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Pokémon kunāne (oneshot)

kunāne

kintsugi

golden scars | pfp by sun
Location
the warmth of summer in the songs you write
Pronouns
she/her
Partners
  1. silvally-grass
  2. lapras
  3. golurk
  4. booper-kintsugi
  5. meloetta-kint-muse
  6. meloetta-kint-dancer
  7. murkrow
  8. yveltal
content warnings: implicit suicide, depression, language, alcoholism. PG-13. this is a story about not being okay.

Originally written for Bulbagarden's Summer 2019 Oneshot Contest, this is my interpretation of the theme "Undelivered Messages". Has since been revised.

two kids, their emotional baggage, and a lapras chase a myth into the bottom of the ocean. it goes about as well as you could expect.

qWWpEdg.jpg

cover by the one and only WildBoots!​

⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆​

"Please, just let me rest."

Rawi throws the blinds open; sunlight tumbles in through the open window. "What are you, a zubat? Let's get some light in here, yeesh!"

"Five more minutes?"

"Absolutely not. Time's a wasting."

I glance at my clock, groan, and bury my head in the pillows. "Some warning would've been nice."

"Life's all about cruel surprises." He laughs, maybe at his own joke or the way that I shy away from the light when he pulls the pillows off of me. "Get out of bed, doofus. You're going hiking today."

"It's not safe to hike alone."

He's already bustling around the room with an ease born from familiarity, scooping up dirty shirts and socks before turning towards the laundry hamper. "I'm coming, of course," he says, and has the gall to sound offended.

I'm still staring at him, blearily blinking the last remnants of sleep from my eyes before I try one more excuse: "It's too late in the day; you'll get hungry."

"There's bread and shit in the fridge. I'll make sandwiches or something and then go on our hike."

"I hate hikes."

He pauses, and then: "You should get out more. Maybe seeing the sunlight will help you get a better poker face."

There was a moment, right before I'd actually had to face daylight, that I could pretend that things were still soft and dark and quiet, but it's gone an instant later as Rawi rips the blankets off of me. "Just leave me alone," I groan.

"No can do. I promised I'd take care of you."

His version of taking care of me involves talking my ear off until I reluctantly crawl out of bed. I know this. I understand this. This is what our family does.

"I'm not brushing your teeth for you, but you'd damn well better do that too." His voice is muffled as he rummages around the closet for a clean pair of socks. "You know what they used to tell us—"

"Don't break routine for anything," I finish for him wearily. I know the drill. This was how we'd rammed ourselves through things when we were younger—by pretending to be tauros going seventy miles per hour down the path, blazing through anything. The instant you slowed down, all hell broke loose. When the dark days came, when getting out of bed was hard, this was how we persisted—the small tasks had to be done, and then the bigger tasks, and eventually you could just endure through anything. "So why'd you drag me out of bed?"

"I just thought it was a beautiful day outside and you'd like to see it. I was thinking about finding Pounamu and taking another swim out on the cove, to our old spot. You've got folks coming in tomorrow and you'll probably need to spend some time talking to them, so I wanted to knock this out early."

"Early?" My words are garbled by the toothbrush, but we've seen each other do worse. I glance out the freshly-opened window for emphasis. It's almost noon.

"Yeah, I dunno if we'll have much time to go visit our spot after this, and it's already getting pretty late in the day."

"Let's just go tomorrow, then," I say at the exact same time I hear, "So I figured we could squeeze in a few hours before sunset and see the comfey bloom."

I sigh.

Rawi looks at me sternly. "We've done this before. You and I both know you'll actually be really excited once you get out there."

"I know."

"And you'll hate yourself if you just sit around and waste today."

"I know, Rawi."

There's an awkward silence that I don't really know how to break, nor do I have the heart to. Rawi takes the opportunity to continue assembling our packs. I can't help but watch as bottles of water disappear into the worn canvas alongside a flashlight and a battered compass.

"We don't need the compass," I mutter sullenly. This is our spot. We know the way by heart, and so does Pounamu.

"Don't be so sure. You never know when we're gonna lose ourselves."

I roll my eyes; he has a way of weaving something poetic into the most mundane of statements.

"Fine. Would it make you feel better if I instead told you that ninety percent of outdoor search and rescues are performed because day hikers don't bring proper equipment?"

He's smiling, a little, but for some reason I can't. "Not in particular," I mutter. Something about his statement is wrong; it doesn't fit together, like a puzzle with five corner pieces. But—

But as he drags me by the wrist outside, both of our bags slung over one shoulder, I realize he's right. I've forgotten how nice the sun is, how good the Alola breeze feels on my skin. It's a thing that I hear a lot from tourists, the sort of thing that outsiders will never understand, how we've learned to take the land the Tapus gave us for granted. The sunrises that draw influencers and photographers in a thousand mile radius are things we see every day. Sometimes it's easy to forget that there are other places in the world where I'd have to hike for miles to get even a glimpse of a clear sky, or where the thoughts of seeing the moonset beneath the summer stars would be nothing more than a dream washed out by city lights.

We're the island's children, after all, and sometimes children can lose sight of just how much family is supposed to—

The sound of waves brings me back as we thread our way down the trail to the beach. I hadn't even remembered putting on shoes, but my hiking boots sink in the damp sand. The cove is beautiful at this time of year. The tide is low in the afternoon, so the shore is already pocked with remnants of the morning's waves, ridged and bumpy like the core of a fruit. The crabrawler tend to be active at dawn and dusk, so their tracks are washed clean. Mine are all that remain. I glance over my shoulder, seeing my footprints traced delicately across the sand, one carefully in front of the other. Something—

"Come on!" Rawi shouts, and I turn back towards him, towards the sparkling ocean.

I miss the cove. When Rawi and I were kids, we would spend days on end out here. Crystal clear waters slowly faded to sapphire. Sky stretched as far as the eye could see. Rocky cliffs were our proving grounds, who could jump further and bolder—but they gave way to soft, white sands worn smooth by the tides. As the sun set, around the golden hour, we watched the cutiefly trickle across the coast, their legs covered with the pollen harvest from the afternoon. In the spring, the mudsdale would bring their young to the cliffs to teach them how to stomp; in the winter, lanturn and chinchou migrated to the warmer waters of the cove and filled it with twinkling lights. At night, we were far enough away from the world that we could stargaze with a naked eye, trace out the constellations with our fingers and chart our own meaning for guardians that were a billion years old.

But the most glorious game of all was—

"Pounamu!" Ahead of me, Rawi wades up to his knees in what I know must be frigid water, but he doesn't flinch. His dark curls flutter in the wind. He cups his hands to his mouth and shouts again. "Pounamu!"

There's nothing but the quiet waves for a second, and then the cove erupts in a spray of salty foam, droplets of water silhouetted against the afternoon sun. A brilliant blue shape carves out of the sea, arched neck rippling upward, like the crest of a wave. The gentle taper of a horn shakes the last flecks of sea from itself; tightly-curled ears nestle on either side of a gentle, intelligent face. With a triumphant bray, the lapras rises from the waters at Rawi's side.

"Pounamu!" Rawi throws his arms around the beast's grey-speckled neck, ignoring the way that the water makes the edges of his pajamas cling fiercely to his legs. His voice grows uncharacteristically quiet. "You're back. I missed you."

The lapras croons and lowers a head the size of a desk with unprecedented care. Brown eyes four times larger than mine close as he nuzzles gently against the top of Rawi's head, which is almost engulfed in the crook between Pounamu's massive jaw and his scaled neck.

"Sorry, we're back. You were here all along, weren't you?" Rawi corrects himself quickly, as if the lapras would actually be offended. He wraps his arms around Pounamu, whispering his own secrets into the lapras's shimmering scales.

Pounamu was our anchor against the storm, the real reason we ventured out to the cove so often. Choppy seas and calm waters—the lapras could handle them both. I don't remember who found him first; I just remember giddy and unadulterated joy as he breached the seas, slowly at first, and then faster and faster, until we skimmed across the waves like an arrow aimed at the horizon. He taught me a lesson that nothing else could: there were giants in the world, creatures bigger and deeper than my limited understanding, but they could be gentle, and they could be good.

Later, I would learn that a lapras is so rare that a single sighting is said to be a miracle. Pounamu is undoubtedly the last of his kind in this cove. There are places for him to go, stormier seas for him to search for the rest of his kin, and yet he always manages to be here for a pair of kids who never fully understood what it meant to grow up.

Had he spent the whole time waiting for the day when we'd come back to him, because he could fill a void that nothing else could? Surely not. Something as beautiful as him couldn't be so lonely that he could pour his heart out to others and expect nothing else in return.

I gently rest my hand on the edge of the lapras's grey shell, the crevasses in the gnarled surface familiar to my smooth hands. I remember what it felt like to clamber up onto his back, hair blowing the breeze, adventure on the horizon. "Hi," I whisper weakly. "I missed you too."

You'd think that the lapras would pick favorites, and that he would pick Rawi (who wouldn't?), but his bray is just as overjoyed when he hears me too. Enormous flippers churn the water to foam before he stills himself just long enough for me to climb on. And suddenly I feel ten feet taller and three feet shorter at the same time; we're both kids again.

"To the horizon, Pounamu!" Rawi whoops, motioning through the air with his hand.

The lapras brays alongside his cry, and we surge forward into the sea. Cerulean flippers skim through the water, sending spirals and eddies all around us, and salty wind fills my nose.

"You okay?" Rawi is staring back at me, one hand on Pounamu's neck for support, the other floating free in the wind. He's perched precariously on the lapras's side, one knee crooked, toes skimming the ocean. The flannel of his pajamas flap in the breeze.

I realize how I must look in comparison: knotted up in the center of Pounamu's shell, knees tucked to my chest, knuckles white as they grasp one of the larger gnarls on the lapras's back. Wrapped up in thought, I've forgotten to see. I sigh and lay down across Pounamu's back, feeling the way that his knobbly shell digs tiny dents into my spine, watching the clouds go by. "This is nice."

"I didn't want you to spend your day alone. Messes with the mind, you know." He taps one finger to his temple and, eyes twinkling, gives me that knowing smile that I've come to hate so much.

I fold my arms across my chest. "I'm not alone."

"Oh, please. I don't count."

"You should." I glower at him, but he doesn't back down, so I reach out for Pounamu. The lapras is there like a lifeline, a pillar of support basking on the waves. "And besides, I have Pounamu."

Rawi's eyes twinkle a little. "You could talk to people, too."

"I do."

"It's been a while."

"They've been busy."

"You could bug them more."

"I'll do better next time."

That's a lesson I learned from him, back when we were kids and scraping our knees on concrete and riding our bikes into the neighbor's miltank—into being somewhat the operative word there. Bad was bad, but you could always do better, and better was the best you could ask for.

"Well." Rawi shifts his weight. I don't look up at him, but I can hear the bags rustling. These are the sounds I know by heart: the faint purr of his backpack's zipper opening, the whisper of rushing water, the faint roar as the handheld propane heater begins boiling. "I'm making hot chocolate."

"I don't want any." My mouth is suddenly dry, though, and I'm not sure why.

"I brought okolehao."

The alcohol's name is like a magic spell. "Give. Now."

There's a warm mug in my hands, and Rawi tosses the flask into my lap. "Save some for me." There's a way that his voice tilts there that almost catches my attention.

"You put too much hot chocolate in here," I mutter instead as I try to top myself off.

"You sound like that's an accident." Rawi catches the flask lazily when I throw it back at him in frustration. "You know, this stuff will kill you one day. Judging by how much of your stash was in the recycling, I'd say that you're drinking more than you should."

"Message in a bottle, if you just know where to look."

He frowns. "This isn't what they mean when they say 'spirits help us'—"

I feel my mood sour despite the day. "You aren't even old enough to drink, let alone lecture me for doing it."

Rawi huffs dramatically, but he's smiling. "This is what I get for trying to do you a favor."

That's what always made us different. Rawiri, whose full name means 'beloved', always loved helping people. He loved making them happy. And he made jokes and mocked himself and sometimes didn't let me see, but he stopped living for himself and started living for everyone else a long time ago. Maybe that was what undid us in the end.

"Sometimes I think I'm doing this wrong," I say aloud, before I can reel the words in. It's good to talk, I tell myself. It's good to get things off of your chest, and if not for Rawi, than for whom?

"What do you mean?"

"We're in the middle of our cove, waiting for the sunset and daydrinking. I have to go to work soon."

"You've got the week off." Rawi helpfully supplements information that I've already forgotten. "And honestly, most people would kill to spend a day like this."

"Right." Pause. "I've been in bed all week, and the strangest thing is that I feel like that's what I've been doing for months now." Another pause. That's the flaw we have, so consistent in our family that it may as well be carved in our genes. We don't like admitting when we're wrong, even if being wrong doesn't mean doing the wrong thing. It hurts to say out loud when I finally admit, "I think I'm depressed."

"You aren't." He's firm, again, as if what I've said is equal parts unlikely and hurtful to him.

"I am." He doesn't know. I'm the older one. I did this long before he did. I remember what it feels like to be lonely, to want to quit, to try to quit. I never told him. We were stony about those kinds of things, even when we were playing pirates on the back of a lapras who returned for no reason than because he could.

"Don't be." Rawi's response is so preposterous that I nearly burst out into laughter right then, until Rawi continues, "Depressed people don't get out of bed or feed themselves or go outside." He gestures to the scene around us, as if it'll prove his point and assuage my feelings instantly.

He doesn't, of course. I don't respond.

"Please." Rawi pauses. "Don't be. I don't want you to hurt like that."

We all want things, Rawi, I almost tell him, but I can't quite make myself break him like that. "Thanks, Rawi," I say instead. "It's been so long since I could just do something like this." I rest my head against Pounamu's rubbery neck, smiling at the way the breeze tickles my hair.

Rawi stops when I say that. I see the slouch return back into his shoulders, the same one I carry, so forgettable that it's practically written into our family's genes. He sighs. "How long was it this time?"

"This time?"

He stares at me, his eyes level. "You and I both know that this isn't the first time."

There's an edge in his voice that makes me stop for a moment, and I start backpedaling. "I don't know exactly—"

He sees straight through my bullshit. He always has. "I bet you do."

I don't meet his eyes.

"How many days have you lost?" His voice is suddenly colored with anger, uncharacteristic of him. There's a hint of a fire burning in his core just visible in his pupils.

"I don't know…"

"How many people have you not talked to, how many sunrises have you not seen, how many ideas have you not had, how many paths of your life have you wasted because you've been curled up in your bed all day? How—"

"Five!" I shout back, and then cover my mouth. The sound is far too loud for the quiet day. I can hear the waves lapping against Pounamu's fins. "Five days," I whisper again. It hurts to say out loud at last. "And you're absolutely right. I should've done something with them."

His anger fades almost as quickly as it came on. "Don't feel so bad about yourself. Five days isn't the end of the world." Warning slips back in; his face contorts with the memory of buried pain. "As long as you don't let it go on for too long, okay?"

"You can't stop me," I mutter darkly.

"I never could."

He sounded sad, and he was sad, but he was also right. Not just because ignoring each other was what family does best. Not just because Rawi's heart of gold was too soft, too malleable, to pierce through my steel curtain. No. It was worse than that, something I'd spent a lot of wasted sunrises and sunsets avoiding, but you couldn't keep things buried forever.

"You're dead," I say, sounding out the words on my lips and hating myself for it.

"Yup."

"There was an avalanche on Mount Lanakila."

"It is the season for it, yeah."

"You were there."

"Mmhmm."

"You didn't survive."

"Stupid of me, right?" He shrugs carelessly.

"You've been dead for nearly a week."

"Five days, actually." His voice is surprisingly matter-of-fact. "But you knew that."

"The funeral is tomorrow. That's why you wanted me to see the comfey. That's why everyone's coming in town." Logistics are starting to crash in like waves, all the things I should've spent the past five days gathering. I will need to speak to the caretakers at Hau'oli. I will need a lei. I will need to organize music—

"Yeah. You should probably clean up. Or don't, really. I doubt they'll expect picturesque perfection from you this time."

But most of all, I will need Rawi. I lean into Pounamu's neck and close my eyes, but I can't drown out his voice. "You're dead."

"Mmhmm, that hasn't changed last I checked."

"But you made me sandwiches. You brought Pounamu here. You're talking to me."

"That was all you, actually. I've always told you that you're stronger than you give yourself credit for." He almost sounds regretful this time, but I don't think he's as hung up on the discontinuity as I am. He's focused on other things, as always, eyes set on new horizons, for messages written in the skies by myths we'll never see. "But I figured I'd come along. I thought it would help, honestly."

"It doesn't." Honestly.

We drift on the water for a while. I lean back and dip one hand in the water, letting it trail off Pounamu's side, and listen to the sound of the wave's lapping against the lapras. It hurts to swallow around the lump in the back of my throat. I should've realized that there was only one set of footprints threading through the sandy beach, that now that I'm grown Pounamu only has space for one.

I remember completing the island challenge and confiding in Rawi that the thing that scared me the most was the lack of goals. There were no more trial captains to pit myself at, no more totem pokémon to study and overcome, that there was no more sense of a timeline, of the world's expectations weighing on me, of being someone else's pride. There was a blank road ahead, full of empty days with no target, and the only person who could fill it was … me.

It's here, though, hugging the briny shell on Pounamu's back, that I realize how wrong I'd been. Deadlines were everywhere now. You had to go climb out to that island sometime soon because one day your body would start to fail you and you wouldn't be able to make the hike. You had to write down that great idea because one day your mind and creativity would get snuffed out. You had to revel in every day with Rawi, the real Rawi, because one day—

"You were depressed," I say aloud, mind switching gears so fast I can feel my thoughts getting roadburn.

"I mean, that's not a surprise to either of us." Rawi smiles weakly.

It was a surprise to me, a little. But I'm not laughing. I sit bolt upright, feeling the cold realization leaking across Pounamu's reassuring presence. "You said that depressed people don't get out of bed, don't feed themselves, don't go outside. But you did all of that."

"Oh." I imagine the way his face contorts as the logical fallacy unfold between us. "Hmmmm. Interesting."

There's a long pause.

"Rawi?"

He doesn't answer me.

"Rawi."

He's deep in thought, face knurled in a fierce frown, and even as he sits across from me on the lapras' back, he's both too real and not real enough. "Huh. You're right; I did say and do all of that. What does that mean for us, then? For you?"

It hurts. It hurts to think about. "Rawi," I beg.

He chews on his lip like he's trying to digest it, and then he looks at me with a newfound expression of pain on his face. He knows just as well as I do what it means. "Well. Fuck."

⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆​

Two days after his funeral, Rawi drags me out of bed again.

"Come on," he says, tugging at my hand. "You're not gonna want to miss this."

"You're dead, Rawi."

But Rawi never let things as trivial as that slow him down. "There's supposed to be this crazy legendary pokémon on the sea tonight," he's chattering. He feels so real when he pulls at my hand, spouting facts and lore that he'd spent his whole life poring over, that I'll spent my whole life shying away from. "It's this crazy little djinn from a far away world. Can you imagine a sea made of sand? They say that Hoopa can travel through all kinds of dimensions in the blink of an eye, and it's going to appear—"

"Rawi." I don't know how to tell him. I don't know how to tell me. "You died."

"That was last week," he says patiently, as if explaining things to a small child. "And I got bored, see? And you looked like you were pretty bored yourself, lying in bed all day, and the Hoopa sighting was on the news." He's poking my shoulder; the covers don't move. "C'mon."

"Rawi, we buried you."

"It was a very nice funeral. I liked your speech."

I want to throw something at him, but I know he's not even there. He's not even there. He's not there. Right?

"I'm sorry," his voice says softly. "I didn't mean to make you upset."

"We buried you." Pause. "I cried."

But I know his response even before he says it, because he's as much a part of me as he's always been.

"And?" he asks, the same old smile painted across his face. "Please. You know me. I'm full of life. Like a little dirt would stop me."

But it does. It does. It does, and we both know it, but neither of us want it to—

In Alola the word for 'hello' and 'goodbye' and 'love' is the same. As a child that had made perfect sense to me, until I learned about the trichotomy that had evolved in languages across the sea. Now, with Rawi in front of me, I understand why our people smudged all three words, and specifically those three words, together like the oranges and blues of a sunset.

On the day of the funeral, I realized something: Rawi had always been the youngest kid in our generation. The darling; the last one to do things. It's stupid. As stupid as trying to reverse the clock, maybe even stupider than that. But I want him here. I am too old to be the youngest.

"Okay." I sit up. "You're right. Let's go see this Hoopa."

This is how I end up on Pounamu's back again, clutching tightly to the lapras's neck like a lifeline. I can hear Rawi behind me when I close my eyes, and I can see him when I open them. The silhouettes of his toothy smile are sharp against the setting sun.

This is good. This has to be good, right? I smile back at him. "Where would you ask Hoopa to take you?"

His head quirks to one side; it's too real; I turn away. "That's an interesting question. Where would I want to be except here, with you?"

There's something wrong here, something I can't put my finger on. It's like trying to squeeze a handful of sand in your fist; it all trickles away back into the beach. Normally I'm the one with my head wrapped up in metaphors like this, trying to attribute meaning to a cycle of random patterns; Rawi's the kind of person who chases them just because they're there.

Rawi started his island trial early and ended it late. He could've been done in a fraction of the time, a trainer of prodigious skill—he'd met and befriended Pounamu, one of the rarest species in Alola, by the time he was six—but he'd taken his time, sussing out Alola's secrets. Even now, as I'm trying to untangle the image of his peaceful face enshrined in funerary lei with his wind-tossed, lopsided grin wide as he drags me on a sidequest, I know he's dead, but it feels so in-character for him to wrench me out of bed to chase a rumor.

There was a fire inside of him that sent him rocketing into the unknown at the earliest opportunity, the kind of fire that made it impossible to be happy standing still. When asked where in the world he wanted to be, Rawi would say anywhere except

Rawi chatters past my confusion. "I met this old hiker on Melemele who said he'd heard of Hoopa, once. He said that Hoopa once snuck into a castle and vanished away everything inside. There was another bit about djinn that granted wishes, and a peasant and a princess and an arcanine, and one about a king and his talonflame, and a captured queen who knew one thousand stories…"

"A thousand?"

"Right?" Rawi mistakes my disbelief for awe. "I like to think that maybe she was Hoopa all along, if she knew so many stories. Because what is a fantasy except briefly being allowed to go to another dimension, to tell a tale of what you saw there?"

As I try to digest, there's no sound for a moment except Pounamu's fins cutting through the water.

"You can make wishes on Hoopa too." His smile is crooked. "But you're supposed to be careful what you wish for. Hoopa's the tricky kind of djinn. One of those kinds of stories, you know?"

"You get what you wish for," I saw hollowly, looking up at him and his smile. "But it's not what you need."

There are two realities stretching out before us. One in which Rawi gets to chatter in my ear night after night, telling me a new story until the end of time; and one in which his voice goes unheard because—

"Tell me about the avalanche." My knuckles are white on Pounamu's shell.

For the first time today, Rawi flinches back. The smile fades. "Can we not?" he asks. "It's embarrassing, you know? Star of our generation makes a careless mistake that every ten year-old gets warned against and dies of exposure. Stupid me. I should've known better."

"Stupid you." I repeat his words quietly, but I can't make myself believe the lie we're telling me.

He's smiling, shaking his head, silent.

The wind picks up a little, and what were once clear skies are suddenly blotched all over with gray.

Pounamu brays in alarm at the onset of the sudden storm, but I can't do anything but wrap my arms tighter around his neck. "But you did know better, didn't you?"

The past week has been an exercise in all the signs I've been ignoring, all the messages that the world has sent me in warning that I've been trying to ignore. Like the hula lessons when we were kids: we danced around it at the funeral; we danced around it at the cove; we're dancing around it here.

Rawi, my sweet, smiling, sad Rawi, left all of his pokémon in town and climbed Mount Lanakila. Alone, without supplies, in the middle of avalanche season.

"You were never planning on coming down, were you?"

The crystalline seas have turned dark. Pounamu brays in alarm. The storm either came out of nowhere or has been growing all this time, while I was oblivious; I don't remember which. But now there's no more ignoring the buffeting wind, the sudden sheets of sea foam. Pounamu banks hard to the right as a wave threatens to overturn us, and icy water drenches through my clothes and fills my nostrils.

"This must be it!" Rawi shouts above the growing storm, his voice as cheerful as ever. "This must be Hoopa!"

I squint against the spray of the storm. Dark clouds blot out the sky, and the waves around us are already ten feet high. We need to turn back. Pounamu screams again; there are some waves that are too high even for him.

Something is bubbling out of the depths. Tendrils of water swirl around it, lifting it ever-higher in the vortex streaked with seaweed. Tiny bubbles of kelp pepper its surface, and the shelled wreck crests above, barnacles crusted across its glassy shell that it keeps firmly, firmly clamped down, refusing to let anyone see.

Another wave washes over the three of us, and I hold as tightly to Pounamu as I can as gallons and gallons of seawater drench me to the bone.

"I just wanted you to be happy," Rawi's saying in my ear, voice impossibly clear despite the storm. "Like me."

Another wave crests, and I have one moment to stare at it, just one, before it crashes down like tauros going seventy miles per hour down a path, blazing through—

I'm thrown from Pounamu's back and into the choppy waters.

The first wave holds me under so long that I almost accept drowning. When I surface, hair plastered across my mouth, I have just enough focus to concentrate on a damp inhalation before the water hurls me back under again.

"Rawi!" I scream, but the storm rips the sound from my words. "Pounamu!"

A wave flings me up. The songlike cry of the lapras is tangled in the wind, but I can't make myself land. The sky is no more than a thick wall of clouds, but even through the darkened sea I can see it before me—knurls of crystal curled up like a clenched fist protect its interior; a pockmarked and mottled cork is shoved deep into the vessel's throat. And inside, the script too blurred through thick glass, a scrap of paper with shards of black text.

Hoopa's behind this storm, and the bottle has to do with Hoopa. I know it. If I just manage to crawl my way forward and reach it, fulfill Rawi's quest, we'll be able to make everything right again. Things will go back to the way they were. I'll get my closure and all of this will make sense.

Except it won't. I know it won't. And that knowledge makes me so heavy that I almost sink to the bottom of the sea.

Pounamu is braying frantically in alarm, bodily slamming himself through wave after wave while I float there, paralyzed. The current drags me inexorably toward Hoopa's bottle.

Things won't go back to the way they were because they can't. Rawi won't take me to the cove ever again because he can't. The world won't be a beautiful place in the exact same way it used to be because it can't, not now that we've lost what we've lost.

Rawi is a scared little boy as he puts on his pajamas and hikes to the top of Alola's tallest mountain, and he quietly waits for the inevitable while I'm not there to protect him. I had my chance to fix that. And now I am an arrow with no target, anger with no outlet. I can tell as many stories as I want and I will never be able to escape that facet of reality.

The waves have thrown me over to Hoopa's bottle, and even though it feels sacrosanct I grab it like a lifeline. Something beats against the glass walls, muffled screams whose vibrations I can feel beating into my fingertips even when the sound is silenced within the storm. There's a message within whose contents I have known the whole time, whose words I have spent all these days running from.

"I never knew what to tell you." Rawi's voice, impossibly calm, is louder and clearer than my own breathing, louder than the sea; I open my mouth for a retort and find my voice barely audible over the whirling tempest; the storm swallows my words and dashes them up against the waves. "I had a note that I wanted to give you, one last story, but I never knew how to end it happily, so I threw it into the ocean instead."

I sense rather than see his attention catch on the bottle in my hands, thrumming like a heartbeat against my soaked fingertips, and I hear panic finally slip into his voice. He knows what I'm about to do, after all, because I know, too. "Please. Be—"

I wrench the cork off of the prison bottle and set Hoopa free.

Pulsing energy explodes out of the neck of the bottle, so much that I can almost feel it shatter in my grasp, and then I watch it surround the ghost wearing the face of a boy I once knew, morphing him darker, larger, unbound. Hoopa towers over me and Pounamu and the seas alike, but in that moment I have no eyes for this legend; all I care about is written on a scrap of paper in the heart of the bottle has ripped itself out of my hands and flown headlong into the sea.

I ignore Pounamu's muffled cries and instead paddle towards it, even as the monstrous form of the freed djinn swivels its attention to me. Arms reach through a thousand dimensions, a thousand realities that are out of my grasp, and then they all reach for me, nails pointed like claws. Disjointed hands bigger than my entire body smash into the sea around me, sending a spire of frothing waves that forces me back.

"I just wanted you to be happy!" Rawi repeats in the ghost's voice, but now his voice echoes through the storm, a thousand Rawi's speaking at once. "Like me!"

There are a thousand dimensions where Rawi is alive and well, and I'm drowning in the only one where he isn't.

Maybe this is why our people fear and revere Hoopa so much. There's a strange sort of magic in this power, the power of a wish, the power of belief. If I believe wholly that story that Hoopa tells me, that Rawi is alive, that none of this ever happened, then for me it's no different than if I whispered my wish into this magic bottle and a genie made it into my reality.

And the price for that wish would be simple—I would just have to close my eyes and ears to reality for the rest of my life, to allow the weight of that lie to drag me down with him.

I almost choke on the sea the first time, almost let it fill my lungs and drag me down, and then Pounamu is surging up beneath me, serpentine neck lifting me into the air and out of the waters. I clutch the lapras, dripping, and the two of us stare at the unbound monstrosity ahead.

"Stay with me. Where would I want to be except here, with you?"

It's not him. That was never him.

My retort bursts back at him. "I made you say that. You aren't real." It starts out calm, and then saying the words aloud makes the truth sink in, the same way my heart sinks in my chest. "This isn't what you would be saying. The real you wouldn't give a damn about making sure I knew what you were thinking because the one time it mattered, the real you didn't."

I look at the bottle one last time, its cork bobbing harmlessly in the sea. I want to close my eyes, but I force myself to look at it, even as Pounamu pulls us away. "You aren't Rawi. You're just all the things I wish I could've told him. All the things I wish he would've told me."

There's no way I could've heard him across the wind, but there's still tangible pain in his voice, that cuts like a knife, when he whispers: "Oh. Okay then."

Three things happen in rapid succession.

The storm crumples into itself, leaving only silence.

The twisted bottle sinks into the sea.

Rawi vanishes from my sight.

⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆​

I return home. I shower the sea away. I dry myself off. I go to sleep, I wake up, I work. I put the bottle and the ghost and my wish behind me. Rawi does not speak to me anymore, but I see glimpses of him out of the corner of my eye, when I don't expect it.

For six months I can't bring myself back to the cove. There's nothing there for me.

It's almost winter when I wake up in the middle of the night, struck by certainty. I put on my hiking boots and shrug my jacket over my shoulders, open the door to the cold.

The path before me is familiar. The dirt crunches a little beneath my feet from the frost. I tuck my hands into my pockets and lower my head against the wind until I reach the cove.

It's cloudy; the night is dark because of it. My flashlight casts strange shadows against the sand, makes gaping caverns and yawning pits out of dunes that are six inches tall. There's a familiar game of shadow puppets here, and just remembering it fills me with warmth.

Rawi was right, as usual. As soon as I'm back, I wish I'd gone a long time ago. The beach is washed smooth, all signs of the storm erased by time.

The waves lap around my ankles as I wade into the sea.

"Pounamu?"

My call is swallowed by the gentle swell of the waves. I hear it echo and taper away, and then fade off into silence.

I wade further and further into the water, until it's nearly up to my waist. "Pounamu!"

The lapras does not come. Of course he doesn't. The ocean is a large place, and I left him alone. There's a bitter moment where I realize that he's just as likely to find his missing family as I am.

This is our cove. It looks the same all over but it isn't; it's my childhood home and now my greatest sorrow. No other place in the world will hurt to look at in the same way that this one does. I will be the youngest for the rest of my life.

I sit with one leg draped off of the rock, toes dipping into the salty water, and time flows. When I'm finally aware of it again, the tide has risen up to my knees. I pull out our flask, half-expecting Rawi to tell me off for that too, but there's only the sea in the sound around me.

Rawi and I turned two happy children into one morose adult sitting on the edge of the ocean, drinking to keep warm. I didn't bring any equipment to spend the night out here. I didn't prepare for this. I didn't prepare for any of this. But I can sit here and look at the night sky and hear the waves beating against the rocks, and I can finally do the things I should've done long ago.

"Sorry. I know you cared."

Five words. I decide on that. Five words. Boil down everything I wish I'd said to a handful of secrets, because time is passing and it is infinite, but ultimately for us it is short.

The words I shouted to Hoopa still haunt me, even if they were never heard by anyone else except me and Pounamu and the waves. Because they were wrong, because I was wrong. Of course Rawi cared. That was who he was. Caring was what he did best.

He kept chattering to me for those five days that I spent curled up in bed; I heard him talking to me every day thereafter; sometimes, I can almost hear his whispers now. He's watching me expectantly when I pack his hiking equipment into the attic, he's humming along when his favorite song plays on the radio, he's on the beach as a stranger walks by with his lopsided gait. I see him everywhere except where I want him to be.

On the zero day, it was easy enough to tell the world one thing and mean another, to commit the same travesty that Rawi had to all of us, to say I was okay and all along know I never meant it. I could wear my funeral lei and say hello-goodbye-iloveyou. I could keep my chin up and my feelings bottled up inside. I could make a speech about trite things that we had all heard before, gloss over his dark undertow and describe him as warm waves in the cove. And I did.

We kept secrets from each other. I never told him how lonely I was, how those five days I spent curled up in bed weren't the only five days in my life that I felt the same way he did, how I'd been pushed to the brink and stared into the abyss in the exact same way he did. I never told him because I didn't want him to think I was less.

I could've told him, but instead, I didn't. And by the time I realized it all, there was no making him any more solid than the ghost across my shoulder. Maybe he hadn't written a note because he'd seen how much I hated stories that ended sadly. Maybe there'd been one and it had been lost to the elements.

But it wasn't just the one message. It had been every message, every conversation I wished we'd had, every sunrise we hadn't seen, every time there was advice I was supposed to tell him and I'd put it off for later, because I'd always assumed there'd be a later.

It had been easy to survey the storm-torn sands and tell myself I'd be exactly who I was going to be, that I'd been okay and okay was a state I'd always known. But instead of patching up, I bottled up. I didn't rebuild anything. I just swept all the broken bits away and hoped I would forget to replace them. And when I kept sifting through the wreckage and found more and more broken bits, and I put them all away, far away, where I'd never accidentally look at them and cut myself on reality.

But when I looked at the pile again and the broken bits still hurt to touch, I corked them in a bottle, and when that wasn't enough, I built the bottle bigger and bigger until it could imprison the whole world that I needed it to; and when that wasn't enough I threw it into the ocean, made a wish on a legend and hoped that it would all work out.

It wasn't until the sea washed an unrecognizable mess of cracks and seaweed and decay back that I realized my mistake: the person left on the beach wasn't me because my heart was scrawled in that bottle.

He felt so hollow when he was dragging me on hikes and to Pounamu and into the sea because it wasn't Rawi, not really. I remembered what I wanted to see of him—a young kid with a heart of gold and eyes full of fire, but there was more to them than that. He was deep like a cove and stormed like rough waters; he had ups and downs and everything in between; when people asked me if we were close I couldn't help but think not close enough because we really weren't, not if I couldn't see the path he was following me down from the start.

"It hurts you, doesn't it?" I imagine him asking. There was always care in his voice, but I can hear the way that it cracks a little more in the middle, edges flaking off the ends of his words. "Why keep revisiting this place? Why open it up again?"

I know the answer to the same question I asked myself every day for months, what I wished we'd been able to tell each other when we needed it most.

Letting the broken bits tumble back out of the bottle is the hardest part, but it's how I learned to fuel myself. When the sky falls and the storm grows and I want to go back to a greyscale life, I open up my chest to that burning hole where my heart beats and I remember. There is a relic there, ancient and rotting, a twisted mass held together by tendrils of glass. It smells of salt and loves the sea, and it will always be mine to bear. Some days, it is my anchor against the storm; some days, it drags me down with it.

He doesn't say anything else. My old brain wouldn't have let him be okay with this, because for my fictional Rawi to acknowledge my pain, I would have to acknowledge his.

And the real Rawi, who would never dream of questioning someone for baring their heart to him like that, would've told me about this bottled fire long ago, because his short and vibrant and painful life was almost certainly fueled wholly by the burden that no one else should hurt the same way he did. That was the danger when he stopped living for himself, until eventually the sea consumed him and his bottle and his heart.

"Hello. Goodbye. I love you."

Alola. I missed him. I miss him. And, when I least expect it, I think I always will.

He is gone and I am here, but I will always be a person shaped by the mold that Rawi used to be.

The waves shift. The water churns. There is a triumphant cry, and Pounamu emerges from the sea.

⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆​
 
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Umbramatic

The Ghost Lord
Location
The Yangverse
Pronouns
Any
Partners
  1. reshiram
Well. This is another case of:


Not gonna lie I was expecting something bad to happen but I wasn't expecting "you're dead" but from there the feeeeeeeeeels (and some morbidly funny moments).

There were some really neat nods to Hawaiian culture in here - somewhat surface level but they work and make sense for Alola. The whole thing about the protag trying to cope with Rawri's loss and chatting up his ghost in the process is trippy and also hnggggggggg again feels

Also: Hoopa! Underappreciated even among Legendaries and Mythicals. Good to see them here... if it's really them, or is it another construct of the protagonist's mind who knowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwws?

Also! Pounamu is a good boy. Good Lapras. Plz give him treats.

But now I'm sad. Damn you. Damn you for making me feel emotions. I was avoiding those.
 

kintsugi

golden scars | pfp by sun
Location
the warmth of summer in the songs you write
Pronouns
she/her
Partners
  1. silvally-grass
  2. lapras
  3. golurk
  4. booper-kintsugi
  5. meloetta-kint-muse
  6. meloetta-kint-dancer
  7. murkrow
  8. yveltal
Not gonna lie I was expecting something bad to happen but I wasn't expecting "[whoops plot twist; REDACTED]" but from there the feeeeeeeeeels (and some morbidly funny moments).
yeah it's never sunny in philadelphia with me here
I'm glad that there were some funny bits though! Rawi's humor was a bit of a balancing act for me.

Also: Hoopa! Underappreciated even among Legendaries and Mythicals. Good to see them here... if it's really them, or is it another construct of the protagonist's mind who knowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwws?
who IS to say
jk i think i'm to say

Also! Pounamu is a good boy. Good Lapras. Plz give him treats.
it is known that Lapras is best boi

But now I'm sad. Damn you. Damn you for making me feel emotions. I was avoiding those.
Haha, glad you... enjoyed? Felt? Unsure. But thank you for reading!
 

kyeugh

you gotta feel your lines
Staff
Pronouns
she/her
Partners
  1. farfetchd-galar
  2. gfetchd-kyeugh
  3. onion-san
  4. farfetchd
sweet, more kintsugi fic! always here for that tbh. guess i’ll jump right in!
“No can do. I promised I’d take care of you.”

His version of taking care of me involves talking my ear off until I reluctantly crawl out of bed. I know this. I understand this. This is what our family does.

“I’m not brushing your teeth for you, but you’d damn well better do that too.” His voice is muffled as he rummages around the closet for a clean pair of socks. “You know what they used to tell us—”

“Don’t break routine for anything,” I finish for him wearily. I know the drill. This was how we’d rammed ourselves through things when we were younger—by pretending to be tauros going seventy miles per hour down the path, blazing through anything. The instant you slowed down, all hell broke loose. When the dark days came, when getting out of bed was hard, this how we persisted—the small tasks had to be done, and then the bigger tasks, and eventually you could just endure through anything. “So why’d you drag me out of bed?”
it seems like we’ve got a pair of siblings here... i assume rawi is the elder one? i’m not sure what to make of his promise to take care of the viewpoint character—perhaps their parents died, and rawi was left behind to raise his younger sibling? that would explain the callback to the family’s philosophy, which i suspect we’ll see put to the test later on. the fic description did mention emotional baggage, so i guess we’ll have to see where it goes...
I miss the cove. When Rawi and I were kids, we would spend days on end out here. Crystal clear waters slowly faded to sapphire. Sky stretched across as far as you could see. Rocky cliffs were our proving grounds, who could jump further and bolder—but they gave way to soft, white sands worn smooth by the tides. As the sun set, around the golden hour, we could watch the cutiefly trickle across the coast, their legs covered with the pollen harvest from the afternoon. In the spring, the mudsdale would bring their young to the cliffs to teach them how to stomp; in the winter, lanturn and chicnhou migrated to the warmer waters of the cove and filled it with twinkling lights. At night, we were far enough away from the world that you could stargaze with a naked eye, trace out the constellations with your fingers and chart your own meaning for guardians that were a billion years old.
man, this might be one of the best descriptions i’ve seen in a long, long time. i’m a huge sucker for descriptions of the natural world, and you do an excellent job at making the world feel real and lived in. the references to the region’s ecology are super awesome. thinking on it now, handfuls of dust sort of does this similar thing where really make the world feel far, far bigger than the people living in it... sort of conveying this feeling of vastness and timelessness, the power of nature. i fall hard for depictions of the world like that, so i fell hard for this bit. super good stuff.
Pounamu was our anchor against the storm, the real reason we ventured out to the cove so often. Choppy seas and calm waters; the lapras could handle them both. I don’t remember who found him first; I just remember giddy and unadulterated joy as he breached over the waters, slowly at first, and then faster and faster, until we skimmed across the waves like an arrow aimed at the horizon. He taught me a lesson that nothing else could: there were giants in the world, creatures bigger and deeper than my limited understanding, but they could be gentle, and they could be good.
given that pokémon are usually depicted as very intelligent, and having the ability to sort of intuitively engage with humans, i think it’s pretty rare that a fic manages to capture the feeling of interacting with a large animal. you do a great job of that here, and it feels cohesive with the description of the natural world before. for me, this bit evokes the feeling of interacting with a horse or a deer—kind of a mutual understanding that transcends social intuition. it’s a very particular feeling and something i feel like i don‘t see enough in pokéfic, so hats off for that.
That’s what always made us different. Rawiri, whose full name means ‘beloved’, always loved helping people. He loved making them happy. And he made jokes and mocked himself and sometimes didn’t let me see, but he stopped living for himself and started living for everyone else a long time ago. Maybe that was what undid us in the end.
hm, so far i’m getting the impression that the two do indeed live alone together, but that rawi is actually younger than the viewpoint character... i wonder what their situation is, and what happened to their family? you’re doing a good job at spacing out these details enough to keep me interested and wondering without saying too much at once.
We were stony about those kinds of things, even when we were playing pirates on the back of a lapras who returned for no reason than because he could.
* other than because he could, i assume?
“You’re dead,” I say, sounding out the words on my lips and hating myself for it.
... oh! wow. i absolutely did not see that coming. it’s been a long time since i’ve seen a twist like that... i wonder what kind of ghost this is? is rawi actually there, or is this all merely a figment of the imagination? will he disappear now?
I lean back and dip one hand in the water, letting it trail off Pounamu’s side, and listen to the sound of the wave’s lapping against the lapras.
* waves
“We buried you.” Pause. “I cried.”

But I know his response even before he says it, because he’s as much a part of me as he’s always been.

“And?” he asks, the same old smile painted across his face. “Please. You know me. I’m full of life. Like a little dirt would stop me.”
hmmmm. so he doesn't go away even if she's aware that he's not real, i guess! the repeated references to how real it feels make me wonder whether it's something beyond a hallucination. i'm kind of curious about what flavor of Apparition we're experiencing here... i assume it'll become more apparent as we go.
Rawi, my sweet, smiling, sad Rawi, left all of his pokémon in town and climbed Mount Lanakila. Alone, without supplies, in the middle of avalanche season.

“You were never planning on coming down, were you?”
mmm. :< i guess if rawi isn't real then he can't tell her anything she doesn't know already. this is still pretty heart-breaking though, especially given how intent rawi (real or not) seems on protecting her and pulling her out of her own depression. (the narrator is a she, right... i'm doing this review across two pretty spaced out reading sessions, so i can't really remember, lol.)

My retort bursts back at him. “I made you say that. You aren’t real.” It starts out calm, and then saying the words aloud makes the truth sink in, the same way my heart sinks in my chest. “This isn’t what you would be saying. The real you wouldn’t give a damn about making sure I knew what you were thinking because the one time it mattered, the real you didn’t.”

I look at the bottle one last time, its cork bobbing harmlessly in the sea. I want to close my eyes, but I force myself to look at it, even as Pounamu pulls us away. “You aren’t Rawi. You’re just all the things I wish I could’ve told him. All the things I wish he would’ve told me.”
wow. i haven't had much to say up to this point because i've just been so sucked into your writing, but this story is seriously powerful so far. i guess this is the line where it comes together just how the story ties into your prompt? my instinct was that it would be an undelivered message from rawi, but it makes much more sense this way.

sorry this review is a bit front-loaded. honestly the latter half of it is just so good and intense that i don't really have much to say about it that isn't self-evident, i think. this is a really beautiful story that feels raw and real and true. the fact that it's technically pokémon fanfic feels mostly incidental but also nontrivial, which is exactly the balance i try to strike with my own writing, and that brought a lot to it for me. at any rate there's so much emotion going on here, and it feels very much like a real response to a tragic loss, a real progression of understanding about the death of a loved one. and it still feels loved even with the fantastical elements included.

one thing i'm not clear on is the role of hoopa in this fic. i'm not really sure why hoopa was in the ocean, how the narrator knew that would be the case, or what exactly was going on throughout that confrontation except for what was literally going on at face value. i guess you could say i understand the what but not the why of that whole scene. also, was hoopa conscientiously playing on the narrator's delusions? how much of that was imagined, and how much of it was consciously carried out by hoopa? was hoopa even actually there? maybe the point is for this stuff to be unclear since it was unclear to the narrator, but i'm just not sure either way.

that aside, this was a beautiful fic, and i'm really glad i read it. very impressed you managed to spin a story this deep and meaningful from that prompt, hahaha. thank you for sharing it with us.
 

StellarWind

Biomechanical Abomination
Location
Across the Threshold of Dimension
Pronouns
Any
I'm kind of terrible at this whole reviewing lark, so I'm sorry if this is a bit jumbled.

The first thing that hit me as I started reading this was the present tense because why is everything happening in one singular moment when there is clearly a sequence of events here ow my neurons. Then the utterly beautiful descriptions started coming up - scenes and little things from the character's past. The Lapras. Emotions. The more the story unfurled the more the present-tense started making sense. A scary amount of sense really - grief and depression, and a feeling of timelessness - everything condensed into one moment - go hand in hand very well. As does the sort of general feeling of how much of what this character experienced in this fic is real and how much is in his mind, particularly with Hoopa. Kind of a perfect choice with all the different pathways the multiverse could take (all the things that could have happened), wishes (both wishing things went differently, and things people wish to have heard/have said to those they lost) and... yeah. Bottles, both real and metaphorical. I've never seen someone put this particular combination together before and it was brilliant. I love how you expanded Hoopa's mythology too, that nod to Scheherazade and One Thousand and One Nights was absolutely on point.

There was just so much emotion in this, that it kept me hanging on to every word. And with my attention span being what it is, that's a very good thing.

Also, that "This isn’t what they mean when they say ‘spirits help us’" line cracked me up.

Absolutely lovely work. ^^
 

Adamhuarts

Mew specialist
Partners
  1. mew-adam
  2. celebi-shiny
  3. roserade-adam
I went into this oneshot expecting a mundane hiking adventure with two bois, but then it quickly became the most depressing thing I've read all week lmao. It was a really well written one shot, all things considered. You did very well in portraying how Rawi being there was symbolic of how the other guy couldn't accept he was gone.

Something felt off from the very start of the oneshot, and the eventual revelation that Rawi was dead explained everything. It's hard to make people care about characters in a single oneshot, but you managed to do so with great characterization and proper build up. I enjoyed reading this sad af boi fic, and the bittersweet ending was noice. :D
 

Pen

the cat is mightier than the pen
Staff
Partners
  1. dratini
  2. dratini-pen
  3. dratini-pen2
Why isn't this on fanfiction.net where I can favorite it?!

Really loved this. The nature descriptions blend seamlessly into the inner monologue and the similes were just excellent throughout. Every word felt incredibly deliberate.

The tide is low in the afternoon, so the shore is exposed far deeper than it normally is, like the rind of a cored fruit.
Tide to fruit, the suggestion of hollowness . . .

I glance over my shoulder, seeing my footprints threading delicately across the sand, one carefully in front of the other. There’s something else wrong there, a train of thought that’s on the wrong tracks, twisting abruptly and morphing into a single set of footprints in the sand. But what?
This was the moment I said to myself, oh Rawi's totally dead. I think you dropped the hints really subtly. The wrongness is clear from the beginning, but it's hard to pinpoint what exactly until here.

“Fine. Would it make you feel better if I instead told you that ninety percent of outdoor search and rescues are performed because day hikers don’t bring proper equipment?”

He’s smiling, a little, but for some reason I can’t. “Not in particular,” I mutter. Something about his statement is wrong; it doesn’t fit together, like a puzzle with five corner pieces. But—
This, though, I only understood on second look, once I learned that Rawi hadn't brought equipment. It's wonderfully done how the facts are weighing on the narrator's mind, not quite able to be coalesced into the horrible truth.

As the sun set, around the golden hour, we could watch the cutiefly trickle across the coast, their legs covered with the pollen harvest from the afternoon. In the spring, the mudsdale would bring their young to the cliffs to teach them how to stomp; in the winter, lanturn and chicnhou migrated to the warmer waters of the cove and filled it with twinkling lights.
These details really bring the world to life.

Brown eyes four times larger than mine close as he nuzzles gently against the top of Rawi’s head, which is almost engulfed the crook between Pounamu’s massive jaw and his scaled neck..
Love everything about the lapras, but especially its sheer physicality, how the wonder of it comes through in the description.

I’m the older one. I did this long before he did. I remember what it feels like to be lonely, to want to quit, to try to quit. I never told him. We were stony about those kinds of things, even when we were playing pirates on the back of a lapras who returned for no reason than because he could.
This was a really poignant moment of characterization.

Deadlines were everywhere now. You had to go climb out to that island sometime soon because one day your body would start to fail you and you wouldn’t be able to make the hike. You had to write down that great idea because one day your mind and creativity would get snuffed out. You had to revel in every day with Rawi, the real Rawi, because one day—
In a story with a ghost, this to me was the most morbid moment. You can feel entropy and decay in the lines.

Two days after his funeral, Rawi drags me out of bed again.

“Come on,” he says, tugging at my hand. “You’re not gonna want to miss this.”

“You’re dead, Rawi.”
I was half-expecting the story to wrap up after the narrator realized Rawi was dead, so this was exciting. Did laugh a little at this part, even though the mood of the story overall is pretty somber.

In Alola the word for ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ and ‘love’ is the same. As a child that had made perfect sense to me, until I learned about the trichotomy that had evolved in languages across the sea, but now, with Rawi in front of me, I understand why our people smudged all three words, and specifically those three words, together like the oranges and blues of a sunset.
This simile is just so good. It makes pictorial sense of the linguistic conflation, turns a quirk of language into a seamless fact of nature. The power lies in how restrained the comparison is.

“You were never planning on coming down, were you?”

The crystalline seas have turned dark. Pounamu brays in alarm. The storm either came out of nowhere or has been growing all this time, while I was oblivious; I don’t remember which. But now there’s no more ignoring the buffeting wind, the sudden sheets of sea foam. Pounamu banks hard to the right as a wave threatens to overturn us, and icy water drenches through my clothes and fills my nostrils.

“This must be it!” Rawi shouts above the growing storm, his voice as cheerful as ever. “This must be Hoopa!”
I think this passage combines and highlights all my favorite aspects of this oneshot--the internal struggle to accept the suicide of a loved one, the stunning nature description, the mythology, and how they all come together to make a whole more than the sum of its parts.


The sky is no more than a thick wall of clouds, but even though the darkened sea I can see it before me—knurls of crystal curled up like a clenched fist protect its interior; a pockmarked and mottled cork is shoved deep into the vessel’s throat. And inside, the script too blurred through thick glass, a scrap of paper with shards of black text.
Ugh so good. Love the hint of violence in how you describe the cork into the 'throat" and the "shards" of text, as if the bottle is already shattered.

Things won’t go back to the way they were because they can’t. Rawi won’t take me to the cove ever again because he can’t. The world won’t be a beautiful place in the exact same way it used to be because it can’t, not now that we’ve lost what we’ve lost.

Rawi is a scared little boy as he puts on his pajamas and hikes to the top of Alola’s tallest mountain, and he quietly waits for the inevitable while I’m not there to protect him. I had my chance to fix that. I didn’t. And that is life. I am an arrow with no target, anger with no outlet. I can tell as many stories as I want and I will never be able to escape that facet of reality.
This was really, really beautiful and gut-wrenching. The mistake a wish can't fix, the way life rushes on, heedless to it.

“I can’t wish you back.”
For me, the passages after this verged too far into over-explaining, into re-explaining what I felt the story had already expressed more powerfully, that you can't paper over this grief with a wish, that understanding what happened means accepting guilt. No specific edits on anything to cut, just that I think it took away from the impact a bit for me, to see written out explicitly what the story had already strongly and compellingly implied.

It won’t go away because it can’t; it’s a part of you now. So you hold the pain tight so that you don’t forget: it hurts, and it hurt you, but it won’t hurt forever. It broke you, but those broken bits are you, yours.
This felt like a turn-to-the-camera moment, more general and banal then the rest of the story's portrayal of grief.

The waves shift. The water churns. There is a triumphant cry, and Pounamu emerges from the sea.
And gorgeously ended, the short sentences are very effective and the image of the lapras emerging is one that will stick with me.

This was a really beautiful meditation on loss and grief and guilt, and moving forwards.
 

WildBoots

Don’t underestimate seeds.
Pronouns
She/Her
Partners
  1. moka-mark
  2. solrock
Why isn't this on fanfiction.net where I can favorite it?!
I second this! I also would love to throw in in my collection of fics about trainers who aren't rookies. Just saying.

This is the version of the pokemon world I like best: nature is dangerous and you have to be prepared. Beating all the competitions doesn't make you happy and whole all by itself.

Rawi's dialogue was especially enjoyable, from the humor to the hypocrisy to the lows. The revelation that he was dead all along made me gasp out loud. The momentary...amnesia(?) didn't feel as believable to me --felt more like a reveal to the audience than to the character -- but it didn't hamper my enjoyment of the story. I loved the foreshadowing about bringing proper equipment...when Rawi chose not to... and the detail of the pajama bottoms, another hint that he didn't need to be prepared for the hike because he's a ghost.

For the most part, the text is clear, easy to follow, and pleasant. Loved the lapras's desk-sized head and the descriptions of the cove. Some of the similes and metaphors broke tone for me and pulled me out of the story a little -- the lapras's neck being like a bird, the tears in the ocean line, the line about flaking like rust. I also drifted from the narrative a little in the segment between the hoopa scene and Pounamu's reappearance -- I got lost in the soup of our protagonist's thoughts, but I think anchoring us with reminders of where we are in the real, physical world would help.

Overall, a very satisfying read. Definitely, definitely happy I took the time.
 

kintsugi

golden scars | pfp by sun
Location
the warmth of summer in the songs you write
Pronouns
she/her
Partners
  1. silvally-grass
  2. lapras
  3. golurk
  4. booper-kintsugi
  5. meloetta-kint-muse
  6. meloetta-kint-dancer
  7. murkrow
  8. yveltal
late responses are LATE. i am so sorry. thank you all!

man, this might be one of the best descriptions i’ve seen in a long, long time. i’m a huge sucker for descriptions of the natural world, and you do an excellent job at making the world feel real and lived in. the references to the region’s ecology are super awesome. thinking on it now, handfuls of dust sort of does this similar thing where really make the world feel far, far bigger than the people living in it... sort of conveying this feeling of vastness and timelessness, the power of nature. i fall hard for depictions of the world like that, so i fell hard for this bit. super good stuff.
given that pokémon are usually depicted as very intelligent, and having the ability to sort of intuitively engage with humans, i think it’s pretty rare that a fic manages to capture the feeling of interacting with a large animal. you do a great job of that here, and it feels cohesive with the description of the natural world before. for me, this bit evokes the feeling of interacting with a horse or a deer—kind of a mutual understanding that transcends social intuition
ahhh, I'm glad you like these! I struggle with writing realistic settings most of the time tbh. And when I'm not shilling N I like to think that humans can live very peacefully alongside pokemon... :thonk:

(the narrator is a she, right... i'm doing this review across two pretty spaced out reading sessions, so i can't really remember, lol.)
technically yes, but I sort of never mention it anywhere in the story except that the title, heh

one thing i'm not clear on is the role of hoopa in this fic. i'm not really sure why hoopa was in the ocean, how the narrator knew that would be the case, or what exactly was going on throughout that confrontation except for what was literally going on at face value. i guess you could say i understand the what but not the why of that whole scene. also, was hoopa conscientiously playing on the narrator's delusions? how much of that was imagined, and how much of it was consciously carried out by hoopa? was hoopa even actually there? maybe the point is for this stuff to be unclear since it was unclear to the narrator, but i'm just not sure either way.
I wanted this story to be about impossible and selfish wishes: one of the irrational things about grief is the feeling of wanting something back while also knowing you'll never get it. And hoopa to me has always been this strange, unexplored pokemon. It's a genie in a bottle, but instead of granting wishes it has the power to transport people to faraway worlds, so I wanted to use that as an exploration of using wishes to escape reality. Hoopa is sort of the manifestation of all of those impossibilities and things that the narrator never got -- Rawi's being there after his death, his forgiveness, his note -- is it all real?? WHO KNOWS I like to think of it as Molly/Entei in the Spell of the Unown, where it's an illusion fueled by how powerfully someone believes in it, but tbh the narrator never figures that out and I don't think she ever gets to.

that aside, this was a beautiful fic, and i'm really glad i read it. very impressed you managed to spin a story this deep and meaningful from that prompt, hahaha. thank you for sharing it with us.
Thank you for the thoughtful review! This story is definitely a bit off the beaten path so I'm glad you enjoyed it

why is everything happening in one singular moment when there is clearly a sequence of events here ow my neurons.
tbh it's a bad habit that I picked up towards the end of 2018, but in this case I did want the past/present/timelessness divide that you mentioned later on!

Kind of a perfect choice with all the different pathways the multiverse could take (all the things that could have happened), wishes (both wishing things went differently, and things people wish to have heard/have said to those they lost) and... yeah. Bottles, both real and metaphorical. I've never seen someone put this particular combination together before and it was brilliant. I love how you expanded Hoopa's mythology too, that nod to Scheherazade and One Thousand and One Nights was absolutely on point.
!! ahh!! thank

Also, that "This isn’t what they mean when they say ‘spirits help us’" line cracked me up.
gotta get that dark humor SOMEHOW

thank you for taking the time to read!

I went into this oneshot expecting a mundane hiking adventure with two bois, but then it quickly became the most depressing thing I've read all week lmao.
oh yikes are the tags too loose? I wasn't sure

I enjoyed reading this sad af boi fic, and the bittersweet ending was noice. :D
hahaha now you see why I like happy Kuki so much! it balances!

thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts!

Why isn't this on fanfiction.net where I can favorite it?!
actually it's not there yet because I still don't like how the ending drags out lol

This was the moment I said to myself, oh Rawi's totally dead. I think you dropped the hints really subtly. The wrongness is clear from the beginning, but it's hard to pinpoint what exactly until here.
I actually really love trying to figure out when people catch on -- I've had some people call me out right away, and some people didn't get it until "you're dead lmao" -- really weird balance to strike there.

This, though, I only understood on second look, once I learned that Rawi hadn't brought equipment. It's wonderfully done how the facts are weighing on the narrator's mind, not quite able to be coalesced into the horrible truth.
ahhhh thank. I am very flattered that you read it twice and with such attention to detail

For me, the passages after this verged too far into over-explaining, into re-explaining what I felt the story had already expressed more powerfully, that you can't paper over this grief with a wish, that understanding what happened means accepting guilt. No specific edits on anything to cut, just that I think it took away from the impact a bit for me, to see written out explicitly what the story had already strongly and compellingly implied.
This felt like a turn-to-the-camera moment, more general and banal then the rest of the story's portrayal of grief.
I! have wrestled! with this quite a lot haha. The initial draft was a lot looser on the explanation, and a lot of the feedback suggested that things were a bit too vague, but I think on future edits I'll stray back towards that side of the balance -- bigger focus on explaining the physical events of the story and letting the emotional ones speak for themselves.

This was a really beautiful meditation on loss and grief and guilt, and moving forwards.
!! this means a lot to me. it truly does <3

I second this! I also would love to throw in in my collection of fics about trainers who aren't rookies. Just saying.
👀

This is the version of the pokemon world I like best: nature is dangerous and you have to be prepared. Beating all the competitions doesn't make you happy and whole all by itself.
yesssss! tbh I'm kinda bummed I wrote this before I read Postcards; missed out on the chance to start talking about the best kind of soap to bring when you sea-camp

The revelation that he was dead all along made me gasp out loud. The momentary...amnesia(?) didn't feel as believable to me --felt more like a reveal to the audience than to the character -- but it didn't hamper my enjoyment of the story. I loved the foreshadowing about bringing proper equipment...when Rawi chose not to... and the detail of the pajama bottoms, another hint that he didn't need to be prepared for the hike because he's a ghost.
I struggle with this! For me the amnesia was meant to be, like, not actual amnesia, just a long collection of ignoring uncomfortable truths such as not responding to reviews in an orderly fashion. For me grief has always felt illogical -- you know it won't really help, but there's that little voice that's like, what if we just pretended nothing was wrong, and this is the result of leaning into that. But! At the end of the day I don't think it'll ever quite feel right because it's not meant to feel right, if that makes sense?

For the most part, the text is clear, easy to follow, and pleasant. Loved the lapras's desk-sized head and the descriptions of the cove. Some of the similes and metaphors broke tone for me and pulled me out of the story a little -- the lapras's neck being like a bird, the tears in the ocean line, the line about flaking like rust.
oh yes I got very purple on this prose. I kinda like the ocean one because salt, but the rust and bird ones I think I'll tone back.

I also drifted from the narrative a little in the segment between the hoopa scene and Pounamu's reappearance -- I got lost in the soup of our protagonist's thoughts, but I think anchoring us with reminders of where we are in the real, physical world would help.
Definitely a balance I struggled with here, and partially why I haven't put this on FFN yet lol -- I'm not entirely happy with how much exposition is at the end still? But one day! Soon!

Overall, a very satisfying read. Definitely, definitely happy I took the time.
!! thank you for reading though!
 

WildBoots

Don’t underestimate seeds.
Pronouns
She/Her
Partners
  1. moka-mark
  2. solrock
missed out on the chance to start talking about the best kind of soap to bring when you sea-camp
NEVER TOO LATE FOR SOAP.

I struggle with this! For me the amnesia was meant to be, like, not actual amnesia, just a long collection of ignoring uncomfortable truths such as not responding to reviews in an orderly fashion. For me grief has always felt illogical -- you know it won't really help, but there's that little voice that's like, what if we just pretended nothing was wrong, and this is the result of leaning into that. But! At the end of the day I don't think it'll ever quite feel right because it's not meant to feel right, if that makes sense?
I feel this, in theory? It's so different from my experience with grief. I'm very matter of fact about it. "Brace yourself for sad news--!" Because I'm used to the facts but don't want to shock people when I tell them lol. But I've also never lost a peer -- my experience is with a parent with a longterm illness -- and that's a really different vibe from what I've lived through. So I'm still not totally sure... but I also acknowledge my own bias here.
 

Starlight Aurate

Ad Jesum per Mariam | pfp by kintsugi
Location
Route 123
Partners
  1. mightyena
  2. psyduck
You reviewed my one-shot on processing grief, now looks like I'm reviewing yours :P

Ngl, I came because I saw lapras and thought that's what this story was about. But I was not disappointed! I usually avoid stories with any suicide but I think this was tastefully done, in part because it's discreet and we see it from the perspective of someone still alive and not the one who committed suicide.

I miss the cove. When Rawi and I were kids, we would spend days on end out here. Crystal clear waters slowly faded to sapphire. Sky stretched across as far as you could see. Rocky cliffs were our proving grounds, who could jump further and bolder—but they gave way to soft, white sands worn smooth by the tides. As the sun set, around the golden hour, we could watch the cutiefly trickle across the coast, their legs covered with the pollen harvest from the afternoon. In the spring, the mudsdale would bring their young to the cliffs to teach them how to stomp; in the winter, lanturn and chinchou migrated to the warmer waters of the cove and filled it with twinkling lights. At night, we were far enough away from the world that you could stargaze with a naked eye, trace out the constellations with your fingers and chart your own meaning for guardians that were a billion years old.
Love this paragraph here. Your description is beautiful and I like that you incorporate Pokemon into it, too.

Something as beautiful as him couldn’t be so lonely that he could pour his heart out to others and expect nothing else in return.
Not sure what you're saying here; it strikes me as clunky. A number of the sentences did, but this one was something I had to reread a couple of times.

Protagonist being told to not be depressed is big oof.

I suspected something was up only when Protagonist mentioned seeing just one set of footprints in the sand reminds me of an overused Christian story about only one set of footprints in the sand and it's because it's Jesus carrying each of us through our lives but I know that's not where this was going I thought Rawi might be some sort of ghost or phantom, and I was (kinda??) correct.

It hurts to swallow around the lump in the back of my throat. I should’ve realized that there was only one set of footprints threading through the sandy beach, that Pounamu only has space for one.
Awwww

Things won’t go back to the way they were because they can’t. Rawi won’t take me to the cove ever again because he can’t. The world won’t be a beautiful place in the exact same way it used to be because it can’t, not now that we’ve lost what we’ve lost.

Rawi is a scared little boy as he puts on his pajamas and hikes to the top of Alola’s tallest mountain, and he quietly waits for the inevitable while I’m not there to protect him. I had my chance to fix that. I didn’t. And that is life. I am an arrow with no target, anger with no outlet. I can tell as many stories as I want and I will never be able to escape that facet of reality.
I liked this bit because it gives concrete examples of what Rawi was like in life, and generally how we (from what I've seen) prefer to remember the people who have passed on before us. I thought his use of metaphor was interesting; in grief, I feel like just bare, concrete statements without much play on words is more common, so it's interesting to see a different description of it here.

It won’t go away because it can’t; it’s a part of you now. So you hold the pain tight so that you don’t forget: it hurts, and it hurt you, but it won’t hurt forever. It broke you, but those broken bits are you, yours.
Interesting perspective--I don't agree with the "it won't hurt forever," bit, because in what I've seen, people go through entire lifetimes and still mourn and are in pain from losing the ones they love. But it is definitely a process that changes you and marks you.

I got a bit lost in your descriptions when Hoopla appears--I also didn't quite understand overall its appearance. I get that protagonist was making a wish for his younger brother to still be alive, to still hold another conversation with him, to hear things he wished his brother would have said. But I had a hard time following the description and thoughts along at the same time--that might just be me, though! This writing style is quite different from my own and it may just be a personal thing.

And your perspective on grief and processing! I appreciated reading through this and seeing your/your characters viewpoints on it. A lot of it was believable and hit in the feels. I definitely find that thinking back to how everything could have been, of what would have happened, of how things would be today, if only you were still alive, is a very real and tangible way to think. And to think of how said death could have been prevented, thinking "if only we did X, if only I listened to Y..."

And I appreciated that you brought protagonist's thinking of how wishing Rawi back and imagining him was considered selfish. This perspective differs a lot depending on culture, religion and faith, but especially that you've given us a strong sense of culture in the family here I think it's an idea that's worth bringing forth. And how having Rawi back won't help--it's not real. Denying his death and trying to live forward as if it didn't happen isn't healthy and it doesn't help anyone and does not honor to the memory that he left behind.

We don't find out why Rawi chose to die, and I think it works with this--especially given that this was suicide, dwelling on and knowing the "why" makes it harder. I like the Hawaiian you've tied into this, especially with "hello," "goodbye," and "love" all having the same word. Languages are so cool and tell so much about people/cultures as we learn about them! And it tied in so nicely here.

(I know this isn't part of the story and it's part of your reviews but I just wanna mention it)
or me grief has always felt illogical -- you know it won't really help, but there's that little voice that's like, what if we just pretended nothing was wrong, and this is the result of leaning into that. But! At the end of the day I don't think it'll ever quite feel right because it's not meant to feel right, if that makes sense?
I feel this; in my experience, it's something that causes a lot of pain but makes you feel better; it rips you to shreds but also makes you feel more whole inside. I'm not sure I'd say it's not meant to feel right, as it's a valid human emotion that every single person goes through at some point in their lifetimes--if you think about it, the only people who don't need to experience loss of loved ones are those who die first lucky bastards I think I view it as a mix of you and OSJ: it's several uncomfortable truths that we don't want to look at but at the same time it's not possible to turn a blind eye to them because life is so radically different. But again, this is definitely something that's different for everyone and can also be different depending on who died and how they died.

Sorry for my word-vomit and rambling. Anyway! This was an enjoyable read. I did not originally intend to spend the last hour typing up a review for this, but I'm glad I did. Your writing style is beautiful; my only complaints with the story were what I mentioned before with getting mixed up in the descriptions and actions and it took me a while to realize what Hoopa was doing there at all. Pounamu's (love the name and its reference, btw) role felt a bit smaller to me than I originally thought it would be, as it ended up being a prop rather than a character--not a bad thing, just not what I was expecting. Overall, this was a beautiful little one-shot that explores the human emotions and I'm glad I read it. Thanks for sharing!
 

kintsugi

golden scars | pfp by sun
Location
the warmth of summer in the songs you write
Pronouns
she/her
Partners
  1. silvally-grass
  2. lapras
  3. golurk
  4. booper-kintsugi
  5. meloetta-kint-muse
  6. meloetta-kint-dancer
  7. murkrow
  8. yveltal
I! somehow kept thinking I'd replied to this.

You reviewed my one-shot on processing grief, now looks like I'm reviewing yours :P
well I truly do not have a derpy dog on this site so it looks like the cycle is broken now!

Ngl, I came because I saw lapras and thought that's what this story was about. But I was not disappointed! I usually avoid stories with any suicide but I think this was tastefully done, in part because it's discreet and we see it from the perspective of someone still alive and not the one who committed suicide.
I agree tbh. It's a tricky subject to broach.

Not sure what you're saying here; it strikes me as clunky. A number of the sentences did, but this one was something I had to reread a couple of times.
This is a good catch! I wanted something about how often the people who seem to do the most good, who seem to have the most friends, are the lonely ones--but boy did that sentence get garbled lol. I don't have a good rephrase in mind quite yet but I'll think of something! This was definitely a story where my prose was pretty overworked, haha.

I liked this bit because it gives concrete examples of what Rawi was like in life, and generally how we (from what I've seen) prefer to remember the people who have passed on before us. I thought his use of metaphor was interesting; in grief, I feel like just bare, concrete statements without much play on words is more common, so it's interesting to see a different description of it here.
This was a fun narrator to play with--I think bare, concrete statements would work as well, just with a different person telling the story. This one was all about looking away from the ugly truths and dressing them up until they're prettier to look at.

Interesting perspective--I don't agree with the "it won't hurt forever," bit, because in what I've seen, people go through entire lifetimes and still mourn and are in pain from losing the ones they love. But it is definitely a process that changes you and marks you.
I absolutely struggle with the timeframe in this one--the narrator is young, and perhaps (unrealistically) optimistic about their capacity to heal. The line I really wanted to come down on was the hurt actively defining you vs the hurt becoming a part of you (not the whole part); this idea that you can be shaped by something but not have it consume you forever. Again, some phrasing I'll want to look at!

I got a bit lost in your descriptions when Hoopla appears--I also didn't quite understand overall its appearance. I get that protagonist was making a wish for his younger brother to still be alive, to still hold another conversation with him, to hear things he wished his brother would have said. But I had a hard time following the description and thoughts along at the same time--that might just be me, though! This writing style is quite different from my own and it may just be a personal thing.
Totally fair haha. I've played with that last section a lot in editing and I'm not quite sure if I've struck the right balance of fantasy and reality.

And I appreciated that you brought protagonist's thinking of how wishing Rawi back and imagining him was considered selfish. This perspective differs a lot depending on culture, religion and faith, but especially that you've given us a strong sense of culture in the family here I think it's an idea that's worth bringing forth. And how having Rawi back won't help--it's not real. Denying his death and trying to live forward as if it didn't happen isn't healthy and it doesn't help anyone and does not honor to the memory that he left behind.
It's definitely a messy concept. I didn't mean to convey that the protagonist thinks it's selfish to wish Rawi back, or that somehow it's better that Rawi is gone now--more that, they need to accept that the Rawi they love is the same Rawi who did this; to deny one is to deny the other.

I feel this; in my experience, it's something that causes a lot of pain but makes you feel better; it rips you to shreds but also makes you feel more whole inside. I'm not sure I'd say it's not meant to feel right, as it's a valid human emotion that every single person goes through at some point in their lifetimes--if you think about it, the only people who don't need to experience loss of loved ones are those who die first lucky bastards I think I view it as a mix of you and OSJ: it's several uncomfortable truths that we don't want to look at but at the same time it's not possible to turn a blind eye to them because life is so radically different. But again, this is definitely something that's different for everyone and can also be different depending on who died and how they died.
tbh one of the best parts about sharing this piece has been seeing everyone's different interpretations of grief! Like you say, OSJ and I are on a pretty wide spectrum, but yours is a third perspective that I think is equally valid--this is a morbid comment in a morbid story, but I always find it so strange but heartwarming to see how we all carve out these little individualized ways to cope with the world.

Sorry for my word-vomit and rambling. Anyway! This was an enjoyable read. I did not originally intend to spend the last hour typing up a review for this, but I'm glad I did. Your writing style is beautiful; my only complaints with the story were what I mentioned before with getting mixed up in the descriptions and actions and it took me a while to realize what Hoopa was doing there at all. Pounamu's (love the name and its reference, btw) role felt a bit smaller to me than I originally thought it would be, as it ended up being a prop rather than a character--not a bad thing, just not what I was expecting. Overall, this was a beautiful little one-shot that explores the human emotions and I'm glad I read it. Thanks for sharing!
ur word-vomit is always appreciated and loved <3

I'm still tweaking this one around, but definitely on a much slower scale--not quite sure if I've quite unpicked the Hoopa knot yet, but it's definitely something I've been looking at. Thank you for your thoughts here!!
 

love

Memento mori
Pronouns
he/him/it
Partners
  1. leafeon
I hope you like pedantic nitpicks

{Rawi throws the blinds open, allowing sunlight to tumble in through the open window.}

To me it sounds a little better to cut "allowing" and write it as "sunlight tumbles in through the open window." "Allowing" would be an auxiliary verb here, if I have my grammar right. Also, "tumble" seemed like a weird verb to me, but I would take that opinion with a grain of salt, because I think I'm biased toward more literal descriptions.

{He’s already bustling around the room with an ease only born from familiarity}

I would consider cutting "only"

{When the dark days came, when getting out of bed was hard, this how we persisted}

I think it needs to be "this *was* how we persisted"

{he always has a way of weaving something poetic into the most mundane of statements.}

I think the "always" could be cut

{I’ve forgotten how nice the sun is, how good the Alola breeze feels on your skin.}

I would like it better if the "your" were "my". I think there are a few points like that in the story. Maybe I just don't like second person pronouns in third person stories.

{When you wake up each day and there’s a stunning sunrise to greet you, one that’s simultaneously just as beautiful as the one before and yet different in every way, you start to forget that there are other places in the world where you’d have to hike for miles to get even a glimpse of a clear sky, or where the thoughts of seeing the moonset beneath the summer stars would be nothing more than a dream washed out by city lights.}

I got the sense this could be cut down in some places. I think "simultaneously" could be cut (maybe also the "just"); "to get even a glimpse of a clear sky" maybe could just be "to glimpse the clear sky"; "or where the thoughts of seeing the moonset" could perhaps just be "seeing the moonset". Or maybe even just "the moonset beneath the summer stars..." although that phrasing might imply that the moonset literally doesn't happen, so I don't know. Writing sure is tricky.

{The tide is low in the afternoon, so the shore is exposed far deeper than it normally is, like the rind of a cored fruit. And before us stretch the sands, washed clean of yesterday’s tracks.}

Regarding the first sentence, I suppose I could see how the shoreline could resemble a peeled rind, but I don't see how the simile relates to the earlier part of that sentence, if you get me.
Also, the shore was a subject of the first sentence, and the sand is the subject of the second sentence, but they are kind of one and the same, in a way? I don't know, felt a little weird to me.

{I glance over my shoulder, seeing my footprints threading delicately across the sand}

I wonder if "threading" should be "threaded"

{There’s something else wrong there, a train of thought that’s on the wrong tracks, twisting abruptly and morphing into a single set of footprints in the sand.}

I'm lost. I think in retrospect that you're trying to say that he's imagining the second set of footprints, but this sentence still doesn't make sense to me.

{Sky stretched across as far as you could see.}

I would cut "across", because when you say something stretched across, it makes me think it's stretching across *something.*

{we could watch the cutiefly trickle across the coast}

I think just "we watched" would work, instead of "we could watch"

{their legs covered with the pollen harvest from the afternoon.}

That is a nice detail

{which is almost engulfed the crook between Pounamu’s massive jaw and his scaled neck.}

I think there was a little slip up somewhere here

{Rawi corrects himself quickly, in case the lapras would actually be offended.}

I'm wondering if this should just be "in case the lapras was offended." (or "as if the lapras would take offence").

{Choppy seas and calm waters; the lapras could handle them both.}

I'm wondering if the semicolon has to be an em-dash, since "Choppy seas and calm waters" is not an independent clause... I think...

{I just remember giddy and unadulterated joy as he breached over the waters}

I wonder if "breached over" couldn't just be "breached"

{the crevasses of the nobbled surface familiar to my smooth hands.}

I had to look up the word "nobbled", but I could not find a usage that made sense here.

{“You sound like that’s an accident.”}

"make it sound"?

{I feel my mood sour despite the day}

What about just "My mood sours despite the day"?

{“You aren’t even old enough to drink, let alone regret drinking it.”}

I didn't exactly get why he said this. Rawi isn't expressing regret, I don't think

{“You’re dead,” I say, sounding out the words on my lips and hating myself for it.}

I chuckled at this. In all seriousness, I like the offhandedness of this revelation, because "he was dead all along" is a common enough trope that making a big deal of it probably would have just made me roll my eyes.

{I close lean into Pounamu’s neck and close my eyes}

I think "close" and "lean" could switch

{I imagine the way his face contorts as the logical fallacy unfold between us.}

Can't he see his face? In a sense, anyway.

{There are a thousand dimensions where Rawi is alive and well, but I’m living in the only one where he isn’t.}

I don't know why this sentence is here and I don't know if it's just because I'm being dumb.

{Tendrils of water swirl around it, lifting it ever-higher in the vortex streaked with soaked seaweed.}

Technically I think "soaked" would be implied

{“I just wanted you to be happy,” Rawi’s saying in my ear, voice impossibly clear despite the storm. “Like me.”}

Right, I'm sure happy people commit suicide all the time.

{but even though the darkened sea I can see it before me}

I think "though" should be "through"

{the storm threatens to swallow my words whole and dash them up against the waves.}

"the storm swallows my words whole and dashes them up against the waves." maybe

{“Wait. Don’t—”}

This whole operation was his idea, no?

{Pulsing energy explodes out of the neck of the bottle, so much that I think it’ll shatter in my grasp}

I might be putting my oar in too much (I worry that's been this entire review), but "think" seems somewhat, I guess, clinical for this context; I would replace it with "fear"

{all I care about is written on a scrap of paper in the heart of the bottle has ripped itself out of my hands and flown headlong into the sea.}

Should it be "that has ripped itself..."?

{sending a spire of frothing waves that forces me back.}

sounds a little off to me

Anyway, sorry if any of those nitpicks seem too subjective, and I hope you call me out on it if that's the case. Sometimes I see issues where there aren't any, but I like to think I'm usually right.

Anyway, I don't really know any Hoopa lore, so all that stuff was kind of confusing to me. I think that had to do with why I was confused about the whole alternate dimensions line.

I felt like the ending could have been cut down; to me it felt like it was summarizing things. I think Pen's review covered this somewhat.

{This was how we’d rammed ourselves through things when we were younger—by pretending to be tauros going seventy miles per hour down the path, blazing through anything}

In retrospect, I think this hints at the unhealthy way in which the characters deal with their emotional pain. Just put the blinders on, ignore it, charge through things anyway, until you can't anymore. Maybe the lines about "an arrow aimed at the horizon" had a similar meaning, and the way the storm crept up on the mc without him noticing. But then again, the latter probably had more to do with the fact that it was a supernatural storm.

Anyway, I like the nature in the story, and the lapras, and I could visualize things well throughout it. Except Hoopa, I guess. I wonder if it shouldn't have been described more. There is an argument to be made that I should already know what it looks like, but it was a little odd to have it show up with minimal description. I mean, admittedly the mc says {I have no eyes for this miracle}, but in the next paragraph he says {the monstrous form of the freed djinn swivels its attention to me}, so certainly he must be able to see it. (Also, I wonder if "attention" should be "head", or if it's fine either way)

But, anyway, I think the nature descriptions aren't gratuitous, but lend a sense of beauty that balances out the sadness. If the world were gray and empty and sucked, then why would I care if somebody chose not to live in it anymore? But the world doesn't suck, and there's a lot to see within it, and that makes Rawi's death sadder and moving on from it that much more important. Pounamu plays into this nicely as well.

I think the hello-goodbye-iloveyou thing makes sense in a way. You could say that the mc greets Rawi again only so that he can say goodbye to him. That's how I looked at it, anyway.

Anyway, moral of the story, to me, is that bottling things up is bad. Don't be like Rawi, kids.
 

Nubushi

しぶい
Pronouns
she/her
Partners
  1. slowpoke-hgss
  2. togekiss-nubushi
So after writing my last review for the Blitz I thought I'd start reading one more story, anyways (knowing there was no way I'd finish a review by the Blitz deadline) and I picked this. Now that I’ve finally gotten through my post-Review-Blitz backlog of reviews and replies I was owing to people on various other venues, I’m back to write a proper review, and rather glad that I didn’t try to review this during the Blitz, so I can take my time with it.

I thought about what would be the best way to format this review, but I had a TON of line-by-line reactions, so I am just going to go through those in order, with some comments to wrap up at the end. I hope that those play-by-play reactions can be helpful, or if not, at least interesting.

“It’s not safe to hike alone.”
Totally did not notice this the first time around, but upon a re-read I noticed that there were some hints like this prior to even the single set of footprints in the sand, which is the more obvious one.

“Fine. Would it make you feel better if I instead told you that ninety percent of outdoor search and rescues are performed because day hikers don’t bring proper equipment?”

He’s smiling, a little, but for some reason I can’t. “Not in particular,” I mutter. Something about his statement is wrong; it doesn’t fit together, like a puzzle with five corner pieces. But—
Hmm. On a second read, I think this is because of the way that Rawi himself went up the mountain during avalanche season without proper equipment, or his pokemon—but the narrator isn’t ready to face it yet.

the shore is exposed far deeper than it normally is, like the rind of a cored fruit.
(upon rereading) This is an interesting metaphor. It’s visually apt, but also really has a lot of symbolic resonances for the story—like the narrator’s feelings of hollowness, or the emptiness or lack of substance of her hallucinated Rawi.

I glance over my shoulder, seeing my footprints threading delicately across the sand, one carefully in front of the other. There’s something else wrong there, a train of thought that’s on the wrong tracks, twisting abruptly and morphing into a single set of footprints in the sand. But what?

So, I had kind of mixed feelings about this particular line on my first read-through of the story. Upon a first reading, I really liked the verbal cleverness of the train of thought on the wrong tracks. I found the train tracks morphing into the single set of footprints confusing, and I think the reason is that you’re starting something that’s just a metaphor for the narrator’s thoughts (train tracks), not an actual physical object in the environment around her, and then this thing that’s not only not part of her physical environment but is just a metaphor for her thoughts morphs into something that is a part of her physical environment (the single set of footprints). Nevertheless, this hint was absolutely plenty clear enough that I was not at all surprised about it turning out that Rawi is dead (but thinking over the story as a whole, I feel that’s totally fine—I’m not sure whether you meant that to be surprising for readers or not, but there are plenty of other twists in the story later, so I don’t feel cheated as a reader by this revelation not being surprising; more on that later).

On the balance, thinking about this line again after having an understanding of the story as a whole, it makes sense to me now and I like it—it expresses the narrator’s thoughts shifting to bring her attention to the single line of footprints, something she doesn’t yet want to acknowledge.

The lapras croons and lowers a head the size of a desk with unprecedented care. Brown eyes four times larger than mine close as he nuzzles gently against the top of Rawi’s head, which is almost engulfed the crook between Pounamu’s massive jaw and his scaled neck.

Lovely description of the lapras (the paragraph shortly above this, where Pounamu is first seen rising out of the sea, is also really gorgeous). Also you’re missing a word after “engulfed.” almost engulfed in? by?

There are a lot of really lovely lines in this section; these are some of the ones that particularly stood out to me:

He taught me a lesson that nothing else could: there were giants in the world, creatures bigger and deeper than my limited understanding, but they could be gentle, and they could be good.

I can feel that excitement with me even now, diluted like tears in the sea

Cerulean flippers skim through the water, sending spirals and eddies all around us, and salty wind fills my nose.

And suddenly I feel ten feet taller and three feet shorter at the same time; we’re both kids again.

^This one does a great job of capturing the narrator’s feelings.

The part where Rawi says “I don’t count,” and the narrator says that he should was another detail hinting at the fact that he is dead, which I totally missed the first time, but got the second time around.


He frowns. “This isn’t what they mean when they say ‘spirits help us’—”

This is one of those lines that’s hard to know how to react to emotionally, because it’s clever and sad at the same time.

he stopped living for himself and started living for everyone else a long time ago. Maybe that was what undid us in the end.
The fact that it’s not “him” but “us” is really interesting. It’s not hard to understand that Rawi might have lived for others to such an extent that he ignored his own needs, or perhaps felt the need to always act happy and cheerful for the sake of others, and that created an emotional strain that was too much to bear. We don’t get as much insight into the way the narrator goes through her life, though (other than her current state of depression—drinking a lot, staying inside a lot and not talking to people much). Nothing in the story particularly made me suspect that she is giving to others so much that she has to hide anything that’s wrong and pretend it isn’t there. So, for a good part of this story, I seriously suspected that both characters were going to drown together (or, rather, Rawi was going to drag the narrator down into death with him); more on that later, but this was one very foreboding-sounding line that made me suspect that something really terrible is going to happen.

“I am.” He doesn’t know. I’m the older one. I did this long before he did. I remember what it feels like to be lonely, to want to quit, to try to quit. I never told him. We were stony about those kinds of things, even when we were playing pirates on the back of a lapras who returned for no reason than because he could.

Hmm, so everyone in this family bottles up and hides their negative emotions. This does give a little more insight into the “what undid us” line.

Rawi stops when I say that. I see the slouch return back into his shoulders, the same one I carry, so forgettable that it’s practically written into our family’s genes. He sighs. “How long was it this time?”
I found the transition to this from the previous lines a bit confusing. First, Rawi is trying to deny that the narrator is depressed. Then he’s asking her how many days she’s wasted. Obviously he was just pretending, all along, that he doesn’t think she’s depressed just to attempt to cheer her up and show her how much she *is* able to do—after all, he was commenting on how much alcohol the narrator has been drinking just prior to trying to tell her she isn’t depressed. But it still feels really weird for her to follow up a comment like “you’re not depressed” with this bit of dialogue—something about the flow from one line to the next seems a bit off to me.

“You’re dead,” I say, sounding out the words on my lips and hating myself for it.
As I mentioned above (I think), I had a suspicion since the single line of footprints whether Rawi was a ghost, so this wasn’t really surprising . . . but I felt like for the story overall, it’s totally fine that this isn’t a surprise.

“That was all you, actually.
Given, I could see that coming, too.

“You were depressed,” …“I mean, that’s not a surprise to either of us.” Rawi smiles weakly.
During my first reading, this made me recall that line about Rawi living for other people being their undoing, and that earlier line (which I had been wondering about) made sense.

What does that mean for us, then? For you?”
I don’t really get what the realization is here that suddenly makes Rawi say “Well, ****.” There was that earlier bit of dialogue where Rawi was trying to deny the narrator is depressed, and then sighs and starts asking her instead about how many days she spent in bed, not experiencing life. So the fact that Rawi is asking “What does that mean for you?” makes it sound like the question is directed towards the narrator’s depression, but this is something that he already basically acknowledged earlier, so I don’t understand why he would have this “Ah, crap” reaction about having to acknowledge that the narrator is depressed. He also acknowledged earlier that he was depressed (and then the question is “you” anyways), so I don’t think it would make sense for this to be a sudden realization that he is depressed, either.

They say that Hoopa can travel through all kinds of dimensions in the blink of an eye, and it’s going to appear—”
Having only played the games from generations 1-5, I wasn’t familiar with Hoopa and looked it up, and just wanted to comment, this is a really fascinating pokemon! Love the concept, so it’s really cool that you wrote a story focusing on this pokemon.

“Please. You know me. I’m full of life. Like a little dirt would stop me.”

But it does. It does. It does, and we both know it, but neither of us want it to—
This is another little thing that I didn’t pick up on the first time through—a hint about the second plot twist, about this not really being Rawi’s ghost that the narrator is seeing.

I understand why our people smudged all three words, and specifically those three words, together like the oranges and blues of a sunset.
Hmm, interesting, kind of foreboding that you chose “sunset” there for your metaphor. This whole paragraph was also really beautiful, and I love the way that you have this word meaning three things make perfect sense to the narrator as a child.

There are a thousand dimensions where Rawi is alive and well, but I’m living in the only one where he isn’t.
I feel like this should have had more emotional impact on me than actually did. Placement, maybe? Might have more of an impact if it were placed nearer an emotional climax of the story. (The “different dimensions where things happened slightly different than this one” concept really fascinates me, though, fiction or real life multiverse speculation.)

“That’s an interesting question. Where would I want to be except here, with you?” There’s something wrong here, something I can’t put my finger on.
This is another line that’s pretty scarily foreboding.

as he’s dragging me on a sidequest,
Feels a little bit game-y, 4th wall breaking.

When asked where in the world he wanted to be, Rawi would say anywhere except—

Yes, I have a bad feeling about this.

snuck into a castle and vanished away everything inside.
Also scary

Because what is a fantasy except briefly being allowed to go to another dimension, to tell a tale of what you saw there?”

He wants to go with the narrator to another dimension?

One in which Rawi gets to chatter in my ear night after night, telling me a new story until the end of time
This is a really interesting comparison, Rawi to Scheherazade. I think it does sort of get at the sense of beguiling, that Rawi’s stories, and the narrator’s allowing herself to listen to them, are something that pulls her away from reality.

“Stupid you.” I repeat his words quietly, but I can’t make myself believe the lie we’re telling me.
First hint of the implied suicide? The juxtaposition of the narrator’s having to face Rawi’s suicide—another piece of reality that she does not want to face—with the coming storm works well.

The crystalline seas have turned dark. Pounamu brays in alarm.
Nitpick, this is the second time in a few sentences that you say “Pounamu brays in alarm,” word for word—even just adding the word “again” to the second time would help avoid the impression that you forgot and wrote almost the same sentence twice.

“This must be it!” Rawi shouts above the growing storm, his voice as cheerful as ever. “This must be Hoopa!”
Well, death would be a way of traveling to another dimension, in a manner of speaking, right?

“I just wanted you to be happy,” Rawi’s saying in my ear, voice impossibly clear despite the storm. “Like me.”
Creepy, creepy, creepy.

knurls of crystal curled up like a clenched fist protect its interior; a pockmarked and mottled cork is shoved deep into the vessel’s throat. And inside, the script too blurred through thick glass, a scrap of paper with shards of black text.
Reference to the “message in a bottle” line from earlier? (Or, rather, that’s a reference to this?) I was a little confused, the first time, that it’s this gigantic bottle that appears, and not Hoopa itself (at first). But given the “genie in a bottle” concept, it makes sense—and also has a lot of metaphorical richness, as when the narrator opens up the bottle, later on, she’s opening up the bottle that contains all the bottled-up emotions that were being hidden.

If I just manage to crawl my way forward and reach it, fulfill Rawi’s quest, we’ll be able to make everything right again. Things will go back to the way they were. I’ll get my closure and all of this will make sense.
Hmm, so the narrator’s wish is she wants to be able to understand Rawi’s suicide, feeling like that will give her closure and she’ll be able to move on—but in real life it isn’t really that simple.

puts on his pajamas and hikes to the top of Alola’s tallest mountain

^Now the fact that he was wearing pajamas on the hike to the cove makes sense.

I can tell as many stories as I want and I will never be able to escape that facet of reality.
This is a shift from Rawi being the one who tells stories, Scheherazade-like, to the narrator being the one telling the stories. Maybe a hint about the upcoming plot twist?

“I had a note that I wanted to give you, one last story, but I never knew how to end it happily, so I threw it into the sea instead.”

This line had a lot of emotional impact.

all I care about is written on a scrap of paper in the heart of the bottle has ripped itself out of my hands and flown headlong into the sea.

So, Rawi turning out to be Hoopa was the twist I didn’t see coming! I also found this line really heart-rending, the narrator goes through all that and doesn’t even get to read Rawi’s note. (Though, I guess in the end, it wasn’t even the case that Rawi wrote a note, in reality—this is another thing that the narrator is making up, or imagining, in her desire to find closure.)

“I just wanted you to be happy!” Rawi repeats in the ghost’s voice, but now his voice echoes through the storm, so a thousand Rawi’s are speaking at once. “Like me!”
This is incredibly creepy, and also a really great portrayal of Hoopa’s unbound form—the huge arms smashing into the sea, the thousand voices speaking, paint a really vivid picture.

There are a thousand dimensions where Rawi is alive and well, and I’m drowning in the only one where he isn’t.
This is a really great line. I feel like the “thousand dimensions where Rawi is alive” had more impact at this point in the story than it did earlier.

Maybe this is why our people fear and revere Hoopa so much. There’s a strange sort of magic in this power, the power of a wish, the power of belief. If I believe that story that Hoopa tells me, that Rawi is alive, that none of this ever happened, then for me it’s no different than if I whispered my wish into this magic bottle and a genie made it into my reality.

And the price for that wish would be simple—I would just have to close my eyes and ears to reality for the rest of my life, to allow the weight of that lie to drag me down with him.
So, I mentioned how for a while, during my first read-through, I thought the narrator might really drown together with Rawi. But it turns out that this is metaphorical—the real danger for the narrator is being “dragged down” by choosing to close her eyes to reality and refuse to accept it.

“You aren’t Rawi. You’re just all the things I wish I could’ve told him. All the things I wish he would’ve told me.”
This, now, really hits home.

It’s also interesting that the storm and everything just goes away when the narrator says this. It’s like, once she decides for sure that this is not what she wants, once she tells Hoopa that she doesn’t want to accept the lie and pretend Rawi is still there, Hoopa honors that request. But she has to make the decision first.

My flashlight casts strange shadows against the sand, makes gaping caverns and yawning pits out of dunes that are six inches tall. There’s a familiar game of shadow puppets here, and just remembering it fills me with warmth.
This is a really vivid image, and I feel like as a metaphor there’s a lot to unpack, though nothing really leaps out to me that makes me feel like I can pin it down and say “it means this!” But as an image, I feel like the shadows, the sense of hollowness of the “caverns” and “pits,” and also the monochrome way that things look at night, is a really fantastic image for capturing a sense of grief: feelings of emptiness, the sort of monochrome, hollow sensations that the narrator is experiencing.

It looks the same all over but it isn’t; it’s my childhood home and now my greatest sorrow. No other place in the world will hurt to look at in the same way that this one does. I will be the youngest for the rest of my life.
I really appreciate the way that this story gets at these kinds of hard truths, like there are no easy answers (there’s no message in a bottle that can magically give the narrator her closure), and how continuing to live with that grief is the harder thing to do.

time is passing and it is infinite, but ultimately for us it is short.
This is really interesting, three different ways of looking at time, but all in a few words.

On the zero day, it was easy enough to tell the world one thing and mean another, to commit the same travesty that Rawi had to all of us, to say I was okay and all along know I never meant it. I could wear my funeral lei and say hello-goodbye-iloveyou. I could keep my back ramrod straight and my feelings bottled up inside

The feelings bottled inside has a lot of resonances—it works really well with Hoopa being the genie in the bottle, and the narrator having opened the bottle being the thing that forces everything to come out all at once, and for her to have to face all those things that she didn’t want to. But also, of course, there’s the way that Rawi was keeping things bottled inside, as well as the narrator.

gloss over his dark undertow and describe him as warm waves in the cove instead. And I did.
Despite that I’ve never given a funeral speech, this is really easy to relate to—this image of Rawi as having the dark undertow underneath the warm waves is a great metaphor for him and fits really well with the personality you’ve established in this story—the person who was always warm, and sunny, and adventurous, and caring, but couldn’t show other people his own needs or pain or struggles.

We kept secrets from each other. I never told him how lonely I was, how those five days I spent curled up in bed weren’t the only five days in my life that I felt the same way he did, how I’d been pushed to the brink and stared into the abyss in the exact same way he did. I never told him because I didn’t want him to think I was less.

I could’ve told him, but instead, I didn’t. And by the time I realized it all, I was far too late
I wonder if this has anything to do with the narrator’s earlier use of the collective voice, “what undid us.” The narrator, the older one, was the first to hide her feelings and pretend that everything was all right even when she was lonely or struggling. This seems to be a family thing, so the fact that the narrator (and others?) act like this influences Rawi also to do the same thing. But if they had all been more open and able to admit these things, maybe it would have helped them—and Rawi—deal with them.

It was easy to survey the storm-torn sands and tell myself I’d be exactly who I was going to be, that I’d been okay and okay was a state I’d always known. But instead of patching up, I bottled up. I didn’t rebuild anything. I just swept all the broken bits away and hoped I would forget to replace them. And when I kept sifting through the wreckage and found more and more broken bits, and I put them all away, far away, where I’d never accidentally look at them and cut myself on reality.

But when I looked at the pile again and the broken bits still hurt to touch, I corked them in a bottle, and when that wasn’t enough, I built the bottle bigger and bigger until it could imprison the whole world that I needed it to; and when that wasn’t enough I threw it into the ocean, made a wish on a legend and hoped that it would all work out.
This is a lot of explanation. I’m not totally sure it isn’t too much explanation, but on the other hand, it is really interesting, and also really psychological—reminds me of the thing that people do where they make mental containers for memories or emotions that are so painful they can’t handle them yet. I also think you mentioned “shards” or something being inside the bottle when the narrator encountered Hoopa out on the ocean, so I like the way that this part about the narrator’s broken pieces that she bottled up was hinted at then.

It wasn’t until the sea washed all those bits back to me, and the bottle was an unrecognizable mess of cracks and seaweed and decay, that I realized our problem. It wasn’t because I hadn’t bottled up enough. It was because I’d bottled up too much, and the person left on the beach wasn’t me because my heart was scrawled in that bottle.
This makes a lot of sense, and really fits with the hollowness of the narrator throughout the story—for example, the way that at first, she is hunched up in the middle of the lapras’s shell instead of stretched out enjoying the wind and the water like Rawi is. You can sense that she is a shell of herself—and that the narrator, too, can look at herself (e.g. when she is thinking about the contrast between her posture and the way she looks riding Pounamu compared to Rawi) and see the same thing.

I know now why he felt so hollow when he was dragging me on hikes and to Pounamu and into the sea: it wasn’t Rawi, not really. I remembered what I wanted to see of him—a young kid with a heart of gold and eyes full of fire, but there was more to them than that. He was deep like a cove and stormed like rough waters; he had ups and downs and everything in between; when people asked me if we were close I couldn’t help but think not close enough because we really weren’t, not if I couldn’t see the path he was following me down from the start.
This is really beautiful; I love in particular the description of Rawi as “deep like a cove and stormed like rough waters.” The way that the narrator is acknowledging how much more to him there was than she even knew is really poignant.

“It hurts. But that’s okay.”

It won’t go away because it can’t; it’s a part of you now. So you hold the pain tight so that you don’t forget: it hurts, and it hurt you, but it won’t hurt forever. It broke you, but those broken bits are you, yours.
This is really beautiful, and sad—but also so important that the narrator is accepting that pain and brokenness instead of trying to bottle it up.


Letting the broken bits tumble back out of the bottle is the hardest part, but it’s how I learned to fuel myself. When the sky falls and the storm grows and I want to go back to a greyscale life, I open up my chest to that burning hole where my heart beats and I remember. There is a relic there, ancient and rotting, a twisted mass held together by tendrils of glass. It smells of salt and loves the sea, and it will always be mine to bear. Some days, it is my anchor against the storm; some days, it drags me down with it.
Also really incredible and beautiful; really gets at the painfulness of allowing oneself to feel.

“Hello. Goodbye. I love you.”
All of these five sets of last five words were really powerful, but especially this one. I loved the way this was woven through the story and took on new meaning each time.

Pounamu emerges from the sea.
This is beautiful, too. The narrator isn’t alone. Pounamu was waiting, after all.

So, I don’t have a whole lot to say by way of overall comments that I haven’t already said.

By the end, it didn’t matter to me that Rawi being a ghost was a plot twist that was easy to see through, because there was more than one twist. The ghost wasn’t really a ghost, it was created by the legendary because of the narrator’s wishes. This is actually a style of story that I really enjoy—where you think the plot twist is going to be one thing, but then it turns out that there’s another one, the real plot twist, behind that. So I really enjoyed that storytelling aspect, and also found this story to be incredibly emotionally meaningful in the way it addressed dealing with grief, and having to face one’s emotions instead of hide from them.

So, going back to the fact that I thought for quite a bit of this story that it was going to be about Rawi dragging his sibling down into death with him. I guess, in the end, it sort of is about how Rawi almost dragged the narrator down with him—thought Rawi wasn’t the first one to bottle up his emotions, the narrator was, the story really is very much about the dangers of doing that. She almost succumbs to unreality—but she forces herself to face the truth. And I will say again, I really appreciate the way that this story addresses things like how facing reality and choosing to continue to live with grief is the harder choice, as well as things like the way that things will never be the same, and there are no easy answers. I find that in society recently, or at least in a lot of things that I read, there don’t seem to be very many stories that address these kinds of hard truths; they are understandably not popular, and it seems like no one wants to write or read about such things. So, thank you for writing a story that does that.

And, thank you for writing such an emotionally powerful story. As I heard someone else say once, a story that makes me feel something is always worth reading. This story made me cry, a lot, both times, but I kind of needed that, so thank you.

P.S.

I can’t explain what the parallel with your story is because it would be a spoiler, but unless you hate manga, you should probably read The Music of Marie. It’s just 2 volumes, so not long at all, but a really incredible story, and I think you would like it.

While writing this review, I was listening to the Terranigma soundtrack, and “Revival of Humans” was playing around the time I was re-reading the part where the narrator first faces the fact that Rawi committed suicide and found this track to have a really fitting mysterious/foreboding atmosphere. I nominate it to be a part of this story’s soundtrack. :p
 

aer

Bug Catcher
Pronouns
he/they
I had a really hard time reading this. I'm still flipping between whether I like it or I hate it, which at least is a pretty unusual feeling to have, and I'm not sure how much of it is related to the story itself and how much is me just fundamentally predisposed to have strong feelings about these kinds of characters. I do think the ending is a bit overexplained, maybe especially because right before I read this I read risk you, with the preoccupation with the self, and how everything before that is a more zoomed-in, lived picture of grief so the narrator summarizing what happens and what they think and what is to be done next is kind of lame.
I understand why our people smudged all three words, and specifically those three words, together like the oranges and blues of a sunset
Maybe this is why our people fear and revere Hoopa so much.
Both of these "our people"s feel kind of clumsy. Makes me think the narrator's talking to someone else instead of themselves.
Brown eyes four times larger than mine
I like this description of lapras. Other than a few notes, a lot of the scenery in this was beautiful, but didn't stick. I wonder if that was intentional? It's pretty but slippery.
 

Shiny Phantump

Through Dream, I Travel
Location
Hallownest
Pronouns
She/Her
Partners
  1. sylveon
  2. absol-mega
  3. silvally-psychic
  4. ninetales-phantump
  5. cosmog
  6. gallade-phantump
  7. ceruledge-phantump
Well, this is kinda hard to review... because it's making me feel too many things to find words for it all. But I love it. It left me feeling a bittersweet sort of melancholy.

Now, having loved it though I may have, I must admit I didn't understand what was going on on a literal level. The story felt like something between a fever dream and a spiritual journey. I don't think that's entirely accidental, especially the spiritual journey half of that vibe, and I did like that. However, I've read it a couple times and am still not 100% on what's actually going on. Like, do we have a hallucination, a ghost, or whatever else? I'm not sure.

I'd like to have more to say, especially more positive to say because this hit me in an emotional spot that really resonated with me, but hitting that spot also left me... kinda without words. Regardless, I felt I had to find some words to say.
 

unrepentantAuthor

A cat that writes stories.
Location
UK
Pronouns
they/she
Partners
  1. purrloin-salem
  2. sneasel-dusk
  3. luz-companion
  4. brisa-companion
  5. meowth-laura
  6. delphox-jesse
  7. mewtwo
  8. zeraora
Crossposted from the original Bulba comp.

Let's see. Generally very good prose, a poignant narrative, good inclusion of bits of Alolan-Hawaiian culture (in that they were good for the story at least), and felt real and melancholy and beautiful. I loved it, and yet I was frustrated by it. The surreality, unreliable narration and your aversion to straightforward prose are a bold entry in that maturing fanfic tradition of writing aimed directly at the reader's heart in what is almost a flow of consciousness, but they make it tricky to be sure of what's going on. I think the theme was well-integrated, but that the writing is a mixed bag. Still very very good prose, though, don't get me wrong.

I'm afraid that after some thought, I'm not sure exactly what specific changes you could make to soften or tease the reveal(s), although if I took a proper beta-reader crack at it I might come up with something. One idea which might have helped is to emphasise that corporeal rules apply to the protag, but not so much Rawi - protag's actions are choreographed, specific, real, whereas Rawi is wherever he is imagined from moment to moment, without space and effort taken much into account. Again, that's something only perceptive viewers would pick up on anyway. I don't think it would help to drop any especially heavy hints, though. It's a puzzle.

It's odd that for being so opaque in the first half, the second half is somewhat a rough and passionate expository explanation of the first half. It could be balanced out, I'm sure.

Regardless, this fic is grief in a bottle and I'll remember it for a long time.
 

TheCouchEffect

Junior Trainer
Pronouns
He/His
I went into this not knowing what to expect other than grief and pain in general. What I got was a wonderful story about grief, coming to terms with loss, and finding a way to move on. I loved it! The relationship between the MC and Rawi was sweet, if incredibly sad since it becomes more and more obvious as the story goes on that this Rawi is just a figment of their imagination and is a more idealized version of the real person. I like how you gace little nods to the culture of Alola and blended it into the story, as well as how you lightly touched on what life would be like for someone after they win their regional competition.

I also like what you did with Hoopa and the Lapras. With Hoopa, it's just nice to see it get some more love and see how its place as a wish granter with access to infinite worlds - and therefor, infinite possibilities - was used to help the MC come to terms with the fact that Rawi is gone. Using Lapras returning at the end to signify that they are ready to move on and return to their new life without Rawi was also a nice touch.

Overall, great job!
 

bluesidra

Mood
Pronouns
she/her
Partners
  1. hoppip-bluesidra-reup
  2. hoppip-bluesidra-pink
  3. hoppip-bluesidra3
Oh boy, here I go ignoring CWs again. What's the worst that can happen?

Half an hour later, I have cried through my first pack of tissues and my right sleeve is all wet. As someone who thinks of suicide on an almost daily basis, this hurt on so many different level and I think I can't even voice it.

I'm kinda proud that I called Rawi being dead from the moment they walked on the beach together and only left one set of footprints. His behaviour was too inconsistent and way more like self-soothing than a real person. But it got really scary when what you know is the inner monologue of that person is compelling them to go into the water.

There’s bread and shit in the fridge.
I dearly hope there is not shit in the fridge >.<
he always has a way of weaving something poetic into the most mundane of statements.
Just like some authors here on TR
We’re the island’s children, after all, and sometimes children can lose sight of just how much family is supposed to—
*suppresses first tear* Ohana means family and family means nobody gets left behind!
the mudsdale would bring their young to the cliffs to teach them how to stomp
What's your hobby? - I stomp
Rawi throws his arms around the beast’s grey-speckled neck, ignoring the way that the water makes the edges of his pajamas cling fiercely to his legs.
Wait, that's not appropriate hiking-- ooooooooooh
The image of commiting suicide in your pajamas. I never thought about what I'd wear this day, but I'm kinda sure I wouldn't bring my pajamas. Maybe one of my better jeans. And yes, if you want to freeze to death, going with a pajama might be the best option, but there are other things too, like shirts. To think that his decision was so impromptu and that he didn't even change out of his sleepwear before he started climbing is saddening.
“You’re dead,” I say, sounding out the words on my lips and hating myself for it.
Called it.
“That was all you, actually. I’ve always told you that you’re stronger than you give yourself credit for.” He almost sounds regretful this time, but I don’t think he’s as hung up on the discontinuity as I am. He’s focused on other things, as always, eyes set on new horizons, for messages written in the skies by myths we’ll never see. “But I figured I’d come along. I thought it would help, honestly.”

“It doesn’t.” Honestly.

We drift on the water for a while. I lean back and dip one hand in the water, letting it trail off Pounamu’s side, and listen to the sound of the wave’s lapping against the lapras. It hurts to swallow around the lump in the back of my throat. I should’ve realized that there was only one set of footprints threading through the sandy beach, that Pounamu only has space for one.

I remember completing the island challenge and confiding in Rawi that the thing that scared me the most was the lack of goals. There were no more trial captains to pit myself at, no more totem pokémon to study and overcome, that there was no more sense of a timeline, of the world’s expectations weighing on me, of being someone else’s pride. There was a blank road ahead, full of empty days with no target, and the only person who could fill it was you.

It’s here, though, hugging the briny shell on Pounamu’s back, that I realize how wrong I’d been. Deadlines were everywhere now. You had to go climb out to that island sometime soon because one day your body would start to fail you and you wouldn’t be able to make the hike. You had to write down that great idea because one day your mind and creativity would get snuffed out. You had to revel in every day with Rawi, the real Rawi, because one day—

“You were depressed,” I say aloud, mind switching gears so fast I can feel my thoughts getting roadburn.
Cue me crying a waterfall.
“Rawi.” I don’t know how to tell him. I don’t know how to tell me. “You died.”
This is the point where you call an exorcist.
No, for real, at this point go see a priest, if nothing else. They are trained in dealing with grief and should know how to handle situations like these.
There are two realities stretching out before us. One in which Rawi gets to chatter in my ear night after night, telling me a new story until the end of time; and one in which his voice goes unheard because—
because ignoring each other is what this family does best
“It’s embarrassing, you know? Star of our generation makes a careless mistake that every ten year-old gets warned against and dies of exposure. Stupid me. I should’ve known better.”
Kinda soothing to know that people think of it that way, ngl.
“I just wanted you to be happy,” Rawi’s saying in my ear, voice impossibly clear despite the storm. “Like me.”
My gremlin brain: See, he's happy now that he's dead. You should--
My "I'm trying to review here"-brain: No! That's his depression telling him to kill himself!
Things won’t go back to the way they were because they can’t. Rawi won’t take me to the cove ever again because he can’t. The world won’t be a beautiful place in the exact same way it used to be because it can’t, not now that we’ve lost what we’ve lost.
Those kinds of stories are the main reason I didn't do it yet even though I don't believe it. Sounds pretty sad to hear him say that, tho.
on a scrap of paper in the heart of the bottle has ripped itself out of my hands and flown headlong into the sea.
on a scrap of paper in the heart of the bottle that has ripped itself (I think there's a "that" missing)
I didn’t bring any equipment to spend the night out here. I didn’t prepare for this. I didn’t prepare for any of this.
Oh nononO! Don't tell me he knows and calculated for the rising tides and is planning the same!
because his short and vibrant and painful life was almost certainly fueled wholly by the burden that no one else should hurt the same way he did.
Feels.
The waves shift. The water churns. There is a triumphant cry, and Pounamu emerges from the sea.
Aaaand here goes the icing on the cake made out of tears. I'm happy to inform you that all my heartstrings have been pulled now.

And, oh god, the title! Had to look it up and at first a siberian tribe came back, but damn. What a cute easteregg.
 
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