Day 1: Sweet

Timeline: Begins after player (May) becomes Champion, before Steven leaves, after Team Magma 'redemption'.

May starts her Pokémon journey at 18, becomes Champion at 19, and is 21 by the end of this fic. Steven is 24 when May becomes Champion and 25 by the end of this fic.

Day 1: He's impressed, because she's bitter like bittersweet chocolate.

CHAMPION MAY CITES STEVEN STONE AS MENTOR AND INSPIRATION

That was the first time she'd ever mentioned me in an interview. I didn't think much of it when I picked up the magazine from the Poké Mart and saw her face on the front cover; May was always very good at being the celebrity Hoenn wanted to hear about. But I hadn't expected to see my own name featured. I'd stopped being headline news quite a while ago.

DEVON CORP. HEIR STILL RETAINS CLOSE TIES TO THE LEAGUE

I suppose I should have been flattered to know I'd made such an impression on her. But, instead, the brief article made me feel a little chilled, as if somehow she'd gotten to know me much better than I'd gotten to know her. May was… an intriguing person, it's true, and I'd wanted to be her friend, had really made an effort to help her along. I'd had a feeling she was looking to challenge the Champion- when you are the Champion, you get to know the type- although the topic had never come up in our rare conversations over the course of two years. I knew that she had a good bond with her Pokémon, and that she was efficient, sweeping through the gyms at a startlingly fast rate even for a talented trainer. I knew that she was good at acting. I even knew her well enough to be able to tell when she was hiding something, which was more and more of the time these days.

But me, an inspiration? Had she seen something in me that I'd failed to notice myself? Or was she just playing up the relationship between us to please the media? Had I ever given her my permission to do that?

I wasn't sure.

I saw the interview on TV the next time I dropped by a Pokémon Center. Onscreen, May was as radiant as ever, as much of a faker as ever, giving the interviewer a smile that didn't reach her eyes.

"The first thing he ever gave me was a Steel Wing TM, which I think is symbolic," she told him. "It's thanks to him that I was able to fly to the heights I have."

Again, I should have been touched. Instead, I thought, bullshit. May called me her mentor, her teacher, but we both knew that was a lie and a challenge and an unpaid debt. I couldn't believe she was calling me out to pay it now. Somewhere along the way, I'd grown to owe her something, and I didn't know how it happened or what it was that I owed, only that it was something I'd miss when I gave it to her.

"Has the constant pressure of being Champion made you bitter at all?" asked the interviewer, offering her the mic. She tipped her head, innocent to a T, as if she didn't even know the meaning of the word.

"I wouldn't say so!" she told him. "That's a very personal question, you know, but I don't mind answering it. It's definitely a heavy responsibility, but I've had a lot of help and support from others."

"So there's nobody you hold a grudge against?" the man asked her, almost teasing, more familiar than he'd got any right to be because that was the script.

"There's nothing to hold a grudge about!" said May, and I couldn't tell if that was the script or not, and watching this was starting to make my stomach hurt, so I went to have my Pokémon healed and pretended I couldn't hear the TV behind me as they started talking about Team Magma- my failure, which I didn't want to think about.

TEAM MAGMA LEADER LOSES TO TEENAGE PKMN TRAINER; STEVEN STONE CONSPICUOUSLY ABSENT

Even so, the next time I saw her, I asked her about the interview.

"Oh, that?" She laughed, treating me like she treated the man on TV, and I could feel myself being brushed off. "Well, you are my inspiration, Steven. I hope you don't mind that I mentioned you."

"Not at all." I couldn't even resent her for lying, because I was doing the same. I did mind. "But I was surprised that you spoke of me so highly." That, at least, was the truth. I didn't expect a straight answer, but I looked at her anyway, waiting.

"Don't be modest," she chided, legs swinging from the table as she riffled casually through the papers we discussed at this meeting. "It doesn't suit you."

"I'm not being modest," I protested, allowing myself to inevitably get drawn into disagreeing with her. "I'm being truthful. For your supposed teacher, I did precious little teaching, wouldn't you agree?"

Her eyes narrowed, although she was still smiling, and I knew I'd broached a topic I wasn't supposed to mention. "I learned plenty from you, Steven," she said, as if challenging me to contradict her again. "Just because you didn't do any deliberate teaching doesn't mean that you didn't teach me things."

The thought of May learning from my behavior made my teeth hurt. I wasn't a good Champion- I spent all my time looking for rocks while wearing expensive three-piece suits, I didn't tie the League to Devon Corp. like they'd wanted me to, and I didn't go easy on challengers like I was supposed to, which is probably the only reason I'd held the title as long as I had. I didn't go to parties. I shied away from publicity. Once I'd panicked and thrown a rock at a reporter's camera. The Elite Four had had a ball trying to hush that one up.

My point being, not only was I a terrible role model for a young, promising new Champion, I was nothing like May at all. I couldn't see myself in her. At first, I'd wanted to be more like her, not her to be more like me. Now, I wasn't even sure of that.

"You lied during that interview," I said. It wasn't intended to be an accusation- I'd said it mildly- but she stiffened anyway, her hands tightening on the sheaf of papers she held.

"So what if I did?" she said, looking down at her dangling feet. "It's what they wanted to hear."

"There's no way you're not resentful about something," I prodded, walking around the table to sit down in the chair nearest to her. She looked away from me, her gaze apparently fixed on a spot on the floor somewhere, her eyebrows furrowed as if she really did have to think hard to find a speck of resentment inside herself.

"I resent you," she said, presently, looking back at me, her eyes hard. I wasn't surprised that she'd feel that way, but I hadn't expected her to say it so bluntly; I'm sure the shock showed on my face, although I tried to hide it. "If you'd done your job as Champion and gotten rid of Team Magma, I wouldn't have had to do it for you and none of that whole catastrophe would ever have happened."

We'd had this conversation before, but it was always surprising to me how clinical she was about it. Gotten rid of. Like it was that easy to destroy an idea that pervasive. We could have imprisoned, or even killed, every member of the organization, and their ideas would still have lived on. Oh, of course I should have made more of an effort, we all should have- I wasn't about to deny my own guilt- but sometimes I wondered if maybe the shock of Groudon actually rising, the actual occurrence of the natural disaster, was what it really took to get rid of Team Magma.

I couldn't say that to anyone, of course, being myself and guilty. But I thought about it a lot. And of course, nobody would let May forget about it either; there had been plenty of headlines about her even before she'd become Champion, because of her feat in the Cave of Origin.

EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD BESTS LEGENDARY POKéMON

TRAINER MAY ONE OF THE ONLY PEOPLE ALIVE TO HAVE BEEN IN CAVE OF ORIGIN

TEAM MAGMA VANQUISHED BY TEENAGER

When one is Champion, one has certain means of escaping media attention, but back then May had just won her eighth badge. It was her first brush with the kind of fame she was now used to experiencing on a daily basis. She was absolutely stormed by reporters; it couldn't have been a pleasant experience. And, of course, part of her appeal was the whole 'unlikely hero' theme; politicians across the region were using her as a figurehead to attack the League, the government, and, well, me. It would have been easy for her to hate me, easy for her to give into the pressure. But the only statement she ever made about the issue in public was that "Somebody had to do it, and it might as well have been me!"

"You don't like being a hero?" I asked her, because an apology would have been the wrong thing to say, and there was nothing I could use in my defense anyway. "You don't like the publicity, or the responsibility?"

"It's not that," she said, thoughtfully, and folded her hands in her lap. She accepted the label of 'hero' without question. "For a hero to exist, first there has to be a problem for the hero to solve. If it means the problem wouldn't have existed, or would have been solved earlier, I'd rather not have become a hero."

It was an impressive thing to say, but I wasn't impressed. I was worried. The way she spoke was concerning- it was half-wistful, as if she didn't even know who she was talking to, as if she was just musing to herself. May, as I mentioned, was good at acting. The things she spoke always depended on the person she was speaking them to. I felt like I'd been pulling the trigger of a gun and my finger had just stopped, right before the gun went off, and if I moved, or said something at all, I'd kill her.

"So, yeah, I did lie," she said eventually, looking straight at me. She didn't sound ashamed. "And I am bitter. Are you surprised?"

"No," I said, because it was what she wanted to hear, but I think I was surprised. Of course I'd known that the mask she put on for the public wasn't the 'real her', as you might say, but to some extent I'd absorbed the words she'd said, over and over again.

"Ha, I thought you would say that." She smiled at me again, and I felt like I'd said something right, even though I knew I probably hadn't. Talking to May was always a little bit difficult- me, feeling like I didn't know her at all, and also feeling like she knew everything about me without having to ask. I wasn't sure how to think about her. "Do I come off as bitter, then?" she asked me.

I considered this. She'd said it flippantly, like a joke, but it made me think nonetheless- did she? Certainly, she wasn't all innocent- having a career in pitting Pokémon against each other and dealing with the dizzying heights of fame at the age of eighteen tended to change that- but there was a measure of genuine sweetness in her that showed through when she was faking things. Maybe that's why she was so good at lying. The trick to lying, as she had told me once, was that there needed to be some measure of truth in it.

"Bitter like bittersweet chocolate, maybe," I said, a humorous answer to a casual question. "In an appealing way."

She stared at me for a second, and I wondered if maybe it'd been an odd thing to say. I'd wanted to make her laugh.

"Snobbish people and socialites enjoy it," I added, and then she cracked a smile. We gave each other tentative smiles for a few seconds.

"I like that," she finally said, smirking, her brown eyes open and attentive again, as if she hadn't told me just five minutes ago that she resented me. "Sweet, but also bitter. Very accurate."

We lapsed into an awkward silence- awkward for me, that is. She seemed perfectly at ease with making me uncomfortable, staring straight ahead at the bland wall of the meeting room. I ran the tip of my tongue along the edges of my teeth. She seemed so imperturbable that it didn't even feel impolite to stare at her; the curve of her hair, the tug at the corner of her lips. It was like admiring a piece of art, not a human person.

"I was telling the truth about you, though, Steven," she said openly, propping her elbows on her knees and looking at me intently. "You really have taught me a lot. I do think that Steel Wing TM is symbolic."

I laughed. "If it is symbolic, the only thing it's symbolic of is that I should have helped you more," I told her. "Steel Wing isn't a flying move, May, it's an attacking move. You can't do any flying with metal wings that weigh you down to the ground."

May was snickering, now. "You can't even take a compliment? How petty," she complained. "Maybe what I needed then was something to anchor me to land. Maybe I was too quick to try and fly away from everything."

I stared at her, confused, turning her words over in my mind. Maybe I was too quick to try and fly away from everything. What did that mean? Did I want to assume anything? What could May have been flying away from, that I'd tethered her down to the ground?

CHAMPION MAY SOARS TO NEW HEIGHTS IN LILYCOVE POKéMON CONTEST

DEVON CORP FUNDS REPAIR TO SOOTOPOLIS CITY

TRAINER MAY: "HOENN IS MY HOME."

"You're still not satisfied, are you." May was wearing a disappointed pout, like this whole conversation had been some kind of test, and I'd failed it. It was, to be honest, just one in a long chain of failures when it came to trying to figure her out. She hadn't asked me a question, but I felt like there was some kind of answer she was looking for; I searched for something to say, but then she beat me to it, letting her feet touch the floor as she turned to face me.

"Fine," she said quickly, both palms on the table, and now it sounded like a challenge. "You don't feel like you taught me anything, right? Then earn the title of 'teacher' and teach me how to do something."

"What do you want to learn?" I asked. She smiled, bittersweet.

"Teach me how to run away," she said.

so i'm about as prepared for daiharu week (on tumblr) as i am for final exams, which is NOT AT ALL
this story has seven chapters, one for each day, and i don't think i did a great job following the prompts but there are prompts
no beta, i apologize in advance hahahaha ha

hopefully i'll be able to post the chapters on the days i'm supposed to. i don't know. i have final exams next week. my brain is fried.

thanks for reading.