Poochyena’s Human
“Hey. Fuck off,” the human says, nudging her away with a paw. She pounces on the new target, growling and slobbering as she attacks the dangly things trailing from its foot.
“No. Would you fucking–” The human drags its foot away and gets down close to the floor, trying to fend her off with its forepaws. “I said knock it the fuck off. Piss off already!”
She dances just outside its reach. “I will not. You’re coming with me. I chose you. Don’t you listen?”
The human flinches. “Jesus. Shut the fuck up already.” It glances towards the front of the store, where Absol and his human wait. But with all the noise, the chatot in an argument again and her own siblings setting up a racket, she’s not worried about them overhearing.
“What even is your fucking problem?” the human grumbles. It tangles its toes in its mane, which is black, like mightyena-black: obviously the best color. She’ll have a mane that color someday, too. “Ain’t you the one the lady stuck back in the cage a minute ago? How the hell did you get loose again so fast?”
“You just have to press on the right part of the floor and the door pops open. It’s easy once you know how. But come on, come on, we haven’t got time for dumb questions. Let’s go!”
“I said quiet.” The human scowls at her. Poochyena’s starting to get exasperated herself. Humans are supposed to be dumb, but really, this? Doesn’t it understand anything?
“What, you want to come with me or something?” She’s only barely started answering when it rocks back and raises its paws. “Okay, okay, I get it. Shut the fuck up already. Look.” It fusses with its mane again, and she wonders if it’s got fleas. That’ll be the first thing to deal with. She’s not going to be known as someone who lets her human get fleas.
“You heard what I said to the lady, right? But look, I was kinda lying about wanting a pokémon for a pet, okay? I want something that can battle. I’m going to be a trainer.”
“If you want something that can battle, why are you over here looking at the eevee? They’re useless in a fight.” A couple of the fluffballs have come over to watch, peering out at her. More frolic in the background, empty-headed as ever.
“Maybe he has actual taste,” suggests one of the eevee, her nose pressed up against the glass. Poochyena snarls at her, but all she does is wag her tail, taunting.
The human looks between her and the tank with naked confusion on its face. She yaps up at it in amused irritation. “Yes, yes, I love to fight! And I always win, too. I’m the strongest. So you’d better be ready, because I’m not going to settle for just any human!”
Everybody knows that if you’re going to go out into the world, if you’re going to be a fighter, you need to have a human by your side. It’s not safe otherwise. And if you find a good human, one that works well with you, you can go much farther than you could alone. You have to pick carefully, though, because a bad human can be worse than useless.
She hasn’t liked most of the humans who’ve come through the shop, especially not the puppies, which are noisy and pokey and the worst. But she likes this one. She thinks it’s nearly full-grown, it’s not loud, and it doesn’t keep jabbing at her with its toes. Best of all it doesn’t smell like the other humans. It smells like dirt and damp and a thousand scents she can’t place, but she knows they mean somewhere different. They mean outside. This isn’t a human that stays hunkered down in its den all the time. It’s free-range, off by itself. It’s exactly what she needs.
She only wishes she could properly explain that, because somehow it doesn’t seem to be getting the picture. Right now it’s not even paying attention to her, leaning away to peer around the edge of the eevee tank. “Look, if you want to come with me, you’re gonna to have to get in a pokéball, all right? Because no way in hell am I paying”–it squints at her cage a moment, and then its eyes get big–“Holy fuck. What, did they breed you to have fucking wings or some shit?”
She stops listening at the word “ball.” “Ball? You have a ball? Throw the ball! Throw the ball! Let’s play!”
That brings the human’s attention back to her. “Shhh! Okay, okay, so you want to get trained, I fucking get it already. But the thing is, I ain’t gonna be no ordinary trainer. Actually… I’m gonna join Team Rocket. You know what that is, don’t you?”
She’s never even heard the word “rocket” before in her life, but if she hasn’t by now it can’t be all that important. She’s almost a month old, after all–she knows everything that’s important to know about life. It’s not like she’s some silly baby. “Where’s the ball? You said you had a ball. Where’s the ball?”
“Well, I guess if you’re sure,” the human grumbles. It reaches into the folds of its skin and pulls out–yes, it is, it really is! She knew she made the right choice, she knew she picked the best human.
“Throw the ball! Throw the ball!”
It sets the ball on the floor in front of her instead. “Then I guess you can–whoah, hey, easy! Are you fucking–?”
She pounces, nearly sends the ball flying with the scrabbling of her paws. She bites down on it, trying to pick it up, but something clicks and she’s surrounded by warm red light…
The light clears, and Poochyena’s somewhere else entirely. The human’s behind her now, sitting up against a wall, a wall she’s never seen before. They’re inside a human den, but it’s big and empty and full of old smells. She breathes deep and concentrates, sorting through layer on layer of human scents, stretching far back into the past, and more recently, pokémon: rattata, spearow, some she can’t identify. Here and there sunlight streams through holes in the roof, throwing golden puddles of light on the ground. It brings with it city smells, rain and garbage and exhaust and all the others she can’t name.
Most important of all, she smells food. Hot food, fresh food, something meaty. And the smell is coming from her human.
She stops sniffing around and bounds over to it, ignoring the words coming out of its mouth. “Hey, I got you a–whoah, fuck! Calm down!”
She attacks the meaty thing, snapping it down without bothering to chew. It’s full of hot grease and spices and flavors she’s never tasted before, and it’s the best thing she’s eaten in her entire life.
“Jesus. Slow down before you choke.” Her human’s words come out a bit mushy, since it’s busy eating, too. She finishes her meal off in a couple quick gulps, then leaps on her human, rearing back and trying to reach its food.
“Hey, no! This is mine. Fuck off!” It holds the meat-thing up over its head and tries to push her away, but she won’t be deterred. If she can’t reach the food, she’ll settle for the next best thing: the grease smeared on her human’s face.
“Agh! Stop! Stop it! Fuck!” It laughs and pulls her away, holding her up in the air while she squirms with indignation. “You got your food, okay? So let me have mine.”
It sets her down on the ground, then crams the rest of the treat in its mouth in one go–no chance for her there. She shakes out her fur and gives her human a stern look. “Someday I’m going to get big. I’ll be so big you won’t be able to pick me up anymore. We’ll see what you do then!”
The human finishes chewing and wipes its face with a paw, then hesitantly reaches out for her. She dances away from it, not sure what this is about, but when it reaches again, toes spread wide, she realizes–it’s a game! She pounces, snapping at the waving toes.
The human snatches its forepaws back. “Jesus! Don’t do that. Come the fuck here.” It lunges and seizes her around the middle, and she’s airborne again before she properly realizes what’s going on, under her human’s curious stare.
“Let’s see, the lady at the shop said you were a girl, didn’t she?”
“Yes. What are you?”
“What? Look, bark once for yes, twice for no, okay?”
“Yes. Honestly, don’t you ever listen?”
“All right, all right.” It gives her a critical look, and she starts struggling again.
“This is uncomfortable, you know. Put me down.”
It does, and she skips away and gets started on a proper investigation. In amongst the human smells are strange sour ones, harsh and surprisingly strong despite their age. She wanders off in the direction of the rusty old towers near the center of the room, nose to the ground and tail in the air.
“Yeah, fine. You’re cute as fuck,” her human says, and a look back finds him smiling, just the smallest bit. “You don’t wanna be cute for the Rockets, though. You gotta be tough, you know? Like, fierce. Can you do fierce?”
Of course she can do fierce! Is there anything she can’t do? She plants her feet and bushes out her fur and starts a long growl, the loudest she can make. She has to stop, though, and laugh at the look on her human’s face. After a moment it laughs, too. “Yeah, yeah, just like that. Not bad.”
“More like awesome,” she says with a huff and goes back to exploring.
“Anyway,” her human goes on in the background, “not meeting the recruiter until six, so I figure we can hang out here until then. It’s a decent spot. Nobody ought to bother us here. At least, not unless that fucking absol shows up. Damn thing kept staring at me. Gave me the fucking creeps. I better not end up fucking cursed for nicking you. That’d be just my fucking luck.”
“Don’t be silly. Absol don’t curse people. And he’ll leave you alone as long as you go far enough away. He doesn’t like to go outside much.” She stops, then, her head popping up as she realizes. “Wait. You did go far away, didn’t you? Where are we?”
Her human isn’t paying any attention. It’s staring off into space and fiddling with–
It’s the ball. “Throw the ball! Throw the ball!” she yells, dashing back to her human. “Throw the ball! Throw the ball! Come on!”
Her human flinches away from her, grimacing. “Wow, what the fuck? The hell are you carrying on about?”
“Throw the ball! Throw the ball!” She pushes her head in under the human’s forepaws, trying to get at the ball. The human holds it up and away, and she darts back, running in circles. “That’s right, that’s right. Now throw! What are you waiting for?”
She’s starting to get a depressing sense of just how dense her human is. Yes, she knows humans need extensive training to be any use at all, but she never expected one would have trouble with something as simple as this!
“What, you want to go back in?” The human’s frowning at her.
She has no idea what that means. “Just throw the ball!”
“Well, okay. If you want to. Return, I guess.” The human presses the button in the middle of the ball, and then it’s red again, red and warm, and she’s–
–out in full sunlight. She freezes for a second. She’s outside. She’s never been outside before. She needs to go, she needs to run, she needs to smell absolutely every part of it. Before she does, though, she needs to make something clear. “Stop doing that!” she snaps at her human.
It barely glances her way before returning its attention to something behind her. It’s got its back pressed against a wall, one coated in dirty black and colorful human marks. From the way her human’s baring its teeth she can guess it doesn’t like what it sees. Apprehensive, she turns around herself and finds–“Oh, come on. I said you needed to go far away! Why don’t you ever listen?” she wails as she sees Absol and his human staring at her from just a few feet away.
“You’re going to send that puppy to battle Azrael?” Absol’s human says. “Honestly. Are you actually criminally negligent, or just stupid?”
“Fuck you, I ain’t neither of those things. And that poochyena could kick your kitty’s fluffy ass any day of the week, bitch. Now get lost if you don’t want to get fucking hurt.”
“That poochyena was bred specifically to compete in cute contests. She’s not a fighter, which you would recognize if you had even the faintest idea what you were doing.”
“Cute contests?” The horror in the human’s voice makes her glance back over her shoulder. Her human’s staring at her now, eyes wide with shock.
“What’s a cute contest?”
“Exactly,” Absol’s human goes on. “Looking for a vicious pokémon to guard your drug den, was that it? Or maybe you wanted to try your hand at the underground fighting circuit? Idiot.”
She growls at Absol’s human. “Don’t talk about my human like that! He’s smart, he knew I was the best at fighting.”
Absol’s human gives her a stern look. “If you return the poochyena now, I won’t press charges. You’ll be free to go off to whatever despicable activity you were planning on. If you insist on being stubborn, Azrael and I will have to take her back by force, and I assure you you won’t enjoy that.”
Her human’s face reddens up, and he grits his teeth again in an angry grimace. “Fuck you, lady. Poochyena, get that thing!”
She’s glad to. Absol’s always ruining her fun, catching her when she gets out of her cage and breaking up all her really exciting fights. Poochyena throws herself forward, slamming into Absol’s shoulder at top speed. He rocks sideways with a little “oof” of surprise, then gives her a baleful red glare.
Absol’s human sighs. “Very well. Azrael, deal with it. But be careful.”
“As you wish.” Absol stalks forward, stepping neatly out of the way of another tackle as he goes.
“Yeah, get it, Poochyena! Tackle again.” Her human inches sideways along the wall, moving slowly, slowly towards the sound of traffic.
“Where are you going?” she yaps at it. Can’t it see she’s in the middle of a fight, here?
“Little one,” Absol says, his voice soft and perfectly even, flowing smooth as silk. “You have no idea what you’re doing. If you don’t come home, you’re going to get hurt.”
She whirls around to face him again, letting out an angry growl. “Yes I do! I’m going on an adventure and I’m taking this human with me and I’ll take good care of it and make sure it gets enough food and doesn’t get eaten and everything and you can’t stop me, so there!”
She charges at Absol, but he puts up a paw and swats her hard across the snout. She stumbles away, snorting and tearing up. That hurt!
“Is that what you think? You know nothing of humans, little one. All you’ve ever heard are stories. Humans run this world. They’re the ones who will decide your life for you.”
“Don’t be stupid. That’s not true.” She knows all about life thanks to the shop’s big old torkoal. The fire-type normally lives in a pen outside, but she comes inside sometimes when it rains, and when she does the whole shop goes quiet so everyone can listen to her stories. Torkoal’s almost two hundred years old, and she knows everything. And she says humans and pokémon are partners, and they exist to help each other, so obviously Absol doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Absol snorts, then pounces on Poochyena, making broad movements, trying to hit her with the flat of his blade. She growls, offended that he obviously isn’t even trying to fight properly. She snaps at his face when he comes in close, and he jerks back, sunlight dazzling from the gemstones in his collar as he shakes out his mane.
“Really, now. You can believe what you want, I suppose. You’re only a cub. But of all the humans there are, this is really the one you want? Look at him. Even now he abandons you in favor of saving his own skin.”
Poochyena spins around in sudden terror and finds her human’s creeping sideways progress has brought it up against a stack of boxes. It doesn’t run, though; it braces a hind foot against the side of a crate and tears off a splintered piece of wood–a weapon, she realizes, the best a human can manage in a fight. Her human drops the club a second later when it finds its weapon’s inner side covered in tiny spiders, more of which come pouring out of the hole it made in the crate.
Poochyena’s distraction costs her as Absol deals her a hearty slap with his paw, then smacks her again with his blade when she tries to get up. “You should stay down,” he says, pressing her to the ground under one paw. “No need to make this difficult.”
Poochyena whines and scrabbles at the pavement, trying to push Absol off. Of course her human is of no help, cursing and beating baby spiders off its arm while Absol’s human laughs at it. Poochyena’s running out of options. It looks like Absol really is stronger than her, but she’s still got one trick left.
She growls up at Absol, loud enough to get his attention, and when he looks around she opens her mouth wide, giving in to a jaw-cracking yawn. She shimmies out from under Absol’s paw while he sways back, yawning himself and blinking in consternation. A second later he he realizes what’s going on and lashes out at her, hissing, “You impudent little fool! How dare you?”
It’s a real attack this time. Poochyena tries to dodge, but Absol’s claws nick her, slicing a short cut down her right foreleg. Absol raises his paw again, then sways, blinking furiously as his eyelids try to drop closed. He collapses sideways, asleep before he hits the pavement.
Absol’s human takes a step back. No laughing now. Poochyena growls at the human as she stalks around Absol’s limp body, ignoring the twinge in her leg where Absol cut her. “That’s what you get for messing with me and my human,” she snarls. “Now back off, or else.”
“I’ll be damned,” her human says. “Nice work, Poochyena. Make sure she doesn’t go anywhere. And you,” it addresses the other human. “Better luck next time, bitch.”
Then it’s gone. It takes Poochyena a second to realize what’s happening. Her human’s running. It’s running away. It’s running away, and it’s leaving her behind.
“Hey!” she barks. “Hey, get back here! Where do you think you’re going?”
She takes off after her human, which is already out of sight around a corner. It’s not exactly quiet, though, and she races after the sound of its footfalls. His footfalls? Absol seemed to think her human was male, but how could he tell?
The human’s nowhere near as fast as her, of course, but he knows the outside world much better. Poochyena does her best to stay focused, but the air is full of tantalizing new smells, sights she doesn’t understand crowding in on all sides. Through it all she tries to hold onto the one constant, the only familiar thing: the smell and sound and sight of her human, always ahead, always running.
He’s not just running, he’s climbing and jumping, swinging over obstacles and hurdling the tops of fences. He has the advantage over Poochyena there, and she wastes time looking for ways to squeeze around or under where he can go over. At last she catches him on an open stretch, and with a burst of speed she catches up, slamming into him and knocking him to the ground.
He curses and throws his hands out to stop his roll, and no sooner has he come to rest than he’s trying to scramble up again. She barks and jumps at him, and he drops back to the ground, glaring.
“Why the fuck are you following me?” he gasps. “Piss off! I don’t need no fucking contest pokémon on my team.”
“You’re my human. You can’t just run off and leave me.” She huffs out an exasperated, exhausted breath. “Why would you run away from a battle we won, anyway? No thanks to you, of course.”
“Look, you should just go back to the shop, all right? A pokémon like you don’t belong in Team Rocket. It was a fucking stupid idea in the first place.”
“I don’t even know what a contest is! Why don’t you understand?”
Her human shields his face with bleeding hands, and she backs off, gone cold all over with horror. He’s hurt? How did he get hurt? It wasn’t her that did that, was it? She barely touched him, it wasn’t even a proper tackle attack, she can’t possibly have hurt her human, not already, that’s not what she wanted, human’s can’t be that fragile. She was careful!
“Look we can do this later, okay?” her human says. “If you’re here, that means your psycho bitch owner probably sent her fucking killer absol after me again as soon as it woke up, and it could show up any second. So I’ll recall you for now, and we can do this shit later, all right?”
Her heart leaps as the ball reappears, but only for a moment. She knows how this works now. She’s not going to be fooled again.
She takes a running leap, and the human yells and drops the ball as her teeth close around his wrist. She lets go immediately and runs after the all, taking it in her mouth and being careful not to touch the button. “This is my ball now,” she says around the unwieldy thing. “You clearly have no idea what to do with it, so you’ve lost your ball privileges.”
Her human rubs the white marks on his wrist and groans. “Oh, what the fuck ever. If you’re not gonna let me recall you, you’re just gonna have to keep the fuck up.”
She has no trouble doing that now that her human’s lost his head start. It’s not long before he staggers to a halt in front of a paint-flaking door set into a brick wall. Her human pants for breath as he tries the handle, then stands back. The door shudders in its frame when he kicks it, but no more than that, and further kicking and cursing does no better.
This clearly isn’t a job for a human. Poochyena throws herself at the door, which hurts–it’s not fair, you attacks aren’t supposed to hurt you–but it rattles louder than ever. Another tackle and the latch finally gives, and she stumbles through the opening with the human hard after her.
“Fuck yes,” he mutters, and Poochyena stares around, trying to figure out what has him so excited. They’re in another big, empty den, but this one’s lousy with recent smells, humans and pokémon alike. The floor’s full of holes exposing pipes and coiling wire, and empty wooden frames draped with plastic sheets section the open space.
“Ha!” Her human’s over near the wall, where a pile of large brown bags is stacked amidst a bunch of human tools she doesn’t recognize. Her human heaves one onto his shoulders, staggering and snarling to himself about the weight. He stomps up a ramp to the second floor, which is a patchwork of plywood and open air. “Come on,” he yells to her. “You want to beat that fucking absol or what? Get over here.”
She sets the ball down and follows as much out of curiosity as anything. “You don’t have to be rude. I’m coming.”
Her human throws the bag down at the edge of the scaffolding. “All right. You. Stay here,” he pants. “I’m going. Down there.” He points below. “When the absol shows up, you push this over the edge on top of it, okay?”
“I don’t think that’s going to stop him,” Poochyena says, but her human kneels down anyway. With a quick motion there’s something gleaming metal in his hand, and he slashes the bag open. Gray powder spills out, and Poochyena sniffs it. It smells earthy but acidic, not natural.
“There. Think you can handle that? It’s heavy.” The metal thing vanishes back into her human’s loose skin somewhere. “Absol do that shadow-walking bullshit, don’t they? It’ll probably be here any minute.”
“I can move it, but I really don’t think dropping it is going to–”
“Great. Stay. Good pooch.” He’s off down the ramp again, and she stares after him in complete exasperation. Well, it’ll serve him right if this doesn’t work. If he won’t listen, he’ll have to face the consequences.
Maybe she can find another human, she thinks as the one down below starts kicking an overturned bucket across the floor with a series of jagged, scraping clanks. There’s lots of humans in the city, after all. It’s dangerous to wander around alone, but she doesn’t need to be alone for long. Just long enough to find someone more more suitable.
Her human flops down on the bucket with a sigh and shakes out his sweaty mane. He’s almost directly below Poochyena now, peering around the dim room, his eyes in constant motion. The air is full of the rustle of drifting plastic as the den breathes.
Or there’s the wild. That’s certainly a good place to meet trainers. She’s been told, though, that there aren’t any wild poochyena around here. And besides, the wild is, well, wild. She can’t make sense of everything she’s been told about it. Plants everywhere? No buildings? How would that even work? And one thing she’s been assured of, one thing she simply can’t believe, is that in the wild there are no treats.
There’s a new sound down below, a rhythmic clicking. Claws on concrete. Poochyena leans over the edge to get a better look.
Absol’s there. He must have arrived the usual way: not there, and then all there, stepping out of shadow as though he were walking through a door. Poochyena’ll be able to do that, too. Someday. For now she can only be jealous.
“Where is the poochyena?” Absol asks as he stalks towards the human. Poochyena could have told him there was no point, that her human’s much too dense to understand him. Not that Absol would listen. Why doesn’t anyone ever listen to her?
Of course her human doesn’t reply. He’s up off his bucket and backing away from Absol. The dark-type keeps coming, his gaze roaming the cluttered den. “You’ve put her away in a pokéball, haven’t you? I suppose I’ll just have to take it from you, then.” He lowers his head, angling his scythe. “I’m not supposed to hurt you. But no one said anything about scaring you a bit.”
There it is. Absol walks underneath Poochyena, and she throws herself forward, tackling the bag hard. It slides with a long, grinding scrape, and gets almost halfway over the edge before it gets stuck.
Absol stops and looks up. Poochyena shoves and butts at the bag, suddenly in a panic, until finally it tips and, ponderously, falls. Absol leaps to the side, and the bag barely clips his shoulder. It lands with a resounding slam and a great puff of gray dust, and Absol lays into it with blade and claws, filling the air with billowing clouds of grit before he realizes it isn’t an enemy.
“Perfect.” Poochyena’s ears prick up. Her human’s voice is hardly above a whisper. In one paw he’s holding the metal thing he brought out before, and now she can see it’s like a claw, a stabbing thing to replace his useless human toes. In the other is a little box, one that must have fire inside, since there’s a tiny flame jetting from the top.
Absol sneezes and coughs, spitting out clotted hunks of gray. Poochyena’s human doesn’t wait for him to recover. She starts to cry out, to tell him he’s an idiot for thinking he can fight Absol. He has his metal claw, but Absol has twelve claws, and the little flame won’t do more than annoy him. But the human’s already already thrown his flame-box at Absol.
It never comes close to hitting him. It disappears into the settling gray cloud, and then there’s a whoosh and a huge thump that Poochyena feels more than she hears, an explosion that knocks her backwards and rattles the wood under her feet. Dust blows everywhere, and the air is hot with the smell of burning.
Then it’s quiet, ringingly, utterly silent. In terror Poochyena realizes that no, it’s not silent, it’s just her ears that have stopped working. She pulls herself forward on her stomach, too achy to stand, and looks down.
Her human’s picking himself up off the floor, laughing and yelling something. She hears nothing but a constant whine. Dust and smoke swirl around where Absol was standing, slowly dispersing into the open air.
A dark crescent of energy slices out of the cloud, and her human stumbles backwards and falls, the attack passing right over his head. It cruises onward and slices through a support pillar before dissipating.
Absol steps into open air, unsteady but resolute. His fur’s standing on end, gone gray with dust where it isn’t blackened or burned away, and he favors a rear leg, hopping awkwardly as he approaches the human. Poochyena can’t see his face, but in every stilted, halting movement, there is bubbling fury.
Absol snaps his head sideways, launching another dark pulse from his scythe. Poochyena’s can just make out a faint static hissing as the attack flies across the room. Her human rolls away, but Absol doesn’t let up, launching dark pulse after dark pulse. One catches her human in the arm, and she can barely hear him yell. He’s got his claw out now, ready to attack.
And there Poochyena is, just watching while her human’s in danger. She’s supposed to defend him, just like he’s supposed to help her. That’s how it works. She takes a moment to judge the distance, get the angle right. Then she charges forward and hurls herself into empty space.
She lands hard on Absol’s back, and they both topple to the floor. Absol hisses and strikes out blindly, transforming into an angry whirl of claws. Poochyena kicks and bites and tries to ignore the stinging cuts Absol lays open across her face and sides. His fur might be draggled, but it’s still thick, and that on top of his squirming thwarts Poochyena’s teeth.
She struggles away, then slams into Absol with a tackle as he’s getting to his feet. He doesn’t go down again, though, and lashes out with a scratch that opens a long gash down her side. He starts to follow as she stumbles away, but then a brick hits him in the side and he spins around, snarling.
“That’s right, Fuzzball,” her human says, lobbing another brick. Absol ducks, and it clatters uselessly across the floor. “You’re gonna have to fight both of us. Can’t take the heat, can you?”
Absol roars and charges at the human, hardly flinching as another brick hits him in the shoulder. Poochyena runs, too, and throws herself into a hasty tackle that only gets her tangled in Absol’s legs. He trips and falls and smacks his head against a pillar, and when Poochyena tumbles to a halt herself, she scrambles to her feet only to find her opponent lying limp and unconscious.
It takes long seconds for her to realize she won, she really won. Absol’s knocked out. Her first battle, and she won. Well, she did have help.
“You okay?” that help asks, kneeling down next to her. He’s clutching his bleeding arm. “You didn’t break nothing, did you?” He reaches out to feel her legs, but his exploration only irritates her cuts, and Poochyena growls and snaps at his paw.
He snatches it away. “Ow! Fine! Be that way! Go ahead and get fucking gangrene or some shit for all I care.” He gets to his feet and glares down at her. “Where the fuck is your pokéball?”
She doesn’t know. She doesn’t feel inclined to help him find it, either. She keeps growling.
“Look, I don’t got no potions or nothing. So you only got two fucking options, here: you go in the pokéball for a while, or you walk around all ripped up until I find something. Your goddamned choice.”
“I don’t know if I want to go with you at all. Maybe I don’t want you for my human anymore.”
“Or you can stand there and bark at me like a fucking idiot. Whatever.” He bends down to unclip Absol’s collar and holds it up to the faint light coming through the windows overhead. He scratches at a gem with one of his toes. “Probably fake,” he mutters, but the collar vanishes into wherever he keeps his other trinkets. Poochyena’s briefly struck with wondering how humans can handle so many items.
Her human looks at her again. “Whatever you’re gonna do, you better get moving. This guy’s gonna wake up in a few minutes, and he’s gonna be pissed.”
That’s true. But she doesn’t know where to go. She can’t go home now, not even if she wanted to. She can go look for another human, but her human’s right, she’ll have no one to heal her. Only now, as the excitement of battle wears off, is she really starting to feel her injuries, a chorus of pain that strongly suggests she lie down and not move for a while.
“Look, just get in the pokéball for a little while so I can get you healed. I promise I’ll let you out as soon as I can.”
She doesn’t know what to do. She looks from the human to the unconscious form of Absol to the door they came in by. She knows where the ball is now. She can smell it, can smell her scent and the human’s on it.
“Oh what the fuck ever. I don’t need you staring at me all fucking pathetic.” He storms off, headed for the door. She watches him go a moment, then goes off to get the ball, which rolled away and fetched up against a stack of boards. It’s covered by a fine layer of gray dust, which is still sifting down out of the air.
The human glares at her when she runs up next to him, but he does stop, and she puts the ball down by his feet.
“You had better do like you said, or you’re going to have more to worry about than your arm.”
“What, changed your fucking mind?” He starts to reach for the ball, then hesitates. “You’re not gonna bite me again if I touch this, are you? Because fuck that, you can walk.”
“Not this time. Prove to me that you can handle it responsibly.”
“Yeah, whatever the fuck you said.” The human scoops the ball up and points the button at her. “Return, then.”
When the red light clears, she isn’t healed. In fact, she aches all over, and her fur’s still matted with dust and blood. She doesn’t really notice, though. What she notices are the trees.
There was a tree outside the pet shop’s window, right on the edge of the street, and it was huge, nearly as high as the roof. But here–here the trees are so tall they’re practically skyscrapers. They’re bigger around than her, crowding so close together they nearly block out the sun. And they’ve stolen all the noise, too, footsteps and honking and the subterranean rumble of the subway that’s always formed the soundtrack of her life. Now there’s only chirping and the rushing of wind through the leaves, plus mysterious rustling near the ground, which is not cement or tile, but dirt and dead leaves and bark and–she has to put her nose down to take it all in.
“Hey. Turn this way so I can get that cut on your leg. And close your eyes.”
Her human’s here too, of course. He’s the one who brought her here out to… to the wild. That must be where they are. Poochyena turns, about to give him a piece of her mind, and only just has enough time to close her eyes before she gets hit with a mist of droplets from the bottle the human’s holding.
Her wounds flare up, pain searing across her body, and Poochyena’s eyes pop open. She growls at her human, and he glances around, like there must be some other target for her anger. “What? It’s just a fucking potion.”
The pain fades away as suddenly as it came, and Poochyena looks down in surprise as her wounds heal in fast motion, disappearing in a matter of seconds. She feels great. Well, she’s still a bit tired, but she doesn’t hurt at all anymore.
“How did you do that?” Not that she really expects an answer. Now that she’s healed she can properly enjoy being outside the city for the first time. She puts her nose to the ground and races back and forth, trying to take it all in.
“Well, you got guts, I guess. I’ll give you that much.” She stops sniffing and looks back at her human. He’s just as disheveled as her, but at least he’s covered up the wound on his arm. He’s watching her in a calculating way, rolling the pokéball around in his paws. She has to fight back the desire to chase it.
“I guess you aren’t completely useless,” she says. “How did you know the dust would blow up like that?”
“I mean, you did jump a whole story to attack an absol that was way out of your fucking league, which was totally stupid, but I guess it worked out.” He’s still spinning the ball between his toes. “We’re lucky that thing wasn’t battle-trained, though. Shit.”
“You did know it was going to do that, right? You didn’t just get lucky?”
“Anyway, you’re free to go. You can get off here, if you want.” He waves his paw vaguely at the trees. “Or I can take you back to the city. Not for a while, though. I’d rather give that damn absol some time to give up on finding us.”
Poochyena takes some time to consider. The human is completely inexperienced. He doesn’t have any other pokémon. Perhaps with the proper training… A test. A final test to see if she ought to keep him.
“Are you listening to me?”
She roots around in the leaf litter until she finds a likely stick, then returns to her human–her potential human–and sets it down by his side. He looks at it in bald confusion.
“What the fuck.” He picks the stick up and turns it around, examining it. “It’s a fucking stick. Congratulations.”
“Throw the stick! Throw the stick!” She really can’t help it, not when he waves it around like that. She rears up on her hind paws and whines. “Throw the stick! Throw the stick!”
The human stares at her, then waggles the stick back and forth, watching as Poochyena jumps around to stay in front of it. And then he throws it.
It’s not a great throw, more a kind of sideways flick, but Poochyena doesn’t care. She races after it and snaps it out of the air before it even gets close to hitting the ground. Then she brings it back and sets it by the human’s side. “Throw the stick again! Throw the stick again!”
“Oh, so that’s what you were carrying on about.” He picks the stick up, and she all but explodes with delight. “I guess I can’t pretend I got anything better to do.” He throws the stick again.
She fetches and fetches, her human’s throws improving with time and sending her ever farther afield. At last she grows bored and leaves the stick to lie and crawls into her human’s lap. “Pet me.”
He scratches her head, tentatively at first, then a bit harder. “Harder, harder. Good. Now the ears. Ears.” He pets her back instead. “Well, at least I know you’re not impossible to train. We’ll work on the listening.”
“If you’re sure you want to stay, I guess you can stay,” the human says, like anybody asked for his opinion. “Why the fuck you’re so excited to run off and join Team Rocket, I don’t know.”
“You’ve got potential,” Poochyena says, “but don’t get cocky. You’ve got a long way to go.”
“Should probably try and get cleaned up before I meet the recruiter,” her human mutters, brushing some gray dust off his leg. He doesn’t get up, though, just leans back against a tree. “Today was one metric fuckton more exciting than I wanted. But what the hell, we fought an absol and won. That’s gotta count for something.”
“It’s not a done deal,” Poochyena says. “I’ll go find somebody else if you don’t shape up. There’s lots of other humans out there. So you’d better be ready to work hard, because I’m not going to settle for just anybody.”
“Well, here we are, anyway,” her human says with a smile. “Nobody’d better fuck with us, am I right?”
Poochyena yawns and stretches, then squirms around, trying to find a more comfortable position. Her human strokes the fur around her neck, and she lets her eyes fall closed. A part of her wants to get up and run off and smell more smells, but she feels all heavy, much too heavy to stand up again. “If you want to improve your chances, you could get me another one of those meat things,” she murmurs dozily. “That’s what you would do if you were smart.”