A.S. (After Silph) 99

November 15

Verity Lakefront

"Barry! Get back here!"

"NO!"

The blond boy ran as fast as he could, his feet pounding away at the slushy ground underneath with fervent terror. If he was a bit more relaxed, he might have enjoyed the opportunity he had to explore his new town, but there was a very pressing danger chasing him.

He may have had problems focusing on boring things, but that didn't mean that he would stick around to have his mom shove pills down his throat, especially when they stuck and scratched until his eyes burned and he choked –

At the next turn he stopped his train of thoughts because there was a girl on the edge of the lake, sitting with her back facing him. She was all hunched up and staring out into the lake. He couldn't see her face, but he thought she might be around his age. She didn't seem to care that she was sitting on a mound of snow.

Glancing around to make sure that his mom wasn't behind him, he snuck up to her. "Hi," he said without quite thinking it through.

The girl's reaction was perfectly justified. She was sitting, staring out at the lake near her home in what would hopefully be solitude to silently think about recent events in her life when all of a sudden, an unexpected, unfamiliar voice said 'hi' to her in a far-too chipper voice. She reacted as any normal human being would have.

Shrieking in surprise, the girl flinched forwards. It would have been fine, but her flinch had thrown her off balance and made her topple. She would have fallen into the water had Barry not swept in, grabbed her shoulders and yanked back with all of his weight. It turned out that he pulled just a bit too hard, as they both lost their balance – the second time in the span of a few moments for the girl – and fell over. "Ow!"

"Sorry," he apologized, and then saw that the girl's eyes were puffy and red, and wet. "Hey, were you crying?"

"Huh?" She rubbed at her face quickly. "Sorry," she said, sniffing.

"Hey, why are you sorry?" He laughed. "You're silly."

The girl gave him a small smile. "And you're weird."

Barry stuck his chest out. "I'm not weird!" he boasted loudly, forgetting that his mother was looking for him. "I'm AWESOME!"

The girl sniffed one last time, and then gave him a curious look. "Is that your name?" she asked, not recognizing the boy from around town.

"'Course not! My name's Barry! Barry Keizer! I just moved to Twinleaf town from Pastoria city and I'm going to be the best trainer in the world, just like my dad!"

At the mention of a father, her face fell just a bit. "I'm Dawn."

Barry wanted to grab her shoulders and shake some sense into her, only she looked kind of sad so he held off a bit. Still, she was doing it wrong. When one introduced oneself, one had to say their full name and where they were from. Like him. He was Barry Damien Keizer, formerly of Pastoria, new to Twinleaf – only, he didn't like the Damien part so he left it out even if his daddy said that middle names were really important. "Dawn what?"

"What?" she repeated, confused.

Now that confused Barry. "What?"

"Wait, what?" Dawn asked in an attempt to clarify everything between the two of them because she was really confused now.

"BARRY!" His mom's voice was loud and close.

He winced. "Oh no!"

"What's wrong?"

"It's my mom –" The hassled woman came swooping in and gripped her runaway son's hand firmly. "She's going to make me eat pills," he finished with a sigh as he was finally caught.

"Pills?" Dawn blinked. "Are you sick?"

"I think so. The doctor said that I have a dis – a dis . . . dis . . ."

"Disorder," Barry's mom filled in. Now that she had caught up to her son (thank Azelf and Mespirit – what if he had gotten attacked or kidnapped or lost in the woods she was unfamiliar with?) she could afford to be more relaxed. "Hello there. Are you Barry's friend?"

"I guess," but Dawn kept her wide blue eyes on Barry. "If there's something wrong and the doctor says you should eat pills then you should eat pills," she told him solemnly. "Or you might die."

Barry's mother sputtered at the completely incorrect direction the conversation was turning to, but Barry himself completely panicked. "Die?! Oh no! I'm too young to die! Mom, am I gonna die?!"

"No, you're not."

But her words were ignored because Dawn was speaking again and there was something about her that made Barry focus and listen to her. "You should eat your pills," she repeated. "Because if you die, people will be sad because they'll miss you. I think I'll miss you too, even if we just met. Want to be friends?"

It occurred to Margaret Keizer that Barry had met a person just as weird, if not more as he was. The odds of meeting such a person in the same region was . . . quite small, and she supposed that Barry was lucky to have found such a person in a small town like Twinleaf just after moving in. "I think you two would be good friends," she said to try and encourage Barry. 'Never let her go, son,' she thought, thinking of how children with ADHD were said to have difficulties with making friends.

"Sure!" Barry slapped his hand into her offered one. "Wanna come and eat cookies at my house? My mom makes awesome snickerdoodles!"

Dawn shook her head and got to her feet, brushing off the dirt from her clothes. "I have to go now," she said. "My mom might be worried about me. But I'll see you around."

Because it was getting late, they went their separate ways for the day. In the evening, Barry took his pills without any complaint for the first time since getting them, heeding what his new friend had said to him. Margaret gave up on trying to convince her son that he wouldn't die, because he took his pills willingly after that.

The next day, they discovered that they were actually neighbours when Barry looked out of his new bedroom's window and saw Dawn's curious face. He yelled, and then dashed down the stairs and out of the house at six thirty in the morning to knock on the neighboring house's doors to yell for Dawn to come out and play, waking up half the town. Barry got in trouble, but Dawn had smiled and come out to play anyways with two homemade muffins in her hands so she could share her mom's delicious baked goods.

And they stayed good friends since, finding more and more common ground between the two until they were inseparable.

A.S.99

December 9

Jubilife City

Lucas was five when he was dressed in black and taken to Jubilife, where everyone was quiet and serious or crying; where everyone was standing outside in the street, despite the cold and despite the snow falling down and turning to black mush under their black-shoed feet.

Some important looking people, like the serious old man his dad worked for, made speeches on platforms before everyone saluted pictures of the Champion and the Elite Four. In between the speeches, more people went around through the crowd handing out white flowers. A pretty lady gave him a sad smile before handing him a white flower that he held onto tightly.

His dad told him that this was because they – the Champion and the Elite Four – were dead. Like grandma. And because they were dead, everyone was here to pay their respects.

After the speeches, the salutes and the solemn ceremony at the site of a ruined building (he had vague memories of a bright and bustling building having been in that very spot, but it was really vague) his father took him by the hand to not lose him and went up to the serious old man. He was in black as well, and not in his usual white coat.

He still looked scary, but he also looked sad. Even sadder than grandpa did when they went to visit grandma's grave.

When he saw Lucas, clinging to his dad's hand, he shed a tear.

Lucas was five when he saw Professor Rowan cry for the first time.

AN: 151st story. And to think that the story was originally only 2k+ long when I first thought of it somewhere around January (so far the prewritten part is around 180k+).

This is a story based on both my Platinum playthrough (played through specifically for the purpose of writing this) and my Pokémon headcanon. Initially I was going to write a short story that was a theory on why no one seemed to know who the Champion was until the final moment, and then it ended up spanning the entire Pokémon universe in an attempt to write a realistic story of the events.

Generic blanket disclaimer: don't own it, don't claim anything that is not mine. Credit for the image goes to Shion/Kizuro (?) or 詩音 (pixiv ID:137851), who was kind enough to give me permission to use it when I contacted him/her. I just cut out the part with the Sinnoh trio and slapped 'TITANIUM' onto it.