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[Cutlerine]

INTERLUDE: ONE FOR MY BABY

Veronika Tejada. Could you get more Unovan than that? One family fleeing the Russian Revolution, another chasing a dream north from Mexico; it took a few decades for them to bump into each other, sure, but where else in the world could these people have collided and fused the way they did? Unova is a special kind of mongrel, a hybrid of invader and indigene, immigrant and refugee, and the way Gwyneth sees it there couldn't be a more Unovan name than Veronika Tejada.

She never tells Nika this. It's only a thought, anyway. Nika is Nika, not a symbol. It's just that sometimes it's nice to be reminded that there's more to Unova than the easy, thuggish power of the dollar and the fist – that alongside its staggering capacity for destroying people it still has some power to create them anew.

When she returns home Gwyneth keeps in touch with Nika via email and phone. There's a lot she doesn't tell her mother about her journey – most notably the fact that she did the better part of it without pokémon – but she can't resist talking about Nika, and her mother can't help but sense what lies behind the gushes of praise. She's never seen Gwyneth like this before, never seen her come so vividly to life over anything, and the difference in her is startling. She wonders if Gwyneth was hurting somehow before and she failed to notice because she was too busy, and her guilt spurs her to make more of an effort.

And she can do that now, because while her other child still hasn't made more than a few brief trips home since the whole Plasma mess, he is sending an awful lot of money in his stead. For the time being at least, he has taken up the Champion role full-time – Alder's heart has really not been in it for a long while now, and he is glad to be relieved – and most of his salary is coming back to Nuvema, along with sizeable chunks of his revenue from League merchandise, sponsorship deals and his appearances in adverts. (His reticence is now part of the character, something the marketing departments capitalise on: he pitches up in ads where people try to talk to him and he simply beckons them into a kind of dumbshow about the product.)

So Gwyneth's mother works fewer hours, cuts back to just one job, and for once actually has the leisure to spend some time with her daughter. Gwyneth has by this point gone back to school, but at the weekends, for the first time that she can remember, her mother is home and not exhausted. It's strange at first, but not unwelcome, especially since school is now more difficult than ever. Everyone finds it hard, readjusting to ordinary life after their trainer journey; tensions are always high, and Gwyneth is an easy target for anyone who needs to vent their frustration. She says nothing, counts the minutes till she can leave, and tries not to care too much when she gets her grades and sees them slip down from average to mediocre.

It's tough, with Nika gone. It's hard to remember what it is that makes Gwyneth anything other than something to be despised. She liberated her pokémon. She is defective in all the ways that matter, and maybe Nika likes her anyway but then again maybe she doesn't, difficult to say with her not around, and even if by some miracle she does she'd be better off without Gwyneth in her life at all. She is poison. You touch her by accident, or to harm her.

But she doesn't cut her ties with her. Gwyneth does a lot of bad things, but she doesn't do that. She hates herself for it, accuses herself of being too weak to let go, and still she keeps on returning calls, sending emails. It's one of the few decisions she makes that she will look back on in future and know immediately and intuitively that it was the right thing to do.

Nika senses something off with her, although she can't tell what it is. She tries to help: attaches photos to her emails of Hekate in weird places, since she has by this point turned up in Humilau; sends Gwyneth songs she likes. Their correspondence becomes a playlist that Gwyneth listens to late at night, trying to find something in it to cling onto.

Something of this shows. One weekend, her mother asks if she'd like to invite Nika to stay sometime during the holidays, and Gwyneth's eyes light up. Yes, she says. She would.

It's strange to have Nika burst into her life at home in Nuvema like this, but it's wonderful too, and though her mother has always been slightly ill at ease with who and what Gwyneth is, has in fact spent long hours staring at her bedroom ceiling at night furiously telling herself that she has a daughter and that she loves her in the hope of stamping out the vague discontent that will not go away, she can't deny that Nika is good for her. She watches them and is aware suddenly that Gwyneth is growing up, as Hilbert already seems to have done, as she must have done in the eyes of her own mother after her trainer journey, decades before. And she tells herself that whatever she thinks of this, she has to do all she can to support it.

Gwyneth does not know any of this. All she knows is that Nika's here again and it's just like it was, only different because now she's not discovering new places with her but showing her round her old stomping grounds, the creek and the old junkyard and the thousand places where you're not really supposed to go but countless cigarette butts and broken bottles prove that generations of teenagers have always gone anyway. And okay, it's not perfect; Nuvema is a small town and Gwyneth is recognised, usually in the wrong ways, and she and Nika attract a certain amount of attention that she is uncomfortable with. But Hekate, with all her old appetite for adventure, has left her mate in Humilau to follow her human partner south, and the one time that anyone tries anything she comes screaming down out of the sky on a black-tinted wind, talons ready. The kids flee, and Hekate lands on a nearby wall, croaking happily and stretching out for Gwyneth to pet her.

After that, they are left alone, at least until Nika has to go. And after that, Gwyneth doesn't notice. The glow fades, and she forgets again what it is that Nika sees in her. She finds herself zoning out, in a particular kind of way that seems to fog her vision and render the world a series of incomprehensible objects, a collection of strange shapes that are for some reason moving. It happens once, and then twice, and then after a while she gets used to it, and stops being afraid.

Gwyneth imagines the bitter thing growing inside her, pushing out from her abdomen around her organs, clutching them tightly in its thorny branches, puncturing them and letting the wounds heal with the spines still lodged inside. Veins completely blocked with plant matter growing down their length, leaking slightly where the thorns push through their surface.

She knows she has to tell someone. She tries to tell Nika, but words will not obey her and all that she can say is that she's scared, and while Nika does what she can to help she cannot read minds. Gwyneth is awed by how much she cares, and though she knows that she is unworthy of this kind of attention she clings onto it, and somehow does not drown.

When the next vacation comes around, Nika's parents, in an attempt to balance the scales of obligation, have Nika ask Gwyneth up to Humilau. This is an exciting trip, but a difficult one; in her house, which is big and expensively furnished and full of icons of saints that creep Gwyneth out, they need to tread carefully. Nika is not yet ready to tell her parents that Gwyneth is anything other than a friend, and so they hold back while inside and escape from the house whenever they can, into the company of Nika's friends. Because Nika, of course, actually has those, unlike Gwyneth – and, much to Gwyneth's amazement and initial distrust, they seem to want to be her friends, too.

It's a good time, out there on the beaches. They roam and find trouble to stare at and watch Hekate and her mate terrorise the local wildlife, giant visitors to an island where mandibuzz don't usually venture. They go swimming, or rather they don't because Gwyneth refuses to do anything that would show so much of her body, and if Gwyneth's going to just sit on the beach and watch then so is Nika. So she stays with her and holds her hand and talks her way slowly through the strange distance that hangs around Gwyneth like a fog, until she at last makes her smile and lean in to be kissed.

It's helpful, but it comes too late. The bitter thing has already spread right through her. And when she goes back home, leaving Nika behind again in the golden tropical light, Gwyneth finds herself starting to struggle – to get her work done, to keep her face in order, even to move at all. She spends a couple of weekends entirely in bed, passing it off as sickness but in truth simply so far detached from the physical truth of her existence that she cannot seem to make her muscles work.

She takes up smoking. She's not meant to, the doctors said she shouldn't when they prescribed her hormones, but this, if anything, only makes her want to do it more. What exactly the risks are she can't remember, but she'd like to be at risk of something; at risk feels like the right thing to be. And anyway, fire and smoke are real in a way that she is not. Breathing them in, touching them to her skin, anchors her to reality for at least a little while.

She keeps going, no matter what. Never look back, she tells herself. Get on with it, because this is just how it is, and if everyone else can soldier on through it then you have no excuse not to follow. So get up, no matter what, and go to school, and do the work, and collect arm scars if you have to but keep on going.

Gwyneth is too good at hiding things. Nobody ever notices, and her mother will not know why it was that she became so distant until the break-up, when Nika calls her in a panic, asking if she's seen Gwyneth and gasping out her fears.

Through all of this, Hilbert comes and goes, quiet and confident. When he's home, their mother is brighter and more cheerful, hums old pop songs from her youth as she moves about the house; Gwyneth tries not to be envious, tells herself it's natural for her to be proud of him, but it still stings. He doesn't even have a personality. He sits down to watch TV and will keep it on the same channel all evening, looking at everything that comes on with equal interest. His pokémon are all like him, stalking around the house in complete silence except for their breath. Only Reshiram is any different: it stays outside, sniffs and growls and sometimes barks, shedding white fur everywhere, and spends long periods away, flying off to god-knows-where with the fire of its tail snarling and whining. When it is around, its presence outside the kitchen window is even worse than Hilbert's empty silence, and Gwyneth, whose bedroom looks down on the yard where it holds court, draws her curtains and stays very still, swearing softly to herself. She could just about handle it when it was separated from her by the length of a TV camera. But to have the legend here, in real life, with her eerie brother downstairs asking politely if there is anything he can help with, is more than she can bear.

Hilbert asks her how she's doing, what school is like, who her friends are. He asks like he genuinely wants to start getting to know her better. Gwyneth tells him to go f*ck himself and derives a vicious pleasure from the look of baffled hurt on his face. He's human after all, then.

She knows she shouldn't have said that. It's okay. She is beginning to get a better idea of the sort of person she is now.

Somehow, she makes it through to the end: school finishes for good, and she hasn't died or dropped out or been expelled. She doesn't have the grades for college even if she wanted to go, so she just combines her part-time job at the bookstore with another one waiting tables in a terrible Italian restaurant and watches herself trading time and energy for tiny sums of money that she does not spend. Her mother tries to talk to her about her future, but Gwyneth keeps slithering out of it. She doesn't want a future. She wouldn't know what to do with one if you gave it to her.

All the while Nika has sustained her, with phone calls and emails and those all-too-infrequent visits. And then she tells Gwyneth that in September she's going to the University of Calarat in Nacrene; and that this is, by the way, much closer to Nuvema; and Gwyneth feels the cartoon lightbulb blink into existence above her head. So she has to have a future, does she? Well, she's sure as hell not having one in this town.

Her mother is glad to see her looking more lively, and she remembers the promise she made herself to do what she could to support whatever it is between her and Nika, and so with some of her money and most of Gwyneth's they make it happen. Somehow, in what seems to her like the unlikeliest turn of events possible, Gwyneth moves to Nacrene, three subway stops away from the apartment where Nika is living.

It is perfect. It genuinely is. Here they are, the two of them, able to see each other whenever they like without the encumbrance of disapproving parents or a town that watches their every movement; Gwyneth meets Nika in the street when she arrives from Humilau and in the purity of that moment the bitter thing seems to die back inside her. It will be okay, won't it? It will. It can and it will, now that she's here. It has to be.

It will be a little while yet before she realises that love is only ever the cure in fairy tales. For a while yet, she feels fine just out of the relief of leaving Nuvema and being here, in a proper city again, with Nika. She reinvents herself: cuts her hair short and spiky, starts dyeing it in extravagant colours, has her eyebrow pierced. Nika says she looks like an exceptionally dorky punk, which Gwyneth, after some consideration, agrees is probably more or less what she actually is.

Nika is studying classics, of course; she adds Latin and Greek to the roster of languages she can speak, or at least fake her way around in, and tells historical stories as well as mythological. Did Gwyneth know about Trajan's campaigns in Dacia? No, of course not, and she listens eagerly as Nika gets excited, paints a picture of the Dacians with their strange curved weapons that split Roman shields and armour open in ways the designers had never foreseen, conjures up a world of strategy and warfare carving up the Balkans with the gladius and the cartographer's pen. Gwyneth does not really understand why the wars of long-dead men interest Nika so much, but she's willing to admit that she can make a good story out of them at least. She sits there enthralled in Nika's apartment, and doesn't realise that she's pulled her sleeve up a little to scratch at her wrist until Nika stops and swears and asks her what the hell happened, and then of course the spell breaks and Gwyneth feels the old shame grinding at her once again. She has to show Nika her arms then, and maybe there's some good in it because now at last she starts to understand what Gwyneth was trying to say when she said she was scared.

They go into Nika's room to be alone, and have a long conversation. Gwyneth struggles to find words and gets angry at herself for it; Nika stays calm, asks her more questions and slowly draws what information she can out of her. By the end of it, Nika has an idea that this has something to do with Team Plasma and what Gwyneth did in Nimbasa, and maybe to do with Hilbert too; Gwyneth, for her part, has realised what Nika did to her back on their journey, how she wanted Gwyneth and stumbled without realising onto the strategy to buy her devotion.

She forgives her immediately, because she knows she's a good person and didn't do it deliberately, and she decides not to tell her, again because Nika is a good person and Gwyneth really doesn't want to upset her. This, it will emerge, is probably not the right thing to do.

The two of them fall asleep very late, and in the morning both feel a little more hopeful. Days pass. Gwyneth stacks shelves and waits tables; Nika studies and plays hockey. Nika's roommate Keisha moves out; a little later, Gwyneth moves in. It is not easy, even with all their practice at living together from their trainer journey; they are both young still, both unused to cramming their lives in around one another. But they manage, and then, after a while, they live. Gwyneth slips back into her old ways, using her love to keep the poison locked away inside her. She remains stable, as far as she and everyone else is aware; she hangs out with Nika and her friends, makes acquaintances among those of them who smoke as they all troop outside to light up. Sometimes she and Nika talk about the bitter thing inside her – mostly Nika, really, checking up on her – but mostly they do not.

For a while, everything seems fine, with the exception of that Christmas, when they each go home to their respective families and all the attendant difficulties that entails, and after which Gwyneth returns fragile and ill-tempered. She snaps at Nika for something stupid and stubbornly refuses to apologise, despite it being entirely her fault; Nika is kind but not a sap, and refuses to let it go without the apology. In the end, Gwyneth has to do the right thing and say she's sorry, that Christmas was rough, and then Nika says sure, she understands, that's an explanation, Gwyneth, but it's not an excuse.

Gwyneth says sorry again, more sincerely this time, and Nika sighs and asks her if she wants to talk about it. And she doesn't, but they do, and it works out okay in the end.

They find the rhythms of their life together. After a while, they stop even pretending that they have separate rooms, and start calling what was Nika's room the study, since the only thing she uses it for now is university work. Sometimes Gwyneth will sit cross-legged on the carpet outside the door and listen to her fingers rattling the keyboard as she writes an essay, reading aloud from and arguing with her books as she goes. She isn't sure why, but she finds it incredibly soothing.

They live. They go out places. They fight, rarely, and Gwyneth always loses because she's always in the wrong and she knows it. She buys Nika flowers because she knows she loves them, and Nika makes her origami animals because she knows she loves them. Sometimes over the vacation they take a week or two and go somewhere interesting by bus or train, either a place they saw before on their trainer journey like Driftveil or somewhere new, like Virbank. Sometimes they stay in and play video games, which Gwyneth always likes because it's the only thing she's better at than Nika is.

That summer, Nika has an awkward conversation with her parents. They don't come out of it very happy. Probably they wouldn't have done whether it was Gwyneth she liked or not, but the fact that it is Gwyneth definitely does not do anything to help. Still, they are caught out by how grown-up Nika suddenly seems to be, how assured and confident in her statements about herself, and they begin to realise that perhaps they cannot claim as central a role in their life as they have always thought they must. It's not much, but it's a start. Nika will work on it over the coming years, and by the time things end they will at least have come to have a certain grudging respect for the woman who makes their daughter happier than they have ever known her to be before.

Nika returns to Gwyneth in Nacrene a little worried but hopeful for the future, and then three weeks later their friend Martin is killed.

Here is how it goes: a couple of drunk kids get together and steal a gun from one of their fathers, go out and swagger around town one evening, feeling bold. In the dark it takes a while for anyone to notice what they're carrying. Martin does, and calls the cops; they see him and yell inaccurate slurs, and one of them raises the gun threateningly and (accidentally, or not) it goes off.

Gwyneth is staggered. It seems impossible. Martin is – Martin is Martin, a kind quiet guy who even she, distrustful of men as she is, thinks of as a friend. He studies – studied – art history, and had a friendly rivalry with Nika as to who was majoring in the most useless subject. He shares with Gwyneth a debilitating insecurity about his history; his family is Sikh, and he has at least a passable command of his grandparents' Punjabi, but his mother is also Henuun and she like Gwyneth comes from a household shorn of its heritage by time and Unova. (Gwyneth likes talking to Martin about this. It makes both of them feel a little better about their respective failures.) He is the only one of Nika's friends who can beat her at video games; he volunteers at the langar in the gurdwara in Nacrene's east side; he is heavily involved in the student activist organisations which Gwyneth, despite not actually being a student, is part of because most of her friends in Nacrene are students, and because she is even now an exceptionally angry person.

He is Martin Singh, whose father gave him and his brother and sister Western names so that life would be easier for them, whose name in the end does nothing to help him, who has a particular laugh that sounds like a tepig choking. He is her friend. He is an expert at the most obscure combos in the fighting games they play. He is an ex-trainer who kept his unfezant, Nrinder, after he came home. Now he is none of those things; now he is a face in a box waiting to be cremated. It seems impossible that someone could have the power to unmake a life like that, to reduce a human being to material components, lying on the sidewalk like a roadkill deer.

The kids – they're Gwyneth's age, actually, but the media refers to them as kids – refuse to take responsibility. They say they were startled, that Martin surprised them and it was all an accident. The courts buy this, of course, because what honest God-fearing Unovan wouldn't be startled, seeing a burly brown man in a turban coming towards them on a dark night, and the sentence is in the end insultingly light. When the news comes, Gwyneth and Nika make placards and join their friends in the ensuing protests.

Things go sour. The police do not approve. Gwyneth gets separated from her friends and, along with a bunch of others she does not know, spends seven hours in a holding cell wearing plastic handcuffs; en route to the station, she picks up a few bruises that she will later refuse to explain. When at last a cop comes to take her away to be released, he stops her in the corridor and asks her what the f*ck she's looking at.

Gwyneth does not answer. She tries to look only at the floor but the cop grabs her face and forces her eyes upwards to meet his. The touch of his thick fingers against her skin makes her flesh crawl and her gorge rise.

She wonders if something terrible is about to happen. And then she realises that it doesn't matter, that the point of this is not to do something to her but to prove to her that it can be done, that who and what she is mean that the right person can do anything to her and nobody will care.

He repeats his question. Gwyneth tells him nothing, sir. He says good girl and lets her go roughly, the pressure of his hands lingering long after they have moved away. She hears him swear and mutter a six-letter word under his breath, just loud enough that only she can hear.

In art, says Martin, hands and eyes are traditional symbols of power and authority. Gwyneth understands now. She is shaking and furious and more afraid than she has ever been in her life. What strikes her is the lack of personal malice. The cop must have friends, family, people with whom he could not act as he has acted here. His hatred for her is the impersonal evil of history. Gwyneth is just definitionally something to be despised, and he is stepping up to the mark.

When Nika comes to collect her she sees Gwyneth and her eyes flash with a seismic anger Gwyneth has never seen in them before. For a minute she actually thinks Nika might punch someone, and she is torn between wanting her to flatten a cop and another desperate want for her to to not cause trouble – and then the moment passes, Nika deflates slightly, and she ushers Gwyneth outside to where she parked her car.

What happened, she wants to know.

Just take me home, says Gwyneth, in a small voice that is not hers. She hates herself for it. Nothing even happened to her. She's got no right to get scared about this, to demand Nika's attention and sympathy.

Even so, she shakes all the way home, and for a long time after.

The protests leave no impression on the public consciousness. They keep happening, but achieve nothing. Gwyneth and Nika continue to attend, although Gwyneth cannot make herself go anywhere near the front, but there comes a point where the general impetus runs out, and after that the only people who bother attending are those who knew Martin personally. They are not numerous enough, and the movement dies without result.

Nobody is okay with this. It just happens anyway. And after it does, nobody has any choice but to move on.

It's not like there isn't anything else to worry about. Gwyneth catches pneumonia, and this naturally enough occupies a lot of her and Nika's time. It also brings her mother and brother to town, which is partly welcome and partly not. She is touched that they care about her, but she hates the attention, knowing she has done nothing to earn it. And Hilbert, whatever he does, can't make her feel better. Not even by bringing daffodils and appealing to their shared childhood.

Still, she makes it through, and life goes on. Always a little bleaker, always a little less worthy, but it goes on. Gwyneth survives. And, at least some of the time, she lives, as well.

After Nika graduates, she is accepted into a moderately prestigious graduate scheme run by Silph and undergoes training for a junior role in the Nacrene office. She makes a lot more money than Gwyneth, but it's okay. Gwyneth has always expected that of her; she's the hero and Gwyneth is the sidekick, after all. There's nothing wrong with playing second fiddle, and anyway with this kind of income they can begin saving for another adventure. They spend three weeks in Kanto, where Gwyneth wanders around looking at street signs she can't read and feeling happier than she has done since they were fifteen and roaming Unova together, and they bring some of the magic with them when they come back. Life feels bearable. It gets comfortable.

This is exactly the kind of thing she is most afraid of.

Even before the move to Aspertia, where Nika has been offered a better-paying position, Gwyneth is starting to feel discontent. How has she ended up here? She feels like she has tried as hard as she can to be mediocre, to not progress through the ranks of whatever company she works for at any given time, to force her way into the low place in life she knows is hers. And yet here she is, leeching off Nika's success, taking her money and her love and giving nothing back but moodiness and irritation.

It's the same old story, as uninteresting as ever. Tensions rise. Nika knows something is up, presses her to see a doctor; Gwyneth reacts with brutal, needless anger. They fight and make up. The poison in her ebbs and flows, sometimes a deadly spring tide and sometimes so low as to be almost absent. Gwyneth knows that what she is doing is wrong. You can't treat people like this, whatever your reasoning, and at some point she will either have to stop or leave.

She cannot stop. And so, after a week-long argument that Gwyneth starts because she finds the engagement ring hidden at the back of a drawer and is suddenly terrified of shackling Nika to her stupid, toxic self for life, she leaves.

She never explains herself. Or maybe she does, but she doesn't want to go and the fear jumbles her thoughts. To Nika, the whole thing seems to come out of nowhere, and she struggles in her shock to figure out an explanation. By now she has come to know Gwyneth as well as anyone, perhaps better in some ways than Gwyneth herself, and in her attempt to work out what has happened she stumbles onto the realisation that she took advantage of Gwyneth's devastating self-hatred, back when they were kids, and, aghast at the thought, decides that Gwyneth must despise her for it.

So she argues only weakly when Gwyneth says that this has gone on long enough, that she cannot be here any more. She asks if there is some way they can work this out, if maybe she can somehow make things more equitable, and Gwyneth does not understand what she means. And they part, full of misconceptions, neither wanting to leave but both convinced they have been destroying the other, and after a little while Nika goes back to Nacrene and Gwyneth is at last able to tell herself that she is beyond her reach. That there she will be safe from Gwyneth's corrosive influence.

She makes no further plans. She takes a measure of comfort in having finally succeeded in becoming the a*shole she always knew she was.

She still loves Nika, more than anything, but it is because she loves her that she had to do it.

 

[Cutlerine]

FOURTEEN: NIKA

If you want to get right down to it – if you really want to break it down – then the worst thing about the dream is that it tells her where everything began. Daughter, trainer, sister, lover; Gwyneth failed at everything, and she did it wilfully and of her own volition. And it all starts there, with Juniper and the offer of a pokémon. Welcome, she says. What's your name? Are you a boy or a girl? And Gwyneth knows that this is it. This is the moment of truth, and if she answers she commits to a life of mistakes that will take her, in the end, down the line to an apartment shared with Nika, and though this is what she wants – what she's always wanted – she can't do it. Not knowing what she does now. If she could take it back, if she could return to that day in Nuvema and say to Juniper no, please, I've changed my mind and I'm not going, she would. If she could cut herself out of the last decade, she would do it in a heartbeat.

She would save Blossom that way. She would save Corbin. She'd let Hilbert be a hero and she would be proud to know him.

She would spare Nika everything, and that, in the end, is worth any price she can think of.

So Juniper asks, and Gwyneth stays quiet, and waits for Hilbert to take her place. He goes with Juniper and she watches, terrified and ashamed and secretly, perversely glad, because if there's anyone who deserves this – to be a trainer, to be Nika's – it has to be him.

Some people get chosen and some do not. Gwyneth has had a long time now to come to terms with this.

*​

Something roars. Gwyneth hears it at first without comprehension, but the venipede stiffens in her lap and scratches urgently at her arm, and then she blinks and feels the world fade back into existence around her.

“What is it, dude?” she asks, and then she remembers the roaring. “Oh. Right.”

The venipede hisses. Gwyneth sighs.

“I'm sure it's nothing,” she says, although she isn't sure of that at all: it was a big roar, the kind that has to come from a very big animal, and from how close it sounded it had to have come from elsewhere on the beach. “We'll be fine.”

She hears a voice, distantly, and a rough noise of uncertain meaning that must come from whatever it was that was doing the roaring. Must be someone with their pokémon.

“See?” she says to the venipede, but she keeps scrabbling at Gwyneth's arm, and actually it's starting to hurt, so Gwyneth sighs again and gets up. “Okay, dude,” she says, too tired to argue. “Okay, I'll go check it out.”

She cradles the venipede in her arm and starts limping along the beach in the direction of the noises. She doesn't take her backpack. It's heavy, and there's nothing in there worth stealing, even if by some unlikely coincidence someone does come along and find it.

It's not so bad, this walk. The sand is easy on her feet, and the surf makes a nice, soft sound, like the sound of someone's breath when you share a bed with them and wake before they do. Gwyneth could fall asleep to that kind of noise, even standing up as she is, and her eyes are in fact starting to close when she sees something move in front of her and she flies back to full consciousness with a jolt.

She can't be sure what she's looking at, in the dark, but it's about nine feet tall, and has the unmistakeable six-limbed profile of a dragon.

“Hello,” says someone, in a soft, gentle voice. “Please don't be afraid. They won't hurt you.”

Gwyneth blinks. In her arms, the venipede freezes. They have both just become aware of the man standing next to the dragon. He is tall and slim, with a Henuun cast to his features and long green hair tied back behind his head.

She knows this man. Everyone does.

“You're N Harmonia,” she says. “You're … and this …”

She stares. The dragon inclines its huge head, and she sees the blue sparks burning in the depths of its eyes. Yes. It is exactly what she thinks it is.

“Yes.” N shrugs, a little embarrassed. “Sorry if we startled you. We've tried to travel by night, to avoid trouble. I don't know if I'm welcome in Unova these days. We just stopped here for a quick break.”

“You disappeared,” says Gwyneth. It isn't what she means to say, it just sort of comes out. “My brother, he said …” She shakes her head. “Sorry.”

“Your brother, did you say?” N looks at her. She's glad she can't see his eyes properly in the dark. In the pictures, they always looked so piercing. Gwyneth would hate to be seen through so completely like that. “Oh! You're Gwyneth, aren't you?”

“Yeah. I guess so.”

N smiles.

“It's nice to meet you,” he says. “Hilbert never said anything about his family. And it's nice to meet you too,” he adds, bending to address the venipede. She clicks at him, moves her legs and her antennae, and N starts, a little taken aback. “Uh, okay,” he says. “Is – maybe I misheard. She says her name is … A*shole?”

It's so unexpected that Gwyneth can't help but laugh, even here with N and Zekrom in front of her, enigmatic and heroic.

“Oh god,” she splutters, through her laughter. “Jeez. No. No, dude, I just call her that a lot because she is one. Her name's―” (and for a moment, just a moment, she hesitates) “―Griselda.”

“Griselda?” repeats N.

“Yeah, Griselda,” says Gwyneth, testing it out to see how it sounds. She has no idea where it came from. It isn't the sort of thing she feels she should question. “Zelda for short.”

She is suddenly aware of the venipede's eye on her, watching carefully. She knows, thinks Gwyneth, wondering. She knew all along. Clever little monster.

“Well, then. It's a pleasure to meet you both, Zelda and Gwyneth.” N smiles. “I suppose we're heading in the same direction.”

“Huh? Oh. Yeah. The wedding.” Gwyneth's heart skips a beat. N must be flying to Humilau. If N is flying to Humilau … “Yeah,” she says, trying to be casual. “I guess we are.” She pauses. “I didn't even know anyone had found you yet.”

N shrugs, and leans against Zekrom. The dragon doesn't move an inch.

“Your brother found me a long time ago,” he says. “I just didn't want to come back. I suppose I was afraid. I miscalculated badly, back when I was younger. My formulae led me to some unfortunate conclusions …” He sighs. “You know, I'm sure,” he says. “You must have been on your journey at the time.”

“Yeah.” Gwyneth hesitates. She could tell him the full story, but there's no point. N has suffered enough, and she is not that cruel, not really. “Yeah, I was,” she says instead. “You know there are some Plasma people in Driftveil trying to return all the pokémon they took?”

“Really?” N stares. “So some of them really were following me, and not – him?”

“Yeah.” She doesn't tell him about the other rumours she's heard, of new Plasma activity down near Virbank. “People seem to be okay with them,” she says. “I think they'd like to see you too.”

“I see.” N fidgets nervously. “Well, maybe I … maybe I'll visit. After everything. I have some business to take care of here in Unova first. But thank you,” he adds. “Really. It means a lot that you told me.”

He smiles. Gwyneth smiles back. She even means it, mostly.

“Hey, well, no problem, dude.”

There is a pause. N seems to be thinking about something, and Gwyneth waits for it to come out.

“You haven't heard … anything else, have you?” he asks at length. “About Plasma, I mean. I'd heard some rumours …”

Gwyneth sighs.

“Okay,” she says. “Sure. I heard that some of them are causing trouble again, down near Virbank. I don't know any more than that, sorry.”

N nods.

“No,” he says. “Thank you, Gwyneth. That's a direction, at least.” He claps his hands together. “But that can wait. Tomorrow your brother is getting married, and unless I am mistaken you have missed the last boat out to Humilau.”

He is very kind, and very clever. He says it just like that, as if Gwyneth has just got her timings slightly wrong, as if she isn't covered in bruises and dirt. For a second, she actually thinks he might not have noticed, and then she sees the look on his face and knows that he sees her exactly as she is, and he would like to spare her the indignity of begging him for help.

She's a little ashamed. But mostly she is grateful, and amazed that someone like N survived someone like Ghetsis Harmonia with his love for other people so perfectly intact.

“Yeah, she says. “I kinda have.”

“I can offer you a lift, if you like.”

“Well, thanks,” she says. “That'd be cool of you. Uh, I left my bag back there, so …”

“That's fine,” says N. “Lead the way.”

Gwyneth heads back, and he keeps pace alongside her, Zekrom stalking behind them with the same unnatural lightness of step she noticed in Reshiram. It always feels wrong to her when something that big moves that quietly.

She glances down at Zelda, but she doesn't seem to be afraid at all. It's probably N. She's heard he's supposed to put nearby pokémon at their ease. Cheren always said that the rumours about N weren't anywhere near as weird as the truth.

“Have you come far?” asks N. “I'm afraid I don't know anything about you. Hilbert is not a very talkative person.”

“You can say that again.” She sighs. “I came from Aspertia. It's taken a while to get here, but I did it.”

“That's quite a trip.”

“I bet you came further,” she says, to shift the conversation away from herself, and he chuckles.

“Yes,” he says. “You'd be right there.” He glances out to sea, across the silver-flecked darkness of the water. “When I got the invitation, I was in Johto,” he says. “In Ecruteak. Parts of its history are very interesting to me. Hilbert of course didn't know, and I was always on the move, so the only way he could get a message to me was to give it to Reshiram and say, 'Go find N.'”

“It can do that?”

“Zekrom and Reshiram can always find one another,” says N. “They are two halves of a whole.”

He says it with a solemnity that makes Gwyneth feel vaguely embarrassed to have asked.

“Anyway, it caused quite a stir,” he goes on. “Reshiram descending on the Bell Tower. Some people thought Lugia had returned.” Gwyneth doesn't know what that is. She doesn't ask. “I left as soon as I got the message. I have to say I was surprised. Hilbert … I guess there's no reason why he couldn't marry, but somehow I wasn't expecting it.”

“Huh,” says Gwyneth. “Yeah, me either.”

They reach Gwyneth's backpack, and she hands Zelda to N for a moment while she puts it on.

“Zekrom flies … rather fast,” he says. “You'll want to hold on. Does Zelda have a poké ball?” She shakes her head. “Ah. Then … maybe I should carry her for you, so you have your hand free.”

“Okay. You're fine with that, right Zelda?”

Zelda clicks and wiggles her antennae. She seems perfectly content in N's arms. Don't be jealous, Gwyneth tells herself, and doesn't quite manage to obey.

Zekrom drops to all fours and crouches, flattening its wings against the ground as best it can. N climbs up in between its shoulder blades, then extends a hand to help Gwyneth up after him. She'd be lying if she said she wasn't a little nervous, but she does it, and sits behind him, feeling a faint buzzing warmth rising through her jeans from Zekrom's back.

“Are you ready?” asks N. “Please do hold on tight. You won't hurt me, and you really don't want to fall.”

She puts her arm around his waist. Beneath the white linen shirt – and who wears those, she wonders – it is hard and taut, like she's looped her arm around one of those sculptures of classical heroes.

“Ready,” she says, because although she probably isn't this is a chance she cannot pass up, the universe throwing her a bone after the hell she's crawled through to get here – and then Zekrom kicks away from the ground in a cloud of flying sand and its tail ignites and she can't think of anything but the speed.

*​

They blaze across the night sky like a shooting star. Gwyneth expected to be deafened by the wind, but in reality most of the noise comes from Zekrom's tail, crackling and whining like an electrical storm, glowing blue and spitting sparks that explode noisily in the air behind them. Her legs are boiling with the heat coming off the dragon's skin; her face is frozen with the cold air rushing past. She doesn't know what she was expecting, but she had an idea that riding the legendary dragon might be a bit more elegant.

The lights of Undella vanish quickly behind the hills, and then between the darkness and the water streaming from Gwyneth's eyes she can't see much at all. This goes on for a few seconds, or a few hours, she can't tell which, and then at last when her arm has begun to ache from clinging to N so tightly Zekrom flares its wings and dims its tail, and slows as it begins the descent towards the city below.

Gwyneth blinks water from her eyes and stares as it comes into focus. There it is, spread out beneath them. It's real. It's really real, and it's right there.

Humilau.

*​

Zekrom lands in an isolated cove on the southwest corner of the island, where rocks and palm trees shelter it from view. It crouches, and Gwyneth slides unsteadily off it into the sand. The bones in her legs feel like they've been replaced with jelly, but they hold, and she doesn't fall over.

N hops down alongside her, irritatingly sprightly, and hands her Zelda.

“Here you are,” he says. “Safe and sound. I hope you weren't too uncomfortable.”

“Nah, dude,” she replies, putting Zelda on her shoulder and trying half-heartedly to sort out the rat's nest the wind has made of her hair. “I'm fine. Better than fine. I mean, I'm here, I …” She stops, aware that she is starting to give away more than she intends to. “Thanks,” she says. “I really appreciate this.”

N smiles.

“Not at all,” he says. “It was my pleasure.”

They stand there for a little while, staring awkwardly, and then N clears his throat and offers her his hand.

“Well, it was nice to meet you,” he says. “I'll see you later, at the wedding. I need to make arrangements for Zekrom before I head into town.”

“Right,” says Gwyneth. “Sure. Uh – when is the wedding, by the way? I lost my invitation.”

“Twelve o'clock,” he replies, graciously pretending to believe her. “At the Church of St. Jude the Apostle.”

Nika's old church. It's going to be a Catholic thing after all, then. Gwyneth always wondered about that. Nika was always conflicted about the church in a way that Gwyneth, raised without religion of any kind, didn't understand; sometimes she hated it, sometimes she turned to it for consolation. Gwyneth guesses that if something like that gets its teeth into you when you're young enough, you're probably stuck with it for life, at least in part.

“Yeah, I know where that is,” she says. “Thanks, N.”

“Not at all,” he says again. “Goodbye, Gwyneth.”

“See you.”

She turns and begins to walk along the beach, around the rocks to where the steps lead up to the road. The air is warm and the silhouettes of palm trees wave gently against the moon; this is it, isn't it? This is really Humilau. She's really here.

At the top of the steps, Gwyneth stops and stares down the road. Beachfront cafés and expensive apartments. It's all just as she remembers.

“Dude,” she whispers, unable to raise her voice any further. “Dude, we made it.”

Zelda doesn't reply, but it's okay. Gwyneth doesn't need an answer. She doesn't need anything at all right now that isn't right here in front of her.

*​

Gwyneth spends the rest of the night sitting on a bench on the seafront, splitting the food she has left with Zelda. The two of them chew and watch the waves change colour with the passing night. It's a long time till sunrise, but it's okay. They made it. From here on out, they can afford to stop and rest.

It's gorgeous. Sand, water, dawn. Palm trees like the long necks of lanky dragons, shaggy with leaves.

Unova, she thinks, and despite everything Gwyneth knows in her heart that she still loves it.

A little after seven o'clock, when she judges it late enough, Gwyneth takes out her phone. She knows that she has gone as far as she can, that there is at this point only one last challenge left to overcome, and now that she is here in Humilau she takes a deep breath and dials the number she has pretended for over a year now that she doesn't remember.

Gwyneth listens to it ringing, and then to a sleepy voice, angry to be woken, asking who this is.

“Hi, Mom,” she says softly. “I'm back.”

*​

She is staying at the Belmante Hotel, on the corner of West Street and Rademaeker Avenue. Gwyneth finds it on her phone's map, and walks, and pushes through the revolving doors, and hears her name called out, sharp and relieved and fearful.

“Hi, Mom,” she says again, letting herself be hugged. “It's … good to see you too.”

Her mother pulls back, casts her eye over her. She looks older than Gwyneth remembered. How long has it been since she last saw her, anyway? Do people really age that much in just two years? Maybe they do if their kids disappear without a trace, thinks Gwyneth guiltily.

“Gwyneth, what happened?” she asks, staring. “You look …”

“Awful,” finishes Gwyneth, smiling crookedly. “Yeah, I know.” She sighs. “Is there somewhere I can sit down?”

She washes her face and free hand in the bathroom of her mother's hotel suite. Her face hurts wherever the water touches it, and it doesn't look much better when she's done, but she feels a little less like she might keel over and die.

In the cosy warmth of the hotel room, she tells her mother some things. She says she's been in Aspertia. She says she got the news late and hitchhiked up here. She says she caught a venipede by accident, was briefly hospitalised, and got into a small fight in White Forest. She says that N brought her the rest of the way from Undella, and her mother sighs, grateful and frustrated.

“God, Gwyneth,” she says. “Didn't you ever think to tell anyone?”

Apparently Nika came round to Gwyneth's apartment one day, hoping to apologise, and found someone else living there. It would have been after Gwyneth was evicted, either while she was homeless or after Shane took her in. Nika tried to make sense of the fact that Gwyneth had apparently moved without telling her, called her mother to see if she knew anything, and then returned to Nacrene, too hurt and confused to live in Aspertia any longer.

“Where were you?” her mother keeps asking, and eventually Gwyneth sighs and admits it.

“I lost the apartment. Didn't have anywhere, for a while. Then … then a friend helped me out.”

Her mother stares. With a sudden fierce anger, Gwyneth wishes she would turn those wounded eyes somewhere else.

“Gwyneth,” she says. “Oh, Gwyneth.”

Gwyneth shrugs. She cannot make herself talk about this.

“I'm okay,” she says. “I got your message. I mean, I have a friend Shane, he knows Cheren. Cheren told him about … this. The wedding.”

“Cheren knew where you were?”

Gwyneth can hear the anger in her voice, and much as she would like to get Cheren into trouble, she shakes her head no.

“He didn't know. He only knew that Shane knew me.”

“Who's Shane?”

“Friend of mine. The one who … helped.” Gwyneth looks away, at Zelde investigating some fluff caught in the carpet. “You don't know him.”

“I think I might like to,” says her mother, with an unmistakeable undercurrent of because he saved my daughter, and Gwyneth feels the anger kick at her insides again.

“Maybe,” she says, forcing it down. “Maybe.”

There is a long silence. The first of the morning traffic starts to go by below the window.

“You know you hurt Nika a great deal,” says her mother, and Gwyneth hangs her head, wishing she could just crumble into dust. That millstone is grinding on her gut again.

“Yeah,” she says, barely even whispering. “I know.”

*​

After some coffee and a shower, and when the shops have started to open, Gwyneth goes out. She has a wedding to attend in a couple of hours, and she owes it to Nika and Hilbert to not show up looking like, well, like she does now. Her mother agrees with her, and so with some of her money in hand Gwyneth and Zelda set out to make themselves presentable.

She finds a hairdresser's minutes after it opens, and manages to get herself seen right away. Her hair is a complete mess, and she is sick of it getting in her eyes, so she has one side cut brutally short and the other not much longer, and the whole heavily bleached to get rid of the ugly remnants of the last dye job. This, as the stylist warns her, is kind of terrible for her hair, but at this point she couldn't care less as long as it stops filling her peripheral vision with fields of rust. It also takes a considerable amount of time, although she thinks it's probably okay. Her good dress is being pressed back at the hotel; all she needs now are shoes that aren't her beat-up old boots and some fresh bandages and make-up. She can do that quickly enough. It's not like the shoes need to be all that nice.

When she leaves the hairdresser's and puts Zelda back on her shoulder, she runs her antennae over Gwyneth's new hairstyle and rattles anxiously to herself, picking up harsh new scents and colours and unsure of what it means.

“Still me, a*shole,” Gwyneth tells her. “Not getting rid of me that easily.”

The friendly hostility in her voice seems to do the trick, and Zelda settles down, reassured. Gwyneth almost laughs. It's nice to have someone around who gets it.

On her way back, she almost buys cigarettes, but then she remembers the staff at the Pokémon Centre talking about Zelda's inflamed lung and decides against it. She's done without smoking ever since she was evicted, when it became more expensive than it was worth. She can keep going without it just fine.

Just outside the Belmante, her phone rings.

“Hello?”

“Hey, man. It's Shane.” (It's Shane again.) “Just checkin' in, Gwyn. How's things?”

Gwyneth runs her fingers through her new hair and sighs. She has no clue how things are. Where would she even start?

“I'm here,” she says, unable to think of anything else. “I'm in Humilau.”

“You made it?” He can't keep the disbelief out of his voice. “You're actually there?”

“Wasn't easy, but – yeah. I made it.”

(In the alley behind the video game store, the cigarette dangles loosely from his hands, a finger-twitch away from falling. Gwyneth in Humilau. It seems impossible.)

“Well,” says Shane. “Congratulations, Gwyn. That's quite somethin'.”

“Hah. Yeah. Yeah, it really is.”

“You found the place and everything?”

“Yeah. I … my mom's here. I'm with her.”

“Really.” Shane doesn't seem to know what to think of this. Gwyneth is with him there. She never thought she'd see the day, either. “And you're okay?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Gwyneth looks around. The street the Belmante is on is very fancy. Palm trees up and down the way, expensive hotels and boutiques. It's the kind of place you can buy your way into when you're one of the top professional trainers in the world. It's not Gwyneth's kind of place, but that's okay. Her mother deserves something good, after everything. “Yeah, we're all okay,” she says. “Haven't slept in a while, but I'll make it through today all right.”

“Good to hear, man, good to hear.” A pause. Gwyneth gets the feeling Shane is trying to say something that he cannot express. “And what about … after?” he asks, eventually, and she sighs.

“I dunno, dude. Let me just get through this, and then ask me again.”

He chuckles, although neither of them think she said anything very funny.

“Fair enough, man. Fair enough. Good luck, Gwyn. 'S a hard thing you're doin', and maybe I don't quite get it, but good luck.”

Honest words from an honest man. Gwyneth will take it. She can't even be angry about that.

“Thanks, dude,” she says. “I'll talk to you later.”

“Bye, Gwyn.”

“Bye.”

She returns her phone to the pocket of her ruined jacket and rests her head on her knuckle for a moment.

Then she straightens up and takes Zelda and goes inside.

*​

Back in the hotel room, Gwyneth takes Zelda into the bathroom and gently cleans the accumulated grime from her shell, a process to which she submits with surprisingly good grace for a creature that has never even heard of baths before. Her burnt side is looking much better now, though Marsden said something about it not fully healing until she next moults. Gwyneth imagines throwing off your old skin, letting it carry with it all your scars and wounds and leaving you clean and new, and smiles grimly. It's a nice idea. Pity it doesn't actually work like that.

After that, she collects her dress, changes, and re-bandages her hand. The wound still looks nasty, and Gwyneth knows that she's going to have to see another doctor about it soon. Dr. ze'Naarat knew what she was doing, but her treatment did sort of assume Gwyneth wasn't going to try to hike through White Forest. She's probably already screwed up all the good work that ze'Naarat did back in the Centre.

She covers it up so she doesn't have to think about it and does her make-up, slowly. It's been a long time since she put more than cursory effort into her appearance. When she's done, she looks in the mirror and raises her eyebrows. There's only so much she can do about the bruises, but if you ignore them she looks slightly better than normal. At least the zits she just popped are mostly invisible now.

“Hello, Gwyneth,” she says, and watches Gwyneth say it back.

She turns away from her reflection, disgusted, and waits for her mother to return from whatever last-minute arrangements she is involved with.

And then she does, looking elegant in a floral dress, and finally it's time. She has the hotel call a cab, and sends Gwyneth and Zelda on their way to the church.

“You're not coming?” asks Gwyneth, when she says this, and she shakes her head.

“Not yet,” she replies. “I'm meeting up with your brother.”

She doesn't ask Gwyneth to come with her. Maybe she thinks she hasn't earned it, or maybe she really does see just how painful that would be for her. Either way, Gwyneth isn't complaining. She just nods.

“Okay,” she says.

Her mother hesitates, looks at her with eyes that Gwyneth struggles to read.

“You're taking this very well,” she says.

Gwyneth bites back a harsh, vicious laugh.

“I guess so,” she replies.

“It's … it's not like you think,” says her mother. “Nika wanted answers, after you left. So did your brother.” Gwyneth can't suppress a snort there, and gets a parental glare in return. “No, really, Gwyneth.”

“Yeah, okay,” she says, angry at herself for spoiling things. “Sorry.”

Her mother sighs.

“We were all worried,” she says. “Nika came to ask Hilbert about you, Hilbert came to ask her. It just – it just happened, Gwyneth. Nobody meant to hurt you.”

The words go in like a knife, swift and brutal. So it's her fault, then. Hilbert and Nika, united by a need for answers and a lost loved one. Searching for Gwyneth in each other's arms. Until, in the end, Gwyneth faded and all they needed was each other.

Or so she hopes. The thought that she might have failed even to make Nika move on is actually more unbearable than the thought of her marrying Hilbert, in its own way. Gwyneth pushes it away and smiles without feeling.

“Okay,” she says. “That makes sense.”

Her mother doesn't say anything. She looks like she might, but at the last minute she shakes her head and just tells her that the cab's here. Gwyneth says okay, she'll see her later, and takes Zelda downstairs to the waiting taxi.

As they drive, she realises her mother didn't mention the scars on her arms, although she's not naïve enough to think she didn't notice.

They arrive early. A lot of other people do as well, hanging around in the sunlit churchyard and talking. They must have done a good job keeping this under wraps; there aren't any photographers. Many of those present Gwyneth knows; others, she recognises from pictures. The Elite Four are here, and some of the Gym Leaders, and the current Champion, Iris, who once beat Nika in Opelucid's Gym. And so are Nika's friends, Aster and Leo and Georgina and Dmitri and the others, and assorted relatives, including of course Aunt Natalya. Gwyneth feels all their eyes upon her as she gets out of the car, and sees people mutter. Yep, she thinks savagely. It's her. She came crawling back after all.

Hilbert is not here, not yet, and nor are Nika or her parents. (Gwyneth doesn't bother wondering why. Hilbert probably has a country to save or something.) But Cheren and Bianca are, and Bianca is about the only person she recognises who isn't looking at her like she's a stain on a new carpet, so Gwyneth drifts towards her with a strained smile.

“Hey,” she says, trying to be casual. “Um. Long time, huh?”

“It sure has been!” says Bianca eagerly. She looks just the same as she always has, energetic and delighted to be alive. It makes her very beautiful in a way that makes Gwyneth faintly angry. “Where have you been, Gwyneth?”

“Oh, just … in Aspertia.” She shrugs. “Working in the Pokémon Centre.”

“Have you like started training again?”

“Huh? Oh. No. Zelda would fight her own shadow if she thought it looked at her funny, but she doesn't battle.” Gwyneth reaches up without thinking the way she used to do with Blossom, runs her fingers along the side of Zelda's carapace. “She just hangs around and eats all my food.”

Zelda chitters in what sounds uncannily like self-satisfaction. Bianca laughs, and when she does that it's hard not to smile as well.

“Are you still working with Professor Juniper?” she asks, and Bianca nods seriously.

“Yep! There's been a lot of new pokémon showing up recently. Not sure why. It's interesting, but maybe worrying. Like the oshawott census shows their numbers are down since other water-types started moving into their territory.”

Gwyneth snaps her fingers.

“Oshawott,” she says. “Did you ever hire a trainer named Saadiyyah to come with you when you went out to those islands?”

“Yeah, actually.” She looks surprised. “You know her?”

Gwyneth smiles.

“Yeah,” she says. “I ran into her on the way here. She was going to that new tournament thing in Driftveil.”

“Oh yeah, that starts today, doesn't it? That's why Clay didn't come. Well, she seemed good. I'm sure she'll do fine. Uh, maybe not as well as you, Cheren, obviously―”

“That's all right, Bianca, I think I'll probably do just fine without your approval,” he says, stepping forward. He has been silent so far, watching. He looks just the same, too, although he also looks better; he always seemed like a kid dressing up as a bank manager before, but now he's old and tall enough to pull the look off. “How are you, Gwyneth?”

His smile is forced. It's okay: so is hers.

“I'm all right,” she says. She can see how hard he is concentrating on not looking at her arms. If it was someone else, she might be appreciative, or annoyed; since it's him, she's slightly amused at his discomfort. “You're making a name for yourself, huh. The kids at the Centre say you're real tough.”

“And they're right, of course,” says Bianca loyally. Cheren, for his part, pauses just long enough to communicate that he knows the comment isn't entirely positive. One point to Gwyneth.

“Thanks,” he says. “So. You got Shane's message?”

“I did, yeah.” She returns his gaze levelly. “Had some trouble getting here, but I managed.”

“I can see that,” he says, and scores a point of his own.

“So are you like best man or whatever?” she asks, changing the subject, and Cheren nods.

“Yes. For some reason.”

“Well, you're like Hilbert's oldest friend,” suggests Bianca. “That probably has something to do with it, Cheren.”

“I know.” He seems a little agitated. Gwyneth doesn't think it has to do with her. “Would you excuse me?” he asks. “It looks like Juniper's just arrived.”

“Oh,” says Bianca. “Sure. I'll catch up.”

He rushes off without another word, and Bianca watches him go over the top of her glasses.

“He gets nervous,” she says absently, as if to herself. “I don't think he means anything by it, Gwyneth.”

Gwyneth blinks.

“Huh?”

“You know.” Bianca turns to face her again. “Are you okay? Really, I mean?”

Gwyneth feels herself staring. She'd forgotten about this. In her mind, Bianca is always the clueless girl who somehow fought on through her trainer journey anyway. But that's not who she is really, is it? She's as sharp as Cheren, just in a different way. She went out into the world to find her own truth, and she succeeded.

“I … well.” It's not a yes or a no, but it speaks volumes. Bianca puts a kindly hand on her arm.

“Can I tell you something I promised Cheren I wouldn't tell you?” she asks.

“Uh, sure. Shoot.”

“I'm not convinced yet.” She looks across the churchyard at Nika's family, mingling with graceless awe among Hilbert's League friends. “I don't know, Gwyneth, maybe it's just me being silly again like usual, but … okay, look. What I want is for everyone to make their own choices and be happy. I don't know if both of those things are happening here today.”

Gwyneth's pulse quickens.

“Meaning?” she asks, but Bianca shakes her head.

“That's all, Gwyneth.” She looks past her, towards Juniper. “I better say hi. See you in a bit.”

“Okay,” says Gwyneth. “See you later.”

She watches Bianca go, then turns away again so that Juniper doesn't see her and come over to talk. Right now she doesn't think she's quite up to that, not with Bianca's words still ringing in her ears. What I want is for everyone to make their own choices and be happy. I don't know if both of those things are happening here today. Meaning – that this is rushed? Is that it? In all honesty, it is weirdly soon for Nika to be getting married, considering everything. Gwyneth doesn't think it's just her who sees that. And what was it her mother said? That they got together because they were looking for her? And …

Well. Don't get ahead of yourself, Gwyneth. You're here to watch and support. Bianca wants people to make their own choices? Nika's made hers. And Gwyneth will turn up to support Nika's choices, every single time. It's the least she can do.

She hears a deep, throaty caw from above, and along with half the guests looks up to see a huge black shape descending from the roof of the church. Zelde shrieks, and Gwyneth takes her quickly in her arm as Hekate lands on the churchyard wall beside her, bone charms clacking as they settle.

“Hey, Hecks,” says Gwyneth, smiling. Hekate croaks and stretches out her neck to be petted as if it was only yesterday they last saw one another. “Hang on a minute. Zelda? This is Hekate. She's cool. You two are gonna be friends. Got it?”

Zelda clicks and eyes Hekate with distrust, but she doesn't scream or fire poison stings at her, and Gwyneth puts her back on her shoulder.

“Okay,” she says. “Now I got a hand free.” She rubs Hekate's leathery head and neck and the giant bird leans into her hand, eyes closed and something that might charitably be called purring rumbling from her throat. Gwyneth thinks people might be staring at her, but it's okay, they'll get bored in a minute. There are other pokémon here – Cheren's emboar, Bianca's musharna. A few others close enough to various guests that invitations have been extended to them. There'll be some open space at the back of the church behind the pews for them all to sit during the ceremony, so they don't block anyone's view.

“Where's your girl?” Gwyneth asks Hekate, and follows her eye up to the roof, where another mandibuzz is perched like a gargoyle in the shadow of the steeple. She sees movement and realises to her astonishment that there's a vullaby there too, shuffling around its mother's talons. “You got a baby now?” Gwyneth asks, and Hekate gives her a smug yes, I made it myself kind of look. “Yeah,” agrees Gwyneth. “'S real impressive.”

Hekate cackles and hurls herself back up into the air, lifting herself half with wingpower and half with timed pulses of darkness that compensate for her massive weight, until she finds an updraught and rides it up to join her family on the roof. Gwyneth watches her and does not know what to feel.

Better get used to that, she tells herself. It's going to be a hell of an emotional day, and at this point she's been awake for over twenty-four hours. If she gets through it all without either crying or shouting at someone she'll be impressed.

Actually, she thinks, probably it's going to be both at the same time.

She hears a whine like an engine screaming, and closes her eyes. She knows that sound. And that means it's finally time.

Gwyneth turns with the rest of the crowd and watches as the car pulls up and the dragon drops out of the sky above it to land at exactly the same moment as Hilbert steps out.

Tall. Handsome. An unreadable smile that looks no different on his wedding day than in the posters of him kids put up on their walls. Yes: this is Hilbert ze'Haraan, Unova's foremost trainer and the chosen champion of Reshiram, the white dragon of truth.

The two of them look posed, somehow, even with Gwyneth's mother getting out of the car behind them. Reshiram folds its wings back along its arms, then drops lightly to all fours and stalks into the yard, Hilbert at its side. It looks bigger than it is; it's only really about ten feet tall standing upright, like Zekrom, but those wings go on for miles, and something about it seems hot and dangerous even when its tail is unlit. And then Hilbert walks up alongside it, looking all nonchalant, and somehow it's just normal and everyone starts talking again, welcoming him and congratulating him on his big day.

He thanks them graciously, quietly, and then he sees Gwyneth standing at the back and his smile actually slips for a moment in his shock. Did her mother not tell him she was here? Maybe she wanted it to be a surprise. Either way, he's coming over here, although thankfully Reshiram is staying near the gate; Hilbert must remember she doesn't really like it.

He stands in front of her now, silent, looking at her. Everyone is staring. Yeah, it's me, the f*ck-up little sister, Gwyneth shouts, in the privacy of her own head. I bothered coming after all.

She looks into his eyes, sees him seeing her. She can no more tell what he sees now than she could ten years ago. Gwyneth can read most people, but Hilbert is either completely opaque or completely empty. It's hard to know which.

“Hello, Gwyneth,” he says, in his calm, deep voice.

“Hey, Hilly,” she says. She always has some vague hopes that the childhood nickname will annoy him, but it never does. “So I heard you were getting married and figured I oughta show up.”

Hilbert glances over his shoulder. The guests hurriedly make a show of talking amongst themselves, and he looks back at her again.

“Are you all right?” he asks.

Gwyneth laughs bitterly.

“Sure I am,” she says. “I just walked into a door, is all. Like twice.”

“That's not what I meant.” Hilbert moves closer. He isn't smiling any more. “You went missing,” he tells her.

“What do you care?”

There is a long silence. Gwyneth has plenty of time to regret saying it.

“You're my sister,” Hilbert tells her.

She has a choice. She is tired and in a substantial amount of pain, which makes the easy option so much more attractive than the other, but it is a choice.

Gwyneth considers the two paths open to her, and sighs.

It has to happen sometime, right?

“I'm … sorry,” she says, with difficulty. “I haven't been … very good at being that.”

Hilbert has a choice too. He could, with his terrible saintly goodness, step forward and forgive her, and Gwyneth would not be able to stop herself from hating him even more. Or he could accept the apology the way it was intended, and prove he is in some way still her brother.

“Yeah,” he says, and Gwyneth feels a heaviness settle on her. “You haven't.”

It's not a bad heaviness. It isn't a good heaviness, either. It just is. Now she has to think of Hilbert as a person, and that's going to be hard, but it's probably for the best.

“I think maybe I've been a bad brother, too,” he goes on. “I'm also sorry.”

The corner of Gwyneth's mouth turns up a little.

“No maybe about it,” she says. “You have.” She forces herself to hold out her hand. “Truce?”

Hesitation. Then:

“Truce,” agrees Hilbert, and shakes it. “I don't think I understand you, Gwyneth. But I'd like to.”

Gwyneth snorts.

“It's not all that,” she says. “Congratulations, Hilbert.”

“Thank you.” Someone Gwyneth assumes must be the priest appears at his shoulder, and Hilbert nods at him. “All right,” he says. “It's time.”

Gwyneth takes a deep breath.

“Hilbert.”

“Yes?”

“Do you love Nika?”

She asks it with a quiet intensity he isn't used to hearing from anyone but himself. He looks like he might laugh, and then, when he sees her eyes and realises it isn't a joke, somewhat startled.

“Yes, of course,” he says.

“And she loves you?”

“Yes.”

Gwyneth listens carefully and she watches his face, and then with a feeling like something irreplaceable is tearing deep inside her she makes the hardest decision she has ever made.

“Okay,” she says, nodding. “Okay, let's go in.”

*​

 

[Cutlerine]

Inside, the church is cool and blotched with colour from the light shining through the stained-glass windows. Gwyneth sees stories in them that she cannot identify. It's okay. They're not really meant for her. Someone else's Aân Hen.

The guests file in and take up their seats, Hilbert's on one side and Nika's on the other. The big pokémon – the emboar, the musharna, Hekate and her family, Reshiram and Hilbert's serperior, along with Iris' haxorus – wait patiently at the back, and the small ones sit in the pews alongside their human partners. Zelda stays on Gwyneth's shoulder, eyeing up the bigger pokémon and rattling aggressively at them until Gwyneth tells her she can go and sit with them if she doesn't shut up. Maybe she gets the threat, maybe she just gets the tone; whichever it is, she quietens down.

Nika's mother arrives and sits at the front, on the other side. She doesn't notice Gwyneth, which suits her just fine. A little while later, Gwyneth sees a pale shape pass silently through the doors out of the corner of her eye, and knows that N is here. She resists the urge to look back, not wanting to draw attention to him, and imagines him sitting unobtrusively among the pokémon, half-concealed by the bulk of Cheren's emboar.

The priest places a sheet of paper on his lectern and has a brief word with the organist. Hilbert takes up his position.

There are noises outside, and a whispered murmur, she's here, and then the music begins and Gwyneth sits on her hands to stop them shaking as with everyone else she turns her head – and sees her.

Nika is so beautiful. Gwyneth knows she doesn't see it, is hung up on her weight and the asymmetric tilt of her nose, but she is, and today as she and her father walk down the aisle everyone in the church can see it too.

She makes Gwyneth's heart ache along with the rest of her. Nika. Here in the same room as her again after all this time. She looks exactly the same, and everything is different.

She sees Gwyneth looking and for a moment they lock eyes, Nika's mouth opening slightly in shock, but she recovers herself quickly and moves on, keeping her gaze forward.

Gwyneth's mother touches her hand, questioningly. Gwyneth nods, I'm okay, and returns her attention to Nika, approaching Hilbert now, face turned so she can't see it. She can see Hilbert, though. He is smiling that enigmatic smile, and it makes her want to take back her apology and break his teeth. Doesn't he get it? This is Nika. Not some trainer facing off against him in a tournament battle, not some journalist who wants a quote for an article, but Nika. It's Nika's wedding day. Don't you dare ruin this, Hilbert.

Gwyneth uncurls her fingers from the edge of the pew and puts her hand firmly back in her lap. Breathe. It's okay.

There is an opening hymn. Apparently it's that kind of wedding. Zelda, who has coped admirably with the organ, finds this a little too much, and Gwyneth has an excuse not to sing along, holding her close and muttering to her instead. She keeps her calm until the end, and returns her to her shoulder when the priest asks everyone to sit.

She watches Hilbert and Nika, tastes the excitement in the air. She listens to the priest and eyes the guests, paying particular attention to Nika's parents. She takes deep, shaky breaths, and waits.

It's going to be okay, she tells herself, without conviction. It's going to be okay.

The priest introduces the bride and groom, as if anyone here doesn't know their names. He moves through his preamble, and Gwyneth doesn't know if this is going agonisingly slowly or all too fast; it's both, it's neither, and Nika is up there by the altar with Hilbert, and as the tension grows, as everyone's excitement fills the room like a choking fog, Gwyneth feels certain her head is going to explode.

The moment comes.

“And now,” says the priest, “if anyone knows of any reason why these two people should not be wed, speak now or forever hold your peace.”

There is a long, unnaturally extended moment of quiet, and a little nervous ripple of laughter. Something beautiful has been shown to everyone here, like an ornament of blown glass, and this is the moment where someone, if they dare, can swing a hammer and send the shards flying across the room. And yes, there are people looking at Gwyneth, too, Cheren and Bianca and even Hilbert, out of the corner of his eye; and her mother and Nika's parents, who have noticed she is here; all of them staring and wondering and probably hoping that she says nothing―

Gwyneth breathes in. She breathes out.

She does not move. The priest smiles a little in relief; he does not know Gwyneth, but he has sensed the atmosphere.

“Well,” he says, and Zelda screams.

The noise is ear-splitting after the calm, particularly when she is right up against Gwyneth's head like that; it echoes off the walls and sends Hekate's daughter into a twittering panic. Everyone stares – Nika stares – and Gwyneth is about to snatch Zelda from her shoulder, red-faced and mortified, when she decides no. She is not going to apologise. She made a decision out there before she came in and she is going to stand by it.

Slowly, half-convinced this isn't happening, she stands up.

“Thanks, Zelda,” she says. “So to finish that thought, I object.”

Time seems to freeze. She sees Cheren flinch and cover his eyes, shaking his head; Bianca staring, encouraging or condemning, who knows; Nika's mother and father, horrified and furious; her own mother, pale and shaking; Hilbert, for once completely stunned; Nika herself, wide-eyed, blank.

Gwyneth breathes out. She is not afraid. She is not even angry. She is having a hard time putting a name to this feeling, but it's there, and it's not going anywhere.

“Nika,” she says. “I owe you an apology. A big one. I'm sorry. I did a bad thing running off like that, and it was one hundred per cent my fault. I'm an a*shole, I guess. Not an excuse, just an explanation. It's something I'm trying to work on.”

Nobody has jumped up to intervene yet. Nobody even seems to have breathed. It's as if they are all as uncertain as she is that this is something that is actually happening.

“I'm not saying marry me,” she goes on. “I'm not even saying take me back, you know? What I am saying, if my advice means anything any more, is don't marry him.” She nods at Hilbert. He shudders slightly, and Gwyneth senses Reshiram shifting on its haunches at the back of the room. She doesn't care: she keeps going, gambles everything on this one hunch that she's been nursing since she spoke to Hilbert outside. “I'm not claiming that really you love me, or that I have some kinda special insight into you or anything. But I don't think you two love each other. Not for me to say how all this happened, exactly, I'm not saying I know all the facts, but I am saying I think I know you two, and I think that maybe you should know that you don't have to do this. If you don't want to.”

She stops. It isn't a great speech, but it's hers, and nobody interrupted. She'll take that, any day of the week.

Nika moves her head slightly, and suddenly all eyes are on her.

“You've got a f*cking nerve, Gwyneth,” she says, cold and angry, and Gwyneth stands still, lets the wave break on her face. “You disappeared. For eighteen months. And now you show up here at my wedding and ask―?”

She breaks off suddenly, and for a long moment there is silence. The priest hovers awkwardly in the background, unsure of what to do.

“You're right,” she says suddenly. “You are an a*shole. And I'm not marrying you, Gwyneth, you've got that damn right.” An outward breath; Nika's parents seem to relax slightly. “But,” she continues, and then falters. Gwyneth is utterly still, heart hammering on her ribs like it wants out of there. Is this it? Did it work? Has she given Nika the opening she so desperately needs? “But …” Nika bites her lip. “I – look, I'm sorry, I'm not marrying you either, Hilbert.”

That one gets a shocked gasp. Her mother looks like she might faint; her father stares, frozen. Gwyneth does not do anything at all.

Hilbert looks at Nika, and Gwyneth sees the first faint signs of that smile playing around the corners of his lips.

“I'm sorry,” says Nika again, turning to him. “I …” She sighs. “I shouldn't have let it go this far. I just thought, after …” She shakes her head. “I'm sorry.”

He smiles, beatific, unbearable, and he nods, and as everyone watches Hilbert ze'Haraan, unchosen for the first time since he was born, walks calmly down the aisle and out of the church into the light.

*​

“Gwyneth.”

She turns. It's Nika, approaching from the direction of the church. Gwyneth is standing by the steps leading down onto the beach, staring out at the ceaseless motion of the waves and stroking Zelda. After Hilbert left, the ceremony collapsed in tatters and she couldn't stay; she thought either Nika's father was going to kill her or her head was going to come apart in pieces like a smashed melon.

“Nika,” she says, a little afraid. “I'm sorry.”

“Yeah, well.” Nika folds her arms. “Apology accepted. You did what had to be done, I guess.”

Not what Gwyneth was expecting. She hesitates.

“Okay,” she says.

They look at each other for a while.

“What you did was inexcusable,” says Nika. “You really are an a*shole. And I can't go through that again, Gwyneth. I … I can't.”

It sounds like an apology. Gwyneth nods; she understands.

“It's okay,” she says. “I wasn't asking you to come back.”

“Weren't you?” Nika's gaze shifts, becomes intent and piercing. “Because Gwyneth, you're an a*shole, sure, but … you are probably the best a*shole out of all the a*sholes in the world. And I … god f*cking damn it, Gwyneth, if you really are working on it, if you're really trying to change, then I can't help but think maybe it's not impossible to forgive you.”

Gwyneth takes a beat. Everything seems suddenly very slow and very clear. The sun, the sand, Zelda on her shoulder, Nika.

What she says now could change the whole future course of her life. It's terrifying. She speaks anyway.

“I walked here from Aspertia, Nika,” she says. “I got poisoned and I accidentally caught a venipede who got hurt when someone tried to mug me and I got beaten up by some guy in White Forest. Maybe that's just an obsession. Maybe that's inexcusable too. But I … I came a long way and I met a lot of people, and most of them were better to me than I deserved.” She closes her eyes. Names and faces float before her. Shane. Maxine. Saadiyyah. Rood. Concordia. Tor. Ze'Naarat. Nick. Cheryl. Zelda. “Nika,” she says. “I think you know how I feel. I think I might be different now, too, but I'm not gonna ask you to take a chance on that. I'm not gonna refuse you the choice either, like I did when I ran away. I'm gonna stand here and let you make the call, and then if you say no I'm gonna just get out of your way and go.”

She says it calmly, but after she's done speaking she holds her breath. The beach seems eerily empty all of a sudden, as if this is somehow being staged. In front of her, Nika furrows her perfect brow and sighs.

“I think you know how I feel too,” she says. “But like I said, I can't go through that again, Gwyneth. Nobody is worth that.”

“I understand.” Gwyneth feels like she might choke. “Good luck, Nika. Good―”

“I'm not done.” She has already started to turn away; Nika grabs her shoulder and turns her back again. “Nobody's worth that, and that's why I have two conditions,” she says. “One, you have to see a doctor, Gwyneth. No more excuses.”

Gwyneth nods. Her blood seems to have turned to electricity, quick and painful in her veins. Something in her screams to argue but a larger part tells it to shut the hell up.

“And the other?” she asks, or gabbles really, through lips that move too fast for her voice to keep up.

“Don't die,” says Nika, pleading. Her hand is tight on Gwyneth's shoulder. “I'm sorry, it feels so selfish to ask, but please, Annie. Don't die.”

They both hear her mistake. It's okay. They both knew how she felt anyway.

Gwyneth swallows.

“I think maybe 'Gwyneth' is okay for now,” she says. “Until … until. And” (the bitter thing inside of her is in full bloom, its flowers whispering that she cannot make that promise) “I promise, Nika. I won't die.”

She can promise, and she does. F*ck the bitter thing. F*ck the poison. Gwyneth is a bad person and she is so sick of it. She will be better. She will.

Nika looks into her eyes and sees the truth of her belief.

“I missed you so much,” she says, and her voice sounds like Gwyneth's heart feels.

“I missed you too,” says Gwyneth.

They do not kiss. They do not embrace. There will be a time for such things, and it will not be any time soon. They have a lot of work to do before they get there, if they ever manage it at all.

They stare, until Nika looks away.

“I think we better go talk to our parents,” she says. “And Hilbert. I … kinda abandoned everybody to come look for you.”

Gwyneth makes a pained face.

“Yeah,” she says slowly. “I think, uh, I think I might get murdered if I show up there again.”

Nika smiles.

“Only one way to find out,” she says, which Gwyneth cannot deny is true, and they start to walk slowly back towards the church.

On Gwyneth's shoulder, Zelda rattles happily, as if this was all her doing.

“I can't believe you have a pokémon,” says Nika.

“Neither can I,” says Gwyneth. “But I guess I'm really glad I do.”

Nika makes a noise that is halfway to a laugh.

“Yeah,” she says. “I guess I am too.”



There we go! Fifteen chapters -- or fourteen and an interlude -- or thirteen and an interlude and then another one -- and it's all done. Much shorter than most of my other fics, but also, I think, my favourite. If you've been reading this, thank you. I think it's probably pretty much the best thing I've ever written, out of both my fanfiction and my original writing. This story has meant an awful lot to me, and I hope you got as much out of reading it as I did out of writing it.

 

[diamondpearl876]

Hey! By the time I was able to catch up on the fic, you'd posted up to the end! So I was glad for my business in that I got to binge read the rest of it, and oh boy, what a ride it was.

I'm sure I've said this in other reviews already, but despite how emotional and exhausting you mentioned it was to write this fic, I appreciate you doing it anyway. It can't be easy to delve deep into a character like Gwyneth, whether you relate to her or not. And it's not always easy delving into topics such as depression, self-harm, dissociation, etc. Yet you did it perfectly and never once did I get the impression that you were trying to shy away from them for any reason. I respect that a lot.

Similarly, not a single detail of Gwyneth's road trip felt wasted. All of it either served the overall melancholic tone of the fic, emphasized the tension between Gwyneth and the minor characters, or gave us an even deeper glimpse into Gwyneth's character.

More props for venipede. For a pokemon main character that can't talk, she had a fair amount of depth to her character as well. Her little quirks were always a treat to read, and I'm a fan of the name Zelda, heh. Oh, and her screech during the wedding actually made me gasp out loud. I don't think Gwyneth even yelled at her for it. After what happened, I'm sure she's thankful that the lil devil venipede did such a thing.

I didn't quite see the end coming, and that's in regards to both N and Nika/Hilbert's wedding (or lack thereof). I vaguely thought that it was a bit coincidental, but... N and Gwyneth were heading in the same direction toward the same destination, so really, it's not that far-fetched. It was just a huge surprise. The part where Nika declared she couldn't marry Hilbert had the opposite problem: it wasn't surprising because it was heavily hinted at how the two didn't actually want to be together, and Nika's actual declaration came abruptly. That's really my only complaint out of everything - her initial reaction to Gwyneth's apology speech was as angry as I anticipated it would be after everything, and the conversation between the two of them afterward had the perfect amount of tension as well as affection.

Again, thank you for writing this. Looking forward to starting Arbitrary Execution and 80 Days next. Please keep writing forever.

 

[Cutlerine]

I'm sure I've said this in other reviews already, but despite how emotional and exhausting you mentioned it was to write this fic, I appreciate you doing it anyway. It can't be easy to delve deep into a character like Gwyneth, whether you relate to her or not. And it's not always easy delving into topics such as depression, self-harm, dissociation, etc. Yet you did it perfectly and never once did I get the impression that you were trying to shy away from them for any reason. I respect that a lot.

Thanks! I wrote Go Home because I was feeling rough and wanted to complain about it, I guess, but it turned into a whole lot more than that and I'm just ... really glad that you and others liked it. I honestly think it's one of the best things I've ever written, if not the best thing I've ever written, and I'm pleased that it's been received well.

Similarly, not a single detail of Gwyneth's road trip felt wasted. All of it either served the overall melancholic tone of the fic, emphasized the tension between Gwyneth and the minor characters, or gave us an even deeper glimpse into Gwyneth's character.

Good to know! Sometimes, writing something like this, you kinda wonder if it's holding together properly, because often each segment seems to fracture into a great many very short scenes and maybe when you arrange them side by side they add up to something and maybe they don't. I'm glad to hear that in the end, they did.

More props for venipede. For a pokemon main character that can't talk, she had a fair amount of depth to her character as well. Her little quirks were always a treat to read, and I'm a fan of the name Zelda, heh. Oh, and her screech during the wedding actually made me gasp out loud. I don't think Gwyneth even yelled at her for it. After what happened, I'm sure she's thankful that the lil devil venipede did such a thing.

Griselda as a name was something I chose mostly for etymological reasons: the 'elda' means 'battle', appropriately enough, and it is the same element as turns up in Hilda/Hilbert (derived from Hildebert), and of course the 'Gris' means 'grey'. Obviously I couldn't resist a name so perfectly fitted to the BW/2 world, and the fact that it can be shortened to Zelda was just the icing on the cake. At any rate, I'm pleased she came across so well; I really wanted her to be a proper supporting character, since Gwyneth spends so much of the story alone but for her, and it's great that she ended up having enough personality to pull that off.

I didn't quite see the end coming, and that's in regards to both N and Nika/Hilbert's wedding (or lack thereof). I vaguely thought that it was a bit coincidental, but... N and Gwyneth were heading in the same direction toward the same destination, so really, it's not that far-fetched. It was just a huge surprise. The part where Nika declared she couldn't marry Hilbert had the opposite problem: it wasn't surprising because it was heavily hinted at how the two didn't actually want to be together, and Nika's actual declaration came abruptly. That's really my only complaint out of everything - her initial reaction to Gwyneth's apology speech was as angry as I anticipated it would be after everything, and the conversation between the two of them afterward had the perfect amount of tension as well as affection.

You've hit on the two weakest point of the whole fic there, yeah. I knew i wanted to have Gwyneth fail and then be saved -- like usual -- by the kindness of strangers, because part of the point of Go Home is that the world is terrible but also the only place you'll find any real material goodness. And N is like Gwyneth, doomed by obsession, but by the time of BW2 (and therefore this story) he's grown into a more rounded person, so he seemed like thematically the best person for the job -- as well as the only one who conveniently had a giant magic dragon to get her up the last few miles to Humilau. I tried to make it seem as likely as possible and not too much like a massive coincidence, but the truth is that sometimes you just get lucky, I guess, and I can't really offer a better justification for it than that.

As for Nika breaking off the wedding ... yeah. I think that by the time I was halfway through Go Home, I'd decided how it was going to end, because honestly as much of a jerk as she is Gwyneth deserved something approaching a happy ending, and I kinda figured that that was probably showing in my writing to the point where I didn't need to make it a secret any more. Like, part of the point of the interlude chapter, apart from finishing off the backstory and putting a little space between Gwyneth giving up on the beach and then regaining her momentum again, was to show that Gwyneth and Nika work together, in all the best ways. I ended up thinking that the big climactic question shouldn't be "will Nika marry Hilbert?" because obviously no, she won't, she'll take Gwyneth back in a really uneasy, awkward way, and so instead I chose to make that question be "will Gwyneth manage to speak up and save herself?" Because in the end, that felt like what Gwyneth's road trip was really about -- whether she could break the habit of a lifetime and believe that there was something good in her after all, that she really did deserve to live. So I put a lot into making the moment where Gwyneth (almost didn't) object the climax of the story, and took some of the weight off Nika's actual response.

Did that work as well as I hoped it would? I'm not sure. I think I had the right idea, but I also agree with you that there's something off there, probably in how abruptly Nika swings from saying "I won't marry you, Gwyneth" to saying "or you, Hilbert". Something for me to think about, for sure.

Again, thank you for writing this. Looking forward to starting Arbitrary Execution and 80 Days next. Please keep writing forever.

Thank you for responding so consistently and thoughtfully! I hope you enjoy my other stories, if and when you get around to them. And finally -- 'forever' is a hell of a long time, but I'm certainly gonna give it a shot!

 

[ikap]

Thank you for posting this onto FFN, because without that I probably would have never found this story. It was a wonderful read.

Im probably gonna update on my thoughts after i can make sense of them.

 

[Ambyssin]

Okay, so after seeing a few people recommending this on the Discord I decided to take a peak at the opening chapter. And it's certainly quite intriguing. My impression is that we've got a story focused on familial ties to some extent. But there's a "six degrees of separation" thing going on here. It's a very grounded premise. Plenty of folks end up estranged from their families and face an odd situation where there's a big event they're expected to show up for. Though, given Gwyneth's situation, I feel like a large part of this will be about whether or not she can even make it to Humilau. I have no idea how accurate that prediction is. But I guess I'll find out in the coming weeks. Along with the whole premise talk, it is interesting that this kind of seems to be a "glimpse into the mind of an NPC" sort of thing. Like, we deal with so many inconsequential NPC's in this franchise and I know I've never stopped to think about them or give them any sorts of headcanons. I've just beaten their Pokémon and taken their money. So I'm very curious how this will play out, especially since you made Gwyneth Hilbert's sibling.

As for my usual, scatterbrained chapter thoughts...

-So, you start with what feels like a cold opening. Most of it is framed rather vaguely, but the conversation b/w Shane & Gwyneth gives me some background to work off of. Namely, Gwyneth’s distant from her family and has been “off the radar” so to speak. And that, she must be connected to one of the player characters from Gen V, since Cheren gets name dropped. The wedding is curious, and I can’t quite tell if Gwyneth likes her brother enough to want to go or dreads the thought of encountering her mother enough to stay away. But I guess it’s supposed to tease like that.
-Ah, so Hilbert’s sister happens to be transgendered. I immediately get a sense of her ending up in his shadow and that not ending well. This feeling only gets worse with the succinct summary of BW in that flashback. I’m not sure why. Since things start off well enough for Gwyneth. It’s very heavy on narration here, but you don’t get too bogged down in the details. So, it’s relatively succinct. But I do like the bits of attitude the narration gets (“Unova League, here we come!”) to break things up a bit.
-Oh… huh. So that flashback was just teasing the girl Hilbert’s marrying. I was expecting things to go off the rails for Gwyneth there. Shows what a positive person I am.

It's a long look and a wary one, and Gwyneth knows what it means. She's seeing the ratty old bomber jacket, the scuffed boots, the hair that is the particular shade of rust you only get when purple dye fades badly. That certain something, they're never sure what, but some ethnicity not quite white; the thinness of someone for whom a balanced diet is something that happens to other people; the (not particularly well) pierced eyebrow. A bloodless androgyny that seems in some sense suspicious.

Ouch, well that’s one way to paint a clear picture for me. A harsh one, but effective nonetheless. And that repeated “Some are chosen, some are not,” line only serves to make my hairs stand on end. It’s kind of depressing to read it. But at the same time, it’s a totally understandable thought process and I sympathize with her for thinking that way. Heck, her uncertainty over going to see her family reminds me of when I'm deciding whether I want to take a trip to see them for a particular holiday, or invent an excuse as to why I can't make it. So, yeah, hits scarily close to home in that regard.

I'll be playing catch up on this more later. For now, sleep. ^^;

 

[Cutlerine]

Okay, so after seeing a few people recommending this on the Discord I decided to take a peak at the opening chapter. And it's certainly quite intriguing. My impression is that we've got a story focused on familial ties to some extent. But there's a "six degrees of separation" thing going on here. It's a very grounded premise. Plenty of folks end up estranged from their families and face an odd situation where there's a big event they're expected to show up for. Though, given Gwyneth's situation, I feel like a large part of this will be about whether or not she can even make it to Humilau. I have no idea how accurate that prediction is. But I guess I'll find out in the coming weeks. Along with the whole premise talk, it is interesting that this kind of seems to be a "glimpse into the mind of an NPC" sort of thing. Like, we deal with so many inconsequential NPC's in this franchise and I know I've never stopped to think about them or give them any sorts of headcanons. I've just beaten their Pokémon and taken their money. So I'm very curious how this will play out, especially since you made Gwyneth Hilbert's sibling.

I'm glad you found it worth the looking! I think the best way to describe Go Home is that it's a story I wrote because sometimes you need to scream, loudly, for 123,000 words. You're right that it's about NPCs, because I love NPCs for being regular people in the face of the awful perfection of player characters, and because being an NPC is a very depressing kind of life and that's very relatable; I always imagine Gwyneth to be the player character not chosen by whoever it was that played her world, so to speak. She could have been Hilda, but, like she says, she's not chosen. Other things that Go Home is about, I guess: America, what constitutes acceptable behaviour, growing up, trainer journeys, trainer fics, trying to love and be loved when you are definitionally unlovable. Some of these are things I'm qualified to write about; some of them are not. Hopefully I did okay with each of them regardless.

-So, you start with what feels like a cold opening. Most of it is framed rather vaguely, but the conversation b/w Shane & Gwyneth gives me some background to work off of. Namely, Gwyneth’s distant from her family and has been “off the radar” so to speak. And that, she must be connected to one of the player characters from Gen V, since Cheren gets name dropped. The wedding is curious, and I can’t quite tell if Gwyneth likes her brother enough to want to go or dreads the thought of encountering her mother enough to stay away. But I guess it’s supposed to tease like that.

Pretty much, yeah! To be honest, I doubt Gwyneth can tell these things either; these things are complicated. But you know, going on a journey in the pokémon world is usually a good way to develop in some way, so perhaps she'll gain some clarity by the time she makes it to the other end of Unova.

-Ah, so Hilbert’s sister happens to be transgendered. I immediately get a sense of her ending up in his shadow and that not ending well. This feeling only gets worse with the succinct summary of BW in that flashback. I’m not sure why. Since things start off well enough for Gwyneth.

I would guess that it's something to do with the fact that it clearly didn't turn out well, since Gwyneth is where she is now. Also yeah, pretty much all my protagonists for the last few years have been trans women or enby; it's, uh, kinda my thing at this point, I guess, although it isn't really a thing so much as "I am interested in people like me and like to write about them and their lives".

It’s very heavy on narration here, but you don’t get too bogged down in the details. So, it’s relatively succinct. But I do like the bits of attitude the narration gets (“Unova League, here we come!”) to break things up a bit.

Yeah, you've probably noticed that in Arbitrary Execution, too -- I like to let my characters' thoughts and ways of speaking bleed into the narration like that, to give a fuller sense of them as people. In Go Home in particular there's a lot of that, because it's obviously a very introspective, narrative-heavy thing, and for large parts of it Gwyneth is more or less alone with her thoughts and memories. I tried to keep it brisk where detail wasn't needed and infuse the present-day sections with Gwyneth's current voice and the past sections with her child-voice, and hopefully it all worked out.

-Oh… huh. So that flashback was just teasing the girl Hilbert’s marrying. I was expecting things to go off the rails for Gwyneth there. Shows what a positive person I am.

I mean, in a way, it is where things start to go off the rails for her: it's the start of her trainer journey, and her acquaintance with Nika. But I won't spoil things for you; I think you'll get a sense of what the flashbacks are for as you read on.

Ouch, well that’s one way to paint a clear picture for me. A harsh one, but effective nonetheless. And that repeated “Some are chosen, some are not,” line only serves to make my hairs stand on end. It’s kind of depressing to read it. But at the same time, it’s a totally understandable thought process and I sympathize with her for thinking that way. Heck, her uncertainty over going to see her family reminds me of when I'm deciding whether I want to take a trip to see them for a particular holiday, or invent an excuse as to why I can't make it. So, yeah, hits scarily close to home in that regard.

Haha, well, Go Home is in all honesty kind of a depressing story, for the most part! 8D Gwyneth is the kind of person who always sees herself through the eyes of others, and she has no illusions about how those others see her. She knows what she is, and why it matters; there are parts later on in the story where you'll see the moments that taught her. But my intention was always to try and make the experience of being someone like Gwyneth intelligible to readers who might not be a person like Gwyneth, both by describing it as best I could and by suggesting points of contact between that experience and that of the reader, so if you're finding those points of contact, and finding parts of Gwyneth's life and thinking relatable, then I'm pleased to hear it.

I'll be playing catch up on this more later. For now, sleep. ^^;

Sure thing! No rush; it's not going anywhere. Except possibly to the Completed Fics subforum at some point, but you can still read and reply once that happens, so y'know, that's fine. Anyway, thank you for your response! Go Home is one of my favourite stories I've ever told, and every time someone takes the time to respond to it, it means so much to me. <3

 

[Sike Saner]

And later on, after Ashley and Tomás are asleep, Gwyneth lies on her back in the cool grass amidst the soft crackle of the dying fire and the zithering of the crickets and looks up at the full moon holding court among the stars, and she thinks maybe she should get in her tent and go to sleep but Blossom is snoring next to her, a little puddle of warmth lapping up against her ribs, and the night is so beautiful, and for the longest time she just can't move for the magnificence of it all.

I think this is my very first time seeing "zither" as a verb. I like it.

Her new munna is sleepy and tractable, and levitates with surprising force; Blossom soon learns he can keep hovering with her standing on his back, and the two of them orbit Gwyneth's head like a cosmic giant riding a planet around the sun.

Oh gosh. Adorable!

Gwyneth has read in her magazine that eighty per cent of first-time Gym challengers fail, underestimating the difficulty.

Of course they do. It's Unova.

Seriously nearly EVERY time I've managed to actually lose a gym fight, it's been there. XD

He's probably too busy to want to worry about dealing with her himself; he's still new to the Pokémon League, and he hasn't got the knack of it yet. That's why people are finding his Gym so hard.

See previous. He made hamburger out of me the first time sdfjsdgf...

“So what am I supposed to do?” Gwyneth is working hard to keep the anger out of her voice. Shane is not the problem. Shane is a friend, and he wants to help.

Yeah don't kill the messenger, Gwyn.

It's interesting, watching her wrestle with her temper like this. The little skrimishes between what she knows about a given thing, logically, and whatever visceral reaction she has to the same input.

A little later on she checks her route on her phone again and is irritated to see it recommends her going most of the way around the upcoming block to get to a street on the far side. She refuses to believe that the wide, angular C the map suggests is the most efficient way to get there; and sure enough, if she looks up ahead, there seems to be an alley or something cutting through the block. Okay, then. It's the middle of the afternoon in a good part of town. Probably a safe bet for a shortcut.

Fate = well and truly tempted.

Nine years. She laughs. It's the kind of laugh that makes people uneasy: could be joy, could be trauma.

Could be both and more.

There comes one absolutely miserable day when they at last reach Wellspring Cave, following a tiny brook through the woods until they arrive at a cleft in the earth that goes down into a profound darkness

Fun fact: I cannot see the phrase "profound darkness" without thinking about the final boss of Phantasy Star IV.

“Okay, thanks … right. Got that down.” Tasnim lowers her clipboard and pen. “Now, I'm not expecting anything here, but I have to ask, can you tell me what happened? It looks like you took a really bad poison sting from a venipede, but we'd like to be clear.”

“That's pretty much it,” answers Gwyneth. “I went down this alley, and it just … jumped out at me.” She pauses. “Didn't know it was a venipede, though. Never got a clear look at it.”

“Right. There was a poké ball with you when you were found …”

“Yeah. Yeah, I had one in my pocket and I guess I just sort of threw it.”

A venipede! I'm becoming quite fond of the things, and I think it's people writing about them that's partly to blame. Rest of the blame goes to the fact that it's a cute little bug.

“You go on now,” she calls. “I don't want any trouble, you hear me?”

A sudden scratching. A dark blur between the shadows. Gwyneth throws up a hand in front of her face, but there's no poison sting, no attack of any kind. Maybe it's out of venom, she thinks. It wouldn't surprise her. Or maybe it just wants to get away from her as badly as she wants to get away from it. She can't say she'd blame it. Gwyneth has no idea what it's like in a poké ball, but she wouldn't like to find out.

She waits a little longer, just to make sure it really has run off, and then looks behind the bag again. Nothing there now except the ultra ball.

Gwyneth picks it up and pushes its two halves together, hard. A sharp twist, and they separate cleanly with the crisp snap of breaking plastic.

“So long,” she says, and drops the broken ball in with the rest of the trash.

I can't help but wonder if we've truly seen the last of that venipede.

“Is it yours?” asks the man politely.

Gwyneth hesitates, and feels the moment stretch out into infinity.

“Uh, yes,” she says, stepping forwards. “Yeah, it's – it's mine.”

And she is screaming inside, screaming at herself to forget the venipede, you have enough problems and you don't need any more; and it's just a bug, it's probably going to die in a month anyway as soon as it starts getting properly cold; and the damn thing's dangerous anyway, it nearly killed you; and somehow Gwyneth is still standing here in front of everyone, in front of all of these people and all of their eyes, and the screaming thing inside her keeps screaming and she keeps listening and nothing whatsoever shows on her face.

Looks like I was right! Glad to see the little cutie again.

“C'mon,” he says. “Gwyneth? It's me. Don't tell me you've forgotten me already.”

And then Gwyneth sees it, and she is so deep in astonishment she forgets the poison-type she's holding pressed up against her heart.

“Tomás?”

Gwyn, if it's any consolation it didn't occur to me either, despite the presence of the conkeldurr. I think the two of us were both too preoccupied with the venipede for it to click, though preoccupied in different ways, of course.

The conkeldurr looks up at the sound of his name and sniffs deeply, nose bobbing. Gwyneth vaguely recalls hearing somewhere that that's something like a greeting, for a conkeldurr.

That's so cute.

Gwyneth looks from her phone to the creature sitting next to her on the bench. It's much less attractive than the one pictured on the website. Its shell is notched and scarred, closer to rust than magenta; the segments behind the hump that are bright green in the picture are sickly and yellowish on the real thing.

Rust and... wait. Waiiiit, that sounds familiar, like...

One quick look at venipede's gen 5 sprites later...

!!!!!!!

“We're going,” she tells the venipede, although she isn't sure why she bothers, and gets up. It crawls down the leg of the bench and takes up its usual position by her feet, ready to move. Gwyneth is still not entirely at ease with the way it hangs around just behind her, always just a few inches away from getting tangled in her legs.

Okay my mind IMMEDIATELY went to my cats, who are very, very skilled at being in the way. Chewie especially, though Meulin's not far behind. In her case though it's less about constant, unwise proximity to my feet and more about the fact that she's a tortoiseshell and therefore hard af to see in dim lighting. And the lighting in the hallway is dim often. XD;

She has friends, and a minccino who rides around on top of a munna like a silky little knight on a flying horse

I wouldn't have guessed that the image presented earlier could be even cuter, but there it is. Holy crap, that's adorable.

A few pale timburr, bug-eyed and white from cave living, slouch out of the dark, brandishing snapped-off stalagmites, but once the first one smashes its weapon without effect on Stegger's chest both run off, cowed.

These timburr are so cool. I like variants like these, adapted to specific environments.

Saadiyyah reaches casually up to Steggers' head as she leaves Campsite 2, runs her fingers affectionately across the heavy lines of his face, and he presses his neck against her hand, infinitely careful of her fragile human bones.

SO CUTE

“Hey, dude,” she says, tired. “What d'you want? Food?” She rummages in her bag, tears off a piece of bread. “There.” She tosses it on the floor and the venipede pounces as if it might sprout wings and fly away. It's a real hunter's pounce, venom and all. Gwyneth can tell because of the sizzle of acid on the floor. One more rule broken, she guesses.

Whoopsy doopsy!

“What about you? Got any stories like that?” asks Saadiyyah, and Gwyneth shakes her head.

“Not exactly,” she admits. “My friend Nika and me, we did the whole thing together, so we were kinda insulated. There was one time we were staying in a lodge in the forest off of Route 6, though, that was us, an ex-Rocket and a clown.”

“I don't even know which one to ask about first,” says Saadiyyah.

I wouldn't have known, either. XD

On her shoulder, the venipede starts rattling, antennae bristling at the sight of its own reflection.

“Chill, dude,” says Gwyneth, too tired to argue. “It's just a mirror.”

It doesn't get it, so she puts it down on the floor where it starts running around frantically, searching for the other venipede.

Oh my god this little dear gets cuter and cuter all the time.

the venipede clinging half-asleep to her backpack

See previous. So cute...

The venipede is back, dragging a torn cardboard carton. There are three and a half chicken nuggets inside it, and also an eye-watering amount of bird crap.

Two feelings I never thought I'd experience at the same time: how precious! and how gross! Eye-watering indeed. XD; Well, the little dear tried. And then probably et the rest of the nuggets, feces and all. :s Bleh. But I'm used to cute things that sometimes do vile ****. Again, I have cats.

a burnt-smelling man with hair standing on end leads a nervy zebstrika down the street, making soothing noises and occasionally receiving minor electric shocks

Pfff. Now there's an image. XD

She remembers the sickly smell of munna smoke charged with fear and anxiety. Like old roses, or blood.

A nice detail, even if the smell sounds hella unpleasant. Fitting, for a psychic species that seems to communicate by scent, among other things.

After she did this, Gwyneth knows she must have gone out to the north edge of town, although she does not remember, and she knows she must have let her pokémon out of their balls, although she does not remember this, either. She does not know what she said to them, how she made them understand that their time with her was over. She remembers hurt and confusion, vaguely, on all sides. She remembers the sickly smell of munna smoke charged with fear and anxiety. Like old roses, or blood.

She knows that when Nika found her again her throat was hoarse and her voice was husky, so she imagines she must have screamed at them. They would not have understood; she is aware of this. All they knew is that they were partnered to a human who loved them and whom they loved. They could not know that Gwyneth only ever needed the slightest bit of encouragement to be convinced of her monstrosity – that she was easy prey for Harmonia and his slick, plausible rhetoric.

She does not blame Harmonia, or she does, but she tries not to. One thing Gwyneth does know now is that it's all on her. She was weak and she paid the price. If she had really believed, the way Hilbert believes or Cheren or Bianca, she would never have been taken in. She has been told that this is not a fault, that she was just kind and trusting and these are strengths as much as weaknesses – even that this is exactly how Harmonia manipulated N – but she remains unconvinced. She was weak. Years of persuasion from Nika brought her round, in the end, to the idea that maybe she wasn't such a bad trainer as she thought she was, but she still fell into the trap, didn't she? And that ruins everything. If she was weak enough to be driven to liberate her pokémon, then she was never worthy of them at all.

I'd figured out, before this point, that this is what she must have done with her previous pokémon. But actually, finally seeing it laid out is when it really, preoperly clicked. When there was no questio about her less-than-friendly relationship with her venipede having to do with much more than having been poisoned by said bug.

Gwyneth finds her eye drawn to the burnt unfezant. Someone did that to it, she thinks. She does not notice, but the fingers of her right hand close defensively around the hump of the venipede.

Aww.

So: aimless wandering again. There's nowhere to sit here, really. In places there isn't even any sidewalk. These suburbs weren't built with pedestrians in mind.

Sounds like where I live. Bleh. XD;

When Nika's turn comes, it's a close thing. Elesa faces a lot of sandile and krokorok, and she has ways of dealing with their immunity to her electric-types' moves; her emolga only ever land for a split second, keeping themselves well out of range of Astyanax's ground-type moves, and shuffle in and out of combat with U-turn, striking repeatedly at his weaknesses much too fast for him to counter.

This is why my approach to her gym is pretty much always to go "eff it", slap attract on most if not all of my team, and rely tf out of said move.

But Nika isn't done yet. She keeps this up for a little while, just long enough for Elesa to raise a quizzical eyebrow and the zebstrika to start whinnying and lashing out wildly in discontent, and then out of nowhere she has Hekate whip up a whirlwind, right between the zebstrika's legs. Its hooves fly out from under it in four different directions and, scrabbling around like a spider on rollerskates, the big horse staggers away, back towards Elesa; snorting furiously, it gathers lightning around itself, and though Elesa shouts for it to stop the command comes too late: the zebstrika launches itself at Hekate in a thunderous wild charge that completely misses, taking it out of the arena and into the back wall with a crash and a strong smell of burning paint. It's not badly hurt – pokémon are tough, and frankly the wall looks like it came off worse – but it's confused, and it takes long enough getting back to the arena that the match is forfeit.

Elesa's not the only one to laugh at this. There's just something distinctly funny about that image.

They have industrial garbodor in there, massive things with bodies of slag and radioactive waste, capable of eating anything from charcoal to depleted uranium.

Well those certainly sound terrifying. I love them.

The venipede scratches around the tabletop, running its antennae over the plastic to soak up whatever oily smells linger in a place like this. Sometimes Gwyneth offers it a fry and it takes it from her fingers with surprising delicacy, holding it between its forelegs and pushing it slowly into its mouth.

I am now thoroughly convinced that this thing is just not even going to stop being criminally adorable whilst alive.

Nimbasa is sort of pretty at night. Not so much this part of town, but she can see the lights of the fairground over the rooftops to the southeast.

The instant she steps foot in Nimbasa I start hearing the music. The same thing very nearly happened with Driftveil and Castelia (and their respective musics). Why's Unova gotta have such a darn good soundtrack. <3

She trails off. He is taller than her, and broader, and almost certainly stronger. A big, simian thing whose flanks steam gently in the cool air walks on its knuckles alongside him. It has no neck and barely any head, face stretched grotesquely across its chest.

For some reason (probably because I've been awake all of an hour at the time I'm typing this) I intially thought the person was being described as simian.

Also that is a wonderfully unpleasant description of a darmanitan. Good ol' freaky fire ape.

The boy swears at her again. His vocabulary is limited. Gwyneth does not judge: so is hers. She tells him she doesn't have anything and his darmanitan whoops and he says he will not ask again and he leans in close as he says it and the venipede, silent until now and unnoticed, leaps out from behind her head, screaming that awful scream it screamed before in the tunnel, and he swears and lets her go as he recoils and the poison sting flies overhead and the darmanitan tears fire from its eyebrow with one hand and lobs it with perfect accuracy over Gwyneth's shoulder to cover their retreat as it follows the running boy still swearing and spitting out slurs and the venipede falls from her with flames licking at its shell and hits the sidewalk without a sound.

**** YEAH, VENIPEDE

The prognosis is not good. A little after midnight, a nurse takes her aside and asks her how long ago she caught the venipede, and Gwyneth says just a few days. The nurse nods understandingly, and tells her as gently as he can that the venipede is not healthy.

“We think she's maybe two years old,” he says. “But it's not been a good two years, I'm afraid. Whatever she's been eating, she hasn't got the minerals she needs to maintain her shell properly. Her lung is inflamed – we think bronchitis, probably from air pollution – and the shell that's grown over her missing eye has gone too deep and is putting pressure on her brain.”

Gwyneth listens without answering, almost without comprehending. She wills herself to remain present, to not let this information flow past her ears without entering. She needs to know.

“All this means she's not like a trained pokémon,” the nurse says. He has a name badge. Gwyneth cannot at this moment in time make out what it says. “She can't just rest and be fine a day later, especially not after a fire attack – that's not just physical damage, it hurts her essence too.” He hesitates. Gwyneth can see he's thrown by her lack of response, but she cannot speak. “Dr. Marsden is a bug-type specialist, and he's doing all he can, but I'm afraid we can't be sure she'll make it.”

Oh no :<

there's a report saying that some third-party researcher has cleared up the crustle swarm on Route 4

Some third-party researcher with the most baffling hair ever

(Seriously Colress I like u but. What even is going on there. XD)

Two boys playing rummy, a krokorok trying to imitate them by holding a fan of cards in its claws.

I love this image.

“Yeah! I mean, I started in Striaton and it's been so cool just getting here. Even if I haven't managed to beat Elesa yet.” Tor looks sheepish. “I thought my sandile would be enough, but, uh, I guess you don't get to be a Gym Leader without figuring out how to cover your weaknesses.”

TM45, friend. TM45.

Huddled under a dripping rooftop, pigeons and unfezant alike fluff out their feathers and stare sullenly into the grey air. Two seagulls tear at trash and take off suddenly, mad-eyed and shrieking: the trash bag has stirred, opened anaemic eyes and rustled softly away down an alley.

Gosh I like trubbish...

Trash bunny, thinks Gwyneth, with a sentimentality that surprises her. She was going to catch a trubbish, back when … well. Back when. Something about their cutesy ugliness appealed to her, although she doesn't know what she would have made of the smell. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered. She's fine with the venipede, after all.

...That said I would imagine that venipede stonk and trubbish stonk are two very different things.

In retrospect, Nika was unusually good at that kind of thing, Gwyneth thinks. She kept a diary – actually wrote in it almost every day, week after week, for as long as they knew each other. Who does that? Gwyneth likes sometimes to think she could keep a diary, but she knows she can't, really. What would she say? Dear diary, today I went to work and was more of an a*shole to people than I should have been. No, she has nothing to say. But Nika always does.

She remembers her filling the pages in her round, looping writing in Pokémon Centres and on buses, moments when there was time to sit and reflect. That is in fact her memory of the bus ride to Driftveil: Gwyneth sitting by the window, watching the bay go pass with wide eyes, and Nika scribbling all her teenage secrets next to her.

I'm definitely envious of people who can actually stick with keeping a diary. That ****'s not easy.

I'm also envious of people who can actually read and write in a moving vehicle without earning an express ticket to pukesville. XD;

Drayden of Opelucid speaks to them – something Gwyneth cannot hear

Muffled by that beard, I would imagine.

(Seriously Drayden what even is that beard.)

Late that night Gwyneth is called back to the ward by an exhausted-looking Dr. Marsden. He is smiling, though, and even before she gets there Gwyneth feels her face start to crack into a grin as well.

On its table, the venipede stirs and glares and is most definitely awake.

“Hey, a*shole,” says Gwyneth, sitting down next to her. “Shoulda known you were too stubborn to die that easy.”

LITERALLY REJOICES even though there's still a handful of chapters to go and thus anything could happen.

Above Tor's head, Vega holds position, motionless but for the beating of her fake wings. Gwyneth does not think she has ever seen anything so emphatically not a bird.

Sigilyph are so great.

“Hey, dude,” she says. “I forgot yesterday – you can have food now, right? Here you go. Courtesy of the Pokémon Centre canteen.”

She holds out her hand and opens her fingers to reveal a chicken nugget she saved earlier. The venipede looks at it, then at her, then takes it delicately between her forelegs and begins to nibble.

Disappointed, perhaps, by the lack of bird... uh, condiment, but I suppose the venipede figures it's the thought that counts.

(You know, I never, never thought I would ever refer to bird **** as a condiment, not even ironically. XD; )

Gwyneth thinks of Humilau, of hot sand and a sky as blue as an untuned TV screen, and briefly finds herself laughing.

remembers back when an untuned tv showed gray static rather than flat blue

feels ever so slightly old XD

That reminds her to take the tablets Dr. ze'Naarat gave her. She does this, eats some stale bread, and sits back, leaning against the cold wall and listening to the whisper of the rain. What irritates her most is that it's not even coming down hard. It didn't put in the effort and come down heavy, it just got through her clothes anyway, by persistence. This strikes her as somehow unfair.

Petty little thoughts like these are just so gosh damn human. Gwyneth is one heck of a good character.

Another time, she hears what is definitely a magmar: low, mournful honking, too big and too deep to be a goose.

Magmar is one of my favorite pokémon but lbr if I knew there was one anywhere near me I would probably panic. Even if they do honk.

She imagines collapsing here and being eaten by wolves or oddish. That's a thing that happens, isn't it? She's sure she saw a TV documentary where some species of oddish found a corpse and planted itself inside it to wait out the day, sucking in blood and rot-liquefied flesh through its roots.

Oh god what. That's delightfully horrific.

White Forest really is beautiful, in the right weather. Gwyneth will concede that much. The russet leaves, the first early berries on the bushes, the glint of light on water when the path veers close to a stream. Birdsong, the pops of colour from cardinals and blue jays, the sudden flash of white overhead as a togetic glides between trees. Under different circumstances, with a working arm and better diet and a friend to walk with, Gwyneth might like to linger, to follow the streams to their sources, to find caves or waterfalls or spectacular trees grown massive with age and lack of human interference. Now all she can do is look, and let the little part of her that isn't concentrating on Humilau and one-foot-in-front-of-the-other nod and say, that's cool.

It reminds her a little of Route 6, in a way – of that particular forest, that particular beauty. Light filtering through leaves, the sound of boots on dirt and fallen sticks. Of course that was different, that was at the height of summer and anyway she herself was different (younger, bouncier, hopefuller); still, there's something there. Some kind of beautiful that only forests share in.

I ****ing love forests.

Brycen recalls it before it gets needlessly hurt and sends out – something, nobody's sure what exactly, hidden in the fog of ice crystals as it is. There are murmurs in the crowd, and then a few yells and sudden gasps as suddenly a looming shape appears behind Britomartis and spouts a pale mist that freezes her solid. In one of those dramatic flourishes Brycen seems to like so much, the fog clears in eddying swirls, revealing a huge, floating nest of angled ice lit by burning eyes: a cryogonal.

Well somebody sure as heck knows how to make an entrance. Goddamn.

She adjusts her sunglasses. In Gwyneth's lap, the venipede clicks inquisitively, staring, and Gwyneth wonders if maybe she sees the mirrored lenses as bug eyes.

I hope so, because that would be precious.

“Yep,” agrees Gwyneth. “You were right.”

“I usually am,” says Cheryl. “One of my best qualities.”

“Yeah, sure, I bet people never get tired of it.”

“Never do, no. Although for some reason they're always busy when I'm makin' plans to go out.”

Gwyneth shakes her head solemnly.

“Must be bad luck,” she says.

“Yup,” says Cheryl. “No other explanation for it.”

I think I could listen to these two talking with each other for a very, very long time.

But Hekate, with all her old appetite for adventure, has left her mate in Humilau to follow her human partner south, and the one time that anyone tries anything she comes screaming down out of the sky on a black-tinted wind, talons ready. The kids flee, and Hekate lands on a nearby wall, croaking happily and stretching out for Gwyneth to pet her.

Good birdie. Very good birdie.

Only Reshiram is any different: it stays outside, sniffs and growls and sometimes barks, shedding white fur everywhere, and spends long periods away, flying off to god-knows-where with the fire of its tail snarling and whining.

Reshiram confirmed for giant dog-dragon.

Sometimes Gwyneth will sit cross-legged on the carpet outside the door and listen to her fingers rattling the keyboard as she writes an essay, reading aloud from and arguing with her books as she goes.

I love this detail.

“It's nice to meet you,” he says. “Hilbert never said anything about his family. And it's nice to meet you too,” he adds, bending to address the venipede. She clicks at him, moves her legs and her antennae, and N starts, a little taken aback. “Uh, okay,” he says. “Is – maybe I misheard. She says her name is … A*shole?”

This might be my favorite application of N's ability to understand pokémon to date.

Gwyneth expected to be deafened by the wind, but in reality most of the noise comes from Zekrom's tail, crackling and whining like an electrical storm, glowing blue and spitting sparks that explode noisily in the air behind them.

I could say that that'd make me terrified to fly Zekrom Air but lbr. I'd be scared brainless to fly exposed to the air on anything. XD;

“Where's your girl?” Gwyneth asks Hekate, and follows her eye up to the roof, where another mandibuzz is perched like a gargoyle in the shadow of the steeple. She sees movement and realises to her astonishment that there's a vullaby there too, shuffling around its mother's talons. “You got a baby now?” Gwyneth asks, and Hekate gives her a smug yes, I made it myself kind of look. “Yeah,” agrees Gwyneth. “'S real impressive.”

Hekate cackles and hurls herself back up into the air, lifting herself half with wingpower and half with timed pulses of darkness that compensate for her massive weight, until she finds an updraught and rides it up to join her family on the roof.

That is so cute. Also the way she takes to the air is neat.

“I walked here from Aspertia, Nika,” she says. “I got poisoned and I accidentally caught a venipede who got hurt when someone tried to mug me and I got beaten up by some guy in White Forest. Maybe that's just an obsession. Maybe that's inexcusable too. But I … I came a long way and I met a lot of people, and most of them were better to me than I deserved.” She closes her eyes. Names and faces float before her. Shane. Maxine. Saadiyyah. Rood. Concordia. Tor. Ze'Naarat. Nick. Cheryl. Zelda. “Nika,” she says. “I think you know how I feel. I think I might be different now, too, but I'm not gonna ask you to take a chance on that. I'm not gonna refuse you the choice either, like I did when I ran away. I'm gonna stand here and let you make the call, and then if you say no I'm gonna just get out of your way and go.”

I am hella proud of Gwyneth in this moment. The amount of maturity on display there is downright beautiful.


So. Here I am, having finally gotten around to reading this. Would've liked to have done so sooner, of course, but ah well. Anyway, maybe it's kind of fitting I've done this when I have, considering that I've also recently begun playing one of the Unova sequels for the first time. (There's another thing I wish I'd gotten around to sooner XD; )

I've already plastered most of my reactions all over the rest of this post, so I guess what I'll do now is summarize, sort of. This is a raw, heavy story that's probably going to stick with me for a very long time. This is a very well-written protagonist, and I am ridiculously happy to have seen her get a happy ending--and a realistic happy ending to boot. This is a fic with a pretty even ratio of adorable moments to heart-stabbing ones, and let me tell you, that's one heck of a strong mix.

Thanks for posting this. It's been unforgettable.

 

[Ambyssin]

Aaaaand we're done. I see why this was so highly recommended in Discord.

There’s a stunning amount of grounded realism that gets mixed into things. I understand that this IS taking place in a real world analogue where Unova is the USA (just with Pokémon). But that doesn’t always go over well. So, you make everything very well integrated, to the point where it just seems to naturally fit into the world you’ve crafted. A lot of it comes from the scenery in general. The Unovan cities are transformed into hubs that take cues from American cities, with outlying suburbs. There are nods to parts of New York City like Soho, or even Brooklyn’s recent “gentrification” over the last several years (with the western part of Castelia become more upscale). But then there are also the characters, few as they may be. They are flawed and come with their own sets of baggage that are right in light with typical problems people have in the world. In some respects, this read like a Pokémon version of Into the Wild. The journeyman aspects are extraordinarily prominent, but the overlying glimpse into characters’ psyches are where things greatly deviate. That, and things end off a bit better for the MC.

Another point I would say is that, while Pokémon to me don’t feel like a critical element of the story, framing the narrative around the changes that a trainer journey brings was a very interesting choice. I like to think I could make a solid argument that you could strip away the Pokémon elements and this story would work great as its own standalone thing. Obviously that didn’t happen, but I do think the Pokémon elements (especially the canon stuff) add an extra layer that makes things that much more enjoyable. It’s interesting to get an outsider, essentially NPC perspective on what many consider some of Game Freak’s most profound narrative events in the whole series. And, at the same time, seeing Gwyneth’s perspective on the canon characters. It’s fun because of how stilted she is toward them and the narration warps to reflect that, so throughout the story I found myself not trusting the descriptions of the characters.

This fic is admittedly “too smart” for a guy like me. I have my typical thoughts on each chapter below, and some of them probably seem like “seeing trees, missing the forest.” I don’t think I could offer legitimate criticisms for the story. You wrote this for a very particular audience and I read it despite probably not being in the target audience. I had fun with it in the end. I will say a couple of things that bothered me, as an individual reader. For one, I do notice that sometimes plot points are teased and then not immediately followed up on even though it feels like they’re subjects that should be tackled right away. I can excuse it in the case of what drove Gwyneth and Nika apart, because that’s a bit of a shocking reveal that comes later. But Martin’s death stuck out as something that I learned about far too late into the story to really feel whatever impact it was supposed to have. And there were a few instances of things that I feel like I deserved to know, because I had questions about stuff, but never really ended up getting an answer. Like, why does Cheren dislike Gwyneth? What happened to lead Nika and Hilbert to each other? Overall, I don’t know if this classifies as a gripe or if you’re just that good of a writer that you motivate me to want to keep going and reach the part of the story where my questions are answered but I just thought I’d say it anyway.

So, for individual chapter thoughts as I read them...

[SPOIL]Ch 2
-Starting off here, I like (maybe not the right word?) that Floccesy has urbanized a bit. I always had this headcanon that Unova favored rapid town expansion, even at the cost of nature… kind of like America. So it’s nice seeing this pop up in another story. Minor detail, but it made me smile.
-Very somber farewell there between Shane and Gwyneth. I’m going to take the opportunity to predict that we’ll see more of Shane, otherwise that exposition about him and Casey wouldn’t serve much of a point, would it?
-The bus depot scene has this very sharp juxtaposition that you paint very clearly. The dialogue b/w Gwyneth and the boy is friendly, but her thoughts fester like an untreated wound.
-Now this 2nd has flashback scene has all sorts of teases going on with it. Gwyneth taking the time to think about Ghetsis’ words. That Team Plasma has more a political slant in this world. And of course Gwyneth’s strong dislike of Cheren’s general demeanor. This flashback didn’t exactly answer the big question I had at the end of the bus station scene: what makes Cheren hate Gwyneth so much? I’m sure it’s coming. That’s just what I was expecting there and the flashback didn’t exactly do that. But, if misdirection was your intention, it worked.
-So, uh, am I to understand that Gwyneth is some sort of Pokémon world analogue to a Native American, then (or maybe an Australian aboriginal)? That’s definitely not something I was expecting and it’s a unique concept to integrate into this world.
-WAIT WAIT *deep breath* Okay, I was absolutely not expecting this to tie into the canonical B2W2 events at all. But there are Hugh and Nate! It’s just a cameo, but still. Color me super surprised. And I guess it does serve as a catalyst for some sort of poison-type move inducing a little delusional trip in her. This is probably just a me issue, but given the narration is all the same style I get disjointed when you’re narrating a past memory while present-day actions are taking place.
-My one thing that struck me as off is simply the second list later into the chapter. Was there a specific narrative reason to separate them like that? If there is, it flew right over my head.

Ch 3
-Opening with the flashback this time. It’s… hmm. I’m not entirely sure on the angle here. Is this dropping a hint that Gwyneth has some sort of attachment issue? Or is this some form of mental illness popping up? It’s tough to tell given the vaguer descriptions. But I think it was planned this way, so I can’t be mad at it. Just curious, I guess.

“You're awake,” says someone. “Hey, take it easy now, okay? We just washed six times the lethal dose of venom out of you.”

Oooookaaaay, I’m slightly familiar with anti-venom treatments in EMS, so that sounds not just unpleasant but I feel like Gwyneth’s heart should have stopped when she got attacked.

-I’m gonna resist the urge to scold the nurse(?) for reacting to Gwyneth’s lack of insurance. Health care professionals shouldn’t judge like that. Do no harm, right? I kid, I kid. It makes her seem more human in the end. But Gwyneth didn’t have to sign any forms saying she was going against medical advice? Now that’s shocking! I’ll just shut up now…
-Uh… am I crazy, or did you skip September 11th? You went from Saturday the 10th, to Sunday the 12th…
-Ah, I must commend you with that Venipede. You really had me convinced it was just there to poison Gwyneth and then hit the road but, nope, it stows away aboard the ship. I had expected it to at least make it to Castelia, but credit it to you that you successfully killed that thought, only to trick me a little while later.
-Oh… hi Tomás. You’re the last person I was expecting to see at this point. Though, I guess the Latino thing should’ve been a tip off. I’m really great at reading, huh? And of course he and Ashley are getting married. Gotta do everything to make Gwyneth as lonely and uncomfortable as possible, I suppose. But she isn’t alone now. She has Venipede. I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be some sort of personification (Pokésonification?) of her thoughts that she seems to have an almost toxic appearance and her interactions seem, well, toxic. Either I’m incorrectly reading too deep or it’s very clever. ^^

Ch 4
-Ok, so it’s just Ch 3 where you mislabeled the date once. Just in case you were wondering.
-I’ve never been a fan of major metropolitan areas. I don’t think it was intentional, but the descriptions of Castelia made me feel like I was, say, in New York City and really desperately looking to get a train out of there as soon as possible.
-Cripes, Shane. You’re one heck of an obtuse guy, apparently. Or you have a massive case of foot-in-mouth syndrome. But, to be fair, I’m pretty sure a lot of people who try to dance around the issue of someone being transgendered, either b/c they’re too politically correct, trying not to offend anyone or anything or just plain uncomfortable with it. My guess is Shane was trying not to offend.

“Okay,” says Maxine. “Indulge me a sec. You're going all the way to Humilau to see your ex marry your brother?”

OH… OHHHHHHHH. Gwyneth’s unease about Nika makes SOOOOOOOOOO much more sense now. Ahhhhh! That’s crazy! But props for being realistic and keeping everything low-key. I feel like there are dramatic stories out there that would take an almost soap opera approach to reveals like that.

Gwyneth imagines Saadiyyah and her rock-types facing off against Cheren. Now that will be a tough battle, even for him. Good.

I love it when extra-snarky tidbits are slipped into the narration like this. They’re always good for a smile.

-Props to Gwyneth for keeping her composure with Saadiyyah. I probably would’ve snapped at her already. I appreciate that the narration lets us know that Gwyneth’s using every ounce of her willpower here. And, of course, that you actually express it more creatively than what I just said. ^^;
-Oooh, nice bit of backstory on the Relic items. Now I feel bad for pawning them off for cash.
-Switching into flashback mode, I see. Kind of an abrupt transition but, again, I think it’s just my poor reading abilities holding me back here. I am surprised that this flashback is heading toward more of a high point. I expected nothing but negativity but it looks like I’m in for a roller coaster. The only question now is when I hit the big drop (and I’m expecting a big drop).

That was when summer meant vacations, though, before Gwyneth ever had to worry about earning a living. Now, it doesn't mean a damn thing.

Geez are you a mind-reader. This is the exact argument I use to justify my incessant hatred of summer. XD




Ch 5
-Minor tidbit again, but it’s funny that Steggers seems to have this strong, silent type routine going. It even carries that over into the wild Boldore encounter (thanks for the shrieking Venipede)I kind of developed that sort of headcanon after seeing this one Gigalith in a Black 2 nuzlocke comic. So, huzzah! My headcanon lives!
-Ooooh, more Pokémon variations to match up with their homes, I guess? At least I think that’s how it is. It’s nice in that it makes the Pokémon seem distinct.
-The idle conversation b/w Gwyneth and Saadiyyah is fun to read. Namely b/c it brings to mind the kind of, I don’t know, introductory/ice breaker sorts of conversations you have at, like, a social function or something. There’s just this sense of familiarity in that we’re all trying to relate one another in some way because deep down humans are social creatures and trying to stay isolated can mess with our minds on major levels.
-I like the brief take on Bianca. It kind of reads as an endorsement of Bianca’s status as the “lesser” or “goofier” rival that Game Freak’s loved to put in their games since, well, I guess this was the first game to really embrace multiple rivals after Gen III had a bit of it. And how it’s not necessarily a bad thing and she’s perfectly happy with herself.
-Hrrrrmmm… again it feels like some of this Team Plasma tidbit stuff is an allusion to some sort of underlying mental condition but I can’t quite figure out. And what’s this? Nika released a Pokémon of hers? Gaaaaah, I hate it how you tease me with such juicy tidbits!
-More game mechanics with the ex-Plasma folks, I see. Wonder if they’ll be making an appearance? (They totally are, you wouldn’t just casually throw that in).

Ch 6
-Out of the tunnel. I’ll admit, there was a sense of dissonant serenity about it that I’ll miss at this point in time. And, I can’t quite say for certain, but it seems like Gwyneth is “warming” up to Saadiyyah but there’s a part of her mind that’s actively resisting it. Almost like companionship is an infection and her mind is the body’s immune system, trying to fight it off.

Once you've walked this country, it never leaves you. Unova. Unfeasible, insane, marvellous.

So, I’ve noticed this pop up frequently. Do you personally like the Unova region as far as aesthetics go or is this just fluff for the sake of the story? You got me genuinely curious. XD

-Ohmygod Morton is such a perfect last name for Clay based on his personality. I mean, I think (you can correct me if I’m wrong) he’s supposed to be a son of immigrants from one of the Japan-based regions, but I still like it.
-If I’m reading that slight flashback right, there’s the use of an extended metaphor to liken keeping debt away to Alice in Wonderland and then debt is personified as a Lycanroc? It’s done so elegantly that admittedly it’s tough to tell if I’m right. But I do like this idea that Gwyneth’s family had debt issues and that it introduces the possibility of Hilbert have noble motives in mind with all this league stuff. That said, why wouldn’t he try to help his sister?
-Wait… okay… does Gwyneth have dissociative fugues? They’re pretty rare as far as psychiatric conditions are concerned. But still, good grief. That’s terrible! Likening it to a dial-up modem only makes it more difficult to stomach. From the looks of it, it’s tied to her releasing her Pokémon because she bought into Ghetsis’ rhetoric. In which case that’s very… deep. And shocking and surprising. But the games kind of led us to believe that that did happen quite a bit so it’s cool to see a POV from one such person.

Ch 7
-Venipede has become a sort of distorted Companion Cube at this point for poor Gwyneth. I’m not really sure how else to describe it.
-The relationship deepened after Gwyneth’s first serious fugue episode, huh? Interesting… it certainly speaks to a certain level of selflessness in Nika that almost seems deceptive for a teenager. I always thought teenagers were considered pretty selfish, so I figured Nika would want nothing to do with Gwyneth once the fugues were apparent. But, ah, that’s just the complexity of this story, isn’t it? Though I guess she did eventually grow tired of it. Kind of like how some caretakers may end up losing their patience (or their minds) with someone they’re taking care of.
-So, is Jackie that one ex-Plasma that got PAWNCHED by his friend (only for Hugh to PAWNCH the jerk right back)? Ah, I do-so love the subtle B2W2 story elements tucked away in here.
-Overall not quite as heavy as a chapter and it’s more – not sure what to call it – grounded? As in, the bulk of it seems like small talk, though there is of course that flashback that thankfully answers a lot of the questions I had surrounded Nika from the start, while raising a few new ones. Namely, “So what finally broke the camel’s back for Nika?”

Ch 8
-Oh, well, I see now that Ch 7 was tamer for a reason. That mugging scene was extraordinarily frightening. In the sense that it felt like it was happening in slow motion. And noooooo, not Companion CubeVenipede. It was providing all the light-hearted moments! Frankly, the scene in the Pokémon center feels like watching someone who’s in shock. But at the very least there’s some glimmer of hope with Dr. ze’Naarat. It seems that she helps snap Gwyneth out of her stupor but more importantly it seems like Gwyneth is finally not attempting to keep the old British stiff upper lip. And quite frankly the body’s only designed to take so much abuse before everything just kind of breaks down and it seemed she was at that limit.
-Another positive with the flashbacks is that there isn’t any serious romanticizing/serializing of Gwyneth’s and Nika’s relationship. It starts off at an extraordinarily slow pace that might make the average reader (or TV watcher) bored. But it’s very realistic overall, I think. Not a relationship expert and know nothing about making them for any form of media. ^^;
-Yay, Companion Cube lives! I swear Venipede isn’t my favorite character, plz don’t kill me.

Ch 9
-I appreciate that Dr. ze’Naarat is here for a reality check. Maybe not the best bedside manner but she’s doing her job, dang it. Frankly if it wasn’t for the way the Unovan health care system works (since it’s PokéMerica) I’m sure Gwyneth never would have even made it this far cause she’d have been hospitalized at some point. Also, I’m not sure if the doctor’s attitude is making reference to this real-world phenomenon, but a fair number of doctors at major hospitals in the US are of a minority race or are from other countries and I know that can create some tension. Well, most of my doctor’s are. And I have more than I would care to admit. *sweatdrop*

She supposes Shauntal Grimes is only writing what she and her readers want of their fiction. There must be someone out there writing something that allows, even if only fleetingly, for Gwyneth to exist. But who?

I’ll admit, I got a laugh out of this. Is this also some subtle way of saying that sometimes authors like to put pieces of themselves into their characters and stories? Not attempting to pry into anything person, I’m just curious if that was your thought process with that line.

-Oh, well hello sudden mentor-ish opportunity moment. After Saadiyyah I kind of wasn’t expecting any more encounters with young trainers. There’s a much softer atmosphere to this one compared to the constrained feelings Saadiyyah brought up in Gwyneth (also that kid in Floccessy, as the narration pointed out).
-I don’t blame you for getting cabin fever, Gwyneth. You can admit you had a brief moment of it! XP
-Cool take on the events of BW’s climax. I liked seeing it from an outsider perspective (since, well, unlike some of the other villainous team shenanigans it seems hard not to know about what N did) and just seeing Gwyneth’s reactions to everything happening.
-And then some more sudden mentorship stuff (complete w/ Gwyneth snarking she shouldn’t be doing this… I guess old habits die hard).


Ch 10
-Companion Cube lives. Huzzah! Gwyneth’s clearly taken up this “We’re in this together now,” mentality. I swear she sees some of herself in that Venipede. Call me crazy, if you must.
-Oh wow symbolic Mandibuzz. That’s not something I would think of. How cute!
-Welp, and just when I thought things were looking up Gwyneth bites the hand that feeds her. Maybe she’s more of a Venipede than she thinks she is. At the very least, she’s ardently refusing to give up in the face of reality, that’s for sure. Luckily Tor is there to bring some measure of happiness in before things can get too dour.
-Ah, now this is definitely hit one of the journeyman story tropes: sneaking onto public transit to jump around to some spot you need to get to. The hitchhiking has finally set in!
-Hmm, at this point admittedly I’m wanting the flashbacks to skip ahead more toward what Nika and Gwyneth did after their journey, but I must be patient and read on, I suppose. But I do appreciate that it was Clay’s Excadrill that gave Nika trouble, as I believe it has a bit of a notorious reputation as far as Gen V bosses are concerned (at least, the Nuzlocke community considers it a bit of a locke-ender).
-Maybe not the right place to say this but it quite literally took me up until Kit popped up to release what the “six-letter word” that was mentioned but never explicitly stated was. I’m not very intelligent. <<;

Ch 11
-As someone who’s gone around some national parks in the northwest, I like the quiet serenity given to White Forest. It reminds me of the backcountry trails where you have a tendency not to run into anyone save for a very dedicated outdoorsman. It’s also a good change of pace from the civilized setting of the last several chapters. But nothing can really go well for Gwyneth, so here’s her hiking in the run which is most definitely the exact opposite of fun if you don’t have a home to return to. I like the use of Chargestones in the trailer area though. It’s way cooler than just some random obstacles in a cave.
-Another interesting flashback that, I guess, sheds a bit more insight into Gwyneth’s and Nika’s relationship. Although if I’m being honest the ex-Rocket tidbit and Pat’s appearance felt oddly out of place. Maybe it becomes relevant to something in a later chapter? But for now I’m just scratching my head and going, “Huh?” Gwyneth compares herself to Nova little while later (travelling “Because she has no other options but running”). It still feels like a bit of an unusual comparison, since I would think Rocket affiliation means running with far more dire consequences.
-I also can’t tell if she’s slipping into another fugue by the end of the chapter or not. Like I said, not very smart. But she seems so fuzzy at this point. It’s a familiar feeling for me, sadly.

Ch 12
-Oh dang. So Gwyneth’s attempts to evade Tor ultimately turn out entirely useless. Again, I wasn’t expecting him to make a genuine reappearance at this point. Goes to show you’re just too good at surprising me, apparently.

Or they do for a moment, anyway, until she remembers what day it is. It's Wednesday the twenty-first. The day before the wedding, and she's still hundreds of miles from Humilau.

I’ll admit that, up until this point, I was actually back-and-forth on whether Gwyneth would succeed or not, but now I’m leaning firming in the “she’s gonna get there too late” category. I guess I’ve been so engrossed in whether Gwyneth was gonna survive the wedding became an afterthought.

-I liked this flashback scene more than the last chapter’s. Even though, again, there isn’t much progression b/w Nika and Gwyneth and you could make the argument that it’s filler, it did follow up on some points brought up with regards to Nika and her Pokémon. Evolutions, of course. But I specifically recall some mentions of how savage Bisharp can be and that’s definitely on full display in that gym battle.
-I don’t think this qualifies as bait-and-switch, but the warning at the chapter’s start made it feel that way. I expected something to go wrong in the cabin and it didn’t, so I thought the flashback would have something go wrong (say, Kit returning) and that didn’t, so I figured the hikers were a red herring but then they weren’t. You successfully tricked me again, it seems. Not that I should be celebrating since good god, poor Gwyneth. But I think the scene was more powerful because it was so short and not dragged out like, say, a TV show or movie might do with a similar scenario.

Ch 13
-Welp, Gwyneth’s had her epiphany. It’s a bitter and caustic one but she finally succumbs to how in over her head she ended up. The impression I get is that really Gwyneth had some sort of co-dependency reliance on Nika and that’s kind of been what’s driving things. Which is gut-wrenching, to be sure. And just when it looks like we’ve reached a stalemate, it’s teleport ex machina! Well, she had to get some sort of good fortune eventually, I suppose. And now we’re officially hitchhiking. I can’t believe it took until almost-the-end to get to this point
-I’ll admit, it’s odd to see a return to small talk with Cheryl after it really feels like that hasn’t happened since Jackie. But, I guess this is symbolizing a bit of an upward swing, since Cheryl seems to be improving Gwyneth’s demeanor, despite the events of the last few chapters. And I mean, goodness, Cheryl’s wit is just so jarring compared to the dialogue up to this point. In a good way. In a refreshing way. It brought a smile to my face.
-The flashback’s appropriately timed, given what’s kind of happening around Gwyneth. I am still wondering when things really broke down between them and all this served to do is just leave me with that question rolling around in my head.

Interlude
-Ah-ha, we’re finally getting light shed on the post-trainer days. And it’s reading like a play-by-play, but it’s the information I’ve basically wanted since the first two chapters, so yay! I like that Gwyneth’s mom gets touched upon here, since her situation was brought up previously, so she’s getting a much-needed revisit.

Hilbert asks her how she's doing, what school is like, who her friends are. He asks like he genuinely wants to start getting to know her better. Gwyneth tells him to go f*ck himself and derives a vicious pleasure from the look of baffled hurt on his face. He's human after all, then.

I think one of the things I like so much is the absolutely skewed perspective of Hilbert. We only really know about him from Gwyneth’s perspective and memories, so it’s totally unreliable and makes it all the more interesting to figure out what he’s really like.

-Speaking of finally getting answers, the Martin thing is finally addressed. I get that it’s supposed to be a profound memory but I must admit that I it didn’t end up having the impact on me that I think you were going for. Maybe it’s because the event only ever got one line in a smattering of chapters, or that Martin was only just now introduced and explained via some exposition. I get that it’s more about how Gwyneth was treated afterward, but if it did have a profound effect on her psyche I feel like it deserved a bit more attention in the story proper. But, again, this was just my take.

She cannot stop. And so, after a week-long argument that Gwyneth starts because she finds the engagement ring hidden at the back of a drawer and is suddenly terrified of shackling Nika to her stupid, toxic self for life, she leaves.

Now this on the other hand, was beautiful and subtle build up. The moment I read this so many gears clicked into place and everything suddenly made sense as to why it all was happening. I was reading this for awhile under a skewed assumption that Nika finally got tired of Gwyneth’s baggage and cut her loose but then there was that tidbit chapters back about Nika planning to propose and I wondered what happened. Now it turns out Nika didn’t necessarily do anything wrong, and that that was the issue for Gwyneth. Holy cow, it’s all so clear now!

Ch 14
-Aaaaaaaand just when I thought we were go for a subdued ending… HI N AND ZEKROM. Didn’t expect to see you two here.
-Companion Cube gets a name! Huzzah! You’ve moved on up in life. And Gwyneth’s get some attachment to it, what with her interactions with N. I’m still calling it Companion Cube, because I like Portal… sorrynotsorry.
-Well, that mother-daughter reunion is about as awkward as I’d expect something like that to be. Actually, no wait, I imagined Gwyneth’s mother having a lot more to say, but I guess she learned that it was useless trying to talk too much to Gwyneth. Speaking of awkward, it’s so… brazenly bizarre to finally see this canon characters speaking after we’ve had nothing but Gwyneth’s skewed memories of them the entire story. But, to be fair, the brief interactions do seem in line w/ Gwyneth’s old descriptions.
-The exception to that, of course, is Hilbert. Not a whole lot of substance to their reunion but the short, terse lines show some measure of progress in Gwyneth’s characterization. It also suggests she really was that badly skewed on her perception of Hilbert, but he acknowledges that he, well, hasn’t really paid much attention to her at all.
-Oh… so the objection comes after all. I’ll be honest, as much as I wanted things to look up for Gwyneth I was hoping for some sort of subdued rekindling with her family and Nika. But… this is the logical conclusion I suppose. Good grief. And I mean, good that Nika reacted the logical way by flipping out at Gwyneth, but denying Hilbert is a bit of a shocking swerve. I get the whole point of it is to kind of reverse Hilbert’s “chosen” status and that the flashbacks built him up as Mr. Perfect in some regards. It’s just so incredibly abrupt. I know that Gwyneth doesn’t know anything about what happened to the two of them, but maybe the interlude could’ve shed a little bit of light on the two of them so that Bianca wasn’t the only hint that this was coming out of left field. But, again, it’s probably me just not understanding something.
-And, with all things said and done, they’re hitting a reset button. As much as you managed to tricked me this fic, this is the one thing I was expecting to happen. Just… as sisters-in-law or something… not as restarting an intimate relationship. Well, okay, a part of me expected it, but my brain couldn’t reason out how she would make it to the wedding and even then her objecting like something out of a TV drama. But it happened. So, congrats. Considering how depressing this fic was a happy ending (even a measured one) is quite the surprise.[/SPOIL]

I know you considered this to be a very important fic for you, so I'm sorry my thoughts are so scatterbrained. But, as I said, this fic is far more emotionally intelligent than me. Still, I wanted to give it the attention it deserved. Because it's very profound. Excellent work!

 

[Cutlerine]

Review response part 1 of 2! This one's well over the character limit, so yeah, I'm going to have to split it.

I think this is my very first time seeing "zither" as a verb. I like it.

I'm pleased to have introduced it to you! I like it a lot. It seems to have become my go-to verb for describing cricket and grasshopper noises.

Of course they do. It's Unova.

Seriously nearly EVERY time I've managed to actually lose a gym fight, it's been there. XD

Yeah, I think the level curve of NPC pokémon in Unova is a little higher than in other regions. I find Clay in particular always manages to get me.

See previous. He made hamburger out of me the first time sdfjsdgf...

Me too. Cheren's Gym is kinda vicious, and I wanted to make that a part of his character in this story, since my goal was to have BW2 playing out slowly in the background, something happening to player characters while NPCs like Gwyneth try to get on with their own little lives.

Yeah don't kill the messenger, Gwyn.

It's interesting, watching her wrestle with her temper like this. The little skrimishes between what she knows about a given thing, logically, and whatever visceral reaction she has to the same input.

Yeah, it was … fun is not the right word, but it was certainly something to write. I liked it, I think, in that I got something out of it, whether or not it was pleasant.

Fun fact: I cannot see the phrase "profound darkness" without thinking about the final boss of Phantasy Star IV.

That's … fair, honestly. Very fair.

A venipede! I'm becoming quite fond of the things, and I think it's people writing about them that's partly to blame. Rest of the blame goes to the fact that it's a cute little bug.

Correction: cute big bug! They're like rabbit-sized, according to the pokédex; I shrunk Gwyneth's down a bit because of something something malnutrition or whatever, to make it a better shoulder-riding companion. But I'm glad that all these fics are getting the good word out about venipede!

Gwyn, if it's any consolation it didn't occur to me either, despite the presence of the conkeldurr. I think the two of us were both too preoccupied with the venipede for it to click, though preoccupied in different ways, of course.

Indeed! Tomás is meant to be a surprise, so I don't think either of you necessarily need to feel bad about that.

Rust and... wait. Waiiiit, that sounds familiar, like...

One quick look at venipede's gen 5 sprites later...

!!!!!!!

Congrats! You are literally the first person to notice without being told! I was looking at venipede and thought the shiny one just looked sorta ill, so I decided to base Gwyneth's venipede's colouration on the shiny palette, and so here we are.

Okay my mind IMMEDIATELY went to my cats, who are very, very skilled at being in the way. Chewie especially, though Meulin's not far behind. In her case though it's less about constant, unwise proximity to my feet and more about the fact that she's a tortoiseshell and therefore hard af to see in dim lighting. And the lighting in the hallway is dim often. XD;

I'm glad it feels real! I don't live with any animals, but I do my best to try and make the pokémon I write feel like animals regardless, and I'm super glad that I've managed to do that here.

These timburr are so cool. I like variants like these, adapted to specific environments.

I always love subspecies. I think I've had them in everything I've written since A Leash of Foxes, actually, but they're becoming more and more of a thing in my fics these days. So I guess what I'm saying is, I'm glad you like my self-indulgent nonsense too.

Two feelings I never thought I'd experience at the same time: how precious! and how gross! Eye-watering indeed. XD; Well, the little dear tried. And then probably et the rest of the nuggets, feces and all. :s Bleh. But I'm used to cute things that sometimes do vile ****. Again, I have cats.

The particular intersection of adorable and vile is so important, I think, or at least it's something that I'm really interested in, and I gave that interest pretty free rein in this fic. I almost went for trubbish as Gwyneth's partner, but in the end I thought that was probably too on the nose and settled for Unova's other cute-yet-gross poison-type, venipede.

A nice detail, even if the smell sounds hella unpleasant. Fitting, for a psychic species that seems to communicate by scent, among other things.

Yeah, I really liked the idea of munna and musharna communicating with like chemical sprays but charged with psychic vibrations, and I used it here to shoehorn in a sly reference to Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, which, as a book about national and personal trauma, was one of the books I went back to when I was thinking about how to write Go Home. One of the bits of traumatic memory that floats through that novel is the smell of old roses, which is later revealed to be the smell of blood, and so I made that the smell of Corbyn's panic.

I'd figured out, before this point, that this is what she must have done with her previous pokémon. But actually, finally seeing it laid out is when it really, preoperly clicked. When there was no questio about her less-than-friendly relationship with her venipede having to do with much more than having been poisoned by said bug.

I'm glad. Like, I was always of the opinion that if people worked it out beforehand, then they worked it out, and that was fine; I just needed to make that moment have weight anyway. So I broke with the present-tense thing, didn't retell it properly the way I did with the other past segments, did all I could to sort of break the conventions the story's established so far and kind of gesture towards the fact that I was trying to narrativise the un-narrativisability of traumatic recollection – and it looks like I did give the moment the sort of impact I was after. Thanks for confirming that.

Sounds like where I live. Bleh. XD;

I haven't been to America since I was a small child, but I am really interested in it, the way you get interested in something that huge and spectacular and cruel, and I really wanted to give my Unova that American sense of place. So if I've managed to make it sound like a place you recognise, then I'll gladly take that!

Well those certainly sound terrifying. I love them.

*pounding on the table with fists* garbodor garbodor garbodor GARBODOR *pounding intensifies*

I am now thoroughly convinced that this thing is just not even going to stop being criminally adorable whilst alive.

It is a real possibility. Science has not yet discovered a way to limit the cuteness of a rabbit-sized centipede.

The instant she steps foot in Nimbasa I start hearing the music. The same thing very nearly happened with Driftveil and Castelia (and their respective musics). Why's Unova gotta have such a darn good soundtrack. <3

Neat! I don't actually remember any of Unova's music, but it's cool to hear what impressions of these places other people bring with them.

For some reason (probably because I've been awake all of an hour at the time I'm typing this) I intially thought the person was being described as simian.

Also that is a wonderfully unpleasant description of a darmanitan. Good ol' freaky fire ape.

Ah yes, those simian men whose faces are stretched grotesquely across their chests. But yeah, darmanitan has always struck me as odd. It just … doesn't seem to have a head. Maybe it's meant to be hidden under fur? I guess that kind of makes sense.

Some third-party researcher with the most baffling hair ever

(Seriously Colress I like u but. What even is going on there. XD)

It's a serious kind of hairstyle that requires a supporting wire frame to be inserted every day after you get up.

...That said I would imagine that venipede stonk and trubbish stonk are two very different things.

Probably! Trubbish is more like the smell of a trash can, while venipede is … well, Gwyneth describes it as also like rotting garbage, but possibly they actually smell better if they haven't been living out of stuff they dig out of people's bins. Hers is not a very healthy baby horse bug.

I'm definitely envious of people who can actually stick with keeping a diary. That ****'s not easy.

I'm also envious of people who can actually read and write in a moving vehicle without earning an express ticket to pukesville. XD;

Me too. Also of people who can actually write at all in a moving vehicle without their pens jumping all over the place. I've never had any luck trying to write on the road. I did use to be able to read while in a car when I was a kid, but alas, no longer. Apparently I grew out of that.

Muffled by that beard, I would imagine.

(Seriously Drayden what even is that beard.)

Oh my god, I had completely forgotten about that and then I Googled it just now and good lord, Drayden, are you okay? And also – why?

LITERALLY REJOICES even though there's still a handful of chapters to go and thus anything could happen.

Sigilyph are so great.

They so are! They make like zero sense but that's all part of their charm.

Disappointed, perhaps, by the lack of bird... uh, condiment, but I suppose the venipede figures it's the thought that counts.

(You know, I never, never thought I would ever refer to bird **** as a condiment, not even ironically. XD; )

And I never thought I'd hear anyone say it, either, so I guess that's two people for whom history has been made today.

remembers back when an untuned tv showed gray static rather than flat blue

feels ever so slightly old XD

They still do, don't they? At least, I thought they did. I've never seen an untuned TV that showed flat blue, this is just the simile with which William Gibson's Neuromancer opens, I just assumed it was a thing because of that.

Petty little thoughts like these are just so gosh damn human. Gwyneth is one heck of a good character.

I'm glad you like her! I like writing people who aren't necessarily likeable; people always act like people, and sometimes that means they're vicious and mean even at the same time as they're powerfully empathetic, and it's been really fun figuring out how to represent all that anger and resentment and grudging, shameful kindness in Gwyneth's person.

Magmar is one of my favorite pokémon but lbr if I knew there was one anywhere near me I would probably panic. Even if they do honk.

That's eminently fair. A big hot goose out on the prowl is definitely not a pleasant thought.

Oh god what. That's delightfully horrific.

Thanks! I kind of based it on armadillos, which I read somewhere will make a burrow right next to a corpse when they find one so they can just hang out and nibble on it for days. Those aren't plants but shush, nobody needs to know that.

Well somebody sure as heck knows how to make an entrance. Goddamn.

I mean, he is an actor. An actor, moreover, who's been in some pretty dire movies, like that series about Brycen-man and the Riolu Kid. I've always found it hard to like not see him as as a big devotee of showmanship and spectacle.

I hope so, because that would be precious.

Wouldn't it just? c:

I think I could listen to these two talking with each other for a very, very long time.

That's good! I was like trying to compress something that lasted an afternoon into a few hundred words, showing how the trajectory of that brief relationship panned out, with all these little insights into the way they spoke to one another. And like if that gave you that impression, of this kind of friendly, terrible-jokes-made-funny-by-delivery sort of thing, then that's kind of what I watned.

Good birdie. Very good birdie.

Best birdie! I love mandibuzz, I think the idea of a big vulture draped in bones is fantastic, and also, you know, giant lesbian vultures. Gwyneth and Nika's enthusiasm is 100% my own.

Reshiram confirmed for giant dog-dragon.

I'm told I'm kind of in the minority about this? Apparently people think Reshiram is meant to be feathery, which, okay, that makes a lot of sense but also no, I can't see that as anything but fur. Which makes its wings … I don't know, big hairy meat flaps or something.

I love this detail.

In this, Nika is just me when I was a student, I think. I might not have been as smart as the people whose books I was arguing with, but the thing is, a book can't argue back, so no matter how smart the writers were you always win. That's the best kind of argument.

This might be my favorite application of N's ability to understand pokémon to date.

This was one of those lines that you have in your mind for like half the story, and you're just waiting and waiting to get your chance to finally roll it out and when you finally do you're just like, god, that was so worth the wait. I'm delighted that you liked it too.

I could say that that'd make me terrified to fly Zekrom Air but lbr. I'd be scared brainless to fly exposed to the air on anything. XD;

Yeah, I've always felt that the dinky little helmet and stuff they give you to ride on charizard in Alola is just so redundant. You fall off that thing and there's no way that a helmet's going to save you then. Flying bareback on a dragon is just … a terrifying prospect, even if that dragon doesn't have a massive sparking generator strapped to its backside.

I am hella proud of Gwyneth in this moment. The amount of maturity on display there is downright beautiful.

I was proud of her too! And I'm really pleased to see that like, that's a sentiment that other people share, that I did my job telling this story and made people care about Gwyneth and what she learns despite the fact that given the chance she would do her best to not care about them in return, so thank you for sharing that.

So. Here I am, having finally gotten around to reading this. Would've liked to have done so sooner, of course, but ah well. Anyway, maybe it's kind of fitting I've done this when I have, considering that I've also recently begun playing one of the Unova sequels for the first time. (There's another thing I wish I'd gotten around to sooner XD; )

I've already plastered most of my reactions all over the rest of this post, so I guess what I'll do now is summarize, sort of. This is a raw, heavy story that's probably going to stick with me for a very long time. This is a very well-written protagonist, and I am ridiculously happy to have seen her get a happy ending--and a realistic happy ending to boot. This is a fic with a pretty even ratio of adorable moments to heart-stabbing ones, and let me tell you, that's one heck of a strong mix.

Thanks for posting this. It's been unforgettable.

Thank you for reading, and for your mammoth response! I'm glad you liked this. It was a weird, painful story that came from a weird, painful place, and I had no idea if anyone other than me would be interested in that kind of thing. I'm glad too that you like the ending; obviously I also wanted her to get a happy ending, because I am a Sentimental Fool, but I had to come up with a way to make that happy ending something that could actually happen in this world, with these people. It wasn't perfect, but I did what I could, and I think I'm more or less pleased with the results.

So yeah. Thanks. Like, a lot. <3

Aaaaand we're done. I see why this was so highly recommended in Discord.

There’s a stunning amount of grounded realism that gets mixed into things. I understand that this IS taking place in a real world analogue where Unova is the USA (just with Pokémon). But that doesn’t always go over well. So, you make everything very well integrated, to the point where it just seems to naturally fit into the world you’ve crafted. A lot of it comes from the scenery in general. The Unovan cities are transformed into hubs that take cues from American cities, with outlying suburbs. There are nods to parts of New York City like Soho, or even Brooklyn’s recent “gentrification” over the last several years (with the western part of Castelia become more upscale). But then there are also the characters, few as they may be. They are flawed and come with their own sets of baggage that are right in light with typical problems people have in the world. In some respects, this read like a Pokémon version of Into the Wild. The journeyman aspects are extraordinarily prominent, but the overlying glimpse into characters’ psyches are where things greatly deviate. That, and things end off a bit better for the MC.

Thanks! Like – I don't actually know much about America, although I'm very interested in it, its size and cultural mythology, so I was apprehensive about writing About America, so to speak. And so I'm always pleased when people recognise elements of America in what I've written. I kind of cheated by expanding Unova from just New York to the whole of America, but it seems to have worked. As someone who watches America from afar, I like Unova, which is itself the product of someone watching America from afar, but I also have issues with it – the weird way its indigenous civilisations are condemned to the distant past, its avoidance of the fact that America is a colonial nation, the flimsiness of its excuses for why roads are blocked off, its endless cutscenes involving characters who don't do enough in-game for me to care about them. So in rewriting Unova here, I wanted to make a critique of its original in-game presentation, too.

Another point I would say is that, while Pokémon to me don’t feel like a critical element of the story, framing the narrative around the changes that a trainer journey brings was a very interesting choice. I like to think I could make a solid argument that you could strip away the Pokémon elements and this story would work great as its own standalone thing. Obviously that didn’t happen, but I do think the Pokémon elements (especially the canon stuff) add an extra layer that makes things that much more enjoyable. It’s interesting to get an outsider, essentially NPC perspective on what many consider some of Game Freak’s most profound narrative events in the whole series. And, at the same time, seeing Gwyneth’s perspective on the canon characters. It’s fun because of how stilted she is toward them and the narration warps to reflect that, so throughout the story I found myself not trusting the descriptions of the characters.

I'd be lying if I said I hadn't considered filing off the Pokémon elements and adding it to my roster of original fiction, but honestly given that this fic is so heavily reliant on both BW/BW2 and the conventions surrounding trainer fics and stuff within the fandom, I just couldn't find a way to do it without taking away part of what makes it work. Like, it's a story about Gwyneth's two trainer journeys for one thing, because I like both the cultural thing of the trainer journey as represented in-game and also the generic thing of the trainer fic as it gets used in fandom; it's also a story about being an NPC while the player characters are out there doing the story and changing the world. Gwyneth's past journey is obviously happening at the same time as BW, and her present-day journey is happening at the same time as BW2 – Nate goes to get the boat captain back, there's a crustle swarm on Route 4, Team Plasma's galleon is moored at Castelia, and by the end N is coming home for his big confrontation with Ghetsis. And there are also the bits in the news where the other games are reaching their climaxes, too.

All of which is to say that I am developing the stuff from Go Home into original fiction, but it's more like taking the core premise of an inadvisable road trip in search of someone you love and combining it with a new set of ideas than just taking out the pokémon.

This fic is admittedly “too smart” for a guy like me. I have my typical thoughts on each chapter below, and some of them probably seem like “seeing trees, missing the forest.” I don’t think I could offer legitimate criticisms for the story. You wrote this for a very particular audience and I read it despite probably not being in the target audience. I had fun with it in the end.

Don't be so hard on yourself! If you read this and you liked it, then I wrote it for you. My thought process when I'm writing is always I want to read this story but it doesn't exist so I've got to write it instead, and because that means my target audience is myself, the story usually comes out in a certain way. But like, when it comes to sharing that story? It's for everyone who wants to read it. I don't believe that people have to be 'smart enough' or whatever to engage with art; I kind of hint as much in chapter two, where Gwyneth mentions that she feels like art is for better people then she is, and the implication is that this is just part of her warped worldview. It doesn't matter if someone doesn't read Go Home the way I read it; nobody ever will, after all. You read it, you had fun, it made you think some thoughts. That's every bit as good as my reading, regardless of what you think about what this fic means.

I will say a couple of things that bothered me, as an individual reader. For one, I do notice that sometimes plot points are teased and then not immediately followed up on even though it feels like they’re subjects that should be tackled right away. I can excuse it in the case of what drove Gwyneth and Nika apart, because that’s a bit of a shocking reveal that comes later. But Martin’s death stuck out as something that I learned about far too late into the story to really feel whatever impact it was supposed to have. And there were a few instances of things that I feel like I deserved to know, because I had questions about stuff, but never really ended up getting an answer. Like, why does Cheren dislike Gwyneth? What happened to lead Nika and Hilbert to each other? Overall, I don’t know if this classifies as a gripe or if you’re just that good of a writer that you motivate me to want to keep going and reach the part of the story where my questions are answered but I just thought I’d say it anyway.

Nah, that's fair. Like, if I were gonna rewrite this, I'd definitely do more with Martin; as it is, I'm at the point where I'm working on three and a half other projects now and I feel like it's time to draw a line under Go Home and move on. So yes, you're right about Martin – I should have at least made more of an effort to include the 'hands and eyes' line more frequently, because that's the thing from him that Gwyneth carries with her forever, the art history lesson that is burnt into her mind as a metaphor for the slant of history. As for Cheren disliking Gwyneth – honestly, it's a personality mismatch, which I tried to tell through implication and stuff but which perhaps I could have made clearer. Cheren's neat and orderly and Gwyneth is a hot dissociative mess. Plus, Gwyneth dislikes him for his success and his association with Hilbert, and Cheren dislikes her for that, and also, though he won't admit it, for the fact that she isn't a success. And then, you know – some people just don't like each other. With Gwyneth, that's like, quite a lot of people, actually.

Nika and Hilbert! I left that out because … you know what? Partway through writing this review, I decided also that I should go and make some changes to try and show how it was they came together, and prepare things a little more for Nika's change of heart at the altar – I added a conversation between Gwyneth and her mum while they're waiting for the taxi to arrive that hopefully does that, and an extra line to Gwyneth's thoughts after speaking to Bianca at the church. Has it really done enough to patch the gap? I'm not sure. There's a bit more I could add, but like I'm wary of overstating things. I'm open to criticism on this point; it's clearly something I have a history of getting wrong.

But yeah – don't let yourself believe that your criticisms aren't valid because a story feels like it isn't pitched at you. Readers are usually right, albeit sometimes not for the reasons they think they are, and no matter how much writers like to think otherwise this is mostly true. I believe this very strongly, and as such I'm always open to critique.

 

[Cutlerine]

Review response part 2 of 2! Man, this was a long one. You guys really spoiled me with the gigantic responses.

Ch 2
-Starting off here, I like (maybe not the right word?) that Floccesy has urbanized a bit. I always had this headcanon that Unova favored rapid town expansion, even at the cost of nature… kind of like America. So it’s nice seeing this pop up in another story. Minor detail, but it made me smile.

Yes, I have this long-standing fascination with America, partly because it's a massive political and cultural power that would be unwise to ignore and partly because parts of it are just so strange to me, and I really wanted to use Go Home as a way to work through some of those thoughts.

-The bus depot scene has this very sharp juxtaposition that you paint very clearly. The dialogue b/w Gwyneth and the boy is friendly, but her thoughts fester like an untreated wound.

Nice. That's kinda what I wanted; Gwyneth tries hard to be a better person, especially when dealing with trainers – I always think about all those NPCs who give you advice and presents as you journey through the region as only reacting to you in that way because you're a child on a trainer journey, and generosity towards you is sort of the done thing.

-Now this 2nd has flashback scene has all sorts of teases going on with it. Gwyneth taking the time to think about Ghetsis’ words. That Team Plasma has more a political slant in this world. And of course Gwyneth’s strong dislike of Cheren’s general demeanor. This flashback didn’t exactly answer the big question I had at the end of the bus station scene: what makes Cheren hate Gwyneth so much? I’m sure it’s coming. That’s just what I was expecting there and the flashback didn’t exactly do that. But, if misdirection was your intention, it worked.

My view is that the games give you a child's-eye view of the world – so of course a child only sees the open rallies and stuff that Plasma hold, and of course everything looks simple and apolitical. Fanfic gives me the chance to explore the depth and complexity that the games don't let you see – which for me means rounding out Plasma considerably, because they're right up there with Skull as my favourite team, with interesting goals and split motivations and schisms and all that other good stuff.

As for the flashbacks more generally – they just tell the story of Gwyneth's other trainer journey, in parallel with her current one. I try to make them mesh with the general thing of each chapter, but it doesn't always work out perfectly.

-So, uh, am I to understand that Gwyneth is some sort of Pokémon world analogue to a Native American, then (or maybe an Australian aboriginal)? That’s definitely not something I was expecting and it’s a unique concept to integrate into this world.

Yeah, one of my big gripes with Unova is that it's a very … one-sided view of America, honestly. It's so positive, so focused on freedom and tolerance, but America is not just that, it's so many other things too. There's a nod towards indigenous civilisations with sigilyph, and the Relic items and locations, but it's just that, just a nod, and that's not really enough. America was founded on conquest and settler colonialism, and given that Unova/America is as much of a character here as anyone else, I wanted to give as much time to its bad sides as its good. So: the Henuun, putting a face to the anonymous ancient civilisation whose ruins pockmark Unova.

Plus, of course, Gwyneth's is the kind of human experience I'm interested in. I pretty much always write about abjection, about people on the wrong side of power relations, because that's the kind of experience that chimes with and matters to me and also because someone's got to write about it, and it might as well be me. Like, if I'm gonna be making art anyway, I might as well make it cathartic.

-WAIT WAIT *deep breath* Okay, I was absolutely not expecting this to tie into the canonical B2W2 events at all. But there are Hugh and Nate! It’s just a cameo, but still. Color me super surprised. And I guess it does serve as a catalyst for some sort of poison-type move inducing a little delusional trip in her. This is probably just a me issue, but given the narration is all the same style I get disjointed when you’re narrating a past memory while present-day actions are taking place.

Yeah! Like I said, I wanted BW2 to be happening in the background while the story went on. It makes for some rather unlikely plot events, like the captain of the boat running off to interviews at PokéStar, but I tried to make it seem at least slightly plausible.

As for the tense thing – I meld everything together in the present tense like that to try and represent the way Gwyneth experiences the past, as these vivid recollections that take over her mind for a while because she's spent so long living in them that they seem almost as real as the present. There are definitely points where that gets a little confusing, but on balance I felt the pros outweighed the cons.

-My one thing that struck me as off is simply the second list later into the chapter. Was there a specific narrative reason to separate them like that? If there is, it flew right over my head.

Yeah, I think. It worked better that way, I felt. I couldn't tell you exactly why, but my inner editor was not pleased with them as a single unit, so I separated them and that felt to me like it worked better. This isn't a very scientific way of organising a chapter, but it's about all the reason I've got, I'm afraid.

Ch 3
-Opening with the flashback this time. It’s… hmm. I’m not entirely sure on the angle here. Is this dropping a hint that Gwyneth has some sort of attachment issue? Or is this some form of mental illness popping up? It’s tough to tell given the vaguer descriptions. But I think it was planned this way, so I can’t be mad at it. Just curious, I guess.

Gwyneth developing attachment issues is definitely intended to feel like a possibility. She could easily have created a very unhealthy relationship; she didn't. It was just blind luck that things worked out the way they did. But yeah, the roots of her vicious, destructive depression go back a long, long way.

Oooookaaaay, I’m slightly familiar with anti-venom treatments in EMS, so that sounds not just unpleasant but I feel like Gwyneth’s heart should have stopped when she got attacked.

I'm gonna level with you, I don't know anything about how poison works. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

-I’m gonna resist the urge to scold the nurse(?) for reacting to Gwyneth’s lack of insurance. Health care professionals shouldn’t judge like that. Do no harm, right? I kid, I kid. It makes her seem more human in the end. But Gwyneth didn’t have to sign any forms saying she was going against medical advice? Now that’s shocking! I’ll just shut up now…

Another admission: I've never done what Gwyneth's doing here, so I also don't know how that works. I guess that wouldn't be a major edit to make, so perhaps when I have a spare moment I'll go back and add a line to cover that. But thank you for bringing an evidently more experienced set of eyes to this part of the story!

-Uh… am I crazy, or did you skip September 11th? You went from Saturday the 10th, to Sunday the 12th…

Oops. Okay, yeah. That's not quite as bad as the time I accidentally got the length of Gwyneth and Nika's relationship wrong and wrote the story with a completely unworkable timescale for several months before anyone pointed it out, but it's still a mistake. I'm, uh, not always the best at keeping complicated timelines in check. This is an easy fix, so I'll do that one right away.

-Ah, I must commend you with that Venipede. You really had me convinced it was just there to poison Gwyneth and then hit the road but, nope, it stows away aboard the ship. I had expected it to at least make it to Castelia, but credit it to you that you successfully killed that thought, only to trick me a little while later.

Chekhov's venipede, right? Go Home is really compressed, both in terms of geography and timescale and in terms of the number of characters, so I wanted to make every person introduced really count. It's a portrait of Unova and its inhabitants, after all. Also, I needed Gwyneth to have a pokémon so she could make a second pokémon journey to Humilau, and venipede was, as you point out, thematically apposite.

-Oh… hi Tomás. You’re the last person I was expecting to see at this point. Though, I guess the Latino thing should’ve been a tip off. I’m really great at reading, huh? And of course he and Ashley are getting married. Gotta do everything to make Gwyneth as lonely and uncomfortable as possible, I suppose. But she isn’t alone now. She has Venipede. I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be some sort of personification (Pokésonification?) of her thoughts that she seems to have an almost toxic appearance and her interactions seem, well, toxic. Either I’m incorrectly reading too deep or it’s very clever. ^^

You're quite right! The venipede is Gwyneth's reflection: vicious, mean, toxic, noisome – but also, in the end, fiercely loyal and completely devoted to the people and ideas she cares about, no matter what. Shane compares Gwyneth to a scolipede in chapter one, and that's the first of the parallels that I make throughout the story.

As for Tomás – yeah, that's the economy of character again, and the way Gwyneth's past so insistently keeps returning to her, no matter what. He also served as a good way to establish that falling in love with someone you meet on your trainer journey is something of a romantic cliché in the pokémon world, and a means of showing another type of passage through the transition from childhood to adulthood in the pokémon world.

-I’ve never been a fan of major metropolitan areas. I don’t think it was intentional, but the descriptions of Castelia made me feel like I was, say, in New York City and really desperately looking to get a train out of there as soon as possible.

Nope, that's super intentional. I have a mixed relationship to major cities; it probably shows through here. And while I've never been to New York, which is obviously the place Castelia is based on, I've heard very mixed things about it, too, and wanted to show as much here.

-Cripes, Shane. You’re one heck of an obtuse guy, apparently. Or you have a massive case of foot-in-mouth syndrome. But, to be fair, I’m pretty sure a lot of people who try to dance around the issue of someone being transgendered, either b/c they’re too politically correct, trying not to offend anyone or anything or just plain uncomfortable with it. My guess is Shane was trying not to offend.

I think of Shane as being politely baffled. His is a fairly common response; the thing about being visibly trans is that people tend to see that before they see your personhood, and so instead of reacting to you as a person they react to you as an idea. Shane is trying not to offend, and probably is sort of like I don't really know what's going on here but it seems important, and also he is actually not all that perceptive. He's a great guy, but he seems like the kind of person who misses a few things.

OH… OHHHHHHHH. Gwyneth’s unease about Nika makes SOOOOOOOOOO much more sense now. Ahhhhh! That’s crazy! But props for being realistic and keeping everything low-key. I feel like there are dramatic stories out there that would take an almost soap opera approach to reveals like that.

I actually revealed that in chapter one! I'm sorry if the line slipped by you – it must have been really weird to read this far without knowing that Nika was Gwyneth's ex. During the car ride to Floccesy, Gwyneth says she's going to her brother's wedding, and Shane points out that it's also her ex's wedding, so yeah, that was intended to be the reveal moment.

I love it when extra-snarky tidbits are slipped into the narration like this. They’re always good for a smile.

Well, Gwyneth is a pretty bitter person, with a lot of petty little thoughts. They were fun to write, and I'm glad they're amusing as well as vicious, otherwise they'd just be depressing.

-Props to Gwyneth for keeping her composure with Saadiyyah. I probably would’ve snapped at her already. I appreciate that the narration lets us know that Gwyneth’s using every ounce of her willpower here. And, of course, that you actually express it more creatively than what I just said. ^^;

Hah, thanks! Obviously Gwyneth really, really resents Saadiyyah for having what she doesn't, but at the same time she feels her own obligation to her very keenly, both as a guest and as an adult speaking to a kid trainer.

-Oooh, nice bit of backstory on the Relic items. Now I feel bad for pawning them off for cash.

Yeah, they're nothing but vendor trash in-game, which I feel is not what they should be. I wanted to give Unova, and what was before Unova, a proper sense of history.

-Switching into flashback mode, I see. Kind of an abrupt transition but, again, I think it’s just my poor reading abilities holding me back here. I am surprised that this flashback is heading toward more of a high point. I expected nothing but negativity but it looks like I’m in for a roller coaster. The only question now is when I hit the big drop (and I’m expecting a big drop).

Gwyneth's first journey was a good one, really! Like, she's definitely very nostalgic about it. She loved it, and she loves the idea of it, and part of the point of the flashbacks is to juxtapose what she feels about her journey as a child with what she feels about her journey as an adult. The point where she considers the change from one state to another to have begun is probably the liberation of her pokémon.

Geez are you a mind-reader. This is the exact argument I use to justify my incessant hatred of summer. XD

Well, a lot of Gwyneth's concerns aren't that specific; many of them are just to do with being bitter about the way life has turned out, or about having lost the grace and freedom of childhood. So you know, much of that is supposed to be relatable.

Ch 5
-Minor tidbit again, but it’s funny that Steggers seems to have this strong, silent type routine going. It even carries that over into the wild Boldore encounter (thanks for the shrieking Venipede)I kind of developed that sort of headcanon after seeing this one Gigalith in a Black 2 nuzlocke comic. So, huzzah! My headcanon lives!

I mean, I'm just not sure how gigalith are meant to make sounds, I guess. They seem to me to be based on speakers crossed with geodes, but like the pokédex doesn't have them making sounds but rather attracted to them, so I've never been sure how I feel about the design. It's cool, but it could maybe use some tightening up to make it more coherent.

-Ooooh, more Pokémon variations to match up with their homes, I guess? At least I think that’s how it is. It’s nice in that it makes the Pokémon seem distinct.

Yep! I can never resist variations and subspecies. They're just so much fun.

-The idle conversation b/w Gwyneth and Saadiyyah is fun to read. Namely b/c it brings to mind the kind of, I don’t know, introductory/ice breaker sorts of conversations you have at, like, a social function or something. There’s just this sense of familiarity in that we’re all trying to relate one another in some way because deep down humans are social creatures and trying to stay isolated can mess with our minds on major levels.

Relatability was the name of the game here, yeah. Gwyneth has her own specific problems, but she also has more universal ones. People being people again, no matter who they are.

-I like the brief take on Bianca. It kind of reads as an endorsement of Bianca’s status as the “lesser” or “goofier” rival that Game Freak’s loved to put in their games since, well, I guess this was the first game to really embrace multiple rivals after Gen III had a bit of it. And how it’s not necessarily a bad thing and she’s perfectly happy with herself.

I always feel like Bianca is a little hard done by in fic – she's not lesser than anyone, she's just a different sort of person to Cheren and Hilbert, and because the game mechanics only really allow BW to measure strength by making a person good at pokémon battling (and because N is a bit dismissive of her at one point) I feel like that encourages people to see her as somehow less successful. But she isn't. She goes out into the world with the explicit goal of finding her truth, and she succeeds; she doesn't save Unova, but she overcomes a lot of her personal limitations and reaches a new understanding with her parents, and her story is really kind of wonderful like that. I wanted very much to make Bianca a success in that way.

-Hrrrrmmm… again it feels like some of this Team Plasma tidbit stuff is an allusion to some sort of underlying mental condition but I can’t quite figure out. And what’s this? Nika released a Pokémon of hers? Gaaaaah, I hate it how you tease me with such juicy tidbits!

I mean, Gwyneth is completely undiagnosed, so I kept references to her mental health vague, but it should be pretty clear that she is severely depressed, with a lot of complications owing to her terrible methods of coping with it, and to who she is as a social entity. I don't think diagnoses are always very helpful, especially if you end up getting caught in the trap of arguing that no it's this condition or no it's that condition without actually paying attention to the material reality of the sufferer's life; real life is much, much messier than any catalogue of symptoms allows for, and what I've aimed for is representing the experience of living with mental illness, rather than saying 'this is Gwyneth and also she is depressed'.

Ch 6
-Out of the tunnel. I’ll admit, there was a sense of dissonant serenity about it that I’ll miss at this point in time. And, I can’t quite say for certain, but it seems like Gwyneth is “warming” up to Saadiyyah but there’s a part of her mind that’s actively resisting it. Almost like companionship is an infection and her mind is the body’s immune system, trying to fight it off.

Absolutely. Gwyneth is empathetic, but she'd like to be empathetic far, far away from other people, if that makes any sense to you. And of course she feels like she (a) doesn't deserve friendship and (b) will poison anyone she gets close to, so there's that too.

So, I’ve noticed this pop up frequently. Do you personally like the Unova region as far as aesthetics go or is this just fluff for the sake of the story? You got me genuinely curious. XD

America is huge, spectacular, beautiful, profound, utterly implausible and breathtakingly cruel. I genuinely believe that. It's incredible that it exists, this emperorless empire that contains so much natural beauty and so many amazing people, and at the same time it's staggering in its inhumanity and its violence. Any nation is a strange thing, really, but America seems particularly strange to me, and given that this story is in part me working through my thoughts about America that was bound to turn up here.

Aside from that, I wanted to think about what it would mean for someone to travel around fake-America on a pokémon journey, on foot through forest and prairie and mountain, and like … the way that would affect you, the love you'd come to have for the people and places even as you began to learn that there is a darkness underneath it all. Like – can you imagine that? An epic road trip at fifteen, unsupervised, with superpowered partners, across spectacular landscapes? It would mark you for life, in all kinds of ways. Especially if at the same time you fall in love with someone.

-Ohmygod Morton is such a perfect last name for Clay based on his personality. I mean, I think (you can correct me if I’m wrong) he’s supposed to be a son of immigrants from one of the Japan-based regions, but I still like it.

Is that so? I didn't know that, and can't find a source for it, but that's interesting. Either way, I'm glad you like his name. The thing about adding surnames to canon characters is that you want to try and make it feel like it's as suited to them as the forename, and it's always satisfying when you manage that.

-If I’m reading that slight flashback right, there’s the use of an extended metaphor to liken keeping debt away to Alice in Wonderland and then debt is personified as a Lycanroc? It’s done so elegantly that admittedly it’s tough to tell if I’m right. But I do like this idea that Gwyneth’s family had debt issues and that it introduces the possibility of Hilbert have noble motives in mind with all this league stuff. That said, why wouldn’t he try to help his sister?

Yes, that's it exactly. Gwyneth isn't all that eloquent, and she needed the Through the Looking-Glass analogy to explain what she meant to Nika; the lycanroc thing is a present-day thing, part of the narration of the story rather than Gwyneth's explanation. As for why Hilbert wouldn't try to help her – well, Gwyneth has gone off the radar; he probably can't find her. And she has already made it abundantly clear that she wouldn't accept any help from that quarter.

-Wait… okay… does Gwyneth have dissociative fugues? They’re pretty rare as far as psychiatric conditions are concerned. But still, good grief. That’s terrible! Likening it to a dial-up modem only makes it more difficult to stomach. From the looks of it, it’s tied to her releasing her Pokémon because she bought into Ghetsis’ rhetoric. In which case that’s very… deep. And shocking and surprising. But the games kind of led us to believe that that did happen quite a bit so it’s cool to see a POV from one such person.

Is it really that uncommon? Perhaps my social group is not representative of the wider world, but I know so many people who have struggled with dissociation, to varying degrees of severity. I certainly do, or did; it's much less of a problem these days than it used to be. Anyway, Gwyneth's particular cocktail of mental health issues is definitely very strongly rooted in the trauma of her pokémon liberation, as well as just … well, her experience of being an indigenous trans woman in a society founded upon white supremacy, and the biting self-doubt that comes with her dual heritage. But going back to Plasma for a moment, I've always thought that Plasma must have left a trail of profound traumas right across Unova, but you never get to see it in-game because you're a player character and physically incapable of being anything other than a staunch opponent of Plasma's ideology – so a fic about being an NPC was a great chance to explore that.

Ch 7
-Venipede has become a sort of distorted Companion Cube at this point for poor Gwyneth. I’m not really sure how else to describe it.

I think I know what you mean. The venipede is a character in her own right, but Gwyneth is very much using her as a symbol, too.

-The relationship deepened after Gwyneth’s first serious fugue episode, huh? Interesting… it certainly speaks to a certain level of selflessness in Nika that almost seems deceptive for a teenager. I always thought teenagers were considered pretty selfish, so I figured Nika would want nothing to do with Gwyneth once the fugues were apparent. But, ah, that’s just the complexity of this story, isn’t it? Though I guess she did eventually grow tired of it. Kind of like how some caretakers may end up losing their patience (or their minds) with someone they’re taking care of.

It depends on the teenager, honestly. I think it's easy to characterise them all as alike, and it's something I'm guilty of myself (see the encounter with the teenage boys in the tunnel), but like they're all people, all trying to navigate the change from child to adult, and some of them manage it with kindness and grace and some of them manage it with anger and viciousness. Nika has always been the kind of person who is nice to people, who gives perhaps too much of herself away in her attempt to make others feel better, and given that she's kind of crushing on Gwyneth already her first instinct on seeing her in traumatic shock is to try and help her.

-So, is Jackie that one ex-Plasma that got PAWNCHED by his friend (only for Hugh to PAWNCH the jerk right back)? Ah, I do-so love the subtle B2W2 story elements tucked away in here.

Yes! Although that hasn't happened yet, of course, since Gwyneth is moving much faster than Hugh and Nate are. But it's about to happen.

Ch 8
-Oh, well, I see now that Ch 7 was tamer for a reason. That mugging scene was extraordinarily frightening. In the sense that it felt like it was happening in slow motion. And noooooo, not Companion CubeVenipede. It was providing all the light-hearted moments! Frankly, the scene in the Pokémon center feels like watching someone who’s in shock. But at the very least there’s some glimmer of hope with Dr. ze’Naarat. It seems that she helps snap Gwyneth out of her stupor but more importantly it seems like Gwyneth is finally not attempting to keep the old British stiff upper lip. And quite frankly the body’s only designed to take so much abuse before everything just kind of breaks down and it seemed she was at that limit.

That's exactly what I was going for with the mugging scene and the bit with Gwyneth in shock in the Centre, so I'm glad to hear that. And yes, there is definitely a sense here in which Gwyneth is being forced at last to admit that she's overreaching herself. She has avoided doing so up till that point because she's afraid that if she does she'll lose her will to continue.

-Another positive with the flashbacks is that there isn’t any serious romanticizing/serializing of Gwyneth’s and Nika’s relationship. It starts off at an extraordinarily slow pace that might make the average reader (or TV watcher) bored. But it’s very realistic overall, I think. Not a relationship expert and know nothing about making them for any form of media. ^^;

I'll be honest, I'm very fiercely solitary and have neither any experience of relationships nor the desire to acquire any, but I have, I hope, some sensible ideas about how people interact with one another, and I do my best to extrapolate from that. I tried to very specifically make something that had roots in childish crushes and obsessions but had the potential to be either something wonderful or something unhealthy or both, and hopefully I did an okay job of that.

-Yay, Companion Cube lives! I swear Venipede isn’t my favorite character, plz don’t kill me.

It's perfectly reasonable for the venipede to be your favourite character! She is pretty great.

Ch 9
-I appreciate that Dr. ze’Naarat is here for a reality check. Maybe not the best bedside manner but she’s doing her job, dang it. Frankly if it wasn’t for the way the Unovan health care system works (since it’s PokéMerica) I’m sure Gwyneth never would have even made it this far cause she’d have been hospitalized at some point. Also, I’m not sure if the doctor’s attitude is making reference to this real-world phenomenon, but a fair number of doctors at major hospitals in the US are of a minority race or are from other countries and I know that can create some tension. Well, most of my doctor’s are. And I have more than I would care to admit. *sweatdrop*

I mean, she'd have to actually be found to be hospitalised. Given how the collective eye of society just slides over homeless people without registering them, I'm not sure anyone would have ended up taking her to hospital. Unless of course you mean that she wouldn't have got out of the Virbank hospital, which, I guess there's probably some truth to that.

Ze'Naarat is Henuun because I needed another Henuun character but with a very different attitude to the world; I think I was also thinking about that phenomenon as well.

I’ll admit, I got a laugh out of this. Is this also some subtle way of saying that sometimes authors like to put pieces of themselves into their characters and stories? Not attempting to pry into anything person, I’m just curious if that was your thought process with that line.

Nah, it's fine. But no, it's me saying that we all need stories in which to see ourselves, and the reason I write so many stories about people like me is that I want to read them and they don't exist yet, so I have to fill the gap. There need to be more good stories about trans people by trans people, for instance.

Also, Shauntal is a terrible hack writer and I'm pretty sure she just abuses her fame as an Elite Four member to get herself published, so I'll always take any opportunity to point up the inadequacy of her writing.

-Oh, well hello sudden mentor-ish opportunity moment. After Saadiyyah I kind of wasn’t expecting any more encounters with young trainers. There’s a much softer atmosphere to this one compared to the constrained feelings Saadiyyah brought up in Gwyneth (also that kid in Floccessy, as the narration pointed out).

Well, it's a very different thing. With Tor, Gwyneth doesn't just owe the debt of an adult to a kid trainer; she also feels another obligation, the necessity of her as an adult trans woman giving a young trans kid hope for their own future. So it definitely was intended to feel different.

-Cool take on the events of BW’s climax. I liked seeing it from an outsider perspective (since, well, unlike some of the other villainous team shenanigans it seems hard not to know about what N did) and just seeing Gwyneth’s reactions to everything happening.

I'm glad you liked it! Plasma's thing was always about spectacle, about making a show of power to get the Unovan public on side; that's how I interpreted the castle attacking the League building and all that. So yeah, I'm glad I captured the showiness of it all.

-Welp, and just when I thought things were looking up Gwyneth bites the hand that feeds her. Maybe she’s more of a Venipede than she thinks she is. At the very least, she’s ardently refusing to give up in the face of reality, that’s for sure. Luckily Tor is there to bring some measure of happiness in before things can get too dour.

It's only been a few days, remember. You can't change the habits of a lifetime in the space of a week or two. Gwyneth's personal transformation is going to take time.

-Ah, now this is definitely hit one of the journeyman story tropes: sneaking onto public transit to jump around to some spot you need to get to. The hitchhiking has finally set in!

Neat. I haven't really read any similar stories, so any similarities are purely coincidental.

-Hmm, at this point admittedly I’m wanting the flashbacks to skip ahead more toward what Nika and Gwyneth did after their journey, but I must be patient and read on, I suppose. But I do appreciate that it was Clay’s Excadrill that gave Nika trouble, as I believe it has a bit of a notorious reputation as far as Gen V bosses are concerned (at least, the Nuzlocke community considers it a bit of a locke-ender).

He's ended a couple of Nuzlockes for me, that's for sure. That excadrill is just very fast and very hard-hitting, which is a really annoying combination. Also I understand wanting to skip ahead, but like, I really had to have the two journeys in parallel, and I needed to give the proper amount of space to what happened to Gwyneth after (a) her misguided liberation and (b) she and Nika became a thing.

-Maybe not the right place to say this but it quite literally took me up until Kit popped up to release what the “six-letter word” that was mentioned but never explicitly stated was. I’m not very intelligent. <<;

Don't sell yourself short! That's not really an intelligence thing, I think, just … a thing. It's not like the two six-letter words are particularly interesting or anything, just hurtful and insulting.

Ch 11
-As someone who’s gone around some national parks in the northwest, I like the quiet serenity given to White Forest. It reminds me of the backcountry trails where you have a tendency not to run into anyone save for a very dedicated outdoorsman. It’s also a good change of pace from the civilized setting of the last several chapters. But nothing can really go well for Gwyneth, so here’s her hiking in the run which is most definitely the exact opposite of fun if you don’t have a home to return to. I like the use of Chargestones in the trailer area though. It’s way cooler than just some random obstacles in a cave.

I did think that if chargestones were real, people would totally be mining them to use for other applications, so I'm glad you approve of my decision to bring them out of the cave and into everyday life. Also that you like White Forest, which is heavily based on walks in the woods in my childhood, and was really intended to have that kind of serenity you describe.

-Another interesting flashback that, I guess, sheds a bit more insight into Gwyneth’s and Nika’s relationship. Although if I’m being honest the ex-Rocket tidbit and Pat’s appearance felt oddly out of place. Maybe it becomes relevant to something in a later chapter? But for now I’m just scratching my head and going, “Huh?” Gwyneth compares herself to Nova little while later (travelling “Because she has no other options but running”). It still feels like a bit of an unusual comparison, since I would think Rocket affiliation means running with far more dire consequences.

It's the desperation, I guess, and the fact that their lives are both essentially made up of bad decisions, and also the grimness of adulthood starting to intrude into the golden world of the trainer journey – something that Gwyneth resists for a long time, with Nika's help, but which eventually overwhelms her. Could I have done a better job of all this? Probably. You're onto something here, I think, but at this point that would be a big enough change that I'm just going to let it go.

-I also can’t tell if she’s slipping into another fugue by the end of the chapter or not. Like I said, not very smart. But she seems so fuzzy at this point. It’s a familiar feeling for me, sadly.

She is slipping in and out of her dissociation all the way through this hike, certainly.

-Oh dang. So Gwyneth’s attempts to evade Tor ultimately turn out entirely useless. Again, I wasn’t expecting him to make a genuine reappearance at this point. Goes to show you’re just too good at surprising me, apparently.

They were always going to turn up again, yeah. I needed a way for Gwyneth to end up in this particular situation, where she puts herself in harm's way to protect someone, and Tor was just a really convenient way for that to happen.

-I liked this flashback scene more than the last chapter’s. Even though, again, there isn’t much progression b/w Nika and Gwyneth and you could make the argument that it’s filler, it did follow up on some points brought up with regards to Nika and her Pokémon. Evolutions, of course. But I specifically recall some mentions of how savage Bisharp can be and that’s definitely on full display in that gym battle.

I mean, you could argue that most of them are filler, honestly; they're all at least as much about atmosphere and mood as they are about anything else. But I'm glad you liked this one regardless.

-I don’t think this qualifies as bait-and-switch, but the warning at the chapter’s start made it feel that way. I expected something to go wrong in the cabin and it didn’t, so I thought the flashback would have something go wrong (say, Kit returning) and that didn’t, so I figured the hikers were a red herring but then they weren’t. You successfully tricked me again, it seems. Not that I should be celebrating since good god, poor Gwyneth. But I think the scene was more powerful because it was so short and not dragged out like, say, a TV show or movie might do with a similar scenario.

Well, it would have been irresponsible of me to post this without a content warning – like if I were reading this story rather than writing it, it would definitely be something I wanted to be warned about beforehand, so as to be able to prepare and be able to read it without trouble. But like, the hikers are definitely meant to feel dangerous, even in that first encounter, and I did want to make use of that to kind of trick the reader in the way you describe. As for the violence itself – yes, I wanted that to be short, sharp and hard, for maximum impact. I have no interest in aestheticising that kind of thing, only in representing it as truthfully as I can.

Ch 13
-Welp, Gwyneth’s had her epiphany. It’s a bitter and caustic one but she finally succumbs to how in over her head she ended up. The impression I get is that really Gwyneth had some sort of co-dependency reliance on Nika and that’s kind of been what’s driving things. Which is gut-wrenching, to be sure. And just when it looks like we’ve reached a stalemate, it’s teleport ex machina! Well, she had to get some sort of good fortune eventually, I suppose. And now we’re officially hitchhiking. I can’t believe it took until almost-the-end to get to this point

It had to happen eventually – both the final admission of defeat, and the hitchhiking. It's not a proper road trip story unless right before the end something terrible happens that makes you feel like the protagonist will never get where they're going, right?

-I’ll admit, it’s odd to see a return to small talk with Cheryl after it really feels like that hasn’t happened since Jackie. But, I guess this is symbolizing a bit of an upward swing, since Cheryl seems to be improving Gwyneth’s demeanor, despite the events of the last few chapters. And I mean, goodness, Cheryl’s wit is just so jarring compared to the dialogue up to this point. In a good way. In a refreshing way. It brought a smile to my face.

It's intended as a reprieve. Like, the further Gwyneth goes, the more violent the ups and downs get, until here in chapter thirteen she ends up jackknifing from lying face-down in the dirt to flirting with a kindly trucker and then back to despair on a beach. And it was just … a good thing to happen, in the end; I needed to show that Gwyneth wasn't irrevocably lost, I guess, that she had it in her to still be a person after everything.

-Ah-ha, we’re finally getting light shed on the post-trainer days. And it’s reading like a play-by-play, but it’s the information I’ve basically wanted since the first two chapters, so yay! I like that Gwyneth’s mom gets touched upon here, since her situation was brought up previously, so she’s getting a much-needed revisit.

Yes, it's essentially like the flashbacks, just extended; it had to wait until now to make sure people would care enough to read through it, mostly. I like to think it isn't completely devoid of literary merit, but obviously it doesn't have as much going for it as a regular chapter.

I think one of the things I like so much is the absolutely skewed perspective of Hilbert. We only really know about him from Gwyneth’s perspective and memories, so it’s totally unreliable and makes it all the more interesting to figure out what he’s really like.

Empty, I should imagine. He is a player character, after all. But yeah, I'm much more interested in the perspective of an NPC than his own, so I don't give him much of a chance to talk on his own behalf. You get to decide for yourself – which is I guess kind of accurate; player characters are just ciphers onto which we project whatever we want, I guess.

-Speaking of finally getting answers, the Martin thing is finally addressed. I get that it’s supposed to be a profound memory but I must admit that I it didn’t end up having the impact on me that I think you were going for. Maybe it’s because the event only ever got one line in a smattering of chapters, or that Martin was only just now introduced and explained via some exposition. I get that it’s more about how Gwyneth was treated afterward, but if it did have a profound effect on her psyche I feel like it deserved a bit more attention in the story proper. But, again, this was just my take.

Like I said, that's eminently fair. I tried to make it echo throughout her experience with the 'hands and eyes' line; probably I didn't do as good a job of it as I could or should have done. That's fine. I wrote Go Home in just a few months, with a vicious, restless kind of discontented energy that didn't always feel like something I was in control of; I didn't expect it to come out perfectly.

Now this on the other hand, was beautiful and subtle build up. The moment I read this so many gears clicked into place and everything suddenly made sense as to why it all was happening. I was reading this for awhile under a skewed assumption that Nika finally got tired of Gwyneth’s baggage and cut her loose but then there was that tidbit chapters back about Nika planning to propose and I wondered what happened. Now it turns out Nika didn’t necessarily do anything wrong, and that that was the issue for Gwyneth. Holy cow, it’s all so clear now!

I definitely wrote it intending to have your initial suspicions seem like a reasonable assumption! Like, Gwyneth and Nika's relationship really could have gone wrong; it was always this fragile, beautiful thing balanced dangerously on a knife edge, and Gwyneth pushed it over mostly because it was right there for the pushing and she believed very strongly that if she could destroy it she should, because it was too good for her.

-Companion Cube gets a name! Huzzah! You’ve moved on up in life. And Gwyneth’s get some attachment to it, what with her interactions with N. I’m still calling it Companion Cube, because I like Portal… sorrynotsorry.

Of course. She's loved the little monster for ages now. She just needed the chance to admit it.

-Well, that mother-daughter reunion is about as awkward as I’d expect something like that to be. Actually, no wait, I imagined Gwyneth’s mother having a lot more to say, but I guess she learned that it was useless trying to talk too much to Gwyneth. Speaking of awkward, it’s so… brazenly bizarre to finally see this canon characters speaking after we’ve had nothing but Gwyneth’s skewed memories of them the entire story. But, to be fair, the brief interactions do seem in line w/ Gwyneth’s old descriptions.

Well, there probably is a lot more to say, but none of it is the sort of thing that can be said very quickly. It will take time to rebuild what Gwyneth spent so much time and energy destroying.

-The exception to that, of course, is Hilbert. Not a whole lot of substance to their reunion but the short, terse lines show some measure of progress in Gwyneth’s characterization. It also suggests she really was that badly skewed on her perception of Hilbert, but he acknowledges that he, well, hasn’t really paid much attention to her at all.

There isn't much substance because, again, he's a player character, and they're empty. Neither of them is really without blame; neither of them can admit this very easily. It's slow and awkward and painful, the way this kind of thing inevitably is.

-Oh… so the objection comes after all. I’ll be honest, as much as I wanted things to look up for Gwyneth I was hoping for some sort of subdued rekindling with her family and Nika. But… this is the logical conclusion I suppose. Good grief. And I mean, good that Nika reacted the logical way by flipping out at Gwyneth, but denying Hilbert is a bit of a shocking swerve. I get the whole point of it is to kind of reverse Hilbert’s “chosen” status and that the flashbacks built him up as Mr. Perfect in some regards. It’s just so incredibly abrupt. I know that Gwyneth doesn’t know anything about what happened to the two of them, but maybe the interlude could’ve shed a little bit of light on the two of them so that Bianca wasn’t the only hint that this was coming out of left field. But, again, it’s probably me just not understanding something.

Yeah, no, that's a fair criticism, honestly. It's less abrupt in the current version than it used to be, but still. I kind of tried to give the impression in the interlude and elsewhere that Nika and Gwyneth really work together well, and that it shouldn't really be a surprise that Nika chooses Gwyneth over Hilbert, but y'know, it's not perfect. And you know what, I can do more to edit that; it won't take too long. By the time I finish writing this gigantic review response, I may actually have already made the edit, so watch this space. It'll probably be in the last chapter, probably part of the pre-wedding discussions between Gwyneth and her mother. Hopefully that helps things out? I don't know, I'll have to see what people think.

-And, with all things said and done, they’re hitting a reset button. As much as you managed to tricked me this fic, this is the one thing I was expecting to happen. Just… as sisters-in-law or something… not as restarting an intimate relationship. Well, okay, a part of me expected it, but my brain couldn’t reason out how she would make it to the wedding and even then her objecting like something out of a TV drama. But it happened. So, congrats. Considering how depressing this fic was a happy ending (even a measured one) is quite the surprise.

I have a feeling things wouldn't have worked out as sisters-in-law; Gwyneth would have been too bitter and too in love with Nika for that. Maybe a more mature person could have managed it, but not her, even after all her experiences on the long road to Humilau. And also, like … I wanted Gwyneth and Nika to have the ending they deserved, which was each other, because they love each other and I am a Sentimental Fool who hates the surfeit of narratives in which lesbian relationships end either badly or with death or both.

I know you considered this to be a very important fic for you, so I'm sorry my thoughts are so scatterbrained. But, as I said, this fic is far more emotionally intelligent than me. Still, I wanted to give it the attention it deserved. Because it's very profound. Excellent work!

Honestly – thank you! My response to your review alone makes this over the character limit; combined with Sike's, we're at like 75,000 characters, which is frankly incredible. I'm really glad you liked it, and I'm touched that you took the time to write all your thoughts out. And, one last time – I would hope that there's no such thing as not being intelligent enough for stories. You don't have to read them the same way I do; you can just enjoy the story they tell. That is as good and valid a response as any – and honestly, you went above and beyond that here. You're right that this fic was super important to me, and I don't think that your response was anything other than thoughtful and considered. Thank you.

 

[icomeanon6]

This was hard to read in a good way. I have a list of books/movies that I call my "Best Things I Can't Read/Watch Again" list, and this will be the first item in the fanfic section.

So my last review was of the first chapter, and since I was mostly reading this during my commute I don't have a lot of notes from individual chapters since then, so this will be more of a comprehensive review. And by "comprehensive" I mean "rambling from point to point in no particular order."

You use the back-and-forth between present and past sections to very good effect. What stands out most to me was how when during the past sections I was feeling, "Story, please just stay here because everything hasn't gone to hell yet," and during the present sections I was feeling, "Story, please don't go back to the past because each bit of context makes everything happening here hurt more." Where this worked especially well was when it was revealed how exactly Gwyneth lost her pokemon. I don't think you could have picked a more heart-rending development, and one that so well explains the way Gwyneth sees herself at once as victim and perpetrator. And it just occurred to me how well that ties in with the way she can't see herself as truly native or white. It leaves her in this awful emotional limbo where she feels the scars of both and the comforts of neither; nothing but pain and guilt, neither material nor moral comfort. Perhaps this also ties in with the cigarette burns and a larger theme of self-harm. Anyway, this is all very heartbreakingly thematically coherent.

Zelda is probably the best part of the story. In addition to being a perfect fit for Gwyneth's issues thematically, she's a very convincingly written little beast. I'd never given venipede as a species two thoughts before, but now I can't help but see it as one of my favorite gen V pokemon. Everything from the noises she makes to the way her feet are like knives but she still has to ride in her spot makes her so endearingly gross. And what a trooper she is, too. I was so worried she wasn't going to recover from that darmanitan's attack. And that scream in the church... what a great moment. By golly, Gwyneth deserved some dividends from the karma of taking the poor thing in, and how wonderful that she was able to recognize the scream as good luck instead of bad luck.

Your skills as a writer shine throughout, especially your control of tone and voice. The oppressiveness and griminess of Gwyneth's present are so convincingly depicted that the relative brightness of parts of her past with Nika actually hurt. I loved how you used the intricacies of Gwyneth's voice to such powerful effect, both in how it shows what a pain the world around her is to her, but also in the rare, surprising things she finds some comfort in. Lousy fast food joints and "Unovan blandness" as her "Aan Hen" is a very American feeling: that awareness that your culture is largely junk, but how it's also home. Your style and skill are great--you convey a lot of nuanced, complicated ideas without sacrificing readability, and all while supporting a well-realized voice of character.

Your depiction of Unova as America rings true, by and large. It's an ugly, beautiful place. Lots of banal suburbs, claustrophobic cities, inspiring nature, and a very diverse bunch of characters. I did spot one recurring Englishism where you'd want an Americanism though: over here a "torch" refers to a stick that's on fire. You want to use "flashlight" instead. (Well-read Americans know it's called a 'torch' in English-English, but I've never heard an American call it one themselves.)

If I have one complaint, it's that I don't think the flashback interlude worked as well as the earlier flashback sections. Most of it's perfectly fine, but the revelation of Martin's death falls a little flat. After all the ominous hints about someone named "Martin" and his death from earlier, I guess I was expecting a depiction that wasn't so hands-off. It's saved somewhat by Gwyneth's encounter with the cop--that made the scene feel closer and more real--but after I'd been squirming in anticipation for a good while and wondering just what happened and how bad was it that Gwyneth is so loath to get into details, the death itself felt a little anticlimactic, even if it explains how it devastated her so much. I might be asking for a lot, here; finding the right spot in the narrative for everything is tough, and even tougher is deciding how much detail and narrative closeness each thing merits.

I skimmed your replies and noticed you have some reservation about the ending, so I'm going to say some words in defense of it. While you're reading the fic the recurring background question (besides 'How can Gwyneth possibly make it there?') is whether there will be the big Wedding-Interruption scene that's so common in fiction. Initially I thought that nothing of the sort could happen for this character, that there would be no way to make it happen and not have it feel contrived, but later I realized that was because I was making the mistake of taking Gwyneth's account at face value. The entire narrative is masterfully contorted and tinted by the main effect of Gwyneth's depression, which is that she is unable to see herself or anything she does as anything but awful. But the events that actually take place show that this is a distortion of who she truly is. An evil person would not adopt a venipede that put her in the hospital; this wasn't an odd twist of fate that taught her a lesson, it was who she always was but couldn't see herself as because she was sick.

Not sure if this makes sense, but when you got to the ending I believed it. Of COURSE the wedding could never keep going as long as she was there, and of course Nika still loved her. It only ever seemed otherwise because Gwyneth kept telling us so, and every time you wrote "some people are chosen and some are not," that was Gwyneth telling us that this is the kind of story that can't have a happy ending just because. But that's just Gwyneth removing Nika's agency from the picture and telling herself it's the other way around, because she can't imagine someone truly loving her.

I honestly hope Gwyneth gets help (and I usually don't write about post-ending hypotheticals like this), because she seriously does need it. Everything that led her to disappear in such caustic fashion is still there, and it'll stay there as long as she sees herself as a cancer. This has all been a long way of saying that your ending makes sense, and it's not just a fanciful, artificial Happy Ending. Gwyneth's still in a really bad way, but she's not hopeless, and that's exactly what you've been building up to the whole time.

There's so much more I could and should say, but I'll try to sum up my thoughts in this paragraph: This is a very real story. There are a lot of big ideas (self-loathing, cultural homelessness, cosmic unfairness) and small details (NPCs and ultra-balls, how venipede work, little bits of Unova) that you weave together perfectly through a devastatingly convincing character in Gwyneth. "Enjoyed" is the wrong word to describe my experience with this fic; "appreciated" or "compelled to finish despite the pain in put in my heart and stomach" is more accurate, and speaks higher of you as a writer. This is a true achievement in theme, character, and craft, and you're right to be proud of it. Thank you for making this.

 

[Cutlerine]

This was hard to read in a good way. I have a list of books/movies that I call my "Best Things I Can't Read/Watch Again" list, and this will be the first item in the fanfic section.

That's an incredible compliment. Thank you. I'm honoured that I managed to make a thing that can fit into that category.

You use the back-and-forth between present and past sections to very good effect. What stands out most to me was how when during the past sections I was feeling, "Story, please just stay here because everything hasn't gone to hell yet," and during the present sections I was feeling, "Story, please don't go back to the past because each bit of context makes everything happening here hurt more." Where this worked especially well was when it was revealed how exactly Gwyneth lost her pokemon. I don't think you could have picked a more heart-rending development, and one that so well explains the way Gwyneth sees herself at once as victim and perpetrator. And it just occurred to me how well that ties in with the way she can't see herself as truly native or white. It leaves her in this awful emotional limbo where she feels the scars of both and the comforts of neither; nothing but pain and guilt, neither material nor moral comfort. Perhaps this also ties in with the cigarette burns and a larger theme of self-harm. Anyway, this is all very heartbreakingly thematically coherent.

Flare nearly destroyed Kalos, Aqua/Magma nearly destroyed the world, Galactic nearly destroyed the universe -- but Plasma actually destroyed people's lives, and that's so much more real and believable than all the rest of them. It's the most human and uncomfortable crime committed by one of the villainous teams, and I knew I wanted to write about it in a way that did it justice. And like, there are certain kinds of people who are particularly vulnerable to Ghetsis' brand of insidious persuasion, which matched up perfectly with the sort of person who I wanted to write about – someone on the wrong side of pretty much every power relation going, someone completely abject. And the perspective of abjection is one of the ones I'm most interested in, so when I decided to poke America with a stick I of course decided to do it from that angle.

Zelda is probably the best part of the story. In addition to being a perfect fit for Gwyneth's issues thematically, she's a very convincingly written little beast. I'd never given venipede as a species two thoughts before, but now I can't help but see it as one of my favorite gen V pokemon. Everything from the noises she makes to the way her feet are like knives but she still has to ride in her spot makes her so endearingly gross. And what a trooper she is, too. I was so worried she wasn't going to recover from that darmanitan's attack. And that scream in the church... what a great moment. By golly, Gwyneth deserved some dividends from the karma of taking the poor thing in, and how wonderful that she was able to recognize the scream as good luck instead of bad luck.

I tend to always do this thing with fics where I pick a pokémon I've never really thought about before and write my way into making it one of my favourites. I was a bit undecided at first as to whether I'd use a trubbish (literal garbage) or even a wingull (seagulls are mad-eyed, vicious trash eaters), but in the end the former felt too obvious and the latter too subtle and also not poisonous enough. But I'm glad I went with venipede in the end. It's got poison, it's canonically vicious, it's just got everything I needed.

Then there was the matter of making something that doesn't really have a real-life equivalent into a believable animal. Like – centipedes are small and not exactly known for their personality, which made Zelda somewhat tricky. I added in some rat and a bit of stray dog, and I'm glad that she came across as convincingly alive.

Your skills as a writer shine throughout, especially your control of tone and voice. The oppressiveness and griminess of Gwyneth's present are so convincingly depicted that the relative brightness of parts of her past with Nika actually hurt. I loved how you used the intricacies of Gwyneth's voice to such powerful effect, both in how it shows what a pain the world around her is to her, but also in the rare, surprising things she finds some comfort in. Lousy fast food joints and "Unovan blandness" as her "Aan Hen" is a very American feeling: that awareness that your culture is largely junk, but how it's also home. Your style and skill are great--you convey a lot of nuanced, complicated ideas without sacrificing readability, and all while supporting a well-realized voice of character.

That's so much what I wanted to convey; thank you for saying so. Part of the point of Go Home is that the world is so terrible that most of the time you find yourself waiting for a giant meteorite to send it the way of the Mesozoic, but it's also the only place that you find anything worth living for. So: sunsets, forests, light on water, the particular buzz you sometimes get with junk culture at night. The kindness of strangers, and the incredible, insane beauty of the trainer journey – because come on, a trainer journey in America of all places seems completely unthinkable, both in terms of the size of the nation and in terms of what the state is willing to spend on its children, and actually getting to do something like that must be an utterly fantastic experience.

Your depiction of Unova as America rings true, by and large. It's an ugly, beautiful place. Lots of banal suburbs, claustrophobic cities, inspiring nature, and a very diverse bunch of characters. I did spot one recurring Englishism where you'd want an Americanism though: over here a "torch" refers to a stick that's on fire. You want to use "flashlight" instead. (Well-read Americans know it's called a 'torch' in English-English, but I've never heard an American call it one themselves.)

Ah, you're right! It's like when diamondperal876 pointed out my writing about lorries instead of trucks: I knew that, but I automatically wrote the word I'm more used to anyway, and of course I didn't catch it in an edit because it didn't look like a mistake, since it, you know, made perfect sense to me. Anyway, I think I've edited all instances of torches now. I suppose at some point I should go and change all the '-ise' words to '-ize', but y'know, I feel there are limits to my dedication.

If I have one complaint, it's that I don't think the flashback interlude worked as well as the earlier flashback sections. Most of it's perfectly fine, but the revelation of Martin's death falls a little flat. After all the ominous hints about someone named "Martin" and his death from earlier, I guess I was expecting a depiction that wasn't so hands-off. It's saved somewhat by Gwyneth's encounter with the cop--that made the scene feel closer and more real--but after I'd been squirming in anticipation for a good while and wondering just what happened and how bad was it that Gwyneth is so loath to get into details, the death itself felt a little anticlimactic, even if it explains how it devastated her so much. I might be asking for a lot, here; finding the right spot in the narrative for everything is tough, and even tougher is deciding how much detail and narrative closeness each thing merits.

That's entirely fair. It's definitely the part that's got the most criticism here on Serebii, although a couple other people have actually said they really like it; I'm inclined to believe the Serebii people here, because now, several months after I wrote it, I think I agree with you. At this point, though, I'm more or less happy to leave it. It's been a while, and I have enough other projects going on at present that I think I'll just have to let it lie.

I skimmed your replies and noticed you have some reservation about the ending, so I'm going to say some words in defense of it. While you're reading the fic the recurring background question (besides 'How can Gwyneth possibly make it there?') is whether there will be the big Wedding-Interruption scene that's so common in fiction. Initially I thought that nothing of the sort could happen for this character, that there would be no way to make it happen and not have it feel contrived, but later I realized that was because I was making the mistake of taking Gwyneth's account at face value. The entire narrative is masterfully contorted and tinted by the main effect of Gwyneth's depression, which is that she is unable to see herself or anything she does as anything but awful. But the events that actually take place show that this is a distortion of who she truly is. An evil person would not adopt a venipede that put her in the hospital; this wasn't an odd twist of fate that taught her a lesson, it was who she always was but couldn't see herself as because she was sick.

Not sure if this makes sense, but when you got to the ending I believed it. Of COURSE the wedding could never keep going as long as she was there, and of course Nika still loved her. It only ever seemed otherwise because Gwyneth kept telling us so, and every time you wrote "some people are chosen and some are not," that was Gwyneth telling us that this is the kind of story that can't have a happy ending just because. But that's just Gwyneth removing Nika's agency from the picture and telling herself it's the other way around, because she can't imagine someone truly loving her.

It was surprisingly hard to not fall into the trap of taking Gwyneth's account at face value myself, actually. Someone told me a few weeks ago that Gwyneth was a very empathetic person, and I went huh? really? and then they went on to explain that her reaction to the kid at the bus stop was the reaction of an empathetic person who wants to be empathetic far away from other people. And then I went oh yeah, I made a whole thing of how Gwyneth's idea of what happened is completely unreliable, so y'know, my reading of the story is sometimes skewed itself. Which is, I think, where my reservations with the ending came from. I got a bit too into Gwyneth's perspective, I guess.

I honestly hope Gwyneth gets help (and I usually don't write about post-ending hypotheticals like this), because she seriously does need it. Everything that led her to disappear in such caustic fashion is still there, and it'll stay there as long as she sees herself as a cancer. This has all been a long way of saying that your ending makes sense, and it's not just a fanciful, artificial Happy Ending. Gwyneth's still in a really bad way, but she's not hopeless, and that's exactly what you've been building up to the whole time.

I built in a bunch of ways to like suggest that she's in a position to begin healing and getting help now, because honestly, I feel exactly the same way about her. Crucially, she has a pokémon again, which is a huge deal given her trauma, and that's why the fic ends with Nika pointing it out and Gwyneth saying that she's glad that she does have Zelda. And she agrees to Nika's condition that she gets help, and she actually means it; there's a whole thing about her thinking that she is sick of being a bad person and wanting to change that. Previously, she's always denied the possibility that she could change. Now that's different, and I think it's not unreasonable to come away from that ending with the hope that things are about to start changing for her.

Besides – in the end, Go Home is a trainer fic, as well as everything else. And part of the point of a trainer fic is that going on a journey with pokémon changes you for the better. Gwyneth's second trainer journey, with Zelda to Humilau, is too short for that change to have taken place completely, but I feel like by the end Gwyneth is finally ready to start getting over … well, her life, more or less, because frankly there's so much there that feeds into her mental illness that it's difficult to point to any one thing in particular.

Or, if you would like an authorial proclamation from on high, here's one of those: after this story ends, Gwyneth moves back in with her mother for a while, gets therapy and medication and real medical attention for her arm, and after some time in which she and Nika work to rebuild bridges, moves back into Nika's apartment in Nacrene, where they are mostly happy, sometimes fighting, always making up again; where, after her next moult, Zelda has surgery to remove the lobe of chitin pressing on her brain; where Hekate and her mate live on the roof and their chick sometimes comes down to play; and Gwyneth's career never really picks up, and she never really makes anything above a junior management level, but she's okay with that, because her depression will never really go away even if it gets better and she learns to manage it and on some level she is still comforted by mediocrity; and Hilbert doesn't ever really come to visit because of how monumentally awkward the whole thing is but when Gwyneth and Nika see him at Christmas and Thanksgiving it's all right, and it gets better with time; and Zelda does evolve in the end, more or less out of sheer stubbornness, and she's around for years and years, slowly getting less vicious and more chill with time; and nothing is perfect, maybe, because nothing ever is, and Gwyneth does find herself falling into ruts and having bad days, weeks, even months and on one or two dark occasions years, and sometimes even Nika's patience is stretched with her, but it's okay, in the end, because what they have is good, the kind of thing that lasts, and while Gwyneth maybe doesn't live as long as someone else might do she does, in the end, look back on hers as a good enough life for her, and better than what she expected back when she was in her early twenties.

Obviously I can't claim that's canon, because the story stands for itself and anything said outside it is a paratext at best, but like, it's how Gwyneth's story ends for me, because I'm incredibly sentimental and I really just want everything to turn out well for her.

There's so much more I could and should say, but I'll try to sum up my thoughts in this paragraph: This is a very real story. There are a lot of big ideas (self-loathing, cultural homelessness, cosmic unfairness) and small details (NPCs and ultra-balls, how venipede work, little bits of Unova) that you weave together perfectly through a devastatingly convincing character in Gwyneth. "Enjoyed" is the wrong word to describe my experience with this fic; "appreciated" or "compelled to finish despite the pain in put in my heart and stomach" is more accurate, and speaks higher of you as a writer. This is a true achievement in theme, character, and craft, and you're right to be proud of it. Thank you for making this.

Thank you for your incisive response, seriously. And for your efforts plugging the story, too, which were extremely flattering. Go Home was one of those stories that came out in one quick, intense burst, without much difficulty and no real major structural edits, and I'm still amazed at how well it turned out. I guess I just had an idea, and also a real need to point at various things (my brain, the world, the brutal American empire) and scream a whole bunch. I don't know quite know how I managed it, especially given that at the time of writing I was (a) studying for the final exams of my degree after years of delays due to bad mental health and poor life planning and (b) having one of the worst times of my life in terms of mental health anyway. All I can do is look at it and be proud of it, and also thank you – and everyone else – who read it and reached out with a response. It always means a lot when people do that, but for this fic, it means so much more. So – thank you, seriously.

 

[Psychic]

Bump time! I’ve got to catch up on some really belated reviews, and I have desperately needed to write about how much I enjoyed this fic despite having read it quite some time ago.

This was a tough read at times, as much as I loved it. I love Gwyneth, I love Zelda, I love their journey, but holy cow do you put her through the gauntlet. I love this hardened character struggling with her own demons, and forcing her out of her comfort zone to do…something, she isn’t even sure what exactly, and yet she’s driven to do it anyway. No matter what gets thrown at her, no matter the doubt and the hopelessness, no matter the mental and emotional struggles and literal hate crimes she endures, she keeps going. And in spite of all of that, her choice to keep going never feels convoluted or like plot convenience – we know her well enough to see why she’s doing it, and rooting for her every step of the way, whether or not we agree with all her choices and ideas. That is hella powerful.

I really can’t speak enough to how well her character comes across. Your narration feels like a real person’s thoughts and reactions, and their not-always-rational and totally raw emotions. It was also fascinating seeing someone this hyper-aware of how they’re perceived, which creates really interesting dynamics and moments. Also how freaking refreshing it is to have stories with trans women and women with anxiety and women of colour, especially in this fandom!

I also just really enjoyed all of the characters. I loved Zelda, and I really enjoyed the way you chose to depict Hilbert, especially from the point of view of his sister – also not something we see much. (Especially not in a way that is anything other than holding them up on a pedestal.) Also Tor and Dr. ze'Naarat and Hecate and just all this good stuff.

There are so many great moments to the fic, and I love the way you tell them. The ex-Rocket, clown, and Beartic was just great, and I like the way flashbacks that like that were distinct from the present. Just the way we slowly see more of Nika and Gwyn’s journey is revealed in such an organic and interesting way that leaves you wanting more.

And of course the moment with N and Zekrom! N’s appearance as the perfect bit of “magic” for the end. It was a great bit of relief after everything Gwyn had been through, and I liked that it was this sort of fairy tale resolution. We desperately needed that scene with Cheryl, that felt grounded and showed a nice moment of connection for Gwyn, but then that last hopelessness to be resolved via these mythical-level characters was the kind of magic we needed.

I really enjoyed the climax, too! I was wondering if Gwyn was going to talk to Nika while she was getting dressed in a hotel room or something, but obviously this way let her interact with all these other characters and get some resolutions and create some great dramatic tension. I also can’t deny that I love a bittersweet but mostly sweet ending. And most importantly, Gwyneth is going to see a doctor!! That may have been one of my favourite parts of the ending. And yes I cried and just had all the emotions.

This was overall a great read, and I’m so glad I had the opportunity to enjoy it. Thank you for writing this. I can't imagine it was an easy process, but the story you wove was really something special.

~Psychic

 

[Cutlerine]

Bump time! I’ve got to catch up on some really belated reviews, and I have desperately needed to write about how much I enjoyed this fic despite having read it quite some time ago.

Aw, thanks! That you wound up coming back to review it means a lot. Go Home is one of the few stories I've written that I look back and think, yeah, I probably wouldn't do that differently even if I got the chance to go back in time with everything I know now, and that gives it a special place in my heart.

This was a tough read at times, as much as I loved it. I love Gwyneth, I love Zelda, I love their journey, but holy cow do you put her through the gauntlet. I love this hardened character struggling with her own demons, and forcing her out of her comfort zone to do…something, she isn’t even sure what exactly, and yet she’s driven to do it anyway. No matter what gets thrown at her, no matter the doubt and the hopelessness, no matter the mental and emotional struggles and literal hate crimes she endures, she keeps going. And in spite of all of that, her choice to keep going never feels convoluted or like plot convenience – we know her well enough to see why she’s doing it, and rooting for her every step of the way, whether or not we agree with all her choices and ideas. That is hella powerful.

I'm glad you think so! Like, there's some explanation given, but a lot of what Gwyneth does is just presented straight, from her own perspective and without much commentary, and that means there's always the risk that it stops making sense, because honestly Gwyneth herself doesn't know why she's doing what she's doing, so making sure the reader knows is not always easy. It's also good to know that people are rooting for her, honestly. She's kind of not always very nice, in ways that are sometimes hard to sympathise with, so with Gwyneth I was always running the risk that I was creating someone that nobody would like.

I really can’t speak enough to how well her character comes across. Your narration feels like a real person’s thoughts and reactions, and their not-always-rational and totally raw emotions. It was also fascinating seeing someone this hyper-aware of how they’re perceived, which creates really interesting dynamics and moments. Also how freaking refreshing it is to have stories with trans women and women with anxiety and women of colour, especially in this fandom!

Oh man, the intersection of those three things is basically my entire thing, so like if that's what you were looking for then you came to the right place. Anyway, thank you! Writing Gwyneth was obviously a super personal thing, so that she came across as real in all her mean, contradictory glory is wonderful to know.

I also just really enjoyed all of the characters. I loved Zelda, and I really enjoyed the way you chose to depict Hilbert, especially from the point of view of his sister – also not something we see much. (Especially not in a way that is anything other than holding them up on a pedestal.) Also Tor and Dr. ze'Naarat and Hecate and just all this good stuff.

I think player characters are really scary people, honestly. They have a frightening, empty perfection to them that must be awful to experience, and fanfiction is a place where you can explore that would be really difficult in original fiction. One of the two original ideas for Go Home was to write a story from the perspective of the character who didn't get chosen on the player select screen at the start of the game. (The other one was the idea of road tripping from one end of Unova to the other to break up a wedding, which I got from a pretentious indie game about doing exactly that, but in a very different way to the way Gwyneth does it.)

There are so many great moments to the fic, and I love the way you tell them. The ex-Rocket, clown, and Beartic was just great, and I like the way flashbacks that like that were distinct from the present. Just the way we slowly see more of Nika and Gwyn’s journey is revealed in such an organic and interesting way that leaves you wanting more.

Thank you! It sometimes felt a bit artificial, with the whole division of every chapter between the past and present, but I tried to make it work with the way Gwyneth stays in present tense as she slithers back and forth in time. The only time she doesn't is with that one memory where the trauma's broken her sense of history.

And of course the moment with N and Zekrom! N’s appearance as the perfect bit of “magic” for the end. It was a great bit of relief after everything Gwyn had been through, and I liked that it was this sort of fairy tale resolution. We desperately needed that scene with Cheryl, that felt grounded and showed a nice moment of connection for Gwyn, but then that last hopelessness to be resolved via these mythical-level characters was the kind of magic we needed.

I kind of feel like there's a big overlap between road trip stories and the questing of a knight in a medieval romance, which is probably where that ending comes from. And also like, she's got as far as she has done at that point half because she's too stubborn to quit and half because of the kindness of strangers, and N's arrival felt like a very apt conclusion to that particular thread. And part of the point of Go Home was that she was never going to be able to make her ridiculous journey. It was only ever going to be possible when someone else swooped in to save her. She's been skulking around the edges of other people's legends her whole life; here, at the end, she finally gets a taste of what it's like to star in one.

I really enjoyed the climax, too! I was wondering if Gwyn was going to talk to Nika while she was getting dressed in a hotel room or something, but obviously this way let her interact with all these other characters and get some resolutions and create some great dramatic tension. I also can’t deny that I love a bittersweet but mostly sweet ending. And most importantly, Gwyneth is going to see a doctor!! That may have been one of my favourite parts of the ending. And yes I cried and just had all the emotions.

It was the only way it could ever really end. I'm not interested in, like, tragedy porn, and I think if things had gone wrong for Gwyneth after all that she went through it would have just been kind of distasteful. So of course Nika still loves her, and while I couldn't really play the ending as straight-up positive, I made it as sweet a kind of bittersweet as I could. And of course I had to be sure that Gwyneth was going to finally get some help, because she sure as hell needs it, and the only thing I could think of that would make her do it would be if Nika made her promise. So yeah, I'm just delighted you liked the ending. <3

This was overall a great read, and I’m so glad I had the opportunity to enjoy it. Thank you for writing this. I can't imagine it was an easy process, but the story you wove was really something special.

Thank you! It was … easier than you might think; sometimes you write a story and it all comes out really fast in one go without needing much in the way of revisions, and this was one of those. I guess I just really needed to write it, at the time. Like a lot.

Anyway, thank you so much again for coming back to review this! It really means a lot.