no cryin', girl. what yer pop always tell ya, eh? gotta keep 'em guessin'. 

lips so wide they split, blood down her face and down her chest, and what radiates is a cruel joy. her laugh is a grating, awful sound, and she tastes mud in the back of her throat. liquor too. her skin burns. 

smoke and fire and ash. 

they were always so careful but avery wanted a toy and parker didn't know any better; all she knew is that she'd found where here parents squirreled away the cash. hell, she'd been the one to fill it some days when they had needles in their arms and she knew those heavy boots on the doorstep wouldn't leave 'til they got what they wanted. 

she put so much of it there; couldn't she take it back?

hunger, a constant companion, even before the laughing and the crumbling and watching the vultures stare down at the wreckage with their snickers, saying, 'eh, job's done. let's go home, boys.' 

home to the place where the powerful were, home to the place where people never starved, and where children could make themselves useful. afterwards, a belly full of sweets, some poor old sap finding 'em only when it was too late. she'd already sold her soul to save her other half.

blood pours down her front and pain lights up her skull.  

the first time she broke someone's nose, she thought she understood why her folks needed their highs. 

strength made the scum skitter like cockroaches, tremble like half-drowned rats. so she got bigger and she got louder and she put her whole ass self into all of it. shaders on, her only weakness in her heart, but that she kept in the hands of another. 

'til avery fuckin' left to sell her own self away, as though parker's martyrdom wasn't enough. 

"you're a nasty piece of work," she says, but really, it comes out more like "youack" because her lips aren't really working anymore and her body hurts so bad, she really just wants to die.

she'd take the magma over this, she thinks, but at least with this much blood, it ought to be over soon. 

her vision is a sea of red shapes. one of them is limp in the street. the others are bigger, with more movement. looks like a bull fighter, but he's not saying olé. in fact, he's not saying anything at all. which is a shame. if she was a badass dark shape fighting a big steel bull - why does it look so familiar? - she'd have a cool one liner to say.

yeah, yeah, yeah. 

speckles on the corner of her vision. the biggest shape in front of her with the too-pretty baby blue eyes is blasted away. she sways, no longer held up with his fist in what remains of her shirt, and looks woozily over at him, pitches forward. 

her hand catches her. the other drags limply forward. spit falls in a thick glob out from behind her teeth. her elbow clips one of her pokeballs and her lucario is there beside her, startled at the sight. 

cold eyes cut to beau and his urshifu, then quickly to the iron boulder, and he opts to crouch down beside his trainer, palms glowing pink to seal the wounds still shedding blood. she snarls and tries to shove him off, but he ignores her, deftly dodging a drunken swing. 

"i'hfuckin' done. done. i'm fucking done," she snaps, forgetting herself, forgetting it all, feeling only the pain, wanting all of it to stop.

that nameless girl's body is motionless in the street.

and then the ground shakes. she lifts her head, bats remus' paw away from her eyes, and cold recognition snaps her back to reality. the building on the hill billows smoke, a quarter of it completely gone. 

adrenaline slams through her, eviscerating her despair. quick, albeit slurred orders have remus slicing off her jacket and wrapping her broken arm tightly around her side. it takes everything in her not to scream. 

the biggest baby keeps them busy. when its foe is underfoot, it does not gloat in its victory. it simply turns, zeroing in on its newest prey, preparing battle simulations before charging and meeting the ursine warrior with a bastardization of a hero's sword. 

jet curls out of his ball at parker's beckoning. 

she hauls her good arm around remus; he hoists her with a grunt, and parker's smile is broad and wolfish and her eyes are cold with pain and sorrow and understanding as they lock with beau - 

right before the smokescreen goes up and they disappear, heading toward one of the only people in the world that really, truly matter. and she thinks, if you're dead nomes, i'm gonna kill ya, but i'll also fuckin' see ya soon.

Beau Fontaine

BOOM

☉

"not bad, considerin' i thought it was s'poseda be a fighting ring," she says with a shrug. granted, it was still a fighting ring. but she'd thought it would have more to do with her fists. being told to bring six of your strongest pokemon maybe should have tipped her off, but two plus two doesn't equal five sometimes, okay?

when she was asked if she wanted to beat up a car, she said yes, no questions asked. fuckin' immediately. it was only after, while they walked, and while she stared at the back of the black dog's neck, that she realized why he looked so familiar. 

it was so long ago it's fine yumi 'n i are fine everything's fine. 

and it is fine. more than fine, really, because that hunk of rust is just begging for someone to slit its proverbial throat. 

amulius, who has also borne witness to nameless horrors as a side effect of nomi's proximity, preens at the idea of destruction. his arcanine takes the first hit and parker whistles. 

"go on, 'mul. kick it."

the bird rockets off, legs streaming with flame. he cries out as he leaves the ground, fire imploding on contact with the rust bucket.

"'nyway, good on that one dude for winnin' it. dunno what i'd even do with a genesect."

Hitoshi Inoue
L|KQ84Kl

☉

they look at least taken aback by the fish bobbers on her partner's hat, and that gives her enough time to start frantically looking for exits, and to reach for one of her pokeballs. but before amulius can pop out in a blaze of glory, familiar carmine eyes hold hers. 

parker grabs grigori as they're sucked into nomi's timey wimey portal. before nomi snatches her hand, she flips the bird to their pursuers. 

her smile is wolfish and she waggles her fingers, looking sideways at her partner in crime. 

"yeah, babes, but at least we got these!"

Grigori Sokolov

☉

they break off into smaller teams. it's easier that way. less conspicuous. somehow parker's in charge of jimmying the lock to get in through the side door. she breaks the knob off instead and then gestures for their measly little group to go.

her hood is up now, pink locks carefully tucked into its shadows. her steel-toed boots are heavy and are not made for sneaking around in the slightest, but it's the poet among them that's trying to get them caught.

"you think shit down here's beautiful, you gotta be bonkers," she whispers back and then raises a brow when he brings up nomi. it's not hard to put two and two together. it's not like she isn't obvious when she's walking around all puppy-dog eyes behind her girl.

"yeah, yeah, she'd prob'ly agree though," she says and then startles when an alarm starts blaring. 

"fuck." she starts shoving shit in her coat - any files that look useful. her gaze lands on something on a desk. "grab that shit and let's go!"

Grigori Sokolov

steal

☉

somehow that means she ends up in a rickety old boat, feeling green around the gills as grigori tries his damndest to capsize them. by the time she's up and crawling on land, she's already over the field trip, and is reminded for the umpteenth time that she needs to get a pokemon that can teleport.

or get her corvisquire, faustus, to evolve.

she looks at him and then looks up at the bright blue sky. "thought 'bout a date once." seems her first time will have to be without Naomi Sato .

"maybe if we don't end up burnin' it to the ground, i'll take my girl here. what 'bout you, eh?"

Grigori Sokolov

☉

he doesn't take the bait. 

that's all it had been, in the end. some little girl bleeding out in the street and she's fucking bait. made to get his back turned so she can scoop herself up onto the biggest baby and make it to nomi. 

but one of her eyes is swollen shut now the other is blinking hard through blood from a cut above her brow. blood in her mouth and on the pavement and her sister's gone now - where did she go?

they must have been horrible little children, leaving each other like that. 

( i'll never leave ya, sis. i gotcha. s'long as we're together, we're invincible. )

off she went to fight a war at rocket's hands and here parker stayed, too chickenshit to get bloodied, to really and honestly fucking accept what they are. what they're meant to be. 

those joneses, yeah, they'll fuck ye right up. 

after a while, pain seems very far away. she's used to it, pulling her own punches and getting treated like a punching bag in return. always so she could leave her contacts without any permanent damage, always so she could tell herself she was a good person with shit luck.

she wishes he had taken the bait.

because he breaks her arm and then all the pain comes rushing in at once, making her scream. maybe it's something in her scream, maybe it's the biggest baby getting bored with its quarry, maybe it's the universe saying i'm not done with you yet, you fucking prick, but the iron boulder turns and its sensors turn red as though it can read the leaguer's rage, and then it charges.

and parker, parker, starts to laugh.

Beau Fontaine

owwwie

☉

they leave him as an oozing, sorry mess in the chair. it's not the first. it won't be the last. they got a whole fucking slew of idiots to interrogate apparently. the grind doesn't stop. 

when he passes out for the last time, parker untangles her finger from his hair. his head lolls. she fiddles with the protective wrappings on her knuckles, wincing. should've pulled her punches a bit more. 

"look, you wanna go all mad scientist? do that in the fuckin' labs." she snags the camera they'd had rigged and shoulders her way to the door. 

"we got orders to keep 'em alive."

Rhys Collins

☉

GIDEON GRAVES. just a flash of his face, a pained look in his eyes. that's all she sees and she's got no damn clue why, only that it's coupled with an aching numbness in her own left arm, one that leaves her gripping it with a scowl. staring forward at that little girl across the street, a chunk of her on the ground. 

her sister is standing over her, trying to get her to move, crying and screaming and giving up and going hysterical. 

and the biggest baby is charging up another attack.

her throat is sore. she realizes she's still screaming when the world claps back into focus. her eyes lock with the leaguer and she knows instantly she's in deep fucking shit. she's on the ground and her arm doesn't feel like it's working for some reason. 

at the very least, she manages to take the first couple of hits. not without blood of course. it sprays out of her mouth, slakes her throat, leaves any witticisms on the backburner. not that she'd have much to say anything.

except, maybe, while he's pummeling her. while her ribs are bruising and her skin is turning blue, while the biggest baby ignores her in lieu of fighting the alien freak, she manages a weak, "shthee's gonna die if we dun help."

Beau Fontaine

parker is losing badly :(
biggest baby fighting buzzwole in the bg hi i hate pkmn battles

☉