d'rascal101
Youngster
An idea that's been kicking around my head for over a decade now. Inspired in part by Lamora's seminal fic, 'A Game of Champions', as well as many others in the same vein. Never thought I'd actually get around to writing it down and planning the story out, but the more I did the more I felt like it was worth pursuing. Quite a heavy AU, based on the premise of how divergent your life becomes with just a few mistakes, a few bad choices, and a bit of bad luck.
AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/83970476
Summary: Sinnoh is a nation held together by controlled violence and carefully managed lies, and Dawn Berlitz has spent ten years mastering both. She has fought the League's wars, buried its secrets, and writ its will across the Pokémon world. As Captain Platinum of Strike Force Victory, she is her nation's most renown warrior.
She doesn't sleep. She hears things she shouldn't. She forgets things she knows she did herself. Somewhere, a ticking clock strikes midnight, and Sinnoh's hour is at hand.
Inspired by 'A Game of Champions', by Lamora.
—————————————————————————————————————————
The silence seemed to stretch on for longer than was proper.
Dawn could hear the tick-tock of the wall clock behind her, digging into the back of her mind. The chair, if it could be called that, was comfortable enough. It reminded her of her father’s old leather recliner, the one that used to sit in the grand dining room patio overlooking the water-terrace. The rest of the room was as unremarkable as the willowy blond woman sitting in front of her.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
She leaned back, and actually tried to relax. The moment her eyes closed, a nagging feeling of unease began to blossom in the tips of her eyelashes. An itch she knew well. One that, given enough time, would turn to a blistering burning she could not ignore. A feeling of soiled sandpaper rubbing on the inside of her eyelids. Soon enough, the whispers would begin, trailing down the back of her neck and into her ears regardless of however hard she tried to ignore them.
“Ehem, Ms. Berlitz?”
Dawn opened her eyes, lazily glancing over to the spectacled woman sitting in front of her. As she did so, the woman’s hands moved and she jotted down something on the little notepad that seemed glued to her left hand.
Grunting in response, she answered, “Yes? I told you earlier, I was quite tired from last night. If we had just rescheduled-”
The therapist cut her off, all while continuing to take her notes, “I’m afraid that wouldn’t have been possible, Ms. Berlitz. You’ve already delayed our meeting thrice already.”
‘*I wonder why*’, Dawn thought spitefully.
Only slim slivers of dull red and orange broke through the window, well past sunset as it was. There was no artificial light, candle or bulb, that shone in the silence of the therapist’s office. It was a remarkably small office for such an important person. And just as remarkably dull. A lone desk and office chair were pushed up against the north side of the room, and a singular window on the east wall provided the only light. Even during the middle of the day, the room must have been unbearably dark given the utter lack of light sources she could see. There was a packed bookshelf and several rows of drawers pushed up against the back. Nothing notable. The most interesting thing was her collection of tomes on psychic-types.
Again, the woman broke her out of her reverie, “Still, I’m glad that you decided to come in today. Don’t worry, most of my patients aren’t nearly as apprehensive during the second meeting as they are during the first.”
That almost made Dawn chuckle, her eyes half-lidded and brimming with tiredness, but alert nonetheless. The glare and light shining off the doctor’s glasses seemed far too bright for the dull shadows of the room. Dawn couldn’t see her eyes at all.
She voiced her thoughts, “Do I seem apprehensive to you?”
The therapist seemed hesitant for a moment, but let a nervous smile play to her lips as she replied.
“Well, it would certainly be something if someone like myself could intimidate a venerable trainer as renown as yourself. Tell me then, why did you reschedule our appointment so many times?”
The sun was beginning to dip well over the horizon, and would soon be casting the room almost entirely into the shadow of night. The fiery hue of sunset still lingered, but only just.
Dawn shrugged, “Several things came up. Perhaps you should ask Lady Cynthia why. Strike Force Victory is under her direct control. I don’t have much say over where we go or when, despite my ‘captaincy’.”
She made sure to stress the venom in the last word. Her feelings on the current situation were well known throughout the Lily of the Valley, and for some reason this skinny therapist had the highest level of security clearance in the Sinnoh League possible for civilians. If she’d been assigned as her therapist, then it was fair for Dawn to assume she’d seen her file.
The doctor seemed amused, “Well, we’re here now, and regardless of however long it took for us to begin, I want you to take your time with this session. Therapeutic dialogue is most effective when made a regular part of your routine, not just as a one-off. Tell me, how is your sleep schedule these days?”
Huffing, Dawn bit back a retort, choosing to lie instead, “My sleep is well.”
Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
The woman’s writing was near silent, as if the pen was gliding on a sheet of oil rather than paper. Over her many years of special operations work, Dawn’s senses were trained to a razor’s edge, and she could tell the doctor was using some sort of silent stylus rather than traditional pen and paper. She’d never even flipped a page on the tiny notebook in her left hand, despite how much she’d have to have written by now.
When the woman chose to let the silence drag on rather than reply, Dawn sighed and gave her a proper answer.
“Not that well, I suppose. Certainly not as well as it could be. But I’ve always had trouble with sleep.”
The woman’s pen came to a stop, the last rays of the dusk sun mingling with moonlight to reflect off her large spectacles once more. Squint as she might, Dawn couldn’t see the woman’s eyes through the glare of her lens.
“Tell me about that. Why don’t you start from the beginning, actually. When did you first starting having sleep trouble?”
Dawn considered giving her another nonsense answer again. But, it was almost nighttime. She was tired and wanted to be home on one of her few nights in Jubilife. Besides, after everything Barry had done in preparation for this meeting today, he’d never let her hear the end of it if she just walked out because the therapist annoyed her too much. They’d not even really started yet.
She sighed, “It started when my father died…”
—————————————————————————————————————————
She could still hear her mother’s scream. She did most nights, in fact. Ever since the first.
Berlitzbergz, the ancestral home of the House of Berlitz, had been quiet as a mouse that night. Dawn had been woken by the shrill shrieking of her mother, and ran down to find her weeping and howling near the entrance to the family parlor room. Fallen and sobbing on her knees, Yanase Berlitz was in such a state that Dawn was utterly shocked. Normally cold, cultured, and composed, Yanase had always been the very picture of old Hisui nobility. She’d raised both her children with a firm hand, always calm and collected even when their father was prone to outbursts of sentimentality.
She’d run downstairs without a care for her own safety, to find a scene that would stick with her for the rest of her life.
Yanase Berlitz had lost all composure, practically on her knees as she sobbed and wailed, her sharp nails rending her scalp and hair with thin streaks of blood. To her left the receiver of their landline phone bobbed up and down on its coiled wire. Phones were a rarity, and landline receivers like those found at Berlitzbergz were a bit of an anachronism. Out of the receiver, Dawn could hear the muted buzzing of someone speaking heatedly on the other end of the line.
Dawn had been the first to find her, but certainly not the last. Her mother’s wails echoed throughout the halls, likely even reaching the servant’s quarters in the lower floors. Sebastian, their butler, was the first of them to arrive. Making a beeline for Yanase, he spared young Dawn only a cursory glance, one full with worry, before running over to comfort Yanase.
“My Lady! What has come over you? What- What has-”
Her mother could only continue to wail. She paid as much heed to Sebastian as she had to Dawn.
The buzzing from the phone’s receiver continued to grow louder. Sebastian was far too busy with her mother to even notice. By now, even though it was well past midnight, the sobbing and screaming had made their way throughout the house, drawing servant after servant to come and check on what was happening. Sebastian was barking at two of the maids to bring water, and another to call for Dr. Moon. The receiver continued to angrily buzz in the corner, forgotten by all but Dawn.
Slowly, she began to creep over, the voice on the other end growing ever louder. It was a large booth style landline, built into the marble counter of their reception room, with fine woodwork and gilding decorating it in the style and blazon of House Berlitz. It was practically an antique, kept by her father out of his love for history more than any practicality. Her fingers wrapped around the handle, and Dawn pulled the phone to her ear.
“-must listen! The entire ship is gone, my Lady. They are out there as we speak with Gyarados, still searching. Please, can you hear me? Lady Berlitz, you *must* seal the manse, and call the coterie. We might still salvage ourselves from this. My Lady, *please*, can you hear me? Professor Rowan is en route alongside Master Palmer, they are intending to secure the cargo but-”
Someone snatched the phone away from her ear, and Dawn turned with wide eyes to see Sebastian angrily glaring down at her, the landline receiver in his hand.
—————————————————————————————————————————
The rest of the night passed in a blur. Once Sebastian had a moment to actually make her mother sit down and take a sip of water, she’d begun to calm. Sputtering between half-held sobs, she had ordered Dawn taken back to her room the first chance she could.
Despite the late hour, people would be arriving soon to contain the fallout. Berlitzbergz was to again fill with researchers, trainers, public relations ‘experts’, and every other profession under the sun. Dawn, and particularly her elder brother, were well used to such a thing. They’d grown up at the feet of their father, the famed researcher and inveterate politician, Lord Berlitz. Their mother, Lady Yanase, was one of the most active socialites in Sinnoh, hailing from an ancient clan that had settled here when this land was still called Hisui. The House of Berlitz was known from Canalave to Sunyshore, and Dawn had seen more of Sinnoh by the time she was four than most Sinnohans would in their lifetime.
She knew the stunt well, though she’d never seen Berlitzbergz readied with such hurry, nor so late at night.
All the lights flickered on, one by one, illuminating the grounds as cars began to roll through the great double-gates and into the long driveway. One after another, from her window Dawn watched faceless suits filter into the reception room as the stars twinkled overhead. The night sky was unnaturally black, and no hint of the moon could be seen. Dawn had been brought back to her room and sternly told to go back to bed before the maid locked the door and left. Now all she could do was watch from her window as more and more strangers arrived.
Despite her young age, she was only ten when it happened, Dawn had already gleaned the truth of the situation from the brief few seconds she was allowed on the phone.
The sheer number of people entering the home was another sign. The last time this many people had appeared with no prior warning had been during the Rotom Disaster when she was eight. But Dawn was a clever girl, her father always used to say she was much sharper than her brother, though he’d been more hard-working. She still didn’t want to truly believe that they were truly gone. Not then. It had taken her years to come to terms with what had truly happened.
For on that night, the S.S. Viscount had sunk en route from Pastoria to Sandgem. It had been an utterly routine voyage, a common way to bypass the long trip around the southern coast of Sinnoh, the lands still uncharted by the route-system, and where only experienced trainers well used to off-routing dared to tread. The ship had been carrying some immensely valuable cargo, along with even more invaluable souls on board. Two in specific.
Her father, and her brother. Along with all of her father’s research from the last two decades. Hundreds of valuable specimens, catalogues of classified research, and multitudes of complex machinery. The S.S Viscount had been chartered specifically for the trip, a world-class vessel capable of sailing from Johto to Hoenn and back again on a single tank of fuel. She’d later learn that the hull had been designed to withstand a few seconds under an active hyper-beam, and enough water-types had been present on board as to have nullified any threat from any shore-dwelling wild pokemon. And there had been lifeboats on board, coupled with the standard Natu teleportation protocol for VIPs, which her father and brother most certainly had been.
All she’d known at the time was that her father was moving his laboratory to Sandgem Town, another step in the Sinnoh-wide research integration initiative that Professor Rowan had launched a few years before her birth. Her brother would be spending the summer there with their father, beginning his internship as a researcher in the Pokemon Professor’s own laboratory. The plan had been for Yanase and Dawn to set sail a month or two after the S.S Viscount landed in Sandgem.
And at the time, and for the next year, she’d still held out hope that they’d be found.
Ships sinking of the southern coast of Sinnoh weren’t that uncommon. It was the most commonly sailed route in Sinnoh, barring transit between the mainland and her northwestern islands, and some veteran trainers even chose to surf the entire length of the coast on pokemon-back. Squads of Gyarados and Milotic were likely already diving deep in the water, along with a small army of Lapras and other surface pokemon attempting to, at the least, locate the wreckage. Transponders and trackers didn’t work off the southern or northern coasts of Sinnoh, but so long as her father had managed to secure even a few of his pokeballs, that shouldn’t have been a problem.
She didn’t sleep that night, staring listlessly out the window with her head resting on the sill. As the sun’s light finally began to break over the edge of the horizon, on what she could see would be a very cloudy day, more and more cars began to roll into the driveway.
With morning came the entire public-relations team, the people Dawn liked least. She eyed them spitefully from the upstairs as they made their way into the reception room and out of her sight. The din and growing commotion down there could barely be concealed from her, even as far away from the center of it as she was. Dawn had already considered sneaking out, but seeing her mother in that strange and distorted fury had utterly frightened the girl. She had never seen Yanase in such a state, wailing and scratching her scalp bloody as she screamed murder.
Still, her mother had surely regained control of her senses by now. Dawn had never even seen her father in such a state of ‘sentimentality’. That was what her mother called it when he gave in to an emotional outburst, as he was wont to do. Her brother had been quite like that as well, fiery in temperament and quick to anger. He’d once broken another boy’s teeth because of something the boy had said about their mother, though he didn't tell her what. And he’d been just as protective of Dawn, and the best brother any girl could have hoped for.
Blinking the worry from her eyes, little Dawn stepped out the window and onto the balcony that overlooked the front-garden. She wasn’t supposed to be stepping outside the window onto the terrace, but she’d long ago figured out how to open the window past the height restrictor her father had installed on it a few years ago. In later years, she’d realized that he’d purposefully installed a rather flimsy restrictor, having always intended for Dawn to either wiggle it till it broke, or figure out how to remove it.
Tip-toeing out onto the terrace, it was only a short walk over to where one of the gutter-pipes met the drain, and Dawn wrapped her small form around the heavy bronze of the pipes and did her best to quietly slide down the pipe and towards the ground floor. Dawn was on the second floor of the house, and the slide was not as daunting as it might have seemed. The guards, and there was no shortage of them, were all either patrolling the grounds or gathered at the grand double-gate, checking IDs and scanning cars before allowing them to enter.
The pipe let her down on the edge of entrance, and after a few cursory checks to made sure she hadn’t been seen, she made her way over. If any of the house Gallade were around, she’d have been caught instantly, but the young girl had correctly surmised that they would all either be patrolling the perimeter, or vetting the strangers at the main gate.
Though the house was packed full, almost everyone was in the reception room or spilling out into the grand hall. Peeking out from the main entrance, she could see that a number of the newcomers had set up workstations and laptops, on couches or chairs of their choosing, speaking animatedly with their peers as they furiously typed away. The first thing she did was count how many people she could see. The reception room could seat a good thirty people, and there was at least fifteen more spilling out into the grand hall.
She moved away from the main entrance, and attempting to round the corner of the house. From there, she made her way over to a specific window, one whose curtains were only half drawn, and from where a terrible din could be heard. The back window to the reception room was always somewhat shrouded, and one’s attention was always directed out the wall-length front window, towards the enormous back-lawn and sculpture gallery.
Quietly, her hands worked the base of the window, and ever so gently Dawn began to lift. All while keeping her head well below window level, and her back flat with the wall. As she heard the smallest release of air, enough of a gap opened up that she could put her ear to it, close her eyes, and try to properly listen. And slowly, the voices began to resolve.
“-but we cannot assume that we will find them, my Lady. It has already been six hours.”
“He’s quite right, Lady Berlitz. Two new teams at South Sinnoh Port have sent in their Porygons, and we have them en-route to Battle Isle for deep-imaging, but preliminary scans suggest that-”
“Enough!”
That was her mother’s voice. It made Dawn flinch, even though it was not aimed at her. Still, the ferocity in the woman’s tone left nothing to the imagination, and Dawn was relived to see that her stern mother had recovered from her earlier state.
Her mother hadn’t stopped speaking, but Dawn had edged just a bit too far from the small gap she’d opened up in the window. It took her a second to realign her ear canal.
“-offering nothing but foolishness. We will redouble all efforts. I will fly to Sage Town to coordinate the SAR from there. And there is still the possibility that the wreckage was swept upstream, along with any lifeboats, into the river estuaries of the Grand Marsh.”
Dawn’s blood ran cold at hearing that. A map of Sinnoh’s southeastern coast sprang to her mind. For leagues south of Pastoria, the coast turned to a murky swamp through which no reliable land or sea crossing ran. It was one of the truest wilds of Sinnoh, known for the whirlpools that drifted off the coast, and the mangrove forests that could ensnare ships whole. But to the S.S Viscount, sailing in a wide berth around the estuary, it should have presented no challenge.
“Leader Wake and his gym trainers are already sailing down the Safari Zone and into the wilds. Their report from staging ground zeta indicates no wild pokemon outbreaks in the region, nor do-”
Someone else cut in, “Searching East of Sage Town is a waste, my Lady. The transceiver made contact with Sandgem before cutting out, and the go-around must be regarded as a false positive.”
A smarmy voice joined the cacophony, “And then there’s the matter of the press. Those kids at South Sinnoh Port have already begun talking. I’ve got no less than a dozen reporters publishing their reports. I’m trying to get the papers to issue a correction, but the real shitstorm will hit this morning, when news breaks properly. The Jubilife office is already swarming with the roaches. *Scheiße*, they might even try to come here, to Berlitzbergz, and-”
At that her mother’s iron voice cut through the din once more, “No. They will not. I will give the press conference at Sage Town. Tell them Berlitzbergz is empty, and bar the road from Hearthome. I will have no parasites coming here to prey on my home and hearth while we suffer through this tragedy. Has the mayor replied yet? Or Fantina? I need to speak with her at once.”
Dawn could hear the uncomfortable shuffling through the double-paned windows. No one said a word.
And then, one of them spoke up, “My Lady… Leader Fantina’s office feels they have made themselves clear. While current events are a tragedy, her involvement-”
It was at that point that a meaty hand came down on Dawn’s shoulder, breaking her out of her concentration. With wide eyes, she looked up to see Sebastian the butler.
—————————————————————————————————————————
He’d made tea for her. Her favorite kind too. Grand Red Robe was the colloquial name for a specific strain of red tea that grew only from the mother trees surrounding the Bell Tower in Johto, tended to by the ceremonial eevee-dancers. The trees had, allegedly, taken root during the era in which Ho-Oh still perched upon the Tin Tower, as it was known in those days. Her father had told her that the tale was entirely horseshit, but that didn't stop her from loving the tea.
She held the saucer gingerly in her hands, looking down at her reflection in the bright scarlet of the the tea. The sun had begun to rise in full by now. It was well past breakfast time. And so, dear Sebastian had the idea to bring the young Lady’s breakfast to her bedroom, being perhaps the one soul in all of Berlitzbergz that had not forgotten about her existence, given recent events.
Dawn gave a sad smile as she watched Sebastian clean up the shattered fragments of the first cup. He’d come into the room only to find Dawn missing, and the window wide open. Given what was going on in the reception room below, she could only imagine the panic Sebastian had felt at seeing her room empty. The shattered remains of the first cup of tea he’d brought to her room were evidence of that.
Still, he wasn’t the butler of House Berlitz for nothing, a quick glance out the window and he’d tracked Dawn’s trail quite well. He’d even avoided letting anyone else, maid or mother, know what Dawn was up to. At the time, she’d chalked it up to Sebastian just not wanting to worry her mother.
As she watched him pick up the last pieces of porcelain, he sighed heavily. Bending over, he began at the arduous task of removing the tea stain from her pink carpets. It was made from Bewear scalpleather, infinitely superior to the gaudy Jigglypuff fur that was so popular in Hearthome. Personally, she wouldn’t cover her Skitty with that. The Bewear throw had been a gift from Elite-Four Lucian for her ninth birthday. And truth be told, Sebastian wasn’t doing the best job of getting the stain out.
Dawn spoke up, still not having taken a sip of the tea, “Why don’t you just have Remi clean that up?”
She could see Remi’s pokeball on Sebastian’s belt, glinting the red and black gold of a luxury ball. Remi was Sebastian’s Audino, and the pokemon she’d seen him call on more often than any other.
He chuckled in response, still working on the throw, “How do you think people got anything done before the Enlightenment, my little Lady?”
Dawn rolled her eyes at him, setting her saucer and cup to the side. The Enlightenment was the Sinnohan name for the era in which Pokemon first emerged onto the world. Most regions had their own names for such things, given the long period of geographical isolation that had followed the emergence of Pokemon into the world. Before the era of exploration and expedition, Sinnoh had been peopled by only a handful of clans that descended from the original human population of the land, though much reduced from the strife and chaos that had followed in the wake of the Enlightenment.
Her own mother descended from one such clan, the *Haiiro no*. Her father on the other hand descended from the settlers who had come to Sinnoh when it was still Hisui, and founded the first expeditionary colonies in the land. Barring Celestic Town, Eterna City, and a handful of others, almost every extant municipality in modern Sinnoh could be traced to the expeditionary settlers who arrived from far-off lands to colonize Sinnoh.
She gave him a rueful smile, “Professor Amaranth says they used machines back then. Today we have Pokemon. Why don’t you have one of the maids do it?”
Sebastian sighed, taking a moment to stand up straight and put his hand on his back. Truth be told, both she and he could see that his incessant scrubbing was only making the situation worse. It was as if he thought the harder and longer he rubbed at it, eventually the stain would just up and suddenly disappear.
Instead, it had only truly spread. He’d mopped up the water, but Grand Red Robe was a terribly strong tea, loaded with tannins. There was little he could have done short of sending it in to the cleaners.
His eyes seemed filled with melancholy, “Oh, I’d rather not tell them why I spilled the tea in the first place, my little Lady. Speaking off, you’ve not touched your cup, or your biscuits.”
Dawn’s eyes followed his finger as it gestured to her now-cold second cup. She was a bit ashamed. Sebastian had gone through all the trouble to make her morning tea, steeped carefully to perfection, regardless of everything that was going on. She could see the bags under his eyes, growing heavier by the hour. Sebastian was old. And *proper* old, not like her parents. He’d been their butler ever since her father was a young boy.
And as her thoughts drifted back to her father, her eyes turned downcast.
“Sebastian… Do you think they’ll find papa and-”
He cut her off, inhaling sharply, “So you *do* know. How? Did you overhear at the window? Or… was it the phone?”
She shrugged, “Both, I think? And mama was… She was so scared, I’ve never seen her like-”
Before she knew it, the sad old man was moving towards her, kneeling down on one knee with a grunt so he could sit at eye-level with the little girl. Even seated on her bed as she was, Sebastian was an enormous man, six and a half foot and broad shouldered. His age had ruined his posture, but not his physique. A single gloved hand came to firmly hold both her own.
“My Lady,” his voice was soft, “You must be strong, though I know it will be hard. You must be strong for your mother, and she for you. I- I do not know what has happened to your father’s boat, but all the resources of House Berlitz and her allies have been called to the task to search for him and your brother, and to bring them home. They *will* find them. I know your father well, he would not want you to give up hope in this moment. Why…”
He chuckled, though it was full of worry, “Why I suppose that wheresoever your father is right now, waiting to be found, he is in good health — hale and hearty, and making his japes and jokes and cheering the spirits of all those around him, including your brother. They may be going through some difficulty, just as we all are here at Berlitzbergz, but rest assured. Whatever has happened, they will return to us.”
Dawn blinked tears away that she hadn’t known were there until a moment ago. Everyone said she took after her mother, and her brother after their father, but she hadn’t realized just how cold and scared she’d been this whole time. Her hands began to shake in Sebastian’s, and try as she might she couldn’t voice her thoughts. Slowly, but surely, she began to sob.
The butler pulled her in, ever so slightly, letting her rest her eyes on his shoulder as he patted her back with one hand, the other still holding her’s.
“There, there…” he said, “It is all well and good to be frightful in such times. But, you must be strong as well. Just as your father has been his whole life.”
And that was how she stayed, for longer than she had expected to, sobbing into Sebastian’s shoulder, before-
—————————————————————————————————————————
The therapist cut in, jarring Dawn for a moment.
She’d just begun to properly get into it. Her eyes half-closed and her brain comfortably half-asleep. For the briefest of moments, the incessant whispers and buzzing that dominated her every waking moment had thoroughly receded, and she’d entered some kind of strange trance, reciting the tale from memory, as if to a stranger in a faraway land, or from a book she’d never read before.
It was so annoying she didn’t even catch the woman’s question.
She bit out, her voice dripping with irritation, “Sorry, say that again?”
This late in the night that Dawn could hardly see the shape of the woman in the chair just a few feet away from her. There was enough moonlight to see most of the office, but the position of her therapist had her in the wall’s shadow. Even her glasses were nothing more than a pale glare that shifted as Dawn blinked.
“Sebastian, your butler; he seemed more of a parent to you on that day than your mother was. Was that a common occurrence growing up?”
The buzzing in the back of her skull was growing louder, and Dawn’s nostrils flared as she realized that her therapist had interrupted her retelling to ask such an unbelievably stupid question.
Letting her irritation show, she replied, “No. My father was the sentimental parent, my mother was the strict parent. They were good together.”
She could sense the woman’s next question before it was even voiced, and Dawn bit her tongue at giving such an answer.
“What about after your father’s death? When it was just your mother?”
Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
“She was not equipped to be a single parent. She spent the next few years searching obsessively for the Viscount. She was in Sage Town or Sandgem or South Sinnoh Port. I hardly saw her those years.”
She could see the wagging glint of the woman’s pen in the darkness. Her eyes had been trained for covert special operations years ago, and she was still at her technical peak. It boggled Dawn’s mind that the woman had herself at such an odd angle. Had they been situated in almost any other orientation, she’d have had a perfect picture of everything the therapist was up to. Glimmora crystal eye-implants were mandatory for every member Strike Force Victory, a policy Dawn had instituted after the Full Moon Island Incident. Still, this meeting was a good reminder that all the tools of the trade would only take you so far, if the singular angle of attack was utterly wrong in the first place.
“Hmmm. Was Sebastian with you for those years your mother spent searching?”
Dawn shook her head, “He was with my mother. Sebastian was a lot more than a butler. He was the head of the family office at the time. He oversaw a hundred more important things, not just Berlitzbergz. He was indispensable to her. It was just the maids with me before I went to Hearthome.”
“I see. Please, continue.”
Instead, she shook her head, sitting up in the recliner. The frenzied noises in the back of her ears were growing louder. It was getting close to midnight.
She voiced as much, “Its late, doctor. I think we should call it for the day.”
The woman’s glasses turned to the window, and she could hear something bordering on feigned surprise in her tone.
“Oh! Goodness me, it is late. Shall we pick this up next week? Same time and day work for you?”
Standing up, Dawn cracked the tired muscles in her back, filling the room with a series of audible pops. In her youth she’d had the figure of a pencil, but age had seen layer after layer of hard muscle added on, and many a harsh scar now dotted her once pristine skin. As she stretched, she fell into the standard limbering routine employed after emerging from a Corviknight drop-strike. She wondered why she felt so tense.
She shook her head, “No. I’ll be in Unova then. Undella Town. If you can make it we can do it there.”
Without another word, she began to make for the door, having nothing left to say to the woman. Dawn heard the surprise in her voice as the session rather abruptly came to an end.
“Oh! Well, perhaps when you’re back then? When will that-”
Cutting her off, Dawn closed the door with a final venomous remark, “Why don’t you ask the Champion about that. I’d like to know too.”
She was too polite to slam the door, but she didn't exactly close it quietly either.
—————————————————————————————————————————
They spent the drive back to her place in relative silence. It was one of the things Dawn liked most about Barry. How much he’d grown up.
She spared him a glance, having been resting her warm forehead on his cool passenger-seat window with her eyes closed for most of the ride so far.
He was wearing the same spec-ops vest as her, over an exceptionally gaudy orange long-sleeve, though at least his black cargo pants were League-compliant. His wavy blonde hair, flying in the wind and refusing any direction, had only grown longer with age. It now more closely resembled the long mane that his father, Frontier-Brain Palmer, had once worn with such style. Though, she thought ruefully, Barry could never pull it off quite like his father had.
Streetlights flickered in even intervals, black poles standing like ever-watchful sentries over the roads of Jubilife City. Barry’s headlights carved a narrow tunnel through the dark, illuminating slick asphalt and the occasional scrap of paper skittering across the road like something alive. The rain had stopped hours ago, but everything still glistened, reflecting light in distorted fragments. As they turned a corner and took the off-ramp from the highway, neon from the downtown signs bled into puddles, turning the street into a fractured mirror.
He slowed at an intersection with no signals. Just a blinking amber light, persistent and indifferent. Buildings rose on either side, their windows mostly black, a few glowing faintly like watchful eyes. Somewhere above, the wind rushed against the cold steel of Jubilife’s skyscrapers, the only such structures in Sinnoh outside of the few that could be found in Sunyshore.
The radio hissed. He hadn’t turned it on.
A voice almost formed out of the static—just enough to make them glance at the dial, then back to the road. Nothing. Only that low, restless noise, like the city itself trying to speak and failing.
Barry tutted as he turned it off, “Damn thing. I need to get her fixed. If we weren’t leaving tomorrow I’d have just given her in today.”
Dawn chuckled. Barry’s problems with his car were legendary. She’d even bought him a new one for a birthday a few years ago, but he barely used it. Barry was one of the most sentimental people she knew.
“You could just tell Argyle to handle it when we’re out of the city. That’s what the staff is for.”
Barry laughed, “Please, like I’d trust Argyle or his goons with Dasha. Speaking off repairs though, how’d that shrink do with your head?”
This time Dawn was the one who laughed, though it was slight. Dasha was Barry’s name for his car; though to be specific, his father Palmer had been the one to name the then cherry-red two-seater. Back in Palmer’s youth, she’d been a top of the line sports car, but she was barely roadworthy when Barry had inherited her a decade ago.
“My head is fine, thank you very much. All she did was waste my time. Ask me questions about my childhood. Nothing I didn’t already know. You know why Cynthia’s doing this, and it has nothing to do with any ‘repairs’ to my head.”
Barry grimaced, turning a corner as he scratched at the sad fuzz that he liked to call a beard. Much like his hair, and his car, Dawn considered it to be nothing more than an active attempt to imitate his beloved father.
His own voice was thick with tiredness as well, “Well, honestly I was planning to listen in on whatever she was going to be asking, but I ended up falling asleep, ha!”
That much was true, he’d been snoring like a baby when Dawn left the doctor’s office and woke him up.
She shrugged, “I could tell you, but it really wasn’t anything important at all. I’d expected her to ask about more recent events. Not about my father’s death; that all feels like ancient history.”
He cast a worried look over to her, “You think she’s starting slow? I cased the joint before your meeting, and put in the psywave detector right where you told me to. You didn’t feel it go off at all? Even once?”
Dawn shook her head, her eyes narrowing as some alertness returned to them.
“No. Not once. It is possible she knew about it beforehand, and decided to leave it in place to give me a false sense of security for the first session. It did its work though. I managed to start and end the capture period right on time.”
He grunted, “You took it when you left right?”
She tried not to snort in response, “Who do you think I am?”
Barry gave her a melancholy smile, “I figured. Had to check though, if we get caught I’m definitely cooked. I don’t think Cynthia is-”
“Cynthia won’t do anything. She had her chance a long time ago.”
He chuckled at that.
Truth be told, Dawn didn’t know if Barry thought that was true. Neither of them knew where Cynthia’s actual tolerance for Dawn’s rebelliousness lay. They could only make educated guesses, and anyone was bound to be this nervous when the stakes were this high. She was asking a lot of Barry. The situation right now was precarious as it was, and any one act might finally tip the scales into Cynthia finally calling for both their heads, and writing off her little project as a sunk cost.
They drove in silence for a while, before Barry again broke it. She was thankful that he often did that without prompting.
“With the briefing tomorrow, you sure the team is prepped? I feel like we’re going into this one half-assed, *again*. Look I’m all for winging it, but if the intel on that pod of Wailord is true then-”
She cut him off, eyes turning away to look out the window, “I already talked about it with Bertha. She’s insistent we can’t delay. The entire region will be in Castelia this weekend, and according to her…”
Dawn mockingly mimicked the old woman’s faux-loving tone, dripping with saccharine venom. Bertha and her fantastic PR team had spent decades deluding the public into believing she was just a kind old grandmother, and while she never dropped the act (even during meetings where assassinations had been openly planned at the table), Dawn and Barry knew well just who she was. Their encounters with her during their youth had dispelled the myth of her personality a long time ago.
“‘Why, it will only make exfiltration just a *wee* harder my dear, I’m sure you and SF Victory shall return without any harm. Oh, the very *future* of Sinnoh is counting on this operation. *So many* operational teams have been deployed, but you are the first team-leader to worry me in such a way.’”
Barry chuckled, though it was devoid of his usual warmth, “Yeah, I don’t know why I asked. Still, might be fun. I mean hey, many people can say they’ve seen a Wailord.”
Dawn didn’t share his enthusiasm. The largest known pokemon alive by a long shot, and perhaps the largest to have ever lived, Wailord were capable of generating sonic waves in the water capable of shredding flesh like it was paper. All from miles away and all without intending any hostility. If a pod grew too excited, their mere act of communicating with one another sent vast sonic blasts through the surrounding water, acting like some mix of sonar and radio, and giving them a perfect awareness of their local waters for leagues. It was impossible to ambush a pod, and no predator (including man) would dare to try.
They were generally not considered dangerous, and the few researchers lucky enough to spot them in the wild had nothing to say but effusive praise of their natural beauty. They theorized that because almost nothing was stupid enough to approach a Wailord pod with ill intent, they’d evolved over generations to have a remarkably docile temperament. Wailord pods usually lingered far off the coast as well, well away from the few shipping lanes that man had managed to restore in the Post-Enlightenment era. A few trainers had managed to raise Wailmer in coastal regions or after bringing them into freshwater habitats, but those few never reached the mind-boggling sizes of their wild cousins. She wondered how a pod would react to the presence of a spec ops team freshly drenched in blood.
“Hopefully we won’t have to count ourselves so *lucky*, our job’s hard enough as it is without a Wailord pod complicating it. Speaking of, did you book the simulation for our dry-run before briefing tomorrow? I want to put the team through their paces so I can get a rough idea of how the actual exit out of Undella is going to go.”
Barry nodded, and as he did so he made one final turn, coming in to maneuver his car through the driveway of a skyscraper building. It was late enough that even her doorman was off duty, though Dawn could spot him at the lobby desk even from this distance and the dim light.
With a clap of his hand on his thighs, Barry leaned back and sighed, “Well, we’re here. You sure you’ll be good?”
Dawn considered his question for a moment, before giving him a nod, “See you at simulation tomorrow. And don’t forget your dress uniform for briefing this time.”
Unlocking the car door, Dawn stepped out and gave Barry a last wave goodbye, before heading into the dimly lit entrance of her apartment building. It was one of the nicer buildings in Jubilife’s most expensive neighborhood, and it looked like it. Art deco lines of gilded bronze threaded their way throughout the building’s white-marble facade, and impressionistic sculptures of proud flying type pokemon crowned the twenty-story building’s penthouses.
Most of the apartments on the upper floors had balconies as well, though only a handful were still lit this late at night. She spared his still-parked car a final look as she entered, her sharp eyes seeing that he was on his phone. Likely sending her another PokePok video she’d ignore until he brought it up in person and demanded she actually watch it.
She swiped her key fob for entry, and gave her doorman only the briefest of nods to acknowledge him before making her way over to the elevator and hitting the button for the 20^th^ floor.
As it ascended, Dawn made a point to keep her eyes glued to her feet. The whispers and scraping that forever plagued her had returned almost the moment she left Barry’s car, though they’d not exactly been quiet before. The elevator was always particularly difficult, given the placement of mirrors surrounding her from all four sides.
If she kept her eyes closed, the whispers grew louder. If she opened her eyes, she have to face the mirror. And so, she just kept her gaze half-lidded, and glued to the ground. A third option, but not one that was particularly pleasant either. She’d always been rather talented at finding a supposed third option when presented with a binary choice. Dawn had learned over the long years, however, that such struggle was almost always moot. At the end of the day, all paths seemed to lead to the same end.
The elevator reached its destination with a ‘ping’ letting her know, and she was stepping out before the elevator doors had even fully opened. There had originally been four penthouses on the 20^th^ floor, and it had been a bitch and a half to force the last owner to sell after she bought out the first three. She’d not bothered actually renovating the four separate units into a singular space, instead just adding doors that allowed easy movement between the units. Still, she avoided the south unit in particular, and made a beeline for the north door and into her living room. As the door opened, she had to squint because of just how bright it was.
Unlike everywhere she’d been in the last twelve hours, her unit was almost absurdly well lit. Sleek and modern light fixtures held the most powerful fairy-resonance bulbs that humanity could create in the modern age. Installed at perfect intervals so as to reduce, or utterly eliminate, the presence of any shadow.
She was particularly appreciative of the Flabébé flower wicks used in their construction. They weren’t of a variable brightness though, and having her unit lit up like a hospital late at night would have been too visible for the notoriously private heir to House Berlitz. A complex electrochemical tint on her windows allowed her to turn the windows wholly black from the outside, while remaining transparent from within. It prevented any from seeing the inside of her unit through the floor to ceiling windows that made up almost the entire outer length of her penthouse.
There were other protections as well; ones she’d have to inevitably check on either tonight or early tomorrow morning. It was rare for her these days to be in Jubilife for consecutive nights, and almost irresponsible not to check whatever was recorded by her cameras, psywave recorders, motion sensors, and other such devices, during her absence.
Kicking off her shoes, Dawn’s fingers went over to her belt where five pokeballs of varying kinds were hooked. With her fingers hovering over the buttons, she began to make her rounds.
In a series of flashes, her team materialized. Barring her Rapidash, who was stabled overnight at the League’s Jubilife HQ due to lingering injuries from their last mission, everyone else was here. Her Empoleon, Lopunny, Froslass, Cherrim, and Pachirisu all appeared in varying bursts, either shaking their heads to reorient themselves, squinting at the bright light, or announcing their names as they materialized. Dawn was always cognizant of the fact that, for them, only a moment had passed from the last time she’d brought them into their balls. They knew this apartment and its sights and smells well though, and none gave her an undue reaction.
Each of the pokemon was released in turn, and each in their own little space.
The rooftop pool went to her Empoleon, having been transformed from a pool into more of a marine environment full of faux-plants, little coves, and other such simulacra.
The ‘little’ fenced garden right next to it was for her Cherrim. She always wondered whether she should expand the garden, but she’d decided to table it once Barry had told her that her Cherrim’s garden was bigger than his entire apartment.
Her Lopunny was released inside her own enormous room, one that Barry jokingly called the pillow-fort. For how much she’d spent on having a contractor work with her to create a perfect recreation of a bunny-pokemon’s burrow network using nothing but soft foam and bedding, she resented the name.
Her Froslass occupied almost half of the western unit by herself, preferring to keep away from the rest of her team even at the best of times. A series of rooms there had been hollowed out, cased with naturally worn granite from a nearby cave, and had their windows boarded up. Blocks of ice had been brought in and shaped by teams of Jynx. The enormous air conditioning units that ran continuously underneath the floor cost her a small fortune in electric costs every month, but the Berlitz estate more than covered it.
Neither she nor the rest of her pokemon much liked her Froslass’ habitat, dark, dim and cold as it was. Given that it was supposed to resemble a frozen underground cave in North Sinnoh, she could only say that the contractor had done his job well.
One by one, as they were released, Dawn clapped her hands to draw their attention, and wordlessly communicated her will to them. It wasn’t something that could be explained to a non-trainer, nor did any veteran trainer ever bother to try, but the bond between man and monster ran deeper than just hand-signals and voice commands. Humanity had dug itself back from the brink of extinction only through their cooperation with the very beasts that had sent them to the edge. There were strange and mysterious things in this world, and the bond between pokemon and trainer was perhaps the most unknowable among them.
Dawn shot each of them a genuine smile, and felt a measure of relief for what felt like the first time that day. Most of them shot her kind looks back, or grunted with tiredness as they made their way deeper into their miniature habitats. The exception was her Froslass, Yuki, who turned into cool mist and disappeared the very second she was released from her ball. The other exception was her Pachirisu, Sue.
Sue didn’t have a habitat like the others, and as Dawn began the trek towards her own bedroom, Sue’s pokeball activated, and the little rodent-pokemon materialized at her knees. She shook herself once, not unlike how a Houndour might, before rapidly blinking and looking up at Dawn. She smiled, leaning down to scratch her companion’s head, feeling the luxurious softness of Sue’s fur. Chuckling, she stood and gestured for the little rat to follow her. Unlike the rest of Dawn’s pokemon, Sue slept in the same bed as Dawn wherever they went.
The little creature was already scurrying towards the bedroom, while Dawn turned to make a stop by her bathroom and dressing room first. Despite everything, a shower and her nightly routine were still necessary. She didn’t know why she followed her schedule as if she was going to be sleeping anytime soon. At this point, she assumed it was little more than force of habit. It didn’t take her long. The days of her spending an hour getting ready for bed were long gone.
And so, when she came back into the bedroom, smiling as she took in Sue’s antics in kicking up her blanket to make herself a burrow, Dawn was entirely ready to lie down and hopefully catch her few minutes of sleep for the night. In fact, she was feeling so tired that might even have been able to take multiple short naps tonight. She never napped more than ten or twenty minutes at a time, even though theoretically she could go anywhere up to an hour or so without triggering the danger zone.
As she began to crawl into bed, her hands cooing into Sue’s fur as she did so, a cold gleam on the edge of her bedside table caught her eye. Something that she had not been expecting stared back at her, and her blood went cold. Her fingers froze in Sue’s fur, beginning to shake with a tremor she’d been holding back all day. The voices in the back of her mind, having gone somewhat quiet ever since Dawn entered her prepared space, suddenly roared back like a dam bursting at the floodgates.
Sue moved even before Dawn did, scurrying out from under her hands as she felt Dawn’s mood abruptly change. In an instant, she was in front of her trainer, her cheeks sparkling with electric light as her eyes rapidly darted back and forth, assessing all possible angles. Despite her cuteness and her age, Sue was a champion pokemon who had cut her way through the gyms of Sinnoh in her prime.
The sense of danger in the air was palpable, and Dawn’s heart had stopped in her chest. She could feel the heavy rush of blood through her veins as she stared, dumbfounded, at something that should very much *not* be on her bedside table. Moving forward on her knees, she crossed the bed to the other side and shakily stood, with Sue’s eyes still darting about and failing to see the offending cause that had so thoroughly triggered her trainer. Dawn had not shown any overt outward reaction, but that didn’t matter. She and Sue were linked in ways well beyond what she could describe, and the pokemon had sensed her master’s unease the moment it had blossomed. Rat-pokemon were jittery skitters by nature, and even small sudden movements could set them off.
But Dawn was as still as a statue as her hands reached out, grasping a well-worn red scarf that she was intimately familiar with. It was heavy, made of the finest mareep wool and dyed scarlet with Ariados shellac.
Sue had now grasped the cause of Dawn’s sudden shock, and Dawn could feel her pokemon’s danger sense suddenly fade, replaced with an intense confusion. She was confused herself. How had this appeared here? This should have been in the vault, well in the back of the south unit. Shaking hands felt open the fabric of the scarf, feeling the hard edges of metal pinned somewhere within.
She unraveled it to reveal eight gym-badges, their sterling silver and copper bits tarnished from the many years, but the gold and gems still shining with the same light they had the day she’d gained them. The scarf was caked in dust, though there were visible fingerprints all over it. Prints in places she’d certainly not touched it just now.
As her brow furrowed in paranoia of how this could have possibly happened, and whether someone had accessed her unit and left this here as a message, Sue leaned over and purposely bumped her forehead into Dawn’s hand, drawing her attention.
Dawn looked down to see a new emotion having replaced confusion in Sue’s eyes. Worry.
With a start, the memory hit her. She blinked, feeling like a fool, as her mouth opened in a silent oh.
She spoke aloud, “Oh goodness, I- I’m sorry Sue. I had forgotten.”
It was the truth. No one had come into her unit and broken into her vault, only to leave the most poignant reminder of her past on her bedside table as some sort of twisted threat or message.
She had been the one to take the scarf out the vault late last night. How could she have forgotten? It had been years since she’d seen this scarf last, and even more since she’d last worn it. It was a relic of an older and somewhat happier time, before everything had gone so wrong. She spared Sue a long look at some point, communicating her apology to her from the depths of her heart. It was no small thing to give a false-alarm to a pokemon as twitchy as a Pachirisu.
But then, for a good while, she just stood there. Staring and entranced by the badges, each story unfurling in her mind and her eyes panned over. Coal, Forest, Cobble, Fen, Relic, Mind, Icicle, and Beacon. Each told a tale, and each was weighty with long forlorn memories. In the blurry corners of her vision, she could see Sue still chittering with worry, uneasy at Dawn’s behavior. Her forgetfulness. And even her thoughtlessness.
Time began to tick onwards and the silence continued, only broken by Sue’s irregular intercessions to come back to bed, and at some point Dawn felt ice cold tears run down her face, her eyes finally unable to hold back the well.
—————————————————————————————————————————
Barry looked at his phone, praying for the nth time that his buzzer had gone off the very second that Dawn had closed the car door behind her, and not a second sooner.
He’d still not moved, his fingers wrapped around the steering wheel as his eyes almost bulged out in disbelief staring at the notification that had so suddenly popped up on his phone screen. He’d propped his phone up against the car’s radio as well. Broken as it was, he had no use for the radio, and much preferred to dedicate that space to his phone’s PokeNav when he needed it.
But right now, all he could do was thank whatever Gods existed in this world, whether they were pokemon or not, that the phone had not buzzed so much as a second earlier.
On the screen, a single notification alighted with a name that Barry had not seen in years. A name Barry had frankly never expected to see again. A name that would have caused Dawn a fury that he just as frankly could not deal with right now. He was barely equipped to deal with his own reaction.
Sparing a quick glance out the window to Dawn’s retreating form, he grabbed the phone so quickly off the radio that he accidentally turned the damn thing on again, causing a violent burst of static to crackle through his speakers before he shushed it. His eyes flickered back to his phone, now in front of him, with his hands shaking as he unlocked it and opened his text.
There it was. A name that he was sure he’d been hallucinating for a minute. For the briefest of seconds, Barry had been hoping and praying that it was just the tiredness from the past week causing his sight to distort. It was an oddly long text, especially given the sender, and Barry’s vision blurred as he tried to skim the opening. Try as he might, his eyes kept flickering back to the profile photo at the top of the chat, where a familiar name read ‘*Dia*’, and an unfamiliar picture of three teenagers stared back at him.
He clicked on it, ignoring the text for a moment, and the old profile photo opened up. He’d not thought of him in so long, that Barry had forgotten what he’d set as Lucas’ old profile photo.
It was him, Dawn, and Lucas.
Standing over the edge of a cliff, with Barry taking the photo trying to get all three of them in a wide selfie. They must have been sixteen, somewhere on the eastern coast, during their travels for Dawn’s gym-challenge. What a momentous year that had been. Nothing had been the same, either during or after that trip. Yet, they had all made their decisions and chosen to stand by them in the many years that came after. He couldn’t imagine why Lucas, his boyhood friend and the man that he’d risked his life for time and time again, would contact him after all that had happened. As far as he was concerned, Dia was dead. What remained was only a shade.
He closed the picture, perhaps more spitefully than he should have.
—————————————————————————————————————————
Would greatly appreciate any advice on which summary you find the best:
Summary: Dawn Berlitz is one of the Sinnoh League's finest: scarred, decorated, and quietly coming apart at the seams. She does not sleep. She hears things. She forgets things she should not forget. A strange therapist with unseen eyes plays her own part in the unravelling. And somewhere off the coast of the mainland, there is an island eternally calling her name. All paths seem to lead to the same end, and no matter the consequences, Dawn is determined to find a way out.
Alt Summary: My name is Lady Dawn Berlitz. I am the captain of Strike Force Victory, the heir to a dead house, and the most decorated operative in the Sinnoh League's history. I do not sleep. I hear things no one else can hear. I forget things I know I did myself.
This is the story of how I became what I am. And what I am going to do about it.
Alt Summary: Sinnoh is a nation held together by controlled violence and carefully managed lies, and Captain Dawn Berlitz has spent ten years mastering both. She has fought the League's wars, buried its secrets, and writ its will across the Pokémon world.
She doesn't sleep. She hears things she shouldn't. She forgets things she knows she did herself. Somewhere, a ticking clock strikes midnight, and Sinnoh's hour is at hand.
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AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/83970476
Summary: Sinnoh is a nation held together by controlled violence and carefully managed lies, and Dawn Berlitz has spent ten years mastering both. She has fought the League's wars, buried its secrets, and writ its will across the Pokémon world. As Captain Platinum of Strike Force Victory, she is her nation's most renown warrior.
She doesn't sleep. She hears things she shouldn't. She forgets things she knows she did herself. Somewhere, a ticking clock strikes midnight, and Sinnoh's hour is at hand.
Inspired by 'A Game of Champions', by Lamora.
—————————————————————————————————————————
Prologue
The silence seemed to stretch on for longer than was proper.
Dawn could hear the tick-tock of the wall clock behind her, digging into the back of her mind. The chair, if it could be called that, was comfortable enough. It reminded her of her father’s old leather recliner, the one that used to sit in the grand dining room patio overlooking the water-terrace. The rest of the room was as unremarkable as the willowy blond woman sitting in front of her.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
She leaned back, and actually tried to relax. The moment her eyes closed, a nagging feeling of unease began to blossom in the tips of her eyelashes. An itch she knew well. One that, given enough time, would turn to a blistering burning she could not ignore. A feeling of soiled sandpaper rubbing on the inside of her eyelids. Soon enough, the whispers would begin, trailing down the back of her neck and into her ears regardless of however hard she tried to ignore them.
“Ehem, Ms. Berlitz?”
Dawn opened her eyes, lazily glancing over to the spectacled woman sitting in front of her. As she did so, the woman’s hands moved and she jotted down something on the little notepad that seemed glued to her left hand.
Grunting in response, she answered, “Yes? I told you earlier, I was quite tired from last night. If we had just rescheduled-”
The therapist cut her off, all while continuing to take her notes, “I’m afraid that wouldn’t have been possible, Ms. Berlitz. You’ve already delayed our meeting thrice already.”
‘*I wonder why*’, Dawn thought spitefully.
Only slim slivers of dull red and orange broke through the window, well past sunset as it was. There was no artificial light, candle or bulb, that shone in the silence of the therapist’s office. It was a remarkably small office for such an important person. And just as remarkably dull. A lone desk and office chair were pushed up against the north side of the room, and a singular window on the east wall provided the only light. Even during the middle of the day, the room must have been unbearably dark given the utter lack of light sources she could see. There was a packed bookshelf and several rows of drawers pushed up against the back. Nothing notable. The most interesting thing was her collection of tomes on psychic-types.
Again, the woman broke her out of her reverie, “Still, I’m glad that you decided to come in today. Don’t worry, most of my patients aren’t nearly as apprehensive during the second meeting as they are during the first.”
That almost made Dawn chuckle, her eyes half-lidded and brimming with tiredness, but alert nonetheless. The glare and light shining off the doctor’s glasses seemed far too bright for the dull shadows of the room. Dawn couldn’t see her eyes at all.
She voiced her thoughts, “Do I seem apprehensive to you?”
The therapist seemed hesitant for a moment, but let a nervous smile play to her lips as she replied.
“Well, it would certainly be something if someone like myself could intimidate a venerable trainer as renown as yourself. Tell me then, why did you reschedule our appointment so many times?”
The sun was beginning to dip well over the horizon, and would soon be casting the room almost entirely into the shadow of night. The fiery hue of sunset still lingered, but only just.
Dawn shrugged, “Several things came up. Perhaps you should ask Lady Cynthia why. Strike Force Victory is under her direct control. I don’t have much say over where we go or when, despite my ‘captaincy’.”
She made sure to stress the venom in the last word. Her feelings on the current situation were well known throughout the Lily of the Valley, and for some reason this skinny therapist had the highest level of security clearance in the Sinnoh League possible for civilians. If she’d been assigned as her therapist, then it was fair for Dawn to assume she’d seen her file.
The doctor seemed amused, “Well, we’re here now, and regardless of however long it took for us to begin, I want you to take your time with this session. Therapeutic dialogue is most effective when made a regular part of your routine, not just as a one-off. Tell me, how is your sleep schedule these days?”
Huffing, Dawn bit back a retort, choosing to lie instead, “My sleep is well.”
Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
The woman’s writing was near silent, as if the pen was gliding on a sheet of oil rather than paper. Over her many years of special operations work, Dawn’s senses were trained to a razor’s edge, and she could tell the doctor was using some sort of silent stylus rather than traditional pen and paper. She’d never even flipped a page on the tiny notebook in her left hand, despite how much she’d have to have written by now.
When the woman chose to let the silence drag on rather than reply, Dawn sighed and gave her a proper answer.
“Not that well, I suppose. Certainly not as well as it could be. But I’ve always had trouble with sleep.”
The woman’s pen came to a stop, the last rays of the dusk sun mingling with moonlight to reflect off her large spectacles once more. Squint as she might, Dawn couldn’t see the woman’s eyes through the glare of her lens.
“Tell me about that. Why don’t you start from the beginning, actually. When did you first starting having sleep trouble?”
Dawn considered giving her another nonsense answer again. But, it was almost nighttime. She was tired and wanted to be home on one of her few nights in Jubilife. Besides, after everything Barry had done in preparation for this meeting today, he’d never let her hear the end of it if she just walked out because the therapist annoyed her too much. They’d not even really started yet.
She sighed, “It started when my father died…”
—————————————————————————————————————————
She could still hear her mother’s scream. She did most nights, in fact. Ever since the first.
Berlitzbergz, the ancestral home of the House of Berlitz, had been quiet as a mouse that night. Dawn had been woken by the shrill shrieking of her mother, and ran down to find her weeping and howling near the entrance to the family parlor room. Fallen and sobbing on her knees, Yanase Berlitz was in such a state that Dawn was utterly shocked. Normally cold, cultured, and composed, Yanase had always been the very picture of old Hisui nobility. She’d raised both her children with a firm hand, always calm and collected even when their father was prone to outbursts of sentimentality.
She’d run downstairs without a care for her own safety, to find a scene that would stick with her for the rest of her life.
Yanase Berlitz had lost all composure, practically on her knees as she sobbed and wailed, her sharp nails rending her scalp and hair with thin streaks of blood. To her left the receiver of their landline phone bobbed up and down on its coiled wire. Phones were a rarity, and landline receivers like those found at Berlitzbergz were a bit of an anachronism. Out of the receiver, Dawn could hear the muted buzzing of someone speaking heatedly on the other end of the line.
Dawn had been the first to find her, but certainly not the last. Her mother’s wails echoed throughout the halls, likely even reaching the servant’s quarters in the lower floors. Sebastian, their butler, was the first of them to arrive. Making a beeline for Yanase, he spared young Dawn only a cursory glance, one full with worry, before running over to comfort Yanase.
“My Lady! What has come over you? What- What has-”
Her mother could only continue to wail. She paid as much heed to Sebastian as she had to Dawn.
The buzzing from the phone’s receiver continued to grow louder. Sebastian was far too busy with her mother to even notice. By now, even though it was well past midnight, the sobbing and screaming had made their way throughout the house, drawing servant after servant to come and check on what was happening. Sebastian was barking at two of the maids to bring water, and another to call for Dr. Moon. The receiver continued to angrily buzz in the corner, forgotten by all but Dawn.
Slowly, she began to creep over, the voice on the other end growing ever louder. It was a large booth style landline, built into the marble counter of their reception room, with fine woodwork and gilding decorating it in the style and blazon of House Berlitz. It was practically an antique, kept by her father out of his love for history more than any practicality. Her fingers wrapped around the handle, and Dawn pulled the phone to her ear.
“-must listen! The entire ship is gone, my Lady. They are out there as we speak with Gyarados, still searching. Please, can you hear me? Lady Berlitz, you *must* seal the manse, and call the coterie. We might still salvage ourselves from this. My Lady, *please*, can you hear me? Professor Rowan is en route alongside Master Palmer, they are intending to secure the cargo but-”
Someone snatched the phone away from her ear, and Dawn turned with wide eyes to see Sebastian angrily glaring down at her, the landline receiver in his hand.
—————————————————————————————————————————
The rest of the night passed in a blur. Once Sebastian had a moment to actually make her mother sit down and take a sip of water, she’d begun to calm. Sputtering between half-held sobs, she had ordered Dawn taken back to her room the first chance she could.
Despite the late hour, people would be arriving soon to contain the fallout. Berlitzbergz was to again fill with researchers, trainers, public relations ‘experts’, and every other profession under the sun. Dawn, and particularly her elder brother, were well used to such a thing. They’d grown up at the feet of their father, the famed researcher and inveterate politician, Lord Berlitz. Their mother, Lady Yanase, was one of the most active socialites in Sinnoh, hailing from an ancient clan that had settled here when this land was still called Hisui. The House of Berlitz was known from Canalave to Sunyshore, and Dawn had seen more of Sinnoh by the time she was four than most Sinnohans would in their lifetime.
She knew the stunt well, though she’d never seen Berlitzbergz readied with such hurry, nor so late at night.
All the lights flickered on, one by one, illuminating the grounds as cars began to roll through the great double-gates and into the long driveway. One after another, from her window Dawn watched faceless suits filter into the reception room as the stars twinkled overhead. The night sky was unnaturally black, and no hint of the moon could be seen. Dawn had been brought back to her room and sternly told to go back to bed before the maid locked the door and left. Now all she could do was watch from her window as more and more strangers arrived.
Despite her young age, she was only ten when it happened, Dawn had already gleaned the truth of the situation from the brief few seconds she was allowed on the phone.
The sheer number of people entering the home was another sign. The last time this many people had appeared with no prior warning had been during the Rotom Disaster when she was eight. But Dawn was a clever girl, her father always used to say she was much sharper than her brother, though he’d been more hard-working. She still didn’t want to truly believe that they were truly gone. Not then. It had taken her years to come to terms with what had truly happened.
For on that night, the S.S. Viscount had sunk en route from Pastoria to Sandgem. It had been an utterly routine voyage, a common way to bypass the long trip around the southern coast of Sinnoh, the lands still uncharted by the route-system, and where only experienced trainers well used to off-routing dared to tread. The ship had been carrying some immensely valuable cargo, along with even more invaluable souls on board. Two in specific.
Her father, and her brother. Along with all of her father’s research from the last two decades. Hundreds of valuable specimens, catalogues of classified research, and multitudes of complex machinery. The S.S Viscount had been chartered specifically for the trip, a world-class vessel capable of sailing from Johto to Hoenn and back again on a single tank of fuel. She’d later learn that the hull had been designed to withstand a few seconds under an active hyper-beam, and enough water-types had been present on board as to have nullified any threat from any shore-dwelling wild pokemon. And there had been lifeboats on board, coupled with the standard Natu teleportation protocol for VIPs, which her father and brother most certainly had been.
All she’d known at the time was that her father was moving his laboratory to Sandgem Town, another step in the Sinnoh-wide research integration initiative that Professor Rowan had launched a few years before her birth. Her brother would be spending the summer there with their father, beginning his internship as a researcher in the Pokemon Professor’s own laboratory. The plan had been for Yanase and Dawn to set sail a month or two after the S.S Viscount landed in Sandgem.
And at the time, and for the next year, she’d still held out hope that they’d be found.
Ships sinking of the southern coast of Sinnoh weren’t that uncommon. It was the most commonly sailed route in Sinnoh, barring transit between the mainland and her northwestern islands, and some veteran trainers even chose to surf the entire length of the coast on pokemon-back. Squads of Gyarados and Milotic were likely already diving deep in the water, along with a small army of Lapras and other surface pokemon attempting to, at the least, locate the wreckage. Transponders and trackers didn’t work off the southern or northern coasts of Sinnoh, but so long as her father had managed to secure even a few of his pokeballs, that shouldn’t have been a problem.
She didn’t sleep that night, staring listlessly out the window with her head resting on the sill. As the sun’s light finally began to break over the edge of the horizon, on what she could see would be a very cloudy day, more and more cars began to roll into the driveway.
With morning came the entire public-relations team, the people Dawn liked least. She eyed them spitefully from the upstairs as they made their way into the reception room and out of her sight. The din and growing commotion down there could barely be concealed from her, even as far away from the center of it as she was. Dawn had already considered sneaking out, but seeing her mother in that strange and distorted fury had utterly frightened the girl. She had never seen Yanase in such a state, wailing and scratching her scalp bloody as she screamed murder.
Still, her mother had surely regained control of her senses by now. Dawn had never even seen her father in such a state of ‘sentimentality’. That was what her mother called it when he gave in to an emotional outburst, as he was wont to do. Her brother had been quite like that as well, fiery in temperament and quick to anger. He’d once broken another boy’s teeth because of something the boy had said about their mother, though he didn't tell her what. And he’d been just as protective of Dawn, and the best brother any girl could have hoped for.
Blinking the worry from her eyes, little Dawn stepped out the window and onto the balcony that overlooked the front-garden. She wasn’t supposed to be stepping outside the window onto the terrace, but she’d long ago figured out how to open the window past the height restrictor her father had installed on it a few years ago. In later years, she’d realized that he’d purposefully installed a rather flimsy restrictor, having always intended for Dawn to either wiggle it till it broke, or figure out how to remove it.
Tip-toeing out onto the terrace, it was only a short walk over to where one of the gutter-pipes met the drain, and Dawn wrapped her small form around the heavy bronze of the pipes and did her best to quietly slide down the pipe and towards the ground floor. Dawn was on the second floor of the house, and the slide was not as daunting as it might have seemed. The guards, and there was no shortage of them, were all either patrolling the grounds or gathered at the grand double-gate, checking IDs and scanning cars before allowing them to enter.
The pipe let her down on the edge of entrance, and after a few cursory checks to made sure she hadn’t been seen, she made her way over. If any of the house Gallade were around, she’d have been caught instantly, but the young girl had correctly surmised that they would all either be patrolling the perimeter, or vetting the strangers at the main gate.
Though the house was packed full, almost everyone was in the reception room or spilling out into the grand hall. Peeking out from the main entrance, she could see that a number of the newcomers had set up workstations and laptops, on couches or chairs of their choosing, speaking animatedly with their peers as they furiously typed away. The first thing she did was count how many people she could see. The reception room could seat a good thirty people, and there was at least fifteen more spilling out into the grand hall.
She moved away from the main entrance, and attempting to round the corner of the house. From there, she made her way over to a specific window, one whose curtains were only half drawn, and from where a terrible din could be heard. The back window to the reception room was always somewhat shrouded, and one’s attention was always directed out the wall-length front window, towards the enormous back-lawn and sculpture gallery.
Quietly, her hands worked the base of the window, and ever so gently Dawn began to lift. All while keeping her head well below window level, and her back flat with the wall. As she heard the smallest release of air, enough of a gap opened up that she could put her ear to it, close her eyes, and try to properly listen. And slowly, the voices began to resolve.
“-but we cannot assume that we will find them, my Lady. It has already been six hours.”
“He’s quite right, Lady Berlitz. Two new teams at South Sinnoh Port have sent in their Porygons, and we have them en-route to Battle Isle for deep-imaging, but preliminary scans suggest that-”
“Enough!”
That was her mother’s voice. It made Dawn flinch, even though it was not aimed at her. Still, the ferocity in the woman’s tone left nothing to the imagination, and Dawn was relived to see that her stern mother had recovered from her earlier state.
Her mother hadn’t stopped speaking, but Dawn had edged just a bit too far from the small gap she’d opened up in the window. It took her a second to realign her ear canal.
“-offering nothing but foolishness. We will redouble all efforts. I will fly to Sage Town to coordinate the SAR from there. And there is still the possibility that the wreckage was swept upstream, along with any lifeboats, into the river estuaries of the Grand Marsh.”
Dawn’s blood ran cold at hearing that. A map of Sinnoh’s southeastern coast sprang to her mind. For leagues south of Pastoria, the coast turned to a murky swamp through which no reliable land or sea crossing ran. It was one of the truest wilds of Sinnoh, known for the whirlpools that drifted off the coast, and the mangrove forests that could ensnare ships whole. But to the S.S Viscount, sailing in a wide berth around the estuary, it should have presented no challenge.
“Leader Wake and his gym trainers are already sailing down the Safari Zone and into the wilds. Their report from staging ground zeta indicates no wild pokemon outbreaks in the region, nor do-”
Someone else cut in, “Searching East of Sage Town is a waste, my Lady. The transceiver made contact with Sandgem before cutting out, and the go-around must be regarded as a false positive.”
A smarmy voice joined the cacophony, “And then there’s the matter of the press. Those kids at South Sinnoh Port have already begun talking. I’ve got no less than a dozen reporters publishing their reports. I’m trying to get the papers to issue a correction, but the real shitstorm will hit this morning, when news breaks properly. The Jubilife office is already swarming with the roaches. *Scheiße*, they might even try to come here, to Berlitzbergz, and-”
At that her mother’s iron voice cut through the din once more, “No. They will not. I will give the press conference at Sage Town. Tell them Berlitzbergz is empty, and bar the road from Hearthome. I will have no parasites coming here to prey on my home and hearth while we suffer through this tragedy. Has the mayor replied yet? Or Fantina? I need to speak with her at once.”
Dawn could hear the uncomfortable shuffling through the double-paned windows. No one said a word.
And then, one of them spoke up, “My Lady… Leader Fantina’s office feels they have made themselves clear. While current events are a tragedy, her involvement-”
It was at that point that a meaty hand came down on Dawn’s shoulder, breaking her out of her concentration. With wide eyes, she looked up to see Sebastian the butler.
—————————————————————————————————————————
He’d made tea for her. Her favorite kind too. Grand Red Robe was the colloquial name for a specific strain of red tea that grew only from the mother trees surrounding the Bell Tower in Johto, tended to by the ceremonial eevee-dancers. The trees had, allegedly, taken root during the era in which Ho-Oh still perched upon the Tin Tower, as it was known in those days. Her father had told her that the tale was entirely horseshit, but that didn't stop her from loving the tea.
She held the saucer gingerly in her hands, looking down at her reflection in the bright scarlet of the the tea. The sun had begun to rise in full by now. It was well past breakfast time. And so, dear Sebastian had the idea to bring the young Lady’s breakfast to her bedroom, being perhaps the one soul in all of Berlitzbergz that had not forgotten about her existence, given recent events.
Dawn gave a sad smile as she watched Sebastian clean up the shattered fragments of the first cup. He’d come into the room only to find Dawn missing, and the window wide open. Given what was going on in the reception room below, she could only imagine the panic Sebastian had felt at seeing her room empty. The shattered remains of the first cup of tea he’d brought to her room were evidence of that.
Still, he wasn’t the butler of House Berlitz for nothing, a quick glance out the window and he’d tracked Dawn’s trail quite well. He’d even avoided letting anyone else, maid or mother, know what Dawn was up to. At the time, she’d chalked it up to Sebastian just not wanting to worry her mother.
As she watched him pick up the last pieces of porcelain, he sighed heavily. Bending over, he began at the arduous task of removing the tea stain from her pink carpets. It was made from Bewear scalpleather, infinitely superior to the gaudy Jigglypuff fur that was so popular in Hearthome. Personally, she wouldn’t cover her Skitty with that. The Bewear throw had been a gift from Elite-Four Lucian for her ninth birthday. And truth be told, Sebastian wasn’t doing the best job of getting the stain out.
Dawn spoke up, still not having taken a sip of the tea, “Why don’t you just have Remi clean that up?”
She could see Remi’s pokeball on Sebastian’s belt, glinting the red and black gold of a luxury ball. Remi was Sebastian’s Audino, and the pokemon she’d seen him call on more often than any other.
He chuckled in response, still working on the throw, “How do you think people got anything done before the Enlightenment, my little Lady?”
Dawn rolled her eyes at him, setting her saucer and cup to the side. The Enlightenment was the Sinnohan name for the era in which Pokemon first emerged onto the world. Most regions had their own names for such things, given the long period of geographical isolation that had followed the emergence of Pokemon into the world. Before the era of exploration and expedition, Sinnoh had been peopled by only a handful of clans that descended from the original human population of the land, though much reduced from the strife and chaos that had followed in the wake of the Enlightenment.
Her own mother descended from one such clan, the *Haiiro no*. Her father on the other hand descended from the settlers who had come to Sinnoh when it was still Hisui, and founded the first expeditionary colonies in the land. Barring Celestic Town, Eterna City, and a handful of others, almost every extant municipality in modern Sinnoh could be traced to the expeditionary settlers who arrived from far-off lands to colonize Sinnoh.
She gave him a rueful smile, “Professor Amaranth says they used machines back then. Today we have Pokemon. Why don’t you have one of the maids do it?”
Sebastian sighed, taking a moment to stand up straight and put his hand on his back. Truth be told, both she and he could see that his incessant scrubbing was only making the situation worse. It was as if he thought the harder and longer he rubbed at it, eventually the stain would just up and suddenly disappear.
Instead, it had only truly spread. He’d mopped up the water, but Grand Red Robe was a terribly strong tea, loaded with tannins. There was little he could have done short of sending it in to the cleaners.
His eyes seemed filled with melancholy, “Oh, I’d rather not tell them why I spilled the tea in the first place, my little Lady. Speaking off, you’ve not touched your cup, or your biscuits.”
Dawn’s eyes followed his finger as it gestured to her now-cold second cup. She was a bit ashamed. Sebastian had gone through all the trouble to make her morning tea, steeped carefully to perfection, regardless of everything that was going on. She could see the bags under his eyes, growing heavier by the hour. Sebastian was old. And *proper* old, not like her parents. He’d been their butler ever since her father was a young boy.
And as her thoughts drifted back to her father, her eyes turned downcast.
“Sebastian… Do you think they’ll find papa and-”
He cut her off, inhaling sharply, “So you *do* know. How? Did you overhear at the window? Or… was it the phone?”
She shrugged, “Both, I think? And mama was… She was so scared, I’ve never seen her like-”
Before she knew it, the sad old man was moving towards her, kneeling down on one knee with a grunt so he could sit at eye-level with the little girl. Even seated on her bed as she was, Sebastian was an enormous man, six and a half foot and broad shouldered. His age had ruined his posture, but not his physique. A single gloved hand came to firmly hold both her own.
“My Lady,” his voice was soft, “You must be strong, though I know it will be hard. You must be strong for your mother, and she for you. I- I do not know what has happened to your father’s boat, but all the resources of House Berlitz and her allies have been called to the task to search for him and your brother, and to bring them home. They *will* find them. I know your father well, he would not want you to give up hope in this moment. Why…”
He chuckled, though it was full of worry, “Why I suppose that wheresoever your father is right now, waiting to be found, he is in good health — hale and hearty, and making his japes and jokes and cheering the spirits of all those around him, including your brother. They may be going through some difficulty, just as we all are here at Berlitzbergz, but rest assured. Whatever has happened, they will return to us.”
Dawn blinked tears away that she hadn’t known were there until a moment ago. Everyone said she took after her mother, and her brother after their father, but she hadn’t realized just how cold and scared she’d been this whole time. Her hands began to shake in Sebastian’s, and try as she might she couldn’t voice her thoughts. Slowly, but surely, she began to sob.
The butler pulled her in, ever so slightly, letting her rest her eyes on his shoulder as he patted her back with one hand, the other still holding her’s.
“There, there…” he said, “It is all well and good to be frightful in such times. But, you must be strong as well. Just as your father has been his whole life.”
And that was how she stayed, for longer than she had expected to, sobbing into Sebastian’s shoulder, before-
—————————————————————————————————————————
The therapist cut in, jarring Dawn for a moment.
She’d just begun to properly get into it. Her eyes half-closed and her brain comfortably half-asleep. For the briefest of moments, the incessant whispers and buzzing that dominated her every waking moment had thoroughly receded, and she’d entered some kind of strange trance, reciting the tale from memory, as if to a stranger in a faraway land, or from a book she’d never read before.
It was so annoying she didn’t even catch the woman’s question.
She bit out, her voice dripping with irritation, “Sorry, say that again?”
This late in the night that Dawn could hardly see the shape of the woman in the chair just a few feet away from her. There was enough moonlight to see most of the office, but the position of her therapist had her in the wall’s shadow. Even her glasses were nothing more than a pale glare that shifted as Dawn blinked.
“Sebastian, your butler; he seemed more of a parent to you on that day than your mother was. Was that a common occurrence growing up?”
The buzzing in the back of her skull was growing louder, and Dawn’s nostrils flared as she realized that her therapist had interrupted her retelling to ask such an unbelievably stupid question.
Letting her irritation show, she replied, “No. My father was the sentimental parent, my mother was the strict parent. They were good together.”
She could sense the woman’s next question before it was even voiced, and Dawn bit her tongue at giving such an answer.
“What about after your father’s death? When it was just your mother?”
Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
“She was not equipped to be a single parent. She spent the next few years searching obsessively for the Viscount. She was in Sage Town or Sandgem or South Sinnoh Port. I hardly saw her those years.”
She could see the wagging glint of the woman’s pen in the darkness. Her eyes had been trained for covert special operations years ago, and she was still at her technical peak. It boggled Dawn’s mind that the woman had herself at such an odd angle. Had they been situated in almost any other orientation, she’d have had a perfect picture of everything the therapist was up to. Glimmora crystal eye-implants were mandatory for every member Strike Force Victory, a policy Dawn had instituted after the Full Moon Island Incident. Still, this meeting was a good reminder that all the tools of the trade would only take you so far, if the singular angle of attack was utterly wrong in the first place.
“Hmmm. Was Sebastian with you for those years your mother spent searching?”
Dawn shook her head, “He was with my mother. Sebastian was a lot more than a butler. He was the head of the family office at the time. He oversaw a hundred more important things, not just Berlitzbergz. He was indispensable to her. It was just the maids with me before I went to Hearthome.”
“I see. Please, continue.”
Instead, she shook her head, sitting up in the recliner. The frenzied noises in the back of her ears were growing louder. It was getting close to midnight.
She voiced as much, “Its late, doctor. I think we should call it for the day.”
The woman’s glasses turned to the window, and she could hear something bordering on feigned surprise in her tone.
“Oh! Goodness me, it is late. Shall we pick this up next week? Same time and day work for you?”
Standing up, Dawn cracked the tired muscles in her back, filling the room with a series of audible pops. In her youth she’d had the figure of a pencil, but age had seen layer after layer of hard muscle added on, and many a harsh scar now dotted her once pristine skin. As she stretched, she fell into the standard limbering routine employed after emerging from a Corviknight drop-strike. She wondered why she felt so tense.
She shook her head, “No. I’ll be in Unova then. Undella Town. If you can make it we can do it there.”
Without another word, she began to make for the door, having nothing left to say to the woman. Dawn heard the surprise in her voice as the session rather abruptly came to an end.
“Oh! Well, perhaps when you’re back then? When will that-”
Cutting her off, Dawn closed the door with a final venomous remark, “Why don’t you ask the Champion about that. I’d like to know too.”
She was too polite to slam the door, but she didn't exactly close it quietly either.
—————————————————————————————————————————
They spent the drive back to her place in relative silence. It was one of the things Dawn liked most about Barry. How much he’d grown up.
She spared him a glance, having been resting her warm forehead on his cool passenger-seat window with her eyes closed for most of the ride so far.
He was wearing the same spec-ops vest as her, over an exceptionally gaudy orange long-sleeve, though at least his black cargo pants were League-compliant. His wavy blonde hair, flying in the wind and refusing any direction, had only grown longer with age. It now more closely resembled the long mane that his father, Frontier-Brain Palmer, had once worn with such style. Though, she thought ruefully, Barry could never pull it off quite like his father had.
Streetlights flickered in even intervals, black poles standing like ever-watchful sentries over the roads of Jubilife City. Barry’s headlights carved a narrow tunnel through the dark, illuminating slick asphalt and the occasional scrap of paper skittering across the road like something alive. The rain had stopped hours ago, but everything still glistened, reflecting light in distorted fragments. As they turned a corner and took the off-ramp from the highway, neon from the downtown signs bled into puddles, turning the street into a fractured mirror.
He slowed at an intersection with no signals. Just a blinking amber light, persistent and indifferent. Buildings rose on either side, their windows mostly black, a few glowing faintly like watchful eyes. Somewhere above, the wind rushed against the cold steel of Jubilife’s skyscrapers, the only such structures in Sinnoh outside of the few that could be found in Sunyshore.
The radio hissed. He hadn’t turned it on.
A voice almost formed out of the static—just enough to make them glance at the dial, then back to the road. Nothing. Only that low, restless noise, like the city itself trying to speak and failing.
Barry tutted as he turned it off, “Damn thing. I need to get her fixed. If we weren’t leaving tomorrow I’d have just given her in today.”
Dawn chuckled. Barry’s problems with his car were legendary. She’d even bought him a new one for a birthday a few years ago, but he barely used it. Barry was one of the most sentimental people she knew.
“You could just tell Argyle to handle it when we’re out of the city. That’s what the staff is for.”
Barry laughed, “Please, like I’d trust Argyle or his goons with Dasha. Speaking off repairs though, how’d that shrink do with your head?”
This time Dawn was the one who laughed, though it was slight. Dasha was Barry’s name for his car; though to be specific, his father Palmer had been the one to name the then cherry-red two-seater. Back in Palmer’s youth, she’d been a top of the line sports car, but she was barely roadworthy when Barry had inherited her a decade ago.
“My head is fine, thank you very much. All she did was waste my time. Ask me questions about my childhood. Nothing I didn’t already know. You know why Cynthia’s doing this, and it has nothing to do with any ‘repairs’ to my head.”
Barry grimaced, turning a corner as he scratched at the sad fuzz that he liked to call a beard. Much like his hair, and his car, Dawn considered it to be nothing more than an active attempt to imitate his beloved father.
His own voice was thick with tiredness as well, “Well, honestly I was planning to listen in on whatever she was going to be asking, but I ended up falling asleep, ha!”
That much was true, he’d been snoring like a baby when Dawn left the doctor’s office and woke him up.
She shrugged, “I could tell you, but it really wasn’t anything important at all. I’d expected her to ask about more recent events. Not about my father’s death; that all feels like ancient history.”
He cast a worried look over to her, “You think she’s starting slow? I cased the joint before your meeting, and put in the psywave detector right where you told me to. You didn’t feel it go off at all? Even once?”
Dawn shook her head, her eyes narrowing as some alertness returned to them.
“No. Not once. It is possible she knew about it beforehand, and decided to leave it in place to give me a false sense of security for the first session. It did its work though. I managed to start and end the capture period right on time.”
He grunted, “You took it when you left right?”
She tried not to snort in response, “Who do you think I am?”
Barry gave her a melancholy smile, “I figured. Had to check though, if we get caught I’m definitely cooked. I don’t think Cynthia is-”
“Cynthia won’t do anything. She had her chance a long time ago.”
He chuckled at that.
Truth be told, Dawn didn’t know if Barry thought that was true. Neither of them knew where Cynthia’s actual tolerance for Dawn’s rebelliousness lay. They could only make educated guesses, and anyone was bound to be this nervous when the stakes were this high. She was asking a lot of Barry. The situation right now was precarious as it was, and any one act might finally tip the scales into Cynthia finally calling for both their heads, and writing off her little project as a sunk cost.
They drove in silence for a while, before Barry again broke it. She was thankful that he often did that without prompting.
“With the briefing tomorrow, you sure the team is prepped? I feel like we’re going into this one half-assed, *again*. Look I’m all for winging it, but if the intel on that pod of Wailord is true then-”
She cut him off, eyes turning away to look out the window, “I already talked about it with Bertha. She’s insistent we can’t delay. The entire region will be in Castelia this weekend, and according to her…”
Dawn mockingly mimicked the old woman’s faux-loving tone, dripping with saccharine venom. Bertha and her fantastic PR team had spent decades deluding the public into believing she was just a kind old grandmother, and while she never dropped the act (even during meetings where assassinations had been openly planned at the table), Dawn and Barry knew well just who she was. Their encounters with her during their youth had dispelled the myth of her personality a long time ago.
“‘Why, it will only make exfiltration just a *wee* harder my dear, I’m sure you and SF Victory shall return without any harm. Oh, the very *future* of Sinnoh is counting on this operation. *So many* operational teams have been deployed, but you are the first team-leader to worry me in such a way.’”
Barry chuckled, though it was devoid of his usual warmth, “Yeah, I don’t know why I asked. Still, might be fun. I mean hey, many people can say they’ve seen a Wailord.”
Dawn didn’t share his enthusiasm. The largest known pokemon alive by a long shot, and perhaps the largest to have ever lived, Wailord were capable of generating sonic waves in the water capable of shredding flesh like it was paper. All from miles away and all without intending any hostility. If a pod grew too excited, their mere act of communicating with one another sent vast sonic blasts through the surrounding water, acting like some mix of sonar and radio, and giving them a perfect awareness of their local waters for leagues. It was impossible to ambush a pod, and no predator (including man) would dare to try.
They were generally not considered dangerous, and the few researchers lucky enough to spot them in the wild had nothing to say but effusive praise of their natural beauty. They theorized that because almost nothing was stupid enough to approach a Wailord pod with ill intent, they’d evolved over generations to have a remarkably docile temperament. Wailord pods usually lingered far off the coast as well, well away from the few shipping lanes that man had managed to restore in the Post-Enlightenment era. A few trainers had managed to raise Wailmer in coastal regions or after bringing them into freshwater habitats, but those few never reached the mind-boggling sizes of their wild cousins. She wondered how a pod would react to the presence of a spec ops team freshly drenched in blood.
“Hopefully we won’t have to count ourselves so *lucky*, our job’s hard enough as it is without a Wailord pod complicating it. Speaking of, did you book the simulation for our dry-run before briefing tomorrow? I want to put the team through their paces so I can get a rough idea of how the actual exit out of Undella is going to go.”
Barry nodded, and as he did so he made one final turn, coming in to maneuver his car through the driveway of a skyscraper building. It was late enough that even her doorman was off duty, though Dawn could spot him at the lobby desk even from this distance and the dim light.
With a clap of his hand on his thighs, Barry leaned back and sighed, “Well, we’re here. You sure you’ll be good?”
Dawn considered his question for a moment, before giving him a nod, “See you at simulation tomorrow. And don’t forget your dress uniform for briefing this time.”
Unlocking the car door, Dawn stepped out and gave Barry a last wave goodbye, before heading into the dimly lit entrance of her apartment building. It was one of the nicer buildings in Jubilife’s most expensive neighborhood, and it looked like it. Art deco lines of gilded bronze threaded their way throughout the building’s white-marble facade, and impressionistic sculptures of proud flying type pokemon crowned the twenty-story building’s penthouses.
Most of the apartments on the upper floors had balconies as well, though only a handful were still lit this late at night. She spared his still-parked car a final look as she entered, her sharp eyes seeing that he was on his phone. Likely sending her another PokePok video she’d ignore until he brought it up in person and demanded she actually watch it.
She swiped her key fob for entry, and gave her doorman only the briefest of nods to acknowledge him before making her way over to the elevator and hitting the button for the 20^th^ floor.
As it ascended, Dawn made a point to keep her eyes glued to her feet. The whispers and scraping that forever plagued her had returned almost the moment she left Barry’s car, though they’d not exactly been quiet before. The elevator was always particularly difficult, given the placement of mirrors surrounding her from all four sides.
If she kept her eyes closed, the whispers grew louder. If she opened her eyes, she have to face the mirror. And so, she just kept her gaze half-lidded, and glued to the ground. A third option, but not one that was particularly pleasant either. She’d always been rather talented at finding a supposed third option when presented with a binary choice. Dawn had learned over the long years, however, that such struggle was almost always moot. At the end of the day, all paths seemed to lead to the same end.
The elevator reached its destination with a ‘ping’ letting her know, and she was stepping out before the elevator doors had even fully opened. There had originally been four penthouses on the 20^th^ floor, and it had been a bitch and a half to force the last owner to sell after she bought out the first three. She’d not bothered actually renovating the four separate units into a singular space, instead just adding doors that allowed easy movement between the units. Still, she avoided the south unit in particular, and made a beeline for the north door and into her living room. As the door opened, she had to squint because of just how bright it was.
Unlike everywhere she’d been in the last twelve hours, her unit was almost absurdly well lit. Sleek and modern light fixtures held the most powerful fairy-resonance bulbs that humanity could create in the modern age. Installed at perfect intervals so as to reduce, or utterly eliminate, the presence of any shadow.
She was particularly appreciative of the Flabébé flower wicks used in their construction. They weren’t of a variable brightness though, and having her unit lit up like a hospital late at night would have been too visible for the notoriously private heir to House Berlitz. A complex electrochemical tint on her windows allowed her to turn the windows wholly black from the outside, while remaining transparent from within. It prevented any from seeing the inside of her unit through the floor to ceiling windows that made up almost the entire outer length of her penthouse.
There were other protections as well; ones she’d have to inevitably check on either tonight or early tomorrow morning. It was rare for her these days to be in Jubilife for consecutive nights, and almost irresponsible not to check whatever was recorded by her cameras, psywave recorders, motion sensors, and other such devices, during her absence.
Kicking off her shoes, Dawn’s fingers went over to her belt where five pokeballs of varying kinds were hooked. With her fingers hovering over the buttons, she began to make her rounds.
In a series of flashes, her team materialized. Barring her Rapidash, who was stabled overnight at the League’s Jubilife HQ due to lingering injuries from their last mission, everyone else was here. Her Empoleon, Lopunny, Froslass, Cherrim, and Pachirisu all appeared in varying bursts, either shaking their heads to reorient themselves, squinting at the bright light, or announcing their names as they materialized. Dawn was always cognizant of the fact that, for them, only a moment had passed from the last time she’d brought them into their balls. They knew this apartment and its sights and smells well though, and none gave her an undue reaction.
Each of the pokemon was released in turn, and each in their own little space.
The rooftop pool went to her Empoleon, having been transformed from a pool into more of a marine environment full of faux-plants, little coves, and other such simulacra.
The ‘little’ fenced garden right next to it was for her Cherrim. She always wondered whether she should expand the garden, but she’d decided to table it once Barry had told her that her Cherrim’s garden was bigger than his entire apartment.
Her Lopunny was released inside her own enormous room, one that Barry jokingly called the pillow-fort. For how much she’d spent on having a contractor work with her to create a perfect recreation of a bunny-pokemon’s burrow network using nothing but soft foam and bedding, she resented the name.
Her Froslass occupied almost half of the western unit by herself, preferring to keep away from the rest of her team even at the best of times. A series of rooms there had been hollowed out, cased with naturally worn granite from a nearby cave, and had their windows boarded up. Blocks of ice had been brought in and shaped by teams of Jynx. The enormous air conditioning units that ran continuously underneath the floor cost her a small fortune in electric costs every month, but the Berlitz estate more than covered it.
Neither she nor the rest of her pokemon much liked her Froslass’ habitat, dark, dim and cold as it was. Given that it was supposed to resemble a frozen underground cave in North Sinnoh, she could only say that the contractor had done his job well.
One by one, as they were released, Dawn clapped her hands to draw their attention, and wordlessly communicated her will to them. It wasn’t something that could be explained to a non-trainer, nor did any veteran trainer ever bother to try, but the bond between man and monster ran deeper than just hand-signals and voice commands. Humanity had dug itself back from the brink of extinction only through their cooperation with the very beasts that had sent them to the edge. There were strange and mysterious things in this world, and the bond between pokemon and trainer was perhaps the most unknowable among them.
Dawn shot each of them a genuine smile, and felt a measure of relief for what felt like the first time that day. Most of them shot her kind looks back, or grunted with tiredness as they made their way deeper into their miniature habitats. The exception was her Froslass, Yuki, who turned into cool mist and disappeared the very second she was released from her ball. The other exception was her Pachirisu, Sue.
Sue didn’t have a habitat like the others, and as Dawn began the trek towards her own bedroom, Sue’s pokeball activated, and the little rodent-pokemon materialized at her knees. She shook herself once, not unlike how a Houndour might, before rapidly blinking and looking up at Dawn. She smiled, leaning down to scratch her companion’s head, feeling the luxurious softness of Sue’s fur. Chuckling, she stood and gestured for the little rat to follow her. Unlike the rest of Dawn’s pokemon, Sue slept in the same bed as Dawn wherever they went.
The little creature was already scurrying towards the bedroom, while Dawn turned to make a stop by her bathroom and dressing room first. Despite everything, a shower and her nightly routine were still necessary. She didn’t know why she followed her schedule as if she was going to be sleeping anytime soon. At this point, she assumed it was little more than force of habit. It didn’t take her long. The days of her spending an hour getting ready for bed were long gone.
And so, when she came back into the bedroom, smiling as she took in Sue’s antics in kicking up her blanket to make herself a burrow, Dawn was entirely ready to lie down and hopefully catch her few minutes of sleep for the night. In fact, she was feeling so tired that might even have been able to take multiple short naps tonight. She never napped more than ten or twenty minutes at a time, even though theoretically she could go anywhere up to an hour or so without triggering the danger zone.
As she began to crawl into bed, her hands cooing into Sue’s fur as she did so, a cold gleam on the edge of her bedside table caught her eye. Something that she had not been expecting stared back at her, and her blood went cold. Her fingers froze in Sue’s fur, beginning to shake with a tremor she’d been holding back all day. The voices in the back of her mind, having gone somewhat quiet ever since Dawn entered her prepared space, suddenly roared back like a dam bursting at the floodgates.
Sue moved even before Dawn did, scurrying out from under her hands as she felt Dawn’s mood abruptly change. In an instant, she was in front of her trainer, her cheeks sparkling with electric light as her eyes rapidly darted back and forth, assessing all possible angles. Despite her cuteness and her age, Sue was a champion pokemon who had cut her way through the gyms of Sinnoh in her prime.
The sense of danger in the air was palpable, and Dawn’s heart had stopped in her chest. She could feel the heavy rush of blood through her veins as she stared, dumbfounded, at something that should very much *not* be on her bedside table. Moving forward on her knees, she crossed the bed to the other side and shakily stood, with Sue’s eyes still darting about and failing to see the offending cause that had so thoroughly triggered her trainer. Dawn had not shown any overt outward reaction, but that didn’t matter. She and Sue were linked in ways well beyond what she could describe, and the pokemon had sensed her master’s unease the moment it had blossomed. Rat-pokemon were jittery skitters by nature, and even small sudden movements could set them off.
But Dawn was as still as a statue as her hands reached out, grasping a well-worn red scarf that she was intimately familiar with. It was heavy, made of the finest mareep wool and dyed scarlet with Ariados shellac.
Sue had now grasped the cause of Dawn’s sudden shock, and Dawn could feel her pokemon’s danger sense suddenly fade, replaced with an intense confusion. She was confused herself. How had this appeared here? This should have been in the vault, well in the back of the south unit. Shaking hands felt open the fabric of the scarf, feeling the hard edges of metal pinned somewhere within.
She unraveled it to reveal eight gym-badges, their sterling silver and copper bits tarnished from the many years, but the gold and gems still shining with the same light they had the day she’d gained them. The scarf was caked in dust, though there were visible fingerprints all over it. Prints in places she’d certainly not touched it just now.
As her brow furrowed in paranoia of how this could have possibly happened, and whether someone had accessed her unit and left this here as a message, Sue leaned over and purposely bumped her forehead into Dawn’s hand, drawing her attention.
Dawn looked down to see a new emotion having replaced confusion in Sue’s eyes. Worry.
With a start, the memory hit her. She blinked, feeling like a fool, as her mouth opened in a silent oh.
She spoke aloud, “Oh goodness, I- I’m sorry Sue. I had forgotten.”
It was the truth. No one had come into her unit and broken into her vault, only to leave the most poignant reminder of her past on her bedside table as some sort of twisted threat or message.
She had been the one to take the scarf out the vault late last night. How could she have forgotten? It had been years since she’d seen this scarf last, and even more since she’d last worn it. It was a relic of an older and somewhat happier time, before everything had gone so wrong. She spared Sue a long look at some point, communicating her apology to her from the depths of her heart. It was no small thing to give a false-alarm to a pokemon as twitchy as a Pachirisu.
But then, for a good while, she just stood there. Staring and entranced by the badges, each story unfurling in her mind and her eyes panned over. Coal, Forest, Cobble, Fen, Relic, Mind, Icicle, and Beacon. Each told a tale, and each was weighty with long forlorn memories. In the blurry corners of her vision, she could see Sue still chittering with worry, uneasy at Dawn’s behavior. Her forgetfulness. And even her thoughtlessness.
Time began to tick onwards and the silence continued, only broken by Sue’s irregular intercessions to come back to bed, and at some point Dawn felt ice cold tears run down her face, her eyes finally unable to hold back the well.
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Barry looked at his phone, praying for the nth time that his buzzer had gone off the very second that Dawn had closed the car door behind her, and not a second sooner.
He’d still not moved, his fingers wrapped around the steering wheel as his eyes almost bulged out in disbelief staring at the notification that had so suddenly popped up on his phone screen. He’d propped his phone up against the car’s radio as well. Broken as it was, he had no use for the radio, and much preferred to dedicate that space to his phone’s PokeNav when he needed it.
But right now, all he could do was thank whatever Gods existed in this world, whether they were pokemon or not, that the phone had not buzzed so much as a second earlier.
On the screen, a single notification alighted with a name that Barry had not seen in years. A name Barry had frankly never expected to see again. A name that would have caused Dawn a fury that he just as frankly could not deal with right now. He was barely equipped to deal with his own reaction.
Sparing a quick glance out the window to Dawn’s retreating form, he grabbed the phone so quickly off the radio that he accidentally turned the damn thing on again, causing a violent burst of static to crackle through his speakers before he shushed it. His eyes flickered back to his phone, now in front of him, with his hands shaking as he unlocked it and opened his text.
There it was. A name that he was sure he’d been hallucinating for a minute. For the briefest of seconds, Barry had been hoping and praying that it was just the tiredness from the past week causing his sight to distort. It was an oddly long text, especially given the sender, and Barry’s vision blurred as he tried to skim the opening. Try as he might, his eyes kept flickering back to the profile photo at the top of the chat, where a familiar name read ‘*Dia*’, and an unfamiliar picture of three teenagers stared back at him.
He clicked on it, ignoring the text for a moment, and the old profile photo opened up. He’d not thought of him in so long, that Barry had forgotten what he’d set as Lucas’ old profile photo.
It was him, Dawn, and Lucas.
Standing over the edge of a cliff, with Barry taking the photo trying to get all three of them in a wide selfie. They must have been sixteen, somewhere on the eastern coast, during their travels for Dawn’s gym-challenge. What a momentous year that had been. Nothing had been the same, either during or after that trip. Yet, they had all made their decisions and chosen to stand by them in the many years that came after. He couldn’t imagine why Lucas, his boyhood friend and the man that he’d risked his life for time and time again, would contact him after all that had happened. As far as he was concerned, Dia was dead. What remained was only a shade.
He closed the picture, perhaps more spitefully than he should have.
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Would greatly appreciate any advice on which summary you find the best:
Summary: Dawn Berlitz is one of the Sinnoh League's finest: scarred, decorated, and quietly coming apart at the seams. She does not sleep. She hears things. She forgets things she should not forget. A strange therapist with unseen eyes plays her own part in the unravelling. And somewhere off the coast of the mainland, there is an island eternally calling her name. All paths seem to lead to the same end, and no matter the consequences, Dawn is determined to find a way out.
Alt Summary: My name is Lady Dawn Berlitz. I am the captain of Strike Force Victory, the heir to a dead house, and the most decorated operative in the Sinnoh League's history. I do not sleep. I hear things no one else can hear. I forget things I know I did myself.
This is the story of how I became what I am. And what I am going to do about it.
Alt Summary: Sinnoh is a nation held together by controlled violence and carefully managed lies, and Captain Dawn Berlitz has spent ten years mastering both. She has fought the League's wars, buried its secrets, and writ its will across the Pokémon world.
She doesn't sleep. She hears things she shouldn't. She forgets things she knows she did herself. Somewhere, a ticking clock strikes midnight, and Sinnoh's hour is at hand.
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