Blue knew this was a nightmare because it had opened with a blastoise. Sure, it'd started out as a nice little déjà-vu-y dream, what with him strolling out onto the deck of a posh cruiseliner to grab some sun and R&R by the pool with Charizard at his side. Real cute, real pleasant, just like the first actual day of this hell-vacation. Almost had him fooled. But then said pool had exploded, drenching him and Charizard and all the fleeing guests, and there'd been a motherfucking blastoise giving him the evil eye in the middle of it all, because that joke sure hadn't been run into the ground already.
He'd already established that even Leaf was unlikely to get her hands on an entire-ass cruise ship solely for her latest idea of a funny, much though she might've loved to. Tank was probably too nice to go along with something like this, anyway. So, nightmare it was.
"What was that before, Tiny?" A figure relaxed in one of the lounge chairs on the other side of the pool, unperturbed by the impromptu shower. "'What's so great about blastoise'? Well, it's your lucky day, because I'm feelin' just about generous enough to give you a demonstration! Let's see how long your loser lizard can stand up to a real champion's partner."
Ah, there it was. He'd thought the voice had sounded familiar. (Had it? Was it his?) The spiky brown hair that became clearer as the guy stood up was a dead giveaway, if nothing else. No idea where the "Tiny" bit was coming from; it wasn't something he'd ever called anybody, and not something he remembered Kimiko or Wallace or anyone mentioning about the other-hims, either. Was this guy taller than he was, maybe? One of the Blues who was supposed to be an old guy or something? Eh. Whatever. No marks for creativity, that was for sure.
"Dr. Minus World, I presume." Blue looked away from him just long enough to give Charizard a thumbs up, then turned back to his doppelganger, sneering. "I've heard so much about you." How you're famous, how everyone loves you, how everyone freaked out when they thought you were gone, how much everyone wishes you were here instead of me. "Yeah, I'd say it's my lucky day, because now Charizard and I finally get the chance to kick one of you smug bastards and your Tank wannabes in the teeth. Shame you're here alone, really." Charizard gave a defiant roar and winged into the air, ready to strike at a moment's notice.
"I'm sure you'd love that, Tiny," scoffed Minus Blue. Fucking weird how Blue couldn't actually see his face. Just the hair, and a vague mass of human-shaped shadows that might've been a little taller than him but c'mon, he wasn't that short, and an overwhelming sense of superiority. Probably just standard nightmare stuff. "Why don't you just focus on me for now? Then we'll see how you really like dealin' with a bunch of mirror-selves. Blastoise?"
The blastoise began to haul itself laboriously up and out of the empty pool, ominous rumbling issuing from its throat and from inside its shell. "Charizard, keep moving! Throw its aim off with a smokescreen, then give it a salvo of dragon pulses," Blue said. Smoke rolled out of Charizard's mouth, enveloping the pool area in a curtain of gray. The dragon circled a few times in midair, just to be certain the blastoise couldn't guess at his position, and then his jaws opened wide again to summon a blast of searing green energy.
Minus Blue laughed and waved a hand in the general direction of his pokémon. The rumbling intensified, and two jets of water came rocketing out of the smoke to strike Charizard square in both wings. They punched through his wings, even, and Charizard could only hiss angrily as his whole body seemed to dissolve into shadows and vanish entirely. "No, Charizard, no—" Blue cried out, heart pounding, but then he caught himself, snarled, forced himself to breathe.
Right. Relax. Nightmare. It wasn't really Charizard. Just a figment of his imagination, meant solely to frustrate him like everything else on this godforsaken boat.
Weird, though. Once you were lucid enough to know that you were dreaming, you were supposed to be able to do whatever you wanted. Like have your charizard blast a stupid turtle and an evil twin right off the deck of a cruise ship with minimal effort. Perhaps this nightmare hadn't gotten the memo.
"Hold up, lemme see if I can do a thing real quick," Blue said, making a brief "wait" gesture. He held out his arm, stared at it, concentrated, tried to will a plate of cheesecake into existence in his hand. The cheesecake, very rudely, did not oblige. "Aw, c'mon, that's not fair—"
The blastoise leveled its cannons at him and then Blue's entire world was water. The torrent punched him clean off his feet and sent him tumbling, rolling down a set of stairs that, had Everything not been Water, he might've realized hadn't been there a minute ago. The hydro pump stopped and he sprawled at the bottom of the landing in a poorly-lit room, sputtering with indignation and also half-filled lungs. Minus Blue was standing directly over him when he looked up. The shadows that made up his "face" were as inscrutable as ever, but Blue knew, just knew, that the prick was giving him the most condescending smile possible.
"Bad luck after all, Tiny," he said, leaning against a wall like they were having a casual chat about the weather. (Seriously, why "Tiny"? Where was that coming from? Why was it gnawing away at the back of his mind?) "Looks like you're not ready to face all your mirror-selves. Maybe you're not even cut out to call yourself a Blue. Maybe it's for the best that all the rest of us are here instead."
Laughter filled the dark space, a hundred cruel voices that had no fucking business sounding like him, laughing over and over again. Just a stupid little kid. Only champion for ten seconds. No one actually cares. Why'd you even bother coming?
"Shut up!" Blue snapped, scrambling upright and lunging for Minus Blue. He just wanted to grab the bastard, just grab him and his stupid hair and his stupid smug shadow-face and shake him until he choked on all their stupid fucking laughter.
"Hey, don't feel too down on yourself," jeered the doppelganger, totally unfazed even as his head wobbled back and forth like a ragdoll. "At least a blastoise is a worthy opponent, right? Coulda been worse. Coulda got your ass kicked by a raticate or something."
The laughing cut out abruptly and the shadows that Blue was manhandling fell away in his hands, leaving him holding, for one genuinely heart-stopping moment, just the doppelganger's head. No, wait, just his... hair? No, not even that, just... something brown and fuzzy. The fuzzy thing blinked up at him, and its face split open into a wide, toothy grin. A toothy grin with a pair of really, really big incisors right in the middle.
"Wouldn't that just've been the worst, Tiny?"
And Raticate sank her teeth into his right arm.
Blue screamed. The fangs punched straight down to the bone, through the bone. A sickening snap rent the air. It didn't just hurt, it burned, like she'd coated her teeth in acid right before trying to shear his limb off. He lashed out wildly and his arm felt like it swung in two separate places as he did. Maybe the awful, disorienting motion was the only reason that Raticate let go of him and scattered to the floor.
"What the fuck?" he sobbed. "What the fuck?!"
"Aw, not impressed, Tiny? And here I spent so much time workin' on that bite attack, just like you asked. Thought you'd finally be happy to see some progress." She righted herself and sprang at him again, her fangs dripping with darkness as she lunged for his leg this time, and Blue only just managed to throw himself out of the way. Raticate rebounded off the wall where he'd been standing seconds before; he moaned as the impact with the floor juddered through his mangled arm.
Tiny. That was what Raticate had called him, ribbing him for being a kid or a new trainer or something. Apparently. He'd never heard it himself; he didn't come from one of the surprisingly numerous minus worlds where most humans understanding pokémon speech was a thing. But Kadabra had said it telepathically when they'd woken up to find Raticate missing that morning, visibly uncomfortable as she had to sully her big adventure to deliver one last spiteful message:
Tell Tiny I hope he gets exactly what he deserves at the League.
(He'd insisted it was fine. Raticate was just holding them all back. They didn't need to waste their time with a teammate who only seemed to want to waste theirs. (His.) It was fine. Now come on, we've got training to do.)
"What do you want?" He'd intended it to sound angry, authoritative, but screw whatever he intended, apparently; it all came out choked with tears. The sleeve of his jacket was ruined by the dark brown stain spreading across it; it took every ounce of his willpower not to think about what it looked like underneath. "You left! You don't have to put up with me ruining your day anymore! Why the hell are you showing up now?!"
"Can't I just want to chat with an old friend? Offer some neighborly advice?"
"You just tried to bite my fucking arm off! You are actively trying to dismember me!"
Raticate made a motion almost like a shrug with her forepaws before she rounded on him yet again. There was an audible clack as her teeth only just missed puncturing his boot. "Well, they say that pain does wonders for clearin' the mind. Maybe I just wanna make sure you can hear me loud and clear. All the time you've spent with your head up your ass so far this trip might muffle things a bit otherwise."
What the fuck. What the actual fuck. What was wrong with this goddamn nightmare? What even was the point of all this? He and Raticate hadn't seen eye to eye on a lot of things as their journey had gone on, sure. They'd argued, definitely. Argued badly enough that she'd finally just up and left the night before they were supposed to face Erika. It had not, in fact, been "fine". But there was no way he'd done anything bad enough to warrant her using his bones to whittle down her incisors now. (Was there?)
He took a deep, shuddering breath, tried to remind himself that this was just a bad dream, just a cruel exaggeration because sometimes nightmares were just the fucking worst like that. He received a headbutt to the stomach for his trouble, all that wind knocked right back out of him as Raticate sat him down hard. He sank back to the deck, whimpering in between gasps for air. His former pokémon ignored his distress and perched on his chest, her expression level and stern aside from the anger dancing in her eyes.
"Sometimes on TV," she said, her voice oozing condescension the way her teeth oozed blood and night, "when a human hasn't quite got it through their head that they're being a dick, the other humans tell them to 'take a good long look in the mirror'. I figure your problem is you think you see mirrors everywhere you go. Maybe sometimes it's a pain, like right now, feelin' like you're surrounded by a million other assholes who're just as obnoxious as you. Mostly it's just a million shiny opportunities to feel smug and stroke your ego."
"Get off me," Blue rasped.
She continued to ignore him. "For real, dude, you're even assumin' all these other Blues would be just as much of an insufferable braggart as you are." She paused for just a second to look consternated. "Which, okay, that might actually be true, based on what other people have been sayin' about their worlds. But still, man, don't you think that miiiight be indicative of a problem? That even when you're just imaginin' alternate versions of yourself, even when you're worried they might be 'better' than you, you're struggling to picture them behaving any other way?
"Don't misunderstand me: I fully admit this multiverse crap is beyond bizarre. Not disagreein' with you for a second there. How'd a little nerdlinger human like you get to be so important in a bunch of different worlds? Feh." She spat at the ground near his face. He could hear the caustic shadows sizzling their way into the floorboards.
"But hey, maybe consider that it's also some flavor of 'beyond bizarre' for everyone else. Maybe consider that they're as just stuck with their own frame of reference as you are with yours, because that's how brains work, how people work. Maybe consider that not a single one of these people—well, dunno, maybe that one guy, but not most of them—set out with the intent to piss you off, and that you would in fact be havin' a much better time on this vacation, relative to its dumpster fire status I mean, if you didn't insist on makin' everything about yourself." She gave his side one last patronizing little pat with her paw before she scampered down his leg and stopped right by the ankle, mouth open wide.
"Oh, I'm sorry, do you not think it's justified?" Blue snarled. He kicked out right as she bent down to bite and sent her tumbling away, then struggled to right himself with just his good arm. "D'you think I should just be really fucking jazzed that I'm constantly being compared to someone else, literally all the god damn time? 'Oh, your grandfather is so famous, your sister is so talented. Maybe someday you'll be just as good as they are! Yeah, you're pretty good, but man, look at Red and Leaf go! Look at all the shit they've done, look at how much everyone loves them!' God, Raticate, for nearly a fucking year—not to mention before that, after that—that was practically all I fucking heard!
"So are you seriously going to tell me that I don't have the right to be just the slightest. Bit. Peeved. That everyone on this stupid boat, on this entire godawful island, sees me as a walking prompt to never shut up about a completely different fucking person? That after everything I did, after all the hell I put myself through, none of it means anything to anyone?"
Her response sliced through the air like her teeth had sliced through his arm. "All the hell we put ourselves through, Tiny. Plural. How quickly you forget."
"No, I... no! No, of course! Everyone!" He let go of his throbbing arm for a moment and grabbed at his head. Of course he hadn't forgotten. Of course he hadn't forgotten. (Maybe not most of the time, not ususlly. But here, when he was by himself, when things were turning against him, maybe he had.) "It— It's not even just me, anyway! If this really is a nightmare then you know what I know! You know what happened on the boat, everywhere else. Those jerks didn't even recognize Charizard. They didn't believe he existed because blah blah blah fucking blastoise or something!"
"And?"
"And? And?! And you don't have the empathy to imagine for a half a second how that feels? To understand how upset he was?"
"Dunno about that, Tiny." She wasn't running at him now, just pacing back and forth, her claws making steady little click-click-clicks against the deck. "I think he was just upset because you were upset. Because his mommy told him that he needed to babysit her human's precious little kit, and Little Sam is uncomfortable when we are not about him. And god knows that 'nervous the second anythin' or anyone gets remotely awkward' is just poor Fishsticks's general state of being.
"Nah, I figure you're the only one who's hot and bothered about it. You're the only one who's really imaginin' that all these mostly-innocuous multiverse weirdos have it out for you, for whatever reason. The only one who figures that just because maybe they're fortunate enough to have a Blue somewhere in their world, they're always thinking about him instead of their own goddamn business. That it's such a personal inconvenience that they're thinkin' about 'him' instead of 'you'."
"I just... I just want people to see me for me," Blue forced out through gritted teeth. "For who I am, not who I am in relation to someone else."
"Just want people to know who you are, huh." There was something else in Raticate's eyes as she stared him down from across the empty room, something guttering behind the fury that burned there. "Funny how you never considered that maybe that was what I wanted."
Blue seethed. What she'd wanted was to goof off when she was supposed to be sparring. To steal Charmeleon and Kadabra's food all the time. To undo his bootlaces when he got annoyed with her. To rearrange the contents of his bag for no goddamn reason.
(To sit by his side by the campfire at night. To nose her way into his sleeping bag. To sniff at all the teas that Daisy had insisted he bring with him, and paw at him to ask if she could try one. To see the kinds of things he liked to carry to remind himself of home.)
Raticate pounced. Blue tried to lash out again and knock her away, but the problem with being right-handed was that his instinct was to swing with his right arm, and that worked out about as spectacularly as you could imagine. He howled as the motion sent fresh shockwaves up and down his arm, and then again as Raticate slammed into him and sent him staggering back into the wall. She dug her nails through his jacket and leaned in close, her massive incisors hovering just inches from his face.
"Battling's fine and all, but honestly, the whole League thing? I could take it or leave it. Let Birdbrain fuss over how sparkly her feathers look on TV, let Spoons get all touristy over her fancy adventure pilgrimage. I just wanted somethin' different!" She looked almost wistful for a second, but then she clenched her teeth again. "Someplace different from that alleyway behind the donut place. Someone different from that spearow nesting on the fire escape who wouldn't stop kvetching about the shitty quality of the fries in the garbage these days. Someone fun! Someone I could play around with, laugh with, see Kanto with! Didn't actually think I was askin' all that much.
"Instead," she growled, "I got who you were 'supposed to be'. Samuel Oak's grandson, except not, because better. Red Hawthorne and Leaf Linden's rival, except not, because better. Coolest guy in the room. Only guy in the room, might as well've been. Someone who sure spent a lot of his own time thinking in relation to someone else, and anyone who wasn't lookin' to help hold up all those mirrors for him twenty-four–seven was just a waste of his time."
"I know that, god damn it! I know that and I dealt with it! What do you want me to say that I haven't said to the others a thousand times already? What I could've said to you if you hadn't fucking left?!"
"Don't even try that," hissed Raticate. "Don't you dare pretend you weren't two seconds away from kicking me out yourself, if I hadn't had the dignity to leave on my own."
"Fine!" Blue shouted. "Fucking fine! I fucked up, okay? With everyone, and especially with you! I was a horrible little asshole who was just in it for himself. I took you all for granted as long as you were willing to go along with what I wanted, and I threw you out"—he'd meant it generally, but still found himself emphasizing the "you"—"when you got fed up with it. Everyone's told me that. I've told myself that. I know I messed up!" His voice gave out as the volume and anger became too hard to maintain. "I... I think I've fixed things, mostly. I've tried to. As much as they can be fixed. Everyone else is happier now, I think. Alakazam left, too, but she was always going to leave anyway, once we were done with the League." (That was what she'd said. That was what he told himself. He could never be entirely sure that it was true.) "But I did at least get a chance to talk to her first. Apologize. I never did get a chance with you. Sometimes I really wish I had."
"Yeah, well," Raticate sighed, "we all want things, don't we." She pressed her face close to his again, so her whiskers brushed his cheeks and her teeth tapped the end of his nose. "Tell me. Do you still want to be champion? D'you still think you're cut out for it? And remember," she added, light from nowhere flashing across her teeth, "I'll know if you're lying."
He winced. Did she know what had happened? She'd been long gone by the time they'd reached the Plateau. But then again, of course this Raticate did. They were still inside his dream, inside his own head—"I'll know if you're lying"—and god knew that some stubborn part of him was still stewing over it.
Yeah, he could've stayed the champion, if he'd wanted. He could probably still do it now, if Lance hadn't settled into the position himself; his team was better than they'd ever been. (It occurred to him that there had to be some bizarro world out there, with all these super fancy bizarro versions of him, where he had managed to hang onto the job. Heh. ...ugh.) But...
"No. Not really. Not gonna pretend it wouldn't be awesome, but it wouldn't be... right. Not after the fit I threw when I left." Blue dragged his good hand down his face, over the trails left on his cheeks. "I sure wouldn't want some bratty crybaby who ragequits over two little losses representing Kanto, if I were Lance. If I were me. Especially not losses against really good teams, and isn't that what the champ's there to help them prove? Isn't that half the point?
"Besides," he added, chuckling a little. "We get to battle a lot more often at the gym, yeah? Teams're only good enough to show up at the Indigo Plateau every so often, but tons of people come through Viridian for the gym. Most challengers are near as good as you'd get up there anyway, and lots of trainers who just want to learn, you know? Trainers who want to study advanced strategy, or just want a chance to sit down and make sure they really understand their partners." (A chance to make sure they didn't turn out the way he had.)
"And you actually like that?" Raticate asked, the corners of her mouth almost twitching. "Wouldn't've pegged you as the type to want to put up with a bunch of anklebiters running around waving their baby pidgey in your general direction."
"Well, they're not usually that little. Probably couldn't tolerate that, you're right." He grimaced, less because of his arm and more at the thought of babysitting. "Sometimes the Viridian Trainer's School takes little day trips to the gym, though. They get to watch a couple battles, and then bombard me with a million questions after. They wanna know how high Pidgeot can fly, and how I got to be friends with a gyarados that big. They wanna know what to do when your fast pokémon gets trapped in a trick room, or what moves it's best to teach a fire-type so they don't get caught out too bad by their weaknesses. I also get a lot about what it's like to fight Red." He rolled his eyes, but he was smiling. "And I can tell them all that, and I know they'll remember and maybe even do something with it. It's nice to get recognized and then... have that actually mean something, I guess."
"Hm. That's pretty neat. I think..." Raticate closed her eyes for a second. "I think I like this Blue Oak better than the one I met before."
"I think I do, too."
"No one's mad at you for havin' goals. No one's saying you're not allowed to be proud of what you've accomplished." Raticate unhooked her claws from his jacket and dropped to the ground, all the fire gone from her eyes; exhaustion had taken its place. "But you have gotta relax, Tiny. Stop hinging all that on havin' the spotlight shinin' on you all the time. Have a little more faith in the fact that you know what you've done. That we... that your team knows what you've all done. Like you said, none of the rest of this matters, right?" She paused, thought for a moment, then smiled softly. "Frankly, seems like it'd be a hell of a lot less stressful if sometimes things weren't about you anyway. Leaves room for some real R&R time, yeah?"
"Heh. Yeah. R&R. That'd be nice."
Neither spoke for a minute or two, Blue nursing the subsiding ache in his arm while Raticate worried at her whiskers, cleaning the final flecks of blood and shadow away.
"Hey," Blue said at last, easing himself down onto the floor. Kinda tricky to stay on his feet, honestly. Why was everything so heavy all of a sudden? His legs, his arms, his head, his eyelids. He had to focus, though. He had to know. "Hey, where... where are you? For real, I mean?"
Raticate's whiskers blew out momentarily as she snorted. "C'mon, Tiny. You're dreamin', remember? I'm not really her, and I'm not really here. Don't get me wrong, I'm more than happy to slap you around with your own subconscious all day and then some, but I don't know anythin' you don't already." She turned slightly, as if to look over her shoulder at a point in the distance. "One can safely assume 'somewhere out there'. Presumably still in Kanto, but who knows? Maybe this rat-on-a-ship thing isn't just your concussed imagination and I really would want to stow away on a cruiseliner. Could be kickin' it on the beach with some cousins in Alola right about now."
It was a stupid question, wasn't it. Should've thought harder before wasting his last couple of words in this stupid nightmare. Understandable miscalculation, though. The pain in his arm might've vanished, and it wasn't flopping around like a noodle anymore, but his head was starting to throb. Little tricky to follow a train of... thing. Word. Thought. Yeah, that one.
"Wherever I am," she added quietly, still looking away, "I'm probably havin' a grand old time without you."
Yeah. Yeah, probably. Why wouldn't she be? What would she miss a trainer like him for, anyway? If she hadn't forgotten about him already, then... well, no, he didn't want her to, even if he wouldn't blame her. But this wasn't some sappy movie where she was guaranteed to come running back to him and want to be his friend again just because he apologized. Fixing real-world fuck-ups wasn't such a sure thing.
Still had to try, though.
"But... look." Raticate sighed again. "If I know me—or, I s'pose, if you think you know me, whatever, bleh—then if you ever do catch up to me, I... I figure it'd probably still be nice to hear you say whatever it is you think you gotta say. I guess."
Blue slumped against something large and reassuringly sturdy. The wall? No, something cooler than the wall. Felt good against his head. Good for relaxing. He closed his eyes. "I'm sorry, Raticate," he mumbled. "I'm sorry that I was..."
The last thing he noticed before everything turned into nothing was her cold little nose, nudging its way under his hand so he could feel her soft, warm fur, give her a little pat on the head. "Save it, Tiny. Tell me when you find me."
