[August 31] [Pokémon] Growing Pains
Title: Growing Pains
Day/Theme: August 31 - floating away in every direction
Series: Pokemon (gameverse, IDK)
Character/Pairing: Green Oak, mentions of Daisy, Red, and Prof. Oak
Words: 403
Rating: PG
Notes: ‘I don’t go home very much, but when I do, I become very nostalgic. ’
Green doesn’t go home often. He has no need to, really; after all, he has his own apartment now, and going home means that he has to sleep in his charmander-themed sheets and wake up whenever Daisy decides that breakfast is in order.
When he does, though, he always ends up spending hours on the front porch. Not doing research, not talking to his grandfather, but just staring at the barren patch of dirt next to the porch steps.
He remembers the days when that patch of dirt was his doorstep. At that very spot was a hole in the siding on the deck, and he remembers when he was small and could crawl beneath the house. He used to pretend that he was a pokemon, usually a growlithe or something equally fierce, and defend his lair (until Gramps came outside and convinced him that, no, growlithe don’t live in caves and he should come have some grilled cheese, would he like chocolate milk with that).
Then one day his shoulders were too wide, and he got stuck down there in that crawlspace, and Gramps had to teach him how to use the little pocketknife he’d gotten for his birthday but never actually opened.
Green also glances at the apple tree on the front lawn. He remembers the days when that tree was his playground. He and Red tried to build a tree house in it. They would have probably succeeded, too, if it hadn’t served as such a nice nest for the local pidgeys. Over days, weeks, a month, the structure slowly became unstable, until Green climbed the rope ladder and stood on the floorboards and fell straight through.
That is a painful memory for him. Not because he’d gotten a broken arm that day, but because he’d gotten a broken dream. (A stupid dream - for the tree fort to eventually become his apartment - but a dream nonetheless.)
Over the years, he’s gotten cynical, he thinks, watching the rainclouds roll in from the south. Old at just twenty-two. Not to mention, nostalgic. He’s been sitting here all day, just thinking about the past… how unproductive.
When the day grows late and Daisy calls for dinner, he sighs and stretches. Tomorrow… tomorrow he will get his research done, like he’d planned. Tomorrow, he would be an adult. Tomorrow, he wouldn’t let his mind drift so far from where he belonged, in the present.