Chapter Text
Kass fiddles with the hem of his jumper. The table in the restaurant he’s chosen has a seat for two. It’s graced with by far the prettiest view towards the beachfront, something he meticulously checked on the restaurant’s gallery on his way here. He gives a dissatisfied glance at the wilted flowers—something he couldn’t have planned for, and debates how likely he is to get noticed exchanging them with ones from another table.
He’s about half a second from doing it when the sound of the front door being opened startles him into a straight posture. It’s not you that walks through the door, however, but a set of random strangers, a young-looking couple that loiter awkwardly around the entrance before they’re led by a waiter to an empty space.
He inconspicuously wipes his palms on a napkin. You’re late. Not by much, but it’s enough to make him think you decided to blow him off, which annoys him more than he cares to admit. Sure, you’ve got your hands full being the Champion of Feroxia, but he’s the Champion of almost every other region on earth, and he made time for this, (cancelled several of his appointments, actually) and if you don’t come here within the next five minutes he’s never going to—
The door swings open again. This time, it is you.
You’re dressed simply, like you’ve been dragged from a field expedition. He’s loathe to admit you look good regardless, but he knows you’ll catch him staring at your legs sooner or later and give him one of your insufferable smiles, like you’re in the middle of a fight and he’s losing, which could well be true. Maybe you deliberately picked out clothes that slotted in the slim overlap of ‘attractive’ and ‘lazy,’ so you could make him feel like a desperate weirdo; like you could wear a trash bag and he’d still have to wipe bits of drool away from his face. Or maybe you snatched the first thing in your wardrobe and he needs to start carrying tissues. Best not to think about it.
He wants to get up from his chair and tell you how much he’s missed you (wants this reunion to be touching) but his tongue tangles into ugly little knots the second your eyes meet. He knows nothing of the sort is going to make it out of his mouth.
“You’re late,” is what he says instead.
He regrets it almost immediately. You’re hardly ten minutes behind schedule and it’s absolutely not the most important thing he could have said about seeing you for the first time in three months.
“Sorry,” you say, unapologetically. Your knowing smile suggests you didn’t expect him to say anything else. You plop down on the chair facing him and drop your rucksack against the table leg. It’s covered in grass; Kass can’t help but turn his nose up,
“And you look like you’ve crawled through a bush,” he continues, though he wishes he didn’t. Still, you don't look offended, and your smile only gets wider.
“I did; got some berries for the trouble.” You grab a menu and flick through it in a flippantly transparent attempt to bury your amusement into nonchalance. “If you warned me this was a date I might have prettied myself up a little.”
“It’s not.”
“Then you should have no problem with the way I look.”
“Who says I do?” Kass also pretends to peruse the menu, even though he decided what to get in the limousine on the way here. “If anything, I’m surprised you didn’t come through that door with mud caked on your face.”
“Noted. I won’t disappoint you in the future.” Your grin reaches from ear-to-ear. Are you even reading the menu? He doubts it.
“Aw, already looking forward to our next reunion?” Even as Kass says this, he’s wondering why he feels the need to be such a spectacular ass. The established dynamic must be stronger than his willpower.
The waiter that attends to your table looks profoundly uncomfortable to hear you bickering between each other, so Kass quickly rattles off his order. This must catch you off guard, because you clearly pick the first thing your eyes land on (soup of the day? In this heat?) and stutter with your delivery. Little victories.
“Tight budget?” he asks, and you rap him over the head with the menu.
You get through the pleasantries by the time your orders arrive. Kass asks whether you’ve been taking care of his pokemon, to which you tell him that his trajetagon (which flew you over here) has become indispensable to maintaining your spot as Champion of Feroxia. Kass quickly learns that this is the same as being Champion of anywhere else, because you follow with a long rant damning all the endless paperwork and Kass is over-eager to remind you he’s champion of five whole regions, meaning he’s got it a lot worse.
“For every plane ticket you sponsor, I’ll gladly take the title off your hands,” is what you spit back. He elects to forget it’s well within your ability to hand his ass to him and says he’d like to watch you try.
When the waiter comes back, he sets your table with two plates: seared trakmaw with black rice and coriander sauce for Kass, an impeccably prepared meal that looks fit for a king, and pumpkin soup for you. It takes barely five minutes of laughing at your attempts to convince him your broth is an untopped classic before you start trying to steal bites.
He feels like a child when he bats your attempts away with his fork, but he’s having more fun than he’s had in months. It always comes down to this when he’s with you. Being petty and small, like kids in a playground. He can’t remember the last time he let himself act like the public world wasn’t a camera on live.
“If you get down on your knees and ask nicely, I’ll let you have some,” he says, only because he’s sure you’re not going to entertain the thought. Which is why his heart jumps when you sit forward in your chair and eye him suspiciously, like you’re considering it.
“Alright then,” you say, standing up. Your chair scrapes on the floorboards and the whole restaurant looks at you. He hates the way his body reacts when you come to the open space beside him: the chaotic percussion of his pulse beating a barrage against his throat. A cloud gathers at the corners of his vision. He feels like he can barely make out shapes, which is a disaster, because if you’re going to do this he wants to see every little detail.
And then you impale a sizable piece of trakmaw onto your fork.
“Keep trying. You might get me on my knees someday,” is your victory speech.
You don’t spend much time in the restaurant. Once your meals are finished, you use the first lull in your back and forth to drag him on a walk along the coast. “The view is too nice to look at it from behind a window,” is your explanation. So that extra bit of forethought to reserve the right table was worth it, after all.
Several wooden piers split the beach in parallel lines. You’ve passed the chokehold with the thickest crowd of people and have arrived at a more remote location, where the only shop still open is a small stall with a windblown roof of thatched grass.
You come to rest at the end of a short, wooden pier that overlooks the glimmers of sunset flickering on the choppy waves of the ocean. You’re not looking at the view, choosing to stare into the shallow water, and he’s not sure if it’s a good thing. Does he want to up his romance here, or not? He can never seem to decide when he’s with you.
“Truth or dare,” you say, before he has the time to think about it.
“Dare,” he answers and changes his mind instantaneously. “Actually—”
“I dare you to get me a hot dog.”
That, Kass decides, is something he can do, and will probably be a lot less hassle than whatever salacious thing you’d have made him admit. “Ketchup or mustard?”
“You ask like the answer is going to be anything but both.”
With a snort that escapes him just before he can think to stop it, Kass digs out his wallet from the pocket of his jacket and goes to make the order at the shop nearby. It takes him barely five minutes to return with a hot dog for you and a fizzy drink for himself, in a can he taps at self-consciously when he realises you are, in fact, looking at the sunset.
“Man, this view almost makes me wish we were on a date,” you say.
It is a date. You have to realise this. It’s been a date since he booked a table for the most romantic restaurant he could find on the internet. Since he opened the shrink wrap on his cologne to spritz his neck. Since he messaged you to schedule a ‘catch up’ long before buying a plane ticket to Feroxia.
“It’s not a date,” he says.
“That's not what I said.”
“I know. I just thought I’d remind you.”
You roll your eyes and swipe the hot dog from his hand when he swings his feet over the edge of the pier. He’s taller than you, but not by much, so his toes barely skim the surface of the water.
“Your turn for truth or dare,” he says.
“Dare,” you respond equally resolutely, and he has to pretend not to be disappointed. He has a couple of questions that he wants to get out of the way before you break apart for the night and don’t see each other for another couple of months.
“I dare you to jump in the ocean.”
You scoff, but barely a couple of seconds pass before you put your hot dog on the pier in its box and strip your clothes off. This shakes him up far more than he finds acceptable. Your pants are next to go, falling into a crumpled heap on the sandy pier, and now he really needs to look away, because any second you’re going to turn around and realise he’s blatantly staring—
“Take a picture; it’ll last longer.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
And with that half-admission, he kicks you off the pier, laughing as you yelp and topple backwards into the ocean.
When you don’t come up, he knows you’re just trying to drag a reaction out of him. Which is why he’s absolutely not going to let you win and check on you. He’s taken the L plenty of times over the course of your acquaintance, and he doesn’t care to give the list another extension. Except, thirty seconds in, the urge to peer over the edge to double check you didn’t snap your neck on a rock overtakes him, and he leans forward on his knees to assuage his imagination.
Of course, you choose that second to resurface with a dramatic gasp and grab the collar of his crewneck, dragging him off the pier with you. He wishes he didn’t scream like a little girl, but the cold seeps into his bones and every single one of his limbs immediately feel like they’re going to fall off, which pisses him off inordinately, because it’s August, and the ocean should be balmy enough to sleep in. He always forgets the seasons in Feroxia are backwards.
“At least I gave you a warning!” he shouts.
“Why would I do that when I can drag you in and hear you scream?”
Kass tries to feel with his toes for the sand, but his feet only kick at the water. It’s so tortuously cold he feels like he’s going to cramp up and drown. “Because I’m holding a drink and don’t have a change of clothes? And my wallet is in my pocket?”
“Oh, can it. I don’t have a change of underwear, either, and we both know the only thing in your wallet is that black credit card you keep showing off. Plus, your drink isn’t even open.”
He can’t refute any of that, so he memorialises his lost pride with a grimace and shuffles closer instead. Just enough that he can excuse it by feeling cold if you question it. Which you don’t.
“It’s your turn, anyway.” you remind him.
“Dare.”
“Ugh, again?” you make a face and dive underwater to sit on the sand for a moment. When you resurface, tendrils of hair stick to your face. “I dare you to tell me why you keep coming back to Feroxia.”
Kass opens his can and takes a small, demure sip out of it. When he realises it hasn’t given him enough time to think of anything to say, he takes another. "Why shouldn't I? It's a nice region,” he says eventually.
"Nice? You hate Feroxia."
"I never said that."
"You said, and I quote, 'I hate Feroxia. It's the worst region to be a trainer. I have to plan my hiking around flash floods, dust storms, and golf-ball sized hail, all within a week of each other, and I can’t even go outside without slathering myself in sunscreen.’"
Kass takes another, lengthy sip of his drink. “Still, you can’t dare me to tell you something.”
“Why not?”
“Cause that’s just a truth, you clueless twit.”
You’re clearly unhappy with that, but he couldn’t care less. Hell will freeze over before he answers that question honestly.
“In that case, I dare you to get me another hot dog.”
“Seriously? You’re such a fatass; you haven’t even finished eating your first,” he says, but he’s already clambering up the balustrade of the pier.
“Hey, I’m kidding!” You drag him back into the ocean and the cold breadth of the sea hits him in all the wrong places. He jitters and playfully slaps your hand away. Despite wearing less clothes, you’ve adapted to the freezing water a lot better than he has, and he wonders if it has anything to do with the fact you seem dead set on staying submerged and toughing it out. Tentatively, he sinks into the water and tries to do the same.
“I dare you to point at the most attractive person on this beach,” you say instead.
Kass lifts a curious eyebrow. When he looks around the sparsely populated coast, no immediate applicants come to mind. He wonders whether you did this on purpose: sat on the question until the only other people around were families and elderly men.
“Hoping it’ll be you?”
You don’t blush at this like he wants you to, but you do avoid eye contact, and that’s enough for him to see through your next feeble words of, “you wish.”
“In that case it’s that guy over there.” He subtly points with his thumb at a bald man nursing a six-pack of beer. The fourty-something peers over his sunglasses at an older woman in a bikini that walks past, eyes clearly trained on her—
“I can see the appeal,” you mumble sarcastically. You jump up in the water and grab the edge of the pier, hauling your body just high enough that you can reach your hot dog from your pile of clothes. Ungracefully, you stuff it into your mouth and lower yourself back into the water. “As a heads up, for your next dare, you’re gonna need to get his number.”
“Easy. I’m sure he’ll be powerless against the unstoppable allure of my black credit card.”
You laugh. He wishes it didn’t make a spark of pride flit through his chest, like he’s a dumb teenager trying to impress his crush with even dumber jokes.
A cloud looms over the sky and another chill passes through both of you. Kass has been in the water for long enough that being submerged is starting to feel better than coming out of it and facing the nefarious grip of the wind, so he sinks a little deeper, up to his mouth.
“Truth,” you say once you finish your hot dog, and he hopes the choppy surface of the ocean distorts his smile past recognition. Clearly, you don’t know what you’re getting into. He’s had a question ready for the better half of two years.
“Why did you keep my autograph?” he asks.
You grip the pier a little harder and turn away from him slightly. “What autograph?”
You’re playing dumb? As if. He’s going to get his answer even if he has to wrangle it out of your dead body. “The one I gave you when we first met in Clefside City.”
It’s not a memory he enjoys recalling. During your first encounter, he mistook you for an over-eager fan and spent the first few minutes lauding about how fantastic he was, basically shoving a pre-signed autograph into your pocket before subtly (not subtly) shooing you off. To say he was devastatingly humiliated when you both walked into the research facility and Professor Wollemi informed him you were, in fact, not some random who felt like following him around, but the only trainer without a single gym badge who had beat him since he came out of pre-school, is a grave understatement. What’s worse, at the time, you’d spent the last few formative years of your life bashing video games in your mother’s attic and you didn’t even know his name.
("Starstruck? Don’t be. If you want to take a picture together, make sure to get it from my left side.")
He’s still bitter. What kind of weirdo keeps their mouth shut through all of that? You probably loved seeing him make a fool out of himself.
“I don’t know which one you’re talking about,” you say.
“Don’t even try. When we last met up in May, after my driver dropped you off, your mum invited me in for pavlova, remember? The autograph was hanging on the fridge, tacked by two pokeball magnets.”
You look angry. He wonders if it's at him or at yourself. “Well, can you blame me for not throwing it out? Your face is plastered on every billboard in Kanto. I thought I’d get good money for it.”
“But you never sold it.” You’re trying hard to pull the wool over his eyes, which means you’ve got something to hide. He’s bursting out of his skin in excitement.
“Alright, but wipe that smirk off your face,” you concede, and splash him with seawater. “I really did intend on pawning it off, you know. If you were half as famous as you said you were, I figured the paparazzi in Valloway would be all over it.”
He swims a little closer. “But?”
“But later, I don’t know. We became friends, and I guess it felt like a memento.”
‘Friends.’ It’s so basic. There’s nothing sentimental about the way you say it, either. You sound like you’re trying to spit a bug out of your mouth. And yet its mere mention has reached a height of sincerity previously untouched in your relationship.
Kass feels strange, unbearably so. He wants to pull you underwater and kiss you. He wants it so bad he can’t think straight.
“What are you staring at?” you ask.
He moves away. “Just wondering what I said to make you think we were friends.”
You snort and kick his leg underwater.
Kass is at an impasse. Either he goes for another dare, which means he has to jeopardise his reputation by asking that bald man for his number, or he opts for truth, and you force him to admit why he keeps coming back to Feroxia, which is a skeleton in a closet he locked and tossed the key to.
Luck is on his side, at least, because you also seem keen to drop the game. You probably realise he’d insist on ending with your turn to keep it fair. (And you’re totally right. He wouldn’t let that slide.)
Instead, you talk about some nuances of pokemon training and loiter around rockpools, where you encounter a beached polydubia and briefly team-up to toss it back into the ocean. It’s shortly after that, while looking at the last scrapes of dusk on the horizon, that Kass decides to drop his bombshell.
“Do you want to stay here overnight?”
You whip around to face him with a glance that seems, at best, suspicious. “Why?”
“I don't really feel like going home in wet clothes. Either I wreck the upholstery in my car or force trajetagon to fly us all the way home, which, even on a good day, doesn’t seem possible, but especially not when we’re still dripping with water. We’ll rent out two separate beds for the night. No big deal.”
Kass knows he’s rambling, but the look on your face makes him feel like he’s diffusing a bomb. Worst of all, he’s not even being honest; God knows if he’s making sense.
“I’ll pay for it, obviously," he adds, maybe in desperation.
Even as you agree, you look unsure, but you don’t put up a fight while you trail along the coastline to the first hotel you see: a modern building with glass walls and an expansive garden of palm trees and low-lit swimming pools. They’re all empty for the moment. Now that the sun has hidden behind the ocean, the infamous chill of the Feroxian night gathers in the air, and every sensible person has gone into hiding.
Kass’ wet shoes squeak against the black marble floor in the entrance. Glazed vases bursting with palm fronds twice his height sit in alcoves lit by lamps that look a little like glowing balls of loosely tangled yarn, and a gigantic clock with the frame of a golden sun ticks his time away in roman numerals. There is only one receptionist. Kass drags himself to the desk in his heavy clothes, leaving a path of wet shoe prints. You look a little more presentable than he does, but your hair still drips seawater onto the floor and your soaked underwear is stuffed into your grass-covered bag, like a dark secret unbeknownst to the rest of the world.
“Can we book a room with two, single beds please?” he asks.
The only room left is going to have a double bed, he’s sure of it. There were none that fit the bill when he checked the website this morning. He’s so sure that he’s holding his breath as the receptionist taps away at her computer, and when she comes up with a smile, tells him that he's 'very lucky' because they’ve had, not one, but two cancellations, and asks him whether he’d like the standard or the deluxe, his disappointment feels like a physical gut-punch. He digs around in his wallet while she rattles off some differences between them, probably mentioning a price he’s grown unaccustomed to listening out for.
“Deluxe, please,” he mutters out of habit, and hands her his credit card. The receptionist, villainess of the night, taps away on the computer without a second thought for his crushed ambitions.
“Show off,” you mutter, just loud enough that he can hear, and he has to curb his smile.
“We’ll see if you’re still complaining after taking your bath in a jacuzzi.”
The receptionist politely pretends not to see you sticking your tongue out as she swipes Kass' card. Which… doesn't seem to work, apparently. He watches her try once, twice, thrice, before she apologises and tells him, "the system must be having some technical issues," after which she resets the card machine (and her computer) to no avail. Regardless of how she sticks the card in or waves it about, she gets the same transaction error.
Kass waves it off with a, "no problem," but he’s probably more confused than she is, because he used it barely an hour ago to buy your hot dog and it was totally fine. The receptionist calls her supervisor over, a woman dressed head-to-toe in white, who does exactly the same thing, and then politely explains his card was declined.
“Are you sure? There should be no limit on that account,” he asks. The supervisor says she’ll try again, but even before she unplugs the machine, it’s clear she’s just going through the motions to placate him.
Kass looks at you in confusion. You look back at him with a guilty expression he’s never seen on your face before.
“What is it?” he asks.
You bite your lip and look away.
“Seriously, what have you done?”
“Nothing!” you say, too loud and too fast. “I'm just thinking. I mean, the last time you used it was at that food stall, right?”
“Yes. If you're implying that buying a hot dog maxed out my credit card—”
“No, it's just, that was before… our little swim, you know?”
Oh, he thinks, of course.
“You mean, before you dragged me in the ocean.”
“Look, my debit was totally fine after a run in the washing machine. It's not my fault you have some bougie card that can’t take being splashed with a bit of water.”
“No,” he enunciates, with sarcasm that drips poison, “of course not. Clearly, Bank of Kanto set out to ruin this whole evening by giving us no choice but to sleep in a bush naked and catch hypothermia.”
This is a prospect you look genuinely horrified for, which surprises him, because it's not possible you got all eight badges without roughing it out at one point or another.
“Can't your chauffeur drive us back to my house?” you ask helplessly, and he remembers your cushy origins prior to becoming champion, as a teenager who played video games all day and rarely saw the sun if you could help it. Clearly, old habits die hard.
“Not unless you feel like trekking across the region. I sent my driver away an hour ago.”
The fear in your eyes redoubles as rage. Maybe this wasn’t the best time for another bombshell.
“Are you for real? When I hadn't even agreed to stay the night?”
Kass figures that he can either stand his ground here or grovel for your forgiveness. Borderline instinctively, he decides that if there ever was a point of no return, it was long before now. Maybe long before today. If you put a knife to his neck and told him to stick a pin somewhere, it would probably land around the time he participated in that stupid online competition, the prelude to this unravelled mess, and was inevitably eviscerated by you, the loser who could identify pokemon by their shrill, bit-crunched, video-game cries and had never touched a pokeball in real life. (And no, that is not a sore spot.)
Needless to say, Kass does not grovel.
“Yes! Back when you dragged me in the ocean like a brain-dead dipshit and I decided I didn't want to wreck upholstery worth two years of your paycheck!”
He knows he’s overstepped the line when you gasp. Great job, Kass. What an unforgettable date this has been.
“That does it, you slimy little grubbit,” you say, rolling your sleeves up. “I don’t give a shit about your half-assed excuses, stupid credit card, and I certainly don’t give a shit about your upholstery. Why don’t you take the next private plane to your mansion in Kanto and get yourself a whole new car with your mountain of savings, since—”
The supervisor clears her throat. Both of you snap from your argument and look at her with a mortified expression, like you forgot she was there.
“Maybe you would like to stay in one of our economy rooms instead?” she asks. “If you happen to have any cash on hand, our rates are listed on the leaflets.”
Kass feels the tension thin to a cold breeze when you sigh and pluck one off a metal stand on top of the reception desk, but your mouth is still set in a tight grimace. Your eyes dash and back and forth over the listings, and you’re clearly not impressed, but he suspects it’s got nothing to do with the rooms and everything to do with the fact he just called you a brain-dead dipshit.
“Would you like me to leave you to discuss?” the supervisor asks.
“No, that’s alright,” you say, and put the leaflet back. “Sorry for the trouble. Just put us in your cheapest room, please. I’ll cover the cost for tonight.”
The receptionist types something on her keyboard and double checks her computer. “That would be the standard suite facing the city. It has, erm, only one single bed though.”
“Fine by me,” you say. “He can sleep on the floor.”
Kass tries not to grimace. Something something, monkey's paw; something something, be careful what you wish for. Sure, universe, lesson learnt.