Rusting Knight
Youngster
- Pronouns
- he/him
Summary: After doing a pretty good job of ruining her own life, Rosie moves out to the grasslands to repair her grandfather’s old hut. There she finds peace, and a strange movement beneath her feet. (2,318 words, one-shot)
Notes: Title taken from the song ‘Good Life‘ by Sammy Rae & The Friends. Beta reading done by SingingViolin and Capt_Hikimari - thank you to both of them. All mistakes left are my own, and I welcome any feedback. And please say hi, if you want! I’m new to the Pokemon fandom and looking to get to know people.
Looking at the foreign, featureless grassland, it struck Rosie that her success tasted bitter. She had run too far away; she had done too good of a job burning down her life. The land lay blue and sleepy under dwindling dusk light. Only the silvery thread of a slow-moving river interrupted the land’s endless pattern. Rosie stood frozen, still hefting a suitcase bulging with cobbled together remnants of her life. Crickets chanted drowsy choruses among brittle grasses and white meadow flowers. Sweat stuck Rosie’s tanktop to her back, dark patches spreading from her armpits. Clinging heat wound up her shorts to prickle along her spine, refusing to depart with the sun. When she blinked Rosie’s eyes felt gritty from long hours staring at the straight dusty road. Regret coiled its greasy length in her stomach.
There was something defiant about her grandfather’s little hut, stranded in the endless stretch of the grassland. Its weatherworn facade hunkered down against the wind, an impassive gray. “You’d be doing me a favor,” Old Pa had said, creaking voice buzzing with static through the phone. “I mean, nobody’s using it, and fixed up I could sell the place, buy your grandmother something nice. Just slap on a few coats of paint, do the job well, and I’ll-” he had faltered and then failed. Rosie closed her eyes in shame at the memory, standing with a suitcase in her hand. Even obscured by the poor connection, she had heard the sticky film of pity over his words. They both knew that this was his favor to her, not the other way around.
Thinking of him made Rosie think of Pokémon, automatic as dominoes falling. Guilt made her pause in the process of moving her last bag into the bare room. From the Pokeball clipped to her belt she released Stellaluna, red light fizzing out in the soft summer air. After Rosie had scratched her purple forehead, the Crobat spiraled into the air. With slow, steady wingbeats that belied the joy she sang in her harsh cry, Stelluna flew. Clouds hunkered low over the flat landscape, so that she seemed at risk of disappearing into their parapets and turrets.
“C’mon Looney Tunes,” Rosie called out after watching her for a long time, tilting her chin up to trace her artful aerial gymnastics. With nobody around, she felt no embarrassment at the childish nickname of an already childish name. It was silly, she felt privately, to have a fighting Pokémon named after a children’s book Zubat. Not that her battling dreams had gone anywhere. Like most wannabe trainers, she had ended up working retail, selling bread and stale pastries two streets from her childhood house. It had been strange to hear other people dismiss the stultifying boredom of life as something she could slip out of easily. Rosie recognised that more drastic measures of escape were needed; she had taken them.
After she called twice more, her Crobat floated down to her shoulder, claws digging to the protective leather pads sewn into her shirt. Lugging the suitcase, she made her way into the hut. Only dust inhabited it now, dancing dizzily in slanted moonlight. Underneath the stink of abandonment there was the warm animal smell that seeped into place where Pokémon lived. Old Pa had raised Pokémon here once, Rock-types that thrived with space and isolation.
Dinner that first night consisted of wilted sandwiches and weak tea. High windows exhibited tiny squares of dark sky coated with ragged gray clouds. “I don’t regret it,” she told the Crobat perched on the rafters, “Not any of it.” Yellow eyes looked at her with disbelief; purple wings shivered in doubt. But Rosie knew she had been right to quit her job, to ditch her pale excuse for a life. There was a good, clean pleasure in sitting on the grimy floor knowing that she had nothing to return to. Rosie curled up on the futon she had brought with her, wrapping a thin blanket around herself. In the dark, hazy space just before true sleep came, she was convinced she could feel the ground tremble, as if something was coiling below the earth.
“No, I’m not coming back anytime soon,” Rosie insisted, barrelling over the intake of breath from her mother. “It feels good, you know, making real progress at something. And it’s beautiful out here,” she said, stepping carefully over pale meadow flowers. She peered up at the sky for the distant shape of Stellaluna, who had taken to long flights across the empty plains. A gratifying ache in her calves made her move with caution; her body was attuning to the strenuous work. There was a duller quality to the light today, like a woolen carpet had been pulled across the world. Rosie watched as the first drops of water splattered on the vibrant grass. “I gotta go, Mom, it’s gonna rain,” she said, and hung up before there was any answer.
Rain fell with relentless force, trying to drive Rosie onto her knees in the sodden earth. Water weighed down her lank black hair, reaching through her boots into the thin socks underneath. “Stellaluna! Looney Tunes!” She yelled, though her voice lacked true panic. Stellaluna had been caught as a wild Pokémon; even a decade of being a trainer’s pet couldn’t rob her of an innate self-sufficiency. It was the storm that worried her, the promise of hail upon the wide grassland. Sight of the hut inspired a wild relief. Rosie was surprised to register that its battered boards rang the clear bell of home, home home in her chest. It was something about the door, a lush dark green painted by her own two hands.
Rosie found Stellaluna already sequestered inside, a dark blot shuffling among the bunches of dried flowers strung up from the refurbished rafters. Fat raindrops hurled themselves against the windows, making a noisy clatter on the newly repaired roof. The Crobat was happier away from the city; there was even a cave system nearby. Rosie often saw her flutter down the opening, fulfilling some desperate desire to be far below the surface. It was odd; her grandfather claimed there had been no caves in the area during his time. “Did you have a nice time today?” Rosie asked her, as she had often been too embarrassed to do in the city, and nodded at the chitter she received in reply.
Curled up under the covers, a cup of instant noodles clasped in clammy hands, Rosie could feel the one discordant note in her new life. It ran under everything she did, an offbeat reverberation of wrongness: the trembling. Working on the door one morning, Rosie had looked down to see the paint in the can ripple. Like the crescendo of a song, the vibrations were growing stronger. Sheltered under layers of blankets, she called her grandfather, telling in fragile scraps about the restless earth. “Stranger things have happened on the grasslands,” her grandfather said.
As a distraction, she pestered him with questions about his old breeding business. He explained to her, in deepening detail, about raising Rock-types. “They loved it out here,” he said, “I had an Aron who would refuse to step foot inside, just slept and played out among those beautiful flowers you get there. He found a good home in the end, went with a Ranger who could let him roam as he wished,” Old Pa’s voice rolled on and on, low and flat like the plains he had once called his home. “People used to come to me just for my Steel-Rock mixes, Shieldon and Nosepass I used to take out to Chargestone Cave.”
Rosie patted the blankets until Stellaluna came to wrap her wings around her head, body shaking with her purring. Hearing about her grandfather’s Pokémon made a newly familiar ambition start up in her, like the heating coil on a stove reddening. “One of the Onixes I raised from the egg evolved, you know,” he continued, in tones of deep pride tempered by faded sorrow, “It made for an enormous, powerful Steelix. I had to release her when I moved to the city to help Grandma with your mother - nobody would take her. It’s an awful shame. You have to be prepared for these things, as a breeder.”
That night Rosie woke long before dawn, the shaking earth rousing her from deep dreams, dread a tight corkscrew in her stomach. Stellaluna’s eyes were reflective in the darkness as they swept anxiously over the hut. “It’s okay,” Rosie told her, and felt a shameful burn at the wavering of her hoarse voice. Her reassurance clattered to the floor like a pebble dropped through the illusory body of a Ghost-type. “It’s okay,” she repeated, trying to convince herself that the earth was not shivering like a scared child.
After the storm, Stellaluna refused to return to the caves, fluttering agitated before the opening. Rosie stood inside the beckoning maw of the tunnel, and called for her, but she did not go. Her disobedience made the dread in Rosie’s stomach wind tighter, drawing everything in her towards itself.
On her back, cool river water soaking her hair and lapping at her stomach, Rosie gazed up into the sky. Wisps of clouds dissolved and mingled with each other like paint in water, pale against the pervasive blue of the sky. The sky seemed closer than it did in the city, liable to collapse under the strain of some great burden. A purple dot glided in idle circles overhead, a teal wing visible when Stellaluna dipped lower. Lazy contentment suffused Rosie’s aching body. Continuous ripples ran across the water’s glistening surface. Even the river was disturbed.
The impact of what she had to do hit like a fist to her stomach, leaving her in a heavy sigh. Rosie flipped onto her stomach, making for the shore. The second she left the water’s grasp, heat laid its heavy hand across her body. Blaring light fell on the landscape with a force like a siren, a relentless noon noise. Cupping her hands over her mouth, her chest swelling with air, Rosie called out: “Stellaluna! Looney Tunes! Come ‘ere!”
Long minutes stretched by as she waited, sweet and thick like taffy pulled on a hook. Rosie dressed in ragged jeans and a flannel, lacing her hiking boots up securely. In preparation for colder temperatures underground, she slung a cardigan over her shoulder. Looking at the sky made her eyes twitch, but she kept on staring and calling until Stellaluna came floating down, agile as a dust mote caught in the light. She landed on Rosie’s shoulders, bristly fur scratching her cheek. Taking slow, reluctant steps, Rosie started towards the cave opening.
Inside the tunnels and caverns of the cave system the cold air carried the musty smell of old, damp soil. There was a strange regularity to the carved out spaces beneath the earth; the walls and ceiling were seized as if custom-made. Chittering, scuttling sounds came from the dark shadows cast by her flashlight, weak Pokémon kept away by the silent presence of Stellaluna beside her. On agile wings her Crobat guided her through the low passages. Rosie was not as comfortable as her companion; fear strung her every muscle taught.
Darkness clustered around her, courteous and enveloping like an overly attentive host. Only the white glare of her torch beat it off, light falling starkly on the rough stone and the occasional shy beauty of a calcite formation. And from all sides, shaking her bones and drawing worried cries from Stellaluna, was the shaking. Pebbles on the ground moved with it; Stellaluna guided her away from cave-ins caused by it. Over and over, her voice hoarse with fear, Rosie had to ask Stellaluna to guide her closer to its origin. She kept up a relentless, soothing patter as the walls shivered around her.
At last, when Rosie’s feet were sore with blisters and sweat beaded on her forehead despite the cold, the vibrations came to a stop. Before her was the gaping mouth of a cavern. Stellaluna alighted on her shoulder; she lifted an absentminded hand to scratch at her forehead. For once she didn’t purr, just keened anxiously once more. Without the familiar rumbling the caves felt alien, like the tunnels were still with the gathering energy of a predator before a pounce. Rosie made herself step into the cavern.
An enormous space opened up, cluttered with massive boulders broken off in a recent disturbance. A hole had been knocked in one wall, surrounded by the debris of its creation. And the artist of this destruction sat at rest in the center of the cavern, steel hide shining in the glare of Rosie’s flashlight. The Steelix was massive, metallic segments scratched up from its diligent tunneling. Red eyes fixed on Rosie; a craggy mouth opened to reveal teeth like tombstones. It shouldn’t be so near the surface without a trainer - by now it should be eating its way to the earth’s core. Recognition rang like a bell in Rosie’s throat and emerged as a small, soft sound.
“Oh,” Rosie said, “You must have been so lonely. Old Pa left you all alone, is that it? Did you come to see who was in your old house?” She took cautious steps closer to the Steelix, her breath catching as it lowered its immense head. The shadows it cast climbed up the walls; Stellaluna fled to the upper reaches of the cavern. With a shaking hand, Rosie met its flat nose as it came to her. There was an odd feeling in her chest, like her heart was dividing into the two wings of a bird. She imagined the Steelix burrowing through the ground around her hut, winding and unwinding below the surface. “It’s okay,” she said, feeling worn steel with cautious fingers, “I’ll look after you now.”
Notes: Title taken from the song ‘Good Life‘ by Sammy Rae & The Friends. Beta reading done by SingingViolin and Capt_Hikimari - thank you to both of them. All mistakes left are my own, and I welcome any feedback. And please say hi, if you want! I’m new to the Pokemon fandom and looking to get to know people.
Looking at the foreign, featureless grassland, it struck Rosie that her success tasted bitter. She had run too far away; she had done too good of a job burning down her life. The land lay blue and sleepy under dwindling dusk light. Only the silvery thread of a slow-moving river interrupted the land’s endless pattern. Rosie stood frozen, still hefting a suitcase bulging with cobbled together remnants of her life. Crickets chanted drowsy choruses among brittle grasses and white meadow flowers. Sweat stuck Rosie’s tanktop to her back, dark patches spreading from her armpits. Clinging heat wound up her shorts to prickle along her spine, refusing to depart with the sun. When she blinked Rosie’s eyes felt gritty from long hours staring at the straight dusty road. Regret coiled its greasy length in her stomach.
There was something defiant about her grandfather’s little hut, stranded in the endless stretch of the grassland. Its weatherworn facade hunkered down against the wind, an impassive gray. “You’d be doing me a favor,” Old Pa had said, creaking voice buzzing with static through the phone. “I mean, nobody’s using it, and fixed up I could sell the place, buy your grandmother something nice. Just slap on a few coats of paint, do the job well, and I’ll-” he had faltered and then failed. Rosie closed her eyes in shame at the memory, standing with a suitcase in her hand. Even obscured by the poor connection, she had heard the sticky film of pity over his words. They both knew that this was his favor to her, not the other way around.
Thinking of him made Rosie think of Pokémon, automatic as dominoes falling. Guilt made her pause in the process of moving her last bag into the bare room. From the Pokeball clipped to her belt she released Stellaluna, red light fizzing out in the soft summer air. After Rosie had scratched her purple forehead, the Crobat spiraled into the air. With slow, steady wingbeats that belied the joy she sang in her harsh cry, Stelluna flew. Clouds hunkered low over the flat landscape, so that she seemed at risk of disappearing into their parapets and turrets.
“C’mon Looney Tunes,” Rosie called out after watching her for a long time, tilting her chin up to trace her artful aerial gymnastics. With nobody around, she felt no embarrassment at the childish nickname of an already childish name. It was silly, she felt privately, to have a fighting Pokémon named after a children’s book Zubat. Not that her battling dreams had gone anywhere. Like most wannabe trainers, she had ended up working retail, selling bread and stale pastries two streets from her childhood house. It had been strange to hear other people dismiss the stultifying boredom of life as something she could slip out of easily. Rosie recognised that more drastic measures of escape were needed; she had taken them.
After she called twice more, her Crobat floated down to her shoulder, claws digging to the protective leather pads sewn into her shirt. Lugging the suitcase, she made her way into the hut. Only dust inhabited it now, dancing dizzily in slanted moonlight. Underneath the stink of abandonment there was the warm animal smell that seeped into place where Pokémon lived. Old Pa had raised Pokémon here once, Rock-types that thrived with space and isolation.
Dinner that first night consisted of wilted sandwiches and weak tea. High windows exhibited tiny squares of dark sky coated with ragged gray clouds. “I don’t regret it,” she told the Crobat perched on the rafters, “Not any of it.” Yellow eyes looked at her with disbelief; purple wings shivered in doubt. But Rosie knew she had been right to quit her job, to ditch her pale excuse for a life. There was a good, clean pleasure in sitting on the grimy floor knowing that she had nothing to return to. Rosie curled up on the futon she had brought with her, wrapping a thin blanket around herself. In the dark, hazy space just before true sleep came, she was convinced she could feel the ground tremble, as if something was coiling below the earth.
*
“No, I’m not coming back anytime soon,” Rosie insisted, barrelling over the intake of breath from her mother. “It feels good, you know, making real progress at something. And it’s beautiful out here,” she said, stepping carefully over pale meadow flowers. She peered up at the sky for the distant shape of Stellaluna, who had taken to long flights across the empty plains. A gratifying ache in her calves made her move with caution; her body was attuning to the strenuous work. There was a duller quality to the light today, like a woolen carpet had been pulled across the world. Rosie watched as the first drops of water splattered on the vibrant grass. “I gotta go, Mom, it’s gonna rain,” she said, and hung up before there was any answer.
Rain fell with relentless force, trying to drive Rosie onto her knees in the sodden earth. Water weighed down her lank black hair, reaching through her boots into the thin socks underneath. “Stellaluna! Looney Tunes!” She yelled, though her voice lacked true panic. Stellaluna had been caught as a wild Pokémon; even a decade of being a trainer’s pet couldn’t rob her of an innate self-sufficiency. It was the storm that worried her, the promise of hail upon the wide grassland. Sight of the hut inspired a wild relief. Rosie was surprised to register that its battered boards rang the clear bell of home, home home in her chest. It was something about the door, a lush dark green painted by her own two hands.
Rosie found Stellaluna already sequestered inside, a dark blot shuffling among the bunches of dried flowers strung up from the refurbished rafters. Fat raindrops hurled themselves against the windows, making a noisy clatter on the newly repaired roof. The Crobat was happier away from the city; there was even a cave system nearby. Rosie often saw her flutter down the opening, fulfilling some desperate desire to be far below the surface. It was odd; her grandfather claimed there had been no caves in the area during his time. “Did you have a nice time today?” Rosie asked her, as she had often been too embarrassed to do in the city, and nodded at the chitter she received in reply.
Curled up under the covers, a cup of instant noodles clasped in clammy hands, Rosie could feel the one discordant note in her new life. It ran under everything she did, an offbeat reverberation of wrongness: the trembling. Working on the door one morning, Rosie had looked down to see the paint in the can ripple. Like the crescendo of a song, the vibrations were growing stronger. Sheltered under layers of blankets, she called her grandfather, telling in fragile scraps about the restless earth. “Stranger things have happened on the grasslands,” her grandfather said.
As a distraction, she pestered him with questions about his old breeding business. He explained to her, in deepening detail, about raising Rock-types. “They loved it out here,” he said, “I had an Aron who would refuse to step foot inside, just slept and played out among those beautiful flowers you get there. He found a good home in the end, went with a Ranger who could let him roam as he wished,” Old Pa’s voice rolled on and on, low and flat like the plains he had once called his home. “People used to come to me just for my Steel-Rock mixes, Shieldon and Nosepass I used to take out to Chargestone Cave.”
Rosie patted the blankets until Stellaluna came to wrap her wings around her head, body shaking with her purring. Hearing about her grandfather’s Pokémon made a newly familiar ambition start up in her, like the heating coil on a stove reddening. “One of the Onixes I raised from the egg evolved, you know,” he continued, in tones of deep pride tempered by faded sorrow, “It made for an enormous, powerful Steelix. I had to release her when I moved to the city to help Grandma with your mother - nobody would take her. It’s an awful shame. You have to be prepared for these things, as a breeder.”
That night Rosie woke long before dawn, the shaking earth rousing her from deep dreams, dread a tight corkscrew in her stomach. Stellaluna’s eyes were reflective in the darkness as they swept anxiously over the hut. “It’s okay,” Rosie told her, and felt a shameful burn at the wavering of her hoarse voice. Her reassurance clattered to the floor like a pebble dropped through the illusory body of a Ghost-type. “It’s okay,” she repeated, trying to convince herself that the earth was not shivering like a scared child.
After the storm, Stellaluna refused to return to the caves, fluttering agitated before the opening. Rosie stood inside the beckoning maw of the tunnel, and called for her, but she did not go. Her disobedience made the dread in Rosie’s stomach wind tighter, drawing everything in her towards itself.
*
On her back, cool river water soaking her hair and lapping at her stomach, Rosie gazed up into the sky. Wisps of clouds dissolved and mingled with each other like paint in water, pale against the pervasive blue of the sky. The sky seemed closer than it did in the city, liable to collapse under the strain of some great burden. A purple dot glided in idle circles overhead, a teal wing visible when Stellaluna dipped lower. Lazy contentment suffused Rosie’s aching body. Continuous ripples ran across the water’s glistening surface. Even the river was disturbed.
The impact of what she had to do hit like a fist to her stomach, leaving her in a heavy sigh. Rosie flipped onto her stomach, making for the shore. The second she left the water’s grasp, heat laid its heavy hand across her body. Blaring light fell on the landscape with a force like a siren, a relentless noon noise. Cupping her hands over her mouth, her chest swelling with air, Rosie called out: “Stellaluna! Looney Tunes! Come ‘ere!”
Long minutes stretched by as she waited, sweet and thick like taffy pulled on a hook. Rosie dressed in ragged jeans and a flannel, lacing her hiking boots up securely. In preparation for colder temperatures underground, she slung a cardigan over her shoulder. Looking at the sky made her eyes twitch, but she kept on staring and calling until Stellaluna came floating down, agile as a dust mote caught in the light. She landed on Rosie’s shoulders, bristly fur scratching her cheek. Taking slow, reluctant steps, Rosie started towards the cave opening.
Inside the tunnels and caverns of the cave system the cold air carried the musty smell of old, damp soil. There was a strange regularity to the carved out spaces beneath the earth; the walls and ceiling were seized as if custom-made. Chittering, scuttling sounds came from the dark shadows cast by her flashlight, weak Pokémon kept away by the silent presence of Stellaluna beside her. On agile wings her Crobat guided her through the low passages. Rosie was not as comfortable as her companion; fear strung her every muscle taught.
Darkness clustered around her, courteous and enveloping like an overly attentive host. Only the white glare of her torch beat it off, light falling starkly on the rough stone and the occasional shy beauty of a calcite formation. And from all sides, shaking her bones and drawing worried cries from Stellaluna, was the shaking. Pebbles on the ground moved with it; Stellaluna guided her away from cave-ins caused by it. Over and over, her voice hoarse with fear, Rosie had to ask Stellaluna to guide her closer to its origin. She kept up a relentless, soothing patter as the walls shivered around her.
At last, when Rosie’s feet were sore with blisters and sweat beaded on her forehead despite the cold, the vibrations came to a stop. Before her was the gaping mouth of a cavern. Stellaluna alighted on her shoulder; she lifted an absentminded hand to scratch at her forehead. For once she didn’t purr, just keened anxiously once more. Without the familiar rumbling the caves felt alien, like the tunnels were still with the gathering energy of a predator before a pounce. Rosie made herself step into the cavern.
An enormous space opened up, cluttered with massive boulders broken off in a recent disturbance. A hole had been knocked in one wall, surrounded by the debris of its creation. And the artist of this destruction sat at rest in the center of the cavern, steel hide shining in the glare of Rosie’s flashlight. The Steelix was massive, metallic segments scratched up from its diligent tunneling. Red eyes fixed on Rosie; a craggy mouth opened to reveal teeth like tombstones. It shouldn’t be so near the surface without a trainer - by now it should be eating its way to the earth’s core. Recognition rang like a bell in Rosie’s throat and emerged as a small, soft sound.
“Oh,” Rosie said, “You must have been so lonely. Old Pa left you all alone, is that it? Did you come to see who was in your old house?” She took cautious steps closer to the Steelix, her breath catching as it lowered its immense head. The shadows it cast climbed up the walls; Stellaluna fled to the upper reaches of the cavern. With a shaking hand, Rosie met its flat nose as it came to her. There was an odd feeling in her chest, like her heart was dividing into the two wings of a bird. She imagined the Steelix burrowing through the ground around her hut, winding and unwinding below the surface. “It’s okay,” she said, feeling worn steel with cautious fingers, “I’ll look after you now.”
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