Fic: Five Times Solana's Underwear Got Ruined, Pokemon Ranger
Title: Five Times Solana's Underwear Got Ruined
Author: wingsofcharity
Fandom: Pokemon Ranger
Pairing: Solana/Spenser, with appearances by all relevant ensemble
Rating: R
Word Count: ~ 5,000
Warnings: Adolescent humor. Mix with wangst, drama, and a dash of sex and serve chilled.
Disclaimer: Pokemon Ranger has buttsex with Nintendo. I get it.
done for the prompt "3. whipped cream" at 20_firstkisses
i.
These are the days that Solana remembers, when she looks back. Not the bad days, not always, not the important days or the holidays, or the hot days or the school days or even the days the Pokemon Professor comes on the TV and something inside her soul lurches over like a body in a grave.
"Okay," she goes, neatly crossing her ankles under her stool and turning to him, feeling strangely adult and not like she's some awkward age between thirteen and fourteen and has never been anywhere in her entire life and she thinks she might like it. "What's your favorite color?"
His name his Bryon, and he thinks about it, and she's expecting some manly kind of color like malboro red, or him to buff the question with some remark about how he likes colors when they match and has no particular favorite, so her little heart gives a flutter when he says, "Violet, I think. Or maybe lavender. Oh, it would help if your name was Violet, or something." He grins up at her. "Are you sure your name isn't actually Violet and your parents have been lying to you since you were born?"
"Um," she goes, feeling a little blank, and she sets her paintbrush down and lays her palms flat on her thighs, ignoring the soft pastel smudges of paint she leaves on her skin. On the easel resting patiently at her elbow, Mt. Coronet spreads across the canvas, half-completed, like the mountain itself must have been at the beginning of time.
His smile turns sheepish the longer the silence spreads. "I'm trying to be romantic. Isn't that what I'm supposed to be doing? Is it working?"
"Um," she says again, brilliantly. Shyly, "I'm not the person to ask."
He rolls to his knees, crawls across the sticks and stones and the heat-dried dirt to reach where she is sitting, overlooking everything. She is suddenly and acutely aware of every detail; the trickle of sweat worming its way through her hair (I'm thinking periwinkle, says her sister. No, cyan, goes her mother. Can't we just call it blue, her stepfather wonders desperately.) to the sun on one arm and the shade on the other, to the shivers that run up and down her skin when she spreads her legs the slightest bit so he can kneel, the flesh of his upper arms warm against the hard knobs on the inside of her knees.
These are the days Solana remembers. Falling in love. She always thought falling in love would be something big, bold, dramatic; something she'd recognize instantly for what it was. An electrical jolt along every fiber in her body, or something, a sudden singing in her blood or trip-beat to her heart, something that would instantly whisper to her in a confidential nature, You're in love. Get ready to burn.
But he is her next-door neighbor. Their windows are right next to each other; when they were younger, she'd listen to him try to learn the trumpet and fail miserably as she doodled along the edges of her work, times tables and the names of the native Pokemon interspersed with portraits of famous professors and little smiling Buisel faces. He confessed, once, shouting across the lunch room just to see her blush, every freckle flaming on her face, that she shouldn't change in front of her window and there was nothing about her that he needed to imagine (that would be true, regardless, because he has always had a 3D mind).
She had loved him for a long time, in that quiet way, like one will love neighborhood barbeques (archaic, outdated word, since nobody on the planet eats meat anymore; haven't, not since the dawn of the professors and Pokemon became friends, not food) and the people they can dare to dive into the shallow end to make themselves look cooler to their friends. There was no falling in love to be done.
His hands cover hers, palms child-soft, where they rest on her bare thighs. She is dressed in next to nothing, and he just wears his shorts, so when he leans up to kiss her, tentatively, gingerly, she fears to touch his skin.
His name is Bryon, and forty years from now he'll be a Gym Leader in a city hundreds of miles away, called Canaclave, but here and now he's barely fifteen years old and she focuses entirely on the wet slide of his lips, and how he makes the world roar.
Unless the world actually is roaring.
She pulls back, sees the confusion in his face just a second before the earth explodes.
She catches a glimpse of a body while she's upside down in midair, huge like boulders, pushing out of the earth like a kazoo, and has time to think Onix before she lands, hard, scraping across rock and then there's nothing but air beneath her and she scrambles for a handhold. Sinnoh arcs out below her, suddenly not just a beautiful landscape but frighteningly real, and Bryon is cussing like a sailor and she feels the Onix land like a ton of bricks and the earth itself jumped and she lost her grip.
She only falls about ten feet before she hits the ground rolling, slipping and sliding through rocks and underbrush, and with every impact she feels her skin burst like a melon or peel like an apple, scratched raw on nature and when she finally comes to a halt, she just lays there for a moment, moaning.
"Solana?" Bryon's voice rings out at the top of the incline, high and worried. "Solana, are you all right?"
She lifts herself onto her elbows. "Yeah," she calls back. "I think I need at least thirty band-aids, though."
She staggers to her feet, brushing the rubble from her wounds and picking out the rocks where necessary, blood rolling without ceremony down her shins, and the sting is only really setting in before a small whisp of a breeze alerts her to something rather important.
Her underwear's gone.
The "oh, my" from the crest of the hill tells her Bryon noticed it at the exact same time she did, and she looks around frantically, bringing her knees together like that was going to shield anything. Surely she would have felt it if it had rolled off of her, wouldn't it? Except. Oh, there they were.
Her heart sinks. Completely shredded, they hang off an erect root she must have hit on the way down, half-way between herself and Bryon and of absolutely no use to her now.
She looks around for a branch or a bush or something she could use to protect her modesty with, and her face is absolutely flaming when she hears Bryon drop from the overhang with a grunt and come mincing down the incline, so she settles for hiding herself behind a tree, even though it's a thin, sickly thing and probably only made matters worse.
She looks up, and Bryon is carefully looking anywhere but at her, not that it should matter since according to him he's seen it all anyway, and she scowls when she sees that his lips are twitching, but then he holds out her painting and she can't be mad at him. It was rather funny, actually, if she thought about in a detached, wasn't-happening-to-her kind of way.
"What, you want me to walk back into town wearing a canvas?" she goes wryly. He chokes on a laugh. "You know," she adds, still blushing. "If you were anything approaching chivalrous you'd offer me your pants."
"I'm not walking down main street completely starkers!" he returns hotly.
Their eyes meet briefly, and then they're laughing, long and hard, and these are the days Solana remembers, back before Pokemon.
ii.
"Hey, sweetheart," comes her mother's voice from the laundry room, and Solana assumes she is measuring out detergent or sorting hot and cold wash or cleaning the lint trap or something else matronly. Maybe she's reading a porno, she thinks uncharitably, big buxom women dressed like Lopunny, girls my age in bikinis with tattoos of Professor Oak low on the butt...
"Hi, Mom," is what she says out loud, dropping her grocery bags in the entry way and massaging her fingers, which are white and have grooves dug into them from the weight of the bags.
"You got a letter today," her mother continues, still at a distance.
"Oh?" Solana replies, tilting her head to look at the thermostat. It was at least forty degrees colder in here than it need to be. She was going to go up to her room, grab some suntan lotion, check to see if there were any recent newsletters from that Fiore-hosted website she liked, the one advocating Pokemon rights, and then go onto the roof or something, where at least it wasn't an icebox. Although, if it had been a letter from school, wondering why she was failing Comparative Anatomy, then maybe she was in trouble and would have to do the laundry herself or something.
But if it had been a letter from school, her mother would have been waiting for her, ready to wave it in her face.
She heads for the stairs, as her mother calls, "Handwritten, from Fiore. I don't even want to imagine how much the postage for that cost. Arrived by Pelipper today. Fancy that! Do you know anyone named Spenser?"
Solana misses a step, and it's a curious feeling of falling, a lurch in her stomach, and she catches herself on the banister.
"Anyway, it's in the kitchen. I'm thinking about lettuce wraps for dinner. How does that sound? Did you get the Worcestershire sauce like I asked you to?"
Her sister's leaning against the kitchen counter, and when Solana walks in, she doesn't even look up from the Pokedex she's fiddling with, reaching behind her and extending an envelope. "Did you hear about the raid they did down by the Route 207 exit?" she says excitedly, like Solana's paying even the slightest bit of attention. "Found an old woman completely overwhelmed with Growlithe. Here, in Orebourgh! They had the house-trained ones for display at the Pokemon Center today. So guess what we came home with?"
She turns the letter over in her hands, her nails chipped and flecked with paint. It feels disappointingly light. She holds it up to the window above the sink, but the sunlight slanting through it doesn't illuminate any of the text.
What was I expecting? she thinks bitterly, heading for the dining room with it. It's probably just some canned thanks-for-your-feedback message, designed to keep me from spamming them with any more letters. I didn't think seven was an excess. She lets her eyes linger on the chickenscratch signature in the corner, the bold sharp slant to the S and the way the 'ser' at the end of his name piddled out almost into a straight line, giving it the look of a child's imitation of waves. I bet he doesn't even read them himself.
"Solana, no, look out --" her sister goes, sharply, as she pulls out one of the chairs and sits down.
There's a yowl like a creature getting its teeth pulled and a whoosh of combustion, and all Solana feels is heat and then she shrieks, all but rocketing ten feet into the air and slamming hard enough against the antique dishwear cabinet to make her grandmother's good china sway ominously.
Her sister comes racing in, Pokedex still held in her hands, her face both amused and horrified as Solana gingerly probes at the burn spreading all across her right buttcheek. Her jeans and her underwear are smoldering. On the chair, the Growlithe snarls, nails dug into the cushion and smoke still curling from its jaws.
Solana gets a skin graft and can't sit properly for weeks, but by then she has read the letter that changes her life.
iii.
She comes barreling through the Ringtown doors feeling like there should be a thunderhead following her. As is, barely anyone looks up until she comes to a halt in front of Spenser and slaps him, hard, across the face like woman do on the early afternoon soaps, palm flat and stinging.
He staggers satisfyingly, shooting her a look of confusion and alarm, hand coming up to cradle his cheek like he couldn't believe that had just happened. On the table, Fearow cries out indignantly, flaring his wings out, but Plusle jumps in the way. Solana gears up to do it again when Murph grabs her solidly around the waist, hauling her back, so she settles for shaking her finger at her Leader in the silence that's fallen around the Base. "I've got two words for you, Spenser," she manages to spit. "Shin. Guards."
And then he really looks at her, sees the tears in her stockings and the bright red scratches high on her thighs, sees the mess of her hair and the dirt on her red Ringtown jacket. He looks beyond her, to the Sneasel who crouches at the door, spitting fury, and if he tilts his head to the right he can see the thin golden line connecting it to the Styler in Solana's hand.
"Oh," he says in a moment of genius.
"Yeah, 'oh'," says Solana nastily. Then, "for Suicuine's sake, put me down," she snaps at Murph. "I'm not going to kill him."
Murph looks askance at Spenser, his round, doughy face looking guileless and Spenser gives one short nod, and she is set back down on her feet, and amidst all her rage she is momentarily jealous. If she was able to communicate as wordlessly as Murph was, for all his klutz and his uselessness in the field, she wouldn't need to be having this explosion here, in the middle of the Ranger Base.
To the side, she sees that her Plusle has backed the Fearow into a corner and feels a pulse of pride for her partner Pokemon.
"I save the world for you," she starts into Spenser, who's really trying not to look at how tattered her outfit is. "The least you could do is give me a uniform that -- oh, I don't know -- actually protects me. As is, the best it does right now is give me yellow armpits and athlete's foot. I didn't know what you were thinking when you designed this --"
"It was Percy. Percy designed all our uniforms," and her Leader's now sounding more amused by the entire thing than she thinks he has any right to be, considering she's still stuck in a state of complete mortification.
"-- but I'd like to see you wear it and try to keep it in one piece when capturing infuriated Pokemon!"
Her anger, like her cuts, is superficial at best, and Spenser knows it, she's sure, or he wouldn't be looking at her with his eyes soft and affectionate like that, like he's remembering exactly why he hired her.
"Duly noted," he says now, and he sets his stack of mail down onto the counter in order to pluck the shredded half of a leaf out of her hair with an almost absent smile, smoothing down the strands of blue that came with it, and Solana feels her heart stumble, trip, and miss a beat, and her blood, which is already boiling with her shame, starts to sing at her. She feels the jolt to the ends of her fingers, as if she had touched her Plusle's cheeks.
Look out, her body tells her. You're in love. Get ready to burn.
She spins around, heading for the lift with her back straight, and hears rather than sees her Plusle and the Sneasel scuttle to catch up to her. Her ears are roaring, so she doesn't hear Karan, the lady with the cornrows at the front desk, give a high, piercing laugh which she quickly smothers behind her hand.
Murph averts his eyes from the tear all along Solana's backside, from the top of her stocking through the elastic fabric of her rather short shorts, and Spenser smiles and wonders if there's any practical reason he should know that his littlest Ranger has a tattoo of a Carnivine, starting at the base of her right butt cheek and curving around a grafting scar.
iv.
Aria makes an impatient noise at the back of her throat, leaning forward so she could languidly brush her ringlets out with her fingers. The bare skin of her back all but peels off her seat in the heat. "The bride's late," she says to no one in particular, and when she settles back, the opal sequins of her dress sparkle and flash in the midday sun like the scales of a Beautifly.
Ahead, underneath the garland arch, Spenser loosens his tie a little bit more so he can feel a breeze across his throat, but today presents a dry, dead kind of heat, and Lunick will say later that he spent the first fifteen minutes of the wedding watching a Swellow's egg fry on the pavement. Gordor's falling asleep at the organ.
In the second pew, behind a violet-haired man who reminds her almost painfully of Bryon, Solana folds her program into a fan and beats it uselessly.
"At least they didn't have any ice sculpture," Joel remarks, removing his glasses to wipe the sweat off the rims onto his trousers.
At his side, Lady gives his knee a soft, reprimanding squeeze. "No, but they do have lettuce wraps."
Seeing the inherent problem there, Joel murmurs back, "Didn't one of the Wintown Rangers bring an Altaria with them? To use Mist and keep the food from wilting?"
"Forget the food," grumps the violet-haired man, who can only be Elita's father. "What about the guests? What I wouldn't give for a Mist right now!"
Suddenly, Solana feels like a chord strung too tight, and should anyone strike her right at this moment, she would make a thin, fierce, discordant noise. With a hasty muttered, "stay" to her Plusle, she gets up and flees at a fast walk up the aisle. A few of the guests look at her, their eyes heavy and hooded from the heat, and some of them she knows and some of them she has never seen before, and two of them -- that she can spot with a cursory glance -- are Pokemon Trainers. They might even be from her homeland.
This just spurns her faster, and when she reaches the air-conditioned refuge of the Ringtown Ranger Base, she ducks into the nearest supply closet and gasps like a Magikarp, leaning her forehead against the air vents and grasping blindly at a shelf with her left hand, feeling the grit and the dust of most supply closets and she knows she's not going back out there.
The subtle throat-clearing from behind her almost gives her a heart attack, and she spins, free hand snatching in vain at the fabric bunched at her waist before she remembers that her Styler is in her purse, out in the second pew with her Plusle.
But it's just Silent Chris, sitting on top of a piano with his feet propped up on the keys, and Solana doesn't know why they have a piano in the supply closet, but apparently they had an organ, too, so maybe she doesn't know everything about the Base she thinks she does.
He pats the spot beside him, an invitation to join him, but she shakes her head, stays where she is. It's not much of a gesture, since closets, by nature, are not particularly large and she was practically on top of the piano anyway. His face is hard to make out in the gloom, the faded sunlight coming in through the small, high window above his head, but she figures it's a pretty good match for the expression on hers.
"Why didn't you stop her?" is flung out of her mouth before she can stop it.
His eyebrow vaults itself across his forehead, and the question comes back to her like a rubber band, only with the pronoun reversed. She is reminded of how cruelly sarcastic Chris can be, without a single word.
Outside, there comes the sound of a crowd stirring, fluttering, and then the organ music strikes up. "I guess that means the bride's finally showed up," she offers, but it's stale in her mouth.
"All rise," she mouths in unison with the judge, and Chris gets to his feet. She tries to flatten herself up against the shelves, to give him room to get out, but he stops and just looks at her with eyes hollow in the darkness, and it's strange to see him in a tux, his hair combed back and furrows of gray tucked neatly behind his ears. He looks sharp, she thinks, and reaches out to delicately brush a cobweb off his lapels.
He, in turn, takes a lock of her curled, gelled hair and twines it around the mass of them at the crown of her head. Then his fist clenches, hard, and she hisses with pain, snatching at his wrist as he yanks her head to the side and it connects solidly with the side of the piano before he drags her back up again until she is arched high on her tiptoes, Swablu dancing in merry circles across her vision. The corners of her eyes are stark with tears, his with accusation.
Get ready to burn.
She informs him that she is wearing the only nice outfit she has and it took entirely too much time to get into and if it gets damaged in any way it's hell on his head, and when he lifts her up so that she is braced against the shelves, her legs spread and she feels the seams tighten ominously so she repeats her message.
He grunts to show he heard her the first time, and worms the slinky fabric up past her waist so it bunches underneath her breasts, and his clothes are only as pushed to the side as they need to be, and in the dimness and the thick dust she can't see what he's doing down there, but he places a hand over her mouth to muffle her protest when he just hooks his finger around the hem of her panties and rips them off.
When he arches up inside of her, she bites down on the soft flesh of his middle finger and he flinches. Her hands are fisted tight against his shoulders, and he moves and she sighs, slick and wet and adjusting fast. Heat flashes through her veins, builds up at the base of her spine.
When the organ crescendos, so are they, Solana with the long, lone wail of a dying horn, like the kind they play at funerals, Chris as quiet as he will ever be.
"I used to paint," she tells the window, as the sweat cools on the back of her neck, her thighs sticky and still dripping.
"Didn't we all?" he answers, and she closes her eyes against the acceptance in his voice.
Later, at the reception, Solana catches Spenser's eye as she winds her way between the guests, wine glass tilted dangerously in her hand and a safety pin holding one of her shoulder straps on, and she smiles, genuine and happy, toasting him with her glass and thinking the lettuce wraps could use some more Worcestershire sauce. But he just looks at her, blank as a rookie's Browser, and it isn't until his eyes flicker down and back up, the tips of his ears going red, that she realizes she is standing in a beam of slanting light, and he has to be able to tell she's naked as a Zubat underneath.
Her smile turns catty, and she cocks her hip into a sway. Behind her, Kevin is choking on laughter as he tilts Lind's head into his lap and, to the jeers of a dozen Rangers, pours whipped cream into his mouth until it overflows. Solana leans around a guffawing Wintown man to swipe some of the excess.
She thinks this is a depths she has not plunged, as she sucks the cream off her fingers, one-by-one, and Spenser's eyes go dark.
It’s a curious feeling of falling.
At his side, Elita laughs at some joke, and she is absolutely beautiful in white.
v.
"Ready?" goes Lunick, taking a deep breath.
Solana pulls the ski mask down over her face, making sure every strand of blue (not periwinkle, not cyan, blue) is tucked up and invisible. She gives him the thumbs up, grinning so wide her face felt like it was going to split.
Lunick yanks the door open, and it bounces off the wall with a bang but she barely hears it as she and Lunick go streaking down the Summerland pier, naked as the day they were born. She whoops and hollers like she hasn't done since she was five, and Lunick waves his Styler around so shards of brilliant yellow light scatter all across the waters.
Cameron splutters to a stop in the middle of what she assumed was a rather awkward speech, and through the holes in her mask she catches glimpses of pale, oval faces as they turn to face them.
There are gasps of outrage and pure laughter as they go dashing through the center of the crowd, which parts as if they are contagious. Leilani reaches out to slap Lunick's bum as he sails past her, causing him to start and almost fall flat on his face. Tiffany takes a picture, her face bright red and Solana makes a mental note to tell her brothers that she needs a porno for her eighteenth birthday. Joel just sinks his head into his hands.
Then it's Spenser, and Solana doesn't think; she snatches at his sleeve to arrest her momentum, spinning them both around and then she smashes her mouth to his.
At first, it tastes like nothing at all, just flesh, like she had pinched him, and he sucks in a startled breath through his nose, flush against her cheek. Then his hands land on her shoulder blades and she is crushed against him, all in a rush, his lips on and around and inside hers and his tongue half-way down her esophagus. Her toes find the edges of his sneakers and use them to push herself up, nipples scraping against the hard lining of his jacket, her fingernails hooking into the "L" engraved on his sleeves as she did so. His hands slip down her back, pressing into the accordion of her spine like a man in love with an instrument, before they seize upon her ass -- the scars and the tattoo -- and grinds her down against him.
"Oh," she hears Joel say faintly, as if all the blood has drained from his head. "I think ... I'll be in the men's room."
Then, a hand is firm on her elbow, detangling her from Spenser and she thinks for a hot, panicked moment that it is Elita, but it's Lunick, who salutes his Leader smartly and without a backwards glance the two of them fly out of there.
"Good show!" Professor Hastings calls after them, as they round the Ranger Base.
They come to a halt outside the Mechanic's home, breathless and panting and laughing all in one. "Man, that was hot," he says, removing his mask and fluffing his hair out.
"Yes, streaking is always very hot," she says with scathing sarcasm, crooking her ankle against her thigh so she could remove a splinter from the sole of her foot. "Let's do it more often."
"I was referring to the part where you molested our Leader in front of ... like, everybody on the planet," and Lunick is off again, howling with mirth, and pushes them both through the door. Minun and Plusle shriek a warning, but it's too late.
The laughter dies abruptly, replaced with a meek, "uh oh."
"Yeah, 'uh oh'," goes Aria, slamming her fists down on her hips and looking at both of them with utter distaste. "You idiots! I have been planning this thing only since the dawn of time, and what do you two do? Turn it into the laughingstock of our generation! Ohhhh, I am going to kill you! Then I'll have a Banette bring you back so I can kill you again!"
Solana, though properly chastised, notices something rather crucial. "Aria, where are our clothes?"
Aria's mouth tilts up smugly.
"Aria," a note of panic creeps into Lunick's voice. "Where are our clothes?"
"Half-way to Johto, I hope."
Solana and Lunick are outside in a heartbeat, and there go their clothes, dark, bloated stains against the water and too far away. Naked on the planks, they can only watch as a Sharpedo rushes up in full predatory mode, and before Lunick can even think about using his Styler, it seizes Solana's ensemble between its teeth and rips it to shreds before their very eyes.
"Oh, dear," goes Aria, without a lick of sympathy. "What ever shall you do now?"
Solana's mature response is to cuss like a sailor.
"Well, you never did like that uniform anyway," Lunick points out, and she shoves him off the pier.
Author: wingsofcharity
Fandom: Pokemon Ranger
Pairing: Solana/Spenser, with appearances by all relevant ensemble
Rating: R
Word Count: ~ 5,000
Warnings: Adolescent humor. Mix with wangst, drama, and a dash of sex and serve chilled.
Disclaimer: Pokemon Ranger has buttsex with Nintendo. I get it.
done for the prompt "3. whipped cream" at 20_firstkisses
i.
These are the days that Solana remembers, when she looks back. Not the bad days, not always, not the important days or the holidays, or the hot days or the school days or even the days the Pokemon Professor comes on the TV and something inside her soul lurches over like a body in a grave.
"Okay," she goes, neatly crossing her ankles under her stool and turning to him, feeling strangely adult and not like she's some awkward age between thirteen and fourteen and has never been anywhere in her entire life and she thinks she might like it. "What's your favorite color?"
His name his Bryon, and he thinks about it, and she's expecting some manly kind of color like malboro red, or him to buff the question with some remark about how he likes colors when they match and has no particular favorite, so her little heart gives a flutter when he says, "Violet, I think. Or maybe lavender. Oh, it would help if your name was Violet, or something." He grins up at her. "Are you sure your name isn't actually Violet and your parents have been lying to you since you were born?"
"Um," she goes, feeling a little blank, and she sets her paintbrush down and lays her palms flat on her thighs, ignoring the soft pastel smudges of paint she leaves on her skin. On the easel resting patiently at her elbow, Mt. Coronet spreads across the canvas, half-completed, like the mountain itself must have been at the beginning of time.
His smile turns sheepish the longer the silence spreads. "I'm trying to be romantic. Isn't that what I'm supposed to be doing? Is it working?"
"Um," she says again, brilliantly. Shyly, "I'm not the person to ask."
He rolls to his knees, crawls across the sticks and stones and the heat-dried dirt to reach where she is sitting, overlooking everything. She is suddenly and acutely aware of every detail; the trickle of sweat worming its way through her hair (I'm thinking periwinkle, says her sister. No, cyan, goes her mother. Can't we just call it blue, her stepfather wonders desperately.) to the sun on one arm and the shade on the other, to the shivers that run up and down her skin when she spreads her legs the slightest bit so he can kneel, the flesh of his upper arms warm against the hard knobs on the inside of her knees.
These are the days Solana remembers. Falling in love. She always thought falling in love would be something big, bold, dramatic; something she'd recognize instantly for what it was. An electrical jolt along every fiber in her body, or something, a sudden singing in her blood or trip-beat to her heart, something that would instantly whisper to her in a confidential nature, You're in love. Get ready to burn.
But he is her next-door neighbor. Their windows are right next to each other; when they were younger, she'd listen to him try to learn the trumpet and fail miserably as she doodled along the edges of her work, times tables and the names of the native Pokemon interspersed with portraits of famous professors and little smiling Buisel faces. He confessed, once, shouting across the lunch room just to see her blush, every freckle flaming on her face, that she shouldn't change in front of her window and there was nothing about her that he needed to imagine (that would be true, regardless, because he has always had a 3D mind).
She had loved him for a long time, in that quiet way, like one will love neighborhood barbeques (archaic, outdated word, since nobody on the planet eats meat anymore; haven't, not since the dawn of the professors and Pokemon became friends, not food) and the people they can dare to dive into the shallow end to make themselves look cooler to their friends. There was no falling in love to be done.
His hands cover hers, palms child-soft, where they rest on her bare thighs. She is dressed in next to nothing, and he just wears his shorts, so when he leans up to kiss her, tentatively, gingerly, she fears to touch his skin.
His name is Bryon, and forty years from now he'll be a Gym Leader in a city hundreds of miles away, called Canaclave, but here and now he's barely fifteen years old and she focuses entirely on the wet slide of his lips, and how he makes the world roar.
Unless the world actually is roaring.
She pulls back, sees the confusion in his face just a second before the earth explodes.
She catches a glimpse of a body while she's upside down in midair, huge like boulders, pushing out of the earth like a kazoo, and has time to think Onix before she lands, hard, scraping across rock and then there's nothing but air beneath her and she scrambles for a handhold. Sinnoh arcs out below her, suddenly not just a beautiful landscape but frighteningly real, and Bryon is cussing like a sailor and she feels the Onix land like a ton of bricks and the earth itself jumped and she lost her grip.
She only falls about ten feet before she hits the ground rolling, slipping and sliding through rocks and underbrush, and with every impact she feels her skin burst like a melon or peel like an apple, scratched raw on nature and when she finally comes to a halt, she just lays there for a moment, moaning.
"Solana?" Bryon's voice rings out at the top of the incline, high and worried. "Solana, are you all right?"
She lifts herself onto her elbows. "Yeah," she calls back. "I think I need at least thirty band-aids, though."
She staggers to her feet, brushing the rubble from her wounds and picking out the rocks where necessary, blood rolling without ceremony down her shins, and the sting is only really setting in before a small whisp of a breeze alerts her to something rather important.
Her underwear's gone.
The "oh, my" from the crest of the hill tells her Bryon noticed it at the exact same time she did, and she looks around frantically, bringing her knees together like that was going to shield anything. Surely she would have felt it if it had rolled off of her, wouldn't it? Except. Oh, there they were.
Her heart sinks. Completely shredded, they hang off an erect root she must have hit on the way down, half-way between herself and Bryon and of absolutely no use to her now.
She looks around for a branch or a bush or something she could use to protect her modesty with, and her face is absolutely flaming when she hears Bryon drop from the overhang with a grunt and come mincing down the incline, so she settles for hiding herself behind a tree, even though it's a thin, sickly thing and probably only made matters worse.
She looks up, and Bryon is carefully looking anywhere but at her, not that it should matter since according to him he's seen it all anyway, and she scowls when she sees that his lips are twitching, but then he holds out her painting and she can't be mad at him. It was rather funny, actually, if she thought about in a detached, wasn't-happening-to-her kind of way.
"What, you want me to walk back into town wearing a canvas?" she goes wryly. He chokes on a laugh. "You know," she adds, still blushing. "If you were anything approaching chivalrous you'd offer me your pants."
"I'm not walking down main street completely starkers!" he returns hotly.
Their eyes meet briefly, and then they're laughing, long and hard, and these are the days Solana remembers, back before Pokemon.
ii.
"Hey, sweetheart," comes her mother's voice from the laundry room, and Solana assumes she is measuring out detergent or sorting hot and cold wash or cleaning the lint trap or something else matronly. Maybe she's reading a porno, she thinks uncharitably, big buxom women dressed like Lopunny, girls my age in bikinis with tattoos of Professor Oak low on the butt...
"Hi, Mom," is what she says out loud, dropping her grocery bags in the entry way and massaging her fingers, which are white and have grooves dug into them from the weight of the bags.
"You got a letter today," her mother continues, still at a distance.
"Oh?" Solana replies, tilting her head to look at the thermostat. It was at least forty degrees colder in here than it need to be. She was going to go up to her room, grab some suntan lotion, check to see if there were any recent newsletters from that Fiore-hosted website she liked, the one advocating Pokemon rights, and then go onto the roof or something, where at least it wasn't an icebox. Although, if it had been a letter from school, wondering why she was failing Comparative Anatomy, then maybe she was in trouble and would have to do the laundry herself or something.
But if it had been a letter from school, her mother would have been waiting for her, ready to wave it in her face.
She heads for the stairs, as her mother calls, "Handwritten, from Fiore. I don't even want to imagine how much the postage for that cost. Arrived by Pelipper today. Fancy that! Do you know anyone named Spenser?"
Solana misses a step, and it's a curious feeling of falling, a lurch in her stomach, and she catches herself on the banister.
"Anyway, it's in the kitchen. I'm thinking about lettuce wraps for dinner. How does that sound? Did you get the Worcestershire sauce like I asked you to?"
Her sister's leaning against the kitchen counter, and when Solana walks in, she doesn't even look up from the Pokedex she's fiddling with, reaching behind her and extending an envelope. "Did you hear about the raid they did down by the Route 207 exit?" she says excitedly, like Solana's paying even the slightest bit of attention. "Found an old woman completely overwhelmed with Growlithe. Here, in Orebourgh! They had the house-trained ones for display at the Pokemon Center today. So guess what we came home with?"
She turns the letter over in her hands, her nails chipped and flecked with paint. It feels disappointingly light. She holds it up to the window above the sink, but the sunlight slanting through it doesn't illuminate any of the text.
What was I expecting? she thinks bitterly, heading for the dining room with it. It's probably just some canned thanks-for-your-feedback message, designed to keep me from spamming them with any more letters. I didn't think seven was an excess. She lets her eyes linger on the chickenscratch signature in the corner, the bold sharp slant to the S and the way the 'ser' at the end of his name piddled out almost into a straight line, giving it the look of a child's imitation of waves. I bet he doesn't even read them himself.
"Solana, no, look out --" her sister goes, sharply, as she pulls out one of the chairs and sits down.
There's a yowl like a creature getting its teeth pulled and a whoosh of combustion, and all Solana feels is heat and then she shrieks, all but rocketing ten feet into the air and slamming hard enough against the antique dishwear cabinet to make her grandmother's good china sway ominously.
Her sister comes racing in, Pokedex still held in her hands, her face both amused and horrified as Solana gingerly probes at the burn spreading all across her right buttcheek. Her jeans and her underwear are smoldering. On the chair, the Growlithe snarls, nails dug into the cushion and smoke still curling from its jaws.
Solana gets a skin graft and can't sit properly for weeks, but by then she has read the letter that changes her life.
iii.
She comes barreling through the Ringtown doors feeling like there should be a thunderhead following her. As is, barely anyone looks up until she comes to a halt in front of Spenser and slaps him, hard, across the face like woman do on the early afternoon soaps, palm flat and stinging.
He staggers satisfyingly, shooting her a look of confusion and alarm, hand coming up to cradle his cheek like he couldn't believe that had just happened. On the table, Fearow cries out indignantly, flaring his wings out, but Plusle jumps in the way. Solana gears up to do it again when Murph grabs her solidly around the waist, hauling her back, so she settles for shaking her finger at her Leader in the silence that's fallen around the Base. "I've got two words for you, Spenser," she manages to spit. "Shin. Guards."
And then he really looks at her, sees the tears in her stockings and the bright red scratches high on her thighs, sees the mess of her hair and the dirt on her red Ringtown jacket. He looks beyond her, to the Sneasel who crouches at the door, spitting fury, and if he tilts his head to the right he can see the thin golden line connecting it to the Styler in Solana's hand.
"Oh," he says in a moment of genius.
"Yeah, 'oh'," says Solana nastily. Then, "for Suicuine's sake, put me down," she snaps at Murph. "I'm not going to kill him."
Murph looks askance at Spenser, his round, doughy face looking guileless and Spenser gives one short nod, and she is set back down on her feet, and amidst all her rage she is momentarily jealous. If she was able to communicate as wordlessly as Murph was, for all his klutz and his uselessness in the field, she wouldn't need to be having this explosion here, in the middle of the Ranger Base.
To the side, she sees that her Plusle has backed the Fearow into a corner and feels a pulse of pride for her partner Pokemon.
"I save the world for you," she starts into Spenser, who's really trying not to look at how tattered her outfit is. "The least you could do is give me a uniform that -- oh, I don't know -- actually protects me. As is, the best it does right now is give me yellow armpits and athlete's foot. I didn't know what you were thinking when you designed this --"
"It was Percy. Percy designed all our uniforms," and her Leader's now sounding more amused by the entire thing than she thinks he has any right to be, considering she's still stuck in a state of complete mortification.
"-- but I'd like to see you wear it and try to keep it in one piece when capturing infuriated Pokemon!"
Her anger, like her cuts, is superficial at best, and Spenser knows it, she's sure, or he wouldn't be looking at her with his eyes soft and affectionate like that, like he's remembering exactly why he hired her.
"Duly noted," he says now, and he sets his stack of mail down onto the counter in order to pluck the shredded half of a leaf out of her hair with an almost absent smile, smoothing down the strands of blue that came with it, and Solana feels her heart stumble, trip, and miss a beat, and her blood, which is already boiling with her shame, starts to sing at her. She feels the jolt to the ends of her fingers, as if she had touched her Plusle's cheeks.
Look out, her body tells her. You're in love. Get ready to burn.
She spins around, heading for the lift with her back straight, and hears rather than sees her Plusle and the Sneasel scuttle to catch up to her. Her ears are roaring, so she doesn't hear Karan, the lady with the cornrows at the front desk, give a high, piercing laugh which she quickly smothers behind her hand.
Murph averts his eyes from the tear all along Solana's backside, from the top of her stocking through the elastic fabric of her rather short shorts, and Spenser smiles and wonders if there's any practical reason he should know that his littlest Ranger has a tattoo of a Carnivine, starting at the base of her right butt cheek and curving around a grafting scar.
iv.
Aria makes an impatient noise at the back of her throat, leaning forward so she could languidly brush her ringlets out with her fingers. The bare skin of her back all but peels off her seat in the heat. "The bride's late," she says to no one in particular, and when she settles back, the opal sequins of her dress sparkle and flash in the midday sun like the scales of a Beautifly.
Ahead, underneath the garland arch, Spenser loosens his tie a little bit more so he can feel a breeze across his throat, but today presents a dry, dead kind of heat, and Lunick will say later that he spent the first fifteen minutes of the wedding watching a Swellow's egg fry on the pavement. Gordor's falling asleep at the organ.
In the second pew, behind a violet-haired man who reminds her almost painfully of Bryon, Solana folds her program into a fan and beats it uselessly.
"At least they didn't have any ice sculpture," Joel remarks, removing his glasses to wipe the sweat off the rims onto his trousers.
At his side, Lady gives his knee a soft, reprimanding squeeze. "No, but they do have lettuce wraps."
Seeing the inherent problem there, Joel murmurs back, "Didn't one of the Wintown Rangers bring an Altaria with them? To use Mist and keep the food from wilting?"
"Forget the food," grumps the violet-haired man, who can only be Elita's father. "What about the guests? What I wouldn't give for a Mist right now!"
Suddenly, Solana feels like a chord strung too tight, and should anyone strike her right at this moment, she would make a thin, fierce, discordant noise. With a hasty muttered, "stay" to her Plusle, she gets up and flees at a fast walk up the aisle. A few of the guests look at her, their eyes heavy and hooded from the heat, and some of them she knows and some of them she has never seen before, and two of them -- that she can spot with a cursory glance -- are Pokemon Trainers. They might even be from her homeland.
This just spurns her faster, and when she reaches the air-conditioned refuge of the Ringtown Ranger Base, she ducks into the nearest supply closet and gasps like a Magikarp, leaning her forehead against the air vents and grasping blindly at a shelf with her left hand, feeling the grit and the dust of most supply closets and she knows she's not going back out there.
The subtle throat-clearing from behind her almost gives her a heart attack, and she spins, free hand snatching in vain at the fabric bunched at her waist before she remembers that her Styler is in her purse, out in the second pew with her Plusle.
But it's just Silent Chris, sitting on top of a piano with his feet propped up on the keys, and Solana doesn't know why they have a piano in the supply closet, but apparently they had an organ, too, so maybe she doesn't know everything about the Base she thinks she does.
He pats the spot beside him, an invitation to join him, but she shakes her head, stays where she is. It's not much of a gesture, since closets, by nature, are not particularly large and she was practically on top of the piano anyway. His face is hard to make out in the gloom, the faded sunlight coming in through the small, high window above his head, but she figures it's a pretty good match for the expression on hers.
"Why didn't you stop her?" is flung out of her mouth before she can stop it.
His eyebrow vaults itself across his forehead, and the question comes back to her like a rubber band, only with the pronoun reversed. She is reminded of how cruelly sarcastic Chris can be, without a single word.
Outside, there comes the sound of a crowd stirring, fluttering, and then the organ music strikes up. "I guess that means the bride's finally showed up," she offers, but it's stale in her mouth.
"All rise," she mouths in unison with the judge, and Chris gets to his feet. She tries to flatten herself up against the shelves, to give him room to get out, but he stops and just looks at her with eyes hollow in the darkness, and it's strange to see him in a tux, his hair combed back and furrows of gray tucked neatly behind his ears. He looks sharp, she thinks, and reaches out to delicately brush a cobweb off his lapels.
He, in turn, takes a lock of her curled, gelled hair and twines it around the mass of them at the crown of her head. Then his fist clenches, hard, and she hisses with pain, snatching at his wrist as he yanks her head to the side and it connects solidly with the side of the piano before he drags her back up again until she is arched high on her tiptoes, Swablu dancing in merry circles across her vision. The corners of her eyes are stark with tears, his with accusation.
Get ready to burn.
She informs him that she is wearing the only nice outfit she has and it took entirely too much time to get into and if it gets damaged in any way it's hell on his head, and when he lifts her up so that she is braced against the shelves, her legs spread and she feels the seams tighten ominously so she repeats her message.
He grunts to show he heard her the first time, and worms the slinky fabric up past her waist so it bunches underneath her breasts, and his clothes are only as pushed to the side as they need to be, and in the dimness and the thick dust she can't see what he's doing down there, but he places a hand over her mouth to muffle her protest when he just hooks his finger around the hem of her panties and rips them off.
When he arches up inside of her, she bites down on the soft flesh of his middle finger and he flinches. Her hands are fisted tight against his shoulders, and he moves and she sighs, slick and wet and adjusting fast. Heat flashes through her veins, builds up at the base of her spine.
When the organ crescendos, so are they, Solana with the long, lone wail of a dying horn, like the kind they play at funerals, Chris as quiet as he will ever be.
"I used to paint," she tells the window, as the sweat cools on the back of her neck, her thighs sticky and still dripping.
"Didn't we all?" he answers, and she closes her eyes against the acceptance in his voice.
Later, at the reception, Solana catches Spenser's eye as she winds her way between the guests, wine glass tilted dangerously in her hand and a safety pin holding one of her shoulder straps on, and she smiles, genuine and happy, toasting him with her glass and thinking the lettuce wraps could use some more Worcestershire sauce. But he just looks at her, blank as a rookie's Browser, and it isn't until his eyes flicker down and back up, the tips of his ears going red, that she realizes she is standing in a beam of slanting light, and he has to be able to tell she's naked as a Zubat underneath.
Her smile turns catty, and she cocks her hip into a sway. Behind her, Kevin is choking on laughter as he tilts Lind's head into his lap and, to the jeers of a dozen Rangers, pours whipped cream into his mouth until it overflows. Solana leans around a guffawing Wintown man to swipe some of the excess.
She thinks this is a depths she has not plunged, as she sucks the cream off her fingers, one-by-one, and Spenser's eyes go dark.
It’s a curious feeling of falling.
At his side, Elita laughs at some joke, and she is absolutely beautiful in white.
v.
"Ready?" goes Lunick, taking a deep breath.
Solana pulls the ski mask down over her face, making sure every strand of blue (not periwinkle, not cyan, blue) is tucked up and invisible. She gives him the thumbs up, grinning so wide her face felt like it was going to split.
Lunick yanks the door open, and it bounces off the wall with a bang but she barely hears it as she and Lunick go streaking down the Summerland pier, naked as the day they were born. She whoops and hollers like she hasn't done since she was five, and Lunick waves his Styler around so shards of brilliant yellow light scatter all across the waters.
Cameron splutters to a stop in the middle of what she assumed was a rather awkward speech, and through the holes in her mask she catches glimpses of pale, oval faces as they turn to face them.
There are gasps of outrage and pure laughter as they go dashing through the center of the crowd, which parts as if they are contagious. Leilani reaches out to slap Lunick's bum as he sails past her, causing him to start and almost fall flat on his face. Tiffany takes a picture, her face bright red and Solana makes a mental note to tell her brothers that she needs a porno for her eighteenth birthday. Joel just sinks his head into his hands.
Then it's Spenser, and Solana doesn't think; she snatches at his sleeve to arrest her momentum, spinning them both around and then she smashes her mouth to his.
At first, it tastes like nothing at all, just flesh, like she had pinched him, and he sucks in a startled breath through his nose, flush against her cheek. Then his hands land on her shoulder blades and she is crushed against him, all in a rush, his lips on and around and inside hers and his tongue half-way down her esophagus. Her toes find the edges of his sneakers and use them to push herself up, nipples scraping against the hard lining of his jacket, her fingernails hooking into the "L" engraved on his sleeves as she did so. His hands slip down her back, pressing into the accordion of her spine like a man in love with an instrument, before they seize upon her ass -- the scars and the tattoo -- and grinds her down against him.
"Oh," she hears Joel say faintly, as if all the blood has drained from his head. "I think ... I'll be in the men's room."
Then, a hand is firm on her elbow, detangling her from Spenser and she thinks for a hot, panicked moment that it is Elita, but it's Lunick, who salutes his Leader smartly and without a backwards glance the two of them fly out of there.
"Good show!" Professor Hastings calls after them, as they round the Ranger Base.
They come to a halt outside the Mechanic's home, breathless and panting and laughing all in one. "Man, that was hot," he says, removing his mask and fluffing his hair out.
"Yes, streaking is always very hot," she says with scathing sarcasm, crooking her ankle against her thigh so she could remove a splinter from the sole of her foot. "Let's do it more often."
"I was referring to the part where you molested our Leader in front of ... like, everybody on the planet," and Lunick is off again, howling with mirth, and pushes them both through the door. Minun and Plusle shriek a warning, but it's too late.
The laughter dies abruptly, replaced with a meek, "uh oh."
"Yeah, 'uh oh'," goes Aria, slamming her fists down on her hips and looking at both of them with utter distaste. "You idiots! I have been planning this thing only since the dawn of time, and what do you two do? Turn it into the laughingstock of our generation! Ohhhh, I am going to kill you! Then I'll have a Banette bring you back so I can kill you again!"
Solana, though properly chastised, notices something rather crucial. "Aria, where are our clothes?"
Aria's mouth tilts up smugly.
"Aria," a note of panic creeps into Lunick's voice. "Where are our clothes?"
"Half-way to Johto, I hope."
Solana and Lunick are outside in a heartbeat, and there go their clothes, dark, bloated stains against the water and too far away. Naked on the planks, they can only watch as a Sharpedo rushes up in full predatory mode, and before Lunick can even think about using his Styler, it seizes Solana's ensemble between its teeth and rips it to shreds before their very eyes.
"Oh, dear," goes Aria, without a lick of sympathy. "What ever shall you do now?"
Solana's mature response is to cuss like a sailor.
"Well, you never did like that uniform anyway," Lunick points out, and she shoves him off the pier.