Together, for rhubarb_tart
Title: Together
Author: troideleven
Rating: PG-13 for nothing really
Verse: Games/Mystery Dungeon 2
Characters: Grovyle/human!Heroine
Summary: One eternity and then some after they were separated, snow falls on a new day where they can finally be together. This is the future they always dreamed of. For rhubarb_tart.
Warnings: Nothing objectionable, I hope.
I don't know which anon you are - the one who prompted the Hero/Grovyle one-sentence or the one who filled it, if either. I thought you must be the one who posted the prompt on page 12, since both specifically mentioned evolution among other things... Anyway, my point is you could always share this with the other anon(s) on your journal, or something, since this pairing doesn't get much attention on the meme.
Anyway, Merry Christmas, and here is your present!
* * *
The morning light made another pass through the mountains, seeming to catch a crystalline peak and glance off it like a mirror. He could imagine it had a clear, pure ringing sound just out of his perception as it flew through the air, so bright, warm, beautiful.
He clenched his arms inward, around his chest, where Celebi had lain. She was gone now, and Dusknoir had vanished, too. His own body was beginning to feel light, and he could sense the yawing chasm of history moving to swallow him up. He'd been preparing himself for this, but in these final moments the feeling of loss was unbearably painful - not for his own short-to-live existence. No.
All he could feel was sorrow that he would never see her again.
He didn't cry out as his body started to fade. This was what needed to be done so the future could be a peaceful one. This sacrifice was so she would have happiness...but that didn't dull the ache.
Finally, he faced the glow of dawn one last time, tears in his eyes, and he whispered her name. And he was gone.
- - -
...
Is this oblivion?
Everything was a confused jumble of sights and sounds, shapes and colors, voices and shouts. He watched as he saw light for the first time through a crack in his egg, he watched as an excited little girl picked him up and held him, he watched as he trained together with the young woman, he watched as the great Dialga tore the world apart with its rage. He watched as a dark shadow attacked them in an insubstantial realm of time, as he almost killed the one he loved for standing in his way, as he and Dusknoir tumbled again into the future.
He watched as he collapsed on the icy mountaintop, and he watched as whispered his last word.
As he saw all these things, he became aware of a sensation of cold, as though something chilled was pressing against him... Surely the abyss was a place devoid of feeling? But that cool, wet something remained, and he thought he could even feel it against one side.
Wait. That meant something, too... He shook his head to try and clear his thoughts, and some of the snow caught in his mouth.
Snow?
Grovyle opened his eyes. He was lying in the snow on the peak of Vast Ice Mountain. Beside him were Celebi and Dusknoir, intact and breathing, each also stirring and siting up with a start. They were alive.
He looked out, his gaze sweeping the horizon, and the morning sun seemed to call to him in greeting. That sound, the sound of the dawn - he'd been right. He could hear it now, echoes of it carried to him on the wind, and it was a ringing note of joy.
Finally, when they had finished speaking with Dialga, he walked to the ridge and called into the sunset:
The wind...the light...if you can carry my message, please take it to her...
"We are still alive!"
- - -
Through a hundred threads of time, through a swirling mass of space, out of a high pure blue sky, down to a peaceful beach of soft sand...
To the waves and the shore where she stands with Squirtle, crying with happiness that she will not vanish, but weeping for Grovyle who she knows is gone...
The ocean breeze and pale white light bring an echo from time and darkness.
When she suddenly stops to listen, Squirtle asks, "What's wrong, Red?"
"It's nothing," she says. The response is automatic, but for some reason it is the truth. She can't put her finger on why, but she knows that now nothing is wrong.
Somewhere, sometime in the future, everything is going to be all right.
- - -
He wakes to find a light snowfall defying the sunrise's warmth on day nine hundred and twenty-eight of the new future. Two years, six months, and fifteen days without her. More than three times three hundred days that he has climbed through the worst blizzards, through hail and sleet, through fog and dark mornings, to the summit of Vast Ice Mountain where he waits for her.
In this new future, the mountain range was the only place he knew - the only place that hadn't changed. His one hope was that she could remember their original future (or was that past, now?), too, and would one day find him atop that icy peak.
If she even existed any longer.
He stood, taking a moment to balance his still unfamiliar, broader frame. He hadn't merely grown. The daily summit and descent, and the countless Pokémon he'd fought on his way, had changed him into this - form. His legs were thicker, the thin leaves on his arms were more a part of his body now, his tail had grown and changed shape, and his sleek and unadorned head was that of a Sceptile.
His routine had hardened his body and soul as effectively as any deliberate training. The night previous, which happened to be his first in that new body, he slept on the mountaintop; before, he had thought a Grass-type such as himself could never survive it.
He couldn't remember what he thought before lying in the snow. Today, he would descend from the mountain and spend the night where he usually did - a not-too-distant seaside ridge that reminds him of Sharpedo Bluff. It brought him precious memories of the nights he spent there with her, nights when there were no barriers of time or space and they were one.
He began pacing, not out of disquiet but to keep warm. Suddenly he remembered the one other night he spent on the mountain, before he evolved. He had been so close to falling asleep, and that would have been the end of him, but then...
It was Celebi who came and found him. She pleaded with him to leave the mountain range, to have a future of his own. She couldn't bear the thought of him never ending his march up and down the peak, but she didn't know how close he'd been to ending it just then... And he did come down. They descended together, not a single word being exchanged - he did not speak anymore - and finally he stood ready to move in another direction, with her.
Then he had begun walking in the direction of the cliffs.
She shouted after him, too stunned even to follow. It had broken her heart, he knew. She had saved his life on that mountaintop, and all he did was continue the same existence which had driven him to give up hope and drift so close to a never ending sleep in the first place.
Since that day he had been alone.
He was practically a legend of Vast Ice Mountain by that time, but no one would miss him if he just stayed a while up there among the snow and froze to death. Yes, he had no pretenses about how his life would end...any chance of a romanticized disappearance was lost when he and the other two were brought back from the void.
He doesn't yet doubt that she still exists, but he fears that someday he will. If that's the case, his options are to allow it to happen or to spend a few more nights on the summit. This time, Celebi will not appear to save him.
What stops him is obvious.
But is it enough? He didn't dwell on it. Either he will come down from the mountain and climb it another nine hundred times, or he won't.
- - -
Eventually he is back atop the cliffs, gazing out at the black blank night-lit ocean.
The starlight dancing ripples on the surface playing tricks with his mind. He is half-asleep and sunlight on moon rock and water deeper than the heavens it reflects.
She comes and sits down then, looking out over that same strange vista of sea. "I had a friend once," she murmurs into the wind. "We used to have a place of our own just like this. If you remember him...if you can bring my message to him, then please..."
It is thirty seconds of absolute silence when she's finished speaking before he realizes he is not dreaming.
In the darkness, she doesn't see him until he is very near. When she looks up and sees him, her eyes widen, and she whispers, "Grovyle?"
How strange she still calls him that.
They are tumbling together onto the lightly dusted cliff top, her kisses are landing all over his head, face, and neck, and he cannot tell they both have new bodies for the ease with which they mesh.
"I waited for you," he says, the sound of his own voice completely alien to him, and that is all he can say.
She doesn't have the breath to respond. She is holding him tightly and in a moment where their motion stops, they realize at the same time just how close they are, how heady to joy of reunion is, and how under that spell they both think the same thing...
Clothes are not something he is used to, but they are quickly forgotten.
He looks her in the eye, and he thinks of asking something, but in an instant it feels silly even to have wondered. There is no doubt of what she wants; what they want. If their love can survive transformations, time, and space, then two different forms will not stop this deepest expression of it.
The only thing she thinks from that moment on it him, the only thing he knows is her, and nothing could be more right.
- - -
She ran her hand over the ridges on his head. "You've grown." She didn't say changed.
"I don't recognize myself," he admitted, "even thought it's been months." His gaze traveled over her bare skin. "But I recognize you."
She laughed, a little self-conscious, but in the dark she didn't worry about it. "You'll always be Grovyle to me...but you've grown up. I can see it in your eyes."
He struggled with the question for a moment, but ultimately gave in. "Where were you? Were you a part of this future the whole time?"
"I was."
He nodded slowly. "Did you look for me?"
Her head shook in a movement opposite his, and she lies closer against his chest. "I couldn't."
"...Why?"
"I said I was a part of this future..." She looked up at him, eyes catching the moonlight. "But you weren't, Grovyle."
His own yellow eyes were under a knit brow. "What do you mean?"
"You've been becoming a part of the real future, not the other way around. You thought you were waiting for me," she whispered, her gaze becoming distant. "But I was waiting for you, too."
He didn't say anything.
"You never left that mountain, not really." She smiled sadly. "You've been trapped there, I guess... I'll try to explain what Celebi told me."
She stood, and he respectfully averted his eyes while she dressed. "Celebi?"
"She told me you were so committed to waiting for me, so focused on that mountain and on the past somehow catching up with the future, that you couldn't really be a part of the present. So she tried to convince you to move on, or move forward, but you..."
"I was a fool," he said. His eyes were fixed on the ground. "All that time...I was stuck in the past, waiting, instead of meeting you in the present?"
"You are stubborn."
He looked up, startled, and she laughed. "Don't worry. You couldn't have known. Even Celebi couldn't really come into that past with you, so she had no way to actually tell you... If you climbed a mountain every day to wait for me...isn't that romantic?"
He again couldn't find the words to say. He had kept them apart like that, and she still cared for him?
"We made it, Grovyle," she said, settling in against him with a comfortable sigh. "This is the future we dreamed of... a future together..." She closed her eyes and let the sound of his breathing lull her. "I don't think it was possible for us to meet any sooner."
He wrapped her in his arms so she would be warm, and let his own eyelids droops as well. "Thank you..." Just as he felt himself slipping into a serene slumber, he heard her murmur something very softly.
"What?" he said quietly.
"I said I almost ruined it," she whispered, and he realized she was crying. "At the end...after we beat Primal Dialga..."
He didn't need to hear this, but he would not hush her, either. He never told her to do anything; he rarely asked.
"When it was time to use the Gears to change the future...I hesitated..."
She meant she didn't want to be erased. He understood that.
But she could tell that's what he took her to mean, and she shook her head. "It wasn't me. The lake trio...they had already told me that only the future would change, and from then on I would still exist."
"It was you," she whispered. "I didn't want you to disappear...even though that meant you would suffer through the old future we hated so much..." She made herself small against him. "I was that close to ruining everything..."
"But you didn't," he said, and it took all his strength to keep the quiver or tears from his voice. "You didn't..." His eyes were another story.
"Grovyle...thank you..." Her words were steadier. "Thank you for everything. Alone, I could never have changed the future... Well, I suppose it's the present now, isn't it? I don't mean just when I became a Pokémon. The strength to start this fight, to go back in time...that all came from you."
"No," he said; whispered, for the calmer her voice became the shakier was his. "I couldn't have done anything if it hadn't been for you. You were...you are...my everything..."
She sighed again, longer and sleepier this time. "Do you know what day it is?"
"Hmm?"
"It's Christmas Day...or it will be soon anyway..." Her eyes were closing once more. "I think you are definitely the best Christmas present I've ever gotten..."
Looking at the light blanket of snow, he could somehow tell she was right. "Then...Merry Christmas."
She took his hand. "Grovyle...let's never be apart." And her breathing became heavier as she fell asleep.
He blinked the tears away. "We won't."
They drifted off to an untroubled sleep, the moon shining with the promise of a dawn just on the other side of the sea, waiting to break with the crystal clear note of a future ready to begin...a future together.
* * *
To Rhubarb_Tart
From Anon
With Love
Author: troideleven
Rating: PG-13 for nothing really
Verse: Games/Mystery Dungeon 2
Characters: Grovyle/human!Heroine
Summary: One eternity and then some after they were separated, snow falls on a new day where they can finally be together. This is the future they always dreamed of. For rhubarb_tart.
Warnings: Nothing objectionable, I hope.
I don't know which anon you are - the one who prompted the Hero/Grovyle one-sentence or the one who filled it, if either. I thought you must be the one who posted the prompt on page 12, since both specifically mentioned evolution among other things... Anyway, my point is you could always share this with the other anon(s) on your journal, or something, since this pairing doesn't get much attention on the meme.
Anyway, Merry Christmas, and here is your present!
* * *
The morning light made another pass through the mountains, seeming to catch a crystalline peak and glance off it like a mirror. He could imagine it had a clear, pure ringing sound just out of his perception as it flew through the air, so bright, warm, beautiful.
He clenched his arms inward, around his chest, where Celebi had lain. She was gone now, and Dusknoir had vanished, too. His own body was beginning to feel light, and he could sense the yawing chasm of history moving to swallow him up. He'd been preparing himself for this, but in these final moments the feeling of loss was unbearably painful - not for his own short-to-live existence. No.
All he could feel was sorrow that he would never see her again.
He didn't cry out as his body started to fade. This was what needed to be done so the future could be a peaceful one. This sacrifice was so she would have happiness...but that didn't dull the ache.
Finally, he faced the glow of dawn one last time, tears in his eyes, and he whispered her name. And he was gone.
- - -
...
Is this oblivion?
Everything was a confused jumble of sights and sounds, shapes and colors, voices and shouts. He watched as he saw light for the first time through a crack in his egg, he watched as an excited little girl picked him up and held him, he watched as he trained together with the young woman, he watched as the great Dialga tore the world apart with its rage. He watched as a dark shadow attacked them in an insubstantial realm of time, as he almost killed the one he loved for standing in his way, as he and Dusknoir tumbled again into the future.
He watched as he collapsed on the icy mountaintop, and he watched as whispered his last word.
As he saw all these things, he became aware of a sensation of cold, as though something chilled was pressing against him... Surely the abyss was a place devoid of feeling? But that cool, wet something remained, and he thought he could even feel it against one side.
Wait. That meant something, too... He shook his head to try and clear his thoughts, and some of the snow caught in his mouth.
Snow?
Grovyle opened his eyes. He was lying in the snow on the peak of Vast Ice Mountain. Beside him were Celebi and Dusknoir, intact and breathing, each also stirring and siting up with a start. They were alive.
He looked out, his gaze sweeping the horizon, and the morning sun seemed to call to him in greeting. That sound, the sound of the dawn - he'd been right. He could hear it now, echoes of it carried to him on the wind, and it was a ringing note of joy.
Finally, when they had finished speaking with Dialga, he walked to the ridge and called into the sunset:
The wind...the light...if you can carry my message, please take it to her...
"We are still alive!"
- - -
Through a hundred threads of time, through a swirling mass of space, out of a high pure blue sky, down to a peaceful beach of soft sand...
To the waves and the shore where she stands with Squirtle, crying with happiness that she will not vanish, but weeping for Grovyle who she knows is gone...
The ocean breeze and pale white light bring an echo from time and darkness.
When she suddenly stops to listen, Squirtle asks, "What's wrong, Red?"
"It's nothing," she says. The response is automatic, but for some reason it is the truth. She can't put her finger on why, but she knows that now nothing is wrong.
Somewhere, sometime in the future, everything is going to be all right.
- - -
He wakes to find a light snowfall defying the sunrise's warmth on day nine hundred and twenty-eight of the new future. Two years, six months, and fifteen days without her. More than three times three hundred days that he has climbed through the worst blizzards, through hail and sleet, through fog and dark mornings, to the summit of Vast Ice Mountain where he waits for her.
In this new future, the mountain range was the only place he knew - the only place that hadn't changed. His one hope was that she could remember their original future (or was that past, now?), too, and would one day find him atop that icy peak.
If she even existed any longer.
He stood, taking a moment to balance his still unfamiliar, broader frame. He hadn't merely grown. The daily summit and descent, and the countless Pokémon he'd fought on his way, had changed him into this - form. His legs were thicker, the thin leaves on his arms were more a part of his body now, his tail had grown and changed shape, and his sleek and unadorned head was that of a Sceptile.
His routine had hardened his body and soul as effectively as any deliberate training. The night previous, which happened to be his first in that new body, he slept on the mountaintop; before, he had thought a Grass-type such as himself could never survive it.
He couldn't remember what he thought before lying in the snow. Today, he would descend from the mountain and spend the night where he usually did - a not-too-distant seaside ridge that reminds him of Sharpedo Bluff. It brought him precious memories of the nights he spent there with her, nights when there were no barriers of time or space and they were one.
He began pacing, not out of disquiet but to keep warm. Suddenly he remembered the one other night he spent on the mountain, before he evolved. He had been so close to falling asleep, and that would have been the end of him, but then...
It was Celebi who came and found him. She pleaded with him to leave the mountain range, to have a future of his own. She couldn't bear the thought of him never ending his march up and down the peak, but she didn't know how close he'd been to ending it just then... And he did come down. They descended together, not a single word being exchanged - he did not speak anymore - and finally he stood ready to move in another direction, with her.
Then he had begun walking in the direction of the cliffs.
She shouted after him, too stunned even to follow. It had broken her heart, he knew. She had saved his life on that mountaintop, and all he did was continue the same existence which had driven him to give up hope and drift so close to a never ending sleep in the first place.
Since that day he had been alone.
He was practically a legend of Vast Ice Mountain by that time, but no one would miss him if he just stayed a while up there among the snow and froze to death. Yes, he had no pretenses about how his life would end...any chance of a romanticized disappearance was lost when he and the other two were brought back from the void.
He doesn't yet doubt that she still exists, but he fears that someday he will. If that's the case, his options are to allow it to happen or to spend a few more nights on the summit. This time, Celebi will not appear to save him.
What stops him is obvious.
But is it enough? He didn't dwell on it. Either he will come down from the mountain and climb it another nine hundred times, or he won't.
- - -
Eventually he is back atop the cliffs, gazing out at the black blank night-lit ocean.
The starlight dancing ripples on the surface playing tricks with his mind. He is half-asleep and sunlight on moon rock and water deeper than the heavens it reflects.
She comes and sits down then, looking out over that same strange vista of sea. "I had a friend once," she murmurs into the wind. "We used to have a place of our own just like this. If you remember him...if you can bring my message to him, then please..."
It is thirty seconds of absolute silence when she's finished speaking before he realizes he is not dreaming.
In the darkness, she doesn't see him until he is very near. When she looks up and sees him, her eyes widen, and she whispers, "Grovyle?"
How strange she still calls him that.
They are tumbling together onto the lightly dusted cliff top, her kisses are landing all over his head, face, and neck, and he cannot tell they both have new bodies for the ease with which they mesh.
"I waited for you," he says, the sound of his own voice completely alien to him, and that is all he can say.
She doesn't have the breath to respond. She is holding him tightly and in a moment where their motion stops, they realize at the same time just how close they are, how heady to joy of reunion is, and how under that spell they both think the same thing...
Clothes are not something he is used to, but they are quickly forgotten.
He looks her in the eye, and he thinks of asking something, but in an instant it feels silly even to have wondered. There is no doubt of what she wants; what they want. If their love can survive transformations, time, and space, then two different forms will not stop this deepest expression of it.
The only thing she thinks from that moment on it him, the only thing he knows is her, and nothing could be more right.
- - -
She ran her hand over the ridges on his head. "You've grown." She didn't say changed.
"I don't recognize myself," he admitted, "even thought it's been months." His gaze traveled over her bare skin. "But I recognize you."
She laughed, a little self-conscious, but in the dark she didn't worry about it. "You'll always be Grovyle to me...but you've grown up. I can see it in your eyes."
He struggled with the question for a moment, but ultimately gave in. "Where were you? Were you a part of this future the whole time?"
"I was."
He nodded slowly. "Did you look for me?"
Her head shook in a movement opposite his, and she lies closer against his chest. "I couldn't."
"...Why?"
"I said I was a part of this future..." She looked up at him, eyes catching the moonlight. "But you weren't, Grovyle."
His own yellow eyes were under a knit brow. "What do you mean?"
"You've been becoming a part of the real future, not the other way around. You thought you were waiting for me," she whispered, her gaze becoming distant. "But I was waiting for you, too."
He didn't say anything.
"You never left that mountain, not really." She smiled sadly. "You've been trapped there, I guess... I'll try to explain what Celebi told me."
She stood, and he respectfully averted his eyes while she dressed. "Celebi?"
"She told me you were so committed to waiting for me, so focused on that mountain and on the past somehow catching up with the future, that you couldn't really be a part of the present. So she tried to convince you to move on, or move forward, but you..."
"I was a fool," he said. His eyes were fixed on the ground. "All that time...I was stuck in the past, waiting, instead of meeting you in the present?"
"You are stubborn."
He looked up, startled, and she laughed. "Don't worry. You couldn't have known. Even Celebi couldn't really come into that past with you, so she had no way to actually tell you... If you climbed a mountain every day to wait for me...isn't that romantic?"
He again couldn't find the words to say. He had kept them apart like that, and she still cared for him?
"We made it, Grovyle," she said, settling in against him with a comfortable sigh. "This is the future we dreamed of... a future together..." She closed her eyes and let the sound of his breathing lull her. "I don't think it was possible for us to meet any sooner."
He wrapped her in his arms so she would be warm, and let his own eyelids droops as well. "Thank you..." Just as he felt himself slipping into a serene slumber, he heard her murmur something very softly.
"What?" he said quietly.
"I said I almost ruined it," she whispered, and he realized she was crying. "At the end...after we beat Primal Dialga..."
He didn't need to hear this, but he would not hush her, either. He never told her to do anything; he rarely asked.
"When it was time to use the Gears to change the future...I hesitated..."
She meant she didn't want to be erased. He understood that.
But she could tell that's what he took her to mean, and she shook her head. "It wasn't me. The lake trio...they had already told me that only the future would change, and from then on I would still exist."
"It was you," she whispered. "I didn't want you to disappear...even though that meant you would suffer through the old future we hated so much..." She made herself small against him. "I was that close to ruining everything..."
"But you didn't," he said, and it took all his strength to keep the quiver or tears from his voice. "You didn't..." His eyes were another story.
"Grovyle...thank you..." Her words were steadier. "Thank you for everything. Alone, I could never have changed the future... Well, I suppose it's the present now, isn't it? I don't mean just when I became a Pokémon. The strength to start this fight, to go back in time...that all came from you."
"No," he said; whispered, for the calmer her voice became the shakier was his. "I couldn't have done anything if it hadn't been for you. You were...you are...my everything..."
She sighed again, longer and sleepier this time. "Do you know what day it is?"
"Hmm?"
"It's Christmas Day...or it will be soon anyway..." Her eyes were closing once more. "I think you are definitely the best Christmas present I've ever gotten..."
Looking at the light blanket of snow, he could somehow tell she was right. "Then...Merry Christmas."
She took his hand. "Grovyle...let's never be apart." And her breathing became heavier as she fell asleep.
He blinked the tears away. "We won't."
They drifted off to an untroubled sleep, the moon shining with the promise of a dawn just on the other side of the sea, waiting to break with the crystal clear note of a future ready to begin...a future together.
* * *
To Rhubarb_Tart
From Anon
With Love