges down the steps, sailing straight over the last few and Cassie's Furret, curled against the bottom stair. It jumps right out of its overgrown fur when he lands by its head with an all-mighty bang, but he's already dashing for the kitchen. Someone had kidnapped the baby. There was something wrong and maybe Xanthus or Cassie had defied all spatial law that said they wouldn't get up before noon and taken her to the hospital. Maybe...
All thought, firing from one side of his brain to the other, dies a sudden death when he skids to a halt in the kitchen doorway, jeans unbuttoned and slung low on his hips, grocery-store brown hair a wild, frizzed mess.
"She's gorgeous," Marina says, tilting one elbow towards him in a careful move not to disturb the four-month old in her arms. She's got one hand curled around the back of her beet-red skull and the other pressing her close to her flesh. The tube top has ridden up away from the waistband of his boxers, which she's still wearing, and her stomach is a good three shades darker than his has ever been in his entire life, even during his Pokemon Trainer years.
This completely irrelevant fact, coupled with the leftover adrenaline still beating through his body, does not a happy Zach make.
Her eyes flicker over his face, and she immediately says, "I didn't mean to scare you. She was crying and I was up. It didn't seem right to get you out of bed. And I knew you had to have formula in the kitchen, because all the shoes over by the door all belong to grown men or children, so that means there can't be a woman in the house to breastfeed her, and there's no sign of any Chansey or Kangaskhan who could do the job either. Is she yours?"
"No," he answers shortly, shuffling over and grabbing the chair back, yanking it away from the table and sinking into it, boneless.
"Mmm," Marina turns away, and the baby in her arm begins to fuss. "She's so beautiful. And I think she likes me."
"She's Susanna's," he blurts out, and half-rises when Marina near drops the infant. She recovers quickly, but he has her full attention now. He had forgotten up until this point that Susanna and Marina were twin sisters; now it floods back to him, pumping through his heart and almost suffocating him. He doesn't think what he's feeling is anywhere near hers; he can almost see the gears turning in her head, like she'd never given a thought to the fact that a family will change in the sixteen years she's been out of it. "Her name's Korea."
"The old Earth goddess of bombs," Marina murmurs. "Patron of the Voltorb family. I remember."
She presses a kiss to the crown of Korea's head, soft and reverent and... forgiving, almost. When she looks back at him, her eyes are alight with curiosity.
It's a mutual feeling, Zach thinks, and now that he can see her in the light, he can see just how sun-fried she is. There’s a thin, puckered scar trailing from the lobe of her ear, down the side of her neck to disappear beneath the hem of her top. She's a Ranger; he knows that now, but he doesn't know her story. He was nine and she was ten when she didn't come home for dinner one night and set the wheel of family tragedy in motion. Here she is now, twenty-six (if he's done the math right) and standing in his kitchen, all but naked with her twin sister's abandoned baby in her arms, like she'd never left.
Before she can form any of the thousand questions she has, Xanthus's voice rings out from the hallway.
"Hey, Zach. If Desarae bing-bongs at the door, can you tell her that I love her but I think she's a total freak for wanting me up this early and that I'll be out -- oh. Hello."
If he wanted to, Zach could have laughed at the image his little brother made, green hair still in spikes that were gelled but considerably flattened now, lip ring still in and looking completely flabbergasted at the sight of a woman in their kitchen. The lapse is temporary, before he quips in his brother's general direction, "I thought you liked them better with natural hair."
"You can hardly talk," Zach says evenly. "Last time she saw you, you were a year old and bald as a Chansey's egg. Now do me a favor and get everybody else up. It's time they meet their long-lost sister."
***
An hour later, Xanthus had gone off to wherever with his girlfriend, Cassie had taken the baby to the herbalist down the street to get something for her hiccups, Jake had herded the little ones across the street to Professor Elm's lab to get a look at the new Rock-Psychic type he had gotten from a friend across the ocean, and Marina is nothing but a pile of tears on the pink Sunflora-print bathroom floor.
Zach goes down the hall to one of a dozen rooms no one ever touched, and raids the chest of drawers across from the bed that hasn't been made in five years and still smells like the dead. She looks up when he tosses the clothes down on the tile beside her, and he answers the question that she's about to ask, "They were Mother's."
When she's composed herself, and dressed, he puts her to work. He has catalogues that need to be looked at and newsletters that need to be read and bills that need to be paid and legal notices that need to be finalized, so she takes the vacuum and the Aero-Dactyl-sol and a scrubber brush and gets to picking up the house. By the time afternoon rolls around, most everybody except Xanthus is home again, and they take over the vacuuming, which leaves Marina to go down to the basement and fetch up as many boxes as she can.
She starts with their mother's room.
She makes the bed and boxes up her clothes and her books and her jewelry. She wipes down the mirror and distributes the shampoos and bath salts to the other bathrooms. She takes the oxygen masks and sterile needles and empty pill bottles out back and burns them the old-fashioned way, with sticks and a flint and half a dozen ivory tears.
She does Raymond's room, and then Suzie Mary's. She's half-way through Molly's room when she runs out of boxes, and she slumps outside the door with its giant, "KEEP OUT: BIOHAZARD" sign and cries and cries and cries until Jake finds her and gets down next to her on the carpet on his hands and knees, head tilted inwards to get a look at her face.
"Don't cry over Molly," he tells her, slow and simple and not very gentle at all. "She killed Raymond."
"What?" she breathes, staring at him through her fingers, thinking of a little ebony-haired girl in her hand-me-down pink tutus and Jigglypuff swim trunks, perfect playmate and wonderful little sister.
"Molly. When she was fifteen. She and Skyler, 'cos they're middle children and all, thought they weren't getting loved enough or something dumb like that, so they ran away. And turns out, Skyler just moved to Violet City and got a job janitor-ing the Pokemon School there, and he was boring. But Molly; she joined Team Rocket! Well, Team Rocket, Aria had disbanded them three years before, over in Kanto. But Molly met with Giovanni and he got her made an executive, so she tried to take over Johto using Pokemon like slaves! And Raymond, and Susanna, and Zach, they all went to stop her. And she got her Ampharos to zap Raymond in the Lake of Rage and fried him stone dead. Ask Zach. He was there."
Suddenly unable to stay standing a moment longer, Zach sits down on the third-to-top stair, where they can't see him but he can see them. The magazines in his arms landslide away from him, but he is far from caring at the moment. Raymond had died eight years ago; Jake had been four. It had been all over the news. How could he sound so ... detached about it?
Marina obviously thinks the same thing, because her voice is incredulous when she asks, "And you don't care?"
Jake shrugs. "It was all so long ago. We can't do anything about it now. Much worse things have happened since then. I was going to ask you if you could help me change a lightbulb. I can't reach it."
She makes a small choking noise, like she isn't sure whether she's going to laugh or vomit. Finally, she gives her blue head a small, apologetic shake, "I don't know how to change light bulbs."
The twelve-year-old quirks an eyebrow. "Ooooh-kay. Why not?"
"Well, I never... never had to." She fumbles around, eyes darting back and forth like she's surrounded by memories she doesn't want to have any part of. "At the Base -- I mean, where I'm from... I don't .. his name was Murph. He was a really sweet guy, clumsy and eager, and he changed our light bulbs. I didn't have to. It wasn't my job."
Genuinely curious now, Jake continues, "Well, didn't you have a home or somewhere that had light bulbs needed changing?"
"No. I slept... I slept there. When I had to. Other times.... well, no, I didn't have a home or somewhere with light bulbs. Sorry. Xanthus can do it when he gets home."
"But--"
"Really, Jake, you've made her awkward enough," Zach composes himself and gathers up his armfuls of magazines, neglecting to rearrange them into alphabetical order like he had before, focusing on breathing in, breathing out. "Honestly. I know you're pubescent and all that, but do try and grow some tact some time. Here, do something with these. Maybe you can line the Furret's nest with this Home and Berry Garden ones. As for the rest of them, gather up Josh and Brian and get Flareon and Ninetails to do their thing. Got it? Can I trust you with that?"
"I'm not five anymore, Zach," Jake says with some exasperation.
"Prove me wrong," he replies, turning the boy around and shoving him down the hall. "And keep Sarah away! Sometimes I'm scared that girl's part Venomoth, she's so attracted to burning things," he adds, more to himself than to Jake, who's already turned the corner and out of sight.
He looks down at Marina, who stares back up at him with eyes red-rimmed and watery. He tries to picture her in a position where she's so powerful that she never has to worry about changing light bulbs. Or did Rangers just not bother with that kind of thing; was she trying to cover up that secretly, they all lived in covens out in the deepest of the Hoenn wilderness, just like Xanthus said?
Who are you? he wants to ask, but he holds his tongue.
She's his sister. That should be enough.
***
So when the day comes where he's applying his Hair for Men solution quietly, before the rest of the house has stirred (and before Xanthus has even gotten home, he's fairly certain), and he finds the pregnancy test in the trash with its positive Chansey emblem, he swears himself to secrecy.
Because she's his sister, and it's enough that she's back from the dead; whatever or whoever she's running from, they'll handle it when it gets here.
***
The days fade into weeks and the novelty of a new face wears off.
Cassie comes home with an extra chair for the kitchen table; Xanthus brings a couple quilts and mutters something about his girlfriend being a bleeding heart; Zach fills out the paperwork and doesn't say a word about all the things she leaves blank. Sarah takes every opportunity she can to stop Marina and get her to kneel down to her height so she can run her hands over her face and her body to memorize it. In turn, Marina learns how to navigate a house occupied by a deaf boy, a blind girl, a baby, and more Pokemon than a Contest convention.
The neighbors are curious, but only to a fault. Zach supposes they know enough about the Alfa family drama to be somewhat jaded to it.
Eventually, he stops thinking of Marina as someone who needs looking after as much as the rest of his siblings and starts viewing her as help. He could work longer hours because she was available to take the kids to their various activities, and make sure they ate healthy, and help them with their schoolwork. Zach encouraged her to bond with Korea, and kept a surreptitious eye on her belly to see if it was growing any.
She's made no move to inform anyone of her condition.
At the same time, he can't shake the feeling that they should be battening down the hatches. It's a prickle on the back of his neck, a remainder from his Pokemon Trainer years, his sixth sense to when a storm was coming.
"You've become incredibly jumpy lately," observes Professor Elm, his tone light.
"Have I?" Zach returns, trying to look absorbed in the paperwork he was sorting. Field notes on the mating habits of Smeargles; third file cabinet to the left, bottom compartment. That stack of lab results had yet to be sorted; he'll do that after he finished notarizing this vaccination notice on the latest recruit to Elm's team, Ma--
Marina Alfa.
"Is something wrong at home?" Elm presses, and he gets up from his desk and comes over to take the seat across from Zach. He's wearing the tie with the coffee stain on it, he notices, but his kindly brown eyes are sharp with concern. He was, in retrospect, one of those rare, meet them once a lifetime nice people. Without his kindness and support of beginning Trainers, the Alfa family wouldn't be half of what it was today.
Of course, maybe they would still have Raymond and Molly and Mom.
"No. Not at all," Zach smiles, and his hands shake on the vaccination sheet.
Maybe he had been wrong. Maybe she was someone he needed to watch over.
"Hmm," Elm pushes his glasses up on his nose and absently runs a hand across his balding head. Then he smiles again. "Your sister has quite an interesting story, does she not?"
"You'll have to elaborate, sir. I have ten sisters."
The professor's lips quirk at the edges. "The one recently returned to you from beyond the grave. Umm... blue hair, red eyes, incredibly fit?"
"I don't know. She hasn't exactly told us."
"I see. Well, she's the most promising student I have, I should tell you. Granted, she's also the oldest, but I ran her through a field evaluation yesterday and she passed with flying colors. She can solve almost any problem I throw at her. If she didn't have such a strong bond with Pokemon, I'd tell her to become a detective."
Zach pushes his chair back and bends down to remove an unopened pack of pens from his bottom desk drawer, just to give his hands something to do.
"Yes, we know,” he says, nervously placing the pens into the mug at the corner of his desk, next to generic family photographs, one-by-one. “Within three days of being in town, she sits down for breakfast and she goes, 'Are you going to do anything about the Chinchou that are eating your electricity and inflating your electric bill?' like our entire neighborhood hadn't been trying to figure that out for years. So, yes, I'm perfectly aware my sister is a prodigy. Who in my family isn't?"
Elm gives him a piercing look, and then sighs. "I know you think your family is cursed, Zach. I just think Pokemon is in your blood. All of you. I think that if Marina got all the chances her twin sister got, she could do amazing things. That's why I put her on my team," he reaches over and raps his knuckles against the sheet Zach had yet to sign.
"She also has a story, like you said," Zach goes testily. "She's running from something, and I want her safe. She's my big sister. We've lost too much. I've lost too much."
He puts his head down quickly, but not fast enough to see the comprehension dawn on Professor Elm's face.
There's a moment of tense silence, before the other man goes, "All right. I won't interfere," and leaves.
***
Zach goes home early.
He takes his shoes off and puts them where they belong in the hierarchy of outdoor footwear by the door, hangs his keys on the key rack and puts his briefcase on the kitchen table and gives a polite 'hello' to Sarah, who's eating sliced strawberries with a stained white towel by her elbow, and is returned in a like manner.
"Did Marina chop those for you?" he asks, visions of Sarah wielding a knife flashing through his mind with an emphatic thud of his heart, and the girl nods quickly, tilting her head in his direction like she can sense every muscle in his body tightening.
"She does it when she's trying to forget," she goes like she's answering a question he didn't ask, and he took a moment to reflect on the scary intuitiveness of his youngest sister. He remembers, though; there had been cut strawberries on the counter when he came home to find his dead sister sitting in their mother's chair.
"Where is she?" he loosens his tie and she stretches her hands out eagerly; he gives it to her and she breathes deep -- he still doesn't ask why she does that; it feels a bit too much like asking a prospective girlfriend why she has hair on her upper lip; you just don’t do it -- before looping it around her neck and tying it with clumsy, five-year-old fingers. It's on backwards, but he doesn't tell her that; the look of pride on her face when she succeeds stops him. She points to the living room, and mumbles something about Josh.
His conversation with Elm flashes through his mind, and Zach flinches.
He doesn't make it beyond the living room door, however. The armchair has been moved so that it was right next to the bookcase, and the top shelf had that disorganized, lopsided look that signaled several volumes had recently been removed. The lamp has also been relocated from its table to the floor, where it creates a dome of light that encompasses Marina and Josh, splayed out on their bellies on the carpet. They have several books spread out around them, a couple dog-eared, and a magazine on Goldeen wrangling he was positive he had told Jake to throw out. And they also have his Pokedex.
He'd forgotten he even had one. He thinks about those days all the time, but there's a difference between remembering them in passing and actively seeking the memories out.
"How about this one?" Josh exclaims, jabbing at something in his book.
"Hm?" Marina leans over, electric blue hair falling all across her shoulders. Her lips curve upwards. "That's a Camerupt. You rarely see those in the wild, because they hide deep in the mountains of Hoenn. I knew a girl who befriended two. They're not very bright, but they make up for it with their size and their tenacity--"
"What's that?"
"Tenacity? Um. Their will-power. Like you, mister, have a willpower to interrupt with questions all the time, Camerupts have a willpower to eat rocks and ... sleep."
"Sounds like Xanthus."
"It does. Fancy that."
"Marina, where you come from, do you have Pokemon Trainers? 'Cause when you talk about people and Pokemon, you always talk about friends. How do you befriend a Pokemon without catching it?"
A ghost of a smile crosses his sister's face, one of those secretive ones that only women can pull off with any aplomb, and for a moment, Zach is certain that she's not going to answer.
But then she shifts her weight up onto her elbows and goes, "Well, it does involve a certain amount of catching. But not a catch to keep, like Pokemon Trainers do. There are similarities between Trainers and my people, just like there are similarities between Wurmples and Weedles. Trainers believe in building a Pokemon's character to further themselves; to them, Pokemon are helpers, friends, but status symbols first and foremost. You've seen plenty of that with Xanthus; he thinks because he has every evolution of an Eevee, he's the coolest thing. But have you seen the way his Umbreon snarls about him? He's lucky that he's dating Desarae; that girl has the true spirit it takes to be a Pokemon breeder.
"My people aren't like that. We're... we're kind of like the police. We maintain the balance between the two worlds; ours, with our cities and our sewer systems and our rock concerts, and the world that was there before we moved in on it; the world of Pokemon. When we catch Pokemon, it's to tell them that we mean no harm, and we need their help, or we're sorry for however we may have wronged them."
Josh's lamp-like green eyes have gone wide behind his glasses. "Your people... you mean the Pokemon Rangers? From Fiore?"
Marina starts so badly she knocks the lamp over; it spins and the lights play merry havoc on the walls until she grabs it and rights it again. "What did you say?"
Josh clears his throat awkwardly. If there's one thing that Zach knows about his brother, it's that he adores anything and everything to do with Pokemon; after their mother had died and before Zach had straightened everything out and shuffled their lukewarm, insipid father off, he had spent much of his time with Xanthus and their eldest sister Karin up on the Indigo Plateau. Now, he just read everything he could get his hands on. Zach doesn't know where a nine-year-old stores the kind of information that Josh could absorb in one sitting. But all that reading meant he did little interacting with anyone outside of the librarian and Desarae, so while aware he had suddenly encroached on a sensitive subject, he was unsure of how to proceed.
"You're a Ranger. I read... I read in one of the magazines that Rangers only really existed in Hoenn up until about twenty years ago, when they started building bases on the island of Fiore, off the Cianwood coast. The article was a bit biased, though. It didn't mention the befriending thing. It mostly just went on about naturalism and the pre-existing state of things. And anarchy. Whatever all that stuff is."
Marina begins to stop looking so scared and mostly just looks bemused. Zach, on the other hand, thinks of the story Xanthus told him the first night, about the local girl who had 'anarchist' carved into her back with Sneasel claws and shivers.
And then she says, "Yes, Josh. I am a Pokemon Ranger. Like this family, it's one thing I will never be able to escape. Not anymore."
***
"What do you think of Marina?" Zach asks out of the blue.
Cassie spins around, lips quirked up in confusion. "Like, in general? Or there is a specific field you want my opinion on, like that shirt she was wearing this morning? 'Cos yeah, that one was mine. But I'm not really into Operation Absol anymore, so it doesn't bother me that she's got it."
"In general, I suppose, yeah," he swirls the dregs of his lemonade and swallows it, leaning back in the lawn chair in the same movement.
She makes a face, brushing a stray curl of soft chestnut hair out of her eyes with the back of her wrist, since her hands are covered in Aipom fur and dirt from the garden. "Where to begin, man. I ... I don't know, Zach. She disappeared before I was born. That's like asking me what I think of a ghost. She's a stranger to me. A stranger who's living in my house, eating my low-fat crackers, wearing my clothes and watching my movies."
He sits up, letting the water bill fall into his lap, and he fixes her with his best disciplinary look, to which she cocks a hip in typical defiant, present pubescent fashion. "Cassie, you're my people meter. You know I don't trust anyone without them going through you first. Which is probably the main reason why I don't date."
"She's our sister!" Cassie exclaims, spooking the Aipom she had been grooming so that it disappears up the nearest tree with only one side of it brushed.
"But like you said, she's a stranger. You've treated her like a stranger thusfar. Like she's just another stray we brought home that needs to be clothed and pampered until we're ready to release it again. So, out with it."
"She's in love."
Whatever he had been expecting, that wasn't it. "Um. What?"
Cassie sits down in the grass, looping her arms around her knees. Behind her, the garden stretches out into the bright sky, and he can see Brian's Diglett inconspicuously trying to make off with one of the gardenias. The Stantler canters over, stopping right behind the girl like it can sense her distress. It tilts its majestic head down, and she reaches up to rub its muzzle. The moment she touches it, the eyes fixed into its horns rivet themselves on Zach, and perhaps it's just his imagination, but they seem to narrow with accusation and he resists the urge to lift his hands.
It seems to give her strength, however, because she takes a deep breath and goes, "She doesn't want to be here. She ran away, remember? She treats being here like a sort of a hotel stay. She cleans up after herself. She keeps her clothes -- hers, the ones we gave her, not mine -- folded at the end of her bed and doesn't put them away in any drawers. She has no books or possessions to speak of, nor is she making any attempt to buy any. She isn't planning on staying." She ticks off each crime on her fingers.
Zach shakes his head. "She has to stay."
"Why? What's keeping her here that wasn't here sixteen years ago?"
"Susanna's baby."
"She's pregnant, Zach. Oh, don’t look at me like that; it's written all over her. She'll have her own tater tot running around and won't need to cling to Korea so. She cares for her twin's baby so much because it's a sort of a trial run."
"You said she's in love. What does that have to do with anything?"
A Girafarig has joined them by this point, and since none of them have a Girafarig, Zach assumes it's Desarae's, which means Xanthus is home early with the intention to stay. Which is incredibly rare.
The Girafarig and the Stantler snuffle and snort warm greetings to each other, and Cassie snatches at her bag to get apples for both of them.
"You don't think about water until it stops coming out of the tap," she goes after a long pause filled only with the sound of crunching and slobbering. "You don't think about sunlight until the sun sets. You don't think about breathing until you're dead. Likewise, you don't love a man until you have to say good-bye. Whatever happened to her, she ran away from it. They'll be coming for her. She's here because she needs our protection."
"What do you think she's running from?"
Cassie worries her bottom lip. "Do you remember what Xanthus said when they shaved and branded that Ranger girl from the other side of town? About the rumors of somebody important getting killed and the Ranger suspected of doing it disappearing --"
"No," Zach says firmly, although he had been thinking along those very same lines. "Marina's not a killer."
"Molly was a killer."
"Marina's not Molly. And what do you mean, was? Molly's still out there somewhere. Still killing people, for all I know."
"Marina's been gone sixteen years, Zach. She could be anyone by now."
"Cassie--"
"You love her."
"Yes, I do. She's my sister. She's our sister. She's hardly going to go and butcher Korea or Jake or anyone in their sleep."
She looks at him, her mouth pursed thin and disapproving like she was the one who was twenty five and he was the fourteen-year-old. Then she hops to her feet, making the Girafarig and the Stantler both snort in surprise and balk. "You asked what I thought. I told you."
He studies her as she walks away, back and upper lip stiff and some of last autumn's leaves skittering across her path. Just when she's about to reach the back door, he calls, "If it was you, I would do everything in my power to keep you safe. I wouldn't turn you out because you gave me a bad feeling."
Cassie just laughs.
On to part two.
Fandom: Pokemon (Anna gameverse) -- Ranger, Gold, Silver, Crystal, and Sapphire
Word Count: ~15,000
The Alfa family tree can be found here. I include it for reference. All names in green are the children of the Alfa family, listed in order of birth.
******
Using its massive strength, Donphan helps clear rock and mud slides that block mountain trails. An ordinary sort of attack won't even leave a scratch.
He's the first one home, he can tell by the lack of a Stantler in the front yard and the empty key rack above the phone with its blinking message button. He drops one bag of groceries there by the shoes, all neatly lined up according to size, and takes the other into the kitchen, not bothering to flick on the light as he tilted the bag over so that the contents spilled out in some gaudy array. He snatches at the Hair For Men bottle, tilting it up to the light so he could read the directions.
Then he notices that, while the overhead light is off, the soft yellow lamp above the sink is on, and there's a mountain of strawberries at his elbow, neatly sliced, adjacent to the small little lump of a towel, stained pink with juice.
Zach spins around, and his sister sits at the table.
"I think I've done something stupid," Marina whispers.
***
Okay, so. He's a Champion; beaten the Elite Four, went out into the wilderness with an amazing team and lived off the land, collected Pokedex information like a druggie collects STDs.
He's also the sixth child of eighteen. He acts as legal guardian for six of his siblings and his niece; signs their field trip permission slips and lets them know what a clean room looks like and that is so not it. He thinks he's going bald on top (and he is, just not as much as he thinks he does.) He likes to think he's a good man, giving up blue skies and silver mountains and endless summers for the banality of this mansion home, groceries on Wednesdays and Sundays and the younger kids in bed by eight and the older ones at least home by midnight. He never asked for this. It defines him.
He can construct the building blocks of life. He can take his squalling baby sister from the nurse all in green and form a good, strong foundation for her to stand on, good, strong earth for her to grow from, good, strong sunlight to shape her, and a shield for all weather that might destroy her. He's built a family from the stones on his mother's grave.
Marina fits nowhere in this picture.
She's dead. She and Raymond and Suzie Mary -- the sacred trinity nobody in their family ever talks about.
There are so many things their family doesn't talk about, it's a surprise any of them manage to communicate at all.
She's asleep on his bed, his boxers stretched across the cavern between her hips and Cassie's tube top is shedding glitter all over his sheets. Her fist is curled loosely by her cheek and her blue hair is wet. The color of his pillows offsets it and makes it appear translucent, and his eyes keep on going back to it because it's just one of those shades of blue that can't exist in nature except when it does, but he was nine when she ran away, and he's certain her hair was as red as an Octillery with a fondness for tomatoes, not this unsettling shade of blue that makes her name almost make sense.
He takes her clothes, and when Xanthus comes home, 30 seconds after the clock strikes midnight and eyes daring him to make something of it, he demands his Flareon burn them.
"You finally get a girlfriend, and you want to burn her clothes?" the seventeen-year-old snarks, and at the kitchen table Sarah eats a handful of sliced strawberries with her head tilted in their direction and her pearl-glass eyes staring right ahead, intuitive and eerie. "Somehow I think you're missing the point."
"Just do it. And find out what a Pokemon Ranger is. Maybe Cassie will know."
At this, sarcastic words fail Xanthus, and he simply stares at Zach like he's a Lickitung with two heads, only breaking his gaze when the infant Eevee in his arm mewls, and he lets him escape to go pawing all across the kitchen counter without a thought to spare for hygiene. "I think you're the only one who doesn't."
Zach grabs a washcloth and follows the Eevee's path. "What do you mean?"
"The Rangers. They've only been all over the news lately," Xanthus leans forward, elbows braced on the sink, and when his tongue flickers out it swipes over his lip ring. "Basically, they're Pokemon extremists. They used to be pretty few and far between; only used to run into them in the highland regions of Hoenn, where nobody gets an education. They've started popping up local, though. All gung-ho about being a Trainer is nothing more than being a cruel and heartless dictator, about Pokemon being our slaves. They've even started developing these things that can snatch a Pokemon straight away from their Trainer!"
Watching Zach's face, his expression grows incredulous. "Where have you been?"
"Why are they on the news?" the man asks, but he's shrewdly watching the Eevee approach Sarah, who seems to feel the former coming and holds perfectly still, because a baby Eevee can and will walk right over a blind girl and scare the living gastlies out of all of them.
Xanthus shrugs. "The usual. Somebody important dies, blame's all on the Rangers because pfft, who else is dumb enough to do that, suspect disappears off the face of the earth. We had one local about two weeks back around the Clefairy moon; I can't believe you've missed this. Anyway, they rooted her out and shaved her head and carved 'anarchist' into her back with Sneasal claws."
He tries to remember how to breathe. "Xanthus... burn the clothes. Burn them now. Don't ask any questions. Just go."
Amazingly, he does.
***
When Zach wakes up the next morning, his alarm clock glibly tries to trick him by telling him it's eight o clock, in its cheery, can-do tin voice. There's no possible way it could be eight; the baby would have woken him up by now.
But the clock wasn't lying, which lead to the only possible conclusion; something was wrong with the baby.
He rockets out of bed, sheets tangling around his ankles and near causing him to fall flat on his face, but he manages to do some little kicking maneuver mid-air that rids him of them, and dressed in nothing but yesterday's jeans and one tube sock, he dashes down the hall to the baby's room, only to find the crib rail lowered and the infant missing.
In full-fledged panic mode now, Zach lunges down the steps, sailing straight over the last few and Cassie's Furret, curled against the bottom stair. It jumps right out of its overgrown fur when he lands by its head with an all-mighty bang, but he's already dashing for the kitchen. Someone had kidnapped the baby. There was something wrong and maybe Xanthus or Cassie had defied all spatial law that said they wouldn't get up before noon and taken her to the hospital. Maybe...
All thought, firing from one side of his brain to the other, dies a sudden death when he skids to a halt in the kitchen doorway, jeans unbuttoned and slung low on his hips, grocery-store brown hair a wild, frizzed mess.
"She's gorgeous," Marina says, tilting one elbow towards him in a careful move not to disturb the four-month old in her arms. She's got one hand curled around the back of her beet-red skull and the other pressing her close to her flesh. The tube top has ridden up away from the waistband of his boxers, which she's still wearing, and her stomach is a good three shades darker than his has ever been in his entire life, even during his Pokemon Trainer years.
This completely irrelevant fact, coupled with the leftover adrenaline still beating through his body, does not a happy Zach make.
Her eyes flicker over his face, and she immediately says, "I didn't mean to scare you. She was crying and I was up. It didn't seem right to get you out of bed. And I knew you had to have formula in the kitchen, because all the shoes over by the door all belong to grown men or children, so that means there can't be a woman in the house to breastfeed her, and there's no sign of any Chansey or Kangaskhan who could do the job either. Is she yours?"
"No," he answers shortly, shuffling over and grabbing the chair back, yanking it away from the table and sinking into it, boneless.
"Mmm," Marina turns away, and the baby in her arm begins to fuss. "She's so beautiful. And I think she likes me."
"She's Susanna's," he blurts out, and half-rises when Marina near drops the infant. She recovers quickly, but he has her full attention now. He had forgotten up until this point that Susanna and Marina were twin sisters; now it floods back to him, pumping through his heart and almost suffocating him. He doesn't think what he's feeling is anywhere near hers; he can almost see the gears turning in her head, like she'd never given a thought to the fact that a family will change in the sixteen years she's been out of it. "Her name's Korea."
"The old Earth goddess of bombs," Marina murmurs. "Patron of the Voltorb family. I remember."
She presses a kiss to the crown of Korea's head, soft and reverent and... forgiving, almost. When she looks back at him, her eyes are alight with curiosity.
It's a mutual feeling, Zach thinks, and now that he can see her in the light, he can see just how sun-fried she is. There’s a thin, puckered scar trailing from the lobe of her ear, down the side of her neck to disappear beneath the hem of her top. She's a Ranger; he knows that now, but he doesn't know her story. He was nine and she was ten when she didn't come home for dinner one night and set the wheel of family tragedy in motion. Here she is now, twenty-six (if he's done the math right) and standing in his kitchen, all but naked with her twin sister's abandoned baby in her arms, like she'd never left.
Before she can form any of the thousand questions she has, Xanthus's voice rings out from the hallway.
"Hey, Zach. If Desarae bing-bongs at the door, can you tell her that I love her but I think she's a total freak for wanting me up this early and that I'll be out -- oh. Hello."
If he wanted to, Zach could have laughed at the image his little brother made, green hair still in spikes that were gelled but considerably flattened now, lip ring still in and looking completely flabbergasted at the sight of a woman in their kitchen. The lapse is temporary, before he quips in his brother's general direction, "I thought you liked them better with natural hair."
"You can hardly talk," Zach says evenly. "Last time she saw you, you were a year old and bald as a Chansey's egg. Now do me a favor and get everybody else up. It's time they meet their long-lost sister."
***
An hour later, Xanthus had gone off to wherever with his girlfriend, Cassie had taken the baby to the herbalist down the street to get something for her hiccups, Jake had herded the little ones across the street to Professor Elm's lab to get a look at the new Rock-Psychic type he had gotten from a friend across the ocean, and Marina is nothing but a pile of tears on the pink Sunflora-print bathroom floor.
Zach goes down the hall to one of a dozen rooms no one ever touched, and raids the chest of drawers across from the bed that hasn't been made in five years and still smells like the dead. She looks up when he tosses the clothes down on the tile beside her, and he answers the question that she's about to ask, "They were Mother's."
When she's composed herself, and dressed, he puts her to work. He has catalogues that need to be looked at and newsletters that need to be read and bills that need to be paid and legal notices that need to be finalized, so she takes the vacuum and the Aero-Dactyl-sol and a scrubber brush and gets to picking up the house. By the time afternoon rolls around, most everybody except Xanthus is home again, and they take over the vacuuming, which leaves Marina to go down to the basement and fetch up as many boxes as she can.
She starts with their mother's room.
She makes the bed and boxes up her clothes and her books and her jewelry. She wipes down the mirror and distributes the shampoos and bath salts to the other bathrooms. She takes the oxygen masks and sterile needles and empty pill bottles out back and burns them the old-fashioned way, with sticks and a flint and half a dozen ivory tears.
She does Raymond's room, and then Suzie Mary's. She's half-way through Molly's room when she runs out of boxes, and she slumps outside the door with its giant, "KEEP OUT: BIOHAZARD" sign and cries and cries and cries until Jake finds her and gets down next to her on the carpet on his hands and knees, head tilted inwards to get a look at her face.
"Don't cry over Molly," he tells her, slow and simple and not very gentle at all. "She killed Raymond."
"What?" she breathes, staring at him through her fingers, thinking of a little ebony-haired girl in her hand-me-down pink tutus and Jigglypuff swim trunks, perfect playmate and wonderful little sister.
"Molly. When she was fifteen. She and Skyler, 'cos they're middle children and all, thought they weren't getting loved enough or something dumb like that, so they ran away. And turns out, Skyler just moved to Violet City and got a job janitor-ing the Pokemon School there, and he was boring. But Molly; she joined Team Rocket! Well, Team Rocket, Aria had disbanded them three years before, over in Kanto. But Molly met with Giovanni and he got her made an executive, so she tried to take over Johto using Pokemon like slaves! And Raymond, and Susanna, and Zach, they all went to stop her. And she got her Ampharos to zap Raymond in the Lake of Rage and fried him stone dead. Ask Zach. He was there."
Suddenly unable to stay standing a moment longer, Zach sits down on the third-to-top stair, where they can't see him but he can see them. The magazines in his arms landslide away from him, but he is far from caring at the moment. Raymond had died eight years ago; Jake had been four. It had been all over the news. How could he sound so ... detached about it?
Marina obviously thinks the same thing, because her voice is incredulous when she asks, "And you don't care?"
Jake shrugs. "It was all so long ago. We can't do anything about it now. Much worse things have happened since then. I was going to ask you if you could help me change a lightbulb. I can't reach it."
She makes a small choking noise, like she isn't sure whether she's going to laugh or vomit. Finally, she gives her blue head a small, apologetic shake, "I don't know how to change light bulbs."
The twelve-year-old quirks an eyebrow. "Ooooh-kay. Why not?"
"Well, I never... never had to." She fumbles around, eyes darting back and forth like she's surrounded by memories she doesn't want to have any part of. "At the Base -- I mean, where I'm from... I don't .. his name was Murph. He was a really sweet guy, clumsy and eager, and he changed our light bulbs. I didn't have to. It wasn't my job."
Genuinely curious now, Jake continues, "Well, didn't you have a home or somewhere that had light bulbs needed changing?"
"No. I slept... I slept there. When I had to. Other times.... well, no, I didn't have a home or somewhere with light bulbs. Sorry. Xanthus can do it when he gets home."
"But--"
"Really, Jake, you've made her awkward enough," Zach composes himself and gathers up his armfuls of magazines, neglecting to rearrange them into alphabetical order like he had before, focusing on breathing in, breathing out. "Honestly. I know you're pubescent and all that, but do try and grow some tact some time. Here, do something with these. Maybe you can line the Furret's nest with this Home and Berry Garden ones. As for the rest of them, gather up Josh and Brian and get Flareon and Ninetails to do their thing. Got it? Can I trust you with that?"
"I'm not five anymore, Zach," Jake says with some exasperation.
"Prove me wrong," he replies, turning the boy around and shoving him down the hall. "And keep Sarah away! Sometimes I'm scared that girl's part Venomoth, she's so attracted to burning things," he adds, more to himself than to Jake, who's already turned the corner and out of sight.
He looks down at Marina, who stares back up at him with eyes red-rimmed and watery. He tries to picture her in a position where she's so powerful that she never has to worry about changing light bulbs. Or did Rangers just not bother with that kind of thing; was she trying to cover up that secretly, they all lived in covens out in the deepest of the Hoenn wilderness, just like Xanthus said?
Who are you? he wants to ask, but he holds his tongue.
She's his sister. That should be enough.
***
So when the day comes where he's applying his Hair for Men solution quietly, before the rest of the house has stirred (and before Xanthus has even gotten home, he's fairly certain), and he finds the pregnancy test in the trash with its positive Chansey emblem, he swears himself to secrecy.
Because she's his sister, and it's enough that she's back from the dead; whatever or whoever she's running from, they'll handle it when it gets here.
***
The days fade into weeks and the novelty of a new face wears off.
Cassie comes home with an extra chair for the kitchen table; Xanthus brings a couple quilts and mutters something about his girlfriend being a bleeding heart; Zach fills out the paperwork and doesn't say a word about all the things she leaves blank. Sarah takes every opportunity she can to stop Marina and get her to kneel down to her height so she can run her hands over her face and her body to memorize it. In turn, Marina learns how to navigate a house occupied by a deaf boy, a blind girl, a baby, and more Pokemon than a Contest convention.
The neighbors are curious, but only to a fault. Zach supposes they know enough about the Alfa family drama to be somewhat jaded to it.
Eventually, he stops thinking of Marina as someone who needs looking after as much as the rest of his siblings and starts viewing her as help. He could work longer hours because she was available to take the kids to their various activities, and make sure they ate healthy, and help them with their schoolwork. Zach encouraged her to bond with Korea, and kept a surreptitious eye on her belly to see if it was growing any.
She's made no move to inform anyone of her condition.
At the same time, he can't shake the feeling that they should be battening down the hatches. It's a prickle on the back of his neck, a remainder from his Pokemon Trainer years, his sixth sense to when a storm was coming.
"You've become incredibly jumpy lately," observes Professor Elm, his tone light.
"Have I?" Zach returns, trying to look absorbed in the paperwork he was sorting. Field notes on the mating habits of Smeargles; third file cabinet to the left, bottom compartment. That stack of lab results had yet to be sorted; he'll do that after he finished notarizing this vaccination notice on the latest recruit to Elm's team, Ma--
Marina Alfa.
"Is something wrong at home?" Elm presses, and he gets up from his desk and comes over to take the seat across from Zach. He's wearing the tie with the coffee stain on it, he notices, but his kindly brown eyes are sharp with concern. He was, in retrospect, one of those rare, meet them once a lifetime nice people. Without his kindness and support of beginning Trainers, the Alfa family wouldn't be half of what it was today.
Of course, maybe they would still have Raymond and Molly and Mom.
"No. Not at all," Zach smiles, and his hands shake on the vaccination sheet.
Maybe he had been wrong. Maybe she was someone he needed to watch over.
"Hmm," Elm pushes his glasses up on his nose and absently runs a hand across his balding head. Then he smiles again. "Your sister has quite an interesting story, does she not?"
"You'll have to elaborate, sir. I have ten sisters."
The professor's lips quirk at the edges. "The one recently returned to you from beyond the grave. Umm... blue hair, red eyes, incredibly fit?"
"I don't know. She hasn't exactly told us."
"I see. Well, she's the most promising student I have, I should tell you. Granted, she's also the oldest, but I ran her through a field evaluation yesterday and she passed with flying colors. She can solve almost any problem I throw at her. If she didn't have such a strong bond with Pokemon, I'd tell her to become a detective."
Zach pushes his chair back and bends down to remove an unopened pack of pens from his bottom desk drawer, just to give his hands something to do.
"Yes, we know,” he says, nervously placing the pens into the mug at the corner of his desk, next to generic family photographs, one-by-one. “Within three days of being in town, she sits down for breakfast and she goes, 'Are you going to do anything about the Chinchou that are eating your electricity and inflating your electric bill?' like our entire neighborhood hadn't been trying to figure that out for years. So, yes, I'm perfectly aware my sister is a prodigy. Who in my family isn't?"
Elm gives him a piercing look, and then sighs. "I know you think your family is cursed, Zach. I just think Pokemon is in your blood. All of you. I think that if Marina got all the chances her twin sister got, she could do amazing things. That's why I put her on my team," he reaches over and raps his knuckles against the sheet Zach had yet to sign.
"She also has a story, like you said," Zach goes testily. "She's running from something, and I want her safe. She's my big sister. We've lost too much. I've lost too much."
He puts his head down quickly, but not fast enough to see the comprehension dawn on Professor Elm's face.
There's a moment of tense silence, before the other man goes, "All right. I won't interfere," and leaves.
***
Zach goes home early.
He takes his shoes off and puts them where they belong in the hierarchy of outdoor footwear by the door, hangs his keys on the key rack and puts his briefcase on the kitchen table and gives a polite 'hello' to Sarah, who's eating sliced strawberries with a stained white towel by her elbow, and is returned in a like manner.
"Did Marina chop those for you?" he asks, visions of Sarah wielding a knife flashing through his mind with an emphatic thud of his heart, and the girl nods quickly, tilting her head in his direction like she can sense every muscle in his body tightening.
"She does it when she's trying to forget," she goes like she's answering a question he didn't ask, and he took a moment to reflect on the scary intuitiveness of his youngest sister. He remembers, though; there had been cut strawberries on the counter when he came home to find his dead sister sitting in their mother's chair.
"Where is she?" he loosens his tie and she stretches her hands out eagerly; he gives it to her and she breathes deep -- he still doesn't ask why she does that; it feels a bit too much like asking a prospective girlfriend why she has hair on her upper lip; you just don’t do it -- before looping it around her neck and tying it with clumsy, five-year-old fingers. It's on backwards, but he doesn't tell her that; the look of pride on her face when she succeeds stops him. She points to the living room, and mumbles something about Josh.
His conversation with Elm flashes through his mind, and Zach flinches.
He doesn't make it beyond the living room door, however. The armchair has been moved so that it was right next to the bookcase, and the top shelf had that disorganized, lopsided look that signaled several volumes had recently been removed. The lamp has also been relocated from its table to the floor, where it creates a dome of light that encompasses Marina and Josh, splayed out on their bellies on the carpet. They have several books spread out around them, a couple dog-eared, and a magazine on Goldeen wrangling he was positive he had told Jake to throw out. And they also have his Pokedex.
He'd forgotten he even had one. He thinks about those days all the time, but there's a difference between remembering them in passing and actively seeking the memories out.
"How about this one?" Josh exclaims, jabbing at something in his book.
"Hm?" Marina leans over, electric blue hair falling all across her shoulders. Her lips curve upwards. "That's a Camerupt. You rarely see those in the wild, because they hide deep in the mountains of Hoenn. I knew a girl who befriended two. They're not very bright, but they make up for it with their size and their tenacity--"
"What's that?"
"Tenacity? Um. Their will-power. Like you, mister, have a willpower to interrupt with questions all the time, Camerupts have a willpower to eat rocks and ... sleep."
"Sounds like Xanthus."
"It does. Fancy that."
"Marina, where you come from, do you have Pokemon Trainers? 'Cause when you talk about people and Pokemon, you always talk about friends. How do you befriend a Pokemon without catching it?"
A ghost of a smile crosses his sister's face, one of those secretive ones that only women can pull off with any aplomb, and for a moment, Zach is certain that she's not going to answer.
But then she shifts her weight up onto her elbows and goes, "Well, it does involve a certain amount of catching. But not a catch to keep, like Pokemon Trainers do. There are similarities between Trainers and my people, just like there are similarities between Wurmples and Weedles. Trainers believe in building a Pokemon's character to further themselves; to them, Pokemon are helpers, friends, but status symbols first and foremost. You've seen plenty of that with Xanthus; he thinks because he has every evolution of an Eevee, he's the coolest thing. But have you seen the way his Umbreon snarls about him? He's lucky that he's dating Desarae; that girl has the true spirit it takes to be a Pokemon breeder.
"My people aren't like that. We're... we're kind of like the police. We maintain the balance between the two worlds; ours, with our cities and our sewer systems and our rock concerts, and the world that was there before we moved in on it; the world of Pokemon. When we catch Pokemon, it's to tell them that we mean no harm, and we need their help, or we're sorry for however we may have wronged them."
Josh's lamp-like green eyes have gone wide behind his glasses. "Your people... you mean the Pokemon Rangers? From Fiore?"
Marina starts so badly she knocks the lamp over; it spins and the lights play merry havoc on the walls until she grabs it and rights it again. "What did you say?"
Josh clears his throat awkwardly. If there's one thing that Zach knows about his brother, it's that he adores anything and everything to do with Pokemon; after their mother had died and before Zach had straightened everything out and shuffled their lukewarm, insipid father off, he had spent much of his time with Xanthus and their eldest sister Karin up on the Indigo Plateau. Now, he just read everything he could get his hands on. Zach doesn't know where a nine-year-old stores the kind of information that Josh could absorb in one sitting. But all that reading meant he did little interacting with anyone outside of the librarian and Desarae, so while aware he had suddenly encroached on a sensitive subject, he was unsure of how to proceed.
"You're a Ranger. I read... I read in one of the magazines that Rangers only really existed in Hoenn up until about twenty years ago, when they started building bases on the island of Fiore, off the Cianwood coast. The article was a bit biased, though. It didn't mention the befriending thing. It mostly just went on about naturalism and the pre-existing state of things. And anarchy. Whatever all that stuff is."
Marina begins to stop looking so scared and mostly just looks bemused. Zach, on the other hand, thinks of the story Xanthus told him the first night, about the local girl who had 'anarchist' carved into her back with Sneasel claws and shivers.
And then she says, "Yes, Josh. I am a Pokemon Ranger. Like this family, it's one thing I will never be able to escape. Not anymore."
***
"What do you think of Marina?" Zach asks out of the blue.
Cassie spins around, lips quirked up in confusion. "Like, in general? Or there is a specific field you want my opinion on, like that shirt she was wearing this morning? 'Cos yeah, that one was mine. But I'm not really into Operation Absol anymore, so it doesn't bother me that she's got it."
"In general, I suppose, yeah," he swirls the dregs of his lemonade and swallows it, leaning back in the lawn chair in the same movement.
She makes a face, brushing a stray curl of soft chestnut hair out of her eyes with the back of her wrist, since her hands are covered in Aipom fur and dirt from the garden. "Where to begin, man. I ... I don't know, Zach. She disappeared before I was born. That's like asking me what I think of a ghost. She's a stranger to me. A stranger who's living in my house, eating my low-fat crackers, wearing my clothes and watching my movies."
He sits up, letting the water bill fall into his lap, and he fixes her with his best disciplinary look, to which she cocks a hip in typical defiant, present pubescent fashion. "Cassie, you're my people meter. You know I don't trust anyone without them going through you first. Which is probably the main reason why I don't date."
"She's our sister!" Cassie exclaims, spooking the Aipom she had been grooming so that it disappears up the nearest tree with only one side of it brushed.
"But like you said, she's a stranger. You've treated her like a stranger thusfar. Like she's just another stray we brought home that needs to be clothed and pampered until we're ready to release it again. So, out with it."
"She's in love."
Whatever he had been expecting, that wasn't it. "Um. What?"
Cassie sits down in the grass, looping her arms around her knees. Behind her, the garden stretches out into the bright sky, and he can see Brian's Diglett inconspicuously trying to make off with one of the gardenias. The Stantler canters over, stopping right behind the girl like it can sense her distress. It tilts its majestic head down, and she reaches up to rub its muzzle. The moment she touches it, the eyes fixed into its horns rivet themselves on Zach, and perhaps it's just his imagination, but they seem to narrow with accusation and he resists the urge to lift his hands.
It seems to give her strength, however, because she takes a deep breath and goes, "She doesn't want to be here. She ran away, remember? She treats being here like a sort of a hotel stay. She cleans up after herself. She keeps her clothes -- hers, the ones we gave her, not mine -- folded at the end of her bed and doesn't put them away in any drawers. She has no books or possessions to speak of, nor is she making any attempt to buy any. She isn't planning on staying." She ticks off each crime on her fingers.
Zach shakes his head. "She has to stay."
"Why? What's keeping her here that wasn't here sixteen years ago?"
"Susanna's baby."
"She's pregnant, Zach. Oh, don’t look at me like that; it's written all over her. She'll have her own tater tot running around and won't need to cling to Korea so. She cares for her twin's baby so much because it's a sort of a trial run."
"You said she's in love. What does that have to do with anything?"
A Girafarig has joined them by this point, and since none of them have a Girafarig, Zach assumes it's Desarae's, which means Xanthus is home early with the intention to stay. Which is incredibly rare.
The Girafarig and the Stantler snuffle and snort warm greetings to each other, and Cassie snatches at her bag to get apples for both of them.
"You don't think about water until it stops coming out of the tap," she goes after a long pause filled only with the sound of crunching and slobbering. "You don't think about sunlight until the sun sets. You don't think about breathing until you're dead. Likewise, you don't love a man until you have to say good-bye. Whatever happened to her, she ran away from it. They'll be coming for her. She's here because she needs our protection."
"What do you think she's running from?"
Cassie worries her bottom lip. "Do you remember what Xanthus said when they shaved and branded that Ranger girl from the other side of town? About the rumors of somebody important getting killed and the Ranger suspected of doing it disappearing --"
"No," Zach says firmly, although he had been thinking along those very same lines. "Marina's not a killer."
"Molly was a killer."
"Marina's not Molly. And what do you mean, was? Molly's still out there somewhere. Still killing people, for all I know."
"Marina's been gone sixteen years, Zach. She could be anyone by now."
"Cassie--"
"You love her."
"Yes, I do. She's my sister. She's our sister. She's hardly going to go and butcher Korea or Jake or anyone in their sleep."
She looks at him, her mouth pursed thin and disapproving like she was the one who was twenty five and he was the fourteen-year-old. Then she hops to her feet, making the Girafarig and the Stantler both snort in surprise and balk. "You asked what I thought. I told you."
He studies her as she walks away, back and upper lip stiff and some of last autumn's leaves skittering across her path. Just when she's about to reach the back door, he calls, "If it was you, I would do everything in my power to keep you safe. I wouldn't turn you out because you gave me a bad feeling."
Cassie just laughs.
On to part two.