JX Valentine
Ever-Discordant
WARNING: The following fic contains violence, blood, gore, character death, and one brief mention of suicidal thoughts. Please do not read if you're squeamish.
Author's Notes:
Soooo ... basically, I originally wrote this for the Quarterly Challenge (y'know, the one with no dialogue), but it's about zombies, so hey! Halloween fic!
This also probably needs a bit of an explanation, kinda like a disclaimer. As always, I'm totally A-OK with any kind of review, buuuuuut I just feel the need to explain the following briefly:
1. Yep. Second person. It was done partly to make the narrator ambiguous and to make the emotions more impactful. The second reason really feeds into the first there. I didn't want to identify the main character simply because if I had, the story would be about who they are, rather than what they felt. Buuuuut ymmv, so feel free to sound off on how you thought I did there.
2. I paid particularly close attention to tenses (because the narrator is all over the place when it comes to memories, so it was a necessity), meaning if it looks like an error it was probably done intentionally, but feel free to ask.
3. I am totally aware that this is super flowery, and I apologize in advance for that. 8D
WITH THAT ALL SAID, here we go~!
This is hope: a growlithe lying on a grave, its head resting on its paws.
It lifts its head when it sees you. You make no effort to run, and neither does it, not even when it sees that you’re carrying a gun. Then again, it might not know what a gun is, and you’re aware of that possibility. It must have been years since this growlithe has seen another living being. After all, the city is empty. Dead. It’s right there, just at the foot of the graveyard’s hill, yet you can’t hear a thing from it—no cars, no voices, no music. Just the wind groaning between the buildings, like an ancient thing that has forgotten how to sleep. And because of that, the graveyard, this place where you’re surrounded by the names of the dead, feels less desolate to you. It is full of people; the city is not.
The growlithe stands, and you hesitate, feeling the butt of the rifle in one of your hands. With some effort, the growlithe trots forward, and in its walk, you can see its skin sag, its bones jut out, its remaining fur fan over pink-brown patches of bare skin. Yet its eyes shine when it sees you. Its tongue lolls out of its mouth, crossing the jagged line of yellowed teeth, and its step is sure and steady. And then, there it is, the growlithe, standing before you with those bright eyes. It barks once, twice, three times, but the third bark tapers off into a high-pitched whine. With a rough shake, it jerks its head towards the grave it had been standing over, then back to you. You don’t need any further explanation. You know who’s buried there now.
And your heart hurts because now you know what it wants.
This is peace: warm sun, the sparkling sea, an eevee running ahead.
In the time before the outbreak, it was just you, your eevee, and a few others. You made very little room for humans in your life, but to you, it didn’t matter. Humans didn’t mean as much to you as pokémon did. Pokémon never judged you. They simply loved you, demanding only food, water, affection, and a place to call home in return, and you gave them all these things in abundance.
You remember smiling that day. You remember that moment on the beach, the way the sun felt on your skin and the way the day seemed so perfect. All of the colors—the gold of the sand, the green of the sea, the blue of the sky—seemed more vibrant, so much more vivid, than they were in any of your other memories. And the eevee. You remember the eevee, the one you had raised from an egg.
You remember your eevee. You remember all the days you spent caring for her egg, polishing it, maintaining just the right amount of light and warmth in its incubator. Even on cold nights, you sat there, blanket wrapped around yourself, eyes fluttering open and shut with lack of sleep, mind desperately focusing on that egg.
And you remember the day she hatched. Winter, just as the days grew warmer and the snow began to thin. You sat there with your work on your lap in front of you, just as you had for months prior to that moment. With each passing second, your fingers laced together words (important ones, although looking back on them now, they don’t seem important at all) with a rhythmic tap, tap, tap on your keyboard. You even remember the exact word you were forming when you heard it: the m, the e, the c, the h, and then your fingers stumbled from the crack. Looking up, it took you a moment before you realized what you were hearing, and when you glanced over, there it was—the tiny crack on the side of the egg.
Piece by piece, you watched it, your work abandoned. You had no words—or, rather, you had plenty of words, but at that moment, they felt like they were all jammed together in your throat. Sometimes, you found yourself forgetting to breathe, asphyxiating on the things you wanted to say, and others, you felt as if those words were bubbling up against your teeth.
And then, at last, after what felt like entire days, the shell broke apart, and there she was. Tiny. Mewling. Silver.
You cried that morning, and even after taking her gently and cleaning her, you did not go back to your work.
All of the time that you spent with her thereafter were a series of moments. The first time she opened her dark eyes to look at you. The time she hobbled across your floor to her food bowl and dove face-first into it. The morning she bounded from halfway across the house to you because she heard you call her name. All the cold nights in the distant wilderness, when she would curl up next to you in a purring, warm ball of fur. All the warm days in the distant wilderness, when the two of you would go for a walk, and she would bound in looping trails around your feet and bark and smile at you—for you. You had handled many pokémon besides this one, yes, but she was one of the first to love you back. And you knew that. (And you still know that.)
And now, now that you’ve gone back to the day on the beach, you remember the way her fur glistened pale silver in the summer sun. You remember the way she forged her wandering paths in the sand with her scrambling paws. You remember her voice, the high-pitched bark, playing over and through the sound of the crashing waves.
Somewhere along your walk, you picked up a piece of driftwood. It felt rough against your then-soft palms, yet wet and soft with seawater. You weighed it in your hand for a few seconds, stopping in your path to consider something. At your feet, a sharp bark drew your attention back to the beach, back to your eevee, and there she was, bouncing up and down as her tail wagged frantically. Her pink tongue lolled out of her tiny mouth, and her eyes glittered as she stared intently at the wood in your hands.
It was the way she looked at you that made you settle on a decision—the way she stared at you as if you were God. How could you possibly say no to a face like that? So you pitched the piece of wood as hard as you could away from you, and you watched it silently as it arced—as your eevee bolted after it, yipping and jumping to reach for it.
And then, she burst into a brilliant, white light. Instantly, your heart twisted. You found yourself shouting, running after your eevee before you could think clearly about what that light meant. It took you a few more seconds to slow, to gain a grip on your thoughts, and when you did, you remember stopping short. Staring. Feeling your heart pound in a different kind of excitement.
Your eevee was no longer an eevee right then. She stared at you, her larger jaws gripping the driftwood. Her head tilted, and even with the wood filling her mouth, she whined in curiosity as she fixed her narrower eyes on you.
Your eevee was an espeon.
As you ran forward, crying and laughing and smiling all at the same time, you couldn’t remember feeling any happier than you did at that moment.
And, years later, as you think of that day, as you think of how you embraced your espeon and how all of a sudden, you felt complete and content and at peace with this single creature, you still can’t think of a single moment after that one in which you felt as happy.
This is fear: the silence of a long night.
It began in the places where trainers went—the virus, that is. There were theories as to what it was or where it came from, but the thing about outbreaks is you would know the country where it started, the place that it would lay waste to, the aftermaths, the death tolls, and everything else—everything but who, specifically, was the first patient.
Some nights, you were curious. You thought about it when you saw the news with its images of riots and panicking reporters. It was your job to know things, but you didn’t. Not this time. You had no theories, no answers, nothing that anyone who called you or emailed you wanted. That was why you withdrew from society and why you eventually turned off the TV. By your calculations, the virus would be in your region in a matter of months. When you stopped listening, you knew that the virus began in Mistralton and swept quickly down to Striaton. You saw how swiftly it cut through an entire region. That was all you had to know.
Your espeon was still by your side then. At night, her ears would prick, and her fur would stand on end. She would curl around your legs and look up at you helplessly, and all you would do was take her in your arms and stare out the window with her. The nights were long and silent and cold, and part of you wished with everything you had that the virus would be stopped by the winter. Wild pokémon hibernated in this region. That you remembered. And so you hoped that the infected would too—or that, at the very least, the virus wouldn’t survive the frost and ice.
It was a long shot, and in the end, that was all it was.
The night they came was dark and deep and colder than most. You weren’t sure what day it was except that it was mid-winter, and you knew it had been months since you had last spoken to another human being. You had stopped going into town too. They wanted answers from you, but you didn’t have them. You weren’t a doctor. You weren’t a general. You weren’t anything at all. You were just smart, so they thought you would create a solution. You knew you couldn’t. So you didn’t.
That night, that particular night, your espeon stood on your chair. Silent. Still. Her body bent and bowed, and her ears angled back. You kept your eyes on her as you moved through the house. You could feel the hairs on the back of your neck stand, and you felt all your muscles tense with each movement. This feeling did not subside when you stood in the kitchenette with the handle of a knife in your hand. It did not subside when you slid the knife out of its block and felt the weight of the weapon in your palm. You turned it then, examining the blade you hoped was still sharp. Glancing up, you found your espeon staring at you with wide, dark, almond eyes. She had refused to sit down, refused to relax in the entire time that it had taken you to find the knife.
You walked to her, the knife by your side. Your fingers gripped the handle tightly, but you kept your other hand relaxed as you reached out to stroke your espeon’s head. She responded by rubbing her lime-green snout against your palm. Inside, you felt a blank—neither the tension of anticipation nor the peace of confidence but rather a numbness, a lack of either.
And you stood there for hours on end, waiting for the darkness to recede into the morning light. Your hand stroked your espeon’s green fur as your eyes wandered to the window.
You tried not to think about it in those long, lonely hours, but you did. The other things that you saw on the news when you last paid attention. The victims. They would always be pokémon. There were theories as to why that was too: mutated strains of pokérus, a strain of the flu born from psychic-types, new forms of meningitis that attacked only some parts of the brain. But no matter what the truth was, the stories were all the same. Brainless pokémon, rising up to attack the living. Newly dead pokémon, rising up to attack the humans. Entire cities reduced to cinders by pokémon controlled by something else. Your hand stroked your espeon’s back a little harder, eliciting a whimper from her lips, and at that, you looked down at her. It had been so long—so very long—since you had seen another human being or another pokémon. All you had was her, and all she had was you. You knew this, and you knew what it meant.
But the truth was, even if she wasn’t all you had, you would have done anything for her. You watched her hatch. She was with you on all those sunny days. It was far from civilization, far from all the humans who only saw you as useful, but her? Your espeon saw you as a parent, as a friend, as a god, as everything. She kept you warm. She kept you safe. She kept you company. Yes, you would do anything you could for that espeon, and that included keeping her safe from the things outside.
By the time your front window crashed open, you were ready. You almost felt relieved that it happened because it meant the wait was over at last. But you didn’t let yourself dwell on this for too long. You threw your hand out to espeon, and she leapt off of the chair and bound towards the stairs. Out of the corner of your eye, you saw her: a sleek, green form sparkling in the moonlight, ears back, fur standing on end.
Your knife went through the first intruder before you could see what it was. You didn’t let yourself look at first. It would make things harder if you knew. You had always wondered what it would be like if pokémon were no longer your friends.
But then, right then, you realized this was not a question you wanted to answer. Not really.
Five more pokémon came through the window. You slit their throats and stabbed their tiny bodies. They swarmed you, biting at your legs and arms. You remember screaming, your voice animal-like and scratchy with panic and disuse. But still, you attacked.
Under your hands, their bones crunched and shattered and snapped. Their blood felt slick and cold on your skin, and their organs popped and splattered. In your hands, their skin slid off like fur-lined gloves, and even as you held their hides, they came at you in droves.
Their claws were cold—as cold as their teeth and as cold as the snow. And their eyes were blank and milky and dead.
Buneary. They were buneary, you realized then. You couldn’t help but look at them—really look at them—and because of that, you hesitated. You hesitated because you noticed their tiny bodies—noticed the way they stumbled across your living room floor, leaving splatters of blood and pieces of skin wherever they dropped themselves. And your heart ached. Actually ached. You couldn’t help but remember their tiny faces, remember what they must have looked like when they lived, remember what their burrows looked like...
...Remember the first time you saw one in the wild.
Sinnoh, in their home region. Your best friend showed you because you were curious about a rock that was supposed to be in their forest, a rock that was supposed to help eevee to evolve. Your best friend, the one who later gave you your espeon. You wondered if she was still alive.
That was all it took: that instant of distraction. And in that instant, the swarm leapt on you, teeth bared and screeches erupting from their dead mouths. For a moment, you felt them, their cold breaths on your skin, their glistening teeth just inches from your face.
And then, you saw green. Glittering green.
Your espeon hissed as she curled around your neck. Her arm stretched before her and slammed into the head of the first buneary, and then, her body lit up blue.
Psychic always made you feel safe. It didn’t matter which pokémon of yours used it. All of their abilities had the same effect. That warmth, like a thick blanket wrapped tightly around your shoulders. That power, ebbing around your body. That drive from the pokémon beside you. Your espeon ripped into the entire swarm with one hit. She threw them into the walls of your home and watched as their tiny frames split open and splattered across the windowpanes. You watched—silent, still, shivering—as entrails and blood trailed down plaster and pooled across hardwood. It was over in seconds.
Or, the battle was, anyway.
Beside you, you heard a whimper. You turned your head and looked at your espeon, and in that moment, you felt your heart ache once more. But this time, it wasn’t out of sympathy for the dead. It was out of the same cold, silent dread you had felt before the swam had come.
There, on your espeon’s thin, outstretched arm, was a scratch.
And although you didn’t know much about the virus, you knew it was transmitted by touch.
This is rage: a smoking gun, a dead espeon, and you.
When you came to them for help, they had you kneel in the middle of the town—what was left of the town—with the barrel of a rifle to the head. It was clear they had never killed a human before; the rifle, you silently noted in your usual brand of gallows humor, was overkill. Later on, when looking back on this moment in hindsight, you realize that was exactly what it was: overkill, because despite being psychic, espeon were simple-minded creatures. She could have dodged the bullet or manipulated it or any number of things, but she didn’t because they had the gun to your head. It didn’t matter that it was for show or that it was too much. It was a gun, and that was why she hesitated. And it made her hesitate just enough for someone else to pull the trigger of another one.
In the instant it took for her to fall, you remembered the day she hatched. You remembered the way she looked, bedraggled and wet and vulnerable. You remember all the smiles she gave you, with her pink tongue out and tiny fangs exposed. You remembered the way she barked for your attention, the way she stumbled for her food bowl, the way she ran ahead of you in those looping paths on your walks. You remembered everything that she was, before and after the evolution, and your heart, for a brief second, hurt beyond any other form of pain you had ever experienced.
Her brains splattered onto the cobblestone. Her blood formed a fan around the front of her lime-green head. And then your espeon fell like a rag doll to the pavement. Her almond-shaped eyes never left you.
In hindsight, you know why that was the first thing they did. All pokémon were threats. Any pokémon could be infected. No pokémon could be cured. Kill them off early and burn the body, and you won’t have to worry. Years later, you will have the people who will travel with you do the same thing over and over and over again. No pokémon. Only the dead.
But this was not years later. This was then, the transitional period between the halcyon days you still yearn for each night and the desolate days that have become your reality each morning. And perhaps because they knew you as the past you, none of them expected you to react with much more than shock. They expected you to be silent, to be unmoving, to need to be carried off and cared for until you were ready to tell them what they wanted to hear.
That’s not what happened.
You remember feeling as if something inside you snapped. You remember your blood burning not like fire but like acid. You remember screaming but not with fear. You remember reaching for the gun at your head.
And you remember the first time you shot a man.
It was so easy right then. Easier than you thought it would be. But the gun flipped in your hands until the muzzle jammed against the man’s throat, and the trigger barely resisted your finger. It was even easy watching the hole open in his flesh and his blue eyes widen and then turn glassy and dark. He didn’t scream, but everyone else around you did. And your body was a cobra then, tight and angry and ready to strike, and so you did. You turned and fired off three more shots: one to shoot the man who killed your espeon and two more to shoot total strangers. It didn’t even matter that you had no idea who they were. You needed the message.
Then, you fired off a fourth, this time at the cobblestone, at the feet of someone who had started forward to relieve you of the gun. They stopped, staring at you, eyes wide with a sudden rush of fear. Their skin looked sicker and paler in the full moonlight, and they stank of sweat and something else. You pointed the gun at them first, finger resting on the trigger. Then you swept the gun slowly, aiming it at each individual around you in turn. Finally, you shouldered it and narrowed your eyes at the man who had stepped forward. He returned the stare, gazing back at you as if you were an animal. You responded by looking down at your espeon, dead and lifeless. And then, you swept yourself down and scooped her ragdoll body under one arm. She was lighter then, smaller—as if life had filled out her bones more than her organs did. You didn’t think about this as you walked towards the crowd and watched them part for you. You didn’t think about anything, really.
Except about where to bury your espeon.
You decided to do it on the beach.
She always liked the beach.
This is pain: two thousand days without her.
By some miracle, the town followed you. They seemed to think you had answers, as they always had. You stopped trying to prove them wrong. That was not what they needed, and you know that now. They need hope; they have always needed hope. They need some sign that there was something out there—some reason out there...
That thought always ends in an ellipsis for you. In the absence of pokémon, the world wilted. It was all science, really. What were humans to the ecosystem, after all? You weren’t pollinators. You weren’t food. You weren’t anything at all but there. And it doesn’t become any more obvious than when you killed off the pokémon. There were no forests anymore. You had no home.
So they followed you because what else were they going to do? And they fed on the remnants of humanity: canned tuna and condensed milk and all. In your opinion, it was no existence worth fighting for, but because you were still with them, the townspeople thought otherwise.
You thought about it, of course. How easy it would be to just tuck your rifle into your mouth. But you never did because they needed you, and you are nothing if not reliable. You were always that. Reliable. Responsible. The person everyone counted on. And the townspeople think this, and you don’t point out that you failed them five years ago, when they came to you the first time for answers. (It doesn’t seem relevant anymore.)
Sometimes, on your travels, you saw her—your espeon. She trotted between empty buildings and curved around dying trees. She stood over you as you slept and followed just behind you as you walked. You saw her in the other pokémon too, the few you encountered as you traveled. Sometimes, you saw her lunging for your companions, her teeth snapping and latching into screaming throats. She wore blood and sinew on her mouth and death on her eyes, and she was beautiful to you. And sometimes, thereafter, you saw her, dead with bullet wounds or in the heart of the fire. Her skin would bubble and blister like honeyed meat until it popped and blackened away.
Those nights, you wouldn’t sleep. (You didn’t sleep much for those five years.)
Then, finally, you simply stopped seeing the dead. Not her, of course. Your espeon would always stalk at the corner of your eyes. No, you stopped seeing the infected. You thought this might happen, that the virus would eat away all the pokémon eventually. And it did. And the townsfolk rejoiced when they realized that.
But you still did not sleep the nights thereafter.
This is hope: a growlithe rising to its paws, eyes locked on you.
You have no idea where the growlithe came from. Perhaps, after five years since the outbreak, the virus died out, killed off all the viable hosts until only a handful were left. And perhaps that handful grew and mated and began to repopulate, taking on the cities as havens for their fledgling kind. Perhaps you are looking at the Noah of growlithe: the first after God parts the storm clouds and places the ark back down on earth. Perhaps.
Staring at it, you shoulder your rifle. It has been five long years since you had last seen an uninfected pokémon. Five impossibly long years. But now you stand there, in a graveyard, looking for your parents and staring down at a growlithe instead. The growlithe pants, wagging its thin, pink tongue as its eyes sparkle at you. How old was it when its master died?
It rears back and bounces its front paws at you, and you know at once what it wants. It wants a new master. It wants food and shelter and warmth and love. It wants all the things a growlithe could want.
You could do it. You realize this. The townspeople listen to you, so if you say a pokémon is safe, then it’s safe, even if it looked closer to death than this growlithe. And you know you have enough supplies, and if there’s a growlithe here, then that must mean there are other resources. A hungry growlithe could find food anywhere in a ten-mile radius.
The growlithe whines again and places its paws on your leg. You kneel and run through its matted fur. It feels nothing like espeon, nothing like the silky fur or the cat-like agility. Yet it has a warmth to it, a trembling anticipation that makes your heart ache. It looks up at you, locks eyes with you, and for a second, you forget any other alternative besides taking this dog.
You stand. Tears sting your eyes, but your mouth stretches and twists into a smile. It’s the first time in five years you’ve felt either. You realize this now. You realize how much time you’ve spent screaming at nights and staring straight ahead during the day. You forgot what it felt like to do anything else. But here you are.
In front of you, the growlithe sits back down. Its tongue hangs out of the corner of its mouth, and its eyes sparkle at you like you’re God. You look up, back towards the desolate city. The townsfolk are waiting for you. They need you to come back. They need something to hope for.
If you say a pokémon isn’t infected, then it’s not infected as far as they know.
But that’s not good enough for you. And it’s not good enough for you because it wasn’t good enough for her.
So you put the muzzle of your rifle to the growlithe’s forehead and pull the trigger.
Author's Notes:
Soooo ... basically, I originally wrote this for the Quarterly Challenge (y'know, the one with no dialogue), but it's about zombies, so hey! Halloween fic!
This also probably needs a bit of an explanation, kinda like a disclaimer. As always, I'm totally A-OK with any kind of review, buuuuuut I just feel the need to explain the following briefly:
1. Yep. Second person. It was done partly to make the narrator ambiguous and to make the emotions more impactful. The second reason really feeds into the first there. I didn't want to identify the main character simply because if I had, the story would be about who they are, rather than what they felt. Buuuuut ymmv, so feel free to sound off on how you thought I did there.
2. I paid particularly close attention to tenses (because the narrator is all over the place when it comes to memories, so it was a necessity), meaning if it looks like an error it was probably done intentionally, but feel free to ask.
3. I am totally aware that this is super flowery, and I apologize in advance for that. 8D
WITH THAT ALL SAID, here we go~!
This is hope: a growlithe lying on a grave, its head resting on its paws.
It lifts its head when it sees you. You make no effort to run, and neither does it, not even when it sees that you’re carrying a gun. Then again, it might not know what a gun is, and you’re aware of that possibility. It must have been years since this growlithe has seen another living being. After all, the city is empty. Dead. It’s right there, just at the foot of the graveyard’s hill, yet you can’t hear a thing from it—no cars, no voices, no music. Just the wind groaning between the buildings, like an ancient thing that has forgotten how to sleep. And because of that, the graveyard, this place where you’re surrounded by the names of the dead, feels less desolate to you. It is full of people; the city is not.
The growlithe stands, and you hesitate, feeling the butt of the rifle in one of your hands. With some effort, the growlithe trots forward, and in its walk, you can see its skin sag, its bones jut out, its remaining fur fan over pink-brown patches of bare skin. Yet its eyes shine when it sees you. Its tongue lolls out of its mouth, crossing the jagged line of yellowed teeth, and its step is sure and steady. And then, there it is, the growlithe, standing before you with those bright eyes. It barks once, twice, three times, but the third bark tapers off into a high-pitched whine. With a rough shake, it jerks its head towards the grave it had been standing over, then back to you. You don’t need any further explanation. You know who’s buried there now.
And your heart hurts because now you know what it wants.
—
This is peace: warm sun, the sparkling sea, an eevee running ahead.
In the time before the outbreak, it was just you, your eevee, and a few others. You made very little room for humans in your life, but to you, it didn’t matter. Humans didn’t mean as much to you as pokémon did. Pokémon never judged you. They simply loved you, demanding only food, water, affection, and a place to call home in return, and you gave them all these things in abundance.
You remember smiling that day. You remember that moment on the beach, the way the sun felt on your skin and the way the day seemed so perfect. All of the colors—the gold of the sand, the green of the sea, the blue of the sky—seemed more vibrant, so much more vivid, than they were in any of your other memories. And the eevee. You remember the eevee, the one you had raised from an egg.
You remember your eevee. You remember all the days you spent caring for her egg, polishing it, maintaining just the right amount of light and warmth in its incubator. Even on cold nights, you sat there, blanket wrapped around yourself, eyes fluttering open and shut with lack of sleep, mind desperately focusing on that egg.
And you remember the day she hatched. Winter, just as the days grew warmer and the snow began to thin. You sat there with your work on your lap in front of you, just as you had for months prior to that moment. With each passing second, your fingers laced together words (important ones, although looking back on them now, they don’t seem important at all) with a rhythmic tap, tap, tap on your keyboard. You even remember the exact word you were forming when you heard it: the m, the e, the c, the h, and then your fingers stumbled from the crack. Looking up, it took you a moment before you realized what you were hearing, and when you glanced over, there it was—the tiny crack on the side of the egg.
Piece by piece, you watched it, your work abandoned. You had no words—or, rather, you had plenty of words, but at that moment, they felt like they were all jammed together in your throat. Sometimes, you found yourself forgetting to breathe, asphyxiating on the things you wanted to say, and others, you felt as if those words were bubbling up against your teeth.
And then, at last, after what felt like entire days, the shell broke apart, and there she was. Tiny. Mewling. Silver.
You cried that morning, and even after taking her gently and cleaning her, you did not go back to your work.
All of the time that you spent with her thereafter were a series of moments. The first time she opened her dark eyes to look at you. The time she hobbled across your floor to her food bowl and dove face-first into it. The morning she bounded from halfway across the house to you because she heard you call her name. All the cold nights in the distant wilderness, when she would curl up next to you in a purring, warm ball of fur. All the warm days in the distant wilderness, when the two of you would go for a walk, and she would bound in looping trails around your feet and bark and smile at you—for you. You had handled many pokémon besides this one, yes, but she was one of the first to love you back. And you knew that. (And you still know that.)
And now, now that you’ve gone back to the day on the beach, you remember the way her fur glistened pale silver in the summer sun. You remember the way she forged her wandering paths in the sand with her scrambling paws. You remember her voice, the high-pitched bark, playing over and through the sound of the crashing waves.
Somewhere along your walk, you picked up a piece of driftwood. It felt rough against your then-soft palms, yet wet and soft with seawater. You weighed it in your hand for a few seconds, stopping in your path to consider something. At your feet, a sharp bark drew your attention back to the beach, back to your eevee, and there she was, bouncing up and down as her tail wagged frantically. Her pink tongue lolled out of her tiny mouth, and her eyes glittered as she stared intently at the wood in your hands.
It was the way she looked at you that made you settle on a decision—the way she stared at you as if you were God. How could you possibly say no to a face like that? So you pitched the piece of wood as hard as you could away from you, and you watched it silently as it arced—as your eevee bolted after it, yipping and jumping to reach for it.
And then, she burst into a brilliant, white light. Instantly, your heart twisted. You found yourself shouting, running after your eevee before you could think clearly about what that light meant. It took you a few more seconds to slow, to gain a grip on your thoughts, and when you did, you remember stopping short. Staring. Feeling your heart pound in a different kind of excitement.
Your eevee was no longer an eevee right then. She stared at you, her larger jaws gripping the driftwood. Her head tilted, and even with the wood filling her mouth, she whined in curiosity as she fixed her narrower eyes on you.
Your eevee was an espeon.
As you ran forward, crying and laughing and smiling all at the same time, you couldn’t remember feeling any happier than you did at that moment.
And, years later, as you think of that day, as you think of how you embraced your espeon and how all of a sudden, you felt complete and content and at peace with this single creature, you still can’t think of a single moment after that one in which you felt as happy.
—
This is fear: the silence of a long night.
It began in the places where trainers went—the virus, that is. There were theories as to what it was or where it came from, but the thing about outbreaks is you would know the country where it started, the place that it would lay waste to, the aftermaths, the death tolls, and everything else—everything but who, specifically, was the first patient.
Some nights, you were curious. You thought about it when you saw the news with its images of riots and panicking reporters. It was your job to know things, but you didn’t. Not this time. You had no theories, no answers, nothing that anyone who called you or emailed you wanted. That was why you withdrew from society and why you eventually turned off the TV. By your calculations, the virus would be in your region in a matter of months. When you stopped listening, you knew that the virus began in Mistralton and swept quickly down to Striaton. You saw how swiftly it cut through an entire region. That was all you had to know.
Your espeon was still by your side then. At night, her ears would prick, and her fur would stand on end. She would curl around your legs and look up at you helplessly, and all you would do was take her in your arms and stare out the window with her. The nights were long and silent and cold, and part of you wished with everything you had that the virus would be stopped by the winter. Wild pokémon hibernated in this region. That you remembered. And so you hoped that the infected would too—or that, at the very least, the virus wouldn’t survive the frost and ice.
It was a long shot, and in the end, that was all it was.
The night they came was dark and deep and colder than most. You weren’t sure what day it was except that it was mid-winter, and you knew it had been months since you had last spoken to another human being. You had stopped going into town too. They wanted answers from you, but you didn’t have them. You weren’t a doctor. You weren’t a general. You weren’t anything at all. You were just smart, so they thought you would create a solution. You knew you couldn’t. So you didn’t.
That night, that particular night, your espeon stood on your chair. Silent. Still. Her body bent and bowed, and her ears angled back. You kept your eyes on her as you moved through the house. You could feel the hairs on the back of your neck stand, and you felt all your muscles tense with each movement. This feeling did not subside when you stood in the kitchenette with the handle of a knife in your hand. It did not subside when you slid the knife out of its block and felt the weight of the weapon in your palm. You turned it then, examining the blade you hoped was still sharp. Glancing up, you found your espeon staring at you with wide, dark, almond eyes. She had refused to sit down, refused to relax in the entire time that it had taken you to find the knife.
You walked to her, the knife by your side. Your fingers gripped the handle tightly, but you kept your other hand relaxed as you reached out to stroke your espeon’s head. She responded by rubbing her lime-green snout against your palm. Inside, you felt a blank—neither the tension of anticipation nor the peace of confidence but rather a numbness, a lack of either.
And you stood there for hours on end, waiting for the darkness to recede into the morning light. Your hand stroked your espeon’s green fur as your eyes wandered to the window.
You tried not to think about it in those long, lonely hours, but you did. The other things that you saw on the news when you last paid attention. The victims. They would always be pokémon. There were theories as to why that was too: mutated strains of pokérus, a strain of the flu born from psychic-types, new forms of meningitis that attacked only some parts of the brain. But no matter what the truth was, the stories were all the same. Brainless pokémon, rising up to attack the living. Newly dead pokémon, rising up to attack the humans. Entire cities reduced to cinders by pokémon controlled by something else. Your hand stroked your espeon’s back a little harder, eliciting a whimper from her lips, and at that, you looked down at her. It had been so long—so very long—since you had seen another human being or another pokémon. All you had was her, and all she had was you. You knew this, and you knew what it meant.
But the truth was, even if she wasn’t all you had, you would have done anything for her. You watched her hatch. She was with you on all those sunny days. It was far from civilization, far from all the humans who only saw you as useful, but her? Your espeon saw you as a parent, as a friend, as a god, as everything. She kept you warm. She kept you safe. She kept you company. Yes, you would do anything you could for that espeon, and that included keeping her safe from the things outside.
By the time your front window crashed open, you were ready. You almost felt relieved that it happened because it meant the wait was over at last. But you didn’t let yourself dwell on this for too long. You threw your hand out to espeon, and she leapt off of the chair and bound towards the stairs. Out of the corner of your eye, you saw her: a sleek, green form sparkling in the moonlight, ears back, fur standing on end.
Your knife went through the first intruder before you could see what it was. You didn’t let yourself look at first. It would make things harder if you knew. You had always wondered what it would be like if pokémon were no longer your friends.
But then, right then, you realized this was not a question you wanted to answer. Not really.
Five more pokémon came through the window. You slit their throats and stabbed their tiny bodies. They swarmed you, biting at your legs and arms. You remember screaming, your voice animal-like and scratchy with panic and disuse. But still, you attacked.
Under your hands, their bones crunched and shattered and snapped. Their blood felt slick and cold on your skin, and their organs popped and splattered. In your hands, their skin slid off like fur-lined gloves, and even as you held their hides, they came at you in droves.
Their claws were cold—as cold as their teeth and as cold as the snow. And their eyes were blank and milky and dead.
Buneary. They were buneary, you realized then. You couldn’t help but look at them—really look at them—and because of that, you hesitated. You hesitated because you noticed their tiny bodies—noticed the way they stumbled across your living room floor, leaving splatters of blood and pieces of skin wherever they dropped themselves. And your heart ached. Actually ached. You couldn’t help but remember their tiny faces, remember what they must have looked like when they lived, remember what their burrows looked like...
...Remember the first time you saw one in the wild.
Sinnoh, in their home region. Your best friend showed you because you were curious about a rock that was supposed to be in their forest, a rock that was supposed to help eevee to evolve. Your best friend, the one who later gave you your espeon. You wondered if she was still alive.
That was all it took: that instant of distraction. And in that instant, the swarm leapt on you, teeth bared and screeches erupting from their dead mouths. For a moment, you felt them, their cold breaths on your skin, their glistening teeth just inches from your face.
And then, you saw green. Glittering green.
Your espeon hissed as she curled around your neck. Her arm stretched before her and slammed into the head of the first buneary, and then, her body lit up blue.
Psychic always made you feel safe. It didn’t matter which pokémon of yours used it. All of their abilities had the same effect. That warmth, like a thick blanket wrapped tightly around your shoulders. That power, ebbing around your body. That drive from the pokémon beside you. Your espeon ripped into the entire swarm with one hit. She threw them into the walls of your home and watched as their tiny frames split open and splattered across the windowpanes. You watched—silent, still, shivering—as entrails and blood trailed down plaster and pooled across hardwood. It was over in seconds.
Or, the battle was, anyway.
Beside you, you heard a whimper. You turned your head and looked at your espeon, and in that moment, you felt your heart ache once more. But this time, it wasn’t out of sympathy for the dead. It was out of the same cold, silent dread you had felt before the swam had come.
There, on your espeon’s thin, outstretched arm, was a scratch.
And although you didn’t know much about the virus, you knew it was transmitted by touch.
—
This is rage: a smoking gun, a dead espeon, and you.
When you came to them for help, they had you kneel in the middle of the town—what was left of the town—with the barrel of a rifle to the head. It was clear they had never killed a human before; the rifle, you silently noted in your usual brand of gallows humor, was overkill. Later on, when looking back on this moment in hindsight, you realize that was exactly what it was: overkill, because despite being psychic, espeon were simple-minded creatures. She could have dodged the bullet or manipulated it or any number of things, but she didn’t because they had the gun to your head. It didn’t matter that it was for show or that it was too much. It was a gun, and that was why she hesitated. And it made her hesitate just enough for someone else to pull the trigger of another one.
In the instant it took for her to fall, you remembered the day she hatched. You remembered the way she looked, bedraggled and wet and vulnerable. You remember all the smiles she gave you, with her pink tongue out and tiny fangs exposed. You remembered the way she barked for your attention, the way she stumbled for her food bowl, the way she ran ahead of you in those looping paths on your walks. You remembered everything that she was, before and after the evolution, and your heart, for a brief second, hurt beyond any other form of pain you had ever experienced.
Her brains splattered onto the cobblestone. Her blood formed a fan around the front of her lime-green head. And then your espeon fell like a rag doll to the pavement. Her almond-shaped eyes never left you.
In hindsight, you know why that was the first thing they did. All pokémon were threats. Any pokémon could be infected. No pokémon could be cured. Kill them off early and burn the body, and you won’t have to worry. Years later, you will have the people who will travel with you do the same thing over and over and over again. No pokémon. Only the dead.
But this was not years later. This was then, the transitional period between the halcyon days you still yearn for each night and the desolate days that have become your reality each morning. And perhaps because they knew you as the past you, none of them expected you to react with much more than shock. They expected you to be silent, to be unmoving, to need to be carried off and cared for until you were ready to tell them what they wanted to hear.
That’s not what happened.
You remember feeling as if something inside you snapped. You remember your blood burning not like fire but like acid. You remember screaming but not with fear. You remember reaching for the gun at your head.
And you remember the first time you shot a man.
It was so easy right then. Easier than you thought it would be. But the gun flipped in your hands until the muzzle jammed against the man’s throat, and the trigger barely resisted your finger. It was even easy watching the hole open in his flesh and his blue eyes widen and then turn glassy and dark. He didn’t scream, but everyone else around you did. And your body was a cobra then, tight and angry and ready to strike, and so you did. You turned and fired off three more shots: one to shoot the man who killed your espeon and two more to shoot total strangers. It didn’t even matter that you had no idea who they were. You needed the message.
Then, you fired off a fourth, this time at the cobblestone, at the feet of someone who had started forward to relieve you of the gun. They stopped, staring at you, eyes wide with a sudden rush of fear. Their skin looked sicker and paler in the full moonlight, and they stank of sweat and something else. You pointed the gun at them first, finger resting on the trigger. Then you swept the gun slowly, aiming it at each individual around you in turn. Finally, you shouldered it and narrowed your eyes at the man who had stepped forward. He returned the stare, gazing back at you as if you were an animal. You responded by looking down at your espeon, dead and lifeless. And then, you swept yourself down and scooped her ragdoll body under one arm. She was lighter then, smaller—as if life had filled out her bones more than her organs did. You didn’t think about this as you walked towards the crowd and watched them part for you. You didn’t think about anything, really.
Except about where to bury your espeon.
You decided to do it on the beach.
She always liked the beach.
—
This is pain: two thousand days without her.
By some miracle, the town followed you. They seemed to think you had answers, as they always had. You stopped trying to prove them wrong. That was not what they needed, and you know that now. They need hope; they have always needed hope. They need some sign that there was something out there—some reason out there...
That thought always ends in an ellipsis for you. In the absence of pokémon, the world wilted. It was all science, really. What were humans to the ecosystem, after all? You weren’t pollinators. You weren’t food. You weren’t anything at all but there. And it doesn’t become any more obvious than when you killed off the pokémon. There were no forests anymore. You had no home.
So they followed you because what else were they going to do? And they fed on the remnants of humanity: canned tuna and condensed milk and all. In your opinion, it was no existence worth fighting for, but because you were still with them, the townspeople thought otherwise.
You thought about it, of course. How easy it would be to just tuck your rifle into your mouth. But you never did because they needed you, and you are nothing if not reliable. You were always that. Reliable. Responsible. The person everyone counted on. And the townspeople think this, and you don’t point out that you failed them five years ago, when they came to you the first time for answers. (It doesn’t seem relevant anymore.)
Sometimes, on your travels, you saw her—your espeon. She trotted between empty buildings and curved around dying trees. She stood over you as you slept and followed just behind you as you walked. You saw her in the other pokémon too, the few you encountered as you traveled. Sometimes, you saw her lunging for your companions, her teeth snapping and latching into screaming throats. She wore blood and sinew on her mouth and death on her eyes, and she was beautiful to you. And sometimes, thereafter, you saw her, dead with bullet wounds or in the heart of the fire. Her skin would bubble and blister like honeyed meat until it popped and blackened away.
Those nights, you wouldn’t sleep. (You didn’t sleep much for those five years.)
Then, finally, you simply stopped seeing the dead. Not her, of course. Your espeon would always stalk at the corner of your eyes. No, you stopped seeing the infected. You thought this might happen, that the virus would eat away all the pokémon eventually. And it did. And the townsfolk rejoiced when they realized that.
But you still did not sleep the nights thereafter.
—
This is hope: a growlithe rising to its paws, eyes locked on you.
You have no idea where the growlithe came from. Perhaps, after five years since the outbreak, the virus died out, killed off all the viable hosts until only a handful were left. And perhaps that handful grew and mated and began to repopulate, taking on the cities as havens for their fledgling kind. Perhaps you are looking at the Noah of growlithe: the first after God parts the storm clouds and places the ark back down on earth. Perhaps.
Staring at it, you shoulder your rifle. It has been five long years since you had last seen an uninfected pokémon. Five impossibly long years. But now you stand there, in a graveyard, looking for your parents and staring down at a growlithe instead. The growlithe pants, wagging its thin, pink tongue as its eyes sparkle at you. How old was it when its master died?
It rears back and bounces its front paws at you, and you know at once what it wants. It wants a new master. It wants food and shelter and warmth and love. It wants all the things a growlithe could want.
You could do it. You realize this. The townspeople listen to you, so if you say a pokémon is safe, then it’s safe, even if it looked closer to death than this growlithe. And you know you have enough supplies, and if there’s a growlithe here, then that must mean there are other resources. A hungry growlithe could find food anywhere in a ten-mile radius.
The growlithe whines again and places its paws on your leg. You kneel and run through its matted fur. It feels nothing like espeon, nothing like the silky fur or the cat-like agility. Yet it has a warmth to it, a trembling anticipation that makes your heart ache. It looks up at you, locks eyes with you, and for a second, you forget any other alternative besides taking this dog.
You stand. Tears sting your eyes, but your mouth stretches and twists into a smile. It’s the first time in five years you’ve felt either. You realize this now. You realize how much time you’ve spent screaming at nights and staring straight ahead during the day. You forgot what it felt like to do anything else. But here you are.
In front of you, the growlithe sits back down. Its tongue hangs out of the corner of its mouth, and its eyes sparkle at you like you’re God. You look up, back towards the desolate city. The townsfolk are waiting for you. They need you to come back. They need something to hope for.
If you say a pokémon isn’t infected, then it’s not infected as far as they know.
But that’s not good enough for you. And it’s not good enough for you because it wasn’t good enough for her.
So you put the muzzle of your rifle to the growlithe’s forehead and pull the trigger.
It’s flattering to hear when something I’ve written affects someone.