~~~ Chapter 70 - Realization ~~~

Macie rolled over.

She opened her eyes, held out her arms, and stretched. Her bangs fell into her eyes and she let out a little puff to blow them out of the way. They just fell back down. She didn't like flicking her head, so she didn't do that.

She wasn't on the couch, which was okay to her. She had long grown used to teleporting to her bed when she fell asleep on the couch.

She sat up, and lifted herself to the floor, then decided she could take another minute. She reached up and grabbed her blanket, pulling it and her pillow, down, to the floor.

Leah could wait another few minutes. Her dad had said it would be at least a day or two, so she would still be there.

A few minutes later, eyes closed and resting on the floor of her room, she rolled over, and a sharp feeling hit her shoulder. She sat up, and grabbed it. It was her barrett. The one she had been wearing when she was having her tea party.

She was hungry.

They had milk.

She could have cereal for dinner.

Her eyes shot open. What if no one has given Leah dinner yet!

Macie could make poffins!

She rushed out of the hall, hair a mess and all tangled up, all sleep having left her.

"Ow!" she cried, as she ran into the kitchen, slipping on a small purple bead. She lifted up her foot and brushed off the sharp bits, the adrenaline of the moment easing up the pain she'd have felt if she were paying more attention. Things that hurt her tended to hurt more when she was being more careful. She'd sweep the kitchen of all the pokeys and ouchies later. Food was most important!

It was only a broken bead anyway, so it wasn't any good for making bracelets or necklaces.

With all the speed she could muster, she found her dad's pokedex on the counter, and pulled up the Poffin recipes for bugs. It took a while, and she tasted the dough herself a few times just to be sure it was tasty, and decided she had added enough sugar.

The problem, however, was that she couldn't decide if it should just be sugar, or if she needed to add dirt.

There was a recipe for grass pokemon, and a recipe for bug pokemon, but she couldn't find one for bug and grass at the same time.

Then, right before she decided to cook the first Poffin, she realized she could just ask Leah what kind of berry she'd like in hers. Macie knew what Arn and Orn liked, of course, and didn't need to ask any more, but she wanted to make sure Leah had something she liked for sure.

"Leah!" Macie chirped out.

Nothing.

She went into the living room, where she'd fallen asleep, and the tile where Leah had been. A blanket of leaves was in the hall, but no leavanny.

"We're making poffins!" Macie called out again.

Not a sound.

Slower, she walked out to the back door.

"Orn!" she exclaimed. She opened the back door. Her dad's dragon hopped off the tree and walked up to her. "She's gone, isn't she?" Macie asked the noivern as it approached.

The pokemon paused ever-so-slightly. They weren't the most affectionate pokemon, however, they were still protective of her. And, with experience, having grown up with them as the two pokemon her father always brought home instead of leaving at a daycare…

Orn knew what had happened. He was demure. Apologetic, almost. But not quite.

"Where is she?" Macie demanded.

His ear twitched in a particular way. She turned to the sky.

She hadn't seen the stray pokeball in the house. Nor did she see it in the grass of the backyard. But she did see a spatula covered in Leah's silk that had the impression of a round object on it.

The puzzle pieces fell together. The crushed beads. The missing pokeball, the pile of leaves on the floor that Leah had been working at.

"He took her back?" Macie said, her eyes starting to tear up.

It held for a brief second. "I was gonna make poffins!" She managed to squeak out, her voice scrunching up. Then the dam broke, her face turned red, the water flowed.

Macie, sobbing, ran back into the house, slammed the door, and ran all the way back into her room. She grabbed her pillow and hugged it.

~~~

"No, absolutely not," Lanky said to Lyra.

It had been a day since Lyra had picked me up. He'd gotten out of the hospital earlier than I thought, though his arm was bandaged even if was moving about just fine. I would make a sash for the arm I had sliced up, since Lanky was still favoring it. As soon as we went to an area that wasn't burned up, anyway.

The leaves where we had camped the last couple nights just weren't good enough.

"We've spent too much time together. I know it's only been a bit over a month, but I'm not about to send my best friend out into the middle of the woods to forage for the rest of her life over a random hunch of yours."

This… wasn't how I expected him to react. I was, honestly, entirely floored. He was starting to put his foot down around others. I thought the safari zone would have been as good a place as any other to hunker down in. Trainers not allowed to use pokemon to battle to catch you would have been as good a place as any other.

"Ugh!" Lyra just exclaimed. "Look, you know what? Fine! I promised myself I'd stop stepping on regional toes and focus on myself, but I guess the one time I break that it's…"

"It's because you see yourself in us, the younger generations. I know." He said. At that, Lyra paused. I could tell, not by her reaction, but Lanky's, that the fight had finally gone out of her. "And I don't want to ignore your advice, but I'm not doing that to Leah."

Straight abandonment, for what? Just because she and I got mixed rolls on the dice?

He had noticed her frown, when she realized he wasn't going to just take her suggestions right away. He thought she was a good and strong trainer, that was true, but didn't think he and Leah had exhausted all their options, for one. For two, there was something of a slightly more… practical reason for him to reject the suggestions.

"At least promise me you'll think about it," Lyra said, finally defeated.

"I will. I'm not going to do something that would hurt or endanger the team," he told her. Which was true. He was still in the early stages of being a trainer, though it wasn't beyond him that he'd gotten incredibly lucky with his first three badges.

Breaking up the team so early in his career… he shuddered to think about what would happen if the professor caught wind of it, given the rough starts they had already had.

The man would be wholly stoic and have the face of a comforting grandfather telling you it was for your own good, as he gutted you alive. Yeah, no. He stopped that line of thought before proceeding down that line of thought any further.

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The man was in his early sixties, and from a different era, he reminded himself.

"All right, I can accept that," she said, throwing out a pokeball, releasing ho-oh, the bird of flame, but this time instead of running, I stood my ground, even as it towered over me. "I've gotta get back, so I'm not gonna be able to stick around and hold you to your promises, but I know you're a good kid."

Ho-Oh was a tall bird, with a really long neck and a nasty beak. It wasn't quite as hot up close as other beings off flame and fire that I had the displeasure of interacting with in dreams, but it was still definitely commanding all of my attention.

Lyra shuffled her stuff around and recalled Meg to her pokeball. "One last thing though, Burgh, I'm gonna need you to do me a favor," she said. I stopped listening to it, Ho-Oh still staring at me.

I raised my arms.

My blades were sharp and my armor was healthy. I didn't hear Lanky's response, but on the side of my vision, I did see Lyra toss a pokeball at him, which he caught. Just as I was about to pull my headdress over my eyes and face, the bird lost interest in me, instead deciding to prune a feather off, dropping it in the dirt.

It wasn't very large, and I didn't move any closer to look at it, but I could tell that it reflected really well in the afternoon sun, like a rainbow.

A second later and Lyra was on its back, the duo flying off and to the north. I watched the bird fly off before checking on Lanky. Well, there went my entire plan.

"She gave me an illegal, homemade pokeball," Lanky said, walking over next to me and picking up the feather. He sat down on a log next to me and just sighed, twirling it in his hand. "What's worse is what it was," he muttered, trailing off about Ho-Oh being a bullshit pokemon.

I wasn't going to be one to disagree, considering it was both a bird, and fire, though Lanky clearly didn't share the same fears I did.

Lanky— well, I— wasn't ready to handle a pokemon of Ho-Oh's level yet, but given my nightmares all had a consistent theme of having my nest burn down to the ground, it was only a matter of time until I got a real crisis that couldn't just be dealt with by running away. Lanky put the pokeball down on the log next to him, softly.

If Lyra had just given him the pokemon to join the team, he'd be sitting with four pokeballs on his belt now, but Lanky's sour mood told a different story. I watched him twirl the shiny, rainbow feather around in his hand for a bit.

"They say the phoenix feather is a good omen. Next up, you should ask Cresselia for a feather next time you see her," He chuckled. A joke I didn't get, but it was nice to see him in a good mood. Right after the hospital, he still wasn't a pretty sight, but his recovery was a lot faster than if I had still been a human and received the same cut.

Well, I probably would have just died, but that was

"I could explain everything I was thinking, I guess," he said. "You deserve that much."

It was the evening, and the sun was going down. I didn't have anything to busy myself with, the leaves in the area hadn't grown back in the last two hours. If anything, things would just get boring. Sitting around, staring into space and listening patiently just wasn't right, but there wasn't much else to do unless we wanted to go into the city.

~~~

Macie had cried for a few minutes, and nearly fell asleep— and would have— if her pillow wasn't soaking wet and her nose runny and she was still hungry. She went to the bathroom, grabbed a piece of tissue and wiped off her nose. Then she saw her face in the mirror at how sad she looked, and started crying again.

It was shorter, this time, and she heard rustling in the kitchen. Her dad was home.

She didn't want to see him.

She didn't want to TALK to him.

But a little bit of hope held that maybe he hadn't actually taken her new friend away. So she cleaned herself up as much as she was in the mood to, and then walked out into the hall. Her face was still red and puffy.

"Hey, Macie." Jacob said, holding a broom, sweeping in the hall. He gave her a faint smile.

"W-w-where is she?" Macie asked. She wasn't dumb—she had her dad wrapped around her little thumb, if she pressed hard enough, and she knew it, though it didn't always work the way she expected it to. Did she really want to know the answer to the question?

"Well—" he started, hesitating. "Her trainer called and asked to have her back, and I couldn't say no," he told her.

"Oh," was all she said. She tried to get control over herself, but she couldn't. The dam broke and she started crying all over again.

Jacob bent down and picked her up, pulling her into a hug. "It's okay," he said, "if you help clean up the house again, we'll see her again before he leaves town."

"D-d-do you promise?" She asked, rubbing her eyes again, as he set her back down.

"We'll have to clean this up, fast," he said, using the high-pitched voice that fathers often used when talking to their daughters. "I'm going to be really busy this week, and so we need to clean up really fast if you want to see her soon."

"O-okay," Macie said.

~~~

"Were you really thinking of actually leaving the team already?" Art asked Leah. He wasn't sure if he wanted the actual answer, or if she'd run away when pressed, but even with Lyra there, she hadn't panicked and run away, which was progress on Leah's front, all things considered.

Even if they were bonded, he still had something of a hard time reading bugs' faces. Sure, he hadn't lied when he's said she was an open book. Her antennae and body language was easy enough to read, so it wasn't a big deal.

It was a kind of barely-conscious intuition, and thinking harder about it, he felt, would have made intuiting her worse

There was folklore that bugs were agents of chaos. And while he didn't consider himself terribly superstitious, the happenings around Leah were frequent and strange enough that it definitely wasn't truly random.

Source of chaos indeed, he thought to himself, amused at the thought, as well as all the trouble his star had consistently gotten herself into over the last month and a half, verging on two months, soon.

Leah nodded at his question. What was strange, was he didn't feel bad about her response. Like he should have been disappointed that she felt as though she needed to leave. No, it was when the actual separation happened, that the guilt would likely seep in.

See, it wasn't that he didn't want her to separate, that he'd denied Lyra's suggestion. It wasn't that it was an impractical suggestion either (which, the separation Lyra had proposed was impractical). Leah had left the wild, and wasn't exactly as healthy as they would have expected her to be. If she was a faller, a pokemon from another world, then it stood to reason that whatever nest she had made at the time was likely not doing so hot.

Leavanny, the pokedex noted, preferred stability— both in location, food, and general creature comforts. Wandering around was a sign that something isn't right. So, thrusting Leah out into the wild on her own would likely only cause more problems. Even if he wanted to let her go, she needed an actual sanctuary, national park or whatever.

The Safari Zone, which Lyra had ultimately ended up suggesting, was not that.

"I'm not against the idea. Leah," he said. "But there's a few problems. First, you'd be leaving behind all the swadloon. When I got my next badge, I was going to meet up with Alder again." The plan was simple: get his endorsement so he could do more gym duties, as the old man didn't seem very interested in staying around the city any more. From there, he could sub in for him at the gym, at least for the people who had less badges than he did. "We'd still need to do battles, but we'd be doing them in the same place—the gym. And with Fidget getting strong enough, I think he could handle most of the fights. And you'd only need to help if you were feeling up for it."

And people would stop constantly telling me what the right and wrong thing to do is.

Another thing he didn't say was that he didn't exactly want to separate her from him. They got along great, other than when she had too much loose energy she had to get rid of—the event that had caused him to go to the hospital—and he was determined to work through those particular mistakes he'd made.

Leah sat there in the dirt, her grass skirt now covered in ash and dust. She'll want to find a stream or something, to wash the bulk of it off soon, a stray thought passed his mind as he contemplated a bit more the situation and what he wanted to do next.

Pokemon built up energy over time if they ate high-calorie foods and didn't have an outlet for it. Which he'd learned after talking to Lyra, searching the pokedex, and the internet. That energy needed to be released, which meant they got a bit extra fighty than typical, and Leah had been no exception. The best option was to find a fighting partner and let them duke it out until they lost or won.

"Does hunkering down at the gym sound like a better setup?" he asked her, to which she nodded again, and he smiled in return. It probably wouldn't be a permanent thing, he decided, but it would need to last at least long enough that he could get his feet under him, both competitively and income-wise.

Another thing he was worried about was the swadloon still under Juniper's care. He was pretty sure as much as the professor was respected, that he didn't exactly trust the professor or whomever he'd sent them to, to keep good care of them in his absence. Juniper meant well, but he was also a hardass from a bygone era.

~~~

That was it? I thought to myself. All that build-up, just for Lanky to sit there in silence? Sitting on the dirt, I decided it was okay to pout.

Lanky seemed to have noticed my demeanor, as he turned his head and looked at me, but then continued to sit in silence. Fine, I thought.

So I walked up to him.

"What?" he asked.

I pointed at, nudging the pokeball Lyra had given him. If the pokeball that lyra had given him was illegal, then he shouldn't be caught with a pokemon in the ball, right?

"Oh? Bored?" he asked.

I nodded.

"All right. Well, let's meet our new, if temporary, friend. Volcarona!" he said, dramatically posing as he threw the pokeball.

It came out, not oriented toward us, but away.

I was not going to run away.

I would not run away.

"Ee—" I chirped, and the volcarona whipped around, and I was greeted not by a moth of majesty and beauty, but a moth with multiple massive gashes in the abdomen fuzz, and a giant scar across two of its six wings.