Chapter Text
You’re pounding on the door of Guzma’s childhood home so hard you think you might break it off the hinges. It’s late and the stars are out, and you can hear the cries of nighttime Pokemon in the distance. He pulls the door open violently, leaning through the door frame, slightly hunched as usual. He’s not wearing his shirt or his shades, just plain grey shorts and his jacket, and his hair is messier than usual. You wonder if you caught him getting ready for bed and he just threw his jacket on to answer the door.
“What the fuck do you want?” he shouts.
“I thought you didn’t curse,” you say, calmly.
“I don’t curse around kids,” he replies, probably referring to Hau, Lillie, and Gladion. “You’re my age. I think you can handle a swear word. Anyway, like I said – why the fuck are you here?”
“Show me how to catch a Wimpod.”
“Figure it out yourself, dumbass!” He makes to close the door on you, but you slam your palm against it and push back. He caves surprisingly easy, letting you push it back open again. “What’re you asking me for?”
“You have a Golisopod. You can’t find those in the wild anywhere on any of the islands. That means either you got a Wimpod as a gift, or you caught one yourself. Show me how you caught it.”
“You throw a fuckin’ Pokeball,” he says, voice tinged with annoyance and brow furrowed as he glares down at you.
“You know what I mean! When I get close it runs, and even if I manage to catch up, if I weaken it too much it finds a way to run and hide.” You lean forward, placing a hand aggressively on the door frame. “I need to catch a Wimpod.”
He snorts loudly and looks you up and down, critically. “For your shitty Pokedex, I bet.” Then he knocks your hand off the door frame, leaning forward and getting in your face until you get intimidated enough to back up a step. “Have you been out trying to catch them today?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, there’s no point going out again tonight because you probably spooked them all. We gotta wait ‘til tomorrow, at least. Meet me at the motel on Route 8 at sunset.”
With that, he promptly slams the door in your face.
When you get to Route 8 the next evening and hop off the Charizard you rode – without your safety equipment, because you didn’t want to look like a dork in front of Guzma – he’s already there, leaning against a tree by the motel.
“There you are.” He strides over to you cooly, his hands shoved in the pockets of his shorts. “Thought you were gonna waste the last bit of daylight we have left.”
The Charizard takes off, probably to pick up someone else, blowing your hair and clothes around in the process. “If doing it during the day was important,” you say, trying to brush your hair back into place, “maybe you shouldn’t have asked to meet at sunset.”
He looks away, obviously irritated, his mouth screwed up in a frown. He’s not wearing his usual clothes today – instead, just a black t-shirt and horrible khaki shorts. He kind of reminds you of a bug catcher. “Says the idiot who came to my house at dusk asking me to help them catch Pokemon, like they’re some kinda rookie loser.” He scuffs the ground with his sandal, looking almost sullen. “Aren’t you the Champion now? You couldn’t have asked someone else or waited until it wasn’t in the middle of the night?”
“It was really frustrating,” you say, quietly, because you are a little embarrassed about harassing him. “I got pissed off because I couldn’t figure it out, and you were the first person I thought of.”
“Wow, fuckin’ thanks. A high honor, I’m sure.” He scoffs at you as he turns and walks towards the rocky beach, but it seems he accepts that explanation since it looks like he’s done pouting.
You follow him, slowing your pace when he slows his as he approaches the middle of the rocky area. He starts rummaging around in his pockets as he turns to face you again.
“So,” he says, and he’s practically whispering, stepping a little closer to you. “They’re called Wimpod for a reason. You can’t treat it like catching any regular Pokemon that likes to fight. Treat it like… like one of those Safari Zones. They have those where you’re from, right?”
You nod. You never actually got a chance to visit one back home, but you get the general idea.
He crouches down, squatting like you’ve sometimes seen him do during a Pokemon battle, and you squat with him when he gestures for you to get down. He gestures a second time to a small hole in the face of the small cliff surrounding the rocky beach.
“That’s one of the holes they like to hide in. I don’t see any out here, so they’re probably still spooked from you traipsing around like a madman yesterday.” He pauses to shoot you a critical, scathing look. Finally, he stops digging around in his pockets, pulling his hand out to reveal a fistful of Pokebeans. “You can sometimes lure them out with food though.”
Guzma sort of waddles closer to the hole, trying to walk without standing up properly. You try not to giggle at him, because it looks silly. He ignores you starts methodically laying down a trail of beans, waddling back over to the middle of the area where you’re still crouched down.
When he reaches you, he grabs your hand, dropping the rest of the beans into your open palm. Then he lays down flat on his stomach, almost like a starfish stuck on a rock during low tide, and gestures for you to lay down too.
“Get a Pokeball ready,” he whispers. “Ultraball, if you have one. You really only get one shot when it comes out. I’ll tell you what to do.”
You rummage in your bag for a second until you find a ball, then lay there for a moment, hand full of beans outstretched towards the hole, your other hand holding the ball ready at your side. “How long do we need to lay here like this?”
He shushes you harshly, keeping his eyes trained on the hole. You can hear some passersby chuckling at the two of you as they head towards the motel. Both of you must look ridiculous. You feel your cheeks heat up and you wonder how Guzma isn’t embarrassed by this.
When the Wimpod finally emerges from the hole, the sun has almost set completely. You can barely see the shape of it illuminated by the last rays of sunlight. You try to shake your limbs awake, nudging Guzma, because the last few times you glanced over at him it seemed like he was about to nod off.
“I see it,” he hisses, as quietly as possible. “Don’t you fuckin’ move.”
You watch intently as the Wimpod follows the trail of beans, gobbling them up one by one, inching closer to the two of you. You’re so excited that your outstretched hand is shaking a little.
Guzma grabs your wrist, pinning your hand down onto the rock, holding you steady. You glance at him one last time, and his eyes are on you instead of the Wimpod, his brow lowered and his mouth a hard, serious line.
“Don’t look at it,” he whispers. “If you look at it when it gets close, it might get intimidated and run.”
“How am I supposed to catch something I can’t look at?” you hiss back, confused and angry.
“Don’t throw the fuckin’ ball like some dumbass. When you feel it eating the beans from your hand, move the ball in your other hand towards it – slowly – and just tap it.”
You want to groan and say how dumb you think this idea is, but you have no idea how close the Wimpod is and you don’t want to scare it now that you’ve come this far. Instead, you just grimace at Guzma and wait.
Awkwardly, since neither of you can really move, you’re stuck just laying there, staring at each other. Guzma’s gaze flits around for a moment before he decides there’s really nothing else to look at and he looks back at you. His face is softer and less annoyed than you expected. His brows are still lowered and he looks serious, but not uncomfortable or angry. His cheek is pressed up against the rocky terrain and you can imagine there’s probably going to be an imprint from it after he gets up.
When you feel the Wimpod’s mouth suddenly tickling your hand, you nearly jolt in surprise. Guzma smiles a thin smile, obviously trying not to laugh at the shocked look on your face. You stick your tongue out at him.
Slowly, you start moving your other hand towards the Pokemon. You can feel it pause before it hesitantly goes back to nibbling on the beans you’ve offered it. Surprisingly, it’s not that hard to estimate how far your ball is from the Wimpod, since it’s practically crawled into your hand. It stops moving when you get maybe a couple inches away, and you stop too, biting down on your lip and looking at Guzma for reassurance.
He slowly tilts his head just enough to flick his gaze at the Pokemon and see what’s going on. Then, he gives you the smallest of nods, and you close the distance between the ball and the Wimpod until you hear the familiar sound of the ball sucking it inside.
You actually drop the ball without thinking about it, immediately sitting up and immediately regretting it as your arms and legs are stricken with horrible pins and needles. You watch in silence as the Pokeball shakes once, twice, three times, then clicks as it locks the Pokemon inside.
Guzma whoops loudly and grabs you by the shoulders, grinning widely. “You did it!” he shouts, looking manic and excited. You were right, there’s little indents all over one of his cheeks from the rock. His face looks flushed, too.
You feel a little dazed, but you think you’re grinning back at him. “I did it,” you say, and when you hear your own voice you realize you sound shell-shocked. You spent so much time, venturing out several days in a row trying to catch this thing. In comparison, Guzma’s technique was so mind-numbingly easy that you can hardly believe it worked.
You can feel the adrenaline of the catch wearing off, and Guzma’s thrilled expression starts to fade into his usual grumpy one. He stands up, staggering a little, his limbs probably as numb as yours. “Yeah, well,” he says, trailing off awkwardly because he doesn’t know what to say.
You grab the ball as you stand and place it with your other Pokemon in your bag. “Thank you.” You give him a sincere smile. “I couldn’t have done this without you.”
“Whatever.” He looks you up and down, like he did last night. It still feels vaguely critical but not unkind. You probably look like a mess, since you’ve been laying in the dirt for about an hour and the wind was blowing your hair around the whole time. “It was annoying but it’s not that big of a deal. Don’t think I’m your lackey now, though. I don’t give a shit about your ‘dex quest. Consider this me paying you back for that thing with the other dimension and the wormholes. We’re even now.”
“Oh,” you say, a little disappointed. You didn’t realize he was doing this out of some sense of obligation, but you probably should’ve expected it. “You didn’t really need to pay me back for that. I did it for Lillie and Plumeria. Because I didn’t like the idea of you stranded there.”
He barks out a dry laugh and looks away. “Okay, sure.”
“I’m serious.” You grip your bag a little harder than necessary, feeling angry that he’s doubting you. “Like, I know you technically already have a rival in Kukui, but I thought – I don’t know. This whole time, travelling through Alola – I mean, I couldn’t really do the trials, because I’m too old, you know? I didn’t really have a goal for a while, until I met you. You were my challenge. It felt like I was chasing after you and then you just up and followed Lusamine through a wormhole and –”
You cut off, because he’s staring at you in disbelief, eyes wide and mouth agape. You wring the strap of your bag in your hands nervously. You’ve almost certainly said too much and made him uncomfortable.
“What I mean to say is, you don’t need to thank me when I did it selfishly,” you finish weakly.
He closes his mouth and looks at you for a while as you stare at his feet, feeling foolish. You wonder if it’d be rude to just leave, if he’d be relieved if you did.
When you work up the courage to look at his face, he looks pissed.
“Battle me,” he growls.
“We just had a battle, like, last week –”
“I know, idiot.” He takes a menacing step towards you, his posture hunched like a wolf ready to pounce. “Battle me again.”
He throws out his Golisopod, and you instinctively reach for your first Pokemon.
It’s dark when you finish the battle. You and Guzma are exhausted and the rocky beach is a little trashed from the violence of the fight. Both of you got knocked down a few times from the force of your Pokemon’s attacks, your shins and forearms littered with scratches from the rocks.
You won, though. Despite having only 5 Pokemon, since your newly caught Wimpod would be useless in battle, you managed to pull out a victory.
Guzma looks absolutely devastated from the loss, tearing at his hair and slamming a fist into the sheer cliff face. He’s cursing loudly, screaming at himself.
“That was dumb,” you shout, but you’re too exhausted to put any real force behind it. “There was no reason to put our Pokemon through a battle like that –”
“SHUT IT,” he yells, whirling around to face you. “You wanna be rivals? This is what rivals do!” He’s breathing heavily as he storms over to you. “We beat each other down and beat each other down until there’s nothing left of either of us, and that’s just how it is! That’s how it’s supposed to be!”
You’re too tired to deal with this. You keel over, bracing yourself with your hands on your knees to stop from falling down entirely. “That’s not what I want.”
He laughs again, short and angry and just as tired as you. “Then what? Because frankly, I don’t understand what the FUCK the Champion is doing wasting time with me. There’s a reason I haven’t come for your little throne whenever you take challengers, you fucking numbskull. IT’S ‘CAUSE I KNOW I CAN’T WIN!” He gasps for air, having hardly taken a breath through his whole rant. “I’m second place at best. I’m a fucking runner-up.”
You shake your head, looking wearily up at him. “That’s not true.”
“How would you know? What have I ever been picked first for?”
“I picked you first. Team Skull picked you first.”
“No!” Another laugh as he leans down to meet your eyes, slamming his hands onto his knees in a mocking version of your pose. His brows have turned up in the middle, a facsimile of worry as he continues to argue. “I’m a consolation prize! You picked me because you couldn’t find someone better –”
He’s in your face, yelling, and you muster up the strength to shove him back. “Stop assuming you know exactly how everyone else feels about you! You don’t know how I feel!”
Both of you stand there for a moment, angry, panting, voices hoarse.
“You made me stronger,” you tell him. “I had to keep getting stronger to keep up with you.”
“Oh, whoop-dee-fuckin’-doo, so glad to be of service –”
“I made you stronger, too! Don’t act like you didn’t get stronger because you wanted to beat me.”
He’s quiet, and you know it’s because he knows you’re right.
“I don’t want us to be rivals who beat each other down. I want us to get stronger together.”
Guzma laughs one last time, but it doesn’t sound as bitter as before. He doesn’t look at you, instead gazing off towards the ocean and the horizon, his face smoothing out, although he still looks tense. “That’s not what rivals are.”
“Then I guess I don’t want to be rivals,” you say.
He scoffs. “Then I guess you should get back to me when you figure out what you fuckin’ want to be.”
He turns and walks off, towards the motel. You let him leave, because you don’t have an answer for him yet.