Fic: Once a Donphan Starts Rolling (Part Two), Pokemon
Title: Once a Donphan Starts Rolling
Fandom: Pokemon (Anna gameverse) -- Ranger, Gold, Silver, Crystal, Sapphire
Word Count: ~15,000
Three days after his talk with Cassie, Zach is woken from a dead sleep by the sound of Xanthus's hair-raising shriek, calling his name.
Having never heard his name shaded in such tones of panic before, Zach’s up and out of bed before he was even really aware he had regained consciousness, and staggering down the hall. Only Sarah and Josh poke their heads out of their rooms curiously; the rest can't be shaken from their slumber (and Brian wouldn't be able to hear it anyway.)
Xanthus isn't in his room; he's in the bathroom, dressed in his loose jeans with chains dangling and a too-tight iridescent shirt -- which means he just got in, surprise, surprise -- and when he sees why, Zach has a heart attack and dies. Twice over, possibly.
"Help me," his brother begs, voice strangled, reaching into the free-standing tub and grabbing Marina under the arms. The water, a dark, murky red, pours off of her as the two of them rather unchivalariously drag her out so she flops against the Sunflora-print tile. Her face is ashen grey and when Zach feels her neck, her pulse flutters against his fingers, erratic and shaky. He finds Xanthus's eyes for a moment before checking her wrists. It seems like the logical conclusion.
"It's not that," Xanthus says, his typical impatient self flashing through. He fumbles around behind him, and then holds up the bottle and turns it so Zach can read the label. "She mixed it with the strongest alcohol we have; from the bottom of Dad's dresser."
"But..." Zach frowns, looking down at his limp, naked sister.
His mind flits from one thing to another; how does Xanthus know where their father's best alcohol was? Not even he knew about that stash, and he was supposed to be man of the house. And Marina had a tattoo of a Plusle and a Minun on her hip, and where on earth did she get that scar; the one that ran from her earlobe down her front until it came to a deep, white, puckered hook to the left of her belly button? It almost looked like a ... wait a minute.
His eyes flicker to the tub, where the bloody water still swishes uncaringly against the sides from the turbulence of pulling her out, and realization dawns. "Oh... oh, no."
"She needs to get to the hospital," Xanthus goes, brushing stray strands of Marina's hair out of her mouth, clueless to the sudden, awful truth that had come to his brother like a Gligar on Halloween. He hops to his feet and grabs a towel, fluffy and pink like it matters. "Give her to me; the Fearow doesn't trust you and I know my way around town better than you do. I'd get her there faster."
"She doesn't like the Fearow," Zach mutters, his mouth numb, gathering her into his arms and pressing her close.
His brother looks at him incredulously. "Whatever reason she has to prejudice Fearows is kind of unimportant in the face of her dying, don't you think? Please, just give her to me."
Without waiting for a reply, he gently but incessantly pries Marina from Zach's grasp and rolls her in the towel before scooping her up and shouldering his way out of the room. Zach stares at the spot where he had been, and if his mind had been willing to cooperate with him he would have remarked upon Xanthus's burst of selflessness flying in the face of his let-'em-burn philosophy. As it was, he pulls himself upright and manages to drag himself over to the tub and pull the plug.
Watching the water whirlpool away down the drain, he says, "Good-bye, little niece or nephew."
***
The last time he had been in a hospital, he had been watching an Electabuzz tap urgently at his mother's chest, trying to get her heart beating again -- up until the nurses pushed him from the room, harshly but still with the undercurrents of politeness, because heaven help you if you weren't polite here in this society, where doors are never locked to you and anyone can walk into your house whenever they wished and you were obligated to feed them and make pleasant talk with them, no matter their demeanor.
Marina Alfa walked into his house -- because it was his now, he didn't what the city said about his father still being alive -- cut up his strawberries, and then killed her infant child in the upstairs bathroom with Aero-Dactyl-sol and alcohol.
When was chivalry allowed to die?
He's on the floor, leaning against the far wall because the chair got too uncomfortable after awhile and the linoleum seemed like a nice change.
He remembers when they had carpet here, though. Removing it was a wise decision; it was hard to roll crash carts across carpet and harder to get stains out of. It did little to make the room more comforting, but if there was one thing that was reliable about hospitals it was their practicality.
He's still sitting there when he hears the door slide open. He lifts his head off the stucco and blinks against the gloom; he hadn't heard the nurses come in and turn the lights off, but the stiffness in his neck and lower back tells him he's been here for longer than he planned. Go figure.
"We know we're supposed to keep this room as sterile as possible, so if anyone asks, you have a very furry child!" Desarae laughs, twisting the cord that would make the blinds separating the room from the hallway shut.
Marina's face lights up in degrees, and Xanthus loosens his jacket so that the Eevee kit can wriggle out of it, plopping onto the bedspread. The two of them follow it, Desarae folding her legs under her like it's a slumber party and Xanthus flopping across the bed and accidentally hitting the lump of Marina's feet with his elbow. His sister gathers the Eevee close and its tiny pink tongue makes a swipe at her nose.
They don't seem to notice Zach in the corner, because when Marina asks, "What time is it?", Xanthus snorts and goes, "A bit past curfew. I bet Zach's probably got all the kids in bed and the dishes lined up in neat little rows by size and color in the dishwasher and all the toilet seats down."
"So why aren't you home and in bed, stinker?" she stretches her leg out to shove the side of his head with her foot.
He bats at her impatiently. "We had a job! There was a certain ... something we needed to pick up at the border."
Curiosity stabs at Zach like the prick of a needle, and he resists the urge to sit up so as not to draw attention to himself. He isn't the only one set on edge by this, because Marina goes still and she wonders, "Really?" in the same kind of voice Professor Elm used when he was trying to remember if he had asked anyone to do whatever task had recently been done. A heartbeat later, his curiosity turned to suspicion; what business could Xanthus have on the border that needed to be carried out in the dead of night? He's doing a lousy job at this parenting thing if his little brother is leading a secret life behind his back!
His imagination is running off with him, putting Xanthus in place of a crime lord or something, when Desarae leans down to pluck up her pack from the ground. Her eyes are dancing when she removes a Pokeball and extends it to Marina, who cups her hands in the way someone who has never held a Pokeball does.
"What is it?" she asks, and all present -- sparing the Eevee, who was too busy nibbling at the IV tape on Marina's wrist -- roll their eyes.
Desarae spreads her hands out expressively, and Zach doesn't think he's ever studied his little brother's girlfriend as closely as he does now. "It's a gift from my brother," she says, her eyes -- the kind of icy blue you rarely ever see in nature, but the Alfa family does have this habit of attracting freaks -- sparkling as she watches Marina turn the Pokeball over. "He left home when I was eleven to begin a career in construction in Hoenn. He married a local beauty, with the unfortunate name of Wanda, and he lives in Verdanturf Town, and it turns out that their house is within biking distance of perhaps the most famous Pokemon Breeders in all of world history. If I didn't have commitments here," she reaches out and Xanthus idly twines his fingers with hers with a soft, sappy sort of smile that didn't fit his spiky green hair and lip ring at all. "I'd be over there in a heartbeat."
There's a pregnant pause, and then it dawns on Desarae that Marina hasn't the faintest clue how to open her gift. She leans forward so that her waterfalls of straight, brown braids fall all over them both and she patiently presses the button. White light flashes and there's the minute shriek of a very small Pokemon, and he hears Marina smother a cry, and from the sound of it, she's either been mortally wounded or handed the world on a silver platter.
"Josh said you talked about them a lot," Xanthus says by way of explanation as the small, yellow-and-orange mouse Pokemon crouches on Marina's knee and the two of them survey each other like they can't decide if they like each other. "So me and Desarae --"
"Desarae and I," Marina and Zach say in unison, although Zach mouths is.
"Whatever. We came to the conclusion that like I'm close to the Eevee family, you're close to the Plusles." Xanthus scoops his hand up under the Eevee kit's ribs and cradles it close, just as his sister stretches her fingers to the Plusle, who delicately sniffs at them while reserving judgment.
"I ... I had one, in Fiore," she whispers, her eyes glassy. "She was my first friend there. We were partners for ten years. Oh, bah!" she exclaims, swiping at her eyes and startling the Plusle. It doesn't retreat far, however, because Desarae shoos it forward again when it tries to scuttle behind her. "You don't want to listen to me talk about what can't be changed. You!" she gets Xanthus again with her foot. "Tell me how your actual job went."
He sits up with a crack of leather, and his grin becomes one-third embarrassment, two-thirds pride. "It'll be on the news tomorrow."
"So I'll see it then! But tell me now!"
Xanthus's whole face twists into a smirk, and both he and Desarae sit up a little straighter. "Heist pulled off with flying colors, leader," he goes with a cocky salute.
Marina squeals, blue hair flying and legs tucking themselves up close to her body, which makes the Plusle hop to her shoulder. It hangs there, tiny claws digging into her hospital gown, like it was always meant to be there.
"We caught up with the caravan just outside of Blackthorn City," whispers Desarae, like a teenage girl sharing a secret. "And Jolteon zapped the drivers senseless and between me and Xanthus, the guards were a piece of cake. We rounded up the Kangaskhan just like you told us and they're on the Underground right now, on their way to someplace safe where they never have to deal with human greed and treachery ever again."
"Ohhh, I love you two!" Marina cries, throwing her arms open, and just when Zach thinks he couldn't be more surprised, both Xanthus and Desarae move into the hug, and within moments, they're a tangle of blankets and confused Pokemon and happy, laughing faces.
When she straightens, she taps both of them on the forehead so that they look up at her and she holds herself all upright and pompous, "As the only Pokemon Ranger in the probably the entire continent, I thus raise you to Ranger Rank Level 1!" She taps them again, smiling like a lightbulb. "Welcome to rookie-dom, my friends. It's a wonderful place to be, up until people actually expect you to do things other than look cool."
"So what's our next job, Leader," Xanthus wants to know, shoving her leg.
"Ow!" she protests, a twinge of real pain flashing across her face, to which the Plusle responds with a chiding cry in the boy's direction. "I don't know; I'll wait and see what Professor Elm tells me; he's been tracking these Go Rock scandals since they began. And hey! Be gentle with me. I'm an old lady!"
"Old!" shrills Desarae, and she's grinning like she's ready to explode into bits any moment now. "You're only nine years our senior."
"I know! I'm ancient!"
Zach's pretty sure that that sound? Was probably the sound of his head exploding.
***
"Don't tell me you slept here."
His eyes open onto Cassie's face, hovering in front of his own. Her lips are wrenched into a dry smile, and her wet curls tell him she didn't have time to shower last night, which meant that it was she who put the younger ones to bed. She rolls her eyes at his grogginess and, a moment later, his stiffness, and extends to him a plate of pancakes.
"Don't say I never did nothing for you," she says, and behind her, the nurse throws open the blinds so that light flooded in, causing Zach and Cassie alike to squint their eyes against the unwelcome invasion. "The cafeteria only had strawberry, by the way. And they've already been cut up, you know, in case you're not a big enough boy to handle them all on your own," here, she ruffles his hair just to see his early-morning scowl.
The irony of cut strawberry pancakes is not lost on him.
"Next time you camp out, remember to bring a pillow, or at least ask for one. You don't have to prove what a big, strong, protective man you are, because we already know."
"Good morning, Cassie," he grates out with a tongue like sandpaper and throat like a desert, and he works his mouth to get the crumbly, dry feeling to go away. She moves away, and his face lights up and he adds, "And good morning, Sarah and Brian!"
The littlest Alfa grabs her brother's hand and guides him over, and they both greet him with big hugs and sticky pancake kisses. Cassie sits down in the chair by Marina's bed, in which the woman in question has curled up with her new Plusle friend tucked in the center like a womb. He meets her eye over Brian's carrot-red head, and he's almost glad when he meets understanding. He doesn't think he's ready to explain, "she killed her baby because she's still trying to escape whatever she's trying to escape."
Brian disentangles himself first, and at his request Cassie lifts him up onto Marina's bed. The boy stares at her for a moment, before he climbs over her to press his hand into her chest like it could cure her. He knew that sign all too well.
I love you.
"Do you love your sister?" he asks Sarah, and she turns her head so that her pearl-button eyes are facing him.
"Yes," she answers without hesitation.
"Why?"
Any other five-year-old might have said, 'because she gives me candy' or 'she helps me build my alphabet blocks for kindergarten'. But Sarah was a creepy five-year-old, so she said, "Because she teaches me how to see."
"What?"
"You see with your eyes," she puts her finger at the corner of his eye, and he thinks it says something about her control that she just lets it hover there, exactly at the corner, like she knew exactly where his face was positioned. "Marina says you rely too much on your eyes. When they're big enough, Rangers are blindfolded and told to capture a Pokemon without looking at them. They learn to see with more than their eyes."
She turns in his arms and presses her palm to the linoleum. He sees the knuckles arch and then whiten and Sarah's mouth become hard and thin, and then she says, "A woman is about to walk past. She's fat. She has a cart filled with ... plants."
Zach looks up instinctually, and not more than thirty seconds later, the rattling sound of wheels greets his ears, and then a pudgy old lady with her grey hair up in a bun goes right on past the door, pushing a courtesy cart full of cooing Sunkerns.
He stares at Sarah, and can tell by the little self-satisfied quirk of her lips that she knows she's right.
"Marina taught me how to do that," she says almost defensively. "She taught me how to see colors. Green is grass. Pink is frosting and whipped cream. Red is strawberries right after they've been washed. Colors, Zach. How am I supposed to believe there are such things as rainbows? All those colors lined up in a neat row in the sky? That's a stupid idea! But they exist. I can't touch it, I can't hear it. But it exists. Marina's taught me more than kindergarten ever did!"
She pauses, and frowns. "You're angry."
"No, I'm not," lies Zach, forcing a smile she can't see (or maybe she can) and kissing her cheek. "I believe you."
"Hey," comes a croak from the hospital bed. "It's a party."
"Marina!" cries Sarah, fluttering right out of Zach's arms and over to her sister, who grasps uselessly at her hands until Cassie comes to the rescue and lifts her up onto the bedspread. Marina opens her left arm for a hug, since Brian is already snuggled into her right, but Sarah is letting her hands slide over the blanket, and then she puts her cheek to it.
"It feels like water!" she exclaims in delight. "Is it blue?"
Zach's eyebrows go up, and Marina laughs and goes, "Yes it is, clever girl! Now c'mere; I haven't hugged you in an entire day! I think I might go crazy!"
The girl obeys, and it's like a repeat of what Zach witnessed the night before with Xanthus and Desarae, only Sarah and Brian lack the fear that the two teenagers had; like if they rough-house too hard, Marina might shatter. They lack the understanding that IV drips and hospital gowns symbolize weakness, symbolize injury and they must walk on eggshells. They don't know, and so every time they plant their hands in Marina's stomach, pain spasms across her face and her laugh chokes.
"I'm glad to see you're working it in those hospital clothes," Cassie goes when the kids settle down, and her voice is mild.
"I thought the towel made me look fat," Marina returns weakly, snaking one arm around Brian so she could plant one hand on her hip and cluck her tongue. "Say, I don't suppose you guys brought any movies? Doesn't that one about the Qwilfish and his son come out today? Finding Sleemo or something like that? There's almost nothing in here to entertain me, so it's up to you," she tickles the six-year-old's ribs, and he grunts with laughter and watches her mouth intently.
"I actually wanted your advice on something," Cassie says, scooting forward in her chair.
"Oh?" To her due credit, Marina only sounds slightly skeptical.
The girl scratches at her earlobe, and then flashes a karat-gold grin that suddenly has Zach understanding why there are so many boys sending her stuff on her birthday, "How do you catch a Donphan? I saw one yesterday on Route 45 while running an errand for the prof, but the only Pokemon I had with me were too low-level. But I'm going to go back later with Meganium."
"Donphan?" A sort of a pleasant surprise takes over Marina's face. "I haven't thought about them forever! Um... well, the major thing you have to know about Donphan is that they are very quick to jump to conclusions. They're loyal to a fault, but they can be incredibly thick-headed, no pun intended. They'll charge at any threat without stopping to examine if they can even handle what they've attempted to bowl over. Use their over-compensation to your advantage; trip it up and trap it, and we should be seeing a Donphan running around in the backyard, ruining the gardenias, in no time."
She smiles at Cassie and Cassie smiles back, full and bright, and Zach doesn't know what to think any more.
The pancakes turn to dust in his mouth.
***
Marina's released the next day.
They walk home, all of them. It shouldn't really count as a family outing, but it winds up that way. Brian picks flowers and gives them to Sarah, and they walk the rest of the way with their heads down over the bright yellow things, since touch is the only way they can communicate and they try as often as they can. Cassie's trying to discreetly pluck one from them, and Zach imagines she's already running it through the hundreds of flower names she's got stored in her head. Josh and Jake claim Marina, and they won't let her take the mincing steps she's trying to take, talking all the while about the new Donphan running around in the backyard, eating all the gardenias.
It's relatively warm out, so Xanthus has his jacket off and tied it around his waist, and if he hadn't been looking for it, then Zach wouldn't have caught the discreet star sewn into the inside pocket. Ranger Rank 1. He's got Korea in his arms, arms wrapped around her so that her back was to his belly and she could see the world. At four months, she was just beginning to do things voluntarily, like reach for Xanthus's lip ring when it got too close to her.
She had also just learned how to laugh, and everybody in the house has used that excuse to make silly faces.
"Marina?" Josh goes suddenly, like something just occurred to him. "Can I take you in for show and tell on Friday?"
"Why would you want to do that?" his sister laughs, and raises her hand and waves back to Mrs. Elm when the latter sticks her head out of her crooked kitchen window and trills a greeting. "I'm hardly somebody to stare at. Why don't you take one of Cassie's Pokemon? Or Desarae? I'm sure Desarae's got plenty of cool stories to tell your friends."
"Yeah, but I want to take you. You're cooler than Pokemon, or Desarae."
"Hey!" goes Xanthus, and Josh sticks his tongue out, which earns him a sharp reprimand from everybody who has developed any sense of manners at all (in other words, only Zach scolds him.)
And Marina's smile is pained, not the kind of pained like somebody's stepped on her stomach, but pained like she's been imaging leaving them and is just now remembering why she hasn't done that yet.
***
Any questions about where she's been are easily brushed away.
"I had a nervous breakdown," she chirps when Professor Elm turns his concerned father routine on. "Coming back from the dead takes a lot out of a girl, I hope you know."
Zach, in all honesty, hasn't decided what he thinks about everything yet. He supposes this is one of those moments that defines who he is, what his character's like; all those things that reflect on him as a person revolves around how he treats his sister.
He loves her.
Except when he doesn't.
He thinks she's gone and taken their lives and turned them all into one big jigsaw puzzle. He's not even sure what image they made before she came and messed them all up.
Or perhaps they were a jigsaw before she came, and she was the one who put the pieces together, just like she was the one who figured out Korea's mother wasn't around, or what was causing the electricity problems. Was that all they were to her? Just another challenge, another job like the illegal Kangaskhan trafficking south of Blackthorn?
"What on earth is she running from?" he muses to his upside down reflection in his spoon after he sucks off the Numel-tine.
***
The tone of the doorbell doesn't sound like the end of everything. It just sounds like a doorbell, and Zach thinks it's a bit too early for the mail man and a bit too late for Desarae, and a bit too mid-term for any boys to be asking for Cassie.
"I'll get it!" laughs Marina, shucking off her Geodude-print oven mitts and mussing up Brian's hair as she darts out of the kitchen.
"But you're hardly dressed!" Zach hollers after her, because she's not. She's wearing his boxers and one of Cassie's tube tops, and last time she wore that particular combination, she was in this very kitchen with a baby in her arms, watching all the years she's been ignoring rush up to meet her at once. This time, it's pancakes and Brian working on his homework (that's due later in the day -- typically, none of the Alfas were procrastinators. Attention-seekers, freaks, do-gooders, and murderers, sure, but not procrastinators. Brian was special); it was just a simple find the Shuckles that match identically kind of thing. And Brian had the perfect eye for it, so Zach wasn't too concerned.
She either didn't hear him or ignored him, because she doesn't come back and he laughs at the image she'll make. Then the pancake batter begins to fizz on his skillet, so he turns his attention to that.
He hears the front door open and close, but he isn't paying enough attention for it to occur to him that the duration between the two was only about a heartbeat long.
He does notice, however, when Marina walks back in with her face grey underneath her fading tan and without a word she ghosts right over to the fridge and removes a carton of strawberries, and then a knife from the cutlery drawer and a fresh white towel from behind the sink. Forgetting the pancakes, Zach watches as she sits down at the kitchen table and lays the strawberries out in front of her and proceeds to slice them, cleanly, precisely, the same move over and over again until the towel was stained pink, and it although it looks nothing like blood, that's what Zach thinks.
The Plusle hops up to investigate, and between that and the sound of burning pancake batter, Zach starts out of his reverie and catches Brian's eye. For all that he's six, the boy knows something's up. Marina decapitates strawberries and lets them bleed all over the white towels when she wants to forget.
The doorbell rings again, and his sister says in a detached voice, "Can you get that, please?"
It takes Zach all of seven seconds to reach the door, but that was only because one of Cassie's Rattata were in the way and he almost tripped. Otherwise, he probably would have beat the record, because he knew the walls of the house kept score and it seemed important.
He can see the shape of the man through the glaze on the windows that framed the front door, and at the sound of Zach undoing the bolt, the figure on the other side shifts direction and he can see it's accompanied by the hunchbacked silhouette of a Pokemon. This, in and of itself, told him nothing, as he couldn't recognize the identity and it wouldn't matter anyway; this was Professor Elm's hometown. Pokemon were everywhere.
He wasn't sure what he was expecting. Some obvious government agent, maybe, or some grand but angry celebrity, or perhaps just the local police, who already were on pretty friendly terms with the Alfa family. Whatever it was, he wanted it to immediately yell at him the nature of his sister's crime.
But the narrow-faced, ratty-haired man with a bedraggled Fearow crouched beside him is none of the above.
His eyes flick over Zach's face, and he knows without being told that he's looking for any resemblances to Marina. Zach's already looked; if you squint, they have the same cheekbones, but everything else about them is polar opposite, as if their parents' genes remembered their previous attempt and built him to be her compliment, or her replacement.
The man is wearing a masculine version of the uniform Zach peeled off his unconscious sister the first night and burned, which leads Zach to the only possible conclusion.
"Leave, Ranger," he says without preamble, letting the door slide shut to a sliver. "There is no place for you or your kind here."
“I need to talk to your sister,” the other replies, his tone of voice indicating that he’s used to being in authority and having people listen to him.
“You’ll have to elaborate, sir. I have ten sisters.”
Frustration flashes across the man's features and Zach finds the door rebounding off his foot when he sticks it right in the way. "I have not," he hisses, "traveled all this way just to be told off by some prejudiced, playground brat. Now where is she?"
"Who are you?" Zach demands, wishing all the while that Cassie or Xanthus or somebody would show up with a powerhouse Pokemon and back him up. It almost makes him feel better; he'll take the side defending his sister over the side that will tell him what she did, as if he had begun to doubt it himself.
"I'm Spenser," the man goes, and Zach can tell exactly what this stranger thinks of him for answering a question with a question, and it's not lost on either of them that he doesn't continue the pattern. "I'm the Leader at the Ringtown Ranger Base, and I'm Marina's boss. We want her back. We want her home."
"This is her home," Zach deadpans, mentally prepping himself for a fight.
"Really?" Spenser flashes back, tone equally devoid of emotion. "She never mentioned you. Not once."
Zach has to hand it to him; they had been talking all of half a minute and this guy had already figured out where such an underhanded comment would hurt the most, and by the way this stranger's blue eyes went guarded, he knew it too. His fingers tightened on the doorknob.
"If you're a Ranger Leader, why did you come here yourself? Your kind aren't welcome in this land, and it's just Marina Alfa. Why not send one of your lackeys?"
"Because she's..." he falters here, only the smallest trip in his voice and it's gone in a flash and he recovers, "she's the best Ranger we have," but Zach notices it and understanding hits him like a Donphan to the gardenias, like a light bulb going on, and he doesn't want to breathe ever again because it's going to hurt too much.
He wonders if the baby Marina never had would have been born with green hair.
He doesn't get a chance to say anything, however, because the sound of a window sliding shut too fast from around back rings clear through the air and Zach presses his lips together.
The Fearow merely lifts its head, but Spenser's hand snaps to his side and Zach, who has never seen a Styler before, is inclined to be skeptical as to how this small, red, egg-shaped thing could defend him against anything. But, then again, the entire Alfa family fortune was built on the back of a Pokeball, and Pokeballs were considerably less than intimidating, so he really had no room to talk.
"What was that?"
"That?" Zach flips his wrist airily. "That was just Marina escaping out the back window."
Spenser spins on his heel, and it's Zach's turn to stick his foot out and stop him, and blue eyes flash murder and now he thinks he gets where the Rangers got their label as anarchists.
"Don't even think about it, boy," Spenser spits. "I'm twice your age and I've got a good hundred pounds on you."
"Granted, she can't get very far," Zach continues like he never said a thing, and he's trying to stop himself, he's trying because he's better than this, better than poisonous words falling from his tongue because he knows they'll hurt, "since she just had an abortion and all that."
He doesn't see the blow coming. Well, he did expect to be punched, but he didn't expect the crackling, electric snap of a whip in his direction. By the time he realizes it's the Styler, the thing has coiled around him three times and his feet are locked where they are. It looks so fragile, crystalline and blue, like if he reached out and touched it, it would snap and his head feels foggy, like his sinuses were clogged. His fingers extend and --
Don't break the line, Spenser's voice is smooth, but sudden in the emptiness inside his skull and he doesn't think Stylers were meant to be used on humans, and his hands snap back and fly to his temples because it's ringing. Blearily, he sees the blue fade and Spenser's arm drop back down to his side, but his voice is still there. Listen to me. I'm not here to harm you. I'm not here to harm Marina. There is a balance in this world and we're here to preserve it. There's a balance in the Ringtown Ranger Base and we need Marina back. At least let me talk to her.
Zach thinks he understands now, how a Ranger gets any Pokemon to trust him or her, and he also thinks that, if abused, that kind of power can destroy the world.
But Marina never told him the story, so he doesn't know that it’s already been tried.
***
He never follows them.
He thinks about it, hands grasping the doorframe and head spinning, half a dozen Spensers running away from him with a stride that says he's spent half his life chasing after his sister (haven't they all?). But then he hears Sarah calling him, voice sharp and worried, and he turns and goes back inside, into the cool air conditioning and the sickly sweet smell of strawberries and the past forty years of Alfa memories and sounds hidden deep in the walls, a constant hum, a constant comfort.
So he never sees Marina stop and let Spenser catch up to her, hands clenched and trembling. He never sees him reach out, the bare edges of his fingers brushing against her elbow, never sees his sister's whole body shudder before she spun and flung her arms around him in a crush of limbs and Ranger Rank stars and hope and anger and fear. Never sees the kiss, desperate and hard enough to make their lips go white while their mouths grasped on and in and around each other, or the way one body near about climbed onto the other in an attempt to get as close as physically possible in one hard rush. It was less of a passionate embrace and more the simple pull of one human who needed another.
But Zach never follows them, so he never hears, "Who killed Joel?"
"I thought you would have figured it by now, best friend and all that. Isn't that the first question people ask?"
"Don't be smart. Not now."
"What do you want me to do, then?"
"Tell me the truth. Was it Keith?"
"Keith loved Joel. Loves him. And no. He has an alibi. Ask Lady, and then ask her again. Everybody lies."
"Marina. We were going to arrest Aria, but then you ran away and conclusions had to be drawn."
"Aria never hurt a living soul."
"But you did?"
"I ... I .. don't .. it was an accident."
"The worst criminals have gotten off with that excuse."
"Then I have a chance."
"Marina."
"Spenser. In my head, my baby was Joel. I could see his face whenever I thought about him, and I heard his voice whenever I was sick and I felt him, everywhere and there was a cliff, so I jumped. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm --"
"Will you come home?"
"Everybody dies."
Zach's not there, so he doesn't see Spenser release Marina and turn away, tilting his head in the direction of Fiore like he can sense it on the edges of his mind, like he's saying good-bye.
He doesn't hear him say, too casually, "I heard the housing market is currently gold in Hoenn."
***
She comes home, the sun low and orange and framing her head, and he could see her roots, because she wasn't naturally blue-haired -- he's sure he knew this, but it's another thing to see the brush of sunset-highlighted auburn along her part -- and she has the mail bundled in one hand like her entire past hadn't just landed on their doorstep.
She's still wearing his boxers and Cassie's tube top, and Zach is tempted to remark on how uncomfortable it must have been to wear that all day, but the fact that the elastic of his boxers, stretching across the cavern between her hips, is backwards and inside out, which they hadn't been at breakfast, he hazards a guess that she had/ been out of those clothes once or twice.
So it confirms his suspicions, and he thinks that before she came back from the dead, he never would have even noticed such a small detail.
"Hey, listen to this!" she goes, all bright and cheery, and behind him, Korea stops crying with a single hiccup. He knows without looking that she's suddenly become all coos and smiles, because Marina's face is her favorite toy and she could entertain herself for hours so long as she kept Marina interested in her, which wasn't hard. He crosses his ankles in front of him, sinking back as much as he could into the welcome chair, a wooden, uncomfortable, rickety thing just a few footsteps away from the front door. "Our cousin Hiro's son Chance just celebrated his first birthday. Huh. I didn't even know Hiro had grown up. But she's our age, isn't she? .. Ah! Uncle Norman is recovering from the pokepox, and he says he's glad it's the worst he has to deal with -- hey!"
He cuts her off by grabbing her wrist, and he feels her bones shift beneath his fingers and it occurs to him that when crushed, the bones in the wrist take the longest to heal out of all the bones in the body. The image of Spenser, wrist arced over his whip of blue energy, flashes through his mind and he realizes that wrist power is everything to a Ranger's career and if he just tightens his grip that much more, he could ruin Marina's life. Just by clutching just a little bit too hard. Forget Dragon Masters and Apricot Men, that was true power.
Her eyes flash at him, wary, and he knows she knows what's on his mind, and it should mean something to him that she believes he will do it.
He loves her.
She's his big sister. He wants her safe. He's lost her once and he wants her where he can keep an eye on her.
He loves her.
"You stole my family from me," he says, and it feels a bit too much like those words have been churning inside his throat like bile for far too long, and his stomach feels small and tight like his anger his been ballooning and pressing it down, and his chest feels entirely too tiny for the same reason. He doesn't remember dragging her into the living room, but here they are and he can barely hear Korea begin crying again, like the faintest buzz of white noise, while he can hear Marina just fine.
"What?"
"They were mine. Dad called me when Mom died, I came back in heartbeat and I've built this family and I've raised them strong and true, and you saunter in like the past sixteen years haven't happened and you take my family from me and you turn them into something I don't recognize. What gave you the right?"
Her mouth works, not unlike a Goldeen in the throes of utmost Confusion, and her eyes flicker around like she's searching the room for wherever the real Zach is hidden, but he's right here in front of her, and the only thing in the living room is the remnants of her own influence; the furniture, rearranged to the corners of the room to leave a wide open space for battling, the textbooks pulled down from the shelves and spread open so that their information lay gutted for anybody (everybody) who wants to know. Her influence is everywhere in this house, and he thinks that's why he's doing this now.
"You're going to leave again." It's not a question. "You're going to leave and we'll have to learn how to live without you all over again."
"You're going to have to learn how to live without me again," Marina goes, her voice quiet and controlled, and she unconsciously shifts her feet so that they're parallel with her shoulders, like Trainers do before a battle begins. "The rest of them don't remember me."
"So what? You think you can just poof, and we'll be all, 'oh well' and move on? We can't do that. The kids love you too much. You've come, and you ruined everything I've tried to raise them to be and now you're as much a part of them as a mother would be. You're ... you're like candy. Use sparingly, or else you'll wind up old and fat and diabetic and that's what you're going to do to these kids. That's what you've done to these kids."
Her nostrils flare. "Are you really that arrogant?"
Zach sneers.
That's when she snaps. "You think you're such a big martyr, giving up your adolescent, irresponsible adventure to come here and take the kids from Dad. You drove him off so you could burden the yolk of responsibility and domesticity all on your own. You were so absorbed in yourself you never noticed you weren't the perfect father of six. You're twenty-five years old, you think you're fifty, and you act fifteen, Zach, and that’s why you don’t date!"
She takes a deep breath and continues, “You speak of me as the Alfa who returned from the dead. Not your long lost sister delivered back to you safe and alive. Do you want me dead?”
"I… I act fifteen? What about you?"
"What about me?"
The image of Sarah, her mouth twisted into a worried frown and her lips asking, "are you mad?", followed by one of Cassie, "she's a stranger," flits across his vision and he says, "You skulk around this house without even thinking of telling us why all of a sudden you want to be a member of this family, and you think taking over for Mom will somehow make it all better."
Understanding dawns. "Is this about Sarah?"
"This is about Jake and Cassie and Xanthus and Brian and Korea and Josh and Desarae and your dead baby and that damn Plusle, but yes, this is about Sarah. Sarah knew nothing of what this family went through before she was born. I never wanted her to. I wanted her to be different, to break our family mold. Now, thanks to you and your 'the blind can see rainbows', she's become something I don't recognize. The same with Josh. The same with Xanthus. But mostly Sarah. Sarah was mine. Sarah was mine."
"And you failed," she says nastily, her whole body trembling and her hands clenching into fists in the fabric of her tube top, right over her stomach. "You failed, Zach. It's as simple as that. This family was falling apart before you came back, and you thought sweeping it all under the rug would fix everything. You had no idea who anybody was. You were the stranger. You are the stranger!"
"So, what? You planned to cure us, just like you planned to raid that caravan of Kangaskhan hoarders outside Blackthorn. Were we just another mission to you?"
"I thought our family motto was 'one more baby, one more person to grow up and make the world a better place.' What ever happened to that?"
"You ran away from us."
"If I hadn't run away, I would have ended up like Molly!"
"You already have!" he screams, and her chest caves like he had punched her. "What did you do, Marina?!"
She brings her fists down on thin air and the veins in her throat bulges as she cries, "I did what I had to!"
"Your whole family thinks you're a murderer!"
"I protected my best friend!" And there, it's out, he can tell by the way her pupils go small and narrow and her breath catches. "I protected my best friend. He was going to get married. He was going to become a Leader. He had his whole life in front of him and I didn't want him doing twenty to life for an accident. I took his fall. I gave up everything I loved so he would be safe."
Her words echo around inside of him, and he knows he's hearing his life's story handed back to him.
"Everybody lies," she breathes, and her eyes flash fire. "I have done nothing this family isn't guilty of a thousand times over."
"I don't lie," he answers on automatic, because he is the role model. He is the martyr.
"Yes, you do. You lied to me. You said giving birth to Sarah was what killed Mom, but it wasn't. It was us. I killed Mom. Molly killed Mom. Raymond and Suzie Mary and Brian and Sarah, we all killed Mom. The pills killed Mom. How many times can you fill a hole created by losing someone before you are nothing but patches and there is too little of you left?"
"Then why did you come back? We were just beginning to live with the hole you created when you ran away, and you come and you rearrange this family and you knock it silly and don't make us do it again, Marina."
"Don't speak to me of holes," she goes, very very quietly, and her hand drifts to her belly and he gets it. He gets it.
There's so much he doesn't know about her. He doesn't know why she ran away and set the wheel of family tragedy in motion. He doesn't know what she did with the six years that lapsed between her never coming home for dinner and her showing up on an island in the middle of nowhere in a Ranger uniform with letters in her pocket. He doesn't know what her best friend did and he doesn't know why he was so important to her that she was willing to hand over the first real life she ever had.
But he remembers his mother's funeral, sitting so small and broken at his father's side with his arms full of pearly-eyed infant, but what he remembers most is how his father didn't look broken enough.
He thinks of his siblings.
He thinks of Karin, holed up in the Elite Four, and he thinks of the Eevee egg that she gave Xanthus without knowing how it would shape him. He thinks of Raymond, six feet under, and he remembers the exact way he fell forward; didn't jerk, didn't crumple, just fell straight forward, too suddenly for there even to be any blood. He thinks of Aria with her sleek black hair and her completed Pokedex, and how she is their mother in every possible way. He thinks of Susanna, showing up on his doorstep with a ten-year-old by her side and her arm full of squalling infant that she handed to him without a word, and she’s a bit too much like her twin for comfort.
He thinks of Molly and Skyler and Maia, the middle children who had to be everything at once and never got the love they deserved, and he thinks he never would have guessed they turned out like that. Molly, a murderer and an adulteress; Skyler, a janitor in a town whose name nobody knows; and Maia, perhaps the most youngest successful businesswoman in Goldenrod City, a prodigy whose family was never even in the picture (or her will.)
He thinks of Loren, who fills the holes with men and calls him every sixth month, drunk off her ass and completely bankrupt, and she never says thank you before she's running like she's afraid of what will catch up if she stays still. He thinks of Mike, how he practically flew out of the house when he turned eighteen like their mother's ghost was on his heels. He thinks of Suzie Mary, and the nine months between her and Xanthus, and he thinks of the lines on Xanthus's mouth and knows who put them there when they lowered her into the ground.
He thinks of his children.
He thinks of Xanthus, who lives life like he's greased in lighter fluid and every time he saves a Pokemon is like striking a flint. He thinks of Cassie, of the jaded way she fills her Pokedex and the careless way she throws her love in the path of whoever needs it the most, and he knows it will get her in trouble someday. He thinks of Jake, who thinks his family mold is that of murderers and Pokemon Champions (and it is, it is, if the law tries Marina for the crime she didn't commit and if the law ever catches Molly). He thinks of Josh; all he ever wanted to do was learn. He thinks of Brian, pressing "I love you" into Marina's chest and he thinks of Sarah, smiling with pearly-white eyes and saying, "She taught me how to see colors."
He thinks of Marina, all blue hair and brown skin and red eyes and black marks; one for Mom, one for Dad, one for Susanna, one for them, one for the murdered and the dead and whoever suffered so that she could become the best, one for her best friend, one for her Plusle, and a giant black chasm where her baby had been.
He kisses her then, hard mouth on hard mouth like Donphan crashing skulls, because what else was there left to do?
Suddenly, he's nine again and she's his closest playmate, for all that she has a twin and he has Molly, who's just ten months younger than him and adores him and everything he does (and he blames himself for how she turned out; he can admit that to himself now.)
Life was perfect then, and that is who he is. He's a boy who loves the sun and loves the going but never the destination, and he loved Pokemon and he loved being a Trainer, but he loves his family more.
He lets that (her) go, and well aware the entire family has crowded into the doorway of the living room, and when the Plusle springs from Brian’s arms and dashes over to leap to his sister’s shoulder like it was always meant to be there, he says, "Leave, Marina Alfa. There's no place for you here."
***
Zach sits on his mother's bathroom counter and watches the drama unfold on the front lawn through the pastel-framed window, running his hands through his thinning hair. He watches the neighbors come, not one-by-one but group-by-group, as if they were unable to approach the house with their pitchforks and torches blazing all on their lonesome. He watches their mouths spew hatred, spew ignorance and unfamiliarity, watches them take a culture that once upon a time used to be an eccentricity of their sister nation and now was evolving. He watches tolerance die a miserable death.
They're there because someone let it slip that the Alfa who was back from the dead was a Ranger. Was an anarchist. Had been ratted out by her own brother.
It's a Clefairy moon, and perhaps that means something. He’s tired of double meanings.
He hears their front door slam and then he sees Xanthus's bright green head and Desarae's riot of braids flying down the steps and stopping right before the gate. He can't see it from where he is, but he imagines they have their Ranger Rank stars emblazoned fearlessly on their chest. He can't hear what they're saying, either, just the hum of their voices, tight with angry and fierce with pride and love.
He gets off the counter when they're joined by Sarah and Josh, and drifts downstairs to the kitchen, stepping over Cassie's Furret at the bottom of the stairs and passing a diagram of dual types with Jake's name scribbled at the top.
This is the house he grew up in. These walls know his secrets, know what he gave up, and they have forever to know what he's going to do.
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 the sixth child of eighteen. He's father to six of those eighteen.
And he'll always have that. Those are the parts of him that will never go away. It's the only thing that's going to fill the holes.
Cassie finds him later, sitting at the kitchen table with a saucer full of cut strawberries in front of him, and she says, "She took Korea."
You never love a girl till it's good-bye.
He looks at her and he says, "I think I've done something stupid."
Once a Donphan starts rolling, it can't be stopped. Its Tackle is enough to take down a house.
********
Back to part one.
Fandom: Pokemon (Anna gameverse) -- Ranger, Gold, Silver, Crystal, Sapphire
Word Count: ~15,000
Three days after his talk with Cassie, Zach is woken from a dead sleep by the sound of Xanthus's hair-raising shriek, calling his name.
Having never heard his name shaded in such tones of panic before, Zach’s up and out of bed before he was even really aware he had regained consciousness, and staggering down the hall. Only Sarah and Josh poke their heads out of their rooms curiously; the rest can't be shaken from their slumber (and Brian wouldn't be able to hear it anyway.)
Xanthus isn't in his room; he's in the bathroom, dressed in his loose jeans with chains dangling and a too-tight iridescent shirt -- which means he just got in, surprise, surprise -- and when he sees why, Zach has a heart attack and dies. Twice over, possibly.
"Help me," his brother begs, voice strangled, reaching into the free-standing tub and grabbing Marina under the arms. The water, a dark, murky red, pours off of her as the two of them rather unchivalariously drag her out so she flops against the Sunflora-print tile. Her face is ashen grey and when Zach feels her neck, her pulse flutters against his fingers, erratic and shaky. He finds Xanthus's eyes for a moment before checking her wrists. It seems like the logical conclusion.
"It's not that," Xanthus says, his typical impatient self flashing through. He fumbles around behind him, and then holds up the bottle and turns it so Zach can read the label. "She mixed it with the strongest alcohol we have; from the bottom of Dad's dresser."
"But..." Zach frowns, looking down at his limp, naked sister.
His mind flits from one thing to another; how does Xanthus know where their father's best alcohol was? Not even he knew about that stash, and he was supposed to be man of the house. And Marina had a tattoo of a Plusle and a Minun on her hip, and where on earth did she get that scar; the one that ran from her earlobe down her front until it came to a deep, white, puckered hook to the left of her belly button? It almost looked like a ... wait a minute.
His eyes flicker to the tub, where the bloody water still swishes uncaringly against the sides from the turbulence of pulling her out, and realization dawns. "Oh... oh, no."
"She needs to get to the hospital," Xanthus goes, brushing stray strands of Marina's hair out of her mouth, clueless to the sudden, awful truth that had come to his brother like a Gligar on Halloween. He hops to his feet and grabs a towel, fluffy and pink like it matters. "Give her to me; the Fearow doesn't trust you and I know my way around town better than you do. I'd get her there faster."
"She doesn't like the Fearow," Zach mutters, his mouth numb, gathering her into his arms and pressing her close.
His brother looks at him incredulously. "Whatever reason she has to prejudice Fearows is kind of unimportant in the face of her dying, don't you think? Please, just give her to me."
Without waiting for a reply, he gently but incessantly pries Marina from Zach's grasp and rolls her in the towel before scooping her up and shouldering his way out of the room. Zach stares at the spot where he had been, and if his mind had been willing to cooperate with him he would have remarked upon Xanthus's burst of selflessness flying in the face of his let-'em-burn philosophy. As it was, he pulls himself upright and manages to drag himself over to the tub and pull the plug.
Watching the water whirlpool away down the drain, he says, "Good-bye, little niece or nephew."
***
The last time he had been in a hospital, he had been watching an Electabuzz tap urgently at his mother's chest, trying to get her heart beating again -- up until the nurses pushed him from the room, harshly but still with the undercurrents of politeness, because heaven help you if you weren't polite here in this society, where doors are never locked to you and anyone can walk into your house whenever they wished and you were obligated to feed them and make pleasant talk with them, no matter their demeanor.
Marina Alfa walked into his house -- because it was his now, he didn't what the city said about his father still being alive -- cut up his strawberries, and then killed her infant child in the upstairs bathroom with Aero-Dactyl-sol and alcohol.
When was chivalry allowed to die?
He's on the floor, leaning against the far wall because the chair got too uncomfortable after awhile and the linoleum seemed like a nice change.
He remembers when they had carpet here, though. Removing it was a wise decision; it was hard to roll crash carts across carpet and harder to get stains out of. It did little to make the room more comforting, but if there was one thing that was reliable about hospitals it was their practicality.
He's still sitting there when he hears the door slide open. He lifts his head off the stucco and blinks against the gloom; he hadn't heard the nurses come in and turn the lights off, but the stiffness in his neck and lower back tells him he's been here for longer than he planned. Go figure.
"We know we're supposed to keep this room as sterile as possible, so if anyone asks, you have a very furry child!" Desarae laughs, twisting the cord that would make the blinds separating the room from the hallway shut.
Marina's face lights up in degrees, and Xanthus loosens his jacket so that the Eevee kit can wriggle out of it, plopping onto the bedspread. The two of them follow it, Desarae folding her legs under her like it's a slumber party and Xanthus flopping across the bed and accidentally hitting the lump of Marina's feet with his elbow. His sister gathers the Eevee close and its tiny pink tongue makes a swipe at her nose.
They don't seem to notice Zach in the corner, because when Marina asks, "What time is it?", Xanthus snorts and goes, "A bit past curfew. I bet Zach's probably got all the kids in bed and the dishes lined up in neat little rows by size and color in the dishwasher and all the toilet seats down."
"So why aren't you home and in bed, stinker?" she stretches her leg out to shove the side of his head with her foot.
He bats at her impatiently. "We had a job! There was a certain ... something we needed to pick up at the border."
Curiosity stabs at Zach like the prick of a needle, and he resists the urge to sit up so as not to draw attention to himself. He isn't the only one set on edge by this, because Marina goes still and she wonders, "Really?" in the same kind of voice Professor Elm used when he was trying to remember if he had asked anyone to do whatever task had recently been done. A heartbeat later, his curiosity turned to suspicion; what business could Xanthus have on the border that needed to be carried out in the dead of night? He's doing a lousy job at this parenting thing if his little brother is leading a secret life behind his back!
His imagination is running off with him, putting Xanthus in place of a crime lord or something, when Desarae leans down to pluck up her pack from the ground. Her eyes are dancing when she removes a Pokeball and extends it to Marina, who cups her hands in the way someone who has never held a Pokeball does.
"What is it?" she asks, and all present -- sparing the Eevee, who was too busy nibbling at the IV tape on Marina's wrist -- roll their eyes.
Desarae spreads her hands out expressively, and Zach doesn't think he's ever studied his little brother's girlfriend as closely as he does now. "It's a gift from my brother," she says, her eyes -- the kind of icy blue you rarely ever see in nature, but the Alfa family does have this habit of attracting freaks -- sparkling as she watches Marina turn the Pokeball over. "He left home when I was eleven to begin a career in construction in Hoenn. He married a local beauty, with the unfortunate name of Wanda, and he lives in Verdanturf Town, and it turns out that their house is within biking distance of perhaps the most famous Pokemon Breeders in all of world history. If I didn't have commitments here," she reaches out and Xanthus idly twines his fingers with hers with a soft, sappy sort of smile that didn't fit his spiky green hair and lip ring at all. "I'd be over there in a heartbeat."
There's a pregnant pause, and then it dawns on Desarae that Marina hasn't the faintest clue how to open her gift. She leans forward so that her waterfalls of straight, brown braids fall all over them both and she patiently presses the button. White light flashes and there's the minute shriek of a very small Pokemon, and he hears Marina smother a cry, and from the sound of it, she's either been mortally wounded or handed the world on a silver platter.
"Josh said you talked about them a lot," Xanthus says by way of explanation as the small, yellow-and-orange mouse Pokemon crouches on Marina's knee and the two of them survey each other like they can't decide if they like each other. "So me and Desarae --"
"Desarae and I," Marina and Zach say in unison, although Zach mouths is.
"Whatever. We came to the conclusion that like I'm close to the Eevee family, you're close to the Plusles." Xanthus scoops his hand up under the Eevee kit's ribs and cradles it close, just as his sister stretches her fingers to the Plusle, who delicately sniffs at them while reserving judgment.
"I ... I had one, in Fiore," she whispers, her eyes glassy. "She was my first friend there. We were partners for ten years. Oh, bah!" she exclaims, swiping at her eyes and startling the Plusle. It doesn't retreat far, however, because Desarae shoos it forward again when it tries to scuttle behind her. "You don't want to listen to me talk about what can't be changed. You!" she gets Xanthus again with her foot. "Tell me how your actual job went."
He sits up with a crack of leather, and his grin becomes one-third embarrassment, two-thirds pride. "It'll be on the news tomorrow."
"So I'll see it then! But tell me now!"
Xanthus's whole face twists into a smirk, and both he and Desarae sit up a little straighter. "Heist pulled off with flying colors, leader," he goes with a cocky salute.
Marina squeals, blue hair flying and legs tucking themselves up close to her body, which makes the Plusle hop to her shoulder. It hangs there, tiny claws digging into her hospital gown, like it was always meant to be there.
"We caught up with the caravan just outside of Blackthorn City," whispers Desarae, like a teenage girl sharing a secret. "And Jolteon zapped the drivers senseless and between me and Xanthus, the guards were a piece of cake. We rounded up the Kangaskhan just like you told us and they're on the Underground right now, on their way to someplace safe where they never have to deal with human greed and treachery ever again."
"Ohhh, I love you two!" Marina cries, throwing her arms open, and just when Zach thinks he couldn't be more surprised, both Xanthus and Desarae move into the hug, and within moments, they're a tangle of blankets and confused Pokemon and happy, laughing faces.
When she straightens, she taps both of them on the forehead so that they look up at her and she holds herself all upright and pompous, "As the only Pokemon Ranger in the probably the entire continent, I thus raise you to Ranger Rank Level 1!" She taps them again, smiling like a lightbulb. "Welcome to rookie-dom, my friends. It's a wonderful place to be, up until people actually expect you to do things other than look cool."
"So what's our next job, Leader," Xanthus wants to know, shoving her leg.
"Ow!" she protests, a twinge of real pain flashing across her face, to which the Plusle responds with a chiding cry in the boy's direction. "I don't know; I'll wait and see what Professor Elm tells me; he's been tracking these Go Rock scandals since they began. And hey! Be gentle with me. I'm an old lady!"
"Old!" shrills Desarae, and she's grinning like she's ready to explode into bits any moment now. "You're only nine years our senior."
"I know! I'm ancient!"
Zach's pretty sure that that sound? Was probably the sound of his head exploding.
***
"Don't tell me you slept here."
His eyes open onto Cassie's face, hovering in front of his own. Her lips are wrenched into a dry smile, and her wet curls tell him she didn't have time to shower last night, which meant that it was she who put the younger ones to bed. She rolls her eyes at his grogginess and, a moment later, his stiffness, and extends to him a plate of pancakes.
"Don't say I never did nothing for you," she says, and behind her, the nurse throws open the blinds so that light flooded in, causing Zach and Cassie alike to squint their eyes against the unwelcome invasion. "The cafeteria only had strawberry, by the way. And they've already been cut up, you know, in case you're not a big enough boy to handle them all on your own," here, she ruffles his hair just to see his early-morning scowl.
The irony of cut strawberry pancakes is not lost on him.
"Next time you camp out, remember to bring a pillow, or at least ask for one. You don't have to prove what a big, strong, protective man you are, because we already know."
"Good morning, Cassie," he grates out with a tongue like sandpaper and throat like a desert, and he works his mouth to get the crumbly, dry feeling to go away. She moves away, and his face lights up and he adds, "And good morning, Sarah and Brian!"
The littlest Alfa grabs her brother's hand and guides him over, and they both greet him with big hugs and sticky pancake kisses. Cassie sits down in the chair by Marina's bed, in which the woman in question has curled up with her new Plusle friend tucked in the center like a womb. He meets her eye over Brian's carrot-red head, and he's almost glad when he meets understanding. He doesn't think he's ready to explain, "she killed her baby because she's still trying to escape whatever she's trying to escape."
Brian disentangles himself first, and at his request Cassie lifts him up onto Marina's bed. The boy stares at her for a moment, before he climbs over her to press his hand into her chest like it could cure her. He knew that sign all too well.
I love you.
"Do you love your sister?" he asks Sarah, and she turns her head so that her pearl-button eyes are facing him.
"Yes," she answers without hesitation.
"Why?"
Any other five-year-old might have said, 'because she gives me candy' or 'she helps me build my alphabet blocks for kindergarten'. But Sarah was a creepy five-year-old, so she said, "Because she teaches me how to see."
"What?"
"You see with your eyes," she puts her finger at the corner of his eye, and he thinks it says something about her control that she just lets it hover there, exactly at the corner, like she knew exactly where his face was positioned. "Marina says you rely too much on your eyes. When they're big enough, Rangers are blindfolded and told to capture a Pokemon without looking at them. They learn to see with more than their eyes."
She turns in his arms and presses her palm to the linoleum. He sees the knuckles arch and then whiten and Sarah's mouth become hard and thin, and then she says, "A woman is about to walk past. She's fat. She has a cart filled with ... plants."
Zach looks up instinctually, and not more than thirty seconds later, the rattling sound of wheels greets his ears, and then a pudgy old lady with her grey hair up in a bun goes right on past the door, pushing a courtesy cart full of cooing Sunkerns.
He stares at Sarah, and can tell by the little self-satisfied quirk of her lips that she knows she's right.
"Marina taught me how to do that," she says almost defensively. "She taught me how to see colors. Green is grass. Pink is frosting and whipped cream. Red is strawberries right after they've been washed. Colors, Zach. How am I supposed to believe there are such things as rainbows? All those colors lined up in a neat row in the sky? That's a stupid idea! But they exist. I can't touch it, I can't hear it. But it exists. Marina's taught me more than kindergarten ever did!"
She pauses, and frowns. "You're angry."
"No, I'm not," lies Zach, forcing a smile she can't see (or maybe she can) and kissing her cheek. "I believe you."
"Hey," comes a croak from the hospital bed. "It's a party."
"Marina!" cries Sarah, fluttering right out of Zach's arms and over to her sister, who grasps uselessly at her hands until Cassie comes to the rescue and lifts her up onto the bedspread. Marina opens her left arm for a hug, since Brian is already snuggled into her right, but Sarah is letting her hands slide over the blanket, and then she puts her cheek to it.
"It feels like water!" she exclaims in delight. "Is it blue?"
Zach's eyebrows go up, and Marina laughs and goes, "Yes it is, clever girl! Now c'mere; I haven't hugged you in an entire day! I think I might go crazy!"
The girl obeys, and it's like a repeat of what Zach witnessed the night before with Xanthus and Desarae, only Sarah and Brian lack the fear that the two teenagers had; like if they rough-house too hard, Marina might shatter. They lack the understanding that IV drips and hospital gowns symbolize weakness, symbolize injury and they must walk on eggshells. They don't know, and so every time they plant their hands in Marina's stomach, pain spasms across her face and her laugh chokes.
"I'm glad to see you're working it in those hospital clothes," Cassie goes when the kids settle down, and her voice is mild.
"I thought the towel made me look fat," Marina returns weakly, snaking one arm around Brian so she could plant one hand on her hip and cluck her tongue. "Say, I don't suppose you guys brought any movies? Doesn't that one about the Qwilfish and his son come out today? Finding Sleemo or something like that? There's almost nothing in here to entertain me, so it's up to you," she tickles the six-year-old's ribs, and he grunts with laughter and watches her mouth intently.
"I actually wanted your advice on something," Cassie says, scooting forward in her chair.
"Oh?" To her due credit, Marina only sounds slightly skeptical.
The girl scratches at her earlobe, and then flashes a karat-gold grin that suddenly has Zach understanding why there are so many boys sending her stuff on her birthday, "How do you catch a Donphan? I saw one yesterday on Route 45 while running an errand for the prof, but the only Pokemon I had with me were too low-level. But I'm going to go back later with Meganium."
"Donphan?" A sort of a pleasant surprise takes over Marina's face. "I haven't thought about them forever! Um... well, the major thing you have to know about Donphan is that they are very quick to jump to conclusions. They're loyal to a fault, but they can be incredibly thick-headed, no pun intended. They'll charge at any threat without stopping to examine if they can even handle what they've attempted to bowl over. Use their over-compensation to your advantage; trip it up and trap it, and we should be seeing a Donphan running around in the backyard, ruining the gardenias, in no time."
She smiles at Cassie and Cassie smiles back, full and bright, and Zach doesn't know what to think any more.
The pancakes turn to dust in his mouth.
***
Marina's released the next day.
They walk home, all of them. It shouldn't really count as a family outing, but it winds up that way. Brian picks flowers and gives them to Sarah, and they walk the rest of the way with their heads down over the bright yellow things, since touch is the only way they can communicate and they try as often as they can. Cassie's trying to discreetly pluck one from them, and Zach imagines she's already running it through the hundreds of flower names she's got stored in her head. Josh and Jake claim Marina, and they won't let her take the mincing steps she's trying to take, talking all the while about the new Donphan running around in the backyard, eating all the gardenias.
It's relatively warm out, so Xanthus has his jacket off and tied it around his waist, and if he hadn't been looking for it, then Zach wouldn't have caught the discreet star sewn into the inside pocket. Ranger Rank 1. He's got Korea in his arms, arms wrapped around her so that her back was to his belly and she could see the world. At four months, she was just beginning to do things voluntarily, like reach for Xanthus's lip ring when it got too close to her.
She had also just learned how to laugh, and everybody in the house has used that excuse to make silly faces.
"Marina?" Josh goes suddenly, like something just occurred to him. "Can I take you in for show and tell on Friday?"
"Why would you want to do that?" his sister laughs, and raises her hand and waves back to Mrs. Elm when the latter sticks her head out of her crooked kitchen window and trills a greeting. "I'm hardly somebody to stare at. Why don't you take one of Cassie's Pokemon? Or Desarae? I'm sure Desarae's got plenty of cool stories to tell your friends."
"Yeah, but I want to take you. You're cooler than Pokemon, or Desarae."
"Hey!" goes Xanthus, and Josh sticks his tongue out, which earns him a sharp reprimand from everybody who has developed any sense of manners at all (in other words, only Zach scolds him.)
And Marina's smile is pained, not the kind of pained like somebody's stepped on her stomach, but pained like she's been imaging leaving them and is just now remembering why she hasn't done that yet.
***
Any questions about where she's been are easily brushed away.
"I had a nervous breakdown," she chirps when Professor Elm turns his concerned father routine on. "Coming back from the dead takes a lot out of a girl, I hope you know."
Zach, in all honesty, hasn't decided what he thinks about everything yet. He supposes this is one of those moments that defines who he is, what his character's like; all those things that reflect on him as a person revolves around how he treats his sister.
He loves her.
Except when he doesn't.
He thinks she's gone and taken their lives and turned them all into one big jigsaw puzzle. He's not even sure what image they made before she came and messed them all up.
Or perhaps they were a jigsaw before she came, and she was the one who put the pieces together, just like she was the one who figured out Korea's mother wasn't around, or what was causing the electricity problems. Was that all they were to her? Just another challenge, another job like the illegal Kangaskhan trafficking south of Blackthorn?
"What on earth is she running from?" he muses to his upside down reflection in his spoon after he sucks off the Numel-tine.
***
The tone of the doorbell doesn't sound like the end of everything. It just sounds like a doorbell, and Zach thinks it's a bit too early for the mail man and a bit too late for Desarae, and a bit too mid-term for any boys to be asking for Cassie.
"I'll get it!" laughs Marina, shucking off her Geodude-print oven mitts and mussing up Brian's hair as she darts out of the kitchen.
"But you're hardly dressed!" Zach hollers after her, because she's not. She's wearing his boxers and one of Cassie's tube tops, and last time she wore that particular combination, she was in this very kitchen with a baby in her arms, watching all the years she's been ignoring rush up to meet her at once. This time, it's pancakes and Brian working on his homework (that's due later in the day -- typically, none of the Alfas were procrastinators. Attention-seekers, freaks, do-gooders, and murderers, sure, but not procrastinators. Brian was special); it was just a simple find the Shuckles that match identically kind of thing. And Brian had the perfect eye for it, so Zach wasn't too concerned.
She either didn't hear him or ignored him, because she doesn't come back and he laughs at the image she'll make. Then the pancake batter begins to fizz on his skillet, so he turns his attention to that.
He hears the front door open and close, but he isn't paying enough attention for it to occur to him that the duration between the two was only about a heartbeat long.
He does notice, however, when Marina walks back in with her face grey underneath her fading tan and without a word she ghosts right over to the fridge and removes a carton of strawberries, and then a knife from the cutlery drawer and a fresh white towel from behind the sink. Forgetting the pancakes, Zach watches as she sits down at the kitchen table and lays the strawberries out in front of her and proceeds to slice them, cleanly, precisely, the same move over and over again until the towel was stained pink, and it although it looks nothing like blood, that's what Zach thinks.
The Plusle hops up to investigate, and between that and the sound of burning pancake batter, Zach starts out of his reverie and catches Brian's eye. For all that he's six, the boy knows something's up. Marina decapitates strawberries and lets them bleed all over the white towels when she wants to forget.
The doorbell rings again, and his sister says in a detached voice, "Can you get that, please?"
It takes Zach all of seven seconds to reach the door, but that was only because one of Cassie's Rattata were in the way and he almost tripped. Otherwise, he probably would have beat the record, because he knew the walls of the house kept score and it seemed important.
He can see the shape of the man through the glaze on the windows that framed the front door, and at the sound of Zach undoing the bolt, the figure on the other side shifts direction and he can see it's accompanied by the hunchbacked silhouette of a Pokemon. This, in and of itself, told him nothing, as he couldn't recognize the identity and it wouldn't matter anyway; this was Professor Elm's hometown. Pokemon were everywhere.
He wasn't sure what he was expecting. Some obvious government agent, maybe, or some grand but angry celebrity, or perhaps just the local police, who already were on pretty friendly terms with the Alfa family. Whatever it was, he wanted it to immediately yell at him the nature of his sister's crime.
But the narrow-faced, ratty-haired man with a bedraggled Fearow crouched beside him is none of the above.
His eyes flick over Zach's face, and he knows without being told that he's looking for any resemblances to Marina. Zach's already looked; if you squint, they have the same cheekbones, but everything else about them is polar opposite, as if their parents' genes remembered their previous attempt and built him to be her compliment, or her replacement.
The man is wearing a masculine version of the uniform Zach peeled off his unconscious sister the first night and burned, which leads Zach to the only possible conclusion.
"Leave, Ranger," he says without preamble, letting the door slide shut to a sliver. "There is no place for you or your kind here."
“I need to talk to your sister,” the other replies, his tone of voice indicating that he’s used to being in authority and having people listen to him.
“You’ll have to elaborate, sir. I have ten sisters.”
Frustration flashes across the man's features and Zach finds the door rebounding off his foot when he sticks it right in the way. "I have not," he hisses, "traveled all this way just to be told off by some prejudiced, playground brat. Now where is she?"
"Who are you?" Zach demands, wishing all the while that Cassie or Xanthus or somebody would show up with a powerhouse Pokemon and back him up. It almost makes him feel better; he'll take the side defending his sister over the side that will tell him what she did, as if he had begun to doubt it himself.
"I'm Spenser," the man goes, and Zach can tell exactly what this stranger thinks of him for answering a question with a question, and it's not lost on either of them that he doesn't continue the pattern. "I'm the Leader at the Ringtown Ranger Base, and I'm Marina's boss. We want her back. We want her home."
"This is her home," Zach deadpans, mentally prepping himself for a fight.
"Really?" Spenser flashes back, tone equally devoid of emotion. "She never mentioned you. Not once."
Zach has to hand it to him; they had been talking all of half a minute and this guy had already figured out where such an underhanded comment would hurt the most, and by the way this stranger's blue eyes went guarded, he knew it too. His fingers tightened on the doorknob.
"If you're a Ranger Leader, why did you come here yourself? Your kind aren't welcome in this land, and it's just Marina Alfa. Why not send one of your lackeys?"
"Because she's..." he falters here, only the smallest trip in his voice and it's gone in a flash and he recovers, "she's the best Ranger we have," but Zach notices it and understanding hits him like a Donphan to the gardenias, like a light bulb going on, and he doesn't want to breathe ever again because it's going to hurt too much.
He wonders if the baby Marina never had would have been born with green hair.
He doesn't get a chance to say anything, however, because the sound of a window sliding shut too fast from around back rings clear through the air and Zach presses his lips together.
The Fearow merely lifts its head, but Spenser's hand snaps to his side and Zach, who has never seen a Styler before, is inclined to be skeptical as to how this small, red, egg-shaped thing could defend him against anything. But, then again, the entire Alfa family fortune was built on the back of a Pokeball, and Pokeballs were considerably less than intimidating, so he really had no room to talk.
"What was that?"
"That?" Zach flips his wrist airily. "That was just Marina escaping out the back window."
Spenser spins on his heel, and it's Zach's turn to stick his foot out and stop him, and blue eyes flash murder and now he thinks he gets where the Rangers got their label as anarchists.
"Don't even think about it, boy," Spenser spits. "I'm twice your age and I've got a good hundred pounds on you."
"Granted, she can't get very far," Zach continues like he never said a thing, and he's trying to stop himself, he's trying because he's better than this, better than poisonous words falling from his tongue because he knows they'll hurt, "since she just had an abortion and all that."
He doesn't see the blow coming. Well, he did expect to be punched, but he didn't expect the crackling, electric snap of a whip in his direction. By the time he realizes it's the Styler, the thing has coiled around him three times and his feet are locked where they are. It looks so fragile, crystalline and blue, like if he reached out and touched it, it would snap and his head feels foggy, like his sinuses were clogged. His fingers extend and --
Don't break the line, Spenser's voice is smooth, but sudden in the emptiness inside his skull and he doesn't think Stylers were meant to be used on humans, and his hands snap back and fly to his temples because it's ringing. Blearily, he sees the blue fade and Spenser's arm drop back down to his side, but his voice is still there. Listen to me. I'm not here to harm you. I'm not here to harm Marina. There is a balance in this world and we're here to preserve it. There's a balance in the Ringtown Ranger Base and we need Marina back. At least let me talk to her.
Zach thinks he understands now, how a Ranger gets any Pokemon to trust him or her, and he also thinks that, if abused, that kind of power can destroy the world.
But Marina never told him the story, so he doesn't know that it’s already been tried.
***
He never follows them.
He thinks about it, hands grasping the doorframe and head spinning, half a dozen Spensers running away from him with a stride that says he's spent half his life chasing after his sister (haven't they all?). But then he hears Sarah calling him, voice sharp and worried, and he turns and goes back inside, into the cool air conditioning and the sickly sweet smell of strawberries and the past forty years of Alfa memories and sounds hidden deep in the walls, a constant hum, a constant comfort.
So he never sees Marina stop and let Spenser catch up to her, hands clenched and trembling. He never sees him reach out, the bare edges of his fingers brushing against her elbow, never sees his sister's whole body shudder before she spun and flung her arms around him in a crush of limbs and Ranger Rank stars and hope and anger and fear. Never sees the kiss, desperate and hard enough to make their lips go white while their mouths grasped on and in and around each other, or the way one body near about climbed onto the other in an attempt to get as close as physically possible in one hard rush. It was less of a passionate embrace and more the simple pull of one human who needed another.
But Zach never follows them, so he never hears, "Who killed Joel?"
"I thought you would have figured it by now, best friend and all that. Isn't that the first question people ask?"
"Don't be smart. Not now."
"What do you want me to do, then?"
"Tell me the truth. Was it Keith?"
"Keith loved Joel. Loves him. And no. He has an alibi. Ask Lady, and then ask her again. Everybody lies."
"Marina. We were going to arrest Aria, but then you ran away and conclusions had to be drawn."
"Aria never hurt a living soul."
"But you did?"
"I ... I .. don't .. it was an accident."
"The worst criminals have gotten off with that excuse."
"Then I have a chance."
"Marina."
"Spenser. In my head, my baby was Joel. I could see his face whenever I thought about him, and I heard his voice whenever I was sick and I felt him, everywhere and there was a cliff, so I jumped. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm --"
"Will you come home?"
"Everybody dies."
Zach's not there, so he doesn't see Spenser release Marina and turn away, tilting his head in the direction of Fiore like he can sense it on the edges of his mind, like he's saying good-bye.
He doesn't hear him say, too casually, "I heard the housing market is currently gold in Hoenn."
***
She comes home, the sun low and orange and framing her head, and he could see her roots, because she wasn't naturally blue-haired -- he's sure he knew this, but it's another thing to see the brush of sunset-highlighted auburn along her part -- and she has the mail bundled in one hand like her entire past hadn't just landed on their doorstep.
She's still wearing his boxers and Cassie's tube top, and Zach is tempted to remark on how uncomfortable it must have been to wear that all day, but the fact that the elastic of his boxers, stretching across the cavern between her hips, is backwards and inside out, which they hadn't been at breakfast, he hazards a guess that she had/ been out of those clothes once or twice.
So it confirms his suspicions, and he thinks that before she came back from the dead, he never would have even noticed such a small detail.
"Hey, listen to this!" she goes, all bright and cheery, and behind him, Korea stops crying with a single hiccup. He knows without looking that she's suddenly become all coos and smiles, because Marina's face is her favorite toy and she could entertain herself for hours so long as she kept Marina interested in her, which wasn't hard. He crosses his ankles in front of him, sinking back as much as he could into the welcome chair, a wooden, uncomfortable, rickety thing just a few footsteps away from the front door. "Our cousin Hiro's son Chance just celebrated his first birthday. Huh. I didn't even know Hiro had grown up. But she's our age, isn't she? .. Ah! Uncle Norman is recovering from the pokepox, and he says he's glad it's the worst he has to deal with -- hey!"
He cuts her off by grabbing her wrist, and he feels her bones shift beneath his fingers and it occurs to him that when crushed, the bones in the wrist take the longest to heal out of all the bones in the body. The image of Spenser, wrist arced over his whip of blue energy, flashes through his mind and he realizes that wrist power is everything to a Ranger's career and if he just tightens his grip that much more, he could ruin Marina's life. Just by clutching just a little bit too hard. Forget Dragon Masters and Apricot Men, that was true power.
Her eyes flash at him, wary, and he knows she knows what's on his mind, and it should mean something to him that she believes he will do it.
He loves her.
She's his big sister. He wants her safe. He's lost her once and he wants her where he can keep an eye on her.
He loves her.
"You stole my family from me," he says, and it feels a bit too much like those words have been churning inside his throat like bile for far too long, and his stomach feels small and tight like his anger his been ballooning and pressing it down, and his chest feels entirely too tiny for the same reason. He doesn't remember dragging her into the living room, but here they are and he can barely hear Korea begin crying again, like the faintest buzz of white noise, while he can hear Marina just fine.
"What?"
"They were mine. Dad called me when Mom died, I came back in heartbeat and I've built this family and I've raised them strong and true, and you saunter in like the past sixteen years haven't happened and you take my family from me and you turn them into something I don't recognize. What gave you the right?"
Her mouth works, not unlike a Goldeen in the throes of utmost Confusion, and her eyes flicker around like she's searching the room for wherever the real Zach is hidden, but he's right here in front of her, and the only thing in the living room is the remnants of her own influence; the furniture, rearranged to the corners of the room to leave a wide open space for battling, the textbooks pulled down from the shelves and spread open so that their information lay gutted for anybody (everybody) who wants to know. Her influence is everywhere in this house, and he thinks that's why he's doing this now.
"You're going to leave again." It's not a question. "You're going to leave and we'll have to learn how to live without you all over again."
"You're going to have to learn how to live without me again," Marina goes, her voice quiet and controlled, and she unconsciously shifts her feet so that they're parallel with her shoulders, like Trainers do before a battle begins. "The rest of them don't remember me."
"So what? You think you can just poof, and we'll be all, 'oh well' and move on? We can't do that. The kids love you too much. You've come, and you ruined everything I've tried to raise them to be and now you're as much a part of them as a mother would be. You're ... you're like candy. Use sparingly, or else you'll wind up old and fat and diabetic and that's what you're going to do to these kids. That's what you've done to these kids."
Her nostrils flare. "Are you really that arrogant?"
Zach sneers.
That's when she snaps. "You think you're such a big martyr, giving up your adolescent, irresponsible adventure to come here and take the kids from Dad. You drove him off so you could burden the yolk of responsibility and domesticity all on your own. You were so absorbed in yourself you never noticed you weren't the perfect father of six. You're twenty-five years old, you think you're fifty, and you act fifteen, Zach, and that’s why you don’t date!"
She takes a deep breath and continues, “You speak of me as the Alfa who returned from the dead. Not your long lost sister delivered back to you safe and alive. Do you want me dead?”
"I… I act fifteen? What about you?"
"What about me?"
The image of Sarah, her mouth twisted into a worried frown and her lips asking, "are you mad?", followed by one of Cassie, "she's a stranger," flits across his vision and he says, "You skulk around this house without even thinking of telling us why all of a sudden you want to be a member of this family, and you think taking over for Mom will somehow make it all better."
Understanding dawns. "Is this about Sarah?"
"This is about Jake and Cassie and Xanthus and Brian and Korea and Josh and Desarae and your dead baby and that damn Plusle, but yes, this is about Sarah. Sarah knew nothing of what this family went through before she was born. I never wanted her to. I wanted her to be different, to break our family mold. Now, thanks to you and your 'the blind can see rainbows', she's become something I don't recognize. The same with Josh. The same with Xanthus. But mostly Sarah. Sarah was mine. Sarah was mine."
"And you failed," she says nastily, her whole body trembling and her hands clenching into fists in the fabric of her tube top, right over her stomach. "You failed, Zach. It's as simple as that. This family was falling apart before you came back, and you thought sweeping it all under the rug would fix everything. You had no idea who anybody was. You were the stranger. You are the stranger!"
"So, what? You planned to cure us, just like you planned to raid that caravan of Kangaskhan hoarders outside Blackthorn. Were we just another mission to you?"
"I thought our family motto was 'one more baby, one more person to grow up and make the world a better place.' What ever happened to that?"
"You ran away from us."
"If I hadn't run away, I would have ended up like Molly!"
"You already have!" he screams, and her chest caves like he had punched her. "What did you do, Marina?!"
She brings her fists down on thin air and the veins in her throat bulges as she cries, "I did what I had to!"
"Your whole family thinks you're a murderer!"
"I protected my best friend!" And there, it's out, he can tell by the way her pupils go small and narrow and her breath catches. "I protected my best friend. He was going to get married. He was going to become a Leader. He had his whole life in front of him and I didn't want him doing twenty to life for an accident. I took his fall. I gave up everything I loved so he would be safe."
Her words echo around inside of him, and he knows he's hearing his life's story handed back to him.
"Everybody lies," she breathes, and her eyes flash fire. "I have done nothing this family isn't guilty of a thousand times over."
"I don't lie," he answers on automatic, because he is the role model. He is the martyr.
"Yes, you do. You lied to me. You said giving birth to Sarah was what killed Mom, but it wasn't. It was us. I killed Mom. Molly killed Mom. Raymond and Suzie Mary and Brian and Sarah, we all killed Mom. The pills killed Mom. How many times can you fill a hole created by losing someone before you are nothing but patches and there is too little of you left?"
"Then why did you come back? We were just beginning to live with the hole you created when you ran away, and you come and you rearrange this family and you knock it silly and don't make us do it again, Marina."
"Don't speak to me of holes," she goes, very very quietly, and her hand drifts to her belly and he gets it. He gets it.
There's so much he doesn't know about her. He doesn't know why she ran away and set the wheel of family tragedy in motion. He doesn't know what she did with the six years that lapsed between her never coming home for dinner and her showing up on an island in the middle of nowhere in a Ranger uniform with letters in her pocket. He doesn't know what her best friend did and he doesn't know why he was so important to her that she was willing to hand over the first real life she ever had.
But he remembers his mother's funeral, sitting so small and broken at his father's side with his arms full of pearly-eyed infant, but what he remembers most is how his father didn't look broken enough.
He thinks of his siblings.
He thinks of Karin, holed up in the Elite Four, and he thinks of the Eevee egg that she gave Xanthus without knowing how it would shape him. He thinks of Raymond, six feet under, and he remembers the exact way he fell forward; didn't jerk, didn't crumple, just fell straight forward, too suddenly for there even to be any blood. He thinks of Aria with her sleek black hair and her completed Pokedex, and how she is their mother in every possible way. He thinks of Susanna, showing up on his doorstep with a ten-year-old by her side and her arm full of squalling infant that she handed to him without a word, and she’s a bit too much like her twin for comfort.
He thinks of Molly and Skyler and Maia, the middle children who had to be everything at once and never got the love they deserved, and he thinks he never would have guessed they turned out like that. Molly, a murderer and an adulteress; Skyler, a janitor in a town whose name nobody knows; and Maia, perhaps the most youngest successful businesswoman in Goldenrod City, a prodigy whose family was never even in the picture (or her will.)
He thinks of Loren, who fills the holes with men and calls him every sixth month, drunk off her ass and completely bankrupt, and she never says thank you before she's running like she's afraid of what will catch up if she stays still. He thinks of Mike, how he practically flew out of the house when he turned eighteen like their mother's ghost was on his heels. He thinks of Suzie Mary, and the nine months between her and Xanthus, and he thinks of the lines on Xanthus's mouth and knows who put them there when they lowered her into the ground.
He thinks of his children.
He thinks of Xanthus, who lives life like he's greased in lighter fluid and every time he saves a Pokemon is like striking a flint. He thinks of Cassie, of the jaded way she fills her Pokedex and the careless way she throws her love in the path of whoever needs it the most, and he knows it will get her in trouble someday. He thinks of Jake, who thinks his family mold is that of murderers and Pokemon Champions (and it is, it is, if the law tries Marina for the crime she didn't commit and if the law ever catches Molly). He thinks of Josh; all he ever wanted to do was learn. He thinks of Brian, pressing "I love you" into Marina's chest and he thinks of Sarah, smiling with pearly-white eyes and saying, "She taught me how to see colors."
He thinks of Marina, all blue hair and brown skin and red eyes and black marks; one for Mom, one for Dad, one for Susanna, one for them, one for the murdered and the dead and whoever suffered so that she could become the best, one for her best friend, one for her Plusle, and a giant black chasm where her baby had been.
He kisses her then, hard mouth on hard mouth like Donphan crashing skulls, because what else was there left to do?
Suddenly, he's nine again and she's his closest playmate, for all that she has a twin and he has Molly, who's just ten months younger than him and adores him and everything he does (and he blames himself for how she turned out; he can admit that to himself now.)
Life was perfect then, and that is who he is. He's a boy who loves the sun and loves the going but never the destination, and he loved Pokemon and he loved being a Trainer, but he loves his family more.
He lets that (her) go, and well aware the entire family has crowded into the doorway of the living room, and when the Plusle springs from Brian’s arms and dashes over to leap to his sister’s shoulder like it was always meant to be there, he says, "Leave, Marina Alfa. There's no place for you here."
***
Zach sits on his mother's bathroom counter and watches the drama unfold on the front lawn through the pastel-framed window, running his hands through his thinning hair. He watches the neighbors come, not one-by-one but group-by-group, as if they were unable to approach the house with their pitchforks and torches blazing all on their lonesome. He watches their mouths spew hatred, spew ignorance and unfamiliarity, watches them take a culture that once upon a time used to be an eccentricity of their sister nation and now was evolving. He watches tolerance die a miserable death.
They're there because someone let it slip that the Alfa who was back from the dead was a Ranger. Was an anarchist. Had been ratted out by her own brother.
It's a Clefairy moon, and perhaps that means something. He’s tired of double meanings.
He hears their front door slam and then he sees Xanthus's bright green head and Desarae's riot of braids flying down the steps and stopping right before the gate. He can't see it from where he is, but he imagines they have their Ranger Rank stars emblazoned fearlessly on their chest. He can't hear what they're saying, either, just the hum of their voices, tight with angry and fierce with pride and love.
He gets off the counter when they're joined by Sarah and Josh, and drifts downstairs to the kitchen, stepping over Cassie's Furret at the bottom of the stairs and passing a diagram of dual types with Jake's name scribbled at the top.
This is the house he grew up in. These walls know his secrets, know what he gave up, and they have forever to know what he's going to do.
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 the sixth child of eighteen. He's father to six of those eighteen.
And he'll always have that. Those are the parts of him that will never go away. It's the only thing that's going to fill the holes.
Cassie finds him later, sitting at the kitchen table with a saucer full of cut strawberries in front of him, and she says, "She took Korea."
You never love a girl till it's good-bye.
He looks at her and he says, "I think I've done something stupid."
Once a Donphan starts rolling, it can't be stopped. Its Tackle is enough to take down a house.
********
Back to part one.