Rusting Knight
Bug Catcher
- Pronouns
- he/him
- Partners
-
author's note: this was an entry for the weird and wonderful oneshot contest in 2025; i'd like to thank negrek for running the contest, and all of the judges for their incredible feedback. i havent had time to edit the story according to their comments, but as one judge raised this as something confusing, i'd like to note up top that in this story jenny is 17 at the start of the story, and liam is twenty, and the second part of the story starts 3 years later.
At the center of its body is a red core, which sends mysterious radio signals into the night sky. - Starmie’s Black and White Pokédex Entry
/
An ancient clay figurine that came to life as a Pokémon from exposure to a mysterious ray of light. - Claydol’s Black and White Pokédex Entry
If Jenny had to pick her second favourite in the world, she would say swimming in the frigid winter ocean. At the first step from wet sand, into the shallows, the cold hit her in a solid slam. The waves lapped her shins, wracking her with shivers. All the hair on her legs rose up in soft silver bristles. “You’re crazy,” her brother called from the shore, as she held her breath and forced herself down into the water’s icy, phantom hold. The sore festering in her chest, anxiety and something awful, felt as if a balm had been smeared over it. With the tight hold she kept on her body, Jenny flipped onto her back. She gazed upwards, trusting the salt water’s buoyancy to hold her lax limbs up. Through threadbare patches in the blue-grey clouds, the sky was a soft, creamy gold. Wingulls circled high above, crying out raucous taunts. Everything emptied out. It gave her such crystalline clarity, the cold filling the deep, hollow places in her body, that Jenny craved it like sugar or salt. Only painting felt better.
“Come back,” her brother yelled, hands cupped around his mouth, trainer’s cap jammed down on his head. Jenny’s forehead was loose, though she had begun to shake. She turned over onto her stomach and struck back toward the beach. With a relief that lasted in the second before the wind whipped at her wet skin, she splashed onto the shining sand. The webbed footprints of Wingulls wandered over the strip that the outgoing tide had just abandoned. Far out, along the horizon, the dim silhouette of a cargo ship hunkered down, the kind that circled Driftveil City like half-starved scavengers. Jenny breathed in the biting breeze, swelling her lungs with brine, burning the insides of her nostrils from the cold. Goosebumps pimpled her arms and legs. “I thought you were lying,” Liam went on, holding out a towel, “About the swimming.”
“Don’t knock it ‘till you try it” Jenny said, drying herself with the towel, savouring the scratchy rasp against her skin. At her brother’s feet his Starmie, rough violet skin gleaming with moisture, rotated its back limbs lazily. Out in the water she had seen it swimming, submerged, moving with a speed that had seized her with a prey animal fear. Jenny shimmied quickly back into her cargo pants and long-sleeved shirt, without waiting for her swimsuit to dry. “Mum says I’ll get sick. But it’s been nice, since I finished school, to have something to get out of the house everyday.”
“Go to the gym. Or hit up one of your trainer’s school friends.” Liam said, shouldering his affrontingly practical backpack, the canvas and strap-covered one bought for his journey. An exact copy, empty and pristine, was propped up in Jenny’s cupboard. Liam’s hair had grown longer since he had left on his trainer’s journey, sticking up straight and black, in the shaggy way her own hair had. They were recognisable as siblings, but only just. Jenny had always wanted to look more like him, to have his olive skin instead of her own pasty tone, to have his pale eyes instead of her black ones. Years ago, when she was ten and he was thirteen, she had spent hours curled up on his bed, watching him lose at video games. A fair way down from them a woman called out to her Herdier, dancing happily in the shallows.
“I’m never speaking to those losers again,” Jenny said, and wrapped her arms around her waist. Clumped hair, black with water, dripped onto her collar and down her back. Beneath her clothes the wet polyester swimsuit itched. The sore in her stomach, warming up with the rest of her, twinged with embarrassment. It was strange to see her brother. Everything he owned was battered, stripped down, covered in smeared dirt and grass stains. A velvet-backed badge case, eight metallic shapes catching the lamp light, hung on their living room wall. Even Aquarii, who had played with her in the sprinklers on hot summers, was strange in its evolved form. When Jenny got up to go to the bathroom at night, moving clumsily through the house, alien in the dark, she saw it, in its living room tank, pulsing with strange colours. On one insomniac night Jenny had balanced her watercolours and a flashlight and drawn it. When she had shown the painting to Liam he had given her an odd, surprised smile, and asked to keep it
“Ah, high school,” Liam said, and reached out to ruffle her wet hair before Jenny ducked away, giving him her best greasy look. “You’ll meet better people on your journey.”
“You met anyone?” Jenny said, and waggled her eyebrows in the way she had calculated to be most annoying, but Liam didn’t take the bait.
“Let’s go to the market,” he said instead, “I’ll treat you to dinner.”
“I wouldn’t say no to burgers,” Jenny said, and they turned to head back through to the carpark, where they had left their bikes. The sun lowered itself down the horizon, catching the whole sky up in a red glow. Orange roofs caught the last glancing rays of light lancing down through breaks in the clouds, bright as neon signs. Trees with rickety, bare branches shuddered noisily. Cars rushed past, trailing blaring pop music. A Murkrow, its witch’s nose tilted down to peer into the road below, shuffled along a powerline, searching for a target or a trinket. As they pedalled down the street, Jenny pulled ahead, sweat mixing with salt water under her helmet. Rain started to fall, rolling in furtive play down windshields and pooling on the grimy pavement. Headlights on snub-nosed cars shone useless into the pale dusk. At a red light Jenny strained to catch the score for the League Championship matches from the radio blasting from an open window.
In the bland fluorescent white that drilled down through the Driftveil Market, in a Red Torchic,
Jenny and Liam ate burgers. Out the big glass doors the last evening shoppers, swaddled in puffer jackets and long scarves, crisscrossed gleaming linoleum floors. Jenny chewed rapturously at dry bread and charred meat. Behind the counter bored teenagers gazed dead-eyed at fryers or leant against the walls, chatting. Liam yammered away, in the convulsive floods of speech that sometimes took hold of him, about his journey. “It was nice having Aquarii with me at night, after it evolved,” he said, wiping greasy fingers on a flimsy napkin. “If I got homesick at night I would let it out of its ball and watch it glow, like it was a nightlight.”
“You got homesick?” Jenny asked, propping her elbow on the streaky plastic tabletop, eyes sliding from Liam’s face to the silent TV screen behind him. It was playing some gimmick TV show, people cooperating with their Pokémon partners to cook elaborate dishes. She stretched out her legs, gaze switching to the three Pokéballs lined up on Liam’s belt. When Liam followed her stare he grinned.
“Yeah, I got homesick,” Liam answered, in the showily grownup way he had adopted, “You’ll get homesick too.”
“Maybe.”
“Definitely,” Liam insisted, crumpling a stained white fast food wrapper in his fist. “Try eating dehydrated rice and vegetables for a full week running.”
“Have you forgotten what it’s like to live at home?” Jenny asked, hooking an ankle around a chair leg, pressing the hard metal into her shin.
“I’m in the Ranger School dormitory,” Liam said, “It’s not exactly paradise on Earth.” He didn’t meet her eyes. Instead he drank the last of his frozen Coke, making an obnoxious slurping sound. “I have a present for you,” he went on, “I caught a Baltoy in the Desert Resort. Just for you. So it’ll be easier for you to leave.” Over the table, with the slowness of faked indifference, he handed her a Dusk Ball, cold in her fingers and gleaming under the fluorescents.
“Thank you,” Jenny said, clenching her fingers around the ball until her knuckles went white. She slipped into her pocket. “But sometimes I think I might not even go. Not everyone does. I just feel too - tired, or something. And it seems pointless. I’m not going to be a trainer. I’m a painter.”
“So? It’s not about - sports.” Liam said, and stood up. “Come on,” he continued, brisk and abrupt, jittering from leg to leg, “We’re going back to the beach. I wanna show you something cool.”
“Okay,” Jenny said, shrugging, and swirled her last fry in a puddle of tomato sauce, wiping salt and grease off on her pants. Liam wrinkled his nose in disgust. They rode back the way they had come, streets emptied after the post-work rush. Puddles gleamed murky under streetlamps. Water flew up under their wheels. Jenny followed the bright light attached to her brother’s bike through the suburban streets. They passed a convenience store, its sterile white aisles lined with alluring Pokémon-emblazoned packaging. In a gap between taller buildings, the Driftveil Drawbridge sparkled with pinpoint lights. Cold prickled every inch that Jenny had left exposed, lashing her cheeks red and making her ears ache. Overhead the moon bleached an oil-slick halo in the thinner clouds.
They left their bikes in the same carpark and walked back to the same stretch of grey sand, and the dark sea, gleaming where the light caught it like a bolt of black silk. Jenny scanned the ground for unbroken spiral shells or bits of smooth seaglass. Waves broke in little loving caresses against the bulky seaweed strewn along the shore. “Watch,” Liam said, and reached for a Pokéball on his belt. In a soft ray of red light, he released Aquarri onto the sand. Jenny pressed her chilled fingers into the warm skin of her own neck. She could hear, very distant, the slow slur of traffic and the rhythmic, subdued push and pull of the water. The lighthouse blinked regularly on and off, from its distant nest. There seemed to be no Wingull now. Liam breathed noisily next to her. Another cargo ship crouched far out to sea, visible by its pinprick lights. The ball in her pocket seemed like an incredibly heavy weight.
“Wait,” Liam ordered, cupping his hands around his mouth and nose to try and thaw them with his breath. His pale eyes were fixed on Aquarii, which had begun to waddle to the water. Before Jenny asked why, he said, “Shhh.” They watched as Aquarri submerged in the ocean and, brighter than in its tank, flared into colour. The gem in its chest radiated flickering multi-toned light, pulsing some strange code, casting shuddering rays onto bulging waves and white froth. A deep, cool stone lodged itself in Jenny’s chest. They seemed separate from the rest of the world, like a solitary, antiquated lighthouse. “It’s emitting radio signals,” Liam said, his voice dropped low. “Right now Aquarii is trying to reach - well, nobody knows. Some people think they came from outer space” Jenny imagined the message that it might be sending, the places it might have come from, the distances its signals travelled. She felt very small. In the hour, or more that they stood on that beach, they didn’t speak, just watched the refracted light in the water around Aquarii.
Routine was the only thing that kept Liam going, most days. He hated to disturb it. At five every morning, in the water-down predawn dark, he woke up. Showered, fed Aquarii and got its tank ready for the day, made himself coffee and toast. While he ate he would sit before its tank, watching its gem illuminate the dark water around it with flickering colour. Trees, laden with rich summer foliage, knocked with injured patience at his window. Pidgey cooed out in the street, soft and drowsy. At this hour his roommate’s Purrloin would nose around the kitchen door, watching him with sly green eyes, its claws clicking on the floorboards. The rich, burnt smell of just brewed coffee hung in the hot, staid air. Liam caught the bus into work, down the avenues made by broad trees and skyscrapers, dowsed in unvarying grey dawn light. Until two in the afternoon, he worked cooped up in Castelia City’s Pokémart.
The chill of the store, the mist curling down his shoulders when he restocked the fridges, the bland white lights, numbed him. His coworkers would talk to him, about their wife’s trip to Kalos, of their dreams of travelling around Unova, and he would do his work and nod along. Most of the time he worked in the back on the fresh fruit and vegetables, hacking leaves off cauliflowers and picking Sitrus Berries off their stems, their sweet juices from berries shining on his gloves. On a shelf behind him, wedged between plastic tubs and other junk, a portable radio played soft pop hits. The only clear thoughts in his head were about finishing work, smoking a joint, and taking Aquarii down to the pier. During his lunch break, Liam ate a sandwich in the Central Plaza, sweat soaking his uniform shirt, watching tourists marvel at the silvery play of the fountain, licking at ice cream cones.
When he clocked off today though, Liam had to pass on the joint and the pier, because he was meant to hang out with his sister. At the thought, for the past week, a live Seviper had started to coil and uncoil his chest. Not that Jenny was scary. In his mind Liam still pictured her pigtailed, and sullen. It was just that she had finished her journey last year, presented a shiny badge case to their parents, and traipsed off to art school. Their mother liked to speculate about her prospects of employment, but not in Liam’s hearing. When he was nearby, their parents talked with starched optimism about the career paths open to a smart man, working in retail. No mention of the Ranger School graduation certificate, recently taken off the living room wall, passed their lips. Or a word about the posting in Pinwheel Forest, technically just deferred indefinitely, ready for his taking whenever he chose. Liam thought about that posting, still, gazing at the billboard outside his bedroom window. He had been so happy there on his journey, training up Aquarii, or watching his team tussle over the lichen-furred roots of massive trees. The light, at noon, was filtered, green, crystalline.
They had arranged to meet up at Café Sonata, at four, which meant four-thirty considering Jenny’s trouble with punctuality. Liam only had time for a shower, drumming the store’s cold off his skin with near boiling water, and a haphazard dinner. He made himself a stir-fry, watching the beaten egg froth up white. The sweet smell of carrot and capsicum frying in honey mingled with the dark salty soy sauce aroma. In a show at shifting the oppressive heat he had the kitchen window cracked open on tin roofs and concrete chimneys. Golden late evening light swayed through the cramped kitchen in freckles and wavering squares. The whine and rush of traffic, and the harsh croaking of Murkrow's huddled in high branches, slipped in through the open window. Liam ate in a rush, wet hair dampening his shirt collar, talking in a conversational tone to the Purrloin.
When Liam went to wash up he found that the garbage disposal was broken, making the sink fill with murky water, swirling with food scraps and coffee grounds. Steam licked up into the hot air. Liam had to dig around in the drain with a gloved hand and scoop out the blockage, making faces at the Purrloin all the while. “Gross, Swiper, real gross,” he told it, “Tell your owner to stop putting her leftovers down the sink.” He missed his train, leaving him waiting in the crowded station, smelling the sweat and perfume of strangers. He texted Jenny to let her know he was going to be late, and she sent back: lol its nice to be the early one for once. When the train came Liam leant his head against the window, watching as it curled in closer to the city, the skyscrapers spilling amber light like caramel from crushed chocolate casings. Sometimes Liam missed Driftveil’s orange rooftops, which were anyway giving away to green and gem-like tiling.
At five, when Liam finally got to the Café, it was bustling with people, their conversation slurred together into a senseless babble over the backdrop of an acoustic guitar. Jenny was seated by the bar, beside a little candle in a cut-glass holder, scrolling on her phone. A glass of Guinness was set before her. She had cut her hair shorter since he had last seen her. Attached to the broad leather belt she wore was a single Pokéball, the Dusk Ball he had given her three years ago. He missed that year, before he graduated and moved to Castelia. Jenny was always asking him to help her train the Baltoy he had caught. She had named it Lascaux. It was probably evolved by now. Jenny held herself like a trainer, straight-backed and confident, though she had confessed to Liam that she hated battling. But their parents wanted a sixteen badge total, divided evenly between children.
“Hey, over here,” Jenny shouted over the roiling noise, and Liam slid into the chair beside her. He signalled to the bartender, a tired twenty-something with straggly brown hair and a rumpled waistcoat-bowtie uniform, and ordered a beer. The café smelt like alcohol and frying chips, everything rendered dim and mellow by the soft lamp light. People, most just come off work, clustered around the tables, in scuffed business casual or slouched in the latest fashions. Liam recognised the song that the guitarist was playing as David Bowie. Through the plate glass windows people in shorts and tank tops eddied under murmuring trees. Street lamps turned the night into a theatrically-lit stage. The Café seemed connected by a tenuous string to the outside world, colder and cozier. Behind the bar bottles in melted candy colours winked in the low light. A Herdier was tied up just out the doors, resting its chin contently on its paws, watching the pedestrians in their restless currents.
“Sorry, I’m late,” Liam said, sipping at his beer, savouring the sour taste on his parched tongue. Sweat dried at the back of his neck and along his hairline, when he took his cap off and rested it on the bench. “How’ve things been?”
“Well, not much has changed,” Jenny said, “Uni is good, my new sharehouse is pretty chill. Over the summer break I’ve taken more hours at the restaurant, so I’ve started renting out a studio. There’s this painting I’m working on - well, it sounds crazy when I say it, but it’s gonna be really cool.”
“That’s plenty of change.”
“I’d have less to say if we hung out more.”
“You’re not as good at the guilt trip as Mum is.”
Jenny laughed, pressing her chilled glass against her temple. “And you? How goes it in the land of stoners and slackers?”
“Don’t be a bitch,” Liam said half-heartedly, “Anyway, I work fulltime. Hardly slacking. Getting a fine arts degree? That’s slacking.”
“Now who sounds like Mum?” Jenny asked, and laughed, “Besides, I’m the least of her problems.”
“Well, I’ll have you know I could go back and take the Pinwheel Forest post anytime I want,” Liam said, pitching his voice into their mother’s insinuating drawl, “If I just wanted to enough.”
“Why don’t you?” Jenny said, placing her glass back on the bench and curling her wrist around it instead, “Get your head out of your ass.”
“Because I don’t want to,” Liam said. He thought wistfully of that deadened time just after graduation, when he used to spend his morning statue-still in bed, staring at his ceiling. It had been relaxing to let that numb spot in his gut spread through his body, like paint in water. When he had called up to defer his first posting it had been such a relief. For a few months, he had told himself, just enough to recover from the stress of school, and then watched that time swell to cover a whole year.
Jenny propped her chin on her hand, digging into the flesh of her lips with her fingertips, gnawing at the last chipped remains of nail polish. There were dark bags under her feverishly shining eyes. Under the warm lamplight her pale skin seemed bleached. She poured out salt from a shaker and began to push it into an abstract pattern. Liam was reminded suddenly of the hours he would see her spend, hunched over a sketchbook. Grains of salt wedged under her nails. “Do you ever get the feeling,” she started, sipping at her Guinness, pausing as if to marvel at the taste. “Do you ever feel like you’re on a tightrope? And you have to try really hard to keep from falling off. So you start up all these routines, right, like I have to get up at a certain time, and go to bed at a certain time, eat this and do that. Or I’ll die. Or start wanting to die. And it feels impossible to do anything else?”
“Yeah, sometimes.”
“Sucker,” Jenny said, and grinned, draining the last of her drink. Unconsciously, her fingers drifted down to the Dusk Ball on her belt, thumb rubbing the marbled black and green casing. “I used to feel that way.”
“Not anymore?” Liam asked, and then leant back on his chair, shame curling in his stomach. He flickered his eyes over the roiling, chattering mass of customers, shoved against the bar or kicked back from the tables. He drained his beer. “Can I see one of your paintings?”
“Sure” Jenny stood up, drinking the last dregs of her Guinness, and shouldered the leather satchel propped against her chair, hung with a grubby plastic Starmie charm, “Just follow me, okay?” They paid and left the bar, catching a bus down to Mode Street, the fashionable evening crowd running with the tourists still lined up outside Casteliacone, heads tilted up to look at the skyscrapers bleaching the sky lavender. In the warm breeze trees rattled in overheated irritation, casting crazy shadows on the footpath. Cafés manned by tired waiters carried out their closing time choreography, chairs going up on tables and disinterested teenagers lazily mopping the tiled floors. Graffiti sprawled across the sides of buildings and low fences. “The painting is based on a dream” Jenny confessed, as they turned down Narrow Street, “It came from Lascaux.”
They entered a squat, old brick building, with a darkened cafe at the front and a closed second-hand shop behind it. The floor was tiled in glossy cream, and the ceiling was art deco frosted glass, arched and beautiful. She stopped before the antique, grille-fronted elevator and pressed the Up button. The doors hissed open, and they stepped into the mirror-panelled interior, and then out into dingy, tiled back corridors, linoleum floors and high small windows, grimy strip lights swinging from long chains. The doors were all made from thick, varnished wood. “Humans made Claydol around 20,000 years ago,” Jenny said, “You can see ‘em on cave walls. Something brought them to life” She turned to look at him, walking backward for a few steps, and reached for the Dusk Ball. With the soft red ray, a Claydol was released, stubby black body and glazed eyes, recognisable somehow as the Baltoy that Liam had caught years ago. “Lascaux has been showing me what.”
“Showing you?”
“In my dreams,” Jenny explained, and paused before one of the many doors. She began to dig through her satchel for her keys; when she found them she fumbled with the lock. Inside was a noble effort towards creating massive amounts of mess in a small space and a short amount of time. On one wall a cluster of photos and postcards were tacked up, all of cave paintings depicting Claydol. Large sheets of scrap fabric protected the floor, stained with paint. The high, clouded windows let in the city bustle, the squawking of Wingulls, a hot breeze to stir the stuffy air. It smelt like oil paint and cigarettes. Liam hadn’t known that Jenny smoked. Lascaux floated over wooden boxes holding paint tubes, canvases leant against the wall, jars filled with murky water, turpentine or oil, clean, tufted brushes, plates encrusted with ultramarine blue and burnt umber.
“See?” Jenny said, pointing to the canvas currently drying on the easel under the windows, “This is what brought them to life. Lascaux remembers it.” Liam stayed rooted to the door. He felt gripped by an emotion strangling and strange, pulsing through his body in icy waves, like the way that pain travels through the limbs. The painting wasn't anything like the sketches that Jenny used to mail him, when she was on her journey. It was enormous, done in layered oil paint, muddy in places, in others seeming to glow with coppery light. Most of the canvas was near black, a smeary dark mass, which seemed to hold the intimation of eyes. In the centre, done in great washes of white and broken brushstrokes of richer colours, was a great pale light, blurring the boundaries of the painting, a violent, terrifying, burning ray. Centuries ago it must have been the Claydol’s first sight. It seemed strange to think that his sister had painted it. Liam’s lips parted involuntarily. His breath caught in his chest. In his mind sunlight fell down through the knitted leaves of Pinwheel Forest’s canopy, green and lovely on the soft undergrowth.
At the center of its body is a red core, which sends mysterious radio signals into the night sky. - Starmie’s Black and White Pokédex Entry
/
An ancient clay figurine that came to life as a Pokémon from exposure to a mysterious ray of light. - Claydol’s Black and White Pokédex Entry
RADIO SIGNALS
If Jenny had to pick her second favourite in the world, she would say swimming in the frigid winter ocean. At the first step from wet sand, into the shallows, the cold hit her in a solid slam. The waves lapped her shins, wracking her with shivers. All the hair on her legs rose up in soft silver bristles. “You’re crazy,” her brother called from the shore, as she held her breath and forced herself down into the water’s icy, phantom hold. The sore festering in her chest, anxiety and something awful, felt as if a balm had been smeared over it. With the tight hold she kept on her body, Jenny flipped onto her back. She gazed upwards, trusting the salt water’s buoyancy to hold her lax limbs up. Through threadbare patches in the blue-grey clouds, the sky was a soft, creamy gold. Wingulls circled high above, crying out raucous taunts. Everything emptied out. It gave her such crystalline clarity, the cold filling the deep, hollow places in her body, that Jenny craved it like sugar or salt. Only painting felt better.
“Come back,” her brother yelled, hands cupped around his mouth, trainer’s cap jammed down on his head. Jenny’s forehead was loose, though she had begun to shake. She turned over onto her stomach and struck back toward the beach. With a relief that lasted in the second before the wind whipped at her wet skin, she splashed onto the shining sand. The webbed footprints of Wingulls wandered over the strip that the outgoing tide had just abandoned. Far out, along the horizon, the dim silhouette of a cargo ship hunkered down, the kind that circled Driftveil City like half-starved scavengers. Jenny breathed in the biting breeze, swelling her lungs with brine, burning the insides of her nostrils from the cold. Goosebumps pimpled her arms and legs. “I thought you were lying,” Liam went on, holding out a towel, “About the swimming.”
“Don’t knock it ‘till you try it” Jenny said, drying herself with the towel, savouring the scratchy rasp against her skin. At her brother’s feet his Starmie, rough violet skin gleaming with moisture, rotated its back limbs lazily. Out in the water she had seen it swimming, submerged, moving with a speed that had seized her with a prey animal fear. Jenny shimmied quickly back into her cargo pants and long-sleeved shirt, without waiting for her swimsuit to dry. “Mum says I’ll get sick. But it’s been nice, since I finished school, to have something to get out of the house everyday.”
“Go to the gym. Or hit up one of your trainer’s school friends.” Liam said, shouldering his affrontingly practical backpack, the canvas and strap-covered one bought for his journey. An exact copy, empty and pristine, was propped up in Jenny’s cupboard. Liam’s hair had grown longer since he had left on his trainer’s journey, sticking up straight and black, in the shaggy way her own hair had. They were recognisable as siblings, but only just. Jenny had always wanted to look more like him, to have his olive skin instead of her own pasty tone, to have his pale eyes instead of her black ones. Years ago, when she was ten and he was thirteen, she had spent hours curled up on his bed, watching him lose at video games. A fair way down from them a woman called out to her Herdier, dancing happily in the shallows.
“I’m never speaking to those losers again,” Jenny said, and wrapped her arms around her waist. Clumped hair, black with water, dripped onto her collar and down her back. Beneath her clothes the wet polyester swimsuit itched. The sore in her stomach, warming up with the rest of her, twinged with embarrassment. It was strange to see her brother. Everything he owned was battered, stripped down, covered in smeared dirt and grass stains. A velvet-backed badge case, eight metallic shapes catching the lamp light, hung on their living room wall. Even Aquarii, who had played with her in the sprinklers on hot summers, was strange in its evolved form. When Jenny got up to go to the bathroom at night, moving clumsily through the house, alien in the dark, she saw it, in its living room tank, pulsing with strange colours. On one insomniac night Jenny had balanced her watercolours and a flashlight and drawn it. When she had shown the painting to Liam he had given her an odd, surprised smile, and asked to keep it
“Ah, high school,” Liam said, and reached out to ruffle her wet hair before Jenny ducked away, giving him her best greasy look. “You’ll meet better people on your journey.”
“You met anyone?” Jenny said, and waggled her eyebrows in the way she had calculated to be most annoying, but Liam didn’t take the bait.
“Let’s go to the market,” he said instead, “I’ll treat you to dinner.”
“I wouldn’t say no to burgers,” Jenny said, and they turned to head back through to the carpark, where they had left their bikes. The sun lowered itself down the horizon, catching the whole sky up in a red glow. Orange roofs caught the last glancing rays of light lancing down through breaks in the clouds, bright as neon signs. Trees with rickety, bare branches shuddered noisily. Cars rushed past, trailing blaring pop music. A Murkrow, its witch’s nose tilted down to peer into the road below, shuffled along a powerline, searching for a target or a trinket. As they pedalled down the street, Jenny pulled ahead, sweat mixing with salt water under her helmet. Rain started to fall, rolling in furtive play down windshields and pooling on the grimy pavement. Headlights on snub-nosed cars shone useless into the pale dusk. At a red light Jenny strained to catch the score for the League Championship matches from the radio blasting from an open window.
In the bland fluorescent white that drilled down through the Driftveil Market, in a Red Torchic,
Jenny and Liam ate burgers. Out the big glass doors the last evening shoppers, swaddled in puffer jackets and long scarves, crisscrossed gleaming linoleum floors. Jenny chewed rapturously at dry bread and charred meat. Behind the counter bored teenagers gazed dead-eyed at fryers or leant against the walls, chatting. Liam yammered away, in the convulsive floods of speech that sometimes took hold of him, about his journey. “It was nice having Aquarii with me at night, after it evolved,” he said, wiping greasy fingers on a flimsy napkin. “If I got homesick at night I would let it out of its ball and watch it glow, like it was a nightlight.”
“You got homesick?” Jenny asked, propping her elbow on the streaky plastic tabletop, eyes sliding from Liam’s face to the silent TV screen behind him. It was playing some gimmick TV show, people cooperating with their Pokémon partners to cook elaborate dishes. She stretched out her legs, gaze switching to the three Pokéballs lined up on Liam’s belt. When Liam followed her stare he grinned.
“Yeah, I got homesick,” Liam answered, in the showily grownup way he had adopted, “You’ll get homesick too.”
“Maybe.”
“Definitely,” Liam insisted, crumpling a stained white fast food wrapper in his fist. “Try eating dehydrated rice and vegetables for a full week running.”
“Have you forgotten what it’s like to live at home?” Jenny asked, hooking an ankle around a chair leg, pressing the hard metal into her shin.
“I’m in the Ranger School dormitory,” Liam said, “It’s not exactly paradise on Earth.” He didn’t meet her eyes. Instead he drank the last of his frozen Coke, making an obnoxious slurping sound. “I have a present for you,” he went on, “I caught a Baltoy in the Desert Resort. Just for you. So it’ll be easier for you to leave.” Over the table, with the slowness of faked indifference, he handed her a Dusk Ball, cold in her fingers and gleaming under the fluorescents.
“Thank you,” Jenny said, clenching her fingers around the ball until her knuckles went white. She slipped into her pocket. “But sometimes I think I might not even go. Not everyone does. I just feel too - tired, or something. And it seems pointless. I’m not going to be a trainer. I’m a painter.”
“So? It’s not about - sports.” Liam said, and stood up. “Come on,” he continued, brisk and abrupt, jittering from leg to leg, “We’re going back to the beach. I wanna show you something cool.”
“Okay,” Jenny said, shrugging, and swirled her last fry in a puddle of tomato sauce, wiping salt and grease off on her pants. Liam wrinkled his nose in disgust. They rode back the way they had come, streets emptied after the post-work rush. Puddles gleamed murky under streetlamps. Water flew up under their wheels. Jenny followed the bright light attached to her brother’s bike through the suburban streets. They passed a convenience store, its sterile white aisles lined with alluring Pokémon-emblazoned packaging. In a gap between taller buildings, the Driftveil Drawbridge sparkled with pinpoint lights. Cold prickled every inch that Jenny had left exposed, lashing her cheeks red and making her ears ache. Overhead the moon bleached an oil-slick halo in the thinner clouds.
They left their bikes in the same carpark and walked back to the same stretch of grey sand, and the dark sea, gleaming where the light caught it like a bolt of black silk. Jenny scanned the ground for unbroken spiral shells or bits of smooth seaglass. Waves broke in little loving caresses against the bulky seaweed strewn along the shore. “Watch,” Liam said, and reached for a Pokéball on his belt. In a soft ray of red light, he released Aquarri onto the sand. Jenny pressed her chilled fingers into the warm skin of her own neck. She could hear, very distant, the slow slur of traffic and the rhythmic, subdued push and pull of the water. The lighthouse blinked regularly on and off, from its distant nest. There seemed to be no Wingull now. Liam breathed noisily next to her. Another cargo ship crouched far out to sea, visible by its pinprick lights. The ball in her pocket seemed like an incredibly heavy weight.
“Wait,” Liam ordered, cupping his hands around his mouth and nose to try and thaw them with his breath. His pale eyes were fixed on Aquarii, which had begun to waddle to the water. Before Jenny asked why, he said, “Shhh.” They watched as Aquarri submerged in the ocean and, brighter than in its tank, flared into colour. The gem in its chest radiated flickering multi-toned light, pulsing some strange code, casting shuddering rays onto bulging waves and white froth. A deep, cool stone lodged itself in Jenny’s chest. They seemed separate from the rest of the world, like a solitary, antiquated lighthouse. “It’s emitting radio signals,” Liam said, his voice dropped low. “Right now Aquarii is trying to reach - well, nobody knows. Some people think they came from outer space” Jenny imagined the message that it might be sending, the places it might have come from, the distances its signals travelled. She felt very small. In the hour, or more that they stood on that beach, they didn’t speak, just watched the refracted light in the water around Aquarii.
TIGHTROPE DANCE
Routine was the only thing that kept Liam going, most days. He hated to disturb it. At five every morning, in the water-down predawn dark, he woke up. Showered, fed Aquarii and got its tank ready for the day, made himself coffee and toast. While he ate he would sit before its tank, watching its gem illuminate the dark water around it with flickering colour. Trees, laden with rich summer foliage, knocked with injured patience at his window. Pidgey cooed out in the street, soft and drowsy. At this hour his roommate’s Purrloin would nose around the kitchen door, watching him with sly green eyes, its claws clicking on the floorboards. The rich, burnt smell of just brewed coffee hung in the hot, staid air. Liam caught the bus into work, down the avenues made by broad trees and skyscrapers, dowsed in unvarying grey dawn light. Until two in the afternoon, he worked cooped up in Castelia City’s Pokémart.
The chill of the store, the mist curling down his shoulders when he restocked the fridges, the bland white lights, numbed him. His coworkers would talk to him, about their wife’s trip to Kalos, of their dreams of travelling around Unova, and he would do his work and nod along. Most of the time he worked in the back on the fresh fruit and vegetables, hacking leaves off cauliflowers and picking Sitrus Berries off their stems, their sweet juices from berries shining on his gloves. On a shelf behind him, wedged between plastic tubs and other junk, a portable radio played soft pop hits. The only clear thoughts in his head were about finishing work, smoking a joint, and taking Aquarii down to the pier. During his lunch break, Liam ate a sandwich in the Central Plaza, sweat soaking his uniform shirt, watching tourists marvel at the silvery play of the fountain, licking at ice cream cones.
When he clocked off today though, Liam had to pass on the joint and the pier, because he was meant to hang out with his sister. At the thought, for the past week, a live Seviper had started to coil and uncoil his chest. Not that Jenny was scary. In his mind Liam still pictured her pigtailed, and sullen. It was just that she had finished her journey last year, presented a shiny badge case to their parents, and traipsed off to art school. Their mother liked to speculate about her prospects of employment, but not in Liam’s hearing. When he was nearby, their parents talked with starched optimism about the career paths open to a smart man, working in retail. No mention of the Ranger School graduation certificate, recently taken off the living room wall, passed their lips. Or a word about the posting in Pinwheel Forest, technically just deferred indefinitely, ready for his taking whenever he chose. Liam thought about that posting, still, gazing at the billboard outside his bedroom window. He had been so happy there on his journey, training up Aquarii, or watching his team tussle over the lichen-furred roots of massive trees. The light, at noon, was filtered, green, crystalline.
They had arranged to meet up at Café Sonata, at four, which meant four-thirty considering Jenny’s trouble with punctuality. Liam only had time for a shower, drumming the store’s cold off his skin with near boiling water, and a haphazard dinner. He made himself a stir-fry, watching the beaten egg froth up white. The sweet smell of carrot and capsicum frying in honey mingled with the dark salty soy sauce aroma. In a show at shifting the oppressive heat he had the kitchen window cracked open on tin roofs and concrete chimneys. Golden late evening light swayed through the cramped kitchen in freckles and wavering squares. The whine and rush of traffic, and the harsh croaking of Murkrow's huddled in high branches, slipped in through the open window. Liam ate in a rush, wet hair dampening his shirt collar, talking in a conversational tone to the Purrloin.
When Liam went to wash up he found that the garbage disposal was broken, making the sink fill with murky water, swirling with food scraps and coffee grounds. Steam licked up into the hot air. Liam had to dig around in the drain with a gloved hand and scoop out the blockage, making faces at the Purrloin all the while. “Gross, Swiper, real gross,” he told it, “Tell your owner to stop putting her leftovers down the sink.” He missed his train, leaving him waiting in the crowded station, smelling the sweat and perfume of strangers. He texted Jenny to let her know he was going to be late, and she sent back: lol its nice to be the early one for once. When the train came Liam leant his head against the window, watching as it curled in closer to the city, the skyscrapers spilling amber light like caramel from crushed chocolate casings. Sometimes Liam missed Driftveil’s orange rooftops, which were anyway giving away to green and gem-like tiling.
At five, when Liam finally got to the Café, it was bustling with people, their conversation slurred together into a senseless babble over the backdrop of an acoustic guitar. Jenny was seated by the bar, beside a little candle in a cut-glass holder, scrolling on her phone. A glass of Guinness was set before her. She had cut her hair shorter since he had last seen her. Attached to the broad leather belt she wore was a single Pokéball, the Dusk Ball he had given her three years ago. He missed that year, before he graduated and moved to Castelia. Jenny was always asking him to help her train the Baltoy he had caught. She had named it Lascaux. It was probably evolved by now. Jenny held herself like a trainer, straight-backed and confident, though she had confessed to Liam that she hated battling. But their parents wanted a sixteen badge total, divided evenly between children.
“Hey, over here,” Jenny shouted over the roiling noise, and Liam slid into the chair beside her. He signalled to the bartender, a tired twenty-something with straggly brown hair and a rumpled waistcoat-bowtie uniform, and ordered a beer. The café smelt like alcohol and frying chips, everything rendered dim and mellow by the soft lamp light. People, most just come off work, clustered around the tables, in scuffed business casual or slouched in the latest fashions. Liam recognised the song that the guitarist was playing as David Bowie. Through the plate glass windows people in shorts and tank tops eddied under murmuring trees. Street lamps turned the night into a theatrically-lit stage. The Café seemed connected by a tenuous string to the outside world, colder and cozier. Behind the bar bottles in melted candy colours winked in the low light. A Herdier was tied up just out the doors, resting its chin contently on its paws, watching the pedestrians in their restless currents.
“Sorry, I’m late,” Liam said, sipping at his beer, savouring the sour taste on his parched tongue. Sweat dried at the back of his neck and along his hairline, when he took his cap off and rested it on the bench. “How’ve things been?”
“Well, not much has changed,” Jenny said, “Uni is good, my new sharehouse is pretty chill. Over the summer break I’ve taken more hours at the restaurant, so I’ve started renting out a studio. There’s this painting I’m working on - well, it sounds crazy when I say it, but it’s gonna be really cool.”
“That’s plenty of change.”
“I’d have less to say if we hung out more.”
“You’re not as good at the guilt trip as Mum is.”
Jenny laughed, pressing her chilled glass against her temple. “And you? How goes it in the land of stoners and slackers?”
“Don’t be a bitch,” Liam said half-heartedly, “Anyway, I work fulltime. Hardly slacking. Getting a fine arts degree? That’s slacking.”
“Now who sounds like Mum?” Jenny asked, and laughed, “Besides, I’m the least of her problems.”
“Well, I’ll have you know I could go back and take the Pinwheel Forest post anytime I want,” Liam said, pitching his voice into their mother’s insinuating drawl, “If I just wanted to enough.”
“Why don’t you?” Jenny said, placing her glass back on the bench and curling her wrist around it instead, “Get your head out of your ass.”
“Because I don’t want to,” Liam said. He thought wistfully of that deadened time just after graduation, when he used to spend his morning statue-still in bed, staring at his ceiling. It had been relaxing to let that numb spot in his gut spread through his body, like paint in water. When he had called up to defer his first posting it had been such a relief. For a few months, he had told himself, just enough to recover from the stress of school, and then watched that time swell to cover a whole year.
Jenny propped her chin on her hand, digging into the flesh of her lips with her fingertips, gnawing at the last chipped remains of nail polish. There were dark bags under her feverishly shining eyes. Under the warm lamplight her pale skin seemed bleached. She poured out salt from a shaker and began to push it into an abstract pattern. Liam was reminded suddenly of the hours he would see her spend, hunched over a sketchbook. Grains of salt wedged under her nails. “Do you ever get the feeling,” she started, sipping at her Guinness, pausing as if to marvel at the taste. “Do you ever feel like you’re on a tightrope? And you have to try really hard to keep from falling off. So you start up all these routines, right, like I have to get up at a certain time, and go to bed at a certain time, eat this and do that. Or I’ll die. Or start wanting to die. And it feels impossible to do anything else?”
“Yeah, sometimes.”
“Sucker,” Jenny said, and grinned, draining the last of her drink. Unconsciously, her fingers drifted down to the Dusk Ball on her belt, thumb rubbing the marbled black and green casing. “I used to feel that way.”
“Not anymore?” Liam asked, and then leant back on his chair, shame curling in his stomach. He flickered his eyes over the roiling, chattering mass of customers, shoved against the bar or kicked back from the tables. He drained his beer. “Can I see one of your paintings?”
“Sure” Jenny stood up, drinking the last dregs of her Guinness, and shouldered the leather satchel propped against her chair, hung with a grubby plastic Starmie charm, “Just follow me, okay?” They paid and left the bar, catching a bus down to Mode Street, the fashionable evening crowd running with the tourists still lined up outside Casteliacone, heads tilted up to look at the skyscrapers bleaching the sky lavender. In the warm breeze trees rattled in overheated irritation, casting crazy shadows on the footpath. Cafés manned by tired waiters carried out their closing time choreography, chairs going up on tables and disinterested teenagers lazily mopping the tiled floors. Graffiti sprawled across the sides of buildings and low fences. “The painting is based on a dream” Jenny confessed, as they turned down Narrow Street, “It came from Lascaux.”
They entered a squat, old brick building, with a darkened cafe at the front and a closed second-hand shop behind it. The floor was tiled in glossy cream, and the ceiling was art deco frosted glass, arched and beautiful. She stopped before the antique, grille-fronted elevator and pressed the Up button. The doors hissed open, and they stepped into the mirror-panelled interior, and then out into dingy, tiled back corridors, linoleum floors and high small windows, grimy strip lights swinging from long chains. The doors were all made from thick, varnished wood. “Humans made Claydol around 20,000 years ago,” Jenny said, “You can see ‘em on cave walls. Something brought them to life” She turned to look at him, walking backward for a few steps, and reached for the Dusk Ball. With the soft red ray, a Claydol was released, stubby black body and glazed eyes, recognisable somehow as the Baltoy that Liam had caught years ago. “Lascaux has been showing me what.”
“Showing you?”
“In my dreams,” Jenny explained, and paused before one of the many doors. She began to dig through her satchel for her keys; when she found them she fumbled with the lock. Inside was a noble effort towards creating massive amounts of mess in a small space and a short amount of time. On one wall a cluster of photos and postcards were tacked up, all of cave paintings depicting Claydol. Large sheets of scrap fabric protected the floor, stained with paint. The high, clouded windows let in the city bustle, the squawking of Wingulls, a hot breeze to stir the stuffy air. It smelt like oil paint and cigarettes. Liam hadn’t known that Jenny smoked. Lascaux floated over wooden boxes holding paint tubes, canvases leant against the wall, jars filled with murky water, turpentine or oil, clean, tufted brushes, plates encrusted with ultramarine blue and burnt umber.
“See?” Jenny said, pointing to the canvas currently drying on the easel under the windows, “This is what brought them to life. Lascaux remembers it.” Liam stayed rooted to the door. He felt gripped by an emotion strangling and strange, pulsing through his body in icy waves, like the way that pain travels through the limbs. The painting wasn't anything like the sketches that Jenny used to mail him, when she was on her journey. It was enormous, done in layered oil paint, muddy in places, in others seeming to glow with coppery light. Most of the canvas was near black, a smeary dark mass, which seemed to hold the intimation of eyes. In the centre, done in great washes of white and broken brushstrokes of richer colours, was a great pale light, blurring the boundaries of the painting, a violent, terrifying, burning ray. Centuries ago it must have been the Claydol’s first sight. It seemed strange to think that his sister had painted it. Liam’s lips parted involuntarily. His breath caught in his chest. In his mind sunlight fell down through the knitted leaves of Pinwheel Forest’s canopy, green and lovely on the soft undergrowth.