route_1065 | (no subject)

(no subject)

Who: Belphegor of Sloth (

belphe); Minamimoto Sho (

yoctogram)
Where: Somewhere enroute to Azalea
When: Backdated to middle of the night May 21st

Summary: Belphe finds herself unable to sleep and gets up to make travel arrangements for the next morning on her Gear. Sho, likewise, wakes up and momentarily flips shits because he thinks she's left again. The Burning Of The Clothes incident is discussed.

Rating: PG to PG-13. Might be a swear word here and there, I'm not sure.

Log: Somewhere after midnight, she had decided that they were going to fly the rest of the way to Azalea. The trip, by ground, would take them nearly a week, supposing they had good luck getting through the caves, and, after all that had gone on, Belphe had severe doubts the haphazard traveling party would hold together that long.

Zodiac and Eros would be up for the task of carrying the three of them, she was sure, and if they got started early enough...

Her eyes settled on her backpack a short distance away before she climbed out of the sleeping bag to claim her pokegear from the front pocket and settle herself beneath a nearby tree to bring up the map.

From here, the trip by air should only take them a few hours...five, give or take. They could be in Azalea before lunch, provided no further complications arose.

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He'd gotten used to having her near. He'd never admit it in so many words, but he'd gotten used to having her near. She was practical, where he tended to get caught up in what he was thinking about and end up trailing off from what he was doing. Or, say, forget to eat and feed his team.

He felt bad about that, but he wouldn't say it either. He'd just tried to give them all attention and show that they mattered without actually admitting anything in words.

She'd let him curl up against her, like usual, which had made him feel like things were going to be okay. That was why the sudden cold of her leaving the bag had him sit up fast enough that his hat fell off with a soft, but intent, "Belphegor!"

He didn't even stop to pick up the beloved accessory until he'd found her under the tree.

The response to Sho's frantic utterance of her name and ensuing explosion of movement was an inquisitive look from where she sat. Her posture did not suggest that she was someone with the intention of going anywhere in the next short while.

"...yes?" she asked, remaining where she was. That was twice now that he had called her properly by name, after months of "Bell". It left her unsure of whether to feel gratified he had finally corrected himself, or perturbed that he'd suddenly bothered.

Sho took a deep breath when he saw she was still there, and turned away to save face while picking his hat up and shoving it back on top of his bandanna. "Thought you'd left again." he mumbled as he settled it, peering at her with yellow eyes partially hidden by his black hand.

"I don't like you being gone, Bell."

"Huu...? Did something go wrong?" She was not someone accustomed to being missed, unless it involved a mess she was supposed to have cleaned up for someone else and had been absent for.

Though, aside from everyone present being hungry and rattled, everyone SEEMED fine...

He blinked at her for a minute, the temptation to give a flippant response almost visible. He was fine everything was fine nothing went wrong...except for everything.

Instead he shrugged awkwardly and continued looking at her without looking directly at her. "You're..." nice, fun, familiar, "I like you. I don't like you being away."

".....ah." Despite the nonchalance of the reply, red eyes widened and blinked several times, betraying the fact his answer had startled her. There was a pause before her knees drew to her chest and her expression clouded.

"....if my presence is valuable to you, then I would thank you not to destroy my things." Sorry, Sho, she's not letting the Great Wardrobe Purging go that easily...

Sho was used to people not understanding him, however he'd had plenty of time bumbling around in the wilderness to try to put together an explanation that would make sense to Belphe - spurred on by the fact that if he didn't he could lose the company of someone he considered...

someone he considered a friend. She wasn't a tool to him, not any more. She was a real person, with real feelings, and he needed her to know he knew that. Somehow.

"What you look like matters." he finally said, drawing his long, overly-thin legs up against his chest and resting his cheek on his knees to look up at her at an angle that couldn't be comfortable considering his spine was limited to human angles, "Maybe not to you, but to other people. People judge." Even when they had no right to, ants that they were.

"Bad clothing makes people look down on you. Try to use you. Not give you the respect you deserve. You don't dress well, Bell." and it bothered him, enough that he couldn't stay still and almost as fast as he'd fallen into the position he burst to his feet and started pacing, hands waving even though he remained quiet enough to not wake Jack and the Pokemon.

"You deserve better than you give yourself. Good clothing means people will listen to you more willingly, it means that they will assume that you are competent in other areas, if you dress right you can define how you are thought of.

"You are beautiful." it wasn't said as a compliment, it was simply a matter of fact, "Mathematically perfect in a way that no natural born creature can come near. When you pair that with dowdy, ugly, and boring clothing it makes people assume that your beautiful body is run by a dull, stupid person. It isn't fair and it isn't right," he briefly lost his trail of thought, going into a quiet but intent string of formula and numbers for a moment,

"it isn't right, but it's how it is. People don't look at you and see Belphegor, amazing Pokemon trainer. They just see a beautiful woman who doesn't know how to dress, and assume that you don't know how to train either. It closes doors."

She weathered his reply with a mask of neutrality, listening to his words, considering them, and comparing them to her bank of personal experiences while traveling Johto.

As someone who had never had her wardrobe called into question in her proper world, she could not say for sure whether his observations carried merit or not. She did not think she'd been treated differently, really. And she'd had her share of challenges from rival trainers...

....of course, she'd never had the problem of being flocked around like some of the other girls. For the mostpart, she'd been left in peace to train, and that had been fine with her. Her team certainly hadn't suffered for it, after all.

Did that really mean people thought less of her?

She flinched at being called beautiful as if it were a pinprick. She could believe, hearing him justify himself, that he'd had good intentions in mind at the time, but that didn't mean she felt she could allow leeway for such things in the future. If, every time they disagreed about something, he solved the problem by destroying it...

...well, that wasn't so different from Beatrice's methods.

She shifted aside where she sat, making room, subtly inviting him to take a seat there if he chose.

He blinked at her for a moment, the collapsed bonelessly next to her, resting his head against the tree. There didn't seem to be anything left that he could say, so his fingers tapped a restless Fibonacci sequence against his thigh while he waited for her to speak.

She was quiet a moment longer, waiting for a pause in the rattling of his fingertips on his leg before speaking.

"I will not leave again." she assured, deigning not to press him or put him on the spot about his apparent need for her to stay. There was little point in it, after all...she'd known him long enough by now to realize that lying was not his style. In his own twisted way, he seemed to put certain value on honesty just as she did, even if it got lost at times in a miasma of equations.

"And, in trade, you will not do something so drastic without my permission again. Is that a promise?"

"I can't." Sho said after another minute had passed, "Sometimes...I get confused." It was as close as he could come to admitting that he wasn't in control during the worst periods, when he screamed and paced and built strange towers out of objects that belonged in the trash. "I'll try."

Well...it was a start, at least.

"That's all that I ask." she replied, allowing the beginnings of a smile to tug at the corners of her mouth. Anger was such an exhausting emotion to cling to...she had no idea how Satan-nee managed.

He slumped over at that, boneless as only a teenager could be, and rested his head against her shoulder. "I can promise to try. I do promise to try." Just don't leave again. I need you. I don't know why, but I do.

She allowed him to rest there, fingertips idly arranging and combing through some stray flyaways of silver hair that hung out from beneath his hat.

Her free hand, however, continued to explore the pokegear's map, manipulating it until she felt she had decided on a final route they would be taking come morning.

"You ought to rest." she told him. "I'd like to leave when the sun rises if we--"

She was interrupted by her backpack suddenly, seemingly on it's own, lurching onto it's side.

"May I stay here?" it was awkward, the first time he'd asked instead of just glomming onto her and forcing his presence, but he was still feeling off-centre and wary of making her angry again. Then he turned to blink at her backpack, tilting his head, "You got new eggs?"

"Not new..." she said, moving to get up to investigate. "Our Meowth eggs had arrived at the center. I had planned to give you yours when my shift was over before--"

Well...she didn't really need to bring it up again, did she? No. So, instead, she knelt to unzip it. Almost immediately, two cream-colored balls of fur rolled out, seeming to be deeply-entrenched in a tug-o-war over a game token.

Little fluffy kittens! And one of them was his. He didn't like people much, except as an audience, but kittens? Who could not be happy when they had kittens? Even Ele was a kitten at one point, although now he was so firmly in his pokeball that Sho wouldn't be surprised if he spontaneously ended up in the computer.

Which was one of those things that his brain kept shorting out on. He'd figure out the equations for how living things could be in the computer at some point.

Her eyes wandered from the kittens to Sho, and back again. It seemed nothing broke an awkward tension better than newborn pokemon.

"One of them is a different color." she noted. It was subtle, but one of them had a more pronounced golden highlight to their fur than its sibling.

"Yes." Sho agreed, holding his hand out to the two kittens. The golden one bumbled closer, bumping his hand and rumbling.

...Didn't matter which egg was technically Belphe's, Sho imprinted. It was obvious in the softness of his smile.

For her part, Belphegor wasn't picky. She had not laid claim to either of the eggs in particular, so did not protest allowing Sho first pick of the kittens.

The other seemed miffed that their game had been interrupted and took a general sniff in Sho's direction. ...nope. it didn't see what its littermate found so appealing. Just some human in a hat.

The baby meowth turned eyes on Belphe and bumbled in her direction instead, coin still firmly in its mouth. Maybe she had more of them...

Sho hefted his newest kitten and stroked it's head gently.

"⦡" he said contentedly, "⦡ is your name." Spherical Angle Opening Upwards.

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