Pokémon A Thousand First Steps (Character Drabble collection)

[tomatorade]

Author's Note:

Alright, so this feels a little presumptuous, but I have so many bits and pieces in my google docs that will kill me if they don't get put out into the world. As such, I've decided on a whim that those I thought were good enough to write but never became full stories and weren't quite oneshots on their own go here.

Consider this like an open-source collection of characters and character moments. Feel free to use anything you like from any of the drabbles, if I was that precious they'd remain hidden on my computer forever.

And I'll put individual CWs for each drabble as they apply.

​

Spoiler: CW

Reference to death, divorce

Attic
​

They used to have an imaginary world in their grandma’s attic. His sister’s idea, mostly—constructed at first with sheets tacked to the walls and jammed under discarded furniture. Eventually, their grandpa constructed them something real, a miniature wood house that sat in the sloped corner of the attic and always smelled like pine and dust no matter how often they tried to clean it. It was a quaint little thing, and they appreciated it with tents of scrap wood and fabric until it was a patchwork mess of colours.

“It’s the guild,” his sister said, fiddling with a cardboard door she’d taped to one of the sides, “that’s where they all live.”

Mateo had to think about that for a while, tracking his character along the wood grain on the ground. It was a little jet plane with chips of white and blue paint flecking from it, with two broken wheels and a bent nose. She’d given it to him a while ago and said it was him; he wasn’t sure why she chose it, specifically.

“What are they?”

“Pocket monsters.” She snorted, then gave her new door a few test flicks. It opened fine. They crowded around to peek inside.

“So, it’s like school.”

“No, it’s a guild,” she said, “They live there and help each other out. They fix problems.”

“And there are no people?”

“People have stupid problems.” She sniffed and wiped her nose on the puffy jacket she wore. Her fingers tangled in a jungle of curly hair. “Ellie’s mom and dad don’t love each other anymore. But if they saw her crying in class, they’d love each other again and she wouldn’t cry. That’s a stupid problem. Pokemon save the world, which is more important.”

“Oh.” He looked down at her, trying to imagine her face through the back of her head. Maybe her grin broke through, for figuring out how to help Ellie so easily; she alway had answers for stuff like this. Or anything, really. She never had to think about a question as long as he did. “That makes sense.”

And sure enough, she turned with a toothy grin, her own little red jet plane clutched between two fingers.

“Ready to play? You gotta knock on the door.”

The guild was her own little world, really. One that Mateo existed on the fringe of but never fully entered. It started with the untouchable playset in the corner, but spread outward as their family dumped all their broken shelves and un-refoldable lawn chairs and empty cardboard boxes in the attic to be forgotten. His sister didn’t forget, though, and they all eventually crowded around the guild, turning a simple toy house into a sprawling campus. Years passed. Mateo, who barely got it in the first place, lost the thread completely. It didn’t help that she brought a new name for everything.

“What did you call it? Chomp-chomp?” He asked one day, watching her fuss with a little plastic shark.

She rolled her eyes like it was obvious.

“It’s garchomp gar-chomp. Not chomp-chomp. He looks scary, but he’s nice.” She held it out in her palm for him to admire.

Mateo plucked the little plastic shark from her hand and turned it around in his grip. He didn’t think it looked scary or nice or gar or chomp. He thought it looked like a bath toy they bought from the dollar store, but he said nothing, just nodded, and placed it back in her palm.

“He’s mine, though. You already have your own.”

Mateo looked back at his little jet plane. Most of the paint had chipped off, exposing gleaming chrome that smelled like mom’s car when he scratched it. He liked it more that way, no matter how much his sister complained.

“Why do I only get one?” Mateo pouted halfheartedly, not quite sure how much he should care. He flicked the plane and watched it roll across the wood floor until it bumped a cereal box they’d set up as a post office.

“You have to make your own. I don’t wanna do everything for you.”

He kept up his pout for a while, but she barely noticed, and a couple minutes of boredom sent him over to the toy box to find another creature. He stuck his hand through a sea of plastic bits, swirled it around like he could’ve just conjured what she did from nothing. But it never came to him, no matter how much he sifted through. They were all characters he already knew from the TV or the toy store or his sister’s imagination and the whole exercise ended with him back at the guild, forcing a serious scowl as he let his little jet plane explore the newly-opened post office.

“You never gave my guy a name,” he huffed.

She turned to him, eyebrows raised and flecks of white glue trapping strands of hair that dared to venture over her cheeks.

“Well, it’s your guy. I was waiting for you,” she said, and shook her head like his teacher did when he said something wrong.

That wasn’t true. She had a new name for everything. She just didn’t want him to know. But no meant no. He never bothered to ask again.

Every day there’d be a new adventure. Mateo’s sister would have all these little teams of characters, with their own team names and cheers and stories, and they go save the world. On monday, they’d fight off a meteor, on wednesday it was an evil god, on saturday, they’d face off against an alien from outer space.

It ended eventually. Grandma didn’t make it home one night, and they couldn’t go to her house anymore. A man their mom talked to told her to get them sketchbooks instead. It worked wonders for Mateo’s sister, who could curl up on the couch with it, or take it to her room, or on her lap under the dinner table, but Mateo couldn’t get into that world anymore, not in a sketchbook, hidden between her covers.

He did get his own book, but never had anything to draw. His parents would loom over his shoulder while he watched TV from the living room’s fuzzy blue carpet, and he’d feel pressured to scratch out spirals and wonky shapes until they lost interest and he could watch cartoons over a palm of empty pages.

But her world returned later, one morning before school as he fished for corn flakes in a bowl of milk.

“You want to play?” she asked, eye-level with his swinging feet slapping the legs of his stool.

“Play what?” he mumbled back through a mouthful of mush.

“At the guild.”

“Oh.” He paused, dropped his spoon in the bowl and let the handle disappear beneath the pond of milk.

He hadn’t thought about the guild for a very long time. Long enough he couldn’t remember what he knew or half-knew. He couldn’t even be sure he wanted to dive back in, but as his sister smiled up at him, he felt a flash of something that had lurked in his shadow for a while.

“Okay.” He nodded and slid off his stool until he stood eye level with her chin. “You left it at Omi's house, though. It’s gone.”

“No, no.” She waggled a finger inches from his nose. “It’s in my room now, all you have to do is follow.”

She didn’t wait for him to respond, twirling so her hair swished around and tickled the end of his nose, bounding out of the linoleum kitchen and onto carpet, her muffled footsteps pounding up the staircase and disappearing. Mateo chewed on his lip and glanced back at his cereal only once before tentatively following, tracking the scuffs and bits of upset fluff across the floor.

As he turned up the staircase, glaring into the halo-light of the dangling lamp that framed his sister by her door, hand hovering over the handle.

“Listen, okay? I have to tell you something first,” she said

Mateo paused at the top step, mirroring her by clutching their splintery railing. Her face was flat. Like when their parents wanted to have a talk, like when she would brush her hair behind her ears and look him straight in the eye.

“We’re going away.”.

He wasn’t five anymore, he thought he knew what she meant. He thought he'd known for a while, but she was probably wrong and his hand itched on the railing.

“Where are we going?” He asked, voice catching at the end. He looked down at his toes and curled them into the carpet, felt them dig into the threads.

“Not you. Me and dad. You have to stay here and make sure mom doesn’t get lonely.”

There was nothing left to say.

“Why can’t you just stay?” He asked.

“You can still come over. And when you’re old enough you can drive yourself and you can come whenever you want.”

It’s not enough, but Mateo won’t cry. He squints around the burn in his eyes, frowns though the burn of his cheeks, unfurls his toes until they hurt, and finally looks up.

A smile split her face, and the light washed over her, and then she glowed. It must not have been a big deal for her.

He would never be able to match that.

“Do you still want to play?”

A sinking in his stomach told him he wouldn’t get to again. He nodded.

“Okay! You knock first, I’ll answer the door.”

The door opened slowly under her touch, it let her in like water, like warmth, like the comforting hand of his mother. The last bit of his memory was consumed by an image of her staring back at him, watching as the crack in her door shrank until she vanished with a final click.

And she leaves.

He grows up, he buys a car, he rolls to a stop across the park, he steps out and slams the door and forgets if he takes his keys. Dead grass and thawed mud greet him as he stumbles over the curb, and quick glances prod him from the playground across the way. Dirt follows him across the street. It’s the first good day of spring, so the smell of rain ushers him up the driveway and abandons him at the door.

There’s so much he has to say, so much distance to cover between himself and the door. It’s got to be a turning point for him. All it takes is a raised fist and a bit of force.

 

[tomatorade]

Pokeball
​

Spoiler: CW

neglect, general mental health issues

Isaac needs a pokemon.

He doesn’t get all the details in the email, but whoever runs the program wants to know he can catch something on his own, so a pokemon he will have.

He lingers around the path to Lostlorn forest, where it’s hazy from smog and the lingering morning mist and it doesn’t look like it’ll be sunny for a week or so, at least not with these black clouds circling like mandibuzz around a carcass.

Even if he longs for the Alolan sun, at least the bad weather here is an excuse for everybody else to be inside. He gets some time to himself. To sit on a log, to be another force causing the spongy rotten wood to disintegrate, and watch the trees. People may mind, but as Isaac huddles in his ratty, black band hoodie, listens to the chirrups of venipede in the bushes and watches the subtle disturbance of leaves as pokemon pass between treetops, clearly the pokemon don’t.

Isaac needs a pokeball.

He’s already splattered in mud and grass stains scrounging around the brush. With all the rich kids in Nimbasa, he figures he can walk down any old path and pick pokeballs like berries from the bushes, but clearly rich kids are more frugal than he expected.

Which leaves him to hunker down and think. A gust of wind brings a sudden chill and he shrinks in on himself, chin to his chest. He glares across the stream burbling along and around the cliffs and into the woods: the last place he’s looked. The stream is up to his neck at the deepest.

Maybe Isaac doesn’t need a pokeball.

New trainers think catching pokemon is all about whipping them at the first thing that moves, but trying to add pokemon to your team by chucking pokeballs sucks. It’s a waste of money. And effort. He’s done his stint on the first journey, and fallen for every stupid piece of advice he got from television, but it’s not happening again.

It just takes a little convincing.

He gets up, ignores the ache in his legs and wanders up to the riverbank until he’s staring at himself in the water. He frowns. That beard he wants is coming in late, huh?

But the smell of clean water and grass gives him an idea. He used to hang around the golf course, kicking through muck all day in the water trap, picking out lost golf balls and putting them in his plastic bucket. After a break to pluck the fat leeches and weeds off his legs, he’s wandering around the parking lot in his swim trunks and selling the balls back to the golfers. The manager doesn’t like him. Not that it matters. Golfers don’t snitch if they’re getting balls half-price.

Looking past his reflection, there’s no telltale red glimmer of a pokeball on the bank. As if anything in life comes that easily.

He sighs, kicks off his shoes and socks, rolls up his pant legs until they bunch up around his hips. He starts with a toe, just skimming the surface. A jolt ripples up his leg and he gasps as his body tells him he’s going under. It takes a minute of inching himself into the water. By the time he’s up to his knees, he’s biting his tongue to keep from chattering and the chill is turning to numbness, his legs pillars of ice balancing him in the water.

It’s a good thing the water is calm—not threatening to swallow him whole. Still, it sloshes against his waist and soaks into his pants and crotch and sometimes he needs to stop and just breathe for a long, painful second. There are brief shots of heat as he slips against the rocky riverbed and scrapes his feet against the hard edges of river stones. No red streams tinge the water, but his pale feet blush. He winces; he’ll feel that later. Was it like this when he was thirteen? He never used to feel like such a chattering, shivering mess, but he must have. It’s not like springs were warmer nine years ago.

Sometimes a Pokémon stands by with that wild curiosity they tend to have. A tranquil, maybe, will perch on a bough dipping into the water like a fisherman’s rod. It’ll ruffle its feathers, dig its beak into a wing without breaking eye contact, then pull out a feather and drop it into the water. The feather’s an old paper boat launching from shore, floating by on the lazy tug of the river, waiting for Isaac to pass by.

But when Isaac does pass under the bough—when he tries to share a word and offer a hand for it, the tranquill takes off In a burst of feathers, scattering leaves in its wake and nearly toppling Isaac into the river. It lives here.

The actual search doesn’t start much better.

The river offers more than the woods, but not by much. Whenever he spots a glint of metal against matte gray stone, it usually ends up being some mystery shard. Or a half pokeball, almost a seashell if it wasn’t such a perfect half-sphere.

He could probably find a way to sell those. He tosses everything he finds to shore.

Then, finally, he starts hitting the jackpot. There’s a little grove around the corner of the cliffs—visible from the path, but with no shore and a layer of branches leaning over the water, protectors ready to catch anything thrown. He finds a couple balls tangled in the branches. A luxury ball jammed into the rocks, slimy with algae. He juggles them in his palm and they clack together like marbles. A self-satisfied smirk spreads across his face.

And there’s another one—

Except it’s different. He holds. He’s crashed mom’s car and lingers outside, hand hovering over the doorknob. It takes a second to appreciate. It’s just a regular ball—red and white—cloistered in a shady nook. He reaches for it, the cold water biting his fingers as they sink underwater. It comes up dripping. What might have been distortion from looking through the water leaves. It’s enlarged. Something’s inside.

He’s not sure what to do. Should he open it? No. No; who knows how long it’s been in there with all the algae. There haven’t been many trainers going in and out of the forest—it’s the off season, nobody’s going into Lostlorn woods and it could’ve been sitting here for weeks.

Isaacs hands are numb and he nearly fumbles the ball. He shoves the others in his hoodie pocket, and clasps the housed one with both hands—cupping it like a baby bird, fragile and young rather than an unfeeling orb still stinging from the cold. His breath is hot against his skin.

There’s a center he can go to—just outside the forest. He decides. It’s time to leave.

~(0)~

Isaac speed-walks to the pokemon center. It’s the gait of someone who’s in a hurry but where being late means showing up tomorrow: the hospital walk.

He meets the nurse—Chloe, the one he always sees with straight red hair and a mole on her neck. It’s empty inside and after a quick back-and-forth she takes the ball into the back and leaves Isaac alone.

Clean floors make him uncomfortable. His sneakers are wet and the rubber soles squeak against vinyl every time he adjusts, so he kicks them off by the radiator and lounges in his moist socks, taking up the whole red loveset in the corner of the room framed between some indoor ferns.

There’s a ticking clock above the desk. It cuts through the ambience—quiet except for the robotic hum of machines behind the counter. Nobody comes in or out and any hope they might is dashed when the rain shows up instead. It patters against the roof. Reinforces their sterile little box. Isaac has nothing but himself.

He wastes the time—the half hour she’s gone—by picking the grime off his collected pokeballs. They stain the creases of his hands like they’re some old map of the forest. By the time he’s done obsessively scraping his nails against the metal, little mountains of green flecks have built up at his feet.

Chloe steps out from the back room, adjusting the white nurse’s cap perched on her head.

“He’s alright,” she says, a calm smile on her face. It’s practiced. She’s seen death, he thinks, so this must be like a splinter.

“Don’t even know who he is.”

“He’s a whimsicott. C’mere.” She waves him up. Thankfully says nothing as she watches him leave a wet trail across the floor in his socks. She sets the pokeball on the counter once he’s close. It pops open under the pressure of her fingers and she holds it open for him as if there’s a pearl waiting inside. Instead, all he sees is absence, little voids where circuitry has been pried off, sharp scratches peeling hairs of metal off the surface.

“It’s an old model,” she says, seeing Isaac’s confused frown, “with a bunch of tech inside instead of one chip. Black market stuff, poachers buy old stock and pry off all the safeguards.”

“Oh. You think they caught the wrong thing and didn’t bother to pick it up?”

“Maybe.” she shrugs. “Or some kid bought the wrong pokeball. Important part is there’s no tracker or registration.”

Great. No trail. Isaac feels a spike of indignation, then wonders why. What would he have done otherwise? Stick the ball in her computer, wait until the culprit walks in—all greasy hair and leather clothes, hear the computer bleep out an accusation: that’s him!, then they beat the shit out of him?

It’s absurd, but still better than what they’re getting.

“What about the whimsicott?”

“He’s fine, like I said. Malnourished and dehydrated—those old balls are built to last, he’s been in there at least since migration and that was a couple weeks ago. Still, physically, it’s nothing a month of good food and water can’t fix.”

There’s always a but…

“But, mentally, eh…” She clicks her tongue, waggles her hand back and forth. “Mentally, he’s near… catatonic. Some physical response, he clearly knows I’m there, but he’s barely reacting. It’s a little outside my purview.”

Isaac drums his fingers on the counter, not finding the right response. The obvious question hangs above them. Chloe dips behind the counter and pops back up with a business card—solid black, sharp, serif font and silver type, a monolith that fits in her palm. Very austere.

Plasma institute for the mental wellness of pokemon.

Isaac reads the name and frowns. It’s like seeing your old bully at the grocery store ten years later. Adult and real and not worth it, but Isaac can’t help but have a list of things to say running through his mind.

“How much is it?”

She sighs. “If you have to ask, it’s too expensive.”

He swallows dryly. It feels like a stone tumbles into his stomach.

“And you can’t take him.”

“It’s a month until training season. Even besides, I doubt I’d have the time.” She pauses, but at his flat stare continues, “Listen, this would be full-time—and I mean full time. He can’t go back to the wild, he can’t go in a pokeball, he can’t stay at my parent’s for the weekend. It’s a lot of responsibility and not something I can go back on.”

Her words come straight and sharp and dense, no room to navigate them. But Isaac meets them with a nod and brings her an easy smile. Maybe she thinks they’d have more of an effect on him. Really, he’d figured most of that out on his own.

It’s a terrible thought to have, but Isaac can’t help but find some appeal in the idea of taking the whimsicott with him. Whatever hardship comes along—fine. He’s so used to shit blowing up in his face that it hardly registers anymore. But to have a pokemon that can’t be taken from him, an ally, maybe one day, a friend, well—

He does need a pokemon. The email said nothing about being battle ready.

“I can take him. I’m a trainer. I have experience.”

It’s true. Technically. Two more years until the license expires. But she doesn’t look impressed.

“Experience, huh? Want to know what I think? I think you should drop him off on the institute’s doorstep.”

“Oh, yeah. In a little basket with a note and a handgun, just waiting for the right words to awaken his inner killer.”

She scoffs. “I don’t know what movies you’re watching. And I’m serious. They don’t advertise it, but they have an ethical obligation. We’ll never see him again, but they can’t just turn him away. I’ve been there. They know what they’re doing.”

But Isaac has trouble imagining a life like that. Haunting the sterile halls of a mental institution, skyscrapers leaning ominously overhead, only shielded by the bars bolted to his window. Imagine going from the freedom of Lostlorn to that nightmare. And under plasma’s name, no less. Their whole deal is pokemon and yet they couldn’t even liberate them right. What credit can he give them?

He chooses.

“I’m going to Alola tomorrow,” he says. It’s not helpful or relevant, but he says it. Chloe just sits there, blinking.

“Do you need to?”

Need is an interesting word. He needs food and water, and no, going to Alola isn’t quite that important. But he already bought the ticket. He already made the decision and although there are people who think he doesn’t need it, they don’t know he’s going and aren’t going to be lining up at the airport to stop him. He tries for his best reassuring smile: light, with a tilt of the head like he’s waiting to listen—it’s something he’s ashamed to say he’s practiced in the mirror.

“My family moved there.”

Also technically true. Mom moved last year and he learned about it on a call with his sister last week after booking the trip and he had no intention of visiting, but still promised anyway. It’s not important.

She purses her lips, fixing him with a narrow-eyed glare. But there’s nothing she can do. Maybe she realizes this, because she sighs and dips under the counter again, surfacing with a notepad and pen.

“Here.” She scribbles for a while, her handwriting an elaborate, loopy cursive. “Get to Melemele and call this number—he’s an old university friend that can hopefully help with whimsicott. In the meantime…” She finishes, slapping the paper on the counter and turning it so he can read. There’s a list of feeding instructions under the number.

She spends a couple minutes running through them, dragging her pen over each word to make sure he gets it: he needs to drink a sugar solution whenever possible (four parts water to one part sugar); he eats basically all the berries and roots people eat, so try to get him on solid food as soon as possible, he needs at least four hours of sun each day—which should be no problem in Alola; oh, and if, by some miracle, Isaac manages to get him to do some exercise, keep up a routine to get his strength up.

The facts swim in Isaac’s head, but he catches up quickly, nodding solidly at each point. It brings him back to those training days, with calendars full of red circles, underlines on specifics of how to feed and treat each pokemon he caught.

He’s ready. “Can I see him?” he asks.

“If you’re taking him, you’ll have to. One second.”

She steps back, her shoes clicking on the tile floors as she walks into the backroom. She reappears a second later. It’s like a magic trick. She leaves without a beard and comes back with a cloud attached to her chin. Really, she’s just holding the whimsicott to her chest. She sets him down on the counter, giving Isaac a wave as permission.

Wilted’s a good word to describe the whimsicott. Deflated, maybe. Sad. That signature puff of cotton hair lays flat against his head, spread across green vegetal curls a sick shade of green. Even the brown of his skin looks dull—it’s a cut stump left outside to dry. He hunches over himself, one little hand drawing circles on the other.

A pang of guilt hits Isaac. Not for anything he’s done. Sometimes guilt means awareness that existing makes him complicit in letting shit like this happen.

“Hey, buddy. You okay?”

Whimsicott shifts. Or maybe not. If so, it’s so subtle Isaac loses it. He gets nothing else from the whimsicott—just a dull expression, amber eyes staring at nothing and that feeling of waiting for something that will never return.

“Can I pick him up?”

“Well you sure aren’t putting him back in that ball.”

Trying to pick him up is like trying to pick up someone else’s baby for the first time. He has to approach at the right angle, bringing his hands in until they meet soft cotton or hard, wooden skin and backing away again. Should he pick him up under the armpits? With one arm under his legs? Should he be looking in or out? Isaac settles on out and tries for a sort of gentle hug, shifting the limp form in his grip until the surprisingly-heavy creature settles. There’s a moment where whimsicott clutches his hoodie instinctively and Isaac believes he might cry, and he’s terrified and sick at the idea of screwing it up. Like, the wailing is going to start and the shushing will follow, him frantic to hide the mistake. But whimsicott’s parents round the corner and laugh it off. Turns out, babies cry like they’re getting paid sixty dollars an hour to do it.

But the whimsicott is not a baby. And if he has them, he’ll probably never see his parents again.

Chloe scrutinizes him as Isaac settles on a comfortable hold—one arm under, one around.

“Last chance to back out. Even if he ends up hating you, abandoning him will only do more harm than good; I’m just making sure you’re not getting into something you’ll regret.”

Isaac looks back—at the sliding door, the trail of sockprints he left up to the counter, the carefully sanitized insides of the pokemon center. Regret, huh? It’s moments like this where everything clicks, sediment falls out of his memories, his mind clears and he’s able to find something he’s lost at the bottom of the lake.

He hates pokemon centers. This is the first time in years he’s spent more than ten minutes. But even the ten minute trips are anxious ones.

Once, he stood at the head of a line, shoved in the crook of the center’s windowsill. The only trainer standing. The rest huddled beside him on the chairs and on the floor if there’s no space. They’re like refugees. Shivering. Pulled from the sea, sobbing, huddled in shock blankets and clutching backpacks and coats and each other. One of the officers on the opposite side of the room muttered numbers. Forty? Sixty? No, with eleven trainers that’s sixty-six.

There’s a burst of heat in Isaac’s gut. A narrowing of vision. He should say something—not everyone had a full team, he sure as fuck didn’t. Sixty-six!

But he doesn’t. He rams himself further into the sill, the metal edge cutting against his hip and shoulder and neck. There’s something sick and boiling in him and he’s afraid if he moves, he’ll punch a hole through the glass.

There’s a moment in every tragedy where sympathy overflows and everyone drowns in it. The parents come; for the moment they aren’t concerned with who let this happen. They will be.

Oh boy, will they.

Now, Isaac wants to sound confident, but he can’t help the bitterness sloshing out of his words.

“You got the right guy, then. I’ve never regretted anything in my life.”

Even if the whimsicott can’t battle, Isaac can’t complain.

Isaac gets his pokemon.