Riona (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rionaleonhart) wrote2010-02-15 02:30 pm
rionaleonhart) wrote2010-02-15 02:30 pm
Fanfiction: Not Set in Stone (David Mitchell, Charlie Brooker, Pokémon AU)
(EDIT: Hello, if you've stumbled across this! I hope that you enjoy the story, or at least that wondering who would write such a thing affords you a moment's amusement. If I might make a request, though: please don't try to bring this to the attention of the gentlemen involved. I'm just a fan; this is just for fun; I really don't want to make them uncomfortable.
In the hopefully-unlikely event that Mitchell or Brooker do find this, they should of course feel free to laugh, roll their eyes, ask me to take it down or review it scathingly on a new series called Internetwipe as they see fit.)
I'm really quite worried about this, because I've never taken my first steps into a new fandom with such a long fic before. I do hope it's worked. (Please do not attempt to take moral guidance from this fic, because it could just as easily have been titled The Unexpected Pleasures of Hypocrisy or Harass Your Friends.)
With thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
zeitheist, to whom I owe a fair bit of the inspiration for this fic.
Title: Not Set in Stone
Fandoms: British Comedy/Pokémon
Characters: David Mitchell, Charlie Brooker
Rating: R, but only for language
Wordcount: 6,500ish
Summary: Because obviously what this fandom needs is a Pokémon AU. Charlie Brooker is the Pewter City Gym Leader. David Mitchell has never owned a Pokémon. They do not, alas, fight crime.
As acquaintances go, it’s perhaps not the most promising start.
It’s auspicious enough at first. David is out for an hour’s walk on the borders of Pewter City. There are Pidgey cooing somewhere nearby, and the sun is out, and it is, if he tunes out the battle cries of trainers on the mountainside above him, a perfectly pleasant day.
And then there’s a crashing sound, and David turns to find the entire side of the mountain hurtling down towards him.
Oh, excellent. He’s going to be killed. Not that he’s ever expected an especially glamorous end, but he’s always rather hoped for something slightly less unpleasant than ‘buried under a pile of rock in his thirties’.
Someone is shouting something, but he can’t make out what over the sound of his own heart thumping in his ears (which he’s going to miss) and the sound of tons of rock thundering in his direction (which he isn’t), and then the landslide is upon him and... no, wait. He’s enclosed in a... cave of rock, somehow. He can hear the landslide passing by outside, leaving him unharmed.
Hyperventilating, David barely manages to register the Onix in the coils of which he is shielded raising its head and looking down at him before he, rather embarrassingly, faints.
-
When David returns to the world, he is lying in a strange bed in a darkened room, staring at the ceiling. He twitches his feet and hands, experimentally; nothing seems to be broken. If he tries to remember the past few hours, the impressions that come back to him are garbled and confused and possibly half-dreamt: movement, warm hands on his back, cold stone against his face, someone calling him a ‘fucking idiot’.
He can hear someone moving around nearby.
“Er, hello?” he says, cautiously. Well, his voice still works. It’s not quite loud enough, though, it seems, and he has to take a deep breath and try again before who he assumes is the owner of the bed comes through the door.
“Hi,” the owner says. “How’re you feeling?”
It’s a man, perhaps a few years older than David, and – oh, shit – he looks familiar. This has the potential to be mortifying. “I’m feeling all right, thanks. Er, how are you?”
The man gives him an odd look. “Fine, but I wasn’t the one who got caught in a rock slide. I’m not sure my wellbeing is the most pressing question.”
Right. No particular sign that David should know who he is. David’s sure he’s seen him before, though. “What exactly happened?”
“You nearly got a mountain in the face. Saw you at the last second, sent my Onix to help. I was shitting myself. You sure you don’t need the hospital or anything?”
The mention of the Onix stirs something in David’s memory – something other than his recent Onix-averted almost-demise, obviously – and he makes the connection. “Oh, you’re the Gym Leader here, aren’t you? Brooker... er, Brooker something.”
“Charlie Brooker.”
“Sorry.”
“I don’t know, it seems fair enough; I don’t know your name.”
“David,” David says. “Mitchell.” He suddenly feels selfconscious about being in this man’s bed, and, after a quick check to make sure he’s wearing trousers, he slips out from under the covers and sits on the edge of the mattress. “Thank you for... well, for saving my life, I suppose.”
Brooker looks a bit uncomfortable, as if he’s about to reveal that the afterlife in fact consists of a bed and a room and a Gym Leader. Instead, he says, “Well, it was sort of my – did you have any Pokémon with you?”
It was sort of my fault, David’s mind fills in. Not inconceivable, if he had an Onix nearby. He decides not to find out whether that was what Brooker was actually going to say, because knowing for certain that Brooker was responsible for causing his almost-death as well as preventing it will probably make this conversation quite a lot more awkward. “No.”
“Oh, thank fuck for that,” Brooker breathes. “I couldn’t find any on you, but I didn’t know whether that was because they’d been carried away by the landslide or what.”
“Well, as I’ve never owned a Pokémon, I can assure you that’s not something you need to worry about.”
Brooker breaks into a bizarre, high-pitched burst of laughter. Of course. “Are you joking?”
David can’t hold himself in. “You see, this is how everyone reacts! There’s no particular reason why everyone on the planet should own a Pokémon; it’s just become expected to the point at which it’s almost impossible to function in society without them. Ferries and planes and public transport are becoming more and more rare because everyone is using their Pokémon for travel, and that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with riding a Ponyta to work, but I don’t want to be forced into depending on Pokémon because our society fails to take into consideration the possibility that someone could live quite happily without a Pokéball on his belt, and that attitude is the reason it’s eventually going to happen.”
Brooker is watching him, eyebrows raised. David suspects that he may not be making an excellent impression, but it’s difficult not to look thoroughly mad when he finds himself on a topic about which he feels so strongly.
“Not that I’m saying you’re single-handedly responsible for humanity’s loss of independence,” he clarifies. “I’m just saying you’re not helping.”
“I think you were eliciting disbelief on purpose,” Brooker says. “You didn’t need to tell me you don’t own a Pokémon, but you’ve obviously been dying to go into that speech.”
“There may be an element of that,” David admits, with a sheepish smile. “But it is something I feel quite passionately about.”
“So you’ve actually never had a Pokémon?” Brooker asks, looking at him as if David is a fascinating but potentially dangerous new Fire type.
“Astonishing though it may sound, it seems to be possible.”
“Who doesn’t have a Pokémon? It’s like you’ve opted out of having... legs.”
“Well, as it happens, I was born with legs,” David says. “I didn’t emerge from the womb with a Tentacool attached to my face.”
“You probably weren’t born with clothes either, but you don’t seem to have any problems wearing them,” Brooker points out. He sounds incredulous, but his incredulity seems more amused than hostile, which is reassuring.
David laughs. “I might have had to overcome a huge inner conflict before pulling my pants on. You don’t know.”
Brooker nods, mock-serious. “Did you?”
“For the sake of the argument, I suppose I’ll have to say yes,” David says. “No; clothes have long been established as a requirement for getting by in this society. Pokémon haven’t, yet, but they’re well on their way. Do you have any idea of how many potential employers ask what Pokémon you have and how you get on with them, even if the job has nothing to do with Pokémon? Do you know what percentage of my taxes goes towards supporting the meaningless pissing contest that is the Pokémon League? Do – ” He momentarily stumbles, seeing Brooker’s smirk and remembering that the person to whom he is speaking is in fact a part of that meaningless pissing contest, but quickly recollects himself. “While we’re on the subject of the inflated importance of Pokémon, can you explain why there’s a Pokémon Centre three minutes from my front door, but I have to walk to Viridian City if I need the hospital?”
“I’m just having trouble imagining why anyone would resist getting a Pokémon. I mean, you’ve got no means of defending yourself, have you? If it weren’t for my Onix, you probably would’ve been killed.”
“Y-es,” David concedes. “I’m willing to acknowledge there are situations in which having a Pokémon might be useful; I just don’t think they should be a necessity.”
“Tell me,” Brooker says, “do you have electric lighting in your house, or do you just wander around with a lantern?”
“That’s entirely different. Buying a lamp doesn’t commit you to the care of a living creature. Irritating children don’t take your having a lamp as an invitation for them to hit you with theirs.”
“Oh, you’re afraid of battling, then?”
“I don’t particularly want to battle,” David says, carefully. He is, in fact, pissing-himself scared of Pokémon battles, but that’s no reason not to imply otherwise. “As a Gym Leader, I imagine you’re a fan.”
“Well, yes, but that’s mostly because of the satisfaction I get from destroying twelve-year-olds. I’m not going to judge you if you don’t share my desperate need for ego-validation. What I do judge you for is your refusal to get a Pokémon on, as far as I can tell, the grounds of ‘oh, everyone else has one’. Maybe there’s a reason for that. You do have a computer, don’t you?”
It’s not just snobbery, David doesn’t say; it’s also his fear of change. “I have a computer, yes.”
“So you didn’t want a Pokémon when you were ten?”
“I felt I wouldn’t be capable of supporting one.”
Brooker bursts out laughing. “No, you didn’t. Nobody’s prudent when they’re ten.”
“All right,” David says; “I was horribly afraid of most Pokémon when I was ten. The point is that I’ve lived perfectly happily for several decades now without a Pokémon, and I don’t see why that should be such an astonishing thing.” The impact of his words may, he feels, be somewhat impaired by his inability to stop grinning. He wonders, not for the first time, whether it is entirely normal to enjoy arguing as much as he does. Then again, Brooker has been smiling for most of the exchange as well.
“You should get a Pokémon,” Brooker says. “Just see how you get on with it. Then you can challenge me for a Boulderbadge; it’ll be nice to fight someone who isn’t a foetus.”
“Oh, no,” David says, with a small laugh, “I really don’t think so.”
Brooker shrugs. “Suit yourself. I honestly think you’re missing out, though.”
There’s a silence, and David senses that the conversation has come to an end. It’s a pity, really; he was rather enjoying it, despite the conflict. Perhaps even because of the conflict.
“I suppose I’d better be going home,” David says. “Thank you for, you know.”
“No problem,” Brooker says. “Just try not to anger any more mountainsides. We’re just behind the Gym, so I’m guessing you’ll know your way back from there. It was nice to meet you.” He barely hesitates before adding, “You enormous Pokémon-less freak.”
-
A couple of days later, David is walking past the Gym and hears echoing crashes coming from within. It sounds as if a fight is in progress, and, struck by a strange impulse, he slips through the door and climbs the stairs to the viewing gallery.
Brooker’s opponent is a teenage girl; her Ivysaur is standing in the middle of the arena, glaring fearlessly up at the Onix towering over it. Both of the Pokémon look exhausted, but David knows the Ivysaur has a huge type advantage. The girl looks determined, one fist clenched in front of her; Brooker, leaning against a pillar on the other side of the field, looks slightly bored, as if he’s known the outcome of this match since it began.
“Onix,” he says. “Dig.”
“Ivysaur, use Vine Whip!” the girl calls.
The Onix lunges towards the ground, but it isn’t quite fast enough. David winces in a combination of sympathy and aural pain as the Onix bellows, sways and finally collapses under the assault of vines, barely missing the panting Ivysaur. The crash echoes horribly around the stone walls of the Gym; he doesn’t know how Brooker manages not to go mad, fighting in here every day.
Brooker recalls the Onix. “Well done,” he says. His tone isn’t especially encouraging – not bitter; just not interested – but the girl evidently doesn’t notice; she punches the air and runs out into the arena to embrace her Pokémon. David makes out the words ‘Pokémon Centre’ somewhere in her babbling to it.
“Hang on, don’t forget your badge,” Brooker says, in a slightly more amused tone.
As the main part of the spectacle appears to be over, David stands from the stone bench and makes his way back towards the stairs.
-
David reaches ground level just as the Ivysaur trainer is leaving the Gym. Brooker is still on the far side of the arena, gathering his Pokéballs together; it seems he’s finished with his battles for the day.
David suddenly feels awkward and sheepish – what if Brooker doesn’t particularly want to see him here? What if he’s just the irritating Pokémon-less stranger who had to be rescued from a landslide and then abused his rights as Brooker’s impromptu guest by launching into an extensive rant about the increasingly Pokémon-obsessed state of society? – but then Brooker catches sight of him and waves, and he supposes he can take that as an invitation to walk across the battlefield and say hello.
What he actually says, because he can’t quite resist, is, “Congratulations.”
“Fuck off,” Brooker says, with a laugh. “I have to hold back on badge matches, anyway; there are regulations.”
It’s friendly, and David feels himself relaxing a little more. “Oh, so you were trying to lose, were you?”
“I wasn’t trying to lose,” Brooker says. “I just... wasn’t trying quite as hard as I could have to win. It’s a very experienced Onix, but most new trainers come here first; it wouldn’t be fair if it turned out to be twice as tough as Cerulean City.”
“Ah,” David says, smiling. “You’re not quite as dedicated to destroying twelve-year-olds as you claim, then.”
“Well,” Brooker says, pitching it a little too high and drawing out the ‘e’, “some twelve-year-olds are cunts, and nobody can prove I’m not going easy on them. D’you want a cup of tea?”
-
Inevitably, the conversation over tea involves more probing into David’s Pokémon non-ownership, which, he feels, really shouldn’t be as interesting as it apparently is, but it’s bearably light-hearted, and at least David now has ‘you were beaten by a teenage girl’ to call upon in retaliation. Eventually, they move onto other topics: David’s aborted attempts at novels, Brooker’s failed Pokémon journey. Brooker becomes a much less intimidating figure as the conversation progresses; he’s foul-mouthed and opinionated, yes, but he’s also intelligent and interesting and, David slowly comes to realise, he has his own insecurities. Somewhere along the line, David finds himself beginning to think of him as ‘Charlie’.
“We should do this again,” Charlie says, after a lengthy debate on the worth of the Pokémon League as an institution, eventually ending in their uniting in their opinions of what a tit Lance is.
“I’d like that very much,” David says, and he realises as he says it that he is being completely sincere.
-
A few pub visits later, Charlie calls David and instructs him to meet him at the top of one of the smaller hills bordering the city. After the landslide incident, David isn’t terribly keen on wandering near the borders again, and something about Charlie’s voice over the phone makes him suspect he’s up to something, but he goes regardless.
The top of the hill is an almost-flat expanse of grass. Charlie is standing in the centre, his coat flapping in a mildly ominous manner.
“Today,” he says, “you are going to learn how to be a Pokémon trainer.”
Oh, dear. David had sort of started to hope that Charlie had given up on that. “Must I?”
“Look,” Charlie says, rolling his eyes, “I am going to drag you into the present day whether you like it or not.” He holds a Pokéball out to David.
David eyes it warily.
“Lesson one,” Charlie says. “It’s a ball. It’s not going to bite your bloody fingers off.”
“Well, that’s a good start.” David reaches out and takes it, cautiously, between finger and thumb. “Are you expecting me to catch a Pokémon with it? Because, as I understand it, it’s almost impossible to catch a Pokémon without a Pokémon of one’s own, which raises the question of how on Earth so many people get Pokémon in the first place.”
“Oh, well, it’s a good thing that ball already has a Pokémon in it, then.”
David almost drops the Pokéball. “What?”
“I’m not giving it to you,” Charlie clarifies. “I just thought I’d lend you a Pokémon for a while. Show you raising one’s not as scary as you think.”
“I’m already a bit scared, I have to say.” David almost rattles the ball, but checks himself; will that hurt the Pokémon? He has no idea what he’s doing. “What if I kill it?”
“Then we’ll no longer be friends,” Charlie says. “I might make my Onix eat you. But you’re not going to kill it.”
“This isn’t your Onix, then,” David says, in some relief.
“No! I’m not sending a beginner out into the world with an Onix; I’m not a maniac.”
David could contest that. He chooses not to. “So, er...”
“David,” Charlie says. “Tell me you know how to open a Pokéball.”
“Of course I know how to open a Pokéball.” It has one button on it; it can’t be that difficult. He presses it, barely manages to keep his hold on the Pokéball as it expands (he’d forgotten they did that), and then hesitates.
“Contrary to what TV may have taught you,” Charlie says, “it’s not actually compulsory to throw the ball across the room like a twat. Just press the button again.”
David presses the button again, and in a flash of red a metre-tall four-armed fierce-looking living boulder emerges, unintimidating in precisely no ways.
“You thought you’d break me in gently with a Graveler?”
“I’m a Gym Leader,” Charlie points out. “I don’t exactly have hundreds of Caterpie in my collection. My other Pokémon are Onix, which you’d probably kill yourself with, and Voltorb, which you’d definitely kill yourself with, so Graveler made the most sense.”
“Right,” David says, eyeing the Graveler. It eyes him back, with a malevolence that David hopes is in his imagination. “This conversation has thus far failed to fill me with confidence.”
“You’ll be fine. Honestly, raising a Pokémon is a piece of piss.”
“Please stop staring at me,” David says, addressing the Graveler. He’s a little surprised, but not displeased, when it grunts and looks away. “I don’t suppose you’ll be as obliging as your Pokémon if I ask you to abandon this ridiculous plan, will you?”
“You see, that’s why you want a Pokémon. They’re much less irritating than humans.”
“They’re only obedient if they’re well-trained, though, surely. I would inevitably fuck it up.”
“David, tens of thousands of idiotic ten-year-olds have managed to raise Pokémon. You would not fuck it up.”
“We’ll see,” David mutters. “Well, actually, we won’t see, because I’m not planning to get a Pokémon any time soon. But what do you expect me to do with yours?”
“She knows Earthquake, Strength, Rock Slide and Explosion,” Charlie says. “Do not tell her to use Explosion.”
More rock slides. Excellent. “That’s not a very tactical moveset, is it?”
“I’m not a very tactical person. I like to knock the opponent out, not fuck about increasing my defence. Why do you know about moveset strategies when you’ve never owned a Pokémon?”
“I do actually live in the world,” David points out. “Pokémon seem to permeate every aspect of day-to-day life; it’s hard not to learn a little about them.”
“That’s a start, at least.” Charlie tosses a Pokéball in the air and catches it, albeit not quite with the fluidity required to make such a move look stylish. “Shall we have a battle, then?”
“Er?” David says, about an octave higher than intended.
“I’ll even give you a massive type advantage,” and a moment later David is staring into the narrowed eyes of a Voltorb. As far as he can tell, Charlie seems to select his Pokémon based on how angry they look.
“I’d... really rather not,” David says. “I mean, it’s not that I don’t appreciate the effort to educate me; it’s just, er.”
“Oh, come on; I’ve just sent an Electric type out against a Ground. It is literally impossible for you to lose.”
“In which case there hardly seems any point in our battling at all.”
“You really don’t want to improve your confidence, do you? It’s a nightmarish prospect for you.”
“It’s more the fact that you’ve just given me something that can create earthquakes and told me to make it attack something that can electrocute me.”
“It’s not going to electrocute you.”
“I’m not entirely confident of that. It’s giving me looks.” Which isn’t at all fair, David feels; surely Charlie should be the one being glared at, as he’s the one who’s just sent it into a hopeless battle.
“Voltorb,” the Voltorb says, menacingly.
“It’s not giving you looks. If it is giving you looks, it’s because it thinks you’re a fucking idiot for worrying so much about this, and it thinks that because that’s exactly what you are.”
“Look,” David says, “thank you very much for the loan of the... terrifying Graveler, but even if I give in to the pressure of society and get a Pokémon eventually I think I’ll probably be staying out of the battling side of things.”
“What if a wild Pokémon attacks you?”
“I’ve managed to survive thus far unscathed.”
“Right,” Charlie says, decidedly. “We are going for a walk in the forest.”
“In the hope that a wild Pokémon will attack me, you mean?” David asks, rather amused.
“That is exactly what I mean.”
-
The inhabitants of Viridian Forest, it seems, are not in an especially hostile mood today. Charlie is unimpressed; David is rather relieved. They wander for some time, the Graveler lumbering along behind them, but they fail to stumble across anything more threatening than a Metapod.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Charlie says. “I’m actually praying we’ll get divebombed by Beedrill at this point.”
The Metapod dangles in silence from the branch of a tree, blinking occasionally.
“I rather like it,” David says. “If I really had to have a Pokémon – and I’m still fairly certain I don’t – I don’t think I’d mind having one like that.”
“So what you look for in a Pokémon is the ability to sit there and do nothing.”
“Basically, yes.”
“I actually cannot believe how dull you are.” He shrugs. “Still, it’s better than nothing. Do you need a Pokéball?”
David stares at him. “Are you suggesting I catch it?”
“I wouldn’t think it was that astonishing a suggestion, given that you just said you wouldn’t mind owning one.”
“Yes, but it’s a Metapod. It’ll evolve in about a week.”
“Ah,” Charlie says. “You’ve found the functionless Pokémon of your dreams, but you can’t catch it because you’re too afraid one day it’ll become interesting.”
“You’re failing to take into account the fact that I don’t really need it. I’m not saying a Metapod would improve my life in any way; it just seems to be the Pokémon that would detract the least from it. The most I can say for that Metapod is that owning it probably wouldn’t actively make me unhappy.”
“Fine,” Charlie says. “You’re a lunatic, but fine. You’re going to fight it, though.”
Oh, not this again. “I’d prefer not to, to be honest.”
“I can almost understand not wanting to fight the Voltorb, but if you can’t even beat a Metapod there’s something very wrong with you. This time I can absolutely guarantee it’s not going to electrocute you.”
“It’s not going to be able to attack me at all, is it? It seems rather unsporting.”
“It’ll recover. It’ll be fine.”
“Even so, I’m not sure I feel comfortable perpetrating entirely needless violence upon it.”
“Metapod,” the Metapod says. David is probably imagining things, but he thinks it might sound a little nervous.
“It’s not ‘needless’,” Charlie says. “You need to know how to give orders to Pokémon, at the very least.”
“In case Team Rocket attack one day and, by miraculous coincidence, a wild Graveler happens to be nearby and in the mood for being ordered around?”
Charlie considers for a moment. “It’s not impossible.”
The man is evidently not to be swayed. David is beginning to wonder whether they’ll ever get out of this forest. “If I succeed in defeating this fearsome Metapod, will you take your Graveler back?”
“That sounds fair enough,” Charlie says, with a grin.
“Metapod,” the Metapod says, dangling harmlessly in front of them.
“Er,” David says, trying to remember the least alarming-sounding of the Graveler’s moves. “Graveler, use – use Strength.”
The Graveler runs towards the Metapod, draws back one of its many fists and throws a punch. David flinches as the Metapod slams into the trunk of the tree and falls to the ground.
“There you go!” Charlie says, with uncharacteristic levels of enthusiasm. He offers David a Pokéball. “You sure you don’t want to catch it? It’s fainted; it’ll be easy.”
“All other objections aside, I’m not going to have a good relationship with it now, am I?” David asks, looking at the Pokéball so he doesn’t have to look at either of the Pokémon. He feels slightly unwell. “It was just minding its own business, and I had that Graveler knock it unconscious. I feel I’ve established fairly conclusively that we’re not going to be friends.”
Charlie rolls his eyes and gives an exaggerated sigh.
There is a pause.
“Oh, all right,” Charlie says, eventually. “Do you want to take it to the Pokémon Centre?”
“I think I would like that, yes.”
-
Two days later, David is roused from vague dreams of being forced into a Pokéball by a giant Graveler by the sound of someone hammering at the front door. He stumbles out of bed, pulls on his dressing gown and opens the door to find Charlie standing there. Charlie is looking slightly menacing, but he always looks slightly menacing, so David doesn’t interpret it as a warning. “Hello.”
“All right, you cannot be afraid of this. You’re not allowed.”
“What?” David asks, rubbing his eyes blearily, before becoming aware that something has just brushed past his leg. He turns around to find an Eevee sitting in his hallway, twitching its tail and looking curiously up at the ceiling. “Your – is that yours?”
“No,” Charlie says. “It’s yours.”
This news wakes David up fairly effectively, and he turns back to stare at Charlie. “What? It – Charlie, I can’t look after this.”
“Of course you can fucking look after it.” Charlie tosses a Pokéball in his direction. David instinctively brings his hands up to shield his face, and the ball clatters onto the floor. “It – anyone ever told you you’re a shit catcher?”
“I didn’t have much warning,” David says, neglecting to mention the fact that he would probably have failed to catch it even had he been given a map of its trajectory and five minutes to prepare. “Look, at this time of the morning I can cope with either the verbal abuse or the unexpected Pokémon ownership; I can’t take both.”
“Unexpected Pokémon ownership it is, then, you... lovely man.”
“Right,” David says, looking over his shoulder at the Eevee. It looks back at him and flicks an ear. “When I said I can’t take both, I may possibly have meant I can’t really cope with any of it at all.”
“Oh, don’t be pathetic.”
“Verbal abuse,” David points out, quickly. “But that’s all right. I’ll keep that. You can take the Eevee away now.”
“It knows Tackle, Sand-Attack, Quick Attack and Growl,” Charlie says, ignoring him entirely. “Just in case you decide to get into battling after all. Not a great moveset, but you could probably crush a few eleven-year-olds, if you wanted.”
“Always an appealing prospect,” David says. The Eevee has wandered through to the living room and out of sight; he is convinced that it is tearing apart his new sofa with its tiny teeth and claws. “Charlie, how do I feed it?”
“It’ll eat grass,” Charlie says. “You will be completely fine. If you cannot look after this Eevee, I’m going to have to question whether you’re qualified to keep yourself alive. Still, if you do manage to fuck it up, give me a ring.” He gives a double thumbs-up and an exaggerated grin. “Good luck!”
“Thank you,” David says, uncertainly.
And then Charlie leaves, and, although David could probably do with his expertise right now, he’s still feeling a little too stunned to prevent him.
After staring at the Pokéball in his hands for a moment, David steels himself and walks into the living room.
The sofa is intact, which is good. The Eevee is sitting on it, which is less good, not only because David doesn’t really want it on the furniture but also because he was already half-hoping he might have imagined the entire thing.
David looks at the Eevee. The Eevee looks at David.
David presses the button on the Pokéball, and the Eevee vanishes in a flash of red light.
It’s much less frightening when it’s in the Pokéball. He considers never letting it out again.
It certainly stays in there for the next few days. At one point, David looks up Eevee ownership guidance on the Internet, with a vague idea of letting it out and getting to know it, but he is slightly put off by the discovery that Eevee apparently require a great deal of affection. David is not much good at showing affection, particularly when he is too busy worrying about something to feel much affection towards it. Probably best for it to stay in the suspended animation of the Pokéball. If he lets it out, it’ll only end up hating him.
-
David avoids contacting Charlie for a while after the Eevee incident, in part because he suspects that Charlie will be less than impressed by the lack of enthusiasm with which he has thrown himself into Pokémon ownership and in part because he’s afraid that he’ll come away from their next encounter with his arms full of Pikachu, but Charlie calls to invite him out for a drink a week later and David can’t think of a good excuse not to go. Besides, he quite likes spending time with Charlie, even if having unwanted Pokémon forced upon him is apparently to be the price. As his desire to punch Charlie in the face, at present not inconsiderable, has yet to exceed the pleasure he gets from his company, he supposes they must still be friends.
They arrange to meet at the Gym, and Charlie looks up and grins as David walks across the echoing arena. “Hi. How’s your Eevee?”
David blinks. “Er, I don’t know. It should be all right in the Pokéball, shouldn’t it?”
Charlie stares at him. “...yes, but you haven’t just left it in there all week, have you?”
Oh, dear. “Is that bad?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Charlie says. “You’ve got to let it out occasionally. If you’re just going to keep it in perpetual suspended animation, you may as well not own it at all.”
“I have to point out,” David says, taking the Pokéball out of his pocket, “that I did rather have its ownership forced upon me.” He releases the Eevee; it shakes out its ears and coat and then begins to run around, sniffing everything in sight, and, yes, David does feel a little guilty for keeping it confined, now that it seems so delighted to be out.
“Want a battle before we go?” Charlie asks, looking at it speculatively. “I know it’s unlikely, but I’ll go easy on you.”
“I don’t know how you can chastise me for keeping it cooped up one moment and suggest having your Graveler pummel it unconscious the next.”
Now it’s Charlie’s turn to look a bit flustered, and, really, it’s about time. He laughs, awkwardly. “You may have a point there.”
-
The pub visit is pleasant enough, but David spends most of it slightly preoccupied by Eevee-related guilt, although he tries not to show it. He lets the Eevee out of its Pokéball the moment he gets home and sits on the sofa with a notepad, trying to sketch out his next column and not to watch the Pokémon uneasily out of the corner of his eye. It pads around on the carpet a bit, which is reasonably inoffensive, then paws at the leg of a chair, and when David gets up to make sure there aren’t any scratches in the wood it jumps onto the sofa and curls up exactly where he was sitting.
David’s not having that. He shoos it off the sofa, albeit slightly awkwardly and with some inexplicable embarrassment (it’s hardly going to judge his ridiculous ‘shoo, shoo’ noises and gestures, surely), and sits down again.
The Eevee has its revenge by falling asleep on his shoes. David ends up staying awake longer than he’d intended, because if he moves to go to bed he’ll wake it up.
-
Charlie calls him the next morning. “Look,” he says, awkwardly, “I know you didn’t – I mean, if you really don’t want the Eevee, I’ll take it on. I wouldn’t really force you to look after a Pokémon you didn’t want to have.” A pause. “And it’s probably sick of you, too, come to think of it.”
David looks down at the Eevee, which is batting at the sash of his dressing gown. “I don’t know; I could try to live with it for a few days, I suppose.”
“All right,” Charlie says, sounding relieved. “Great. Sorry.”
-
David calls the Eevee into its Pokéball before visiting the shops, because he may be letting it out more often but he’s not about to start walking around with a Pokémon on his shoulder, and it’s tempting just to leave it there when he gets back home. Eventually, though, he presses the button to release it.
It yawns, stretches, and then jumps straight onto the sofa. When he chases it off, it begins licking its paws, evidently pretending not to be interested in any nearby upholstery, and then jumps up again and resists all attempts at shooing. David has the mad suspicion that it knows he was considering leaving it in the Pokéball again and has decided to punish him.
Eventually, he gives up and sits down next to it. So long as it doesn’t have its claws out, he supposes it isn’t really doing any harm.
They sit there for about an hour, David reading and the Eevee sleeping beside him, and then the Eevee uncurls itself, blinks sleepily at him, and then crawls onto David’s lap and goes to sleep again.
It’s sort of inconvenient, because David is now forced to hold the book above the Eevee rather than resting it in his lap, but he finds himself smiling a little, all the same.
-
Over the next few days, it becomes a sort of ritual: in the evenings, David settles down with a cup of tea and a novel, and his Eevee immediately leaps up to fall asleep on his lap. He generally keeps it in its ball during the daytime, but he occasionally takes it out to graze. He buys a bag of biscuity things from the nearest Pokémart, which it seems to enjoy, and it’s when he begins to worry that he doesn’t know how much is a healthy amount of food for an Eevee that it hits him: he actually owns a Pokémon now.
He’s not sure how to feel about that. Not owning a Pokémon has almost been a part of his identity for a long time. He’s certainly going to have to find new material for his column, which has mostly been about the unexpected and unfair difficulties of going through life without Pokémon. But he can’t say he dislikes the situation.
David feels rather as if he should give his Eevee a name, if he’s going to be living with it, and eventually he settles on Robert. The thought occurs to him, a moment after he decides on the name, that he has no idea whether Robert is a male or a female Eevee or indeed of how to tell the difference, but somehow Robert seems a fitting name for it regardless.
Charlie, upon their next meeting, wastes no time in informing David that Robert is a ridiculous name for a Pokémon, but he is so obviously delighted that David has apparently become attached enough to name it that David can’t take it personally.
-
“I do feel rather as if I’m betraying my principles,” David says, a couple of evenings later. He’s sitting with his back against the stone wall of the Gym, watching Robert and Charlie’s Onix’s interactions in the arena with some unease; Charlie insisted it would be fine to introduce them, and they seem to be getting along well enough, but David can’t help feeling that it’s a trap and at any moment he’ll be dragged into a battle.
Charlie sits down next to him. “Well, your principles don’t really matter any more, do they, because you were probably the only person without a Pokémon in the world.”
“I suppose there’s no reason for me to stop arguing against the overdependence on Pokémon, even if I have one,” David says, frowning. “I’d just... feel like a bit of a hypocrite.”
“On the bright side, you can’t ride your Eevee to work or across the ocean, so there are plenty of Pokémon-related privileges you still don’t have,” Charlie says. “Fight against those, if you really think having a little furry pet makes you less qualified to rant at strangers for ten minutes about the unfairness of the world.”
“Oh, all right,” David says, beginning to smile. “Just don’t bring me a Lapras; I need to have something to complain about.”
In the arena, Robert struggles up onto the Onix’s tail, scrabbles for purchase on the rock and then falls off. The Onix looks mildly bemused, or so David thinks; he’s certainly not an expert on the facial expressions of Onix.
“Speaking of betraying your principles,” Charlie says, “want a battle?”
David laughs. “No.”
In the hopefully-unlikely event that Mitchell or Brooker do find this, they should of course feel free to laugh, roll their eyes, ask me to take it down or review it scathingly on a new series called Internetwipe as they see fit.)
I'm really quite worried about this, because I've never taken my first steps into a new fandom with such a long fic before. I do hope it's worked. (Please do not attempt to take moral guidance from this fic, because it could just as easily have been titled The Unexpected Pleasures of Hypocrisy or Harass Your Friends.)
With thanks to
zeitheist, to whom I owe a fair bit of the inspiration for this fic.Title: Not Set in Stone
Fandoms: British Comedy/Pokémon
Characters: David Mitchell, Charlie Brooker
Rating: R, but only for language
Wordcount: 6,500ish
Summary: Because obviously what this fandom needs is a Pokémon AU. Charlie Brooker is the Pewter City Gym Leader. David Mitchell has never owned a Pokémon. They do not, alas, fight crime.
As acquaintances go, it’s perhaps not the most promising start.
It’s auspicious enough at first. David is out for an hour’s walk on the borders of Pewter City. There are Pidgey cooing somewhere nearby, and the sun is out, and it is, if he tunes out the battle cries of trainers on the mountainside above him, a perfectly pleasant day.
And then there’s a crashing sound, and David turns to find the entire side of the mountain hurtling down towards him.
Oh, excellent. He’s going to be killed. Not that he’s ever expected an especially glamorous end, but he’s always rather hoped for something slightly less unpleasant than ‘buried under a pile of rock in his thirties’.
Someone is shouting something, but he can’t make out what over the sound of his own heart thumping in his ears (which he’s going to miss) and the sound of tons of rock thundering in his direction (which he isn’t), and then the landslide is upon him and... no, wait. He’s enclosed in a... cave of rock, somehow. He can hear the landslide passing by outside, leaving him unharmed.
Hyperventilating, David barely manages to register the Onix in the coils of which he is shielded raising its head and looking down at him before he, rather embarrassingly, faints.
When David returns to the world, he is lying in a strange bed in a darkened room, staring at the ceiling. He twitches his feet and hands, experimentally; nothing seems to be broken. If he tries to remember the past few hours, the impressions that come back to him are garbled and confused and possibly half-dreamt: movement, warm hands on his back, cold stone against his face, someone calling him a ‘fucking idiot’.
He can hear someone moving around nearby.
“Er, hello?” he says, cautiously. Well, his voice still works. It’s not quite loud enough, though, it seems, and he has to take a deep breath and try again before who he assumes is the owner of the bed comes through the door.
“Hi,” the owner says. “How’re you feeling?”
It’s a man, perhaps a few years older than David, and – oh, shit – he looks familiar. This has the potential to be mortifying. “I’m feeling all right, thanks. Er, how are you?”
The man gives him an odd look. “Fine, but I wasn’t the one who got caught in a rock slide. I’m not sure my wellbeing is the most pressing question.”
Right. No particular sign that David should know who he is. David’s sure he’s seen him before, though. “What exactly happened?”
“You nearly got a mountain in the face. Saw you at the last second, sent my Onix to help. I was shitting myself. You sure you don’t need the hospital or anything?”
The mention of the Onix stirs something in David’s memory – something other than his recent Onix-averted almost-demise, obviously – and he makes the connection. “Oh, you’re the Gym Leader here, aren’t you? Brooker... er, Brooker something.”
“Charlie Brooker.”
“Sorry.”
“I don’t know, it seems fair enough; I don’t know your name.”
“David,” David says. “Mitchell.” He suddenly feels selfconscious about being in this man’s bed, and, after a quick check to make sure he’s wearing trousers, he slips out from under the covers and sits on the edge of the mattress. “Thank you for... well, for saving my life, I suppose.”
Brooker looks a bit uncomfortable, as if he’s about to reveal that the afterlife in fact consists of a bed and a room and a Gym Leader. Instead, he says, “Well, it was sort of my – did you have any Pokémon with you?”
It was sort of my fault, David’s mind fills in. Not inconceivable, if he had an Onix nearby. He decides not to find out whether that was what Brooker was actually going to say, because knowing for certain that Brooker was responsible for causing his almost-death as well as preventing it will probably make this conversation quite a lot more awkward. “No.”
“Oh, thank fuck for that,” Brooker breathes. “I couldn’t find any on you, but I didn’t know whether that was because they’d been carried away by the landslide or what.”
“Well, as I’ve never owned a Pokémon, I can assure you that’s not something you need to worry about.”
Brooker breaks into a bizarre, high-pitched burst of laughter. Of course. “Are you joking?”
David can’t hold himself in. “You see, this is how everyone reacts! There’s no particular reason why everyone on the planet should own a Pokémon; it’s just become expected to the point at which it’s almost impossible to function in society without them. Ferries and planes and public transport are becoming more and more rare because everyone is using their Pokémon for travel, and that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with riding a Ponyta to work, but I don’t want to be forced into depending on Pokémon because our society fails to take into consideration the possibility that someone could live quite happily without a Pokéball on his belt, and that attitude is the reason it’s eventually going to happen.”
Brooker is watching him, eyebrows raised. David suspects that he may not be making an excellent impression, but it’s difficult not to look thoroughly mad when he finds himself on a topic about which he feels so strongly.
“Not that I’m saying you’re single-handedly responsible for humanity’s loss of independence,” he clarifies. “I’m just saying you’re not helping.”
“I think you were eliciting disbelief on purpose,” Brooker says. “You didn’t need to tell me you don’t own a Pokémon, but you’ve obviously been dying to go into that speech.”
“There may be an element of that,” David admits, with a sheepish smile. “But it is something I feel quite passionately about.”
“So you’ve actually never had a Pokémon?” Brooker asks, looking at him as if David is a fascinating but potentially dangerous new Fire type.
“Astonishing though it may sound, it seems to be possible.”
“Who doesn’t have a Pokémon? It’s like you’ve opted out of having... legs.”
“Well, as it happens, I was born with legs,” David says. “I didn’t emerge from the womb with a Tentacool attached to my face.”
“You probably weren’t born with clothes either, but you don’t seem to have any problems wearing them,” Brooker points out. He sounds incredulous, but his incredulity seems more amused than hostile, which is reassuring.
David laughs. “I might have had to overcome a huge inner conflict before pulling my pants on. You don’t know.”
Brooker nods, mock-serious. “Did you?”
“For the sake of the argument, I suppose I’ll have to say yes,” David says. “No; clothes have long been established as a requirement for getting by in this society. Pokémon haven’t, yet, but they’re well on their way. Do you have any idea of how many potential employers ask what Pokémon you have and how you get on with them, even if the job has nothing to do with Pokémon? Do you know what percentage of my taxes goes towards supporting the meaningless pissing contest that is the Pokémon League? Do – ” He momentarily stumbles, seeing Brooker’s smirk and remembering that the person to whom he is speaking is in fact a part of that meaningless pissing contest, but quickly recollects himself. “While we’re on the subject of the inflated importance of Pokémon, can you explain why there’s a Pokémon Centre three minutes from my front door, but I have to walk to Viridian City if I need the hospital?”
“I’m just having trouble imagining why anyone would resist getting a Pokémon. I mean, you’ve got no means of defending yourself, have you? If it weren’t for my Onix, you probably would’ve been killed.”
“Y-es,” David concedes. “I’m willing to acknowledge there are situations in which having a Pokémon might be useful; I just don’t think they should be a necessity.”
“Tell me,” Brooker says, “do you have electric lighting in your house, or do you just wander around with a lantern?”
“That’s entirely different. Buying a lamp doesn’t commit you to the care of a living creature. Irritating children don’t take your having a lamp as an invitation for them to hit you with theirs.”
“Oh, you’re afraid of battling, then?”
“I don’t particularly want to battle,” David says, carefully. He is, in fact, pissing-himself scared of Pokémon battles, but that’s no reason not to imply otherwise. “As a Gym Leader, I imagine you’re a fan.”
“Well, yes, but that’s mostly because of the satisfaction I get from destroying twelve-year-olds. I’m not going to judge you if you don’t share my desperate need for ego-validation. What I do judge you for is your refusal to get a Pokémon on, as far as I can tell, the grounds of ‘oh, everyone else has one’. Maybe there’s a reason for that. You do have a computer, don’t you?”
It’s not just snobbery, David doesn’t say; it’s also his fear of change. “I have a computer, yes.”
“So you didn’t want a Pokémon when you were ten?”
“I felt I wouldn’t be capable of supporting one.”
Brooker bursts out laughing. “No, you didn’t. Nobody’s prudent when they’re ten.”
“All right,” David says; “I was horribly afraid of most Pokémon when I was ten. The point is that I’ve lived perfectly happily for several decades now without a Pokémon, and I don’t see why that should be such an astonishing thing.” The impact of his words may, he feels, be somewhat impaired by his inability to stop grinning. He wonders, not for the first time, whether it is entirely normal to enjoy arguing as much as he does. Then again, Brooker has been smiling for most of the exchange as well.
“You should get a Pokémon,” Brooker says. “Just see how you get on with it. Then you can challenge me for a Boulderbadge; it’ll be nice to fight someone who isn’t a foetus.”
“Oh, no,” David says, with a small laugh, “I really don’t think so.”
Brooker shrugs. “Suit yourself. I honestly think you’re missing out, though.”
There’s a silence, and David senses that the conversation has come to an end. It’s a pity, really; he was rather enjoying it, despite the conflict. Perhaps even because of the conflict.
“I suppose I’d better be going home,” David says. “Thank you for, you know.”
“No problem,” Brooker says. “Just try not to anger any more mountainsides. We’re just behind the Gym, so I’m guessing you’ll know your way back from there. It was nice to meet you.” He barely hesitates before adding, “You enormous Pokémon-less freak.”
A couple of days later, David is walking past the Gym and hears echoing crashes coming from within. It sounds as if a fight is in progress, and, struck by a strange impulse, he slips through the door and climbs the stairs to the viewing gallery.
Brooker’s opponent is a teenage girl; her Ivysaur is standing in the middle of the arena, glaring fearlessly up at the Onix towering over it. Both of the Pokémon look exhausted, but David knows the Ivysaur has a huge type advantage. The girl looks determined, one fist clenched in front of her; Brooker, leaning against a pillar on the other side of the field, looks slightly bored, as if he’s known the outcome of this match since it began.
“Onix,” he says. “Dig.”
“Ivysaur, use Vine Whip!” the girl calls.
The Onix lunges towards the ground, but it isn’t quite fast enough. David winces in a combination of sympathy and aural pain as the Onix bellows, sways and finally collapses under the assault of vines, barely missing the panting Ivysaur. The crash echoes horribly around the stone walls of the Gym; he doesn’t know how Brooker manages not to go mad, fighting in here every day.
Brooker recalls the Onix. “Well done,” he says. His tone isn’t especially encouraging – not bitter; just not interested – but the girl evidently doesn’t notice; she punches the air and runs out into the arena to embrace her Pokémon. David makes out the words ‘Pokémon Centre’ somewhere in her babbling to it.
“Hang on, don’t forget your badge,” Brooker says, in a slightly more amused tone.
As the main part of the spectacle appears to be over, David stands from the stone bench and makes his way back towards the stairs.
David reaches ground level just as the Ivysaur trainer is leaving the Gym. Brooker is still on the far side of the arena, gathering his Pokéballs together; it seems he’s finished with his battles for the day.
David suddenly feels awkward and sheepish – what if Brooker doesn’t particularly want to see him here? What if he’s just the irritating Pokémon-less stranger who had to be rescued from a landslide and then abused his rights as Brooker’s impromptu guest by launching into an extensive rant about the increasingly Pokémon-obsessed state of society? – but then Brooker catches sight of him and waves, and he supposes he can take that as an invitation to walk across the battlefield and say hello.
What he actually says, because he can’t quite resist, is, “Congratulations.”
“Fuck off,” Brooker says, with a laugh. “I have to hold back on badge matches, anyway; there are regulations.”
It’s friendly, and David feels himself relaxing a little more. “Oh, so you were trying to lose, were you?”
“I wasn’t trying to lose,” Brooker says. “I just... wasn’t trying quite as hard as I could have to win. It’s a very experienced Onix, but most new trainers come here first; it wouldn’t be fair if it turned out to be twice as tough as Cerulean City.”
“Ah,” David says, smiling. “You’re not quite as dedicated to destroying twelve-year-olds as you claim, then.”
“Well,” Brooker says, pitching it a little too high and drawing out the ‘e’, “some twelve-year-olds are cunts, and nobody can prove I’m not going easy on them. D’you want a cup of tea?”
Inevitably, the conversation over tea involves more probing into David’s Pokémon non-ownership, which, he feels, really shouldn’t be as interesting as it apparently is, but it’s bearably light-hearted, and at least David now has ‘you were beaten by a teenage girl’ to call upon in retaliation. Eventually, they move onto other topics: David’s aborted attempts at novels, Brooker’s failed Pokémon journey. Brooker becomes a much less intimidating figure as the conversation progresses; he’s foul-mouthed and opinionated, yes, but he’s also intelligent and interesting and, David slowly comes to realise, he has his own insecurities. Somewhere along the line, David finds himself beginning to think of him as ‘Charlie’.
“We should do this again,” Charlie says, after a lengthy debate on the worth of the Pokémon League as an institution, eventually ending in their uniting in their opinions of what a tit Lance is.
“I’d like that very much,” David says, and he realises as he says it that he is being completely sincere.
A few pub visits later, Charlie calls David and instructs him to meet him at the top of one of the smaller hills bordering the city. After the landslide incident, David isn’t terribly keen on wandering near the borders again, and something about Charlie’s voice over the phone makes him suspect he’s up to something, but he goes regardless.
The top of the hill is an almost-flat expanse of grass. Charlie is standing in the centre, his coat flapping in a mildly ominous manner.
“Today,” he says, “you are going to learn how to be a Pokémon trainer.”
Oh, dear. David had sort of started to hope that Charlie had given up on that. “Must I?”
“Look,” Charlie says, rolling his eyes, “I am going to drag you into the present day whether you like it or not.” He holds a Pokéball out to David.
David eyes it warily.
“Lesson one,” Charlie says. “It’s a ball. It’s not going to bite your bloody fingers off.”
“Well, that’s a good start.” David reaches out and takes it, cautiously, between finger and thumb. “Are you expecting me to catch a Pokémon with it? Because, as I understand it, it’s almost impossible to catch a Pokémon without a Pokémon of one’s own, which raises the question of how on Earth so many people get Pokémon in the first place.”
“Oh, well, it’s a good thing that ball already has a Pokémon in it, then.”
David almost drops the Pokéball. “What?”
“I’m not giving it to you,” Charlie clarifies. “I just thought I’d lend you a Pokémon for a while. Show you raising one’s not as scary as you think.”
“I’m already a bit scared, I have to say.” David almost rattles the ball, but checks himself; will that hurt the Pokémon? He has no idea what he’s doing. “What if I kill it?”
“Then we’ll no longer be friends,” Charlie says. “I might make my Onix eat you. But you’re not going to kill it.”
“This isn’t your Onix, then,” David says, in some relief.
“No! I’m not sending a beginner out into the world with an Onix; I’m not a maniac.”
David could contest that. He chooses not to. “So, er...”
“David,” Charlie says. “Tell me you know how to open a Pokéball.”
“Of course I know how to open a Pokéball.” It has one button on it; it can’t be that difficult. He presses it, barely manages to keep his hold on the Pokéball as it expands (he’d forgotten they did that), and then hesitates.
“Contrary to what TV may have taught you,” Charlie says, “it’s not actually compulsory to throw the ball across the room like a twat. Just press the button again.”
David presses the button again, and in a flash of red a metre-tall four-armed fierce-looking living boulder emerges, unintimidating in precisely no ways.
“You thought you’d break me in gently with a Graveler?”
“I’m a Gym Leader,” Charlie points out. “I don’t exactly have hundreds of Caterpie in my collection. My other Pokémon are Onix, which you’d probably kill yourself with, and Voltorb, which you’d definitely kill yourself with, so Graveler made the most sense.”
“Right,” David says, eyeing the Graveler. It eyes him back, with a malevolence that David hopes is in his imagination. “This conversation has thus far failed to fill me with confidence.”
“You’ll be fine. Honestly, raising a Pokémon is a piece of piss.”
“Please stop staring at me,” David says, addressing the Graveler. He’s a little surprised, but not displeased, when it grunts and looks away. “I don’t suppose you’ll be as obliging as your Pokémon if I ask you to abandon this ridiculous plan, will you?”
“You see, that’s why you want a Pokémon. They’re much less irritating than humans.”
“They’re only obedient if they’re well-trained, though, surely. I would inevitably fuck it up.”
“David, tens of thousands of idiotic ten-year-olds have managed to raise Pokémon. You would not fuck it up.”
“We’ll see,” David mutters. “Well, actually, we won’t see, because I’m not planning to get a Pokémon any time soon. But what do you expect me to do with yours?”
“She knows Earthquake, Strength, Rock Slide and Explosion,” Charlie says. “Do not tell her to use Explosion.”
More rock slides. Excellent. “That’s not a very tactical moveset, is it?”
“I’m not a very tactical person. I like to knock the opponent out, not fuck about increasing my defence. Why do you know about moveset strategies when you’ve never owned a Pokémon?”
“I do actually live in the world,” David points out. “Pokémon seem to permeate every aspect of day-to-day life; it’s hard not to learn a little about them.”
“That’s a start, at least.” Charlie tosses a Pokéball in the air and catches it, albeit not quite with the fluidity required to make such a move look stylish. “Shall we have a battle, then?”
“Er?” David says, about an octave higher than intended.
“I’ll even give you a massive type advantage,” and a moment later David is staring into the narrowed eyes of a Voltorb. As far as he can tell, Charlie seems to select his Pokémon based on how angry they look.
“I’d... really rather not,” David says. “I mean, it’s not that I don’t appreciate the effort to educate me; it’s just, er.”
“Oh, come on; I’ve just sent an Electric type out against a Ground. It is literally impossible for you to lose.”
“In which case there hardly seems any point in our battling at all.”
“You really don’t want to improve your confidence, do you? It’s a nightmarish prospect for you.”
“It’s more the fact that you’ve just given me something that can create earthquakes and told me to make it attack something that can electrocute me.”
“It’s not going to electrocute you.”
“I’m not entirely confident of that. It’s giving me looks.” Which isn’t at all fair, David feels; surely Charlie should be the one being glared at, as he’s the one who’s just sent it into a hopeless battle.
“Voltorb,” the Voltorb says, menacingly.
“It’s not giving you looks. If it is giving you looks, it’s because it thinks you’re a fucking idiot for worrying so much about this, and it thinks that because that’s exactly what you are.”
“Look,” David says, “thank you very much for the loan of the... terrifying Graveler, but even if I give in to the pressure of society and get a Pokémon eventually I think I’ll probably be staying out of the battling side of things.”
“What if a wild Pokémon attacks you?”
“I’ve managed to survive thus far unscathed.”
“Right,” Charlie says, decidedly. “We are going for a walk in the forest.”
“In the hope that a wild Pokémon will attack me, you mean?” David asks, rather amused.
“That is exactly what I mean.”
The inhabitants of Viridian Forest, it seems, are not in an especially hostile mood today. Charlie is unimpressed; David is rather relieved. They wander for some time, the Graveler lumbering along behind them, but they fail to stumble across anything more threatening than a Metapod.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Charlie says. “I’m actually praying we’ll get divebombed by Beedrill at this point.”
The Metapod dangles in silence from the branch of a tree, blinking occasionally.
“I rather like it,” David says. “If I really had to have a Pokémon – and I’m still fairly certain I don’t – I don’t think I’d mind having one like that.”
“So what you look for in a Pokémon is the ability to sit there and do nothing.”
“Basically, yes.”
“I actually cannot believe how dull you are.” He shrugs. “Still, it’s better than nothing. Do you need a Pokéball?”
David stares at him. “Are you suggesting I catch it?”
“I wouldn’t think it was that astonishing a suggestion, given that you just said you wouldn’t mind owning one.”
“Yes, but it’s a Metapod. It’ll evolve in about a week.”
“Ah,” Charlie says. “You’ve found the functionless Pokémon of your dreams, but you can’t catch it because you’re too afraid one day it’ll become interesting.”
“You’re failing to take into account the fact that I don’t really need it. I’m not saying a Metapod would improve my life in any way; it just seems to be the Pokémon that would detract the least from it. The most I can say for that Metapod is that owning it probably wouldn’t actively make me unhappy.”
“Fine,” Charlie says. “You’re a lunatic, but fine. You’re going to fight it, though.”
Oh, not this again. “I’d prefer not to, to be honest.”
“I can almost understand not wanting to fight the Voltorb, but if you can’t even beat a Metapod there’s something very wrong with you. This time I can absolutely guarantee it’s not going to electrocute you.”
“It’s not going to be able to attack me at all, is it? It seems rather unsporting.”
“It’ll recover. It’ll be fine.”
“Even so, I’m not sure I feel comfortable perpetrating entirely needless violence upon it.”
“Metapod,” the Metapod says. David is probably imagining things, but he thinks it might sound a little nervous.
“It’s not ‘needless’,” Charlie says. “You need to know how to give orders to Pokémon, at the very least.”
“In case Team Rocket attack one day and, by miraculous coincidence, a wild Graveler happens to be nearby and in the mood for being ordered around?”
Charlie considers for a moment. “It’s not impossible.”
The man is evidently not to be swayed. David is beginning to wonder whether they’ll ever get out of this forest. “If I succeed in defeating this fearsome Metapod, will you take your Graveler back?”
“That sounds fair enough,” Charlie says, with a grin.
“Metapod,” the Metapod says, dangling harmlessly in front of them.
“Er,” David says, trying to remember the least alarming-sounding of the Graveler’s moves. “Graveler, use – use Strength.”
The Graveler runs towards the Metapod, draws back one of its many fists and throws a punch. David flinches as the Metapod slams into the trunk of the tree and falls to the ground.
“There you go!” Charlie says, with uncharacteristic levels of enthusiasm. He offers David a Pokéball. “You sure you don’t want to catch it? It’s fainted; it’ll be easy.”
“All other objections aside, I’m not going to have a good relationship with it now, am I?” David asks, looking at the Pokéball so he doesn’t have to look at either of the Pokémon. He feels slightly unwell. “It was just minding its own business, and I had that Graveler knock it unconscious. I feel I’ve established fairly conclusively that we’re not going to be friends.”
Charlie rolls his eyes and gives an exaggerated sigh.
There is a pause.
“Oh, all right,” Charlie says, eventually. “Do you want to take it to the Pokémon Centre?”
“I think I would like that, yes.”
Two days later, David is roused from vague dreams of being forced into a Pokéball by a giant Graveler by the sound of someone hammering at the front door. He stumbles out of bed, pulls on his dressing gown and opens the door to find Charlie standing there. Charlie is looking slightly menacing, but he always looks slightly menacing, so David doesn’t interpret it as a warning. “Hello.”
“All right, you cannot be afraid of this. You’re not allowed.”
“What?” David asks, rubbing his eyes blearily, before becoming aware that something has just brushed past his leg. He turns around to find an Eevee sitting in his hallway, twitching its tail and looking curiously up at the ceiling. “Your – is that yours?”
“No,” Charlie says. “It’s yours.”
This news wakes David up fairly effectively, and he turns back to stare at Charlie. “What? It – Charlie, I can’t look after this.”
“Of course you can fucking look after it.” Charlie tosses a Pokéball in his direction. David instinctively brings his hands up to shield his face, and the ball clatters onto the floor. “It – anyone ever told you you’re a shit catcher?”
“I didn’t have much warning,” David says, neglecting to mention the fact that he would probably have failed to catch it even had he been given a map of its trajectory and five minutes to prepare. “Look, at this time of the morning I can cope with either the verbal abuse or the unexpected Pokémon ownership; I can’t take both.”
“Unexpected Pokémon ownership it is, then, you... lovely man.”
“Right,” David says, looking over his shoulder at the Eevee. It looks back at him and flicks an ear. “When I said I can’t take both, I may possibly have meant I can’t really cope with any of it at all.”
“Oh, don’t be pathetic.”
“Verbal abuse,” David points out, quickly. “But that’s all right. I’ll keep that. You can take the Eevee away now.”
“It knows Tackle, Sand-Attack, Quick Attack and Growl,” Charlie says, ignoring him entirely. “Just in case you decide to get into battling after all. Not a great moveset, but you could probably crush a few eleven-year-olds, if you wanted.”
“Always an appealing prospect,” David says. The Eevee has wandered through to the living room and out of sight; he is convinced that it is tearing apart his new sofa with its tiny teeth and claws. “Charlie, how do I feed it?”
“It’ll eat grass,” Charlie says. “You will be completely fine. If you cannot look after this Eevee, I’m going to have to question whether you’re qualified to keep yourself alive. Still, if you do manage to fuck it up, give me a ring.” He gives a double thumbs-up and an exaggerated grin. “Good luck!”
“Thank you,” David says, uncertainly.
And then Charlie leaves, and, although David could probably do with his expertise right now, he’s still feeling a little too stunned to prevent him.
After staring at the Pokéball in his hands for a moment, David steels himself and walks into the living room.
The sofa is intact, which is good. The Eevee is sitting on it, which is less good, not only because David doesn’t really want it on the furniture but also because he was already half-hoping he might have imagined the entire thing.
David looks at the Eevee. The Eevee looks at David.
David presses the button on the Pokéball, and the Eevee vanishes in a flash of red light.
It’s much less frightening when it’s in the Pokéball. He considers never letting it out again.
It certainly stays in there for the next few days. At one point, David looks up Eevee ownership guidance on the Internet, with a vague idea of letting it out and getting to know it, but he is slightly put off by the discovery that Eevee apparently require a great deal of affection. David is not much good at showing affection, particularly when he is too busy worrying about something to feel much affection towards it. Probably best for it to stay in the suspended animation of the Pokéball. If he lets it out, it’ll only end up hating him.
David avoids contacting Charlie for a while after the Eevee incident, in part because he suspects that Charlie will be less than impressed by the lack of enthusiasm with which he has thrown himself into Pokémon ownership and in part because he’s afraid that he’ll come away from their next encounter with his arms full of Pikachu, but Charlie calls to invite him out for a drink a week later and David can’t think of a good excuse not to go. Besides, he quite likes spending time with Charlie, even if having unwanted Pokémon forced upon him is apparently to be the price. As his desire to punch Charlie in the face, at present not inconsiderable, has yet to exceed the pleasure he gets from his company, he supposes they must still be friends.
They arrange to meet at the Gym, and Charlie looks up and grins as David walks across the echoing arena. “Hi. How’s your Eevee?”
David blinks. “Er, I don’t know. It should be all right in the Pokéball, shouldn’t it?”
Charlie stares at him. “...yes, but you haven’t just left it in there all week, have you?”
Oh, dear. “Is that bad?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Charlie says. “You’ve got to let it out occasionally. If you’re just going to keep it in perpetual suspended animation, you may as well not own it at all.”
“I have to point out,” David says, taking the Pokéball out of his pocket, “that I did rather have its ownership forced upon me.” He releases the Eevee; it shakes out its ears and coat and then begins to run around, sniffing everything in sight, and, yes, David does feel a little guilty for keeping it confined, now that it seems so delighted to be out.
“Want a battle before we go?” Charlie asks, looking at it speculatively. “I know it’s unlikely, but I’ll go easy on you.”
“I don’t know how you can chastise me for keeping it cooped up one moment and suggest having your Graveler pummel it unconscious the next.”
Now it’s Charlie’s turn to look a bit flustered, and, really, it’s about time. He laughs, awkwardly. “You may have a point there.”
The pub visit is pleasant enough, but David spends most of it slightly preoccupied by Eevee-related guilt, although he tries not to show it. He lets the Eevee out of its Pokéball the moment he gets home and sits on the sofa with a notepad, trying to sketch out his next column and not to watch the Pokémon uneasily out of the corner of his eye. It pads around on the carpet a bit, which is reasonably inoffensive, then paws at the leg of a chair, and when David gets up to make sure there aren’t any scratches in the wood it jumps onto the sofa and curls up exactly where he was sitting.
David’s not having that. He shoos it off the sofa, albeit slightly awkwardly and with some inexplicable embarrassment (it’s hardly going to judge his ridiculous ‘shoo, shoo’ noises and gestures, surely), and sits down again.
The Eevee has its revenge by falling asleep on his shoes. David ends up staying awake longer than he’d intended, because if he moves to go to bed he’ll wake it up.
Charlie calls him the next morning. “Look,” he says, awkwardly, “I know you didn’t – I mean, if you really don’t want the Eevee, I’ll take it on. I wouldn’t really force you to look after a Pokémon you didn’t want to have.” A pause. “And it’s probably sick of you, too, come to think of it.”
David looks down at the Eevee, which is batting at the sash of his dressing gown. “I don’t know; I could try to live with it for a few days, I suppose.”
“All right,” Charlie says, sounding relieved. “Great. Sorry.”
David calls the Eevee into its Pokéball before visiting the shops, because he may be letting it out more often but he’s not about to start walking around with a Pokémon on his shoulder, and it’s tempting just to leave it there when he gets back home. Eventually, though, he presses the button to release it.
It yawns, stretches, and then jumps straight onto the sofa. When he chases it off, it begins licking its paws, evidently pretending not to be interested in any nearby upholstery, and then jumps up again and resists all attempts at shooing. David has the mad suspicion that it knows he was considering leaving it in the Pokéball again and has decided to punish him.
Eventually, he gives up and sits down next to it. So long as it doesn’t have its claws out, he supposes it isn’t really doing any harm.
They sit there for about an hour, David reading and the Eevee sleeping beside him, and then the Eevee uncurls itself, blinks sleepily at him, and then crawls onto David’s lap and goes to sleep again.
It’s sort of inconvenient, because David is now forced to hold the book above the Eevee rather than resting it in his lap, but he finds himself smiling a little, all the same.
Over the next few days, it becomes a sort of ritual: in the evenings, David settles down with a cup of tea and a novel, and his Eevee immediately leaps up to fall asleep on his lap. He generally keeps it in its ball during the daytime, but he occasionally takes it out to graze. He buys a bag of biscuity things from the nearest Pokémart, which it seems to enjoy, and it’s when he begins to worry that he doesn’t know how much is a healthy amount of food for an Eevee that it hits him: he actually owns a Pokémon now.
He’s not sure how to feel about that. Not owning a Pokémon has almost been a part of his identity for a long time. He’s certainly going to have to find new material for his column, which has mostly been about the unexpected and unfair difficulties of going through life without Pokémon. But he can’t say he dislikes the situation.
David feels rather as if he should give his Eevee a name, if he’s going to be living with it, and eventually he settles on Robert. The thought occurs to him, a moment after he decides on the name, that he has no idea whether Robert is a male or a female Eevee or indeed of how to tell the difference, but somehow Robert seems a fitting name for it regardless.
Charlie, upon their next meeting, wastes no time in informing David that Robert is a ridiculous name for a Pokémon, but he is so obviously delighted that David has apparently become attached enough to name it that David can’t take it personally.
“I do feel rather as if I’m betraying my principles,” David says, a couple of evenings later. He’s sitting with his back against the stone wall of the Gym, watching Robert and Charlie’s Onix’s interactions in the arena with some unease; Charlie insisted it would be fine to introduce them, and they seem to be getting along well enough, but David can’t help feeling that it’s a trap and at any moment he’ll be dragged into a battle.
Charlie sits down next to him. “Well, your principles don’t really matter any more, do they, because you were probably the only person without a Pokémon in the world.”
“I suppose there’s no reason for me to stop arguing against the overdependence on Pokémon, even if I have one,” David says, frowning. “I’d just... feel like a bit of a hypocrite.”
“On the bright side, you can’t ride your Eevee to work or across the ocean, so there are plenty of Pokémon-related privileges you still don’t have,” Charlie says. “Fight against those, if you really think having a little furry pet makes you less qualified to rant at strangers for ten minutes about the unfairness of the world.”
“Oh, all right,” David says, beginning to smile. “Just don’t bring me a Lapras; I need to have something to complain about.”
In the arena, Robert struggles up onto the Onix’s tail, scrabbles for purchase on the rock and then falls off. The Onix looks mildly bemused, or so David thinks; he’s certainly not an expert on the facial expressions of Onix.
“Speaking of betraying your principles,” Charlie says, “want a battle?”
David laughs. “No.”
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