you are maybe barely thirteen years old. you are living life to its fullest as much as you can, because two and a half years ago you learned just how precious time can be. how it can change people irreparably. you know now, perhaps, what is most important to you: your pokemon, your friends & family, anything feasibly within your reach. but you chose to lie low, to try your best to be normal again.
it is not easy, but for a while it seems possible, because the horrors have quieted down. things feel back-to-normal (you’re trying to remember what normal is; you think you used to know it). your best friend tells you his sister found her family. he wants, desperately, to find his—because while you’ve opened your home to him, he aches for his own truth. you wonder what he will find, but you don’t know how to offer to help him. he leaves you behind. you feel like family is complicated, if it’s anything like your own, and maybe he shouldn’t go looking. maybe he won’t like what he finds—or perhaps that’s your mother’s voice echoing in your skull like a bad dream.
you both have that feeling deep in your gut, swirling like a tornado. it feels like your friend is barreling towards something that will swallow him whole, but you’re not invited to the party, you can’t follow and you don’t know enough about what’s going on to crash it. maybe, it will crash itself. crash and burn like a fighter pilot being shot out of the sky.
you remember being younger—not too much younger, though, because if you were much younger than you were then, you’d still be asking why the sky is blue and water is wet and wondering who stole your favorite crayon—and leaning over a balcony, watching exhibition matches before a tournament that was doomed before it even began. why are you there? someone is going to hurt people. there are adults—most of them, adults, anyway—down on that stage they call a battlefield. the adults are doing nothing. one of them, one of those gym leaders, is your enemy. you don’t know which one.
they are not all useless adults. one of them is young, younger than the rest. barely a teenager himself. only a bit older than you. he is new to the role, and—as you are yet to realize—he knows that two others among his rank cannot be trusted. you don’t know this. that new gym leader doesn’t know that his enemies are not the one you’re looking for; his grandfather practically sent you, but he has no clue you’re there or that you even exist. you don’t know he’s wary of the adults on that stage with him. you don’t know you probably should be, too—but hey, one of those “suspicious” gym leaders did save you. if you’d known surge’s past before that—what he’s done to those who came before you—would it matter? would you trust him? would you trust any of them if you knew how corrupt the league has become?
the champion doesn’t show. the crowd boos and jeers. only the viridian city gym leader knows the reason he isn’t here (and maybe the saffron gym leader does, too, but she’s busy avoiding the former’s glare). you’re wondering about it, yourself. the champion is a hero, is he not? did he not take down team rocket three years earlier? was he not involved in protecting the world from whatever disaster it was that wiped out half of vermillion city last year? (well, that was the kid in the straw hat, wasn’t it? and where did THEY end up? if that’s the case, why aren’t they and their pikachu—the champion’s pikachu, supposedly, as if that makes any sense—here with you now?) where is the champion today when there’s a gym leader at the pokemon league tournament responsible for a tragedy yet to be written?
it does not matter. you are nothing, until the egg hatches in your arms and pichu is staring straight through your eyes into your soul and raising his little paws up as if to say I’m here! I’ll help! and your heart squeezes because this is what you were meant to do. and then you—and your best friends, too, because there was always meant to be three of you here and now, together, even if there were four who came before you—enter the time stream because it is the only option.
time travel leaves a bad taste in your mouth (the champion is here now, and so is the straw hat kid, and the viridian gym leader and your best friend’s sister, and they are just like you, it turns out. kids on a special adventure through life) but pichu knows volt tackle, of all moves. you are told it is because you brought that power out of him, just by being there. and the masked man is gone and you find yourself later thinking to yourself that there is no possible situation you’ll ever find yourself in that can top whatever the hell happened to you over the last few months (when you are sixteen, you will look god in the eyes and realize you were so hilariously wrong).
you just wanted to catch ‘em all. you just wanted your backpack back. now you have two best friends and a handful of kids from one-region-over who you once thought could hang the stars and now you know them intimately because you are—as they say—trauma bonded for life.
well. then you are twelve and a half or maybe thirteen, and you have had a relatively normal few years, ignorantly and blissfully pretending that a couple of eleven year olds saving the world from destruction via legendary pokemon on the international news doesn’t make the butterfree in your stomach do backflips. you sit idly by because it is their turn and not yours. you are done, you think. you hope, maybe. because bad things, you pray, can only happen to eleven year olds with the sky as their limit.
(red and blue and green were your age when the elite four attacked. they were fourteen when you stumbled into their lives, dragging them down with you. yellow was twelve then, when they released the beasts from the tower—you think, all of a sudden, maybe you are overdue for another disaster of epic proportions. you pull the covers up over your head and don’t get involved with the mess in hoenn. you turn the radio up when you realize it is celebi’s cry that is piercing your eardrums. you know you’re the only one who can hear as time rewinds itself.)
and then, of course, it is six months later and your best friend flies a little too close to the sun on his quest to discover his origins. things keep happening outside you and your friends’ control, and as they say, evil never rests. but you are normal, now. you don’t get involved and honestly you didn’t even have time to consider going to help out. it is over as soon as it began.
you get the call and your blood turns to ice. your friends are—not gone, per se, but they might as well be. no one knows how to fix it. the one who caused it has disappeared. you don’t even know what pokemon she used, what attack it was. the pokemon that tried to protect them is gone too, and you think, briefly: would it even listen? the only ones it trusted were turned to stone in its attempt.
you try to sleep, but when you close your eyes, all you can see are nightmares. there are only two of you again, just like there were only two of you back at the last pokemon league tournament, standing room only, watching and waiting and theorizing because there was nothing else you could do. silver is gone and the look frozen on his face haunts your dreams. it feels less like petrification and more like a gravestone. did he find his family? you wonder. you wonder if you’ll ever know. you wonder if he and your other friends are asleep (or something else you are loathe to admit). you wonder if they’re sleeping, if their nightmares are as bad as yours.
(a quiet voice in your head tells you that if they’re asleep, their nightmares would be much worse. something about proximity and a pokedex entry yet to be written. you don’t even know or care; you just hope yellow is okay if you ever get them out of this mess.)
and then, finally, after months without hope—someone tells you about jirachi. you have one chance, now. you cannot throw it away. you wish hope dream pray emerald can pull it off.
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