Winter
Wind ravaged the plateau, tearing swiftly over the grass, and challenging all those who stood before it with an imposing barrier. But although it tore over their respective fur, hair, and clothes, the three figures on the plateau barely seemed to notice. They had spent a long time in wind harsher than this - together - battling more fierce than the storm itself howled. The storm which, summoned in their wake, seemed to empower them towards ever greater strength. In a storm more ferocious than this one, Velvet had fought a dragon, and won. She did not fear the wind. She soaked it into her bones.
Phi closed her eyes, and tried to soak it in, too. Tried to feel the crashing wake of the air, sensing it like a white cold that peeled the quiet out of her skin. Tried to soak in a wild ferocity that could force her body past terror, past cold, past fatigue. Into a dream.
Four years had passed since she had stopped dreaming. Three years since she smoked like a wildfire, driven on by the wind towards ever greater bravery, terror, and tears. Somewhere along the line she had started to feel not empowered but overtaken by the storms they made, swept up in her own hurricane of a dream. But Velvet had never been swept away. She prided herself in never being knocked off her feet - and ever since she had found Sparrow, she was stronger still. Velvet and Sparrow had been her rocks in the hurricane, keeping her alive, keeping her together, letting her l(o)ose herself. Giving space for Phi to heal. It was no wonder it was so hard for Phi to say goodbye to them now.
“I - I’ll be back one day, I’m sure. I know you don’t want to leave.” The tall, lanky Herdier and the oddly coal-colored midday Lycanrok only nodded their confirmation, holding each other close in the wind. They had become very close to each other - very close indeed. Phi was proud of them. She worried often for Velvet, whose ferocity betrayed a pain Phi couldn’t understand, and when she’d first met Sparrow, even she couldn’t handle that wildfire of a wolf (even Sparrow, too, couldn’t handle herself). But the two of them together - it had been difficult at first. But now they held each other up, kept each other together. Phi knew they would be okay.
More than okay - they would be wild, fierce, and strong. They would be the winter storm. Out here, on the vast plateaus of Poni Island, they would take a piece of Phi to where she had always wanted to be. Somewhere where the wind never stopped blowing - somewhere where you were never sure if you controlled the wind or the wind controlled you. Somewhere you could be swept away, forever breathless, forever running - forever free.
Perhaps they had seen the tears in her eyes, for the two wolf pokemon leapt towards her, and held her close, too.
“I’ll be okay,” she told them, voice joyful and haunted. “I’m sure sometimes I’ll still get swept away, but I understand now. I have Ai. I have everything I’ve learned from you.” I have Rose she thought, but didn’t say out loud.
There was another part of these winds - other sensations beyond freedom and strength. Those of pain and fear, as forcefully strong as the joy. Although Velvet and Phi had healed from their own separate wounds, healing was a process. It would never fully be over.
“Go be… something,” she added, placing a hand on each pokemon. “Go be anything. I’ll see you soon.” Her arms enveloped them both, feeling rough fur, scraping against the edges of Sparrow’s rocks and Velvet’s goggles, until at last she released them. She took a step back.
The wolves howled, and the wind howled back to them. Phi got lost for a moment in the perfect, piercing blue that seemed to sweep out of their forms and create the winter sky. Then they were gone, and so was she. Or - they had left, and her brain, for a long time, left her too. She let herself get overtaken by the wind. Her short, roughly cropped hair grew tangled in its clips, and she smiled, long gone to a distant, quiet, cold place. A body beneath the newly falling snow.
Ai waited for a long time at the base of the plateau, guarding his trainer’s bag and pokeballs, waiting for her to return. His massive purple and grey form lay solemnly on the grass as the clouds began slowly to blanket it with white, the tip of his tail every so often flicking the snow off his brow.
It used to be she that worried about him, but now the Skuntank felt the opposite was more true. They had both come - first to Kalos, then to Alola - in search of memories. Ai wasn’t quite sure what, in the end, they had found, but it didn’t really matter. As long as they were together, he didn’t want much else. Except naps. More naps - and maybe a tournament or two he could watch as a spectator.
His head flicked upwards as he caught a sound in the quiet. A tense moment passed, before the slow, limping gait of his trainer came into view. Taken by a fierce excitement, the normally lazy beast bounded towards her, caught in his own winter storm. His limp barely slowed him as he leapt into her arms, and they both fell to the ground.
For a moment he was sure she was laughing, and he returned with his own eerie, beautiful chortle. But her body shivered, as if she were crying. And so, he held her close, and didn’t let go.
The wind picked up around them, carrying away their laughter and their tears. Together, quietly, they dreamed.
Spring
It felt like winter had lasted a long hecking time, and Phi did not appreciate this fact. She might have made it worse by immediately leaving Alola to travel to Sinnoh, but she really didn’t want to admit this. All the quiet trainer knew was that it was finally over.
She heaved the yellow lizard riding on her back higher onto her shoulders, a skip starting to her step. Although her hip still troubled her (and a number of other things over the last few years), she had been working hard to take care of it, and it sometimes allowed her these moments. These moments where she somehow felt young, a clarity in her eyes. Felt like the flowers and the roots themselves, grasping at the earth, and flourishing out towards the sun. She wanted to yell. She wanted to fly. Hell, she wanted to call out Sans and ask him to let her fly. But she had a place to be, and she needed her feet on the ground if she had any chance of finding it.
“We have to be close. You getting anything, Ai? Osh?” The Skuntank had his nose studiously to the ground, trailing farther and farther behind as his eyes scrutinized their surroundings. The Manectric, in comparison, was zigzagging like a spastic zigzagoon up and down the path, eyes darting but barely keeping up with his boot-clad feet. He yelped and barked in response to his trainer for no apparent reason other than the joy of it, stomping the ground with his front paws and jerking his hind legs into the air. The little spazz. She hecking loved him.
It was so easy to love right now. So easy to see the beauty that was in front of her, the energy that crisscrossed the spring evening like an electric terrain. She soaked it into her bones - a sunflora, turned towards the sun.
These days it made her tired, more than anything, to watch him run. But she liked this kind of tired. It was the one that came when her body, no longer swept up by a dream, had let her feel. Had let her relax. Osh was the only one she seriously battled with these days, now that she’d left her wolves behind, because she loved him, and he loved… he loved. He loved.
Maybe she’d paint him later. If they couldn’t find the lagoon tonight, maybe she’d paint him dancing in the falling sun.
Her train of thought was interrupted by a low, rolling sound - somewhere between a bark and a laugh. She turned to see Ai, the Skuntank, stiffly posed towards a portion of the cliff they were walking beside. A sudden thrill swept into her veins, matching the venom in his, as she spotted the thin crevice barely visible beneath a wall of vines that led all the way into the mountain.
They had found it. At long last, they had returned. It wasn’t long until Phi had pushed herself into the crevice, through the stifling dark, and out into the open, into a cavern of dripping water and the platinum sheen of a hidden, underground lagoon.
Although technically from Kalos, Phi didn’t have a home base, or anywhere to return to. There were, too, many acquaintances she had made on her journey, but none of them she trusted enough to take care of her pokemon. So when she didn’t feel like she could take care of one, or she didn’t have enough room to keep them travelling with her, she felt like she had only one course of action. Find them a home, where they could live. Where one day, if they still wanted her, she could return. This was the course of action she had taken after she left Kalos, when she realized that her pokemon needed something she couldn’t give them. They needed open ocean. At the time, she’d been travelling primarily on land. But now that she only had four pokemon… she had changed a lot in the last four years. She could make room in her life for them. So she had returned, and she could only hope that her Lumineon had waited for her.
Her hand dipped into the water, leaving tense and quiet ripples in her wake. To her surprise, it almost immediately brushed up against scales.
“Sunny…” she breathed, unable to imagine her luck. “Sunny?”
The fins that trailed out of the water in greeting sent a wash of curling pink into Phi’s vision, spreading out over the cave, until she was embraced by the soft, quiet warmth of their meeting.
I’m here, the warmth seemed to say.
“I’m here,” the trainer echoed back, a gentle joy keeping her heart beating.
She could stay here awhile.
She could stay here for a very long time.
Summer
Why did she keep feeling this way.
Why did it hurt.
Why couldn’t she stop it.
Why couldn’t she just… live. And be.
Why the hell was she considered an elite trainer. Why the hell had they invited her here. Why hadn’t she stayed forever in the ocean, and pretended she no longer existed.
Why did she feel so different practically all the time, so that she could barely keep herself straight.
Why had she lost. Why had she won. Neither of those things should have happened that day. She shouldn’t even have been on that stage.
Next to her, Sans shrieked, and she wanted to shriek with him. She hated this so much. It didn’t used to bother her, the way everything moved and grew and took her over - how color bled out of her eyes, and a dream took over her gaze. But more and more she felt like it made her into an idiot.
The weight of spectacular battles and missed opportunities weighed into her back. Didn't everyone all say that opponents should become friends? Why didn’t she have any friends? Couldn’t keep up with any contact she made? Couldn’t remember if she was even supposed to meet up with them?
Did anyone even respect her, or care that she was there? Was it her fault, because she just didn’t know how to be in the same world as all the other trainers around her?
She turned towards her prehistoric bird, a living icon of being out of place, buried her face into his chest, and shrieked in agony. Even the gentle touch of Rose, her Abra, climbing up her back couldn’t break her out of the tangles of her brain.
There was no reason for it, but it hadn’t been a good day. It wouldn’t be a good day ever again. That was what her body told her.
There was a reason for it. It had been a bad day, but she had survived them before. Sometimes she was this way. Sometimes she had to be fighting - fighting trainers, fighting herself, fighting the dreams that kept her from living and the pain of the distance they made. That was what her experience told her.
Her experience told her that she would be okay.
Fall
The dream was in her eyes again. Not like smoke, not like wind, not like fire or pain. Easily and quietly, sweeping her through the world, showing her what made it worth living. She kept close to her Skuntank, both of them heavily limping, because when she was deepest in dream was when she loved him most. When she could remember what he meant to her, in memories that ached out of her body with every sense that brushed past her. When she didn't need to fight who she was anymore.
When she was deepest in dream she was also deepest in sorrow, but she tried to forget that part, Tried to forget how everything felt heavy and meaningful and real, even though she was more out of touch with reality than she wanted to admit. It didn’t matter. Until it escaped her, she would follow the dream - and now the dream led her onwards, deeper into Unova’s forests, where she had ultimately started her journey.
Her hand brushed over the limb of a tree, the bark rough and spectacularly brown, swimming with algae and leaves. Her thigh rattled against a fern, which seemed to sing, a chorus of bells and brushstrokes texturing the air with inaudible voices. She wasn’t searching for anything in particular - she was just searching. Wandering. Exploring. Lost, and dreaming of meaning. She hadn’t actually expected to find it.
Ai led the way, breaking through a bramble and out into a clearing. The clearing - a landscape of oddly lush grass that swarmed her eyes. It reached into her, evoked a tender green that drained the energy out of her, left her listless to her bones. Phi stood there, stunned, confused, and awed, unable to explain what had happened - until, that is, Phi spotted her.
There, standing in the middle of the clearing, leeching the courage out of her body, was a Sawsbuck. Her heart caught in her throat. She thought that every moment she could break the air as if it were glass. There was a - an openness to its appearance that she couldn’t comprehend. An honesty so fierce it made her mask fall away, her stance bleed into her sorrow, herself feel everything she had wanted to keep out of her body. The confusion, the love, the joy, and the sorrow. It all filled the air, brought out of her.
The Sawsbuck stepped towards her as if she had been there just for Phi - and maybe she had. Phi couldn’t explain how she knew this. An old memory, maybe, of a Deerling in the woods? It didn't matter. She was sure - the Sawsbuck had been waiting for her. It moved across the clearing and pushed into her outstretched hand, so that Phi's hand rested against her snout, beneath her eyes.
“You are… the forest,” said Phi, unconsciously. The deer pushed her hand farther, until it rested against the antlers. “Why did you wait for me?”
In answer, she saw something she couldn’t explain. Her eyes, deep in dream, unfocused completely. The green soaked into her throat and eyes, flickering into brown, red, white. She felt unbearably that she had to cry, or its force would tear into her, leaving nothing behind. So she cried.
Beneath her eyes the Sawsbuck changed, her antlers and fur moving with the seasons. Phi felt what the Sawsbuck felt. Phi felt apprehension, confusion, fear, joy. A deep sorrow at every change, a tangible frustration at every end and every return, as the cycles moved in and out - heavy weight on her antlers, only blooms, falling leaves, shedding fur - uncontrollably. All she could do was keep living.
Phi took her hand off the deer, and breathed out.
“You’re like me,” she said. “You keep changing. You keep cycling back. Sometimes you go to dark places - sometimes to light. You don’t… control-”
And then she couldn’t finish what she was saying, so instead she bent into the deer, who trusted her, who she trusted, inexplicably.
“Thank you for finding me,” Phi whispered. It was only then that she felt the weight on her shoulders, the Abra pressing one hand into her head, one hand onto the deer. The Abra who had facilitated the dream.
For the very first time in two years, Rose spoke.
It was you who found yourself.
Phi gasped. Her chest settled. She leaned into the deer, and she felt Peace.
Winter
It was warm in the Pokemon center.
It used to be that Phi rarely spent her time here, but things that used to be often changed. She fully expected something in her body to flip the switch, and a feeling of discomfort to take her over, take her far away from these buildings once more. But for now, it didn't feel bad. It felt good - in the warmth, nestled between the broad side of a Sawsbuck and the twitching form of a sleeping Manectric half on her lap. It felt good - watching the snow pile on the side of the window as an Abra teleported gleefully into and out of the cold. It felt good.
Her hand traced the rough edges of an empty pokeball, cut up by countless sandstorms. For a while she lived like the storm, and sometimes it was still a fitting metaphor. But this new metaphor - she liked this one more.
Her head fell back against the deer, staring up at the antlers, which were white as snow.
Phi was the forest.
Changing continuously, cyclically, uncontrollably, beautifully. Terrifyingly sad, dangerously happy, and everything inbetween.
And at night - at night, sometimes, the mist would come out, and the forest would start to dream…
She closed her eyes. Above her, on the Sawsbuck's back, the large form of Ai chortled merrily.
She'd be alright. He didn't need to worry for her tonight.
Wind ravaged the plateau, tearing swiftly over the grass, and challenging all those who stood before it with an imposing barrier. But although it tore over their respective fur, hair, and clothes, the three figures on the plateau barely seemed to notice. They had spent a long time in wind harsher than this - together - battling more fierce than the storm itself howled. The storm which, summoned in their wake, seemed to empower them towards ever greater strength. In a storm more ferocious than this one, Velvet had fought a dragon, and won. She did not fear the wind. She soaked it into her bones.
Phi closed her eyes, and tried to soak it in, too. Tried to feel the crashing wake of the air, sensing it like a white cold that peeled the quiet out of her skin. Tried to soak in a wild ferocity that could force her body past terror, past cold, past fatigue. Into a dream.
Four years had passed since she had stopped dreaming. Three years since she smoked like a wildfire, driven on by the wind towards ever greater bravery, terror, and tears. Somewhere along the line she had started to feel not empowered but overtaken by the storms they made, swept up in her own hurricane of a dream. But Velvet had never been swept away. She prided herself in never being knocked off her feet - and ever since she had found Sparrow, she was stronger still. Velvet and Sparrow had been her rocks in the hurricane, keeping her alive, keeping her together, letting her l(o)ose herself. Giving space for Phi to heal. It was no wonder it was so hard for Phi to say goodbye to them now.
“I - I’ll be back one day, I’m sure. I know you don’t want to leave.” The tall, lanky Herdier and the oddly coal-colored midday Lycanrok only nodded their confirmation, holding each other close in the wind. They had become very close to each other - very close indeed. Phi was proud of them. She worried often for Velvet, whose ferocity betrayed a pain Phi couldn’t understand, and when she’d first met Sparrow, even she couldn’t handle that wildfire of a wolf (even Sparrow, too, couldn’t handle herself). But the two of them together - it had been difficult at first. But now they held each other up, kept each other together. Phi knew they would be okay.
More than okay - they would be wild, fierce, and strong. They would be the winter storm. Out here, on the vast plateaus of Poni Island, they would take a piece of Phi to where she had always wanted to be. Somewhere where the wind never stopped blowing - somewhere where you were never sure if you controlled the wind or the wind controlled you. Somewhere you could be swept away, forever breathless, forever running - forever free.
Perhaps they had seen the tears in her eyes, for the two wolf pokemon leapt towards her, and held her close, too.
“I’ll be okay,” she told them, voice joyful and haunted. “I’m sure sometimes I’ll still get swept away, but I understand now. I have Ai. I have everything I’ve learned from you.” I have Rose she thought, but didn’t say out loud.
There was another part of these winds - other sensations beyond freedom and strength. Those of pain and fear, as forcefully strong as the joy. Although Velvet and Phi had healed from their own separate wounds, healing was a process. It would never fully be over.
“Go be… something,” she added, placing a hand on each pokemon. “Go be anything. I’ll see you soon.” Her arms enveloped them both, feeling rough fur, scraping against the edges of Sparrow’s rocks and Velvet’s goggles, until at last she released them. She took a step back.
The wolves howled, and the wind howled back to them. Phi got lost for a moment in the perfect, piercing blue that seemed to sweep out of their forms and create the winter sky. Then they were gone, and so was she. Or - they had left, and her brain, for a long time, left her too. She let herself get overtaken by the wind. Her short, roughly cropped hair grew tangled in its clips, and she smiled, long gone to a distant, quiet, cold place. A body beneath the newly falling snow.
Ai waited for a long time at the base of the plateau, guarding his trainer’s bag and pokeballs, waiting for her to return. His massive purple and grey form lay solemnly on the grass as the clouds began slowly to blanket it with white, the tip of his tail every so often flicking the snow off his brow.
It used to be she that worried about him, but now the Skuntank felt the opposite was more true. They had both come - first to Kalos, then to Alola - in search of memories. Ai wasn’t quite sure what, in the end, they had found, but it didn’t really matter. As long as they were together, he didn’t want much else. Except naps. More naps - and maybe a tournament or two he could watch as a spectator.
His head flicked upwards as he caught a sound in the quiet. A tense moment passed, before the slow, limping gait of his trainer came into view. Taken by a fierce excitement, the normally lazy beast bounded towards her, caught in his own winter storm. His limp barely slowed him as he leapt into her arms, and they both fell to the ground.
For a moment he was sure she was laughing, and he returned with his own eerie, beautiful chortle. But her body shivered, as if she were crying. And so, he held her close, and didn’t let go.
The wind picked up around them, carrying away their laughter and their tears. Together, quietly, they dreamed.
Spring
It felt like winter had lasted a long hecking time, and Phi did not appreciate this fact. She might have made it worse by immediately leaving Alola to travel to Sinnoh, but she really didn’t want to admit this. All the quiet trainer knew was that it was finally over.
She heaved the yellow lizard riding on her back higher onto her shoulders, a skip starting to her step. Although her hip still troubled her (and a number of other things over the last few years), she had been working hard to take care of it, and it sometimes allowed her these moments. These moments where she somehow felt young, a clarity in her eyes. Felt like the flowers and the roots themselves, grasping at the earth, and flourishing out towards the sun. She wanted to yell. She wanted to fly. Hell, she wanted to call out Sans and ask him to let her fly. But she had a place to be, and she needed her feet on the ground if she had any chance of finding it.
“We have to be close. You getting anything, Ai? Osh?” The Skuntank had his nose studiously to the ground, trailing farther and farther behind as his eyes scrutinized their surroundings. The Manectric, in comparison, was zigzagging like a spastic zigzagoon up and down the path, eyes darting but barely keeping up with his boot-clad feet. He yelped and barked in response to his trainer for no apparent reason other than the joy of it, stomping the ground with his front paws and jerking his hind legs into the air. The little spazz. She hecking loved him.
It was so easy to love right now. So easy to see the beauty that was in front of her, the energy that crisscrossed the spring evening like an electric terrain. She soaked it into her bones - a sunflora, turned towards the sun.
These days it made her tired, more than anything, to watch him run. But she liked this kind of tired. It was the one that came when her body, no longer swept up by a dream, had let her feel. Had let her relax. Osh was the only one she seriously battled with these days, now that she’d left her wolves behind, because she loved him, and he loved… he loved. He loved.
Maybe she’d paint him later. If they couldn’t find the lagoon tonight, maybe she’d paint him dancing in the falling sun.
Her train of thought was interrupted by a low, rolling sound - somewhere between a bark and a laugh. She turned to see Ai, the Skuntank, stiffly posed towards a portion of the cliff they were walking beside. A sudden thrill swept into her veins, matching the venom in his, as she spotted the thin crevice barely visible beneath a wall of vines that led all the way into the mountain.
They had found it. At long last, they had returned. It wasn’t long until Phi had pushed herself into the crevice, through the stifling dark, and out into the open, into a cavern of dripping water and the platinum sheen of a hidden, underground lagoon.
Although technically from Kalos, Phi didn’t have a home base, or anywhere to return to. There were, too, many acquaintances she had made on her journey, but none of them she trusted enough to take care of her pokemon. So when she didn’t feel like she could take care of one, or she didn’t have enough room to keep them travelling with her, she felt like she had only one course of action. Find them a home, where they could live. Where one day, if they still wanted her, she could return. This was the course of action she had taken after she left Kalos, when she realized that her pokemon needed something she couldn’t give them. They needed open ocean. At the time, she’d been travelling primarily on land. But now that she only had four pokemon… she had changed a lot in the last four years. She could make room in her life for them. So she had returned, and she could only hope that her Lumineon had waited for her.
Her hand dipped into the water, leaving tense and quiet ripples in her wake. To her surprise, it almost immediately brushed up against scales.
“Sunny…” she breathed, unable to imagine her luck. “Sunny?”
The fins that trailed out of the water in greeting sent a wash of curling pink into Phi’s vision, spreading out over the cave, until she was embraced by the soft, quiet warmth of their meeting.
I’m here, the warmth seemed to say.
“I’m here,” the trainer echoed back, a gentle joy keeping her heart beating.
She could stay here awhile.
She could stay here for a very long time.
Summer
Why did she keep feeling this way.
Why did it hurt.
Why couldn’t she stop it.
Why couldn’t she just… live. And be.
Why the hell was she considered an elite trainer. Why the hell had they invited her here. Why hadn’t she stayed forever in the ocean, and pretended she no longer existed.
Why did she feel so different practically all the time, so that she could barely keep herself straight.
Why had she lost. Why had she won. Neither of those things should have happened that day. She shouldn’t even have been on that stage.
Next to her, Sans shrieked, and she wanted to shriek with him. She hated this so much. It didn’t used to bother her, the way everything moved and grew and took her over - how color bled out of her eyes, and a dream took over her gaze. But more and more she felt like it made her into an idiot.
The weight of spectacular battles and missed opportunities weighed into her back. Didn't everyone all say that opponents should become friends? Why didn’t she have any friends? Couldn’t keep up with any contact she made? Couldn’t remember if she was even supposed to meet up with them?
Did anyone even respect her, or care that she was there? Was it her fault, because she just didn’t know how to be in the same world as all the other trainers around her?
She turned towards her prehistoric bird, a living icon of being out of place, buried her face into his chest, and shrieked in agony. Even the gentle touch of Rose, her Abra, climbing up her back couldn’t break her out of the tangles of her brain.
There was no reason for it, but it hadn’t been a good day. It wouldn’t be a good day ever again. That was what her body told her.
There was a reason for it. It had been a bad day, but she had survived them before. Sometimes she was this way. Sometimes she had to be fighting - fighting trainers, fighting herself, fighting the dreams that kept her from living and the pain of the distance they made. That was what her experience told her.
Her experience told her that she would be okay.
Fall
The dream was in her eyes again. Not like smoke, not like wind, not like fire or pain. Easily and quietly, sweeping her through the world, showing her what made it worth living. She kept close to her Skuntank, both of them heavily limping, because when she was deepest in dream was when she loved him most. When she could remember what he meant to her, in memories that ached out of her body with every sense that brushed past her. When she didn't need to fight who she was anymore.
When she was deepest in dream she was also deepest in sorrow, but she tried to forget that part, Tried to forget how everything felt heavy and meaningful and real, even though she was more out of touch with reality than she wanted to admit. It didn’t matter. Until it escaped her, she would follow the dream - and now the dream led her onwards, deeper into Unova’s forests, where she had ultimately started her journey.
Her hand brushed over the limb of a tree, the bark rough and spectacularly brown, swimming with algae and leaves. Her thigh rattled against a fern, which seemed to sing, a chorus of bells and brushstrokes texturing the air with inaudible voices. She wasn’t searching for anything in particular - she was just searching. Wandering. Exploring. Lost, and dreaming of meaning. She hadn’t actually expected to find it.
Ai led the way, breaking through a bramble and out into a clearing. The clearing - a landscape of oddly lush grass that swarmed her eyes. It reached into her, evoked a tender green that drained the energy out of her, left her listless to her bones. Phi stood there, stunned, confused, and awed, unable to explain what had happened - until, that is, Phi spotted her.
There, standing in the middle of the clearing, leeching the courage out of her body, was a Sawsbuck. Her heart caught in her throat. She thought that every moment she could break the air as if it were glass. There was a - an openness to its appearance that she couldn’t comprehend. An honesty so fierce it made her mask fall away, her stance bleed into her sorrow, herself feel everything she had wanted to keep out of her body. The confusion, the love, the joy, and the sorrow. It all filled the air, brought out of her.
The Sawsbuck stepped towards her as if she had been there just for Phi - and maybe she had. Phi couldn’t explain how she knew this. An old memory, maybe, of a Deerling in the woods? It didn't matter. She was sure - the Sawsbuck had been waiting for her. It moved across the clearing and pushed into her outstretched hand, so that Phi's hand rested against her snout, beneath her eyes.
“You are… the forest,” said Phi, unconsciously. The deer pushed her hand farther, until it rested against the antlers. “Why did you wait for me?”
In answer, she saw something she couldn’t explain. Her eyes, deep in dream, unfocused completely. The green soaked into her throat and eyes, flickering into brown, red, white. She felt unbearably that she had to cry, or its force would tear into her, leaving nothing behind. So she cried.
Beneath her eyes the Sawsbuck changed, her antlers and fur moving with the seasons. Phi felt what the Sawsbuck felt. Phi felt apprehension, confusion, fear, joy. A deep sorrow at every change, a tangible frustration at every end and every return, as the cycles moved in and out - heavy weight on her antlers, only blooms, falling leaves, shedding fur - uncontrollably. All she could do was keep living.
Phi took her hand off the deer, and breathed out.
“You’re like me,” she said. “You keep changing. You keep cycling back. Sometimes you go to dark places - sometimes to light. You don’t… control-”
And then she couldn’t finish what she was saying, so instead she bent into the deer, who trusted her, who she trusted, inexplicably.
“Thank you for finding me,” Phi whispered. It was only then that she felt the weight on her shoulders, the Abra pressing one hand into her head, one hand onto the deer. The Abra who had facilitated the dream.
For the very first time in two years, Rose spoke.
It was you who found yourself.
Phi gasped. Her chest settled. She leaned into the deer, and she felt Peace.
Winter
It was warm in the Pokemon center.
It used to be that Phi rarely spent her time here, but things that used to be often changed. She fully expected something in her body to flip the switch, and a feeling of discomfort to take her over, take her far away from these buildings once more. But for now, it didn't feel bad. It felt good - in the warmth, nestled between the broad side of a Sawsbuck and the twitching form of a sleeping Manectric half on her lap. It felt good - watching the snow pile on the side of the window as an Abra teleported gleefully into and out of the cold. It felt good.
Her hand traced the rough edges of an empty pokeball, cut up by countless sandstorms. For a while she lived like the storm, and sometimes it was still a fitting metaphor. But this new metaphor - she liked this one more.
Her head fell back against the deer, staring up at the antlers, which were white as snow.
Phi was the forest.
Changing continuously, cyclically, uncontrollably, beautifully. Terrifyingly sad, dangerously happy, and everything inbetween.
And at night - at night, sometimes, the mist would come out, and the forest would start to dream…
She closed her eyes. Above her, on the Sawsbuck's back, the large form of Ai chortled merrily.
She'd be alright. He didn't need to worry for her tonight.