[The Stag]

Samuel Goodwind was born in the harshest winter ever recorded on Kanto soil. The year that even the ghosts curled under the reaves of the house of the unwearied to just have a hint of warmth. The year was ravaged not only by the horrors of demolition but also by the blankets of snow and massive crop death.

The war would rage for two more years, and the war's runtime had already turned Kanto's economy ragged. He was too young to remember the stories his family recounted to him of this time in harsh whispers. However, he felt the impact of it all his life. Every checkpoint was defined by what happened years ago beyond his recollection.

The first few years of his life mimicked this: the little food they had in the town due to rationing (rice and sweet potatoes and berries), how his grandmother would rub her hands to rashes in her worry, and the sunken faces of everyone around him like weathered bark.

The war had plagued Kanto many years after its end.

Despite that, Lavender Town purged on. Even the grandest losses of the war could not bar the humanity that lived on with Kanto resilience. The town was defined by ghosts and the dead, yet they all centered themselves on the life that gathered there.

Samuel was raised running around with the child of his father's arcanine as the only reminder of the man. The proud pokémon his father had as a starter died only a few short months after he did, taken into another trainer's care.

Garnish was his only friend besides the ghost pokémon he secretly played with, and they were tied to the hip. His mother's drowzee would watch them with lidded eyes from the porch of their family house. The pokémon of his grandmother, teasing ghost pokémon of many varieties, were who played with him.

His family consisted of his tall mother and silent grandmother. They both wore their hair up in a tight bun even though the matriarch of their house had long gone gray. To counter, his mother had him young, and her hair was still an unlit black that shone eerily at different times of the day. They both had weathered hands, but his mother was from kneading rather than his grandmothers from her constant rubbing.

His mother was a woman who wanted to run away from him. It was one of the first things he knew for sure. A woman who was culled and tied down by the war raging in their land in her late teens. She was stuck in the aftermath, and his mother couldn't leave her own mother's haunted house. So she hated the ghosts and her lack of freedom while also trying to love him.

It took years for Samuel to learn this. Years of placing all the stories the two women in his life told him in careful arrangement. His mother's disdain for ghosts that his grandmother let prowl around and how she would always look outside their window, into the oblivion far from there and away from the Tower.

By the time he was eight, his mother traveled away from Lavender Town a few times a month to Pewter City and only came back for her family.

So, Samuel stayed around the ghosts and the deceased.

Gastly and shuppet were for the wicked. Even if Lavender Town prayed and respected the ghosts, there was still a healthy fear for them. When travelers came to their town, they found imaginary hands constantly pulling and pushing them away from it. Samuel had been born into the sensation, that calling and culling call of the damned, so he could never understand what they meant.

The closest he got was when the ghost pokémon would come to him. Like any other species of pokémon, they had varying personalities and wants. Most of them were just troublemakers or Watchers, as his grandfather liked to call them.

They would scare children until they got used to it, which took longer for Samuel because of his mother's over-protectiveness. Then, after they tired of that, they would just haunt every crevice of darkness in Lavender Town.

Samuel's grandmother, however, was never scared away by these warnings. She was defined by her silent rebelling of all her life, the grit of Kanto nationalism, and the solidness of her traditional faith. The woman was practically made of incense she burned at graves and the bitterness of the coastal town she grew up in. She was too sickly to fight in the war, so she pushed Lavender Town into something that would survive it all.

Despite Lavender Town being smaller than most towns in Kanto, they were popular during the war due to the Tower, a lying place for any pokémon of Kanto origin and identity.

Samuel's grandmother was the one who was the reason so many pokémon were able to be laid to rest. She worked tirelessly to organize the town to contain all the numbers it saw and took the time to allow the funeral rituals to be done for each one.

She was also distant, a punishing figure to people who wronged others. When the town fought, she would settle it with an unforgiving interference. Any ghost pokémon that got too vicious was swiftly with her own. He had grown up with many tea ceremonies being held in their tearoom to 'resolve issues'.

That was one of the factors that defined Samuel's childhood. Because of his grandmother's stubbornness and her wish to forget about the loss of the love of her life, she threw herself into her job. With the hundreds of pokémon admitted into the massive Tower throughout his childhood, none was left without ritual and praying in its immittance.

She never forgot the ones who were cremated before their names could get recorded with their class name, nor the ones that their owners couldn't bear to give up until years later, nor the ones who had done terrible things that left Samuel to feel the crawl of ghosts lurking from his unease.

His grandmother carried a love inside her for every pokémon. And that, in part, was why the ghosts of Lavender Town loved her. Samuel would often play with the gastlys who chased his grandmother's ankles, who would carefully dodge his playful strikes to not hurt him and swirl around his grandmother's legs. The other ghosts would tilt him away from the vicious ones.

Samuel grew up in unnatural cold of the ghost pokémon he chased with a growlithe puppy yipping at his heels. Garnish was his light, and she loved the ghosts just as much as he did. The mix of childish curiosity and genuine awe of the spectral pokémon always had him reaching for the unattainable.

In the midst of one of these playful ventures of his, his mother slapped his hand away from a pokémon and told him to never touch the ghost pokémon. The sting of the hit and his shame had him sitting on the porch of their steps for at least half an hour. Garnish had her fluffy head on his lap and stayed quietly. The ghosts chimed and wisped away in the corners of his senses.

His mother would always snap at him to not go towards the ghosts, and despite his curiosity and adoration for the floating pokémon in their town, he listened to her.

...

Many simple things changed as Samuel grew older. The television sets everyone used, even in the dusty traditional town of Lavender Town, were developed into newer models. New stations were created as the Indigo League finally settled, and battles were now more common on TV than word of mouth. People started to wear fashion from magazines imported from Sinnoh, which Samuel only saw on TV, foreign clothes built for constant winter instead of the seasonal winter Kanto got.

Despite Kanto suffering greatly from the Great War, they led the way through technological innovation with other regions such as Hoenn and the faraway Unova. Samuel didn't care, but his mother would always listen to Auntie Amber, who was not his actual Aunt, ramble on about it.

What also changed was that his mother decided that moving to Pewter City was what she wanted to do. He was ten, so it was practically the end of the world. He sulked for a week when it happened.

He hated going to Pewter City, to his father's childhood home. They went there every summer, and it was always unfearingly hot. Nothing like the shaded hometown he lived in, where it was also unnaturally chilly in at least some places despite whatever the weather was. The kids didn't like him. They said he was unnatural and weird.

So when he went to play outside, it was only with Sticks, his mother's mankey who was like an overbearing mother herself, and Garnish.

Samuel hated it, hated Pewter. The house, which his mother loved so dearly that she cleaned thoroughly at least twice a week, felt so foreign to him. The pictures on the wall were of people who he had never met. He tried to read the books on the shelves, but they were above his level.

His mother just shooed him outside after he spent too long in front of the TV. Samuel didn't tell her that the other kids made fun of him.

It was easy to tell Samuel didn't belong amongst the mountains and trees. Apparently, his mother got tired of his moping. She took him back to Lavender Town as she opened her bakery with the money she had saved for years.

Auntie Amber had moved in with her to help her. Samuel's grandmother was unusually unhappy with that, but Samuel wasn't sure why. If anything, he was only upset that his mother would visit less often, and that Auntie Amber couldn't watch him anymore.

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But at least he wasn't being harassed by kids who wanted to Brock with geodudes.

...

Only a few years later, after many trips to detested Pewter to his mother's bakery, something changed. In between all the sweets he was given, countless times his mother taught him how to cook in his dead father's house, all the times he would kneel until his legs fell asleep praying with his grandmother, in between watching the ghosts fly through timbers of roofs, moments stagnated between the dullness of school, of running through the woods with Garnish-

Well, at the current moment Samuel was running through the woods because he had been stupid enough to try and watch the broadcast of one of Red's new battles when he was visiting Pewter. The trainer's names had been everywhere lately. He beat the previous Champion, his best friend, but still turned the position of Champion down.

It wasn't hard to admit that Samuel thought Red was one of the best trainers he had ever seen. He had been following his journey in broadcasts and radio stations for years. It was rare for someone to progress so fast, but Red was a genius. He toppled the Indigo League's rather distinct Johto influence like it was nothing. Everyone in Kanto loved him, and it was evident by how everyone around them raged when Lance took the title.

Even his grandmother, who despised the circuit, was off put that Red wasn't crowned Champion.

Today, the match between Red and Clair from Johto was going to air. He was gushing about different strategies people had devised for hours to Garnish and his reluctant mother before the match started. Samuel was running out the door as soon as the time came for the broadcast to start. He could hear his mother's voice telling him to be careful behind him. Auntie Amber was in the garden out front and waved at him when he ran past her.

Before he could get to the plaza because Samuel had the worst luck ever, a solid hand snatched him before he even got to the main pathway for the city.

"What-" Samuel was startled quiet. Then he was quickly quieted by a growlithe far larger than Garnish prowling towards him. Fuck, he should not have left Garnish at home.

A boy, a few years older than Samuel, stood behind the intimidating pokémon. Reuben, who had made it his hobby for years to bother Samuel whenever he was stuck there for the summer, stood behind him with a telling smirk. Both wore matching shirts with a graphic of Red and his notorious starter Pika the pikachu.

Reuben's geodude rolled forward to peer shyly at him before it rolled away.

"That is him. This is the guy that harassed Geogeo the other day." Samuel wanted to say that he didn't do anything, but the growlithe crouched closer to him, and he was frozen solid.

"So you didn't have me on this route for nothing?" The older guy said sarcastically and whistled to his growlithe. The pokémon shook its fur and snarled loudly at Samuel.

And well, his mother always had told him to follow his instincts. You couldn't live around ghost pokémon all your life without a healthy dose of fear inside you.

So the growlithe snarling was a big wave to 'yeah, this is the time you should start running'. He should have brought Drowzee like his Auntie told him to.

That was how he ended up running through the woods like an idiot. He pushed away the tree branches and skid through the mud patches as he could hear the two brothers and their pokémon jeering behind him.

Samuel imagined for a brief second that he was like a small shuppet being chased by a gengar. Fear chilled him like ice, and his palms started bleeding as he accidentally stuck his hands into a bush of thorns as he tripped. He could see small smears of bright red on the leaves as he panicked. His feet wouldn't cooperate with his mind.

A push knocked him back down in his loss of balance.

"No-" Samuel gasped, his elbow taking the damage of his fall. Why didn't he bring Garnish? He needed to call for help. Maybe there was a ranger-

He heard laughter behind him, and when he tried to push himself up again, a foot pressed on his back and face-planted him on the ground. Shame rose in him as he tried to fight the force being inserted onto him.

"I have no idea why you ran. You looked like an idiot!" Ruben sneered, and Samuel instinctually covered his head as he prepared for more kicks.

"I didn't do anything wrong. He lied to you-" Samuel tried to defend himself, but the foot on his back pressed harder until he wheezed.

"Like I'm about to believe that. Now, I'll give you one chance to say you're sorry before I rough you up, you hear?" The older boy taunted.

Goodwinds didn't beg, was Samuel's first thought. His next one was that it would be stupid to antagonize and ignore when he was outnumbered by humans and pokémon, which his grandmother also taught him not to do.

However, he didn't get the chance to respond before another voice answered his assailant.

"Got your ass." He heard a feminine voice say behind him, and Samuel flinched at the cuss word and harsh tone. He didn't recognize the voice, and some part of him shivered in anticipation.

"Fuck! Rueben, get out of here!" Samuel heard another shout and the crashing in the bush as someone ran away.

When he twisted his body to look behind him, he saw an arbok wrapping around the intimidating growlithe without issue. The growlithe snarled and let out a torrent of flame, which rushed over Samuel. The humans, the voices, were secondhand to the dangerous pokémon in front of him.

The attack didn't stop the arbok from opening its mouth eerily wide. It reminded Samuel of a haunter. Samuel tried to move his body, but he just trembled as he watched the two pokémon roll around viciously. It was obvious the growlithe was losing. This was nothing like the spars his mother and Auntie did.

A howl pierced the air and was clipped silent by an action Samuel could not see. As if it was interrupted and closed off. The boy huddled away from the fighting pokémon and tried to make himself as small as possible. He heard a hiss as the arbok's tail hit a tree harshly. The growlithe slipped from the snake pokémon's grasp and raced back toward it.

The attack was amateurish, and the arbok took rapid advantage of that to wrap around the smaller pokémon again.

"I told you to not be an asshole, Reath." He heard the feminine voice say, and then their conversation was lost in the screeching of the growlithe. The boy covered his ears, but the sound was so close it pierced through. Samuel yelped as the two pokémon surged towards him in their wrap in each other, fire striking the trees in a circle as the growlithe was rolled around.

He needed to move! Samuel's hand gripped a tree root as he threw himself over the other side of the tree as the two pokémon slammed into the large trunk. The growlithe's tail, the same color as Garnish's, moved erratically as it shook right beside his head from around the curve of the trunk.

Samuel hated Pewter. This wouldn't be happening if he was back in Lavender. There wasn't any time to think about it as growlithe started to still. The arbok was choking it near unconscious.

"Stop! Stop, I'm sorry! I'll go, let him go!" Reath begged, sounding desperate and terrified. It was disturbing to hear someone sound like that.

"Do you actually mean that?" The woman's voice said, and Samuel was shocked by how nonchalant it sounded.

"Yes, fuck yes! Now let him go!" A flash of light appeared, and he heard the growlithe fall to the ground in a thud. Samuel scrambled away as the older boy who chased him only minutes before lurched to grab his pokémon.

Please don't see me, please don't see me! Samuel thought desperately. He did not want to be caught by whoever this insane woman was.

Reath's terrified eyes met his briefly as he almost dropped his larger than normal pokémon. Then, he gritted his teeth and picked up his pokémon. Samuel watched with his heart pounding as Reath stumbled away.

The teenager's breath was coming out ragged. He was hyper aware of it as he covered his mouth with both hands to silence himself.

He heard the crunch of leaves as the woman he had not seen stepped forward. Her legs appeared in the corner of his vision as he tried to lean away.

The woman stood beside his hiding place without noticing him, her face turned to the direction of the kids her arbok scared off. The black jumpsuit she wore was unzipped and hanging off her shoulders. She blinked at him as if she had forgotten he was there or at least surprised he still was. Samuel stared, stuck, at the bright red 'R' on her uniform, which had been covered before the woman's jacket fell open as she stretched her arms above her head.

It was hard to notice anything else about her. The colors all swam together as Samuel realized he probably wasn't in a better situation now.

His grandmother's warnings about Team Rocket and the sort came to mind, even after Red and the League had driven them off. Samuel vividly imagined her stern face when she told him that if he ever joined Team Rocket, she would hang him to dry on their clothes rack in the backyard.

Why was there a Team Rocket member here? Weren't they all arrested? There had been news coverage over it for weeks, and it had woken the gossip ring of Lavender Town because Tendou Hikari, who was the son of the shopkeeper everyone knew, had been part of it.

"Families around here had some sort of family in Rocket. They just kept it better hidden." His mother had remarked and told him to steer away from gossip.

However, hearing about what Team Rocket had done and tried to do was different than being saved by someone from the organization randomly in the middle of the woods.

"You, you're from-" Samuel said abruptly, looking at her shirt.

"Are you looking at my tits? Yes, I have tits. Lugia. This is why I hate these backwoods missions." Then she looked down at the exposed logo on her shirt.

It was silent for a few more moments. Samuel saw a wurmple glare down at him from where it was disturbed in the branches above them.

"Fuck, I knew I should've changed."

"You shouldn't curse." Samuel said admonished. It was a habit from his mother, but from the amused look on the woman's face, she didn't care. That was the moment that he realized she was not a woman, but a girl only a few years older than him. A right about teenager.

"Huh." She said, then tilted her head at him from where he was still huddled in the crevice of tree roots. Then she squatted in front of him, and he scrambled back. She didn't say anything else.

"I won't tell anyone, I..." He trailed off nervously as she kept staring at him. Please don't bring out your scary arbok, he thought rapidly.

"Kid, you are actually perfect." She then grinned excitedly at him; a bit manic. She stuck her hand out to him, and he saw that under her jacket sleeves she had many colorful beaded bracelets. There was even one with a bunch of audinos.

"For what?" Samuel said suspiciously. He took her hand in his own shaking one out of caution more than anything. Would she just drag him up if he didn't take her hand?

"I need to get somewhere, and you will help me." She said gleefully and then hugged him. What the hell? Her hair smelled nice, and he flushed at the fact that he was being hugged by a random teenager in the middle of the woods. Then, his politeness won over his reason, and he hugged her back awkwardly.

"What?" Samuel said, and then the girl squealed in happiness and hugged him tighter.

"Well... if you don't help me, I'll just sick my arbok at you!" Her voice was cheerful, and Samuel felt his heart shrivel up. Nervousness licked at the bottom of his stomach as he realized he didn't really have a choice in the matter.

"Okay..." Samuel said, and then the girl pulled away to zip her jacket. Samuel bushed the dirt and forest muck off him as he swallowed dryly. He did not have a good feeling about this, at all.

Samuel's mother was going to maul him when he got home.

...