Melanie

The soil in Melanie's cliffside neighborhood is poor and rocky, but Florges is more than ambitious enough for them both. The cottage has a beautiful cobbled patio, lined with bare trellises. They could grow morning glories or jasmine, nasturtiums or honeysuckle. They could work their way down from there: lavender and heather, marigolds and petunias, poppies and lilies. The choices are endless. Florges will make it so.

The mulch-maker from the Lilycove Department Store catalogue works double-time. Aggron tills the earth slowly, stretching out healing muscles, and Melanie buries her hands deep into the thick layer of topsoil that they spread on afterwards. It stains her fingers, the dirt streaking across her skin, until she looks a little like Aggron now.

What a relief, she thinks, pressing dusty fingerprints into Aggron's tough hide. His armor is battered and broken and glued haphazardly together with harsh new growth, but look—now she can paint happier designs over them with her dirty fingers: bold flowers and fat bumblebees and a wavy sun.

Melanie starts her garden with a catalogue and a dream, tiny and frail like the seedlings she buries tenderly into the earth. Every drop of water that she pours down upon them is a promise towards better days.

There are steel pins and plates in both of Melanie’s legs, one more so than the other, and they make her stiff if she's not mindful of the time. What a struggle it had been those first few days after she'd finally graduated from the walker, to swallow her pride and look past her mulishness whenever she'd started to flag and had to reach for a support. But Melanie loves comfort above all else—loves to stretch in the sun and sit in the shade—and so now there's always a cane near to hand in her garden.

Tender points of green have started to poke out of the soil when they start planning to lay out a path to the gate. A neighborhood kid drops by to stare at Aggron as he paces the walk, great head lowered as he prepares the designated stretch.

The child is no more than seven, excitable and vibrant. He looks at Aggron with big eyes shining with awe. To him, the scars are a mark of honor; a promise of greatness. "One day," he boasts, tiny chest puffed up and with bravado the likes that only a child could sport, "I'm going to stand at the very top, too."

Melanie stutters to a stop. It is only the soothing pulses of psychic energy and sweet scent of Aromatherapy wafting from Florges' blossoms that keeps her in her garden.

"You have to be careful," she thinks she says.

"Don't worry! I'll have my partner with me!"

Melanie smooths a hand over Aggron's sun-kissed armor, sanded down and polished to a shine. "Yes," she agrees softly, "but it wouldn't hurt to put safety first. You have to look behind you every once in a while as you're climbing."

Because here is the truth of the matter: Melanie has never stood at the very top of anything. Instead, she'd been at the bottom, crushed under rock, impossible weights on her legs and side. Her partner had been glowing white. Florges' Pokeball had been just out of reach. And all around her had been screaming.

Some days, Melanie dreams about what could have been.

She could have finished her Hoenn trip with no incidence. Could have flown back to Kalos to throw herself back into her fun but unremarkable career as a Coordinator in Kalos’ niche Pokémon Contest industry. Could have applied to that design firm in Lumiose that she had been on the fence about. Could have moved to the City of Light where fairytale-esque Kalosian romances happened. The world could have been her clamperl.

But life in Mossdeep is easy enough to settle into. On the good days the view from her house is amazing—just miles and miles of crystal clear waters that stretched endlessly into the horizon, thick cotton-candy clouds dotting the perimeter, and wingull wheeling high above. The garden blooms, and sweet scents perfume the air, carried off by warm ocean breezes.

There are many good days on Mossdeep.

But on the bad days, Melanie wakes up and even the faintest of early morning chills is enough for her to ache. It’s a colossal effort to convince her joints to turn and a monumental undertaking to just sit up. The clock will tick by as she clutches at her knee and tries to will the pain down so that she can reach for the glass of water and painkillers that she keeps on the bedside table. Sometimes Florges has to fetch them for her, and the humiliation and frustration builds with every pained shuffle through the house. On the bad days, every little clatter reminds her of the split second rumble before Granite Cave crumbled down, and she has to have the house locked down in radio silence so as to not hear a single whisper about anything related to battling.

On the very worst days, she can’t even enter a room and close the door behind her without panicking, even with Florges at her side. Aggron, too big to safely let out in the house, can only shake in his ball as she clutches it to her. There aren’t a lot of those days, thankfully, but there are enough.

And yet. And yet.

There is a bakery two streets from the hospital that has the most divine garlic twists. The sand is warm beneath her feet on Aggron's favorite route. On her desk sits tickets to a star show at the space center for next month, booked with nothing but giddy anticipation for a fun night out. It has been weeks since she has consciously thought of Granite Cave and the what-could-haves, and it no longer felt like a chore to do so.

She was doing the best she could at the moment, and for the first time in a long time, she was alright with just that.