[This piece has recently been revised to reflect my current style. If you'd like more information on that, please consult my profile. Other than these revisions, the general tone and feel of the text that follows is still a time capsule from the glorious early 2010s. Thanks for understanding.]

Word Count: 2,045 words.

How to Get Ahead in Café Courting

Lumiose City—once a beautiful, picturesque hub of all things love and romance; now a seedy den of inequity overrun by tourists, yuppies, and other undesirables. The luminous spark once felt in the days of passionate young couples courting under the moonlight has been utterly snuffed, supplanted by soulless corporate entities desperately trying to replicate the feeling to varying levels of failure, all for the sake of their bottom line.

For the lovey-dovey drones visiting from every region under the sun, it's everything the brochures promised and then some. For Serena, it's everything that makes her question if there's always been this many cafés in town.

"Hmph."

She has a table reserved for them out on the patio. The gossiping staff can't decide amongst themselves whether she's dining alone or not, nor can they come to a consensus on whether such an alien prospect is stranger than a customer possessing patience in a city notorious for its impatient people. They receive a partial answer when one of them nervously asks if she's ready to order. Distracted by Lumiose's many metropolitan eyesores, she says something along the lines of 'I'm waiting for someone' to the waiter, and he quickly marches back to his post because something about her tone gives him goosebumps.

Serena takes a sip of her milkshake. It's pretty damn good for a beverage modeled after Slurpuff, and not nearly as sickeningly sweet as it sounds.

"You sure took your sweet time."

Calem arrives ten minutes late to find his 'date' already not making eye contact.

"S-sorry! I, uh... traffic."

"You drove here?"

Calem shrugs like a man on thin ice. "Uh, no... I kind of just lied to you and I'm not really sure why."

To his surprise, she doesn't blow a fuse on him. He's offered a milkshake, but he declines, orders a latte, and then has the gall to haughtily brag about his maturity in beverage selection compared to hers after having just been spared from armageddon. She immediately regrets not blowing a fuse.

"Alright," Serena frowns at the dumb, smug look on his dumb, smug face as he sets his hot drink down. "Let's cut to the chase. Why did you call me here, ma chérie?"

"Don't," she's already beginning to regret things.

"Come on," he leans in slightly with a twinkle in his eyes. "How many times have I asked you to have brunch with me at one of these places? Hopefully not too many. I mean, I like to think things aren't that complicated between us. It's definitely not in the triple digits, I should think—"

Serena takes another prolonged sip of her shake in the midst of his rambling, electing to let him run through the rest of his script until he either talks himself out or realizes she's waiting to explain the very thing he's asking her about. Either would be preferable.

"Maybe I've been playing this game all wrong," he ignorantly muses with a hand on his chin. "All this time I've been the one asking for brunch, when I should have been the one waiting for you to ask me! Of course! Why didn't I think of that before? Girls tend to be the more forward ones these days—"

"Are you done?"

Calem draws back to her with a smile, always one to return at her beck and call. "Just about,"

A restless sigh escapes Serena as the nitwit on the opposite end of the table settles down. "When you beat Professor Sycamore at the lab," she begins, looking almost embarrassed as she reflects on the memory. "I'm... not sure how to explain it, but as I was watching you battle, something clicked inside of me, and well..."

Calem nearly burns his tongue from the mere suggestion of what she might possibly be trying to say. "Hold on. You're kidding. Are you saying you—"

"You're the strongest one out of our little circle of friends, okay?" she crosses her arms. "And I want us to become rivals. Is that what you wanted to hear?"

"Er, not exactly..." he admits before the obvious hits him. "So, wait. You invited me all the way to this lovely establishment just to declare a rivalry? You could have done that over the Holo Caster!"

It takes a second for Serena to process her folly, blush and all. "W-well, yes, sure! I suppose it sounds stupid when you put it like that...!"

"You know you have three other stooges to choose from, right?" he cocks a brow. "Why me, exactly? Not that I'm complaining of course, but I'm definitely not as perky as they are.

"Therein lies the reason."

Her answer almost makes him spit out his latte, but he brute forces the scalding drink down his throat before such a thing can happen. "Aagh! My tongue! Er, I mean, say what now?!"

"I need a competent rival," she explains. "Someone who pushes me to go forward, to do better, to stop living in the past and look forward to what's on the horizon. You... You're the only one that fits that description, I guess."

"Is that so?" a coy smirk and a touch of narcissism turn his inquiring brow into a suggestive one. It's a look only a mother can love.

"Can you not do that?" she has half a mind to thwack him on the forehead for even thinking about it. "Try to at least be a little serious here. I'm not joking around. I truly think we both have the potential to be good trainers. I want to make sure we promise to commit to each other's development before our journey really gets off the ground so we can—"

"Oh, I get it," he cuts her off without even thinking about it. "This really is a date! You're just too shy to admit it so you're masking it as a declaration of—OW! What was that for?!"

"You know damn well what that was for," she pulls her foot away from his shin. "Come on, no more games. You act like a little creep but I know you have a brain in there, I see it working whenever you battle. Do you want to be rivals or not? Because if not—"

"You know, isn't it kind of weird for you to just setup this date and then refuse to call it one? What kind of mademoiselle does that?"

Serena sips her shake—hard, with reckless abandon and mad, twitching 's hardly much of the sugary, coma-inducing concoction left, and she doubts she'll be in good spirits by the time it dries up—especially since the option of dumping it on him just went out the window.

"You think if this were a date," she humors him for reasons even she cannot comprehend. "I would be waiting for you to ask me something romantic, right?"

"Huh," Calem pauses to mull on the matter. "I guess, but—"

"Unless you're blind, you'll notice that we're not doing that, so why are you jumping to all these needless conclusions?"

"Maybe I was waiting on you to ask!"

"The girl never asks."

"Sometimes she does! You know, if she really likes the guy or something like that, or if the boy is too afraid to—"

"No, she doesn't. It's always the guy—ugh, why am I even talking to you about this? You've gotten us completely offtrack!"

"Because you wanted it to happen?"

"The only thing I want to happen is for us to become bitter rivals so that I can feel an extra sliver of satisfaction when I finally pummel you into the earth like the sap that you are—"

"That sounds great and all," there's a break in his words as he daintily slips his hand into hers. "But here's a completely different yet equally viable idea: why not take it a step further?"

"You have five seconds to let go of me."

"You said you wanted to see us develop together as trainers, right?"

"Right, but what does that have to do with—?"

Calem cuts her off again because he's an ignoramus. "You also said that I'm strong. 'The strongest' if I recall correctly."

"I take it back," she says as she fruitlessly tries to take back her hand. "You're not better than me."

"Well... I disagree. So there."

"Are you going somewhere with this or what?"

"As a matter of fact, I am! Ready for it? Three, two, one... Okay, hear me out! Rivals schmivals, let's be traveling companions instead. We'll be able to keep tabs on each other like you desperately want and neither of us will be able to get too far ahead or too far behind the other! We'll be on equal footing, and of course, we'll battle a ton along the way even though I'm pretty much going to win every time guaranteed."

"That's quite a lot of stock you're putting in yourself," she says while squeezing him. "If you leave your expectations unchecked, it's only going to hurt more when someone finally shows you the door."

"So... That's a yes?"

Sounds of Fletchlings and idle background chatter fill in for the deathly silence that falls over them. Somewhere amidst the awkwardness, Serena manages to wrestle her hand out of his grip.

"I work pretty fast. How do I know you won't be dead weight? I'm not going to be taking things lightly."

"Aww, what? You should!" Calem frowns. "Part of the fun of an adventure is taking it at your own pace. All you seem to do is focus on the negatives and hardships of a journey. That can get you stressed out. You need to accentuate the positives!"

"Accentuate...the positives?" Serena blinks, hesitant yet intrigued. "The only reason I focus on the negatives is to offset my expectations. If I set my expectations high, I'll always end up disappointed. If I realistically expect things, then anything unexpected becomes a pleasant surprise."

"Alright... I guess I can understand that, sort of, kind of, maybe, but! Look at it this way—would you rather be super hyped and then crushed for a little bit when things don't work out, or would you rather be the wet blanket in the room because you think everything is going to be worse than horrible?"

"I never said that! I said I think realistically.

"Which clearly means you want everything to suck."

Another round of abominable silence nudges the trainers to a conclusion.

"I guess we could both learn a thing or two from each other, huh?"

With her milkshake finished and her own proposal at a standstill, Serena concedes.

"I would like that."

"Hm?"

"What you asked," she makes no attempt to look at him. "Just don't fall behind."

For Calem and his wildly vivid imagination, her approval (even if reluctantly) is the equivalent of uncharted territory. To commemorate the monumental stepping stone in their relationship that everyone and their mother can see from a mile away, he once again tries to test his luck with her.

"So is this a date now, ma chérie?"

"Persistent, aren't we?"

"Come on," he pleads quite pitifully. "We're companions now!"

"Traveling companions."

"Still?"

"Don't push your luck," she shifts her eyes in either direction. "Especially not with others watching."

"Please!" he waves them off. "They're too engrossed in themselves, they don't care about us! Ah, I feel a one liner coming up! None of them care about you... the way I do!"

"Please don't twinkle in my direction," Serena asks while taking a gander under their table, having felt something on her legs.

"And don't play footsies with me either."

"It's what people do on dates," the boy explains, his smile dumb and eyes glossy. "Along with long walks on the beach and waxing poetic, or so I've heard."

"There's hardly anything poetic about you," Serena grins from the excellency of her ice cold burn. Calem reaches for her hand again in the interim, possibly in some dreamy endeavor to seal their bond with a gentleman's kiss, but she squeezes him with the grip of an iron maiden before he can even so much as think about it.

"You better know where you're going with this, neighbor."

"A-aah! Y-yes ma'am!" Calem squeaks, shivering from head to toe as a kiss is placed upon his writhing fingers.