Un(tilt)ed, Pokemon (Anna gameverse)
Title: Un(tilt)ed
Author: wingsofcharity
Fandom: Pokemon Ranger
Pairing: Everybody/the kitchen sink
Rating: soft R
Word Count: 5,834
Warnings: None.
Disclaimer: Pokemon Ranger has buttsex with Nintendo. I get it.
done for the prompt "12. injury" at 20_firstkisses
"Do you know what's going to happen now?"
Lunick drags himself out of his haze to focus on her, and finds her leaning out over the brim of the Ludicolo's hat. She's all long, sun-kissed tan limbs and non-existent bikini lines. There are freckles air-brushed along her shoulders, but today they're covered up by her periwinkle braids, which are frizzed from the swim they took off the coast earlier. They also blend in with the strings of her top, and from where he is, he can't tell if she's wearing anything at all. It's decidedly nice.
He smiles, slow and languid, moving his bare feet so that they dug deep into the sand where it was cool and taking a deep breath so that his abs stretched in the sun and he could feel life in every rib. His Minun's ear brushed his every time he inhaled, and it twitched away from him sleepily.
He was so happy his stomach hurt.
"Nothing's going to change," he murmurs, licking his dry lips. "Right, Solana?"
The Ludicolo began to lumber across the beach, slow and rocking like the movement of the waves, but he still saw her smile over the dark, leathery rim of its hat, bee-stung lips curving only at one corner as only a woman could really pull off. "You have to know, Lunick."
There was a flash and he saw her skull grinning at him, only a few patches of blue hair clinging to its ream of bone and the silhouette of a Banette stamped above her eye socket, and he woke up screaming, the sound of Gordor's organ music ringing in his ears.
...
Murph rubs soft, slow circles into Spenser's back. It's something his mother had taught him to do, along with folding the laundry and changing the Bellossom-scented plug-in and sorting the light bulbs by wattage.
Pokemon first, then people, yourself last. It's the creed he lives by.
Lunick sits cross-legged on the blue-rimmed glass desk and for once isn't scolded for it by the lady with the crystal-blue cornrows who's usually working her way through some dime-a-dozen romance novel while waiting for the odd Ranger to come along with a Styler that needs to be recharged. Minun is a comforting weight on his thigh, warm and alive.
"You knew this day was going to come," says the maroon-haired Ranger from upstairs, keeping her voice soft and low like she's afraid of startling anyone; the trademark of any Ranger worth her salt.
"She's right, Spenser," her husband adds, and the lines in Murph's face get deeper as his hands knead along ever-tightening muscles in Spenser's shoulder blades. "You persuaded Solana to abandon everyone who loved her with just six letters. How long did you think it would be before a better offer came along?"
"She's not programmed to stay in one place after the adventure wears off," the maroon-haired woman says in what Lunick supposes she thinks is a sympathetic tone of voice. "You know that better than anyone."
Now, Lunick had gone to school. Granted, he had dropped out after six years to join the Ranger Union, but he knew enough. He knew the elementary sciences of electric charges; one positive and one negative and the pull of one on the other is the force that held the universe together when all theories rightfully say it should be flying apart at the seams.
He thinks that without Solana and her Plusle, the Ringtown Ranger base was without its positive charge and floated in its own cloud of negative energy.
The universe flying apart at the seams.
...
One month becomes two, and the world is a Ferris wheel; Lunick has never seen one in person, because the only living replica of one is in Sinnoh, but he thinks time works in much the same way. They had been paused high at the top, all of them together, following the episode where they saved the world. It had seemed like the exhilaration would never end.
But then it did, and the wheel turned.
Lunick watches Spenser, and it's not like he's lost all will to live -- he didn't love Solana that much. None of them (all of them) did. But he's different, and it's not a different that Lunick can get his mind around. He thinks of the Serra mountains falling, and he knows that near-death experiences are hard to shake, even for people like Spenser, who, as far as he is concerned, made those mountains.
And sometimes, he learns, people don't come back.
He goes to the Serra Mountain Range, and Elita stops him and with her Skarmory's eyes, hard and flinting, she says, "I looked for him too. He's not there."
Some people don't come back.
And suddenly, Lunick is more terrified than he can put into words.
...
Spenser is different and Murph has become stronger and Elita has become a little less lofty, and Lunick is not there the day everything changes (again.) He's on a patrol mission at Panula Lake, for absolutely no reason that he could decipher.
Solana told him once that the sign, the one that warns him against drinking the lake water because of its high salt content, is mysteriously replaced if it is cut down. He doesn't have any friends with him who might be willing to test this myth with him and he's feeling too lazy to descend into Panula Cave to find a Sneasel, but he'll think back on it later with a little bit of bitter irony. If someone cut down a Ranger, how does one go about replacing the bits and pieces of that person that make up everyone else?
There's a little bit of Solana in Lunick's heart, and although his missing it hasn't turned him into a stranger like it has Spenser or a hero like it has Murph, he's aware of it. So when is their mysterious replacement going to be coming around?
"What's that?" he goes blankly, when he comes back from the mission with nothing to report (he can scarcely remember why he was sent; something about a red Gyarados) and finds the Ringtown Rangers all gathered around something on the front desk.
"It's a baby," says Murph, his facing shining. "A Pokemon Trainer came by yesterday and blam! Just had it right here in the lobby. Then she took off without so much as a whoopsie-daisy."
"Murph," says Spenser sternly, and shifts his elbow as the bundled thing in his arms mewls. Fearow cranes his neck around and comes within inches of impaling the baby on his beak. "Be nice. Lunick, come say hi."
...
The baby's name is something incredibly dumb like Clarence or Clarice, as in "I smelled you coming," because they can, but it's only twenty-four hours and Lunick hears Spenser call her "Solana."
It takes him another twenty-four hours to realize Spenser intended to keep her.
He's out of there before the day was done.
....
"What exactly am I supposed to be seeing?"
It has never occurred to him to ask why Aria didn't have a friend Pokemon. Neither did Leilani, or any of the Rangers upstairs at Ringtown. He wasn't sure what the distinction was, why Murph had Slowpoke and Aria had nothing. On his shoulder, Minun chitters something and starts grooming his hindquarters.
Aria shifts her stance from teenage girl slump to angry girl attitude, perching her hand on her hip and giving him a dirty look.
For the first time, he looks at her ringlets, huge like hoops around her face and they look gaudy to him. They're out of place, the both of them, in this little back-corner grocery with gnats migrating to and from various fruit displays and the clothing worn and hanging limply on the racks. A Shuckle sits on top of the counter, and Lunick only notices it when the cashier hands it a Berry like clockwork.
"This is what Solana never wanted," Aria goes, clean and white, and Lunick has never thought of her as a deep person until she took him by the hand and brought him to the slums of Fall City.
"Kevin and Lind both came from here," she had told him, and they had stood in the middle of the street and watched people go past, long at the leg and slouched at the shoulder and very suddenly, Lunick understands something so acutely it hurts.
He had been raised on the creed that all humans were created equal and nothing he had seen while working for the Ranger Union had dissuaded him otherwise, and when he had grown up that had not matured with him. The only schism in the world, the only equilibrium tipped was the one between man and Pokemon, and he had been so naive. There were too people who were unequal to others in this world; it was right here, in the bits of Fall City tucked away in the shadows of the Capture Arena, back behind and around and in the narrow spaces of the Dusk Factory -- not something he usually saw when chasing Solana and the Go Rock Squad.
Aria tilts her head, and for a moment, something in her face changes, and he thinks he might actually be seeing the human side of Aria and that wasn't what he had been expecting when he came here to Fall City to hide under Joel's skirts while Ringtown went googledy over the mystery baby. "I think," she goes, and her works suck the heaviness right out of the air and even the Shukle stirs, "I think we might not mean a whole lot down here. Asking one of these people what it feels like to live with injustice and poverty is like asking what it feels like to live with air.
"They can't grasp the meaning of it."
Lunick gets it. "How ridiculous we must seem."
Aria nods. "That's why Solana couldn't stay."
"She left a lot of people lost and confused in her wake."
"She would have left a lot of people lost and confused if she had stayed."
...
People forget that Lunick is a hero, too. Solana might have been the one to draw the Capture Lines around Sucuine and Raikou and Entei, and then Kyogre and Groudon and Rayquaza in their turn, but Lunick had been by her side the entire time. He expected them to be able to glow about those days for years. He expected to never leave her side, and with that thought came all sorts of implications that stabbed at him now.
Lunick understands how hard it is to just settle. To realize that life isn't always going to be as exciting as Solana's first few days at the Base, and to move into a mundane life of shuffling papers and the occasional escort mission.
But he doesn't want to run.
He wonders what that says about him, and what that says about Solana.
...
Sometimes he thinks they were all in love with each other.
...
When he comes home, it's dark and the Base is pretty much shut up except for Spenser, stroking a fire in the grate with one hand and methodically rocking Clarice in her bouncer. He glances up only once, and then proceeds to feed several handwritten letters into the fire.
"Spurned lover?" Lunick goes snidely, and thinks again about positive and negative charges and comes to the conclusion that he should be ashamed of himself.
Spenser does not reply.
...
Weeks pass. Months pass. There's no letter, no call, no nothing. Ringtown stops waiting. Ringtown breathes, and the rest of Fiore takes this as permission to move on. It wasn't like she died or anything, guys, come on.
Spenser doesn't come back, but Lunick has stopped missing the old Spenser and has gotten used to the one that takes his duties as surrogate father to a misfit first and foremost and his Ranger Leader duties a close second. The first sign that he's cleaned up nicely is he recruits a new Ranger.
Lunick recognizes her as the girl who always ate a Pineco-jelly sandwich with Magikrisps at noon at the Clock Tower in Fall City, whose Jigglypuff Solana had rescued and who always said she was going to be a Ringtown Ranger. He's insanely proud of her, even though he had nothing to do with it. He's proud of the Base, too, because here was the replacement he had been wanting since he read that sign at Panula Lake.
"It's too late," Murph tells him cheerfully, and for a moment, Lunick is totally confused.
"The baby," the big man clarifies. "Sol -- Clarice. She's here to stay. I just want you to know that."
Lunick wants to know if it's really that obvious how much he dislikes the fact that everyone is trying to make the baby the new Solana. Because he doesn't hate the baby herself.
Then, one day, when they're all sitting around outside and he's just come back from kissing Larry's daughter behind the tool shed and probably covering them both with toxic Oddish spores and has busied himself with pretending he had been there all along, and then suddenly everyone else goes really quiet and he looks up and she's walking right for him, unsteady like she isn't sure whether she's going to fall flat on her face or fly, and she has hands shaped like Staryu and her head's roughly the size and shape of a Geodude's body and he remembers her being bald for the longest time and he wasn't sure when she grew hair.
She reaches him, and without thinking, he kneels and scoops her up to a chorus of cheers, and she trills with delight when he spins her around and Lunick wonders if he's the only one who sees it, or if he's the blindest one of them all.
...
"You're doomed," Spenser tells him. "Wait, no. I'm doomed. You're not doomed. You're just ... treading water or whatever it is you young people do before you coming bouncing right back."
Lunick's eighteen now and he watches Spenser lift his Styler to his mouth and murmur some breathy secret message to Joel or whoever's waiting on the other end, and he doesn't think he ever had sex with Solana.
The old Solana, he has to think, because even he has stopped calling the child Clarice and it's becoming too confusing to call them both Solana, and pretty soon, the older one will be completely phased out of his thoughts and it's almost genius, the way they had this planned. He hadn't realized that's what they were doing before it happened.
But for all that her uniform had been cut in the most interesting way, it was pure polyester and there was no way she could have gone all patrol all hot and sticky and aching in so many places and been able to keep a straight a face as she did. There was also an energy about people that changed after they had sex, seen each other naked and been as vulnerable as a human being can be. It goes deeper than bonds over Pokemon and deeper than whatever was in those letters Spenser burned.
They loved each other, that was all, Lunick knows, and it surprises him.
"Solana, sweetheart, no. Don't touch the glass," he murmurs, and she looks at him with huge, anime eyes and bee-stung mouth and nods and sinks back into her stroller, unaware of her part in Operation Free the Illicit Zoo.
Lunick thinks they might be corrupting her.
...
So he's teaching a chemistry class in Summertown on Monday nights (positive and negative charges) and on Tuesday he has to take Solana to her beginner's gymnastics class and Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday he and Kevin and Lind go to the Fall City slums and enroll the people there in easy jobs; half a day at the Base, washing and cleaning shelter Pokemon, half a day out in the fields working to protect the wild ones. Jobs are being generated. Injustice and poverty are tangible words.
But it doesn't stop him from thinking this was the kind of life the old Solana never wanted, with every waking instant booked.
Then again, he isn't really sure what she wanted. She just went with whatever they told her to do.
...
Lunick takes up with a married woman for kicks.
Spenser finds out and raises a ruckus fit to wake his mom from the dead.
Lunick's not a teenager anymore (and Spenser never was) so the excuse, "But she's the only one who had an interest in me!" and "she was easy" doesn't have the same clout in their world that it used to.
"I've heard the excuses before. It feels right, you need it, she's going to leave her husband and really, truly you were meant to be together," Spenser tells him without elaborating on how he knows, but since he never has any visitors during the holidays, Lunick has a pretty good idea. His Leader sighs, eyeballs moving under the blue-veined flickering of his eyelids, and continues, "I don't know how much you care, Lunick, but there's a child in this Base now. She'll be exposed, from an early age, to the unpleasantries of this world and she shouldn't, but we can't stop it."
His eyes snap open and they burn, "Imagine. Imagine, Lunick, that she finds out one of her own heroes is no better than the bad guys."
...
"We need to stop doing this," he says seriously, but she doesn't even pause, because the way some couples would say, "I love you" or "oh, do that again" with abandon is the way they say, "we need to stop" and "this is wrong."
She snakes her arms around his neck and their mouths meet in the middle. In the beginning, she actually invited him in, scratched his Minun behind the ears, gave him a soda and they talked on her obnoxiously orange couch before she lifted her mouth to his, but now he has a key to her back door and they do their talking during and after sex. For his part, he can't quite touch her enough before the night's through and she's pushing him out because her husband gets off work and will be home with take-out shortly; he's scared that when she stopped shaving and didn't bother to perfume herself and he found himself perfectly comfortable with her body in any form, they were moving onto something deeper. He loves kissing every bit of flesh, even her ankles and the insides of her knees and her hips and stomach and her mouth, most especially her mouth.
Which was all right with him, because she didn't seem to want to stop kissing him.
She tilts her head and moves her mouth deeper, backing him against the door so that it clicks shut. When her hands trail to the loops of his belt, he grabs her wrists and holds them out away from him, and her green eyes snap to his face.
"Touch my Styler," he goes darkly, "And I will never come back."
She backs off, then, watching him with hooded eyes. They retreat into her kitchen, where she chivalrously offers him a drink even though he's already fished a Plusle-emblazoned pop can out of the bottom of her fridge. Somewhere in the middle, he winds up brushing just a little too close to her, and the tension snaps and they're after each other again, hands and hips and mouths, and the soda is abandoned.
"So why are you breaking up with me?" she wants to know, straddling him on the sofa, lavender hair swinging loose down her shoulder blades.
"Because I need to be a better role model for Solana," he goes, and she leans over him, shifting her weight so that her bare chest was plaited against his and her hips rode lower. He plants a series of kisses on and around her mouth.
She crosses her arms over his clavicle, her face as serious as she ever got. "Can you give me a better reason than that?" she murmurs softly. "I can't exactly bitch to my girl friends about my lover wanting to be a better father. Something like you don't like the way my perfume smells, or you think I'm too involved in my career."
"Or I'm afraid your husband will beat me to a bloody pulp?" Lunick chuckles. He doesn't want to touch the 'father' remark with a ten-foot-pole.
"You're a Pokemon Ranger, Lunick," Tiffany kisses him, soft and careful like she's in love. "And there is nothing a Ranger can't do and nobody a Ranger can't beat. No one knows that better than me."
...
"Tell me something, Spenser," Lunick says when they're alone in the break room, spreading cream cheese on his bagel with the same knife he was pretty sure he'd seen Murph sucking jelly off earlier. Spenser stirs sugar into the apricot tea they got from one of the sweet Fall City girls who said their Solana helped her while patrolling there, and doesn't turn to look at him, just tilts his head to show he's listening.
"When you were reading the job description for Ringtown Ranger Leader, under what article did it require you to sleep with all your colleagues' wives?"
Spenser's whole body jerks like Minun had shocked him, and when he spins around, Lunick already has his bagel down and he drums his fingers on the sides of Solana's head to show that he's covered her ears. The girl's crayons droop between her fingers, because she's grinning crazy like she thinks they're absolutely hilarious.
Lunick smiles coolly. "You try so hard to be a good father to her. It would just be awful if she found out one of her heroes was just like the bad guys."
...
"If you sit still and listen to Lunick's story, we'll get you an ice cream sandwich, okay?"
He captures Solana's attention instantly, and she drops her Camerupt plushie (courtesy of Tiffany, who had been over last week to get her divorce notice finalized) and shifts position so that she's sitting on the sides of her knees in that way that only really little kids can get away with, and her eyes are bright and dancing. Her entire face is one big picture of trust.
"Okay, then," Lunick goes, lifting a finger to his mouth. Then he bounces off the vinyl chair to the floor with her.
"Once upon a time, there was a real small kingdom. It only had about twenty subjects. But it was a very peaceful kingdom on the border of a big, wide forest. The people lived in harmony, guarded by their Rangers. But then one day, a professor was robbed right outside the kingdom by the nefarious --"
"What does that mean?"
"Bad people, honey. Remember what I was telling you about the other day? The people who don't care about Pokemon, they just want money and fame and glory? That's nefarious."
"Oh! Okay."
"So the professor was robbed by this nefarious group called the Go-Rock Squad, and he came to the kingdom and its Rangers for help, because the thing that was stolen was very important to them all, and they couldn't share it with the Go-Rock Squad--"
"I thought we were supposed to share with everyone," Solana goes.
"Ice cream sandwich," Lunick says warningly, and she quiets down, though she does crease her eyebrows like she's trying to work everything out in her head to make his statement make sense. He feels overwhelmingly proud for a moment (not that he stumped her, but that she was thinking.) "But the Rangers couldn't spare anyone to go chase them down. So the Ranger Leader sent the littlest Ranger, a real pretty girl named Solana --" he reaches out and taps her nose, and her whole face brightens up. "-- out to do their job for them.
"It was a good thing they did, too, because the littlest Ranger was the best Ranger the kingdom had ever seen! With the help of her friends and all the Pokemon in the land, she stopped the Go-Rock Squad from using the legendary Pokemon and the professor's invention to rule the world!"
"Was her name really Solana?"
"Yes. Yes, it was. And she didn't stop there, oh no. The littlest Ranger, she tamed Kyogre and she tamed Groudon and she saved Rayquaza, she collected information on all the Pokemon in the land and even some from regions far away. She even beat the Ranger Leader at his own capture game!"
"Did they live happily ever after?"
Lunick smiles wistfully. "You're a big enough girl now, Solana, for me to tell you that no, they didn't. The littlest Ranger, she grew up and she left as abruptly and mysteriously as she had come, and nobody in the kingdom really knew how to live without her. They tried. They held onto all their memories of her, but she had gone off to bigger, more important places. The small kingdom at the edge of the forest couldn't compete."
Solana looks at him, eyes wide and emphatic, so Lunick shakes himself and goes, "And it's a good thing she left, too, or else she would have realized she was completely in love with me, and you can't have two amazingly-awesome people in the same kingdom together for very long."
"You lie," Spenser says stoutly from underneath the comprehensive but confusing flow of Ranger Net information.
"Okay, yeah, I am," Lunick shrugs, before grinning wide at Solana and she grins back. "But let's get you that ice cream sandwich. I never lie about desert!"
...
"I think I can stop coming to see you so often."
The Drowzee Man looks at him shrewdly.
"I'm serious," Lunick insists, lifting his Styler and encouraging Jolteon to move before Camerupt rolled over in his sleep and crushed her. Minun hops to his shoulder and hangs there, out of reach of the curious Tangela, who isn't curious enough to risk getting his vines slapped away for being too touchy-feely. "I don't have to go back in my head to see her. She's everywhere, isn't she? That's what my dreams have been trying to tell me. She's in every Capture I make, she's in every victory celebrated at Ringtown, she's in every nice thing someone in Wintown says to me. I don't need her here physically to hear her talk to me, or to laugh when she laughs."
He nods hypnotically. "Very good, Ranger."
Lunick smiles ruefully. "I confess, though, I still would have liked to know if she was in love with me."
"You are a fool if you never knew the answer to that," the Drowzee Man says before nodding off.
...
Lunick kneels next to Solana with her brand-new purple coat with the Hello Skitty emblem on the breast slung over his knee, and he teaches her how to put it on so that her long sleeves don't ride up. She wriggles impatiently, but she grabs a hold of the ends of her shirt sleeves as he helps her slide into her coat, then tugs her cuffs out so she can show them to him, beaming proudly.
He smiles at her and asks her to check her backpack to make sure she has everything; he has her list them precisely as he has always asked her questions so that she learns to store every new piece of information she gathers.
They're just about to leave when she goes suddenly, "Wait! I haven't given Murph and Slowpoke a hug today!" and then she dashes off, dropping her gloves on principle and out of sight before he can formulate a reply.
He follows her at a slow pace, but the low and murmured voices of Spenser and Joel make him stop.
He's about to poke his head in and say good morning, because today was a mail day and the two of them needed as many cheerful remarks as they could get, but he doesn't get so far as to push the door open before he sees Spenser lean across the table suddenly to press his lips to Joel's.
The arch of Joel's eyebrows tell him this is the first time this has happened, and the way Spenser settles back into his seat and takes his pencil up tells him this wasn't the first time he's thought of doing it. Then Joel smiles.
There's a lot Lunick could say about it, he supposes, backing away from the door.
He could scoff and go, "Well, of course it was going to happen sometime," but he doesn't, because he didn't see it coming. Sure, they talked about each other all the time, but people can move from mortal enemies to friends without crossing the border into lovers. Mortal enemies turned friends could kiss without crossing the border into lovers. Either one of them could be enamored with girls and still kiss and not cross the border into lovers.
Joel had talked about it before, the idea of a rival being the one person who knew you inside and out. They were aware of everything you did, until they knew you better than you knew yourself. When recognized and both parties willing to let a little bit of pride and personal opinion slip, the movement into friendship was easy. The movement into lovers, while gradual, was not necessary. It just happened to be a step Spenser and Joel could take, if they so wished to, without the fear that their bond would fall apart. And that, if anything, was true friendship.
The bonds true friendship makes never break.
Even if one party vanishes off the face of the earth.
Lunick gets it now.
Solana comes clattering back down the steps, wiping Slowpoke saliva off her face and grinning wide to show her victory.
"Are you ready, baby girl?" Lunick asks, swinging her up onto his hip, coat and backpack and all. She wraps her legs around his waist and kisses his cheek with her mouth and not her lips as little kids tend to do.
"Always, Daddy," she says.
...
She makes a noise in the back of her throat, not a keen but not a yelp, when his fingers trail up her back to tug at the yielding strings of her bikini top. It slides down her arms, and she moves ever so slightly -- not aiding him in its removal, but conveniently allowing gravity to take it the rest of the way to the sand.
"Do you know what's going to happen now?"
He's tempted to pretend he didn't hear her at all. The day is beautiful, the sun warm but not intrusive, the sand hot beneath his feet and the breeze welcome on his back. Their friend Pokemon amble leisurely along the crests of seaweed offered up by the waves. The faint, tinny sound of somebody's portable radio floats to them, between the cries of Wingulls and the ever murmur of the sea, like a lover to her lord's ear, like a baseball whistling home.
He brushes her periwinkle hair aside, and she turns then, capturing his face between her hands and his mouth with hers. He cannot help but clutch her close at that point, fingers white against her spine and the small of her back, their bare chests plaited together and he wasn't sure why he just thought her eyes were green, because they were as red as nutmeg.
They part, and the mere feel of his lips against his own teeth and nothing else is inadequate. As if sensing the same thing, she moves to kiss him again, but he worms a finger between them.
"What happens now?" Lunick echoes, touching the features he had memorized a hundred thousand times, beginning with her lips. He closes his eyes and lets his arms drop to his side. "Now, Solana, the littlest Ranger, now you will become a fairy tale."
He opens his eyes, and she is gone, and it is just him and Minun on the empty stretch of Summerland beach.
"And the rest of us will Capture On."
Author: wingsofcharity
Fandom: Pokemon Ranger
Pairing: Everybody/the kitchen sink
Rating: soft R
Word Count: 5,834
Warnings: None.
Disclaimer: Pokemon Ranger has buttsex with Nintendo. I get it.
done for the prompt "12. injury" at 20_firstkisses
"Do you know what's going to happen now?"
Lunick drags himself out of his haze to focus on her, and finds her leaning out over the brim of the Ludicolo's hat. She's all long, sun-kissed tan limbs and non-existent bikini lines. There are freckles air-brushed along her shoulders, but today they're covered up by her periwinkle braids, which are frizzed from the swim they took off the coast earlier. They also blend in with the strings of her top, and from where he is, he can't tell if she's wearing anything at all. It's decidedly nice.
He smiles, slow and languid, moving his bare feet so that they dug deep into the sand where it was cool and taking a deep breath so that his abs stretched in the sun and he could feel life in every rib. His Minun's ear brushed his every time he inhaled, and it twitched away from him sleepily.
He was so happy his stomach hurt.
"Nothing's going to change," he murmurs, licking his dry lips. "Right, Solana?"
The Ludicolo began to lumber across the beach, slow and rocking like the movement of the waves, but he still saw her smile over the dark, leathery rim of its hat, bee-stung lips curving only at one corner as only a woman could really pull off. "You have to know, Lunick."
There was a flash and he saw her skull grinning at him, only a few patches of blue hair clinging to its ream of bone and the silhouette of a Banette stamped above her eye socket, and he woke up screaming, the sound of Gordor's organ music ringing in his ears.
...
Murph rubs soft, slow circles into Spenser's back. It's something his mother had taught him to do, along with folding the laundry and changing the Bellossom-scented plug-in and sorting the light bulbs by wattage.
Pokemon first, then people, yourself last. It's the creed he lives by.
Lunick sits cross-legged on the blue-rimmed glass desk and for once isn't scolded for it by the lady with the crystal-blue cornrows who's usually working her way through some dime-a-dozen romance novel while waiting for the odd Ranger to come along with a Styler that needs to be recharged. Minun is a comforting weight on his thigh, warm and alive.
"You knew this day was going to come," says the maroon-haired Ranger from upstairs, keeping her voice soft and low like she's afraid of startling anyone; the trademark of any Ranger worth her salt.
"She's right, Spenser," her husband adds, and the lines in Murph's face get deeper as his hands knead along ever-tightening muscles in Spenser's shoulder blades. "You persuaded Solana to abandon everyone who loved her with just six letters. How long did you think it would be before a better offer came along?"
"She's not programmed to stay in one place after the adventure wears off," the maroon-haired woman says in what Lunick supposes she thinks is a sympathetic tone of voice. "You know that better than anyone."
Now, Lunick had gone to school. Granted, he had dropped out after six years to join the Ranger Union, but he knew enough. He knew the elementary sciences of electric charges; one positive and one negative and the pull of one on the other is the force that held the universe together when all theories rightfully say it should be flying apart at the seams.
He thinks that without Solana and her Plusle, the Ringtown Ranger base was without its positive charge and floated in its own cloud of negative energy.
The universe flying apart at the seams.
...
One month becomes two, and the world is a Ferris wheel; Lunick has never seen one in person, because the only living replica of one is in Sinnoh, but he thinks time works in much the same way. They had been paused high at the top, all of them together, following the episode where they saved the world. It had seemed like the exhilaration would never end.
But then it did, and the wheel turned.
Lunick watches Spenser, and it's not like he's lost all will to live -- he didn't love Solana that much. None of them (all of them) did. But he's different, and it's not a different that Lunick can get his mind around. He thinks of the Serra mountains falling, and he knows that near-death experiences are hard to shake, even for people like Spenser, who, as far as he is concerned, made those mountains.
And sometimes, he learns, people don't come back.
He goes to the Serra Mountain Range, and Elita stops him and with her Skarmory's eyes, hard and flinting, she says, "I looked for him too. He's not there."
Some people don't come back.
And suddenly, Lunick is more terrified than he can put into words.
...
Spenser is different and Murph has become stronger and Elita has become a little less lofty, and Lunick is not there the day everything changes (again.) He's on a patrol mission at Panula Lake, for absolutely no reason that he could decipher.
Solana told him once that the sign, the one that warns him against drinking the lake water because of its high salt content, is mysteriously replaced if it is cut down. He doesn't have any friends with him who might be willing to test this myth with him and he's feeling too lazy to descend into Panula Cave to find a Sneasel, but he'll think back on it later with a little bit of bitter irony. If someone cut down a Ranger, how does one go about replacing the bits and pieces of that person that make up everyone else?
There's a little bit of Solana in Lunick's heart, and although his missing it hasn't turned him into a stranger like it has Spenser or a hero like it has Murph, he's aware of it. So when is their mysterious replacement going to be coming around?
"What's that?" he goes blankly, when he comes back from the mission with nothing to report (he can scarcely remember why he was sent; something about a red Gyarados) and finds the Ringtown Rangers all gathered around something on the front desk.
"It's a baby," says Murph, his facing shining. "A Pokemon Trainer came by yesterday and blam! Just had it right here in the lobby. Then she took off without so much as a whoopsie-daisy."
"Murph," says Spenser sternly, and shifts his elbow as the bundled thing in his arms mewls. Fearow cranes his neck around and comes within inches of impaling the baby on his beak. "Be nice. Lunick, come say hi."
...
The baby's name is something incredibly dumb like Clarence or Clarice, as in "I smelled you coming," because they can, but it's only twenty-four hours and Lunick hears Spenser call her "Solana."
It takes him another twenty-four hours to realize Spenser intended to keep her.
He's out of there before the day was done.
....
"What exactly am I supposed to be seeing?"
It has never occurred to him to ask why Aria didn't have a friend Pokemon. Neither did Leilani, or any of the Rangers upstairs at Ringtown. He wasn't sure what the distinction was, why Murph had Slowpoke and Aria had nothing. On his shoulder, Minun chitters something and starts grooming his hindquarters.
Aria shifts her stance from teenage girl slump to angry girl attitude, perching her hand on her hip and giving him a dirty look.
For the first time, he looks at her ringlets, huge like hoops around her face and they look gaudy to him. They're out of place, the both of them, in this little back-corner grocery with gnats migrating to and from various fruit displays and the clothing worn and hanging limply on the racks. A Shuckle sits on top of the counter, and Lunick only notices it when the cashier hands it a Berry like clockwork.
"This is what Solana never wanted," Aria goes, clean and white, and Lunick has never thought of her as a deep person until she took him by the hand and brought him to the slums of Fall City.
"Kevin and Lind both came from here," she had told him, and they had stood in the middle of the street and watched people go past, long at the leg and slouched at the shoulder and very suddenly, Lunick understands something so acutely it hurts.
He had been raised on the creed that all humans were created equal and nothing he had seen while working for the Ranger Union had dissuaded him otherwise, and when he had grown up that had not matured with him. The only schism in the world, the only equilibrium tipped was the one between man and Pokemon, and he had been so naive. There were too people who were unequal to others in this world; it was right here, in the bits of Fall City tucked away in the shadows of the Capture Arena, back behind and around and in the narrow spaces of the Dusk Factory -- not something he usually saw when chasing Solana and the Go Rock Squad.
Aria tilts her head, and for a moment, something in her face changes, and he thinks he might actually be seeing the human side of Aria and that wasn't what he had been expecting when he came here to Fall City to hide under Joel's skirts while Ringtown went googledy over the mystery baby. "I think," she goes, and her works suck the heaviness right out of the air and even the Shukle stirs, "I think we might not mean a whole lot down here. Asking one of these people what it feels like to live with injustice and poverty is like asking what it feels like to live with air.
"They can't grasp the meaning of it."
Lunick gets it. "How ridiculous we must seem."
Aria nods. "That's why Solana couldn't stay."
"She left a lot of people lost and confused in her wake."
"She would have left a lot of people lost and confused if she had stayed."
...
People forget that Lunick is a hero, too. Solana might have been the one to draw the Capture Lines around Sucuine and Raikou and Entei, and then Kyogre and Groudon and Rayquaza in their turn, but Lunick had been by her side the entire time. He expected them to be able to glow about those days for years. He expected to never leave her side, and with that thought came all sorts of implications that stabbed at him now.
Lunick understands how hard it is to just settle. To realize that life isn't always going to be as exciting as Solana's first few days at the Base, and to move into a mundane life of shuffling papers and the occasional escort mission.
But he doesn't want to run.
He wonders what that says about him, and what that says about Solana.
...
Sometimes he thinks they were all in love with each other.
...
When he comes home, it's dark and the Base is pretty much shut up except for Spenser, stroking a fire in the grate with one hand and methodically rocking Clarice in her bouncer. He glances up only once, and then proceeds to feed several handwritten letters into the fire.
"Spurned lover?" Lunick goes snidely, and thinks again about positive and negative charges and comes to the conclusion that he should be ashamed of himself.
Spenser does not reply.
...
Weeks pass. Months pass. There's no letter, no call, no nothing. Ringtown stops waiting. Ringtown breathes, and the rest of Fiore takes this as permission to move on. It wasn't like she died or anything, guys, come on.
Spenser doesn't come back, but Lunick has stopped missing the old Spenser and has gotten used to the one that takes his duties as surrogate father to a misfit first and foremost and his Ranger Leader duties a close second. The first sign that he's cleaned up nicely is he recruits a new Ranger.
Lunick recognizes her as the girl who always ate a Pineco-jelly sandwich with Magikrisps at noon at the Clock Tower in Fall City, whose Jigglypuff Solana had rescued and who always said she was going to be a Ringtown Ranger. He's insanely proud of her, even though he had nothing to do with it. He's proud of the Base, too, because here was the replacement he had been wanting since he read that sign at Panula Lake.
"It's too late," Murph tells him cheerfully, and for a moment, Lunick is totally confused.
"The baby," the big man clarifies. "Sol -- Clarice. She's here to stay. I just want you to know that."
Lunick wants to know if it's really that obvious how much he dislikes the fact that everyone is trying to make the baby the new Solana. Because he doesn't hate the baby herself.
Then, one day, when they're all sitting around outside and he's just come back from kissing Larry's daughter behind the tool shed and probably covering them both with toxic Oddish spores and has busied himself with pretending he had been there all along, and then suddenly everyone else goes really quiet and he looks up and she's walking right for him, unsteady like she isn't sure whether she's going to fall flat on her face or fly, and she has hands shaped like Staryu and her head's roughly the size and shape of a Geodude's body and he remembers her being bald for the longest time and he wasn't sure when she grew hair.
She reaches him, and without thinking, he kneels and scoops her up to a chorus of cheers, and she trills with delight when he spins her around and Lunick wonders if he's the only one who sees it, or if he's the blindest one of them all.
...
"You're doomed," Spenser tells him. "Wait, no. I'm doomed. You're not doomed. You're just ... treading water or whatever it is you young people do before you coming bouncing right back."
Lunick's eighteen now and he watches Spenser lift his Styler to his mouth and murmur some breathy secret message to Joel or whoever's waiting on the other end, and he doesn't think he ever had sex with Solana.
The old Solana, he has to think, because even he has stopped calling the child Clarice and it's becoming too confusing to call them both Solana, and pretty soon, the older one will be completely phased out of his thoughts and it's almost genius, the way they had this planned. He hadn't realized that's what they were doing before it happened.
But for all that her uniform had been cut in the most interesting way, it was pure polyester and there was no way she could have gone all patrol all hot and sticky and aching in so many places and been able to keep a straight a face as she did. There was also an energy about people that changed after they had sex, seen each other naked and been as vulnerable as a human being can be. It goes deeper than bonds over Pokemon and deeper than whatever was in those letters Spenser burned.
They loved each other, that was all, Lunick knows, and it surprises him.
"Solana, sweetheart, no. Don't touch the glass," he murmurs, and she looks at him with huge, anime eyes and bee-stung mouth and nods and sinks back into her stroller, unaware of her part in Operation Free the Illicit Zoo.
Lunick thinks they might be corrupting her.
...
So he's teaching a chemistry class in Summertown on Monday nights (positive and negative charges) and on Tuesday he has to take Solana to her beginner's gymnastics class and Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday he and Kevin and Lind go to the Fall City slums and enroll the people there in easy jobs; half a day at the Base, washing and cleaning shelter Pokemon, half a day out in the fields working to protect the wild ones. Jobs are being generated. Injustice and poverty are tangible words.
But it doesn't stop him from thinking this was the kind of life the old Solana never wanted, with every waking instant booked.
Then again, he isn't really sure what she wanted. She just went with whatever they told her to do.
...
Lunick takes up with a married woman for kicks.
Spenser finds out and raises a ruckus fit to wake his mom from the dead.
Lunick's not a teenager anymore (and Spenser never was) so the excuse, "But she's the only one who had an interest in me!" and "she was easy" doesn't have the same clout in their world that it used to.
"I've heard the excuses before. It feels right, you need it, she's going to leave her husband and really, truly you were meant to be together," Spenser tells him without elaborating on how he knows, but since he never has any visitors during the holidays, Lunick has a pretty good idea. His Leader sighs, eyeballs moving under the blue-veined flickering of his eyelids, and continues, "I don't know how much you care, Lunick, but there's a child in this Base now. She'll be exposed, from an early age, to the unpleasantries of this world and she shouldn't, but we can't stop it."
His eyes snap open and they burn, "Imagine. Imagine, Lunick, that she finds out one of her own heroes is no better than the bad guys."
...
"We need to stop doing this," he says seriously, but she doesn't even pause, because the way some couples would say, "I love you" or "oh, do that again" with abandon is the way they say, "we need to stop" and "this is wrong."
She snakes her arms around his neck and their mouths meet in the middle. In the beginning, she actually invited him in, scratched his Minun behind the ears, gave him a soda and they talked on her obnoxiously orange couch before she lifted her mouth to his, but now he has a key to her back door and they do their talking during and after sex. For his part, he can't quite touch her enough before the night's through and she's pushing him out because her husband gets off work and will be home with take-out shortly; he's scared that when she stopped shaving and didn't bother to perfume herself and he found himself perfectly comfortable with her body in any form, they were moving onto something deeper. He loves kissing every bit of flesh, even her ankles and the insides of her knees and her hips and stomach and her mouth, most especially her mouth.
Which was all right with him, because she didn't seem to want to stop kissing him.
She tilts her head and moves her mouth deeper, backing him against the door so that it clicks shut. When her hands trail to the loops of his belt, he grabs her wrists and holds them out away from him, and her green eyes snap to his face.
"Touch my Styler," he goes darkly, "And I will never come back."
She backs off, then, watching him with hooded eyes. They retreat into her kitchen, where she chivalrously offers him a drink even though he's already fished a Plusle-emblazoned pop can out of the bottom of her fridge. Somewhere in the middle, he winds up brushing just a little too close to her, and the tension snaps and they're after each other again, hands and hips and mouths, and the soda is abandoned.
"So why are you breaking up with me?" she wants to know, straddling him on the sofa, lavender hair swinging loose down her shoulder blades.
"Because I need to be a better role model for Solana," he goes, and she leans over him, shifting her weight so that her bare chest was plaited against his and her hips rode lower. He plants a series of kisses on and around her mouth.
She crosses her arms over his clavicle, her face as serious as she ever got. "Can you give me a better reason than that?" she murmurs softly. "I can't exactly bitch to my girl friends about my lover wanting to be a better father. Something like you don't like the way my perfume smells, or you think I'm too involved in my career."
"Or I'm afraid your husband will beat me to a bloody pulp?" Lunick chuckles. He doesn't want to touch the 'father' remark with a ten-foot-pole.
"You're a Pokemon Ranger, Lunick," Tiffany kisses him, soft and careful like she's in love. "And there is nothing a Ranger can't do and nobody a Ranger can't beat. No one knows that better than me."
...
"Tell me something, Spenser," Lunick says when they're alone in the break room, spreading cream cheese on his bagel with the same knife he was pretty sure he'd seen Murph sucking jelly off earlier. Spenser stirs sugar into the apricot tea they got from one of the sweet Fall City girls who said their Solana helped her while patrolling there, and doesn't turn to look at him, just tilts his head to show he's listening.
"When you were reading the job description for Ringtown Ranger Leader, under what article did it require you to sleep with all your colleagues' wives?"
Spenser's whole body jerks like Minun had shocked him, and when he spins around, Lunick already has his bagel down and he drums his fingers on the sides of Solana's head to show that he's covered her ears. The girl's crayons droop between her fingers, because she's grinning crazy like she thinks they're absolutely hilarious.
Lunick smiles coolly. "You try so hard to be a good father to her. It would just be awful if she found out one of her heroes was just like the bad guys."
...
"If you sit still and listen to Lunick's story, we'll get you an ice cream sandwich, okay?"
He captures Solana's attention instantly, and she drops her Camerupt plushie (courtesy of Tiffany, who had been over last week to get her divorce notice finalized) and shifts position so that she's sitting on the sides of her knees in that way that only really little kids can get away with, and her eyes are bright and dancing. Her entire face is one big picture of trust.
"Okay, then," Lunick goes, lifting a finger to his mouth. Then he bounces off the vinyl chair to the floor with her.
"Once upon a time, there was a real small kingdom. It only had about twenty subjects. But it was a very peaceful kingdom on the border of a big, wide forest. The people lived in harmony, guarded by their Rangers. But then one day, a professor was robbed right outside the kingdom by the nefarious --"
"What does that mean?"
"Bad people, honey. Remember what I was telling you about the other day? The people who don't care about Pokemon, they just want money and fame and glory? That's nefarious."
"Oh! Okay."
"So the professor was robbed by this nefarious group called the Go-Rock Squad, and he came to the kingdom and its Rangers for help, because the thing that was stolen was very important to them all, and they couldn't share it with the Go-Rock Squad--"
"I thought we were supposed to share with everyone," Solana goes.
"Ice cream sandwich," Lunick says warningly, and she quiets down, though she does crease her eyebrows like she's trying to work everything out in her head to make his statement make sense. He feels overwhelmingly proud for a moment (not that he stumped her, but that she was thinking.) "But the Rangers couldn't spare anyone to go chase them down. So the Ranger Leader sent the littlest Ranger, a real pretty girl named Solana --" he reaches out and taps her nose, and her whole face brightens up. "-- out to do their job for them.
"It was a good thing they did, too, because the littlest Ranger was the best Ranger the kingdom had ever seen! With the help of her friends and all the Pokemon in the land, she stopped the Go-Rock Squad from using the legendary Pokemon and the professor's invention to rule the world!"
"Was her name really Solana?"
"Yes. Yes, it was. And she didn't stop there, oh no. The littlest Ranger, she tamed Kyogre and she tamed Groudon and she saved Rayquaza, she collected information on all the Pokemon in the land and even some from regions far away. She even beat the Ranger Leader at his own capture game!"
"Did they live happily ever after?"
Lunick smiles wistfully. "You're a big enough girl now, Solana, for me to tell you that no, they didn't. The littlest Ranger, she grew up and she left as abruptly and mysteriously as she had come, and nobody in the kingdom really knew how to live without her. They tried. They held onto all their memories of her, but she had gone off to bigger, more important places. The small kingdom at the edge of the forest couldn't compete."
Solana looks at him, eyes wide and emphatic, so Lunick shakes himself and goes, "And it's a good thing she left, too, or else she would have realized she was completely in love with me, and you can't have two amazingly-awesome people in the same kingdom together for very long."
"You lie," Spenser says stoutly from underneath the comprehensive but confusing flow of Ranger Net information.
"Okay, yeah, I am," Lunick shrugs, before grinning wide at Solana and she grins back. "But let's get you that ice cream sandwich. I never lie about desert!"
...
"I think I can stop coming to see you so often."
The Drowzee Man looks at him shrewdly.
"I'm serious," Lunick insists, lifting his Styler and encouraging Jolteon to move before Camerupt rolled over in his sleep and crushed her. Minun hops to his shoulder and hangs there, out of reach of the curious Tangela, who isn't curious enough to risk getting his vines slapped away for being too touchy-feely. "I don't have to go back in my head to see her. She's everywhere, isn't she? That's what my dreams have been trying to tell me. She's in every Capture I make, she's in every victory celebrated at Ringtown, she's in every nice thing someone in Wintown says to me. I don't need her here physically to hear her talk to me, or to laugh when she laughs."
He nods hypnotically. "Very good, Ranger."
Lunick smiles ruefully. "I confess, though, I still would have liked to know if she was in love with me."
"You are a fool if you never knew the answer to that," the Drowzee Man says before nodding off.
...
Lunick kneels next to Solana with her brand-new purple coat with the Hello Skitty emblem on the breast slung over his knee, and he teaches her how to put it on so that her long sleeves don't ride up. She wriggles impatiently, but she grabs a hold of the ends of her shirt sleeves as he helps her slide into her coat, then tugs her cuffs out so she can show them to him, beaming proudly.
He smiles at her and asks her to check her backpack to make sure she has everything; he has her list them precisely as he has always asked her questions so that she learns to store every new piece of information she gathers.
They're just about to leave when she goes suddenly, "Wait! I haven't given Murph and Slowpoke a hug today!" and then she dashes off, dropping her gloves on principle and out of sight before he can formulate a reply.
He follows her at a slow pace, but the low and murmured voices of Spenser and Joel make him stop.
He's about to poke his head in and say good morning, because today was a mail day and the two of them needed as many cheerful remarks as they could get, but he doesn't get so far as to push the door open before he sees Spenser lean across the table suddenly to press his lips to Joel's.
The arch of Joel's eyebrows tell him this is the first time this has happened, and the way Spenser settles back into his seat and takes his pencil up tells him this wasn't the first time he's thought of doing it. Then Joel smiles.
There's a lot Lunick could say about it, he supposes, backing away from the door.
He could scoff and go, "Well, of course it was going to happen sometime," but he doesn't, because he didn't see it coming. Sure, they talked about each other all the time, but people can move from mortal enemies to friends without crossing the border into lovers. Mortal enemies turned friends could kiss without crossing the border into lovers. Either one of them could be enamored with girls and still kiss and not cross the border into lovers.
Joel had talked about it before, the idea of a rival being the one person who knew you inside and out. They were aware of everything you did, until they knew you better than you knew yourself. When recognized and both parties willing to let a little bit of pride and personal opinion slip, the movement into friendship was easy. The movement into lovers, while gradual, was not necessary. It just happened to be a step Spenser and Joel could take, if they so wished to, without the fear that their bond would fall apart. And that, if anything, was true friendship.
The bonds true friendship makes never break.
Even if one party vanishes off the face of the earth.
Lunick gets it now.
Solana comes clattering back down the steps, wiping Slowpoke saliva off her face and grinning wide to show her victory.
"Are you ready, baby girl?" Lunick asks, swinging her up onto his hip, coat and backpack and all. She wraps her legs around his waist and kisses his cheek with her mouth and not her lips as little kids tend to do.
"Always, Daddy," she says.
...
She makes a noise in the back of her throat, not a keen but not a yelp, when his fingers trail up her back to tug at the yielding strings of her bikini top. It slides down her arms, and she moves ever so slightly -- not aiding him in its removal, but conveniently allowing gravity to take it the rest of the way to the sand.
"Do you know what's going to happen now?"
He's tempted to pretend he didn't hear her at all. The day is beautiful, the sun warm but not intrusive, the sand hot beneath his feet and the breeze welcome on his back. Their friend Pokemon amble leisurely along the crests of seaweed offered up by the waves. The faint, tinny sound of somebody's portable radio floats to them, between the cries of Wingulls and the ever murmur of the sea, like a lover to her lord's ear, like a baseball whistling home.
He brushes her periwinkle hair aside, and she turns then, capturing his face between her hands and his mouth with hers. He cannot help but clutch her close at that point, fingers white against her spine and the small of her back, their bare chests plaited together and he wasn't sure why he just thought her eyes were green, because they were as red as nutmeg.
They part, and the mere feel of his lips against his own teeth and nothing else is inadequate. As if sensing the same thing, she moves to kiss him again, but he worms a finger between them.
"What happens now?" Lunick echoes, touching the features he had memorized a hundred thousand times, beginning with her lips. He closes his eyes and lets his arms drop to his side. "Now, Solana, the littlest Ranger, now you will become a fairy tale."
He opens his eyes, and she is gone, and it is just him and Minun on the empty stretch of Summerland beach.
"And the rest of us will Capture On."