New Leaves

Riftclaw

Special thanks to Kuraness and Kylandryn for beta reading!

Prologue

Today, Gold was bored.

He was sprawled on the most comfortable of the couches in the lounge room, lazily turning the pages of the newest romance novel he’d picked up. His favourite reading buddy, an espeon named Vivi, a lilac-coloured cat with large pointed ears and a forked tail, was napping on the second-most comfortable couch with her tail and paws occasionally twitching in her sleep.

It had been a good nine months since Gold had arrived at Blackthorn, and almost eight since he’d moved in with Lance instead of living in the trailer that was still parked out in the yard. It’d been three months since Silver had caught pokérus and nearly died, and one since he’d gotten better and gone back up into the mountains to train.

Gold had very insistently bullied his-rival-slash-best-friend into taking a phone (one that he’d paid for) with him this time. It hadn’t been easy to convince the guy to take it, but he was at least checking in every few days now, even if that amounted to a single I’m fine text to keep Gold from flying out there on his boyfriend’s dragonite.

Gold flicked over another page, although his mind was definitely not on the current heroine’s struggle between the successful, celebrity boyfriend and the dark and broody newcomer that drew her attention the moment he walked into the room. He wasn’t sure if he was bored of the book or just too preoccupied with his own thoughts to give it a fair shot, really. There was so much to think about.

He’d earned his last Johto badge from Clair some time ago. She’d given him a bit of shit over it, which he’d later figured out was as much because he was dating her cousin-slash-big-brother as it was that she’d lost to a stranger with a cute pink pokémon almost as big as he was. They were on much better terms now, at least. Some days they even trained together, both obliquely studying each others’ techniques while they chatted about life in Blackthorn and dragon taming as a whole.

Silver’s insistence on spending so much time training in the mountains had lead to Gold getting decently ahead of him in travel and badge count. It had given him a lot more time to rest and recover, as well. He’d been pushing himself hard the last couple of years, determined to prove that he was, in fact, perfectly capable of keeping up with any able-bodied trainer that anyone wanted to measure him against. He didn’t even need to beat Lance to know he’d proven himself, making it to the Indigo Plateau and fighting him there was going to be enough.

And, well. Win or lose, he was going to be able to come back home and make out with Lance about it. The thought of that made him smirk a little.

The other concern Gold had was getting too far ahead. Silver was a pretty powerful trainer despite the hurdles he kept tripping on, but it would be far too easy for Gold to push himself way past a point where Silver could hold his own. The guy was already struggling with the fact that he kept losing (no matter how hard he insisted his losses were flukes), and Gold steamrolling him the way Lance had could end up scaring him off entirely.

Scaring him off had never been the plan. There was a good heart buried in there under all that anger, someone just needed to coax it out. It might not even be Gold who ended up doing so, but he was determined to at least put enough foundation in there for the next person who tried to reach him to have an easier time. The cracks were already forming, if Silver’s crobat’s recent evolution had anything to say about it. Silver was trying, and it was beginning to show.

There was another, more recent thought flitting through his mind around the other thoughts, too. It was about a text Lance had sent him about an hour ago.

Might be home late tonight. Something’s happening at Lavender.

Which raised a lot of questions, but Lance was a big boy and also the current Indigo League champion, so whatever was going on was probably going to be fine. It did make him wonder what was going on, though. Lavender was a bizarre place to cause trouble. Even with the new radio tower on the coast, there was almost nothing there.

Gold sighed, flipping his book over to glare at the cover. Maybe it was time to admit defeat and come back to it later. He couldn’t even remember the main character’s name.

Almost immediately, his pokégear began to ring. Gold jumped, then scrambled for it in the pocket of the bag he’d left sitting by the coffee table. He’d half expected Lance, but the caller ID was... Elm? He hadn’t heard from the professor in at least a month.

“Professor, hi,” Gold said. “What’s up?”

“I’m... Not sure, actually,” Elm replied. “There’s something weird happening with the radio broadcasts. Have you heard them? They’re talking about Team Rocket.”

Gold frowned. “Like, reporting on them, or...?”

“That’s what’s weird. It almost sounds like they’re the ones broadcasting.”

“I’ll... call you back.” Gold hung up without waiting for a response, immediately flipping to the radio setting and tuning into the Pokémon Talk frequency.

“It’s been three years but we’ve rebuilt the team and restructured! We’re proud to announce that we’re back!”

He switched frequencies, bouncing to the Lucky Channel. He listened to it for a moment, then hopped again to the Variety Channel. The same message seemed to be broadcasting on a loop on all of Goldenrod’s stations.

Gold flipped back to the phone setting, pulling up Silver’s number and opening a message window.

Hey. Turn on the radio, any frequency. Shit’s going down.

I’m busy.

Not when you hear this, you won’t be.

He snapped the device closed, grabbed his cane from where it was resting on the side of the couch, and hauled himself upright with a groan. He already knew he wasn’t going to be able to take his assistance pokémon, a large, bull-like tauros, through the radio tower’s narrow halls and winding staircases. He was just going to have to shove anything he could carry into his usual backpack and hope for the best.

He loaded the pack with whatever seemed useful, mostly medicine and some backup TMs. His pokémon were fine, and when he called Vivi over to put her in her pokéball for the trip, she bounded over with great excitement.

Gold put his hat on, and shouldered the pack. He was going to regret the carry weight later, probably, but there might not be backup this time. Better to be prepared to heal his team on the run. He paused for a moment as he ran a mental inventory on what he’d gathered.

...Better take the heavy-duty first aid kit, too. The only reason nobody had gotten shot at Mahogany was the big orange dragon that followed Lance around like a huge puppy. Gold didn’t think his luck would be that good this time, with his less intimidating pokémon team.

Packed and as dressed up as he ever got, Gold slipped out of the house, locking the door behind him, then paused to pull his pokégear back out of the pocket he’d shoved it into. He found Lance’s name in the contacts list and texted him, too.

Looks like your problem might not be the only one today. Don’t worry, it’s handled.

He called out Grace, and the togekiss obligingly grabbed him by the shoulders and launched them both into the skies in the direction of Goldenrod.

Chapter 1

Having such easy access to Lance’s dragonite had spoiled him, Gold thought as they touched down in Goldenrod. A togekiss was a strong flyer, but the travel was nowhere near as comfortable and speedy. Maybe he should take Pike’s offer of a dratini of his own... He’d have to think about it.

There were a startling number of people in Team Rocket uniforms scattered around the city, and the usual residents had locked themselves away in their homes. Gold swapped Grace out for Vivi, who perched on his shoulders and glared ferociously around them as he hobbled down the street to the radio tower.

When they got there, however, it was clear they weren’t getting in through the front. A good dozen Rockets were gathered around the door, and as tough as his pokémon were, Gold wasn’t sure he fancied a twelve-on-one fight.

What he needed was backup.

He circled back, heading purposefully towards the city’s pokémon gym. There were some grunts barricading the doors there, too, but a much more manageable three, so he called out his ampharos and clefable alongside Vivi and sent all three rushing in.

The look on the Rocket grunts’ faces when they noticed the oncoming pokémon was priceless. The moment the grunts were distracted, though, the door to the gym blasted open and Whitney’s miltank came charging out with a furious bellow.

“Shit! Scatter!”

The three grunts fled down the street immediately as the chubby pink and brown cow gave chase. Whitney followed her pokémon out, calling it back before it could get too far away. Behind her came the rest of the Goldenrod gym trainers, all looking various shades of worried.

“Hey girls! Long time no see,” Gold chirped, recalling Twinkle and Fabelle as Vivi jumped back up onto his shoulders. “Thought I’d swing by and help you out with this little pest problem. Everyone doing okay?”

“We’re fine,” Whitney answered. She looked more angry than afraid. “Are they all at the radio tower?”

“Not all of them, but their main force is in there for sure. The front door is barricaded. Do you know if there’s there another way in?”

“The underground tunnels connect to the basement. We can get in through one of the paths from the marketplace.” Whitney huffed. “I don’t know if I fancy our chances. Six of us against a whole force?”

“Well...” Gold drawled. “I’m no champion, but he did let me demolish about half of their forces at Mahogany. And that was like, two against fifty. All together, we can absolutely pull it off.”

Whitney frowned, considering.

“I’m ready,” Bridget said firmly. Behind her, the other three gym trainers nodded in agreement.

Whitney glanced back at them, and her expression became determined. “Let’s do this.”

* * *

Their little group slipped quickly but quietly through the streets, making their way down the stairs into the underground. Whitney lead them to the storeroom in the gallery where, tucked between racks of costumes, a door lead into the deeper tunnels.

Gold paused by one of the clothing racks as Whitney worked on the lock. It was stocked almost entirely with Team Rocket uniforms in various sizes, but it was clear more than half of them had been taken already. “Looks like they set up here, actually. We should probably be ready to fight our way through the basement.”

“Should we take a couple of these?” Victoria asked. “Maybe we can use them to sneak past the guards.”

“Hm. Good idea, honestly. Let’s see if anything fits.”

By the time Whitney was done picking the lock, Gold and Victoria had assembled enough fitting pieces for all six of them to be disguised. A quick discussion between the six of them lead to the decision to go in dressed as Rocket grunts to try and sow extra chaos among the ranks, and they vanished one by one into the changing rooms and came back dressed in black.

Gold had bundled up his signature hoodie and shoved it into his pack; pulling the Rocket cap down over his eyes made him almost unrecognisable. Vivi was still lounging across his shoulders, but it was fine, surely someone in Team Rocket had a weird cat in there.

“Everyone ready?” Whitney asked. She’d pulled her hair back into a single ponytail and threaded it through the back of her cap.

“Let’s do this!” Carrie echoed Whitney’s earlier declaration.

The maintenance tunnel behind the door was cramped and dimly lit. It had that damp, heavy atmosphere you could feel standing in the mouth of a cave. The six trainers moved quickly and quietly down the tunnel, Whitney leading the way. A few turns later, she found the door they were looking for, and after a few minutes work she’d picked that lock to let them into the basement floor of the radio tower.

“We can go up the elevator or we can go up the north or south stairs,” Whitney said in a hushed voice.

“No elevators. Too easy to trap us in one,” Samantha said.

“Heads for north stairs, tails for south stairs,” Gold said, flipping a coin he’d pulled out of his pocket. He caught it on the back of his left hand, and showed the others that it had landed on tails.

“That’s an interesting coin,” Bridget remarked as they headed for the south stairs. “American?”

“Mmhm, it’s a Morgan dollar,” Gold answered. “One of the older mintings. Bit of a collector’s item, since they never really stopped using notes over there. Got it years and years ago from an old family friend.”

“You’re from there, aren’t you?”

“Kinda. I spent a lot of my childhood in Orre. But I was born in Venezuela.”

“Wait, really? Where does the ‘Maple’ come from?”

“Branding, believe it or not. Grandpa’s Japanese and grandma was Venezuelan.”

“Wait, they just changed their names to match the company?”

“Rich people never do anything weird. They’re so well known for being intelligent and stable,” Gold said drily.

“Including yourself in that?” Victoria asked with a smirk.

“Shit, yeah. You could write a thesis on all the things that are wrong with me specifically.”

That got a few giggles.

The group reached the door to the stairwell, and they paused for a moment to check each other’s disguises before walking into it. Whitney lead the way up the stairs from the basement, Gold taking the rear to try and keep his cane less visible. The next floor up, they found two bored looking Team Rocket grunts leaning against the wall watching the door out to the lobby.

“Oh hey, more new recruits?” The shorter and younger one asked in surprise.

“That’s us,” Whitney said, trying her best to sound kinda bored. “We got told to take over watching the stairs so you guys could go help out in the Underground.”

“Oh, they’re still having trouble with that weird kid? I guess it’d make sense they’d want us stronger trainers to go in if that’s the case.” The older woman shrugged. “Well, welcome to guard duty. We’ve got guys on all the floors now, so you really only gotta watch this door and make sure nobody can get up to the first floor.”

“Sounds easy enough. Have fun in the Underground for us,” Whitney drawled.

“What you got there?” The younger woman asked, squinting at Gold.

“Here?” He jerked a thumb at his pack. “Loot. Lotta good stuff lying around, it’d be stupid not to take it.”

“Heh heh heh. That’s using your brain. You’ll go far kid.” The older one said. She opened the door into the lobby, and both of them left. The door clicked shut delicately behind them.

“I can’t believe we actually got away with that,” Samantha said.

“They don’t know each other, I think. Too many new people,” Gold murmured, leaning into the middle of the stairwell to verify the floors above were empty. “Little bit of an exploitable weakness.”

“She thought you were a kid,” Bridget snickered.

“I’m five-four, most people think I’m a kid.” Gold smirked. “Also an exploitable weakness.”

“What’s our plan from here?” Samantha asked.

Gold cracked open the door into the lobby and peered outside for a moment, then let it close again. “I think we need at least three of you to hold the stairs. The rest of us should go out, probably in pairs, maybe taking turns so it doesn’t look as obvious, and start evacuating the hostages down to the basement.”

“Alright,” Whitney said. “What’s our cover story?”

“We’re moving them to a more secure location. That woman said something about a kid messing with them in the underground, they may buy it if they’ve been having trouble. If you can let the hostages know we’re here to help, it might go smoother.” Gold reached up to adjust the Rocket hat again; wearing it forwards was actually annoying after how long he’d been wearing his own cap backwards. “I might head out into the lobby alone and grab the receptionist, though. I think she’s had a bad enough day already.”

* * *

Gold slipped out into the reception hall, the Rocket cap still pulled low to try and hide his eyes. Vivi was back in her pokéball, being just unusual enough that he didn’t feel super comfortable walking around with her without the rest of the group. He’d also left his cane with Whitney, so he felt a little unstable, but it was fine, he didn’t need to walk that far...

“Hey,” Gold said, approaching the grunts who were keeping the receptionist corralled at her desk. “Been asked to start stashing the hostages in a safer place because of that one kid causing problems in the underground.”

“Petrel still hasn’t taken care of him? Ugh,” one of the grunts responded. “Yeah go for it, it’ll be easier if we don’t gotta watch her.”

Gold tapped his hand to his hat brim in a mock salute and made his way over to where the receptionist was sitting nervously in her corner. Now that he was closer, he recognised her; she was the same person who’d been working reception the first time he’d visited the tower, and they’d chatted for a while.

“Hey, Drea,” he said softly. She frowned as Gold tipped his hat up ever so slightly and winked at her, then mouthed a quiet ‘you?’ He grinned and shushed her, before grabbing her arm to ‘escort’ her back to the stairs. “No sudden movements please, you’re my cane for a few minutes,” he told her quietly.

“Okay,” she whispered. “What’s going on?”

“We’ll fill you in on the plan once you’re out of harm’s way,” he murmured back.

They were almost at the door to the stairs when, abruptly, someone came crashing through the barricaded front doors.

“Uh-oh...” Gold hissed, as he recognised the red-haired man in the leather jacket who was commanding a feraligatr to rip through the grunts’ pokémon as they stormed in.

“Problem?” Drea stiffened.

“Uh, kinda. He’s on our side but also he’s gonna kick my ass over the disguise if he catches up. Let’s hurry.”

They reached the stairwell, and Gold pushed Drea towards the waiting Samantha, before spinning back to ‘defend’ the door from the oncoming Silver. He wanted to try and loop him in on the plan, but the guy could be... a little unpredictable at times.

Silver made a beeline straight to Gold, likely because he was the closest target on the floor. Gold braced himself for the inevitable.

“I am so sick of you pathetic little rats,” the red-haired man spat as he approached.

“Yeah, me too, it’s getting pretty tiresome,” Gold shot back.

There was a long moment as Silver processed whose voice he was hearing. And then he exploded.

“You?! What the fuck are you wearing!?” Silver snarled. He grabbed at the Rocket hat Gold was wearing and yanked it off, grey eyes narrowed in fury. “What is wrong with you?!”

“Lots and lots and lots,” Gold answered with a completely straight face.

The grunt that had been guarding the elevator had gone very still, recognising Gold now that he wasn’t hiding his amber eyes behind the cap’s brim. “It’s that little shit from Mahogany!”

“Sorry, do you mind, we’re having a moment,” Gold said to him absently.

Silver sneered and shoved him away. Gold caught himself on the wall, hissing slightly from having to twist a little too far to stay upright. He was really regretting leaving his cane behind now.

The rest of the Rockets were taking notice now. “Quick! Barricade the stairs! Don’t let them get up to the first floor!”

Gold glanced over his shoulder, lip curled back in distaste. “Thanks for blowing my cover by the way, that’s great.”

“Why do you even have a cover?” Silver hissed. “Are you suddenly not strong enough to deal with them yourself?”

“Happy to read you in on the plan if you’ll stop screaming at me in the lobby!”

Silver paused. “No, actually. Fuck this, and fuck you.” He turned on his heel and stalked back towards the exit.

Gold rolled his eyes, sighed, and then reached out with his psychic powers. He gripped Silver very gently and lifted him a good two feet into the air, drawing a startled yell from the other man.

“Yeah! You forgot I could do this, didn’t you, bitch!?” Gold shouted at him. “Get back here!”

Silver clawed at the air with an incomprehensible snarl, but it did absolutely nothing to stop the telekinetic power pulling him back towards Gold. Gold backed up to the stairwell and yanked Silver through the open door, swinging him around to pin him to the wall about a foot above the floor.

Only Silver would ever know just how gently his back had actually impacted the wall. He opened his mouth to start yelling, and Gold grabbed him by the shirt and dragged him down to eye level. “Shut. Up.”

Wisely, he did.

“Well, that certainly went,” Whitney said. Drea was hiding behind the gym trainers, and she looked like she was trying very hard not to laugh.

“Hey! You guys on watch, where did those punks go?” A voice called down from a floor above. Gold threw himself against the wall next to Silver, praying that the landing would obscure them from whoever was overhead.

“No idea!” Bridget called back up. “We wedged the door shut. Maybe they went back outside?”

“...Keep an eye on it. Sing out if anything comes through that door.”

The group remained quiet until they heard the door above slam shut again. As soon as the echo had faded, they turned their attention back to Silver, who was glowering at them with folded arms.

“Great job, dipshit,” Gold grumbled. “Things were going so smoothly til you showed up.”

“What, with you skulking around in the shadows like cowards?”

“Oh, don’t you start.” Gold flipped him off and turned back to Whitney. “Change of plans, I guess. I’ll put my usual clothes back on and make a ruckus while the rest of you get the hostages out.” He paused after pulling the Rocket shirt over his head, then shot Silver a look. “You’re helping.”

Silver spluttered for a moment. “I’m not helping you—”

“Who said anything about helping me? I’m taking Whitney, you’re helping the others hold the stairwell,” Gold shot back, glancing over his shoulder to glare at him for a moment before looking away to pull his hoodie back on. His back to Silver, he winked at Whitney, who had to suppress a sudden grin. “You’ve never fought a double in your life, I don’t think you could keep up.”

Silver lunged towards him, grabbing him by the front of his hoodie and pulling him around to face him. Gold smirked, somehow managing to look down his nose at the much taller Silver.

“Fuck you,” Silver growled. “Like you can do anything but get in the way.”

He shoved Gold away and stormed up the stairs. Gold grabbed his cane and scurried after him, ignoring the way his bones were already aching trying to navigate the stairs. Seven flights was going to hurt in the morning.

Gold caught up to Silver before he could barge right through the door, grabbing his arm. “Wait.”

Silver shot him a poisonous look.

Gold was unfazed. “If we go through the door, they’ll bar everything coming off the stairwell and stop the girls from using it to get the hostages out. I’m thinking teleporting right into the middle of them would sow a lot more chaos.”

Silver was quiet for a moment, successfully confused enough to not be angry anymore. “Like, with Abra—”

“Yeah that could work too,” Gold muttered, digging into his pocket for his phone and calling up a floor plan.

Silver’s voice dropped to a lower volume. “...Since when could you teleport?”

“Uh. A while?” Gold glanced up from the phone, biting his lower lip. “I know you think I’ve been slacking off, but I’ve really just been... Training myself? After we talked about, uh—” He cut himself off, took a deep breath, then continued. “I figured maybe I should try and get better control of it. Maybe see if I can figure out what dad was by finding out what I can do.”

Silver frowned at him. He looked like he was about to say something else, but then he glanced over his shoulder at Whitney and Bridget, standing just a few steps down from the landing they were on. Instead, he let his abra out of its pokéball.

The little yellow, fox-like pokémon that appeared reached up to Silver immediately, and the red-haired man bent down to pick it up surprisingly gently, setting it on his shoulders. It nuzzled in against his throat with a happy little grumble, long reptilian tail draped lazily over Silver’s shoulder.

Gold held the phone up to Abra’s face, growling something to it in its own language. Abra nodded, and then all three of them vanished in a flash of light.

Chapter 2

Gold and Silver re-materialised in an empty cubicle in the middle of the first floor. Both ducked down to get their bearings. Abra stayed comfortably on Silver’s shoulders, clearly just happy to be out with its trainer.

“Not putting Abra away?”

“You’re trying to be sneaky and you forgot about plausible deniability?”

Gold frowned, nodded, and leaned around the cubicle wall to peer across the room. There were at least a dozen grunts hanging around the elevator entrance, just milling around and talking. In the recording booth beyond were a number of people in office clothes and street wear. “Doesn’t matter, really. Our plan is to just run in there and fuck their shit up.”

Silver nodded, reaching for Feraligatr’s pokéball.

“Wait. That was you in the underground, right?” Gold asked, his voice low. “Are your pokémon okay?”

“They can still fight,” Silver answered in a similar tone.

“Still,” Gold pulled a half dozen full restores out of an easy-to-open pocket and pushed them into Silver’s hands. “Not gonna get a chance to use them before we start a riot, probably. Ready?”

“Waiting for you.”

“Awesome,” Gold almost purred. He braced himself against his cane and hauled himself upright, bounding out from behind the flimsy cubicle walls into the hall and flinging one of his luxury balls across the room. “Pyra! Earthquake!”

Silver leapt out behind him, lobbing Feraligatr’s ball overhead. “Feraligatr! Surf!”

The Team Rocket grunts had a split second to turn to face the two pokémon rushing towards them—one a large, badger-like creature with a flaming fur ruff, the other a blue, bipedal crocodile—and then Gold’s typhlosion slammed a foot into the floor, causing the entire building to quake. The grunts that didn’t fall over with the tremor were immediately swamped by a wave of water that swept them into the far wall.

“Shit! How did they get in?!”

“Doesn’t matter! There’s two of them and fourteen of us!”

The grunts scrambled to release their pokémon in response, emboldened by the math.

“Aww, only fourteen? That hardly seems fair... To you,” Gold crowed. “Lava plume!”

With the grunts’ attention locked on the two trainers attacking them, Whitney and Bridget had slipped through the doorway to the southern stairwell and hurried across the room to the recording booth. Whitney pulled the makeshift lock off the door handle and pulled it open, hurriedly shushing the people inside.

“It’s okay, we’re here to get you out,” Whitney explained in a hushed voice. “Follow Bridget, quickly, straight to the stairwell door.”

Bridget lead the hostages across the room, Whitney taking up the rear. One of the grunts noticed them, but just gave them a thumbs up, clearly fooled by their disguises. Whitney paused to look back at the doorway, and gave Gold a salute before pointing upwards.

She felt rather than saw his acknowledgement, an odd little psychic hum. He was clearly fixated on the battle he and Silver were engaged with, snarling wordlessly while his typhlosion bounded and twisted around Silver’s feraligatr to snap and spit fire at the enemy pokémon trying to take advantage of the feraligatr’s more limited movement.

Not that Silver’s feraligatr wasn’t holding its own, though. Whatever it hit stayed down, and Silver seemed to have a very good eye for what it should be hitting next. As she watched, it snapped up a tapir-like drowzee with a crunch before throwing it back towards its trainer.

Whitney grinned as she closed the door. Maybe they talked like they couldn’t stand each other, but their battle styles meshed perfectly. They were almost dancing.

“Is everyone okay?” She asked, turning back to the half dozen people huddled on the stairs and pulling off her hat so they could see who she actually was.

“Oh my god, Whitney,” DJ Mary gasped.

“Hey Mary!” She gave the DJ a reassuring smile. “It’s going to be okay. We’ve got a little safe space down in the basement by the tunnel into the underground. Carrie will take you downstairs and keep guard while we get the rest of the hostages out.”

Carrie smiled reassuringly at Mary, and gestured for the group of people to come with her. They filed down the stairs after her.

There was a shimmer of light and Gold and Silver reappeared on the landing, Silver’s abra still draped across his shoulders.

“—and if he could be here, he would be, but. Oh.” Gold blinked, seemingly only just registering the scene change. “Hi Whitney.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Mm, fine. I was just explaining to bonehead here,” he shot a glare at Silver, who glowered back, “that we’re the cavalry, actually. Because the champion probably isn’t going to make it in time.”

Whitney frowned. “What do you mean?”

Gold sighed. “About an hour before the radio signals changed, I know Lance went to Lavender Town, and he probably took the elite four too. Something was happening there, probably at their radio tower, that needed their attention—”

“Which is stupid, because there’s nothing there—” Silver interrupted.

“Which is the point I was trying to make,” Gold snapped back. “There’s no way the Rockets didn’t send another group, maybe even their main force, to bait them out to the new tower there so they could take over here without opposition.”

“That would make sense, actually.”

All three of them glanced up. Victoria was leaning over the railing a floor above them.

“Think about it,” she said. “The Lavender tower is just a relay. They have a few DJs and a couple dozen office clerks, but they re-air most of our shows. If they wanted our equipment and to keep the champion away while they did what they needed to...”

“Yeah,” Gold said. “They don’t even need to beat him. Just keep him busy long enough to get their message out.”

“They want Giovanni back,” Whitney murmured. The way Silver flinched at the name of the missing Rocket boss didn’t escape her notice. “But is that all they want?”

“If they wanted more than that, they’d have started broadcasting the signal from Mahogany already,” Gold answered. “I don’t think they ever intended to take the tower permanently. They get their message on the air, and by extension every TV and radio broadcast on the fucking planet, then they retreat, and they start another Lake of Rage with their own equipment somewhere we don’t know about.”

Whitney sighed. “Man. Talk about a high-pressure situation.”

* * *

Abra teleported Silver and Gold up another floor, into small storeroom on the western side of the building. Gold took a moment to patch up their pokémon with his collection of potions and elixirs, and then they emerged into another open conference room with a handful of hostages huddled in one corner and a dozen Rocket grunts staring at them in shock.

“Happy birthday!” Gold shouted, hurling his togekiss’ pokéball in their direction. “Air Slash!”

Silver shot him a look even as he followed suit. “Crobat, cross poison!”

They were three floors up now, and the Rockets were clearly panicking. Every time they thought they’d cut the two trainers off, Abra would teleport them into a different area they could launch another attack from. The stronger Rocket trainers were scrambling to catch up, but the unpredictability of their path through the building was keeping them from actually confronting the pair.

“I feel like you’re not taking this seriously, somehow,” Silver grumbled, as they swept through the room and chased the grunts out into the hall. Gold’s togekiss’ soft flight feathers nearly brushed the walls of the hallway as it pursued them, Silver’s crobat twisting elegantly around it on its four leathery wings.

“What, you don’t enjoy crushing your enemies beneath your hooves?” Gold shot back.

It took Silver a lot of self-control to not make a crack about preferring to crush Lance under his hooves instead. He didn’t even have hooves. And as much as he and Gold tended to verbally tear strips out of each other, he wasn’t sure where threatening Gold’s new boyfriend fell on the acceptable scale.

“How did that even happen,” Silver grumbled, pointing Crobat at a raticate that had just launched itself around a corner. The giant brown rodent was flung into the wall with a decisive chop of the purple bat’s wings.

“Huh?” Gold glanced back at him, the blue psychic glow fading from his amber eyes. The desk he’d just angled over the northern stairwell door thumped heavily into place.

“You and Lance. How did that happen? I get sick and I wake up and suddenly you’re just...”

“It really wasn’t a ‘just’ dude, we were dating for months before you got sick,” Gold returned, before hissing a command to his togekiss. Grace spun on a dime and sent an air slash directly into the face an arbok that had reared up from behind the piled equipment. The violet cobra tumbled back into the debris with a clatter. “It’s not like I could really tell you shit when you’d holed up like a hermit out in the forest, it’s not like you had a phone before I bought you one—”

“You really didn’t have to buy me a phone,” Silver grumbled.

“Yes, I did,” Gold hissed. He spun around to face Silver, eyes glowing as a door slammed shut in the face of the grunt that was about to charge out at them. “Yes, I did! Three weeks you were lying there in that tent slowly fucking dying and nobody knew it was happening. And even when we found you, we weren’t even sure you were gonna make it. There were a good few weeks there I was wondering what name we were going to bury you under.”

And then Gold turned away, his focus back on hunting Rocket grunts.

“You’re lucky that abra loves you so much,” Gold muttered. “Because you wouldn’t be here without it.”

Silver reached up to scratch behind Abra’s ear, almost unconsciously. It wasn’t the first time Gold had said something like that, but something about it made him feel... He wasn’t really sure how he felt. The pokémon rumbled a little and nuzzled at him in response.

It was a weak pokémon. Fast, but all it could do was run away. He’d always insisted that he only wanted to train strong pokémon. And yet... He’d never let go of it. He’d thought about it, but they’d been through so much together. Even if that had mostly been hiding, and running, and stealing whatever scraps they could to survive.

Calling Gold for help wasn’t the first time it had saved him. It probably wouldn’t be the last.

“God,” Gold said with a sharp exhalation, startling him out of his thoughts. “We fucking suck at talking about our feelings.”

Silver snorted. It wasn’t inaccurate, but still. A split-second later, a pair of Rocket grunts swung around a corner, a weezing and an electrode rushing towards them, and like a well-oiled machine Grace and Crobat tore them down. Gold and Silver charged past the fallen pokémon, giving the bomb-like electrode a wide berth. One of the grunts made a grab for Gold as they passed, and Silver shoulder-checked him hard, sending both Rockets tumbling to the floor. The Rockets were getting bolder, actively targeting the two of them as well as their pokémon now.

Nobody had pulled a gun yet, but Silver remembered how this kind of conflict went. It was only a matter of time before their opponents stopped playing by the rules.

“For the record,” Gold said, once they’d turned a corner and put some distance between them and their last adversaries. “And I know you pretty much hate him for kicking your arse anyway. But he’s actually a nice guy. Sweet, gentle, a bit oblivious sometimes.”

“He dresses like a dork.”

“I can’t even begin to explain why that makes him cuter to me.”

“Yeah, yeah. You have terrible taste in men, we know that.”

“Says the guy who has willingly made out with me, more than once,” Gold teased. “Does that count as a self-own?”

Silver paused and glanced over at him. Gold was wearing his infuriating little smirk again. The urge to wipe it off his face was strong, but they really didn’t have the time to be playing around. Before he could say anything, though, Gold paused, eyes glowing faintly.

“Floor’s clear. Time to bounce up.”

Chapter 3

The fourth floor was about when their plan started falling apart. The higher they went, the stronger the Rockets they were facing were getting, and the dirtier they were fighting. Silver still hadn’t seen a gun, but more of them were trying to physically assault the pair as they charged through the offices and recording spaces on the fourth floor.

Gold was getting trickier with his psychic powers, tossing anyone unlucky enough to get too close away and hopping short distances to dodge pokémon attacks aimed at him. He was wasting a bit too much energy on taunting them, but that was Gold. He tended to get a little caught up in the joy of messing with people. Unlike Gold, Silver was hyper-focused on the fact that they were walking a very fine line that was potentially going to end with someone getting killed.

With that in mind, Silver wasn’t pulling punches. Every grunt he took down, he made sure stayed down-- leaving someone with a broken bone meant that they wouldn’t be capable of following and potentially being a problem later.

And then they got swarmed in a maze of tighter, interconnected office spaces. A good dozen Rockets with fully-evolved pokémon managed to wedge their way between the pair, and they were forced to retreat away from each other under the barrage.

Silver ordered Feraligatr to swamp them with a surf, and the moment they were off balance he recalled it, spun on his heels and bolted. He hated himself a bit for doing it, but there wasn’t room for the big pokémon to manoeuvre without Gold’s typhlosion to cover its speed deficit. He darted through the interconnecting offices out into a hallway, hopefully one that would let him circle around and rejoin Gold.

Abruptly, his perspective changed, like he was suddenly heading in a completely different direction. A gunshot ran out, ricochet hitting the wall behind him, and he scrambled away, trying to figure out where the shooter was.

And then he realised Abra wasn’t draped across his shoulders anymore.

The moment he registered that the pokémon was no longer with him, he spun in place to look for it—

And he was pulled up short as something caught his hair and yanked back. He stumbled, one hand reflexively grabbing at his hair himself to try and reduce the pressure– then he froze as barely-warm metal was shoved up under his jaw.

Ah. There was the gun.

“I don’t know what you think you’re playing at, Angie,” Proton sneered in his ear. “But it’s gonna stop here.”

Shit.

Gold, he thought, as hard as he could, hoping desperately that the psychic could hear him. Gold, help!

Proton used the handful of hair he’d managed to grab and the muzzle of the gun to drag Silver back towards the northern stairs. Silver dug his heels in, clawing at Proton’s wrist with his other hand, but he was too off-balance to resist successfully. Proton kept pulling, and, inch by inch, he was losing ground.

The good news was that Proton hadn’t pulled the trigger, which meant someone wanted him alive. The bad news is that whoever it was knew who he was, and he absolutely couldn’t let them get their hands on him.

Incoming on your six! A thought echoed sharply through his head. A loud crash of splintering wood and plasterboard followed, and Proton was startled enough to loosen his grip; without a second thought Silver twisted himself around and threw his weight to one side. The gun went off, way too close to his face for comfort, but he was still able to scramble away so it couldn’t have actually hit him.

Abra lay on the floor where it had fallen, and Silver rushed to its side and scooped the little yellow pokémon up, twisting around to keep it shielded.

Gold, on the other hand, was so angry that the emotion was a palpable sensation hanging in the air around him. He’d sent his donphan directly through the walls the moment Silver had called out, and now he crashed just as heavily through the opening wielding a huge table from the conference room on the other side of the floor. Proton fired at the tiny psychic with a snarl, but Gold’s elephant-like pokémon leapt between them, deflecting the bullets with her rock hard hide.

And then Gold slammed the conference table into Proton like it was a club. Proton hit the wall, sandwiched for a moment between it and the table, then collapsed to the ground, gasping for breath. Gold dropped the table and grabbed the winded Proton instead, dragging the man across the room and tossing him into a storage closet. He slammed the door shut, then ripped the metal legs off the table with his psychic powers, firmly wedging them into the door frame to hold it closed.

“If he gets out or someone else comes in, knock their feet out from under them and keep them from getting up,” Gold said to Dinah, before limping as fast as he could to Silver’s side. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t think Abra is,” Silver whispered. Something was running down the side of his face, but he disregarded it until a splatter of red hit Abra’s yellow carapace. Maybe Proton hadn’t totally missed.

“He will be. Let me see.” Gold was already on his knees and digging through his pack.

It actually took Silver a lot of willpower to not just clutch the tiny psychic pokémon closer. He handed Abra over, and Gold turned it over gently, investigating the oozing bullet wound. Abra whined at him, and he murmured something Silver couldn’t understand in a soothing voice in response.

“Good news is, it’s gone clean through,” Gold muttered. “I can do a patch job that’ll stabilise it, but it’ll need to rest for a while after. Hold it for me?”

Silver took the pokémon back as Gold dug a bit deeper into his pack, pulling out some significantly more professional looking tools. He laid a capped syringe, a few rolls of bandages, and an unusually red potion out beside them, then grabbed a few pre-packaged wads of gauze. He ripped one of the gauze packets open and pressed it to the wound, trying to mop up some of the blood, and with his other hand he raised the syringe to his teeth to bite the cap and pull it off the needle.

“This is gonna sting a little bit, buddy. Try not to move. Deep breaths.” Gold lifted the gauze up a little to slide the needle under Abra’s carapace, slowly injecting the anaesthetic into the pokémon’s flesh. He pressed the gauze back down as he slid the needle back out, then recapped it with the cap still held in his teeth.

“Can you hold the gauze down for me, Silv?”

“I... Yeah.” He pressed his fingers down over the gauze, letting Gold take his left hand away. “What kind of potion is that?”

“The kind you need a license just to carry,” Gold answered. Now that both of his hands were free, he was focused entirely on priming the red potion–something Silver had never seen someone do before. “If the regular ones are like, thirty, fifty, seventy, a hundred parts-per million of the active ingredient, this one is a thousand.”

“So... Ten times stronger than...”

“A full restore,” Gold answered. He turned his attention back to Abra. “Alright, buddy. I won’t lie, even with the anaesthetic I just gave you, this is going to hurt like a bitch. If you’re gonna squash something about it, please pick a piece of furniture and not me. Okay?”

Abra made a weak little sound.

“Thanks. I know I can’t trick you with this one so, on three. One, two, three.”

Unlike the weaker potions, this one didn’t spray as much as pour. Gold emptied it directly into the wound, and Abra responded with a shriek that rattled their bones. The little pokémon broadcast the sensation directly into both humans’ minds, so for the briefest moment they both felt the super strength potion burning through their shoulders as it knitted Abra’s flesh back together in a matter of seconds.

“Jesus,” Silver gasped.

“Oh, you felt that?” Gold laughed weakly. “Welcome to being a nurse when you’re an empath.”

He ripped open another packet of gauze and swabbed the rest of the blood off Abra’s carapace. The hole left by the bullet was gone, like it had never been there.

“Holy shit.” Silver’s fingers were actually shaking as he reached for Abra’s pokéball. That had rattled him in a way he didn’t think he could be rattled. How could Gold have ever considered a career where he’d have to do that frequently?

“Good job, Abra,” Gold murmured, gently stroking Abra’s head. “You’ve been very brave. Time to get some rest, huh? Thank you for your help today.”

The pokémon rumbled something tiredly, nuzzling at Silver’s arm for a moment before it was recalled into its pokéball.

“I don’t need to translate that one for you, do I?”

“...No.”

“Good. Okay, one second,” Gold muttered, shoving everything back into his bag. He whistled to Dinah, who came bounding over to be recalled, then grabbed Silver and teleported them back to the stairwell. Silver barely noticed, staring down at Abra’s pokéball, and the little yellow pokémon curled up inside it.

He was startled out of his thoughts by Gold’s hand touching his face. Oh, right. He was bleeding.

“Oh, shit,” someone said from nearby. One of the gym trainers. “What happened?”

“Silver’s Abra took a bullet for him,” Gold answered, brushing Silver’s hair back behind his ear. “Second shot grazed him.”

Abra took a bullet for him.

Silver kind of shut down for a moment. It had all happened so fast he’d barely registered it while it was happening, but that was what had happened. The pokémon had sensed the danger, and moved them both in order to prevent the shot aimed at Silver from connecting. Not far enough or fast enough, in such a tightly-packed, crowded office space, so Abra had been hit in its own shoulder moving him out of danger.

If there’d been any doubt in his mind that Abra cared about him, it was pretty much obliterated now. And part of him was struggling desperately to understand it. He didn’t even train it.

Gold was aware Silver was dissociating a bit from the shock, but it was going to make it easier to tend to the bleeding graze on the side of his face, so he decided not to pull him back to reality just yet. Instead he engaged Samantha, pulling her attention off Silver’s emotional crisis.

“It looks worse than it is. Head wounds tend to bleed pretty freely, but the shot just barely clipped him. Probably won’t even scar.” He pulled a potion–just a regular, low concentration one–out of his bag. “Don’t do this, by the way. I’m actually legitimately a trained professional, and this is really hard to do safely.”

He swabbed up as much blood as he could, spraying the potion very lightly onto the cut on Silver’s face. He worked his way down Silver’s brow, then cheek, carefully cleaning the area as new skin bloomed where the droplets of potion fell. Silver barely responded beyond closing his eyes as Gold worked his way down. Once the wound was closed, Gold wet a wad of fresh gauze with water from a bottle he’d also stashed in his pack, and used it to clean the worst of the blood off Silver’s face and out of his hair.

They needed a new game plan, probably. They knew where the rest of the hostages were now, but the fifth floor would still need to be cleared. And looking at Silver, he wasn’t sure if the other man was going to be willing to keep going. He turned to Samantha.

“Can you go grab Whitney for me? Sorry, I know she’s probably a few floors down but I need to talk to her.” He gave Samantha a gentle smile when she nodded and headed down the stairs. He waited a few more moments before turning his attention back to Silver, who was still staring, unfocused, at Abra’s pokéball. “Hey, hey. Come back to me, babe.”

There was a long moment of silence.

“...What did you just call me.” Silver glared tiredly at him.

Gold just grinned, leaning forward to let his forehead rest against Silver’s. “You up for more? Two more floors.”

“They’re gonna have more guns.”

“Well yeah, that’s why I’m asking. You’ve already gotten shot at once.” Gold’s grin faded into a more serious look. “I have powers. You don’t. You’re putting yourself in more danger than I am.”

Silver closed his eyes, quiet for a moment. “I’m not backing down from a challenge just because I can’t throw things around with my mind.”

When he opened his eyes, Gold was grinning at him again. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

“We can’t let them split us up again,” Silver said. “The ones who are left, they know who I am. Proton did. I think he was trying to take me to them.”

Gold’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah, I thought so. Are you ready to face people who might be people you used to know? Do you think you can handle fighting them?”

“I have to be. We are the cavalry, remember?”

Of all the things he could’ve remembered from their earlier discussion. Gold sighed. “Yeah. But it’s still gonna be rough.”

Chapter 4

They were standing in the lobby of the sixth floor now. The doors to the big conference hall that took up most of the floor appeared to have been barricaded from the inside.

“It’s cute that they think that’s going to stop me,” Gold said, a somewhat feral grin stretched across his face. He raised a hand and held it out, eyes glowing, and a vending machine wrenched itself out of the wall behind them. “Heads!”

The vending machine hit the doors with a surprising amount of force. They splintered on impact, blown off their hinges as the vending machine tumbled through into the room ahead. A few packets of snacks scattered across the floor along with shards of wood and glass.

Gold and Silver walked through the wreckage to meet their next opponents, Pyra and Feraligatr at their sides.

“Ah, Angelo. What an... unpleasant surprise.”

Silver froze. He hadn’t heard that voice in seven years, and somehow that tone still made him feel like a five year old who just broke a very expensive vase.

Beside him, Gold came to the abrupt realisation that people Silver used to know that he’d have to fight may have included his mother. Fuck.

“Turning on your own father’s legacy like this... You’re such a disappointment,” Ariana sneered. “You’re not half the man your father was.”

Silver’s ears were ringing. Everything felt very far away, suddenly.

“He’s ten times the man his father was,” Gold shot back, dragging him back to the present. “Wanna see?”

Silver glanced over at the shorter man, who met his gaze with a steely expression. Hold it together, Silver. I’ll take over, copy my calls vocally. Feraligatr, you’re priority two. Pyra moves first, then you.

Feraligatr snorted an affirmative, rearing up in front of Silver. Pyra settled in beside it, roaring furiously at the Rocket executive standing opposite them. Ariana released an arbok, while the grunt standing behind her let out a hypno; the purple cobra and the yellow bipedal tapir squared off across from Gold and Silver’s pokémon.

Silver put everything he had into composing himself. Take a deep breath. Grit your teeth. If she doesn’t give a shit, then neither do you.

Four moves. Gold seemed to have looped him into whatever telepathic communication network he’d developed with his pokémon, and he was already launching into the strategy. Pyra, you’re going to duck under Feraligatr and hit the arbok with zen headbutt. Feraligatr, I want you to hit that hypno with crunch.

“Feraligatr, crunch!” Silver echoed, and Feraligatr moved nigh-instantaneously, a fluid lunge over Pyra to snap its jaws at the hypno. Pyra had streaked under Feraligatr almost the same moment he’d spoken, ramming its head into Ariana’s arbok and sending it flying across the room. Both opposing pokémon hit the floor, and vanished into their pokéballs.

Good. Time for a trick combo, Gold told them. Pyra, you’ll lead with earthquake. Feraligatr, delay until Ariana sends out her murkrow, then hit it with ice fang.

Silver was struck by an errant thought as he watched Ariana release a dark-bodied pokémon with a gigantic flower growing from its head—a vileplume—and her support brought out a living pile of toxic sludge—a muk. Could Gold actually read his opponents’ minds? Or was his memory for the people he’d fought just that accurate?

The thought pulled him a little bit out of the disconnected state he was trying not to lose himself in as the entire building shook with the force of Pyra’s earthquake. Both opposing pokémon went down immediately, and the grunt beside Ariana took a step back with a hand over her mouth, clearly already out of pokémon.

Ariana wasn’t, though. She launched the black crow pokémon at them immediately.

“Ice fang!” Silver barked, and Feraligatr lunged, snapping Ariana’s murkrow out of the air the moment it materialised and tossing it roughly to the floor. The bird pokémon gave a half-hearted squawk, its feathers stuck together with clumps of fresh ice, then vanished back into its pokéball.

Ariana was staring at them. At him. The few remaining Rockets were staring at Ariana in horror.

Beside him, Gold leaned heavily on his cane, glaring down his nose at them. “Get out of our way. And my sight.”

None of them moved at first, but then Gold used his telekinetic powers to pick up the vending machine he’d broken the doors open with again, and they bolted. Silver watched them go, his emotions once again threatening to choke him. His mother didn’t even look back as the elevator doors closed behind her.

And then someone started to clap.

Silver jumped, turning sharply towards the far wall. A dozen or so people were standing there behind some overturned desks, and they were applauding.

Gold smiled at him, but it was that tight, tense smile that said he knew exactly how fucked up Silver was about what had just happened. Then he turned to the last group of hostages. “Director?”

“Yes! That’s me! Well done! That was masterful battling!”

“Was that all of them? Is there anyone else upstairs?”

“Just the boss. He went up there alone.”

“Alright,” Gold said. “Whitney and the other girls from the gym are waiting for you in the southern stairwell. They’ll get you safely down and out of the building. We’ll finish this up.”

The hostages came out from behind their makeshift barrier and headed towards the southern stairwell. Gold watched them go, unmoving until the door closed behind the last one, but the moment it did he grabbed Silver by the arm and pulled him towards a nearby office. He let go once he’d gotten both of them through the door, kicked it shut, and wedged one of the chairs inside under the door handle.

As soon as his brain engaged with the sight of the empty office, Silver slid to the floor with a thump. His breath was catching in his throat, his chest too tight, his face too hot.

It shouldn’t hurt. It shouldn’t hurt. He’d known, ever since his father had left, that he was alone. He’d mourned that seven years ago, when he was a kid abandoned and struggling to survive on the edges of society. Why was facing his m–Ariana’s–derision so painful?

Gold had slumped gracelessly beside him, holding his cane to his chest behind raised knees. He was panting, lines of pain and exhaustion drawn taut across his face. “You ready to hear me call her a bitch yet?”

Silver’s instinctive response was a disbelieving, borderline hysterical chuckle. He glanced at the other man through eyes that stung with barely contained tears. Gold wasn’t looking at him. The chubby trainer was staring out the far window, his usual tired and gentle expression completely absent.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice so soft. “I shouldn’t have pressured you into climbing the tower with me. Especially after Abra got hurt.”

And then Gold dropped his cane and reached over, pulling Silver into a hug. That probably shouldn’t have been the thing that broke the dam, but it was. Silver sobbed into Gold’s hoodie while Gold held him, cheek resting against his head. They just sat there for a while, Gold very gently stroking Silver’s hair while he cried himself out.

“You gonna be okay?” Gold asked, once Silver’s sobs had subsided to shaky breathing.

“No,” Silver answered, surprising himself with how raw his voice was and how honest the answer was.

Gold reached down and tapped one of the pokéballs on Silver’s belt, and his sneasel appeared in a flash of light. The pokémon climbed into Silver’s lap without a moment’s hesitation, shoving its wet little nose towards his face. A moment later, he wrapped his arms around it, and it purred, nuzzling at his cheek.

“I gotta go finish this,” Gold said. “I want you to wait here for me, okay? When this is all over, let’s go get drunk or blow some shit up. Whatever you need, I’ll be here for you.”

Silver’s arms tightened around Sneasel, whose purring ramped up a few notches. Gold squeezed his shoulder, then hauled himself upright with his cane, shoved the chair out of the way and stalked out into the hall.

A few minutes later, the tower shuddered violently.

Chapter 5

Gold rode the elevator up to the observation deck on the seventh floor. There was no-one else to worry about, and his aching spine needed a break. He was fuming. He was angry at himself for not considering how badly this could go for Silver. At Ariana for being perhaps the worst mother he’d ever fucking met. At Giovanni for being the ultimate deadbeat dad.

And at whoever he was about to go beat up, because without that there wouldn’t have been a radio tower invasion to thwart.

There was a soft ding, and the elevator doors slid open. Gold stepped out, Pyra at his side, and walked out onto the observation deck. He’d been expecting at least one or two more grunts, but no, there was just the one person up here.

“Hey, bitch,” Gold yelled as he approached the man standing by the glass window. “Game over.”

The man turned around, eyes narrowed dangerously. “Oh, I was expecting Angelo to be with you. I suppose seeing his mother actually rattled him, hm?”

Gold had never come so close to exploding someone on the spot. Instead he gritted his teeth and gestured to his typhlosion. “You’re out of options. You wanna do this the easy way or the hard way?”

Archer considered him for a long moment. “Hard, I think.”

A split second later, he had a gun pointed directly at Gold, and he pulled the trigger. Gold flinched instinctively, and the bullet stopped as though it had hit a wall. It fell to the ground with a tinny clatter.

A glimmering blue bubble had appeared, just large enough to shield both Gold and his pokémon. Gold had his arm up, like he’d been about to try and shield himself with that instead, and the expression on his face was one of clear shock.

“Ah, shit,” Archer said. “You didn’t know you could do that, and now I’ve lost the element of surprise. Houndoom!”

A huge black canine pokémon with silver horns and bone-like protrusions on its body launched itself out of the shadows on the side of the room with a snarl. The glimmering shield Gold had projected around himself popped like a soap bubble, and he blinked out of range as his typhlosion ran to meet the houndoom head on.

Archer fired at him again, but the bullet just impacted with another soap bubble shield and fell harmlessly to the floor. He hissed, and pulled a pair of pokéballs out with his other hand, releasing a large blue golbat and a duck-faced magmar. He commanded them both to attack Gold’s typhlosion, which distracted Pyra long enough for the houndoom to leap past her and lunge for Gold instead.

Gold teleported to the other side of the room immediately, barely dodging the houndoom’s fangs. He already knew what Archer was trying to do–as powerful as the shields he’d suddenly managed to summon were, they weren’t going to stand up to a dark-type pokémon who could shrug off psychic attacks entirely. Houndoom just had to pop the bubble to give Archer the chance to take a clear shot.

Gold flung one pokéball towards Pyra, and his ampharos appeared in a flash of light, releasing an electrical discharge at the two pokémon attacking his typhlosion. He dropped another pokéball behind him as he teleported away from the houndoom again, and the dark canine was suddenly face to face with an angry donphan. Dinah reared up and slammed her front feet into the floor, sending the houndoom skidding into the wall as the tower quaked.

Archer’s golbat had crumpled to the floor when the electrical blast hit it; Archer recalled it with a sneer and released an electrode. The round red and white pokémon made a sharp crackling noise. “Sonic boom! Houndoom, break that shield down!”

Fuck. Electrode was fast. And the houndoom was up and chasing him again, although Dinah was hot on its heels. Gold glanced around in a panic, looking for anything he could put between himself and the houndoom, but the observation deck was mostly empty bar some bench seating and a few coin-operated binoculars on iron poles.

Gold held up a hand, making a grabbing motion, and pulled. One of the poles ripped itself out of the floor in response, and he dragged it with him as he blinked again, barely avoiding another gunshot. Dinah made a grab for the houndoom with her trunk, but Archer’s electrode hit her in the side and sent her spinning. Twinkle sent a beam of light from the orb on her tail towards Archer, forcing him to stop trying to aim and duck behind the centre column for safety, giving Gold a moment to try and deal with the houndoom.

Gold braced himself and swung the pole at the houndoom as it lunged for him again. The metal impacting the pokémon’s side caused him to wince in sympathetic pain, but he readied the pole for another swing as he backed up. Houndoom whined, but it forced itself back to its feet anyway, its front left leg hanging uselessly as it approached him on three legs.

Please don’t make me hurt you again, he plead silently. The houndoom lunged for him again, and he swung his makeshift club in response, knocking it into the far wall. This time it didn’t try to get back up.

Archer called his houndoom back to him, throwing a weezing out into the fray. The floating, sea mine-like poison-type pokémon threw up a smokescreen to hide its trainer from both from Twinkle and Pyra. The electrode made another dive for Gold, but Dinah hit it from the side and sent it rolling across the floor.

Gold surrounded himself with another bubble a split-second before another shot rang out from inside the smog cloud.

Earthquake, earthquake, shit, we need those pokémon down, Gold gasped telepathically to his pokémon. He still had three more in the wings, but his own body was starting to fail him, and he knew that if he ran out of energy to protect himself he wasn’t going to make it out of the fight alive. Pyra, zen headbutt that damn weezing!

Twinkle finally managed to land a dragon pulse on the magmar, sending it crashing to the floor. Dinah hit the floor, knocking the electrode off-balance, then rolled into a ball and rammed into it, leaving it rolling dizzily across the room. Gold teleported again as Pyra lunged through the smog, homing in on Archer’s location with his psychic powers.

Archer’s weezing went flying. Gold leapt forward, and holding himself in the air purely with his psychic powers, whipped his cane around Archer to put him in a chokehold. Archer froze, still holding the gun, as Gold’s pokémon surrounded them.

“You can try and shoot me,” Gold panted. “But if you do, they’ll tear you apart. So you can drop the gun and walk out of here with me, or I can choke you out and drag your unconscious body down to the station myself. Your choice.”

Archer ejected the clip, dropping first it, then the gun itself, to the floor.

“Good decision. Start walking.”

Gold stayed airborne, marching Archer towards the elevator. His pokémon crowded close, and the bared teeth and glares made it clear that if the executive tried anything else, he was going to have to deal with them personally.

They hadn’t quite reached the elevator doors when they opened, and a half dozen cops rushed into the room.

“Oh, look, your escort is here!” Gold chirped, before giving Archer a hard shove in their direction. “Time for your walk of shame.”

“I will get you for this, you little freak,” Archer hissed over his shoulder as he was handcuffed.

“I’m sure you’ll try,” Gold said serenely as he recalled his pokémon. “Have fun in jail.”

* * *

Gold teleported to the southern stairwell the gym trainers had been holding. It was silent and empty, every hostage safely evacuated. Perfect. He slumped against the wall, sliding down it to the floor.

He was fine. He just needed a moment. He just...

Gold curled in on himself, panting harshly. The adrenaline that had flooded his system while he was fighting for his life was wearing off, and he was starting to feel every step he’d taken running after–and from–the Rocket invasion force.

Fabelle let herself out of her pokéball. The large pink fairy pokémon twitched her ears and went into his pack for the emergency painkillers. She pushed a couple of tablets and a half-empty bottle of water into his hands, grumbling at him until he put them in his mouth and washed them down with the water. Once he’d done so, she settled in beside him, humming a soothing tune. He leaned against her, still panting, eyes slipping closed despite himself. He needed to get back up. He had to go get Silver and—

His pokégear began to ring.

He fumbled for it with a quiet curse, checked the caller ID, and answered it in a voice that was probably a little hoarse. “Hey, babe. All clear over here. You okay over there?”

“I got a little punched in the face, but I’m fine. Are you okay?” Lance sounded tired and a little stressed. He could hear the faint sounds of a hospital across the line.

“Uhh. Well. I definitely overdid it,” Gold answered. “But I’m still in one piece. Silver’s been with me, and I think he’s probably having a worse time right now. Who punched you?”

“Absolutely massive guy they had on one of the upper floors. He only got a few hits in, but he hit like a... Hm.” Lance trailed off, like he’d just remembered who he was talking to and how experienced he was with being hit by a truck.

Gold started to laugh, although it was kind of a tired laugh. “Must’ve been huge if you’re describing him as ‘massive’.”

“Not many people can make me feel short,” Lance admitted. “They’re talking about letting me leave soon, I think. Want me to come pick you up?”

“Please. Uh... I think I’m gonna pressure Silver into coming with us if he’s still where I left him. I’ll set him up in my trailer, maybe.”

“He can stay in the spare room as long as he can tolerate being in the same building as me,” Lance said drily. He clearly hadn’t forgotten how venomous Silver’s reaction to him had been last time he’d seen him. “Is he okay?”

“Physically, yeah. Patched up the one injury he picked up. But emotionally? Fuck no. I gotta explain later, though.”

“Okay. See you in fifteen?”

“Yeah. Thanks. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

Gold closed the pokégear, a smile creeping across his face. Lance had the most uncanny ability to make him giggle and blush over the most normal conversations. It was a good thing he had no sense of shame, or the reaction might’ve been embarrassing.

* * *

The moment Archer stepped outside, he was swarmed by the press, while several members of Johto’s woefully underfunded police force marched him straight to the nearest cop car. By chance, he ended up sitting next to Petrel, who was watching the pigs round up the grunts who hadn’t been able to escape the dragnet.

“Which one got you?”

Archer glanced at him. “Not Angelo.”

Petrel snorted. “Why didn’t you shoot the little fucker?”

“I tried. He threw up a psychic shield and the bullets just fell to the floor.” Archer shook his head. He could still see it in his mind’s eye. “A perfect blue soap bubble.”

Both men were quiet for a few moments.

“There’s only one pokémon that creates psychic shields that look like soap bubbles,” Archer continued quietly. “Well. Two.”

Petrel became very, very still as the implications settled in. “Do you think...”

“No. If it was, then we’d all be dead. But...” Archer paused. “Did you know he was born in South America? I didn’t, until today. I think that’s very, very interesting.”

Chapter 6

Surprisingly, Silver had actually stayed exactly where Gold had left him. He was still on the floor in the dark office, clinging to his sneasel and breathing with the sharp little hitches of someone who’d managed to cry until there wasn’t anything left to cry out.

“Hey,” Gold’s voice said gently from the doorway. “You ready to bail?”

Silver wiped his face, glancing up at him with reddened eyes. “Yeah.”

He put his sneasel back in its pokéball and got to his feet. He felt weak and shaky, but it seemed the worst of it had subsided for now.

“Lance called,” Gold told him, shuffling over to let Silver out of the office. Silver noted the stiffness to the movement, and briefly wondered just how rough the battle above had been for Gold to be obviously struggling now. “He’s gonna come pick us up. The clowns are moving in for the kill, so we probably don’t want to get caught on the ground.”

“The... The clowns,” Silver echoed.

“Yeah. You know, the um. The media circus. The clowns.”

“...Who teaches you these things?”

Gold shrugged.

They made their way up the access stairs to the roof, Gold painfully hauling himself up with both his cane and the railing. Silver knew better than to try and help—Gold was touchy about that, especially when he was simmering mad under the exhaustion.

The roof was as wide as the observation deck below, but with enough open space that even a pokémon like a dragonite could fly in and land safely. Said orange dragon pokémon was leaning on the rail and enjoying the wind blowing through its antennae as it watched the sun set.

Lance was standing beside the dragonite, slouching to the right ever so slightly. As they got closer, it became clear the dragon tamer had been in a fight himself–his left eye was swollen and heavily bruised, and a few butterfly bandages pinned some scrapes closed on his brow and cheek.

“I wanted to lead with ‘you wouldn’t believe the day I’ve been having’,” Gold remarked as they approached, “but it kinda looks like you’ve had one too.”

Lance snorted, raising a hand to gingerly touch his cheekbone. “That big guy had a mean right hook.”

“Mm,” Gold murmured. He stepped forward, leaning up to kiss the taller dragon tamer. “Little more than just a punch to the face, though, huh? You’re definitely gonna be limping tomorrow.”

“Can’t slip anything past you, can I?” Lance grimaced. “It’s just bruising and a cracked rib. I’ll be fine. I’m mostly just reeling at the audacity of hitting both towers in the same day.”

Silver had been spacing out a bit, deeply uninterested in their romantic gestures, but the last comment snapped him out of it a little. “It was the other radio tower?”

“Mm. It’s pretty clear now it was a diversion. Bad judgement call on my part, but there’s only so much five people can do with two entire regions.” Lance sighed. “One of the ringleaders at Lavender was definitely Unovan, so I’m concerned this still won’t be the last of it.”

“I definitely recognised some Sinnohan and Hoennian accents in the group here,” Gold murmured. “I also got the distinct feeling we haven’t really ended this from the new boss.”

Silver grimaced.

“That’s a problem for later, I think,” Lance said. “Time to bunker down and wait out the media. They’re going to be all over this for weeks.”

“Parasites,” Gold grumbled. “Home, then. We can set you up in the trailer or the spare room, Silv, whichever you prefer.”

Silver was a little startled at being so explicitly included. “...Okay.”

Lance’s dragonite came to his side and crouched down beside him before he could turn to it and ask. Lance gave it a tired smile and climbed up onto its shoulders, then reached down to haul Gold up behind him. Once Gold was settled, the dragon tamer offered his hand to Silver.

In any other situation, Silver probably would’ve refused it. But he was exhausted, emotionally wrung out, and definitely didn’t want to try and escape the media downstairs by himself. He took Lance’s hand, and used the other man’s strength as leverage to seat himself behind Gold.

“Hold on tight,” Gold told him. “These things don’t really have a low speed.”

* * *

Gold hadn’t been joking, Silver thought a little dizzily as he slid down the dragonite’s side back to the earth. It had taken less than fifteen minutes for the orange pokémon to blast over the forests and mountains between Goldenrod and Blackthorn, and now they were high on the plateau above the city centre. A significant chunk of the city’s residences appeared to be up here above the Dragon’s Den, and apparently Lance lived a short distance away from the cliffs leading down to the cavern’s entrance.

The house itself was... just a house. Silver wasn’t sure why he expected something more extravagant. Gold’s trailer was parked to one side, still as cosy-looking as ever.

Once all three of its passengers had disembarked, Lance’s dragonite wandered over to a large, flat rock sitting by the house. It climbed up on top of it and curled up with its snout resting on folded arms.

“The rock’s heated,” Lance explained absently as he unlocked the door and led them inside.

The house continued to be strangely normal. An open room with a few couches and a low table facing a TV, some shelves along the walls stacked with books and random nick-knacks, and a kitchen split from the area by a counter with a few bar stools tucked under the overhang.

“Bathroom’s the first door on your right, guest room’s the second. Feel free to dump your stuff there.” Lance was already headed to a door on the opposite side of the room, unfastening his cape as he went. Gold had stopped by the middle couch, dumped his pack on it, and was now digging through one of the pockets.

Silver walked into the guest room, which was smaller, but large enough for a double bed, a couple end tables and a chest of drawers by the wardrobe door. He dumped his own gear in a corner, grabbed a clean change of clothes, and circled out to the bathroom. Gold had vanished in the meantime, and Lance was now messing around in the kitchen, the sleeves of his jumpsuit tied around his waist over the hem of an undershirt he’d apparently been wearing under it.

The bathroom was clean and tidy, just a toilet, a sink and a shower with a glass screen. Silver tossed himself under a stream of lukewarm water, scrubbed the sweat and blood out of his hair, then dried himself off and put the clean clothes on. He paused to study himself in the mirror, tracing the fine, pale line of barely-healed skin where Proton’s wild shot had grazed him. That had come dangerously close to taking out his eye, and there was the smallest gap in his left eyebrow where the bullet had seared through.

He remembered, dimly, that Gold had said something about it being unlikely to scar, but something told him that the neat cut in his brow might be there for the long term.

His worn clothes in the hamper by the door and his hair wrapped in his towel, Silver headed back out into the living room and settled down on one of the smaller couches to the side of the big one Gold’s bag was still sitting on.

A few minutes later, a damp Gold returned to sprawl across the larger couch, using his bag as a pillow to keep his spine straight and grabbing the TV remote to start flicking through channels. He found a news broadcast and stopped there, scanning the scrolling headlines at the bottom of the screen.

“There,” he murmured. “Team Rocket administrator Archer David arrested at Goldenrod’s radio tower. Lavender radio tower invasion thwarted by Indigo elite four and champion. New Bark Town trainer and currently unknown partner–okay. Okay, they don’t know who you are yet. We have time.”

“For what?”

“To make Angelo Sakaki disappear from the records. Toss me your trainer card, will you? I’m gonna call Bill.”

Frowning, Silver dug his wallet out of his pocket and gently lobbed it in Gold’s direction. Gold caught it with his telekinesis, settling back against his pack and flipping open his pokégear.

It was at that point Lance wandered back into the room, also damp but now dressed in a loose, long-sleeved shirt and a pair of jeans. It was almost uncanny to see him in such casual clothing. “I need a beer,” he announced. “Gold?”

“Just water for me, thanks. Shouldn’t mix it with these.” Gold shook a pill bottle in his general direction.

“Mm. Silver?”

“...Sure.” He was still technically a week underage, but he felt pretty firmly that he’d had the kind of day that’d justify it. Gold hadn’t immediately started poking fun at him, either, so odds are he agreed.

Gold found Bill’s number his contact list and dialled. Lance brought him a glass of water while he waited, deposited an open bottle of Suicune Beer in front of Silver, then dropped onto the couch next to Gold with his own.

“Hey babe!” Gold chirped into his pokégear as Bill answered. He re-positioned himself to drape his legs over Lance’s and grinned as he complained back. “No, no–actually, I have a favour to ask. Can you put a freeze on an ID number in the trainer registry for me? Mmhmm, yeah. Number is...” He flipped Silver’s trainer card over. “Three eight zero zero six six dash four three eight six. Yeah that’s him. Mhmm. No, we need to think of a good cover story, this ID just needs to look like it’s been inactive for a few years. I’ll call in the morning and we’ll set up the new one once we’ve figured something out. Thanks babe. Pft, no you don’t. Talk to you later, love you!”

“Why do you talk to him like that?” Lance asked.

“Because he hates it,” Gold answered.

Silver snorted into his beer. That could not have been a more typical Gold answer.

Gold shook a couple of pills out of the bottle he’d left sitting on the table and downed them with a glass of water. “I’m not cooking tonight, by the way.”

“I’m not really feeling it either,” Lance responded. “Curry?”

“On one hand, I don’t want to be boring. On the other... Mmm. Curry.” Gold paused. “What about you, Silver? Do you have any preference?”

“I have no idea what you have in this city.”

“The Thai place we like is in Fuchsia so it doesn’t really matter what you want, I’ll just pick it up on the way back on Drago.” Lance shrugged. “There’s a folder full of menus in the drawer under the table if you need some ideas.”

Silver retrieved the described folder, flipping it open to discover a ridiculously thick stack of take-out menus from stores all over both regions. They were helpfully sorted into Kanto and Johto sleeves, so he took the former out. “I didn’t think you knew how to cook, Gold. You’re always eating at that farfetch’d place.”

“Well, yeah. I own it. And getting good, cheap vegetarian food is difficult when you’re not well enough to cook.”

“I’m sorry you... What?”

“I own Lucky Kamonegi?”

Silver shook his head in disbelief. “Sometimes I forget what a trust fund baby you are.”

Lance looked like he was trying so hard not to laugh.

Gold snorted, although he seemed more amused than offended. “I don’t spend enough money on stupid shit like vodka full of diamonds or whatever, I guess.”

Lance frowned. “Is that actually something you can buy?”

“I was pulling it outta my ass, but I’m sure someone would make it if I waved a cheque under their nose.” Gold waved a hand absently. “I don’t really get it and I don’t really want to. Sorry you spent twenty grand on the ability to take the most expensive shit ever, but I wasn’t really raised to be wasteful.” He paused for a moment, then fished a pokédoll out of his bag and tossed it directly at Silver’s head. “Quit making me bitch about rich people, it makes me look like a hypocrite.”

Silver ducked the throw easily, smirking.

Lance tapped Gold’s thigh. “Let me up.”

Gold raised his legs straight up, bending himself almost perfectly in half.

“Show-off,” Lance teased as he got up. “Did you decide on what you wanted, Silver?”

“Viridian’s not too far out of the way, is it?”

“Not at all. What are you looking at?” Lance leaned down, glancing at the menu Silver was looking at. Silver tapped one of the burgers on the menu with a finger. “Alright. Can I take that?”

Silver handed it over and Lance walked into the kitchen, dialling the first restaurant.

“So what do you two even do up here?”

“Well, Lance essentially works a nine to five with a lot of on-call work. So when he’s home we’re mostly just relaxing. Which, you know what I consider relaxing.”

“Using him as a pillow while you read your romance books?” It was kind of a half-hearted jab, though. “Have you battled him yet?”

“Nah. We do some training together sometimes but we don’t generally battle. We’re saving that.”

“What, for marriage?”

In the kitchen between calls, Lance burst out laughing. He doubled over almost immediately, clutching his side.

“Please don’t make my boyfriend laugh with a broken rib. You’re gonna kill him.” Gold bit his lip, unsuccessfully trying to stop himself from grinning.

“I’m okay,” Lance wheezed. “Ow.”

Gold shook his head. “Probably I should’ve thought about the fact that he thinks I’m funny, so he’d think you’re funny too.”

Silver snorted.

“Alright, I’m going to grab the food. I’ll be back soon,” Lance said.

“Don’t remember the marriage thing halfway over the Viridian forest and laugh yourself off into the trees!” Gold called after him.

Lance waved him off as he walked out the door, still snickering.

Gold was quiet for a moment, head cocked to the side. “...Okay, they’re gone. We gotta talk strategy while he is.”

“Does he not know?”

“No. Not yet. Bill does, because I used his computer to dig up your vaccination records when you got sick, but I didn’t pass the actual files to the hospital. I didn’t think it was a good idea to let anyone know you were connected to... You know who, and I still don’t think it is.”

“You can say Giovanni, you know.”

“Babe, you flinch every time someone does,” Gold shot back. Then, “ugh. I’m doing it again. Focus.” He shook his head. “We’re going to get Bill to write you a new record and gen you a new trainer ID tomorrow. But we need someone with authority to sign off on it, and that’s probably gonna have to be Lance, so I’m gonna have to fill him in on it tonight.”

Silver sighed. “So I should be prepared to defend myself, then?”

“Hm? Oh, no. If he gets upset about anything it’s going to be how badly people failed you. Because, yeah, you’ve been a bit of a shithead, but you have reasons.” Gold rubbed his face, then pinched the bridge of his nose. “And I don’t think anyone could look at what you did today and say you haven’t been trying. I know we’re kinda volatile around each other, but I’ve seen it, and if I can then so can anyone else.”

“Volatile is definitely a word for it,” Silver muttered.

“I’d say I have no idea why you make me such an asshole, but I know exactly why. You’ve never pulled your punches with me and the novelty has never worn off.” Gold dug one of his fingernails under one of the nails on the opposite hand. “Honestly, I’m kinda looking forward to not keeping that secret from him. I don’t like keeping secrets from him all that much.”

Silver thought for a moment. “He knows you can turn into a pokémon, then?”

“...No.”

“No?”

“See the thing is like... He’s fucking onto me. He doesn’t know but he’s guessed a lot just from the way I act and smell?” Gold huffed, hugging his arms to himself. “Which, like, how do you even broach that subject. ‘Hey babe I know I’ve been refusing to admit this for months but did you know you were absolutely right when you said I was a cat?’”

Silver started to laugh.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s very funny. Really thought I’d have more time to ease into it rather than just waking up with my head on his chest and getting hit with ‘did you know you purr in your sleep?’ like a fucking week into knowing him. And that was before I knew!”

“You purr in your sleep?” Silver managed to get out between wheezing gasps of laughter.

“Apparently! Either he’s the only person who’s ever noticed or the only one who’s ever triggered it and I’m not sure which is worse.”

“This is the funniest possible relationship drama you could’ve embroiled yourself in,” Silver told him. He was still snickering, and it was actually a bit of a relief to see such genuine amusement in his expression. “I still can’t believe how married you’ve gotten to him in the last, what. Six months?”

“...Eight months. And I swear we’re actively toning it down right now. He hasn’t called me kitten once.”

“He calls you kitten!?”

“I told you! He’s onto me!” Gold responded indignantly, and Silver dissolved into laughter again.

Chapter 7

Fortunately, picking up their dinner had gone mostly uneventfully. Lance had explained the joke that had made him laugh so loudly to Drago, who had immediately teased him about it and threatened to drop them both into the trees just to be funny, but he’d not actually done so. He paused to scratch Drago behind his antennae before the dragonite returned to his warm sleeping rock, then picked up the bags of food he’d brought home.

Approaching the house, he could hear Gold and Silver laughing, and it made him smile. Silver had clearly not been doing well when he’d met them on the roof of the radio tower, but it sounded like he was starting to relax now.

Which was kind of a relief, really. If he could just manage not to put his foot in it somehow, they could solve the problem of Gold getting panicky about his best friend potentially being in danger and the potential media stalking they were all going to be dealing with for at least the next couple weeks.

There’d been footage of the pair on the TV in the restaurant when he was waiting for Silver’s burger, actually. Someone had been recording on a phone when (presumably) one of their pokémon had flung a vending machine through the double-doors into the room the last of the hostages were being held in. They’d walked into the room side by side, and they’d crushed their opposition in perfect sync.

It did kind of make him proud.

Gold held his arms out towards him as he walked in, so he went to the shorter man’s side first. “Do you want the food or me?”

“Hm. You,” Gold replied, grabbing the front of his shirt and pulling him down for a quick kiss.

“Shameless,” Lance murmured, but he lingered for a moment anyway. He really wanted to crawl into bed with him and go straight to sleep, although he already knew they were both going to be up for most of the night. He instead placed the bag with their curries inside into Gold’s hands. “You want plates?”

“Nope! I’m going to eat it straight out of the plastic like god intended.”

...It was going to be so difficult for him to resist laughing for the next few weeks.

“You want a plate?” He asked Silver as he handed over the burger he’d ordered.

“I’m good,” Silver answered. “Thanks.”

“You want another beer?”

“Sure.”

Lance settled back on the couch next to Gold, who handed him his beef curry before going back to the TV and bouncing to another newscast to catch the updates.

The three of them ate mostly in silence, watching as the headlines cycled again. They were reporting on Lance’s hospital visit now, but had very little info on why he’d been there; they still hadn’t figured out who Silver was, but someone had figured out he was Gold’s friend and/or rival; and Gold had gone from being “New Bark Town trainer” to “Maple Industries heir Cain Maple”.

“Are they allowed to do that?” Silver had asked.

“Unfortunately, like Lance, I do count as a public figure,” Gold had answered with a sigh.

The next cycle covered the arrests made over both tower invasions. Silver flinched when he saw Ariana’s mugshot next to Archer’s, but if either of the other men had noticed they were kind enough not to mention it. Lance managed to hurt himself laughing again when they named the ringleaders of the Lavender tower takeover.

“His name is Cliff?!” He gasped, clutching his side.

“Oh, is that they guy who punched you? Apt name?”

“Certainly felt like hitting one!”

Gold had been about to say something else when his pokégear, still lying abandoned on the table, started to ring. He regarded it warily, like it was going to bite him.

“Going to answer that?”

“Depends on who it is. If it’s my mother... Solid maybe.” Gold leaned over gingerly, scanning the screen. “Ah, it’s the professor. That one’s probably safe to take.”

Professor Elm started the conversation in a stressed and rather loud voice. “Gold. Sincerely. What the fuck—”

Gold clapped a hand over his mouth as Lance threw his head back and laughed, before wincing and putting a hand to his injured side. It took a considerable amount of effort for Silver to stifle his own laughter.

“Sorry professor, you’re going on speaker now,” Gold told him through barely suppressed giggles.

Elm sighed noisily. “Who was that laughing?”

“Everyone,” Gold answered. “But the loud one was Lance.”

“I suppose I can’t tell him off.” There was a pause. “Gold, your mother is going to kill me.”

“Not before she kills me!” Gold said brightly. “We’ve got about five hours before she wakes up and sees the news though. Pray for me.”

“Pray for yourself,” came the reply. “Lance, I saw you’d been at Celadon hospital, are you alright?”

“The guy who is apparently named Cliff gave me a black eye and a cracked rib. I’ll be fine.”

“Well, at least until Amber gets there.” Elm said. Lance and Gold both snorted in response.

“...What is your mother like?” Silver interjected.

“She looks almost exactly like me with long hair, but instead of being funny she decided she would just kick everyone’s ass if they stepped outta line.” Gold glanced at Lance, who was trying to stop himself from laughing again. “...And I have really gotta stop being funny.”

“Maybe for at least twenty minutes,” Lance managed.

Elm was chuckling. “Can I assume, since Lance is there, you’re not in town?”

“Yeah. He picked us up and flew us up into the mountains.”

“Hm, good. There were reporters sniffing around your mother’s house earlier, but you’re much less accessible by foot up there.” Elm sighed again. “If you need anything, call. The media circus around this one is probably going to be rough.”

“You have no idea,” Gold muttered, glancing significantly at Silver.

* * *

Gold put himself to bed about an hour later, too sore to stay upright much longer. Lance tidied up after their takeout dinners, then followed him, leaving Silver to flick mindlessly through television channels.

He didn’t really want to go to sleep himself, despite how tired he was. The day’s events had stirred up enough unpleasant memories that he was reasonably sure that he wasn’t going to be sleeping well if he did.

He was so busy trying not to think about the encounter with his mother at the top of the radio tower that he didn’t actually notice Lance reappearing until the man spoke.

“Sorry,” Lance said. “I need you for a minute.”

The dragon tamer didn’t wait for a reply, just picked up Silver and slung him over a shoulder. Silver yelped in surprise, but didn’t get much of a chance to struggle before Lance deposited him, surprisingly gently, on the bed beside Gold. Without saying anything else, he turned around and left.

Silver frowned at Gold, baffled. “Why?”

“Heh, sorry,” Gold said. “We’re not done talking, I think. Give him a minute.”

From somewhere outside, there was a loud sound somewhere between a roar and a scream. Silver stared at Gold, his frown deepening. “Why?”

“I told him,” Gold answered. “He’s upset. Not at you. We’ll probably have to give him a bit longer now, though, there’s no way some relative or another isn’t going to come and ask him if he’s okay.”

“Why is he upset, though?”

“Because you got left behind and had nobody helping you until I came along. He’s also probably kicking himself for not being nicer to you the first time you met.” Gold sighed. “Well, I guess while we wait for him to get back, we can start working on your cover story. I’ve been trying to figure out why people wouldn’t have heard of you before now, and it’s actually pretty difficult! Like, maybe you’re a foreigner, but how good can you fake being a foreigner?”

For a moment, Silver considered refusing and just leaving. “...I do speak English.”

“I mean, you do, but your accent’s kinda... Academic? I have no idea where you picked it up, but it couldn’t possibly pass for American. Do you wanna be from Galar?”

“No.” The answer came immediately. Gold laughed.

* * *

Lance was already regretting the outburst before the echoes had really faded. Screaming out his frustration like that didn’t really help with the issue at hand, and he’d probably just woken up half the city. Stupid and selfish.

Drago was giving him a slightly amused look.

“Are you like, actually hurt or—oh, wow, you’re actually hurt,” Clair remarked. As they usually did when they were speaking to each other alone, she’d defaulted to the dragon pokémon language instead of Japanese. “That’s one hell of a black eye.”

Lance waved her off. “Not why I was shouting. Sorry to disturb you.”

“You’re not getting rid of me that easy. Spill.”

Lance sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. “How much of the news have you seen today?”

“A bit, here and there. You and your boyfriend are both storming towers to save people now, hm?” She paused. “Are you worried about Gold?”

“...No. Gold can handle himself, especially around the media. It’s his friend I’m worried about.”

“The redhead who was with him?”

“Mm.” There wasn’t really a delicate way to approach the next part, really. “He’s Giovanni Sakaki’s son.”

Clair was quiet for a long moment as the gravity of that sentence sank in. “Oh. Shit.”

“Gold’s working on getting him some kind of plausible alternate identity set up, so that he can hopefully avoid it being publicised, but... What kind of cover story are we even going to be able to give him?” Lance almost put his face in his hands, and managed to avert that just before palming himself in his black eye. “I’m so tired.”

“Maybe we can—”

“Lance, are you alright?”

Lance sighed. “Hi, mum.”

“Oh, honey, what happened to your face?” Minerva came up to gently brush her fingers against his uninjured cheek.

“I got into a bit of a fight, I’m fine,” he muttered. “It’s really not the problem right now.”

“You know him,” Clair said drily. “You know he only ever worries about other peoples’ problems.”

“Bruises fade.” Lance shook his head. “Really, I’m fine—”

“That was a bit of a racket,” another voice interjected.

“Hello, grandfather.” Deep breath. “Is there anyone else who wants to join the impromptu family reunion we’re apparently holding tonight?”

“Me!” Zinnia said brightly from elder Pike’s side.

“Hello, Zinnia,” Lance responded, although he sounded far less exasperated with the fourteen-year-old. “That’s every Tatsumi on the plateau now, hm?”

“Seems like it,” Pike responded. “What on earth happened to your face, young man?”

“I’m going to start wearing a bag over my head, I think,” Lance grumbled. Clair laughed.

“You wouldn’t last five minutes,” his mother informed him lovingly.

“Again, the injuries aren’t the actual problem. Can we focus, please?”

“In this family?” Clair asked with a smirk. She cut back to their original topic almost immediately, however. “Gold’s friend is in a lot of potential trouble.”

“Trouble how?” Minerva asked.

Lance sighed. There wasn’t a lot of point in keeping too much of it from them, really. “He was... Left behind, when Team Rocket was disbanded the first time. Today he fought his own mother helping Gold thwart their attempted comeback.”

Everyone was quiet for a moment as the information sunk in.

“Don’t tell me that red-haired woman...” Minerva trailed off. Lance gave her a slightly pained look, and she closed her eyes and huffed. “Poor kid.”

It was Zinnia who spoke up into the silence that had settled over the adults. “Why don’t we just tell them he’s from here?”

“...That could work, actually,” Minerva mused. “There are a lot of people in town who have red hair.”

“How long has Gold known him?” Pike asked.

“Years. I think Gold’s probably been paying his way since they started adventuring. You know how generous he tends to be.”

“You don’t really know him, though?” His grandfather pressed.

“I don’t know him that well, no.” Lance closed his eyes and shook his head a little, trying to clear it. “I think Gold is a good judge of character, though. Especially with the way he can read people. If he says Silver is genuinely a good person trying to do better than his parents did, then I believe him.”

“I will say that I agree with that,” Clair said. “He is pretty perceptive.”

It took Lance a minute to actually catch up to what they were hinting at. “Wait. Are you actually considering doing this?”

“I think we’ve pretty much decided,” Pike responded.

“Aeron can’t veto a decision we make,” Clair said. “But I think he’d enjoy this one, just for the prestige it brings the clan if the unknown hero of the radio tower is one of ours.”

Chapter 8

“Great news,” Lance muttered as he came back into the room. “The council has decided your fate.”

“What?” Silver demanded, looking startled.

“You’re a Blackthorn citizen now. Congratulations,” Lance said, then just kind of slid into a boneless heap on Gold’s other side, face down on one of the pillows.

“I... What?”

Gold ran his fingers comfortingly though Lance’s hair. “So you pulled family aggro and now they’re all in on this? That’s... kind of hilarious.”

“I cannot stress how few words I managed to get into the discussion,” Lance mumbled, just barely audible through the pillow. “Grandfather and Clair decided, though, and Aeron doesn’t have veto powers.”

“I’m very lost right now,” Silver admitted.

“Small town politics,” Gold informed him. “Blackthorn has a mayor, an elder, and a gym leader, and they vote as a council on major decisions. Lance’s grandfather is the elder, and his cousin is the gym leader now. Lance told them you needed a cover story, so they’ve decided they’re going to give you one.”

Silver got very quiet for a moment. “But... Why?”

“Because you’re a hero. That part hasn’t sunk in yet, huh?”

“I’m a what?” Silver was too shocked to try and play it cool.

Lance started to laugh weakly, wincing a little between breaths.

“They put you on the news, Silver. You were instrumental in saving the day. You’re a hero.”

“I didn’t even help you with Archer,” he said, very quietly.

“Doesn’t matter. You helped with every other floor. And you cleared out the underground on your own.” Gold patted Silver’s knee affectionately. “The entire reason we’re trying to obscure your identity is because the media will be absolutely rabid about it if they find out who your parents were. They’re already going to be talking about you for weeks.”

“You’re lucky nobody is hounding you for interviews,” Lance said. “I’ve already had to turn my phone off.”

“Nobody knows his number except me,” Gold said. “Since I’m the one who gave it to him, and it’s not even signed under his name.”

Silver seemed like he was having a lot of trouble processing the information he’d just been presented. Although there was definitely one question he needed to ask. “What’s the catch?”

“I actually don’t know. I’m not the guy who gets to decide these things.”

“He almost was,” Gold added. “But since he’s champion, they passed him over to give the position to Clair instead. He’s got pull but he doesn’t have power.”

Silver had spent enough time watching the internal politics of Team Rocket management to understand that, at least. “Christ. Okay.”

“Should mention that you probably won’t be a Tatsumi,” Lance said. “Because that would draw a lot of attention you really don’t need right now. Clair and I are just too well-known, even Zinnia has trouble because of it, and she’s just barely a Tatsumi.”

“I don’t want to be related to you,” Silver said bluntly. “...No offence.”

“None taken. I probably wouldn’t want to be either.”

Gold snorted in amusement. “It could be worse. We could’ve had to try and convince people you were from Galar.”

Silver glared at him, lips curled back in distaste.

“All that aside,” Lance said. “Silver. I owe you an apology. I was a little too harsh with you in Mahogany. I was in kind of a hurry, but that really isn’t an excuse for it. Sorry for that.”

“It’s fine,” he said, after a significant pause. “I probably would’ve done the same.”

“Still. I regret it.”

“Aren’t you dragon tamers like Gold? Feel like you probably had more on your mind than some punk kid demanding a battle.”

Gold looked like he was about to say something to that, but then his pokégear started ringing. He glanced at the caller ID, then sighed. “Gotta take this, sorry.” He climbed over Lance, grabbing his cane from where he’d left it against the wall, and hobbled out into the living room, answering the phone as he left. “Hola, madre.”

“You know, I always forget he speaks Spanish,” Silver muttered as the door closed quietly behind Gold. “Mm. I was gonna use that call as an excuse to sneak out, but he just went and blocked the only exit.”

“Wait til he comes back, but I don’t care if you stay. I grew up sleeping six to a bed like everyone else in our age group.”

Silver was quiet for a moment. “That’s... very weird.”

“So I’ve gathered,” Lance said, closing his eyes. “It’s just what it was like. So many people died during the Third Plague that there weren’t enough adults to watch us all if we all had our own rooms. Growing up here was just eternal slumber parties in spare rooms.”

“Huh,” Silver said. Then a realisation hit him. “What do you mean, ‘in our age group’, how old are you?”

Lance’s brows creased. “How old do you think I am?”

“I don’t know, like thirty?”

“...I don’t really look thirty, do I?” He sounded almost wounded.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-three!”

“Bullshit,” Silver said reflexively.

It was at this point that Gold finally came back into the room, rubbing his face tiredly.

“Hey! How old is he?” Silver demanded, gesturing at Lance.

Gold stared at Silver for a moment, clearly confused by the question. “...Twenty-three?”

“What the fuck,” Silver whispered, with a whole lot of feeling.

Gold frowned at him, then glanced at Lance. “Why are we confused about your age now?”

“I was talking about growing up, and we derailed because apparently I look thirty.”

“Oh, and your vanity could not handle that, huh?” Gold was smirking.

“I’m not—”

“Yes you are. If I was feeling mean I’d dig my fingers into your hair so you’d prove my point by spending twenty minutes fixing it even though it’s like an hour past when we’re usually asleep.” Gold shuffled up to the bed, placing his cane against the wall and leaning down to kiss Lance’s definitely-not-pouting lips. “You’re very handsome. You have also not looked your age basically ever. I’ve seen the photos.”

Lance sighed. Silver stifled a laugh.

Gold crawled onto the bed between them, grabbing one of the abundant pillows to bury his face in. “So where were we in the discussion about growing up?”

Lance was still a little pouty. “The fact that we didn’t have a lot of adults around and had to share rooms a lot.”

“Did you tell him about the way you were all roaming around like a pack of feral animals?” Gold rolled over to smirk at his boyfriend, his back against Silver’s side.

“Okay, it wasn’t that bad,” argued Lance.

“I’ve seen those photos, too.” Gold shot back, his face a perfect mask of innocence.

Silver was no longer stifling his laughter.

“You’re lucky you’re cute,” Lance muttered.

“For what it’s worth, I’d peg you at like, twenty-seven. Of course, I would also—”

Gold was cut off mid-sentence as Lance very calmly shoved a pillow over his face.

* * *

A combination of the pre-dawn morning light and light from the slightly ajar bathroom woke Silver up entirely too early. He wasn’t sure when he’d fallen asleep, but apparently Lance had been serious about not caring if he’d stayed where he was, because they hadn’t moved him back to the guest room when he had. Gold was curled up against him, face pressed into his shoulder and deeply asleep.

Through the gap between the bathroom door and the wall, he could see Lance–already in his usual outfit sans cape–frowning at himself in the mirror as he styled his hair. He couldn’t quite stop himself from smirking as he remembered Gold’s playful threat from the night before. Lance was definitely more than a little vain.

He squinted and blinked his eyes a few times, trying to clear them. It seemed to be a lot brighter around sunrise and sunset lately. He should probably ask Gold if that was one of the side-effects of his recent illness that he was supposed to be looking out for later.

While he was musing about that, Lance finished fussing with his hair and walked out of the bathroom, pausing on the threshold.

“Sorry,” Lance said in a low voice. “Did I wake you?”

Silver shook his head.

“I’ll be back in an hour or so with breakfast. Have to go record something for the morning broadcast.”

Silver didn’t want to say anything with Gold still very unconscious on him, so he gave the dragon tamer a thumbs up, immediately regretted it, and closed his eyes. He heard the door click shut quietly a moment later.

He woke up again as Gold uncurled himself and stretched in the brighter morning light. He was kind of startled he’d fallen back asleep.

“Morning,” Gold mumbled. “When did Lance leave?”

“He said he’d be back in an hour when he left but I think that was like two hours ago. I fell back asleep.”

“He always underestimates how long this stuff will take. We can be lazy about it.” Gold nuzzled into his chest with a little sigh.

Silver rested his chin on Gold’s head, pulling him in closer. And then he paused. “I should’ve asked this earlier but uh. Your boyfriend is okay with this right?”

“You know all those books you make fun of me for reading? They all have one thing in common—nobody talks about anything until it’s reached boiling point. Which is fun in a story, but not in real life.” Gold reached up and brushed Silver’s bangs to the side with his fingers. “We’ve talked about you and how I feel about you. Kind of a lot, actually. When he says he’s okay with it, he means it.”

“...I suppose you can tell, with the whole mind-reading thing.”

“Mmhmm. And, well. If he wasn’t okay with me being cuddly with my closest friend, then we wouldn’t be dating. You know what I’m like.”

“A cat?” It took at lot of self control to keep his voice even as he spoke, recalling their conversation from the night before.

Gold’s eyes narrowed. “I’m gonna push you out of the fucking bed.”

* * *

Lance had already had enough of today.

Part of him had hoped that announcing that they were going to be putting challenges on hold for a couple of weeks would go smoothly if he showed up without trying to conceal his rather nasty black eye, but as usual he’d underestimated how much everyone wanted to know every detail about the attempted takeovers. Every time he tried to slip away to go home, someone else had cornered him, because a press conference wasn’t enough, every reporter in the room had to have an interview.

Not for the first time, Lance thought of Red and his peaceful mountain retreat with envy.

He was finally able to extricate himself when Bill showed up asking for a lift to Blackthorn, giving him a polite reason to refuse to talk to anyone else. Gold messaged him the moment they stepped out of the building, somehow managing to catch him the moment he was free to answer.

Hey. Still getting breakfast?

Picking it up now. Sorry.

It’s okay, don’t worry. Get me a double order?

“Sorry about this,” he added aloud to Bill. “I really expected that to be a half hour at most.”

“You have got to learn to tell them to fuck off,” Bill replied, snickering a little.

“...Could you imagine how they’d cover that, though. I do not need the media speculating on whether or not I’m having a mental health episode because I shut someone down too hard.” He whistled for Drago, who had been sunning himself on the roof. The dragonite descended with a sharp gust of wind, settling beside him as light as a feather.

“You could always just point Gold at them. I’m sure he’d love to hunt them for sport.”

“I think I’d rather they didn’t find out about him for as long as possible, actually,” Lance remarked as he climbed onto Drago’s back. He’d said it kind of reflexively, and part of him felt bad about it, but... Once the media figured out that he wasn’t just dating another man, but the rich heir of the world’s biggest transit company, they weren’t going to give either of them a moment of peace. It was already difficult to keep them out of his day-to-day life.

He just wanted to keep Gold to himself for a bit longer.

“The eternal struggle of being a public figure, huh. Guess it’s probably worse that he’s so high-profile too.” Bill settled in behind him on the dragonite’s back. Drago flapped up into the air and circled the plateau before gliding off to the south-west.

The wind rushing past them made it harder to talk easily, so Lance waited the ten minutes it took Drago to streak from the Indigo Plateau to Cherrygrove City before he replied to that. “In the sense that it’s gonna be a scandal, yes. I don’t think he’s afraid of anything, though. He’s been openly out as trans since he transitioned.”

“Sometimes I wonder how much shit his family got about that. He was like eight when he decided, wasn’t he?”

“Around that. It was just before he moved to Orre, if I remember correctly. Apparently they thought the guy that hit him did it as a hate crime at first.”

“Huh. I mean, that makes sense but. Huh.”

They’d walked to the Lucky Kamonegi storefront as they’d talked, and settled in to wait in line with some of the other customers. Nobody so much as batted an eye, which was fascinating to Bill, who was used to people in Kanto getting worked up whenever Lance showed up.

He’d been about to ask if it was a Johto thing or a regular customer thing when an older man with short-cropped dark hair came out from behind the counter to greet them.

“Lance!” The man was grinning from ear to ear. “Here to pick up the boss’ brunch, yes?”

“He wants double his usual order, and a couple of the breakfast rolls, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“Not a problem! I’ll be back shortly.”

“The boss?” Bill asked quietly.

“He liked the food so much he bought the chain. Insists it wasn’t even half his budget.”

“...Can you imagine having that much money to throw around?”

“I try not to think about it too much, honestly. Came in handy when we had to replace the couch in a hurry, though.”

Chapter 9

“Time to get up, I think,” Gold murmured, closing his pokégear. “Sounds like they’re on their way. We’ll have to take a photo for your new trainer card, actually. Want me to do your hair?”

“...How?”

“However you’d like. You don’t have to please anyone but yourself.”

Silver thought about it. “Braid it for me?”

By the time Lance and Bill were walking in the door, Gold and Silver were sitting cross-legged on one of the couches, watching the news. Silver’s abra was sprawled in his lap, and he was petting it absently while Gold was weaving his hair into a fishtail braid.

“Good boy, taking time off work,” Gold said, looking up at Lance. “I thought I’d have to bully you into it.”

Bill laughed at the sheepish expression on Lance’s face. “Oh, so that’s why you suddenly have a somewhat healthy work/life balance.”

“I’m not that bad,” Lance argued, although it was a little half-hearted. Silver was possibly the only person currently in the city who didn’t know about his work habits.

“Folder on the coffee table has the info you need in it, Bill,” Gold said.

Bill dropped into the couch opposite the one Gold and Silver were sitting on, pulling his laptop out of his bag and setting it up on the coffee table. Lance distributed the food, which was mostly picking his and Silver’s out and handing Gold the rest of the bag, then settled on the larger couch to catch up on the headlines.

Gold finished the braid and tied the end, teasing it out a little and adjusting the strands he’d left free around Silver’s face. “There we go. Go look in a mirror and let me know if you want any changes.”

Silver got up, gently placing his abra on the couch cushion before heading into the bathroom to look at his hair. Bill was almost done setting up; a handful of portable devices were now scattered across the coffee table, most connected to the laptop with a cable.

“Before we get started,” Bill said. “Can I just say that it’s very funny you’ve managed to convince this many people to help you commit identity fraud?”

“It’s for a good cause,” Lance said mildly, still halfway through his breakfast burger.

“The best part is that I didn’t even come up with this plan, apparently his—” Gold gestured at Lance “—grandfather and cousin did.”

Bill snorted in amusement. “Clearly they’ve already accepted you as a local, if they’re willing to go along with your schemes.” He flipped open the folder and scanned the contents of the first sheet, then pulled up a database entry window.

Silver came back into the room, not exactly smiling but clearly looking pleased. “I like it. Thank you.”

Gold grinned at him.

“Come sit down,” Bill said. “You want ‘Silver’ to be your actual given name?”

“I can do that?” Silver asked as he settled back down on the couch. Abra climbed back into his lap immediately, and made a happy rumbling sound when Silver pet its head in response.

“Yup. Most things can be wriggled around a bit. You’re gonna be a Nagoshi, and I’m not changing your birth year, but if you want a different day or month, I’ll do that.”

“...Same day’s fine.” Silver scratched Abra behind an ear absently. “Where does Nagoshi come from?”

Lance closed his eyes, thinking. “Nagoshi... They were a family that lived a little way out of the city proper, in a little farmhouse up on the ridge. None of them survived the plague. Well... I guess your new backstory is that you did. There were a few kids here and there who moved in with distant relatives in other regions.”

“So... I came back to Johto because it’s where my ‘family’ was from?”

“Sound enough logic,” Gold said. “You could also say you wanted to try and reconnect with the culture, because it is really different here.”

“If Clair doesn’t try to rope you into some beginner dragon-taming classes, I’d be surprised,” Lance added.

Silver hummed thoughtfully, glancing down at his abra.

Bill tapped a finger against his laptop’s case. “Silver, did you get your blood type when you were in the hospital? We weren’t recording that when you got your first license.”

“It’s B positive,” Gold chipped in, before Silver could say anything. “I don’t think I told him that.”

“Why did they need my blood type?”

“You had a lot of infusions while you were under. In most cases they’d just use O negative, but you needed hybrid blood and we’re almost never O-type. Nobody knows why.” Gold shrugged as if to emphasise the point. “It’s funny, though. Since Blackthorn is one of the only places in Johto with a lot of hybrids, a lot of the blood came from residents.”

“It’s come a bit full circle, hm?” Lance mused. “I wonder if that’s why you ended up with fangs? Most of us have them.”

Bill glanced up from what he was doing. “Wait, it actually gave you fangs?”

“Treating active DXZ infections is pretty much just tricking the virus into picking up the human strain and implementing that instead of whatever random traits it feels like assigning. Not that it’s alive, it’s a virus, but you know what I mean.” Gold rubbed his face. “Hybrid blood has a natural immunity so it’s easier to push the right changes through, but sometimes it’ll introduce some of the nonhuman traits we have.”

“It will make pretending to be from here easier,” Lance mused. “When I was travelling, people would take one look at my smile and go ‘Blackthorn?’”

“Were they weird about it here too?” Gold asked.

“Uhh... Kind of?” Lance tapped his fingers against the arm of the couch. “More so in Kanto than Johto.”

“They were really weird about it in the part of Venezuela I was born in. People in Orre were more normal about it. Of course, a few years ago it became ‘cool’ and nowadays people will pay thousands of dollars to get veneers to make their canines look sharp.”

“I love listening to the things you two talk about sometimes. You had to worry about people being weirded out by your teeth?” Bill shook his head.

“Humans will find any reason to be weird about complete strangers,” Gold said. “And to be fair, do these look human?” He tilted his head back and pulled his upper lip up, showing off sharp canines twice as long as the teeth around them, and his rather pointed premolars. He closed his mouth and nodded at Lance. “His are worse though.”

“Worse how?” Silver asked.

“They go all the way to the back,” Lance answered, tapping his jaw just under his ear. “I didn’t get proper molars.”

Silver frowned. “Doesn’t that make it hard to eat?”

“Crunchy stuff, sometimes.”

Bill tapped a few keys absently. “Almost done here, by the way. You guys take a photo for me yet?”

“No, not yet,” Gold answered, then nudged Silver. “Let’s go outside, we can use the side of the trailer as a backdrop.”

They got up and left the room together. Bill pushed the sheets he’d just printed towards Lance. “Sign these for me?”

“How much more do you need once these are signed?”

“Just the birth certificate, which you’ll need to get either your grandfather or the mayor to sign. Not sure who you made an arrangement with. I’m not filing that, though, that’s for the local records.”

“Mm.”

Gold and Silver came back into the room, Silver carrying a big metal box. Gold handed Bill a camera, then settled down on the couch, taking the box out of Silver’s hands as he sat down. Abra climbed back into Silver’s lap the moment he was seated.

Bill plugged the camera into his laptop and pulled the nicest of the photos off the memory card, loading it into the ID database.

“What’s his new ID number?” Gold asked, having set up his pokéball repair kit.

“Three three two nine four one dash one five six one.” Bill recited.

“Cool. Pass us your pokéballs, Silv.” He took the offered balls, setting the first one–Feraligatr’s–in a slot in the kit to reprogram the internal ID. “You want any custom balls or are you happy with what you have?”

“Leave it for now.”

Gold moved to the next pokéball, humming to himself. “Wait. Do you have any pokémon in storage?”

“He has one,” Bill offered before Silver could answer. “I can fix that one. I’ll transfer all ball purchase records made in Johto to the new ID; we’ll make it look like he got his license a few weeks before the first purchase.”

Gold finished with the last pokéball–Abra’s–and handed all six back to Silver. “Do we have much else to do to finalise this?”

“Just printing the new card. Speaking of, can you pass me your old one, Silver?”

“Sure.” Silver pulled it out and offered it across the table.

Bill took it and used a tool to snap the chip out of it, dropping it into a plastic sleeve; he pulled another of his devices closer and loaded a blank card into it. He typed something into the laptop, and the device began to hum. “You can keep the rest of it, if you want. Just can’t take the chip now it’s void.”

“Toss it,” Silver said, after a moment’s thought. “Fresh start, right?”

“Mhm.” Bill dumped the rest of the card in his bag, and started loading the equipment he’d brought into it as well. “I’ll make sure it doesn’t end up anywhere it might be found. And we’re pretty much done once the new card’s finished. There’s the new birth certificate to get signed–I would suggest it’s someone who isn’t Clair.” The device with the new card in it beeped, and Bill removed the new card before packing it and the laptop into his bag.

“I’ll run the birth certificate over to Pike while Lance drops you off,” Gold said, snagging the paper and standing up.

“Sounds good.” Bill held the new trainer card out to Silver, who took it in hand; it had the same modern design that Gold’s had, black and grey with gold embellishment rather than the plain black on white of his old card. He pocketed it, feeling an odd sort of excitement.

A fresh start, without any ties to his birth parents. A picture of himself he actually liked, that they would’ve undoubted despised. Abra climbed up onto his shoulders, nuzzling in against his neck with an affectionate trill.

Bill offered Silver his hand, and grinned when Silver shook it. “Nice to meet you, Silver Nagoshi. Feel free to drop by for a visit if you’re ever in Kanto.”

“Thank you for your help,” Silver said quietly.

“Don’t mention it,” Bill replied. “Seriously. The only reason this isn’t super illegal is the lack of a national government.”

Lance snorted, barely restraining an answering wince. “Where do you want me to drop you?”

“Goldenrod, I think. May as well take a few hours to see the family.” Bill swung his bag over his shoulder. “Thanks for behaving yourself this morning, Gold.”

“I’m very tired,” Gold said. “I’ll be back to normal soon.”

“I can’t wait,” Bill shot back sarcastically, following a snickering Lance out of the house.

“How are you feeling?” Gold asked, once the other two men had left.

Silver thought about it for a moment. “...Free.”

Gold grinned at him. “Let’s go drop off the last paper we’ve gotta get signed for you and introduce you to Elder Pike, hm? I know he and Clair both want to have a chat with you.”

* * *

Gold led Silver out of the house and a few doors down, pointing out Clair and Minerva’s houses as they went. Lance’s house was actually furthest from the main ring of houses on the plateau around the open caldera of the Dragon’s Den, and apparently his grandfather’s was the closest.

Gold knocked, waited for an answering “come in!”, then tugged Silver in by the hand. This house was quite similar to Lance’s, but there were three people settled around a large dining table in the position that Lance’s house had couches. “Morning, everyone. Here’s the last few papers that need signatures.”

“Morning Gold,” a middle-aged woman with dark hair said with a bright smile. “And you must be Silver, hm? I love your hair.”

“Uh. Thanks. It’s nice to meet you.” He bowed, maybe a little nervously.

“Silver, this is elder Pike, gym leader Clair, and Minerva–she’s Lance and Clair’s mother.” He’d nodded at each of them in the order he’d introduced them, right to left.

Silver frowned, glancing at Clair. “Aren’t you his cousin?”

Minerva laughed. “You didn’t warn him, I see. I actually adopted Clair when her parents passed during the plague.”

“Oh. That makes sense.” At least, he thought it did.

“Don’t worry,” Clair said. She seemed amused. “It’s only going to get more confusing when the townspeople start referring to us as cousins and siblings interchangeably in front of you.”

“How could you take that experience from him?” Gold asked with a smirk. And then he yawned, widely. “Oops. I should go take a nap before my mother gets here.”

“Oh, is she coming to visit?” Minerva asked, perking up.

“To kick my a—butt—yeah. When she’s done with that I’m sure she’d love to sit down for tea.” Gold nudged Silver in the arm. “Will you be good for a bit?”

Silver bit his lip, because he kind of wanted to say no, but it was also very clear that Gold needed some rest. His skin was dark enough that he didn’t usually have visible dark circles around his eyes, and he sure had them today. Asking him to stay was probably a bit much... And he did have Abra still draped across his shoulders.

As if sensing that thought, Abra rumbled and stuck its nose into his hair.

“Oh, honey, you’re not in trouble,” Minerva said, clearly having noticed his discomfort. “We just want to make sure we have our stories straight for when we inevitably have to cover for you in front of the press.”

Gold bumped his forehead against Silver’s shoulder. “They’re nice people. Promise.”

Silver sighed, putting an arm around Gold and squeezing him close for a moment. “Go sleep. I’ll survive.”

“If you really need me, get Abra to wake me up. You’ll be fine, though. I’ll see you back at the house later, okay?”

“Go sleep,” Silver muttered, giving Gold a light shove towards the door. Gold laughed and headed for the door, leaning heavily on his cane.

“Sit down, honey, I’ll get you a cup of tea.” Minerva’s voice followed him as he left the house.

Gold only walked as far as he needed to in order to hide the fact that he was teleporting directly back to the room he’d been sharing with Lance. Teleporting cost a lot of energy, but right now, walking cost him a lot more.

He and Lance had stayed up far past the point where Silver had passed out on them, the bantering they’d been using to try and lull Silver into a calmer mood turning to a more serious discussion about what they were going to do to help him. Neither of them had gotten more than a couple of hours of sleep before Lance had left for the televised announcement about rescheduling league challenges.

“Hey,” Gold breathed as he felt Lance crawl onto the bed beside him. “You okay?”

“Tired,” the dragon tamer answered, slipping his arms around Gold’s waist and nuzzling in against the back of his neck. “Silver with Clair?”

“Hopefully. Left him with your family, at least.”

“Good.”

What Silver needed, Gold had mused, was grounding. Something to push him in directions he simply wouldn’t push himself, to help him better connect with his team and maybe, if they were lucky, the people around him. That Pike and Clair had been so quick to take to Zinnia’s idea was a godsend, if they could just get it to stick.

Lance had laid out the suggestion that Clair might try to teach Silver dragon taming very deliberately. He’d actually texted her during the night, as Silver slumbered beside them, and asked her to take care of it for him. He wasn’t able to dedicate that kind of time to anything outside of the pokémon league currently, or he would’ve been trying to take it on himself.

There was a chance that dragon taming, being a pokémon training specialisation that focused on personal discipline and physical training as well as training the pokémon themselves, would give Silver that structure. He just needed to be convinced to start, and then to stick to it. Clair and Lance had discussed, briefly, the possibility of weaponizing Lance’s reputation against Silver in an attempt to motivate him.

Whether the man took the bait or not remained to be seen.

Lance sighed, noisily.

“Yeah, I know,” Gold muttered in response.

“I didn’t say anything yet.”

“You’re thinking very loudly.”

“I’m not sure if falling in love with a mind-reader was a good or bad idea,” Lance grumbled.

“When it’s good, it’s good, and when it’s bad, it’s bad.”

“Very helpful.” There was no venom there, though, just dry acknowledgement. It had taken a little adjustment, but they communicated a lot better for it.

Gold took one of Lance’s hands in his own, kissing the calluses on his knuckles. “I’d tell you to stop worrying, but it’d be hypocritical of me right now. He’s a big boy, we gotta let him make the decision on his own.”

“Mm.” Lance was not a person who could just not worry, anyway. Even if everything went perfectly with Silver, he still had to think about the eventual legal reports for the tower invasions, as well as leading the league once the time he’d requested was up.

“One thing at a time, babe,” Gold murmured. “And that first thing better be resting up so your rib heals faster.”

Lance managed to suppress his answering laugh into a snort, and he nuzzled into Gold’s hair. “I’m fine.”

“Liar,” Gold responded, having felt his barely suppressed flinch alongside the little jolt of pain through his empathetic sense. “If I have to spend the next two weeks making you take care of yourself, I will.”

“I know,” he replied. “...Did I mention Karen’s not the only one who knows now?”

“Changing the subject,” Gold grumbled. “Who’d you tip off?”

“Will and Koga. Karen will probably tell Bruno now that the deal’s off, though.” Lance sighed. “My fault. I couldn’t get the space to call you without snapping at them, and well. Kitten’s out of the bag, I guess.”

Gold didn’t laugh at him, although he came close. “You know we’re not going to hide this forever. Gonna have to finish coming out of the closet eventually, babe.”

“No,” he whined, hiding his face in Gold’s shoulder.

Gold did laugh this time. “How’d they react?”

“...I didn’t notice. Too busy chasing them out.”

“Bet Karen thought that was hilarious.”

“Probably. Nurse said I could leave and I just bolted.”

Gold wriggled around to face him, stroking his cheek with a thumb. “You are an adorable disaster, you know.”

Lance blushed, grinning at him, and leaned in to kiss him.

Chapter 10

Sitting at the table with Lance’s family was giving Silver entirely too much insight on why Lance was the way he was. Minerva was gentle and empathetic, and apparently his only parental figure, while Pike clearly had endless patience for even the most foolish questions. Along with Clair, they were apparently the only Tatsumi family members left besides Zinnia, a second-cousin who had only recently moved from Hoenn back to Blackthorn herself.

The Tatsumis had started with a discussion of the town’s history–going over the effects of the Third Plague that Lance had briefly mentioned the night before, the subsequent collapse of town management and the panicked attempt at getting things back under control.

Pike had been in his late forties when the plague hit, and he was one of only two surviving members of the original dragon taming clan when it finally ended. Minerva had been in her early twenties, and had lost her husband; Clair had lost both of her parents. Minerva had taken in Clair and raised her alongside her son, because Clair had nobody else, but she’d also provided childcare for a good dozen other Blackthorn children.

The plague had devastated the city, and left a lot of children with one or both parents dead. Everyone who could work, had to. Even the surviving retirees had been forced to pick up their trades again, because they’d lost that many people. Without every available pair of hands, there were no crops to feed everyone though Blackthorn’s harsh winters.

Being older than most of the other children Minerva had cared for, Lance had ended up helping her wherever possible. He’d often carried Clair around while leading a good half of the group, getting the lot of them into boundless trouble. Clair had rolled her eyes when Minerva spoke about how close the two of them had been growing up, but she didn’t dispute it.

The council that had been briefly mentioned the night before had been formed in order to manage what resources and manpower Blackthorn had left as it got back on its feet. Pike and the now deceased Tyrone had split the upkeep of the Dragon’s Den and the gym between them, and both brought whatever they could to aid Aeron, who was still the city’s mayor. Tyrone had been older than Pike by over twenty years, and when he had recently passed away, his position had been given to Clair.

Lance’s position as Indigo League Champion kept him out of most of the city’s day to day governing. He was the person most likely to succeed Pike, provided he actually had the time to take the reins when Pike eventually retired. Pike insisted he had no intention of doing so anytime soon; Tyrone had been two decades his senior, and he intended on living at least that long himself.

The Nagoshis, whose name Silver had inherited, were a small family who owned a farm on the city’s outskirts. Their story was a sad one, as they’d taken ill and perished before anyone could manage to get out to check on them. Many of the residents believed the building was haunted as a result, although it was maintained by the same janitorial staff who kept the rest of the city cleaned and repaired.

(“Gold insists it’s not haunted,” Clair had interjected. “And he’s psychic, so I suppose if there were ghosts to be seen, he would’ve seen them. But the air in there is just... sad.”)

The story they were planning to tell the media when pressed was simply that Silver had been sent away to stay with a distant family member on the outskirts of Kanto, and had returned to Johto in recent years to reconnect with his heritage. It was the easiest way to explain why nobody knew who he was before now, and why he didn’t already know the intricacies of Blackthorn daily life.

Which had led to Clair taking him outside to discuss the prospect of picking up dragon taming. They’d had a two pokémon match so she could assess his skills, and it’d ended in a draw, his sneasel knocking out her dragonair before being knocked out in turn by her kingdra, and kingdra going on to knock out his magneton by using scald to burn it and whittling it down with dragon pulse.

“Interesting,” Clair mused. “You’re certainly strong, but undisciplined. No, don’t get stroppy with me–you know I’m right. You can go a long way with raw power, but without precision you’ll hit walls.”

Silver frowned, not quite grimacing. He didn’t want to admit that she was right.

“Hm. How do your battles with Gold go, generally?”

“He cheats,” Silver grumbled.

Clair’s lips twitched, like she was trying to suppress a smile. “He uses a lot of tricks, yes. Just knowing your type match-ups doesn’t really help, does it?”

Silver exhaled sharply through his teeth.

“Gym challenges are interesting, because up to a certain point, they’re tailored for your skill level. Trainers holding no badges fight weaker teams than those holding seven, and those holding eight fail the majority of the time, because at that point the leader is allowed to use their real team.” She tapped a foot against the ground absently. “You’re about to hit the point the training wheels come off. Do you really think you’re ready for that?”

The worst part, he thought, was that he didn’t. There was a reason he’d spent so much time deep in the wilderness with his pokémon over the last year. The earth badge he’d stolen from his father meant he could’ve moved onto the league at any point after defeating Pryce, and he’d stalled there, still smarting over Lance wiping the floor with him in the Rocket hideout.

Maybe Lance felt bad about that in hindsight, but he’d still throw everything he had at someone coming for his title. And for all his bluster, Silver did not feel confident about his chances.

Instead of answering honestly, though, he deflected. “So, what, you teach me the secret technique and that fixes my issues?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“It’s more than simply knowing what the core of dragon taming is. It takes dedication, self-discipline, and trust in your pokémon.

“Drago!” She called. “Would you mind helping me demonstrate?”

There was a low rumble from across the yard, and Lance’s dragonite yawned, stretched, then stood up and ambled over.

“Dragon taming is about knowing your pokémon’s strengths and weaknesses intimately... Because you are assessing them when they attack you.”

She gestured at Drago, who planted his feet square, drew back his right arm with his claws balled into a fist, and threw a punch directly at her. Clair braced, then swung her own right hand forward, catching the dragonite’s fist in her open palm. The force of the blow seemed to flow through her body, and her heels dug into the earth in response.

Clair had budged maybe an inch catching a punch from a pokémon who could bring down walls with ease.

“The important part is training yourself as much as you train your pokémon.” She stepped back, bracing herself again, and caught a left-handed punch with her own left hand. Drago snorted, stepping back, then swung his tail around towards her; Clair turned sharply, catching it in the crook of her heeled shoe. “Without training yourself, you cannot bring out the best in your pokémon.”

Clair gave Drago’s tail a light push with her foot, and he turned back around, standing up straight in front of her.

“That’s it? That’s the secret technique?” Silver asked. “That’s bullshit.”

“Maybe. But he still thrashed you, didn’t he?” She asked lightly.

Silver scowled.

“If it didn’t work so well, he wouldn’t still be sitting at the top.” Clair shrugged. “Only two people have managed to humble him, and both were prodigies in their own right. Not all of us get that advantage; we have to work for it.”

* * *

Gold bolted awake very suddenly, Silver’s abra’s voice in the back of his mind. The pokémon had noticed two people approaching the house, and sent him a quick mental image of them in case it was important.

Lance grunted in response to Gold jumping, his face still half-buried in Gold’s chest.

“Gotta get up,” Gold muttered, taking a moment to stroke Lance’s cheek. “Abra just told me my mum’s here. Go back to sleep if you can.”

“Mmngh, no,” Lance responded, clearly not conscious enough yet. “‘M coming with.”

Gold wriggled out from under him, pausing to kiss him on the forehead. “Seriously, stay in bed and get some more rest, I’ll be fine.”

Gold walked into the bathroom and splashed his face with cold water, washing the sleep out of his eyes. He was still exhausted, but his mother wasn’t the kind of person to wait. She was a woman used to ruling the roost and people jumping to her beck and call, and he was old enough now that she didn’t give him the same kind of preferential treatment he’d gotten as a kid.

He wasn’t actually worried, really. The worst she could do now was cut him off, but he’d had control of his trust fund account since he’d turned 18, and he now had enough personal investments to not need to think about money even without dipping into the company coffers. Between that and living full-time with Lance, Gold was more or less settled.

And for all he played up how scary she was, his mother wasn’t... mean. Hot-headed and assertive, but ultimately a decent person.

Gold grimaced at himself in the mirror, thoughts turning back to facing down Ariana the day before. He shook it off, though, needing to focus. He ran his fingers through his hair, letting it settle so it looked like more intentional bedhead, and walked back into the bedroom. Lance was sitting on the edge of the bed, clearly wavering between getting up and falling back down into the pillows. He was still dressed exactly the way he had been when he’d crawled in beside Gold, with his jumpsuit sleeves tied around his waist, dark undershirt a little askew. One of the scars his aerodactyl’s talons had left on his shoulder that one time he’d fallen into the caldera was just visible where the neck had pulled to the side. His red hair was sticking out at wild angles, the gel he used to spike it up now conspiring to make him look like a startled meowth.

Gold bit his lip to try and restrain the smirk that really wanted to be on his face. “Babe, you look like a rapidash dragged you ass-backwards through a bramble patch.”

“It’s fine,” Lance muttered, scruffing at his hair in an attempt to control it.

“This is because I was teasing you about being vain last night, isn’t it?”

“No,” Lance answered, in the tone of voice that made it clear it was exactly why.

“Really, it’s fine, we’re just going to have an argument over the fact that I’m a grown man now. You should really just lie back down.”

Lance shook his head stubbornly and lurched to his feet, heading for the bathroom himself. Gold caught his hand and squeezed it affectionately as he passed, then made his way over to the other side of the room, where he’d unceremoniously dropped his jeans before getting into bed earlier.

Once he was presentable enough to go out in public, Gold grabbed his cane and headed for the front door. He managed to open the door the exact moment elite four member Koga had been about to knock on it, which was a little startling. Amber was standing behind Koga, her mouth set in a stubborn line.

“Hola, mama. Koga.” He bowed briefly. “If you’re looking for Lance, he’s probably about five minutes behind me. Please excuse us.”

Gold stepped outside and pointed off to the west, and he and his mother began walking.

Lance was actually not that far behind Gold, appearing in the doorway and squinting at Koga in the midday sunlight just a couple of minutes later.

“Something the matter?” Lance asked, clearly still a little jet lagged.

“I have a couple of things I need to discuss with you, if you have the time.”

Lance was running his fingers through his hair, trying to get it to behave somewhat, although the bedhead he’d ended up with seemed very determined to stay where it was.

“I think it’s a lost cause,” Koga said drily.

“Probably,” the younger man admitted. “Walk and talk? I need to keep an eye on this.”

Koga fell into step beside him, and they followed Gold and Amber away from the houses. Mother and son were talking to each other furiously in Spanish, clearly not giving each other an inch in their argument. Lance picked up his pace a little to catch up to them.

The little group emerged from the trees surrounding the practice fields the gym trainers tended to use; Gold and Amber picked the closest empty one and took opposite sides. Lance stopped at the edge of it and settled himself gingerly on one of the bench seats, and Koga followed suit.

“So,” Koga said. “Your boyfriend, hm?”

Lance sighed. “I am very sorry for snapping at you yesterday.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m honestly a little impressed you managed to keep it from us that long.”

“Mostly. Karen knew before I did.”

“Hah!”

Out on the field, Gold and Amber had chosen their first pokémon; Gold sent out his donphan and his mother had sent out a large, bear-like pokémon with a black body, a pink head and tail, and white, fluffy ears.

“Oh, what’s that?”

“Bewear, I think it’s called? It’s a pokémon from Alola.”

Lance and Koga were a little too far away to hear the calls, but the pokémon were already rushing towards each other. Gold’s donphan rolled sharply under a powerful blow from the bewear, knocking it off-balance and spinning across the field.

“So. Some of the ringleaders are demanding to speak to ‘Angelo’. Am I correct to assume this is your boyfriend’s red-haired friend?”

Lance nearly hit himself in his black eye again. Of course Koga would have figured it out already. There wasn’t much else to do but come clean, though. “Unfortunately. We’re essentially putting him under witness protection; he was already going by a different name, but we’ve made that official.”

“Is he really Giovanni’s son?”

“I’m not the only one who was in the dark about it, hm?”

They watched as the donphan outsped the bewear and brought it to its knees with a body press. Amber recalled it and released an azumarill—a round blue rabbit-like pokémon with a white, bubbly pattern on its belly—which promptly launched itself at the donphan with an aqua jet, sending the elephant-like pokémon skidding across the field. The donphan tried to get back up, clearly not down for the count, but Gold recalled it and sent his ampharos out into the fray.

“How old is he? Twenty?” Koga mused. When Lance hummed an affirmative, Koga continued. “My daughter is about the same age, and yet, not once during gym leader events did he mention he had a child. And you know how I ramble about Janine.”

Lance grimaced. “Gold and I stayed up late with him last night, trying to help him calm down. I got the distinct feeling that he considered living on the streets an improvement over living at home.”

Koga winced.

Out on the field, Gold’s ampharos blasted Amber’s azumarill with a discharge, pulling it up sharply with inflicted paralysis. Gold pressed the advantage immediately, and the azumarill went down to an electro ball. Amber’s next pokémon was a somewhat cat-like pokémon with dark blue fur, white markings, and cyan eyes. The blue pokémon’s long ears unfolded, eye-like markings concealed within them beginning to glow –

And Gold’s ampharos hit it with a signal beam, knocking it out in one hit.

“Oh, that surprised her,” Koga muttered, attention back on the battle.

“Mm,” Lance responded. “I’m starting to understand why he tends to use so many unconventional strategies.”

“He’s going to be fun if he comes up to the plateau. Do you know if he’s planning on a challenge?”

“He’s waiting on Silver to be ready, I think. He mentioned wanting to head east with him when it was time.”

Amber sent out a delicate, plant-like creature with bouquets of roses instead of hands next, and Gold immediately switched to his espeon. The roserade scattered toxic spikes around the field, but Gold pressed his type advantage, and his espeon brought it down with a well-aimed psybeam.

“What are they fighting about, by the by?”

“She doesn’t like when he goes off and puts himself in danger. His argument is that he’s an adult now and can take care of himself.”

Koga chuckled softly. “Have to let them grow up sometime.”

“You’d know better than me.”

Amber brought out a large grey bird pokémon with brown markings next, and Gold’s espeon baton passed back to his donphan. The elephant pokémon used rapid spin to clear the field right before Amber’s unfezant knocked it out with a steel wing.

It was at this point that Clair and Silver arrived, both pausing to watch as Gold sent his clefable out to face his mother’s unfezant.

“Oh, is that Amber?” Clair asked.

“Huh. He wasn’t kidding when he said they looked nearly identical,” Silver observed.

Lance hummed an agreement. “Thanks for the heads up, by the way. We were asleep when she got here.”

“I can tell,” Silver said, pointing at one side of his head.

Lance sighed and started trying to ruffle his hair back into shape again.

“Use less gel, stupid,” Clair offered helpfully. Koga raised a hand to his face, clearly concealing a smile.

On the field, Amber’s unfezant raised its wings and began to glow. Gold’s clefable took advantage of the pause to hit it with thunder wave. The unfezant squawked in frustration as the electricity crackled through its wing, causing it to lose the move it was setting up.

“Oh, that’s going to cost her,” Koga muttered.

Gold’s clefable skipped playfully up to the now-grounded bird and punched it with a fist that crackled with electricity. Amber recalled her unfezant and summoned her last pokémon, an arcanine which launched itself at the clefable in the blink of an eye. Gold’s clefable threw up a protect shield, deflecting the extreme speed attack, and bounced back as the huge orange canine sprinted across the field back to Amber’s side.

“I wonder if she was expecting him to do this well?” Lance mused.

“Precision against raw power,” Clair said, almost absently, glancing over at Silver. “He’s picked up all his little tricks to try and handle her.”

Amber’s arcanine howled, cloaking itself in flames, and lunged for Gold’s clefable. Instead of trying for another protect, though, Gold recalled it, switching his typhlosion in to tank the hit instead. The arcanine switched from flare blitz back to extreme speed, rocketing across the field towards the typhlosion.

Gold’s typhlosion roared, flame collar igniting, and then it slammed one of its hind paws into the ground with enough force to make the ground shake. Amber’s arcanine was thrown off balance and skidded across the field.

“What was that, earthquake?” Koga asked, frowning.

“No, that was bulldoze,” Silver answered.

Gold’s typhlosion roared again, its flaming collar burning brighter, and slammed both front paws into the ground, the force of the blow causing it to crumble. A violent shudder rippled through the earth, knocking Amber’s arcanine heavily to the ground. Lance hissed, grabbing the arm of the bench to steady himself as his broken rib sent a jolt of pain through him in response. Clair and Silver both stumbled a little, but caught themselves quickly.

“That was earthquake,” Silver said, perhaps unnecessarily.

Gold had gone to the arcanine’s side, and was petting it reassuringly as he administered a potion. It wagged its tail furiously and licked his hands, clearly completely unbothered about losing the fight. Amber reached his side, and they began to talk again, but this time far less aggressively.

“Anything you want to say, you can say in front of Clair, she knows,” Lance said to Koga, who nodded in acknowledgement.

“You are Silver, yes?” Koga asked.

“Depends on why you’re asking,” Silver replied, immediately defensive.

“Mostly to pass along that a few of the Rocket leaders are asking for you,” Koga said, nodding to Silver. “You are, of course, welcome to ignore it. I think the police are just hoping they’ll slip up and give away where they’ve been hiding if they’re provoked.”

“I’m not speaking to Ariana,” Silver answered flatly. “I’ll consider Archer but only if it’s absolutely necessary. Proton can get fucked, though.”

“Language, young man,” Amber said, having come back into earshot.

“No, no, he’s allowed,” Gold intervened before Silver could say anything. “Proton nearly shot him in the face yesterday.” Amber shot him a venomous look, but Gold just smirked. “Can’t take it back now, I won.”

“Being a menace today, are we?” Lance asked mildly.

“Always,” Gold replied, leaning down to kiss him on the cheek. “Go fix your hair, we may as well go impose on your mother for a bit while we sit down and talk.”

Lance sighed and got up to go do so.

“I’m joking about the imposing. Minerva is dying to meet you,” Gold added to his mother. “Feel free to stick around too, Koga, I’m assuming Lance is going to read you guys in anyway.”

“I think I will, thank you.”

Chapter 11

Twenty minutes later the entire group were seated around the dining table in Minerva’s house, sipping from cups of tea while Gold recounted yesterday’s events. Silver cut in here and there, but largely left Gold to do the talking; it was clear he was more comfortable letting Gold take the spotlight to deflect from his own minor discomfort at being included in such a large group. His abra was nestled in his lap, occasionally chirping for attention, which seemed to be keeping him stable.

Gold was nursing his espeon Vivi, and he’d pulled his chair right up against Lance’s so he could snuggle in against his boyfriend’s side. Lance had his arm around Gold’s shoulder, and was leaning against him, starting to lose the fight against his own tiredness. He had taken the time to wash the gel out of his hair and restyle it before he’d rejoined them, though, so he at least looked a little less dishevelled.

Silver got very quiet when the subject of Ariana came up. Gold grabbed one of his hands under the table as the three parents at the table made disapproving noises.

“Question,” Amber said. “Perez or Taylor?”

“Taylor,” Gold answered.

Amber looked displeased, but moved on immediately. “And then you went up to fight Archer?”

“Mm. I was going to lie about how hard he tried to kill me, but I figured out light screen so him pulling a gun on me wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been,” Gold shrugged. “And before you get angry with me, mama, I was being careful. Shielding and teleporting only.”

“Honey, the next time someone pulls a gun on you, you should use those fancy psychic powers to steal the gun and shoot the fucker.”

“Noted,” Gold said as nervous laughter echoed around the table. Lance pressed his face into Gold’s shoulder, and Gold rested his head against his.

“It’s a little concerning to hear they were better armed at Goldenrod,” Koga mused.

“Not surprising, really. They baited you out there on purpose, and while I don’t know about the rest of you, the idiot who shot Lance? Drago would gut them immediately.”

“Wish you wouldn’t sound so enthusiastic about that,” Lance mumbled into Gold’s shoulder.

“Am I wrong?”

“No, but—” Lance paused, frowning. “I’m too tired to have this argument.”

Gold pressed a kiss into his hair. “It’s okay. The point is that your dragonite loves you very much and would maul anyone who seriously hurt you.”

“Mmm,” Lance responded, tone more than a little disapproving.

“You wanna go home and go back to bed?”

“Maybe in a bit.”

The conversation moved onto the media circus surrounding the radio tower takeovers. All over the world, people were losing their minds over the resurgence of Team Rocket and the still-unknown whereabouts of Giovanni Sakaki. The internet forums were aflame with conspiracy theories, and more than a few of those were being reported as fact.

Silver stayed fairly quiet when the topic of his father came up, but did clarify that the last time he’d seen Giovanni, the man was travelling west from Viridian. This many years later, he could be anywhere, but he definitely did not leave Japan immediately after his defeat at Red’s hands.

Lance ended up almost falling out of his chair after the discussion moved on from there, at which point Gold pressured him into getting up and going home with him. Silver tailed them out, still cradling his abra in his arms. Clair excused herself to go check in on the gym before closing time, leaving Minerva, Amber and Koga sitting at the table together.

“Would either of you like another cup of tea?” Minerva asked. “I think I need some parent venting time.”

Koga laughed. “Sure.”

“Please,” Amber said. “That boy is going to drive me into an early grave, I’m certain.”

* * *

The moment Lance’s head was on the pillow he was out like a light. He’d probably wake up in a couple of hours if food was waved under his nose, but the odds of him stirring beyond that til the morning were low. Gold kissed him on the forehead and wandered back out to the lounge room to check in on Silver.

Silver was sitting on the couch he seemed to have claimed since he’d arrived, clinging quietly to his abra. The little yellow pokémon was muttering something under its breath, and tilted its head to give Gold a sad look. Gold settled down beside Silver, putting an arm around his shoulders. Silver sighed, leaning into him.

“Sorry about how much talking you had to do today,” Gold said. “For what it’s worth, that should be the last time you need to explain anything to anyone else.”

“For now at least,” Silver muttered. “Might have to go talk to Archer.”

“Fuck him. You don’t owe him anything.”

Silver huffed.

“No, I’m serious,” Gold insisted. “Where the fuck were they when you actually needed help? They only care now because you’re strong enough to stomp them.”

“Am I, though? We got separated and Proton managed to get his hands on me right away. If you weren’t there, I wouldn’t have gotten away.”

“Tell me, Silver. Do you think I’m weak?”

“...No.” It was still kind of grudging, but Gold considered that progress, really.

“What about Lance?”

Silver glared at him. Gold decided to take that as enough of an answer, though.

“When we ripped through the hideout at Mahogany, we did it exactly the way you and I took on the Rockets at the radio tower. We split up here and there to destroy a lot of equipment, but we were right there watching each other’s backs the whole way through,” Gold explained. “He had to come save my ass when I got in over my head, too.

“The point is, you know. You don’t have to go it alone, and it’s generally better not to. Everyone fucks up sometimes. What matters is how well you handle that.”

Silver went quiet for a bit. When he spoke, it was in a voice much less certain than usual. “...Clair and I talked for a bit, before your mother got here. She asked me if I thought I was ready to start fighting at league levels.”

“What’d you tell her?”

“I didn’t, but... I don’t know?” He looked over at Gold, his grey eyes uncertain. “You, Lance, this whole... I don’t know.”

“You know, there’s a lot more strength in being able to admit that to yourself than you think there is.”

“Bullshit.”

“I mean it. Feeling like you’ve got something you need to work on is the first step to working on it.” Gold leaned in against him, squeezing his shoulders. “Do you know what you’re really struggling with right now?”

“...Everything.”

“It can’t be that bad, Silv.”

“No? No matter how long I spend training, you still wipe me out every time we battle. I’m not making any progress.”

“I’m still the only one who gives you trouble, though.”

“You’re the only one that matters.”

“You know, that’s almost kinda sweet,” Gold said, grinning at him. One of his fangs jutted out over his lower lip.

Silver swatted at him, annoyed. “You know what I mean.”

Gold giggled, but quickly composed himself again. “Yeah. Did she say anything else?”

“She offered to teach me dragon taming.”

“What’d you say?”

“That I’d think about it. I’m not really sure I have the right.” Silver pinched the bridge of his nose, eyes squeezed shut. “And well. What is your boyfriend gonna think about me just like. Dropping into his town and picking up his speciality like I own the place?”

“God, are you kidding? He’d be delighted.”

“...Really?”

“Oh, yeah. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, because he’s tired and injured so he’s not quite himself right now... But he really wants you to like him.”

Everything about that sentence baffled Silver. “He does? Why?”

“You’re my friend, and he wants to at least be friendly with you so you don’t feel unwelcome.” Gold leaned over to rub his cheek against Silver’s shoulder. “And he thinks you’re a tough, determined person, which he really respects. He doesn’t even know about how you got to Johto yet.”

“...Walking from Viridian to New Bark Town is one of the stupidest things I ever did.” Silver exhaled sharply. “I set foot on Route 22 with a genuine death wish.”

“And you kept found the strength to keep walking, because you realised you wanted to live. You really don’t understand how admirable that is?”

“I don’t think anything I do is ad—” Silver broke off before he finished that sentence, suddenly self-conscious about how brutally honest that opinion was.

Gold just put his arms around Silver and pulled him into a tight hug. Silver tried to resist for a moment, but folded into it instead.

“I think you should say yes,” Gold murmured. “I think that... I think you need more positive connections in your life, and this might be a good way to find some. Cause I love the shit out of you, man, but who we are to each other is always gonna have that little... competitive edge.”

“Is that really a bad thing?”

“If it’s making you feel inferior, yeah. I don’t want to be making you feel shitty because you think you can’t keep up, even though we’re basically neck and neck.”

“I don’t feel like we’re that close.”

“Maybe you don’t, but like... Fights that aren’t a bit difficult aren’t fun. I always have fun fighting you.” Gold tugged Silver closer, leaning back so they were more sprawled on the couch together than awkwardly hunched into each other. Abra resettled itself on Silver’s stomach, making a happy little rumble. “I look forward to our battles. You’re good at keeping me on my toes.”

 Silver settled in against him, resting his head on Gold’s shoulder. “You know that makes it even weirder that you haven’t battled Lance right?”

“Sure. But also if I’m good enough to give him a challenge I think he might just fucking resign before I get a chance to properly take on the league.”

“...What.”

“Five years at the top and the last people who even gave him trouble were Red and Blue. And he’s only there out of obligation in the first place, because he can’t bring himself to abandon everyone who relies on him and nobody else will take it. Blue refused after Red took off.”

Silver was very quiet as the implications of this set in. He had the distinct feeling that this was something maybe only Gold knew, but... hadn’t Clair said something similar about Red and Blue being Lance’s only real peers? The last five years had been the longest streak anyone had held the title since the league started eleven years ago. “There’s gotta be someone else, right?”

“The chain of succession is like... Red, Blue, dead guy.”

“Shit, wait, Fuego is dead?!”

“Yeah it was really sudden. Massive stroke. Think they attributed it to the chain smoking.” The first champion of the Indigo League had been a fire-type specialist who was almost never spotted without a cigarette hanging from his lips.

“Well that’s comforting,” Silver muttered, referencing their shared bad habit of sneaking off for the odd smoke.

“Guy was a pack a day smoker, we’re fine.” Gold waved a hand in the air. “The only other alternative is like. A free for all. And that’s good for nobody.”

Silver pulled a face. “Politics.”

“You know how it gets at the higher ranks,” Gold answered. “Especially since we’ve had like five champions total and two of them were Lance.”

“So what, you’re gonna go claim the top job to save your boyfriend from boredom?”

“Pft, maybe,” he responded. “More likely that I’ll lose, but at least I wanna give him a fight that gets him fired up again. And I’ll challenge him again every week if it means he starts enjoying going to work instead of just feeling like he has to.”

“Is that cute or pathetic?”

“Both?” Gold laughed. “I’ll be honest, I never thought I’d get this far. I hoped, but I expected to flag well before I got to this point. If I can at least hold my own in that arena, I’ll be happy. And as embarrassing as it is, I’ll sit on the sidelines forever as long as I can be with him.”

“At least you know it’s embarrassing.” Silver snickered.

“Yeah. I think that’s just what love is though. Being okay with being embarrassing.” He sighed. “I should order some cheap shitty food and head to bed proper. You hungry yet?”

Silver made a non-committal gesture with one hand.

“You can raid the fridge and pantry for whatever. Most of what we have needs cooking though.” Gold stifled a yawn behind one hand. “I could pick you up something you could microwave maybe. Lance is usually okay with me borrowing Drago for food runs.”

“...He just lets you borrow his champion-level dragonite to pick up fast food.”

“To be fair, I gave him a credit card.”

Epilogue

When Silver emerged from the bedroom the next morning, he found Lance making a cup of tea in the kitchen, watching the TV on mute. He looked far more alert than he had the day before, and he nodded at Silver before taking his tea down to one of the couches.

Silver found a box of Gold’s usual cereal in the pantry, poured himself a bowl, and then wolfed it down without bothering to go sit down. He’d just finished cleaning the bowl when there was a knock at the door. Lance got up, mug still in hand, and went to answer it.

“Good morning Lance!” A young voice said, somewhat forcefully. “Is Silver up yet? Can I talk to him?”

“Good morning, Zinnia. I’ll ask. Silver?”

He didn’t have a good reason to refuse, so he walked over to the door. Lance sauntered back to the couch, attention on the TV once more. On the doorstep stood a teenage girl, maybe a little taller than Gold, with ruby red eyes and long dark hair.

“Hi,” the girl said, sounding like she was trying very hard not to be nervous. “I’m Zinnia. I’m Lance and Clair’s cousin and I just moved here from Hoenn. Clair said she asked you if you wanted to come and train with us and I wanted to say that—you should say yes. Because I’ve only been here a few months and I’m still at the beginner stuff and right now I’m the only one. But if you came and joined us we could learn together!”

It took Silver a few moments to process that much information that fast.

“I haven’t made a decision yet,” he said carefully. “But I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Okay! Thank you! That’s all I wanted to ask!” Zinnia replied, then bolted off past Lance’s sleeping dragonite.

Silver closed the door, turning towards the couches as he heard Lance snickering.

“What are you smirking about,” Silver said, eyes narrowing.

Lance just sipped from his mug, clearly unfazed. “Nothing.”

Silver kept glaring at him, but it was starting to dawn on him that he was about as nonthreatening to the dragon tamer as a hatchling dratini. He sighed as he dropped himself onto one of the other couches. “...Everyone in your family is just weird as hell, huh.”

“Pretty much.”

“How old is she?”

“Fourteen,” Lance answered. “But we usually start the early training at twelve. She didn’t have that option, since she grew up in Fallabor with a relative on her father’s side.”

“Where’s Fallabor again?”

“Northwest Hoenn. She’s a long way from home, and all of her friends are back there, but we’re the only family she has left now.”

Silver frowned. He wasn’t sure if Lance was telling him that to make him feel bad for Zinnia or not—would the guy who pretty openly told him he ‘didn’t love his pokémon enough’ even bother being that manipulative? Lance really did not seem like the kind of person who could pull that off.

...And, he told himself, he did not care about some random kid’s sob story. That was Gold’s area of expertise, not his.

Silver sighed, resigning himself to having to actually have a conversation. “What happens if I say yes?”

“Basic training until you can prove you’re competent in fights and pokémon battles. You know a lot about pokémon training already, so I imagine you’d be focusing on the physical side.”

“I know how to throw a punch.”

“I haven’t seen you fight,” Lance said pointedly. “But there’s a style to the way we do you’ll have to learn.”

Silver frowned.

“Aside from the fighting and battling, you’ll also have to take some pokémon raising classes,” Lance continued. “Once you pass basic training, you get a dratini egg to hatch and train. For most of us, that’s our first pokémon, and baby dragons are a little... bite-y.”

“...Dratini have teeth?”

“Dratini have many tiny, very sharp teeth. They can’t hurt you much when they’re small, but you need to teach them not to bite before they get bigger, or they’ll take chunks out of you without really meaning to.” Lance paused. “That’s true of most dragons, really. The bigger they are the easier it is for them to hurt you whether they mean to or not.”

“Probably a good thing I haven’t started working with that gyarados, then,” Silver mused.

Lance shot him a look that was almost concerned. “When did you get a gyarados?”

“While you and your boyfriend were playing hero at Mahogany. Figured I’d capture one while the lake was full of free dragons.”

Lance just hummed thoughtfully, brows knit together. “I’m not going to say ‘don’t train it’, but I would definitely suggest you go talk to Clair about it before you start, regardless of the decision you make about taking up dragon taming.”

“Don’t you have one?”

“I raised Typhoon from a magikarp, so we had a strong connection before he got big enough to bite me in half,” Lance answered. “Clair has a lot more experience with wild-caught gyarados, so she’d have better advice for you than I would.”

There was something about the idea of Lance Tatsumi carting around a magikarp with his team of dragons that suddenly made it difficult for Silver to keep a straight face. “Sorry, I’m just picturing you trying to train a magikarp.”

“If it helps, I was also a weedy little teenager at the time.” There was the faintest hint of laughter in Lance’s voice as he said it.

Silver actually started to laugh in response, clearly enjoying the mental image. It was at this point that Gold emerged from the bedroom, looking like he’d just rolled out of bed in the exact clothes he was wearing.

“Morning,” Lance said, attention immediately diverted.

“Morning, handsome,” Gold yawned. “Morning, Silver. Don’t be surprised if the TV starts calling you that today, I texted Verde your new name last night.”

“Who’s Verde?”

Gold walked into the kitchen and stuck his head into the pantry. “Friend of mine who’s a talk show host and sometimes reporter. He’s become the most popular guy in Hollywood since the takeover.”

“Bet he’s living for that,” Lance said.

“Oh for sure. Being the centre of attention and being able to tell everyone about our wild days of stealing booze and smokes by hiding them in my wheelchair? He’s having the time of his life.” Gold pulled himself back out of the pantry, ripping the wrapper off a protein bar and devouring roughly half of it in one bite. He chewed for a moment, almost thoughtfully, then swallowed. “Mum’s gonna be so mad but the circus is gonna love it.”

“She gonna make you fight her again?” Silver asked.

“Nah. We’ve basically settled that argument. Besides, if they’re focusing on my wild child era, they won’t be looking too closely at you. It’s a win-win.” Gold shoved the rest of the bar into his mouth, then shuffled over to settle on the couch next to Lance. “Okay, that’s all the effort I’m putting into today.”

“Mm. I should get to the paperwork,” Lance said absently.

“What you should do is relax. You filed leave.”

“If I don’t do it now, I have to do it later. Besides, you said you didn’t want me doing anything active for the next week.”

Gold gave him a despairing look, then turned to his best friend instead. “One of these days, Silver, I’m gonna teach this poor man how to take a vacation.”

Silver snorted.

* * *

Silver went for a walk a little while later. Gold and Lance bounced off each other in a way that made it kind of hard to think while he was in the same room, and he still had a lot to think about. And he really didn’t know how he felt about Lance anymore. It was kind of hard to stay furious with someone who was clearly trying so hard to make him feel welcome and didn’t have the guile to hide how earnest it was.

He was sitting on a boulder overlooking the caldera of the Dragon’s Den with a lit cigarette hanging from his fingers when Clair eventually found him.

“Penny for your thoughts?” she asked, settling a little downwind.

“Just thinking about Gold’s dork-ass boyfriend,” Silver answered.

Clair laughed. “Media paints him with a lot more gravitas than he actually has, doesn’t it.”

“Mm. And I don’t really get...” He trailed off, trying to put it into words. He took another drag as he thought. “Gold says he wants me to like him. I don’t understand why he would. I’ve been a bit of a shithead every time we’ve met before now.”

Clair was quiet for a moment. “You and Gold are very close, aren’t you?”

“What does that have to do with—”

“Bear with me. He’s definitely called you his best friend in front of most of us, and it’s clear you tolerate him a lot more than you would anyone else who got too far into your personal space.”

“It’s kind of hard to stop him from getting cuddly, if you hadn’t already noticed,” Silver said drily, flicking the ash from the end of his cigarette. “He’s like if you shoved a meowth in a human body.”

Clair made an amused little sound. “Lance has said the same thing. Still.

“When he was a kid, Lance had a friend named Rune, and they were as close as you and Gold are now. They did everything together, to the point that his friend delayed setting off with his first pokémon until Lance turned fifteen and they could leave together.

“I’ve known him all my life, so I know that Lance looks at you two like ‘ah, this is just like me and Rune’, and he’d never forgive himself for doing something that would break up your friendship. Losing that connection tore him apart.”

“What happened?”

“Rune died.”

Silver had to hide his reaction to that behind another drag of the cigarette. “...You know, I was making fun of him about how weird you all are earlier, but you’ve all got some kind of tragic backstory to go with that, huh?”

“Living surrounded by so much death does tend to make you a bit weird,” Clair admitted. “Add in the fact that most of us have some pokémon blood, and we all feel at least a little inhuman because of it... why try to be normal?”

...It did make a lot of sense when she put it like that.

Silver took one last drag of his cigarette and stubbed it out in his pocket ashtray, exhaling the smoke slowly. A lot had happened over the last couple of days, and he still wasn’t sure what he really wanted to do with himself in the face of it. Turning his back on everything he used to know was going to be hard. He had more than a few bad habits to break, he wasn’t sure if his past wasn’t going to come back and bite him if he tried to move on... But he did have Gold, and apparently the family Gold had already practically married into.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

Silver Nagoshi turned to Clair Tatsumi. “So. When do I start this training?”