Luna and Esperanza make room for Noah to climb in the sidecar, then settle on his lap. You pound the gas once everybody’s sitting. What the fuck is a seatbelt, anyway?
“Yeah, if you die you’ll respawn, sure,” you call over the roar of the engine, “but you’ll be in excruciating pain for days. I did it twice. I’d know.”
“And dying is a lot less cool than you’d expect.”
Maybe you’re the only one who expected something different, though.
“That depends where you wanna go, bud– oh, shit!” Some kind of hulking metal beast runs out into the road. “Esperanza, Protect!”
You floor it and run the thing down as fast as you can. The force of your bike and the green wall of energy she generates knocks it down hard to the pavement. It starts spitting sparks, and you breathe in as you keep driving.
“No idea what the fuck that was. You okay?”
THE weight of his words finally dawns on him in the wane of his vertigo. Wouldn’t that make him the hypocrite, to chide Leo for his reckless parade into death, and yet accept its probability with open arms. There’s not a day in this city where he doesn’t feel inevitably stupid-- ironic, for someone once so proud of his so-called superior intellect. Ironic that the boy he’d found an idiot was far, far wiser.
He can only think at half-depth; the rest of his effort is put into staying on the bike and holding Leo’s Pokémon close to his chest (half out of fear for their safety, half out of fear for his own), because god, he’s still not sure if this thing is a bike or what.
( ✱ ) “As I’ll ever be,” he says, heaving. “Probably something the scientists made and want us to clean up. Again. You know how it is. You’re okay, right?”
