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The rustling of grass, the sharp whistle of a scalchop slashing through the breeze, and it’s over, as it always is. Servine collapses like a ragdoll into the dew-damp dirt.
Cheren sighs. Holds back a wince.
He should be used to this by now, he reasons – but then, this isn’t how he’d envisioned this journey playing out. Not for the first sixteen years of his life, not a year ago, when they’d left Nuvema Town.
Their first battle, he could write off as luck. A matter of speed, their Pokémon’s genetics, any homefield advantage a bedroom might provide.
But he kneels in the grass, pages through his bag for a revive, and glances at the victor in front of him, and he knows, deep down, that Hilda Weiss isn’t just lucky.
She ruffles her Dewott’s fur, then seems to remember Cheren. “Wanna call it there?”
“Yeah. I don’t want to waste all my medicine on training.”
“Oh, dude.” She reaches into her own bag. “This one’s on me. I’ve got plenty. Stocked up back in Driftveil.”
She procures a revive and a potion – how she manages to find anything in that jumbled mess, he’ll never know.
“Thanks.” There’s more on the tip of his tongue – “I don’t think I could’ve lasted through to Mistralton without Servine” – and, while it’s true, it puts a pit in his stomach, so he elects against saying it.
Hilda crouches down to Servine’s fainted body. Dewott peers over her shoulder, curious. “She’s getting pretty strong, y’know. A little more oomph on that Mega Drain, and she could be a real heavy hitter.”
“I had the type advantage there. She should’ve been a heavy hitter.”
Hilda shrugs. She crushes the revive tablet in her hand and cups the powder in her palm, holding it up to Servine’s nostrils. “I guess. But you always wipe the floor with Bianca, and her team’s got type advantages over yours. I think there’s more to it than that.”
It’s interesting, her subtle, offhanded form of arrogance. Almost unnoticeable to someone who knows her less than he does.
Of course there’s more to it than that. And whatever it is, she’s got it, and Cheren doesn’t.
Servine stirs. Her tongue prods at the powder.
“I think we should try for another mile, maybe, and then set up camp. What time is it?”
Cheren checks his watch. “Five-thirty.”
“Yeah, figured. That’ll give Hilbert and Bianca time to catch up.” She smooths her free hand over Servine’s head as she licks up the rest of the powder from Hilda’s palm. “There you go, girl. Good as new.”
Servine stumbles to her feet, nuzzles Hilda appreciatively, and trots over to Cheren. She curls into his chest, and he smiles. In another life, she’d be a Champion’s ace. A Serperior, standing proud in those marble halls with all the regality she’d deserved – no, earned.
She still can be, he corrects himself. If he just works harder.
Hilda tosses him the potion, and with a few sprays, Servine’s eyes are sharp and bright again.
“If she’s ready to go…” Hilda stands, and Dewott stares up at her, as though awaiting her next move.
It’s an image that makes his heart ache, on which his mind can’t help but elaborate. Her hair tangles in the wind, and her eyes match the sky’s shade of overcast – a backdrop upon which she and Dewott are vibrant subjects.
He can see her now, more clearly than he’s ever been able to picture himself, standing at the peak of Victory Road. A mighty Samurott at her side. An unwavering smile playing upon her lips.
She’s beautiful. It pulls the knot tighter in his chest.
Dewott returns to his Pokéball; Servine does the same.
“C’mon.” Hilda extends a hand, and Cheren takes it, though he could rise perfectly well on his own.
Her hands are rough. They always have been. Even as kids, they’d been perpetually dry and calloused – from scaling the trees outside their houses; from digging for shells on the beach; from teaching painful lessons to bullies twice her size, for whom Cheren and Bianca were easy pickings. From gripping pencils and scrubbing floors in the detentions she’d resultantly land herself in.
And though those hands now pry his lifelong dream from him, when she lingers for a noticeable second, two, he does, too.
When her hand slips from his, it tumbles from his mouth: “How do you do it?”
“Hm?”
“You have to have a strategy, right?”
She shrugs and starts down the worn dirt path comprising Route 6. “Not really. I mean, in actual battles, I plan stuff out a little better.”
He slings his bag over his shoulder and catches up to her. “Well, that’s what I’m asking.”
“You think I’m just gonna tell you my strategy? No shot, man.” A smarmy grin crosses her face. “Maybe we just have to spend more time battling one-on-one, huh? Then you can pay attention and figure it out yourself.”
He narrows his eyes at her. She laughs, but glances up and away, briefly, as if he’d missed something.
“Okay, for real,” she says, “I think about type matchups and all that shit. Like, in a real battle, if you’d have led with Servine, I probably would’ve found a way to get Simisear or Swoobat out.”
“And if you couldn’t?”
“Then I’d work with what I have. I don’t know.” She kicks at a pebble in the road, sending it careening into the grass. “I’m not a whackjob like N. I can’t straight-up talk with my Pokémon. But I think we’ve got a rhythm. I just rely on that.”
His brows furrow. “So it’s instinctual?”
“I guess. It’s not like that for you?”
He doesn’t answer. It’d be untrue to say he doesn’t feel a connection, a rhythm, with his Pokémon.
Yet she makes it sound so simple. As if that’s the infallible solution to battling, as if it’s something only she had ever thought of.
“I kinda figured it would be,” she continues on. “You’re not a bad trainer, y’know.”
“Wow, thanks.”
“No, I mean, you’re a good trainer. Really good,” she says. “I’m not gonna lie. I know I’m good. So I think I know a good trainer when I see one.”
Just not as good as you, he thinks, but doesn’t say. She certainly knows that, too.
“There’s a reason you’re my favorite battle partner. Doubles with you, it’s like –” She snaps.
He laughs, curt, but a tinge of heat rushes to his face. Dammit. “Okay, you don’t have to flatter me.”
“I’m not.” She steps in front of him and jabs a finger into his chest. “You’re good. I just don’t think you’re ever gonna be good enough for yourself. ”
Those gray eyes stare him down, and he blinks for some reprieve. “What do you mean?”
She turns on her heel and keeps walking. “It’s like Alder said, back when we met him.”
“Ugh, not this again.”
“No, listen to me. This isn’t about becoming League Champion or whatever. If you beat me sometime, would that be enough for you?”
“Of course it would,” he says without thinking, then flushes.
“I don’t believe you. You beat random trainers all the time, and it’s not enough. You’ve beaten five gyms now. You beat Hilbert. You beat Bianca. None of that’s enough. But you really think that winning against me would make you feel better?”
It would. She keeps going.
“I know you want to be the Champion. So after me, it’d be Alder. And then what? You go fight all the other Champions? Sit there undefeated forever?”
“So this is about becoming Champion.”
“How is it that you can be so smart and so damn stupid at the same time?” She turns around again, treads backwards onto the weathered old wooden bridge in front of them. “I’m saying I’m not special, and if you get better than me, you’re still not gonna think you’re good enough.”
But that’s just the thing. She is special.
He doesn’t have to constantly think about the others ahead of him – the remaining three gym leaders, the Elite Four, even Alder. They’re a nebulous future, stepping stones in the path towards his dream.
Hilda, though. Hilda’s his past, intertwined with him for as long as he can remember. His present, standing at his side and in his way, occupying thoughts both bitter and saccharine.
It’d be easier – a smaller pill to swallow, certainly – were he pinned anywhere but the crossroads of wanting her and wanting to be her.
“It’d just be nice, one day,” he says.
The wood planks creak under Hilda’s feet as she treads to the railing, leans back against it, despite the certain risk of splinters. She eyes the silver-blue river rushing below, Cheren, the railing. “Check this out. Someone carved their ex’s number in here.”
He’s sure she wouldn’t have wasted breath on it, were it not for the conversation that’d preceded. It’s a bad habit of hers, avoidance.
He indulges her, anyhow. He joins her at the railing, glances at the countless messages, hearts, and initials carved into the wood by visitors gone by. Feels the occasional mist against his skin.
“What about you?” he asks.
“Huh?”
“Where are you planning on taking this? When will it be enough for you?”
She grins. Lets out a huff. “Well, I wanna be Champion, too. Was that not obvious?”
“Sure, but how is that any different than me?”
“That’s not the only thing keeping me going. I love battling. I’d battle even if I had no chance at being Champion.” She glances over her shoulder, back at the water. “I think getting Dewott and leaving town were the best things that’ve ever happened to me. I know Bianca thinks that, too.”
She’s setting him up to answer for himself, but he doesn’t take the bait. “Of course Bianca does. She escaped home, and she doesn’t have to go back. You’re not escaping something, are you?”
She rolls her eyes. “I’m doing fine. Just needed some time away. It was getting kinda… stuffy, I guess.”
“Nuvema?”
She pushes off the railing and starts off again. “We should keep going if we wanna make another mile.”
He calls it a truce.
They don’t address it after that, for the rest of their mile down Route 6. Instead, they return to small talk. Previous gym battles. What should be done about Team Plasma. Potential dinners they can assemble from the canned food in their bags.
Cheren trails behind. At Hilda’s side, but behind, out of step.
And despite the raging rivers winding through the path, the other trainers and wild Pokémon they pass, the heavy wool tufts of clouds above their heads – when he looks ahead, all he can see is her.