🌷tea for two 🌷

“Wouldn’t it be better to capture memories that the subjects are aware of and consenting to?” he asked.

Gloria’s expression dropped, her smile cast towards the ground. “I know. There’s just… something different about taking pictures of people who aren’t posing for the camera.”

She looked up, her smile softening, as Hop’s laughter filled the air. A snowflake had landed square on Marnie’s nose, melting before she could cross her eyes to see it.

“See?” Gloria said, gesturing to their friends as Hop tried to catch a snowflake on his nose, bouncing to and fro across the street in a frenzied dance. She brought out her phone and quickly snapped a few photos of the moment.

“Moments like these,” Gloria said, lowering her phone, “they don’t last.”

As if on cue, Hop ceased trying to land a snowflake on his nose.

“Isn’t that why people say you should live in the moment and not behind your phone?” Bede asked.

Gloria kept her gaze on Hop and Marnie, her smile fading. “And how long do those memories last?” she asked in return. “Even now, they’re beginning to fade.”

She lifted her hand, gloved palm towards the sky, and let snowflakes settle across her fingers. They were gone before she had taken her next breath.

“How much will I remember in a years time?” Gloria asked. “In two years?”

There it was again - behind Gloria’s eyes, a depth of pain that escaped in her voice and tugged on Bede’s heart.

“What’s brought this on?” Bede asked. “You’re not just talking about memories of this moment, are you?”

Finally, Gloria looked at him. Really looked at him. There was no forced smile, no twisting or pursing of her lips. She took a breath, and then another, as if she couldn’t figure out how to answer him.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to… ruin the moment. We’re out here to have fun, not…” Gloria sighed.

“I never said you ruined anything,” Bede said, shrugging despite the pull on his heart. He could see Gloria wrestling with something behind her eyes, something painful and heavy, and wished he could take it from her. Wished he could bear that weight, if only for a moment, if only for the selfish desires of his heart, if only so she could smile once more.

The corners of Gloria’s lips pulled up a fraction, but the weight behind her eyes dragged them down again. She looked away, towards Hop and Marnie. Her gaze was distant. Bede knew that whatever it was that was weighing so heavily on her heart had taken hold again. It wouldn’t be enough for him to bear that weight. No, he needed to break it.

And it broke with the sound of a shutter.

Gloria turned towards Bede, her eyes wide, and he took another picture.

“Wh-What are you doing?” she gaped at him, incredulous. Flustered, absolutely adorable, the pink on her cheeks darkening as she flushed.

Another click, another picture.

“I’m capturing a memory,” he said, letting a devious grin smooth over his face.

Gloria scoffed. “That’s not-”

“Not fair?” Bede smirked. “And I wonder if Hop and Marnie would say the same thing if they knew you’d been taking pictures of them in secret all afternoon?”

She stared at him, pursing her lips. Brown eyes narrowing in defiance. Despite the fire in her gaze, her expression was light.

“So?” Bede decided to ask. It was now or never. “What’s with the sudden interest in photos?”

Gloria let out a breath. She fiddled with the pocket her phone was nestled in. Her gaze drifted, but no longer did the weight behind her eyes cloud her mind.

“I just… don’t want to forget,” she said quietly. “Snowflakes are beautiful, but the second they land, they’re gone. It’s like that with memories, too. They begin to fade as soon as the moment ends. I have so many pictures of my father, of all of us together. But they’re all… staged. Posed for the camera. If the only memories I have of him are those photos… am I really remembering him at all?”

She sighed, clouding the air in front of her lips. “I wish… I had more to remember him by.” She reached up to the sky, to the blanket of clouds above, to the dazzling stars behind them, her fingers seeking them out. “Sometimes, it feels like I’m reaching for a falling star, its burning so, so bright, and I can see it in my mind, and then-”

Her fingers closed into a fist. She drew her hand close, slowly opening her grip.

“It’s gone,” Gloria said. “So… taking photos like this-” she pulled out her phone “-are my way of catching a falling star.”

“So you can put it in your pocket?” Bede offered.

She smiled at him. “And never let it fade away.”

Her smile, this time, was one of understanding. He knew that feeling well, of reaching for something that feels so real, so tangible, yet so far away. He had his own memories he wished would burn brighter. His own memories that were fading. A face he didn’t know, a smile he couldn’t place. A voice that was growing quieter with every passing day.

“Well,” Bede said, letting his expression soften, “We’ll just have to make new memories. Together.”

Gloria’s smile brightened in return. “”I think I’d like that.”

“Hey, lovebirds!”

And the moment was shattered once again.

Bede bit back his grumble and leveled a glare towards Hop.

“We’re going to leave you behind if you don’t hurry up!” Hop yelled down the street loud enough for all of Circhester to hear.

Gloria snorted. “Looks like we already have some memories to be making,” she said. She lightly elbowed Bede, giving him a smile. “C’mon, let’s go.”

If it wasn’t for her, if it wasn’t for that smile, he would have had a few choice words to shout back at Hop. Bede rolled his eyes and huffed, despite the pattering of his heart.

He followed after Gloria with a grumbled “fine.”

He had his own memories of this moment stashed away in his pocket. A snapshot in time.

Bede doesn’t know how he got here. 

There’s something digging into his side, uncomfortable and wet (a log, some part of him helpfully supplies, before his thoughts sink into oblivion) as he half-squats, half-slumps onto the peat. Bioluminescent mushrooms pulse like strings of faerie lights at the edges of his periphery; he closes his eyes and feels the pleasant hum of television static against his bones, loose-limbed and sluggish. 

“Bede. Hey.” Someone’s standing him, shaking him. Glor-Gloria? What’s the champion doing here? She’d had more pressing obligations to take care of than visiting him, right? Unless she was…

He sits bolt upright. “Training.” 

“Hey. Bede no, you’re in no state to train.” She’s grabbing his shoulders, so irritably he shrugs her hands off. “Okay, fine. Haterenne, help me please?” 

“Hissssss.” 

“I know, it’s my fault, you can hate me for this later. Could you teleport him to Opal before he pukes on me?”

“I won’t puke on you.” He attempts to stand up, wobbles, and relocates onto the log, looking up at her like he only intended to shift his seat all along. “Just...don’t say a word of this to Opal, she doesn’t know I’m rende...rendezvu...meeting you for training at night.” 

Gloria makes a face like a goldeen, open-mouthed and slack-faced, before reeling herself in, blowing her bangs out of the way in exasperation. “What’re we going to do then?” 

“Train.” The log is awfully comfortable. 

She throws her hands up, stalking a ways away into the undergrowth. “Fine, you win. Hatterene, he’s yours now.” 

“Rene.” 

“This’ll wear off,” he insists after her. “Besides, we still have an entire night. It’s only--”

                                                                                     --Three in the morning. 

He knows this because it’s a routine ingrained into his internal body clock, reinforced by Sylveon sitting at his bedside and repeatedly probing him in the cheek. She dodges the togekiss sleep mask he flings at her, mewling incessantly from her safe space behind his rarely-used study desk as he fumbles the blanket off himself. 

Check surroundings. Judging by the iron klefki wards she hung in front of her door every night, Opal’s asleep across the hall; woman can sure sleep like the dead when she wants to. It’s quiet, empty. The portobellos growing on the kitchen walls ebb with the faint chartreuse of early morning. He pulls on his gear as quickly and quietly as possible, recalling Sylveon into her ball before climbing out his bedroom window. 

Despite most of the Ballonlea population being asleep, the Glimwood Tangle is teeming with activity: impidimps chittering from the trees, the echoing croons of hatterene in the distance, a male indeedee wandering around collecting swathes of amanita--most likely for some courtship ritual. He’s been gym leader for nearing six months now, and they no longer saw him as an intruder on their turf. The oranguru that always meditates underneath a wisteria-choked tree barely gives him the side eye as he passes. 

At the edge of the faerie ring, in their designated meeting location, he finds the Champion resting between the boughs of a tree. 

She’s already noticed him, of course--squirrelly, quick-eyed and observant, Challenger Bede had scribbled in his league-issue notepad, where he kept track of rivals and how to counter them--and he watched out of the corner of his eye as she made her way down, landing like it’s all she’s known, to fall and pick herself up. 

“The usual?” He prompts. 

“Nope.” Something clinks in her tired leather bag as she straightens herself. “I was thinking of having a battle today. Haven’t had one outside a boring league stadium in weeks.”

He makes a noise at the back of his throat reserved for when the region’s champion calls million-dollar, painstakingly designed entertainment buildings “boring”. Then again, Gloria never cared much for the stark geometry of commercial buildings. 

“But first. I brought something.” After rifling through her bag, she produces a jar of clear fluid with more flourish than she ever showed in her league battles, handing it to him. 

He unscrews the lid for a whiff and immediately regrets it. “Don’t tell me you smuggled alcohol all the way from Wyndon.” 

“Aren't you legal?” 

“Yes, I am. You aren’t.” Hatterene take him if Opal caught him in a hangover the next morning. At least Gloria had her own condo. 

“It’s only illegal if they catch you.” She replies, and Bede would agree wholeheartedly on any other day, if not for his desperate need to retain the vestiges of self-control slipping through his fingertips. Before he could protest, she takes the jar, tips it back to take a sip, then returns it to him.

He supposes he’s not a stranger to alcohol. While Rose never greeted him in-person, Bede had attended fancy meet-ups with potential patrons on behalf of the man (Galar loves a good rags-to-riches story, Oleana always told him) and let himself enjoy a flute or two of champagne on corporate dime. 

One sip. Surely nothing would come of one sip. 

“Alright,” he relents, “I suppose it’ll take more than a--

                                                                                    --Couple swallows in and he’s starting to feel lightheaded, the tips of his fingers strangely numb like that one time he accidentally stuck them into Gardevoir’s moonblast. Damn Opal and her “fairy boot camp”, he could bet on his favorite soap opera that no other trainer got their leg tied to their pokemon and forced to three-leg a batt--

“Drink.” Gloria orders, pushing the empty mason jar she refilled with water up to his lips. It tasted slightly viscous when he drank and...how did she get this anyways? Was it from her golisopod? Was he drinking bug spit?

“Bede. About your. Uh.” 

“We’ve disgus...discussed this to death already. I didn’t mean. Anything with the finalist speech. It was the heat of the moment, I was focused, and you were all that was on my mind--” 

“--So you were thinking about me then?”

“What?”

“What?”

“Anyways,” she continues uneasily, “Could you recall Hatterene? She looks like she wants to tear me to shreds with her mind.” 

“Oh.” He glances back and, sure enough, Hatterene is right behind him, every strand of hair bristling with psychic energy. “Hattie, behave. You’re better than this.” 

Hatterene trains the brunt of her attention to him, and there’s the low before a tidal wave, thrumming in his skull like a shotgun blast before she presses her pokeball and enters it with a huff. 

He hears an audible exhale from Gloria in the ensuing silence. “I haven’t heard you call her ‘Hattie’ in a long time.” 

“Old habit.” She’s long outgrown it now, but he still remembers her as a hatenna small enough to fit within the cradle of his arms, the outlier of the batch Macro Cosmos had donated to his orphanage. Most likely a breeding reject--too smart for her own good, too ill-behaved and unruly to be championship material--because nobody liked a pawn that didn’t follow orders. He knew how it went. “My younger self’s nicknaming skills left much to be desired.” 

They’ve come a long way since then.

“That’s sweet,” she says, and normally Bede would bristle at a challenge to his dignity, but today his limbs are sluggish and the bottomless pit of hatred he’d often found himself visiting seemed strangely empty.

"You were friends since you were young," Gloria clarifies, "And she obviously cares for you a lot--I've heard most hatterenes are as misanthropic as psychics come. It's nice that you've managed to keep it strong through your gym challenge."

"Gloria..."

"What's done is done though. I'm Champion, he's a researcher, and you're drunk out of your mind." When Bede sputters in response, she tips the jar of water in his general direction. He's forced to catch it so she doesn't spill the entirety of the contents on his clothes.

Definitely bug spit. But if this is the fix to the pressure building behind his eyes then he may as well take it. Even if that damn taste--

                                                                                    --is not at all what he expected: medicine-grade and overpowering, a hyper beam to his sinuses so powerful it forces him to tears. If this thing is safe to drink, the only reason would be because no bacteria would bear to live in it. He manages to swallow purely by willpower, refusing to spit it out in front of Gloria; whatever face he saves is instantly destroyed when she bursts out laughing at his expression. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, not sorry at all. Bede stares intensely at a cluster of mushrooms metres away and prays it’s too dark to catch the blood rushing to his face. “I thought-I thought you’d take it better. Maybe I overestimated you.” 

“And should I be under the assumption you’re a heavyweight drinker?” 

Gloria shrugs in lieu of an answer. “Leon always brought some kind of new wine or liquor when he visited home, and shared some of it with Hop. Hop shared some of it with me.”