An unexpected dicovery

An unexpected discovery

The young man sat down at the dining room table and began to eat with his mother. Although he was a bit too preoccupied with the tauros steak in front of him to notice, his mother fidgeted a bit nervously in her chair. In fact, the young man had seen her act like that several times throughout the day, but dismissed it as the behavior of a widow. She did say it was the anniversary of the first time she had met the young man's father, so it would make sense if the day brought back some less than pleasant memories. A few minutes and half a steak later, the young man was brought back to the world of the living by his mother's voice.

"Dear? I need to tell you something... It's about your father." The woman said, adding the final four words after a short pregnant silence. The young man looked up to his mother, a curious look on his face. To him, there wasn't anything to say that hadn't been said; his father met his mother a year and a half before he had been born, married his mom, and died during the pregnancy. Pretty open and shut, thought the young man. But instead of voicing such thoughts, he let his mother continue. It was a special, if slightly dark, day for her.

"You have a job, you have your own pokemon, and you have a house of your own. You're an adult now, ready adult things." The young man nodded his head as his mother said these things, but stayed quiet as he grew more interested as to just where his mother was going with this. He felt the pokeball in his pocket that contained his most trusted partner wiggle a bit, but stayed shut. He reached into his pocket, set the ball onto the table, and watched as it wiggled and rolled about on the shiny wooden surface. His mother glanced down at the ball, and back to her son.

But the young man saw it.

He turned his attention back to the wiggling red and white sphere. Inside its thin walls resided not just the first pokemon he had acquired, but also the first pokemon he had ever met. This pokemon, an Infernape named Blake to be exact, acted like a caretaker for the young man alongside his mother, much like the father that he never knew. In fact, it used to be his mother's, but she gave it to her son when he left for his journey when he was only 15 years old. It showed unwavering loyalty to the boy all throughout his journey, something odd for a technically traded pokemon. The young man turned his attention to his mother, nodding silently to indicate for her to go on.

"One such adult thing is something about your father I've been meaning to tell you for quite a while now. Your father was a kind and gentle man, but some would call him fiery if they saw what he did to people who threatened his family. Doubly so when I was pregnant with you." She said, glancing to the pokeball every few words. The young man noticed this, and decided to test a thought. He lightly shoved the leg of the table, not enough to move it too much, but just enough to shake it and any loose objects on its surface.

One such loose object was the Blake's pokeball.

It shook and rattled about on the table, soon finding itself on the table's edge. As it hung there, the middle aged woman's eyes never left it for a moment. It seemed to teeter on the edge for a moment that lasted ages. Seemingly sick of the drama, physics enforced themselves again, making the ball follow through and fall down off of the table, towards the hardwood floor. With surprising speed and agility more befitting a professional athlete, the woman ejected herself from her chair and slid across the ground, hands open to catch the falling ball before gravity could do its malicious work on it. The woman caught the ball and stood up, holding it close to her chest as if it would disappear in an instant if she let go of it.

Standing up to her full height, she was met with a wide eyed stare from her son, the man in question in awe over the impressive feat. She none too eagerly set the ball down next to her son and walked back to her seat, looking a couple of times as though she would turn around and snatch the ball back up, but she managed the journey and acted as if nothing at all had happened once she returned to her seat.

The young man slowly reached out, grabbed the ball, and stuffed it back into his pocket, all while watching his mother's eyes track the ball the whole way, even following the path it would have taken once it was behind the wood of the table. Deciding that that little display of athletic ability is best left unmentioned, she cleared her throat and continued on.

"Your father was always so warm and protective; he even got in-between me and an attacking pair of Solrock and Lunatone that apparently thought we were intruding on their territory. One time he even..." The young man tuned his mother out as he began to pay more and more attention to the growing number of strings that were appearing in his head. Soon enough several of these strings began to connect to one another. His eyes widened in shock and surprise as the final string connected with its partner. He looked to his mother and saw that she had apparently seen his shock and was nodding rather happily, obviously pleased that her son had managed to figure it out without her having to be overly blunt with it.

However, if his mother was pleased, he was anything but. His look of surprise quickly shifted to one of disgust. "Are you saying Blake is my father?" He said as he quickly got to his feet. His mother adopted a shocked look. Clearly, she thought he would react better. Not entirely sure of what to do, she decided to be honest and nod her head. The news was too much for him to bare, so he began to pace and shake his head as though denying it would make it untrue. He began to panic, his heart sped up and he began to pace quicker and quicker, his mind ablaze trying to think of ways to deny what he had just heard. He couldn't really be half Infernape, right?

"Jake, please calm down, your scaring me." His mother insisted, fear beginning to creep into her voice. This wasn't how she had planned this at all. At the sound of his mother's voice, Jake slowly turned to her, his eyes burning a hole into his mother. He was about to say something, when he saw something that brought a downright evil grin to his face.

His mother was scared, Jake had never been like this before. She noticed that he wasn't looking at her, but rather at something behind her. She looked behind her and at first didn't see anything. She did a double take and her eyes went wide when she realized what her son was looking at.

The door.

She turned around and opened her mouth to say something, but Jake was already pushing his way past her to the door. "Jake! Wait! We can talk about this!" She said to her son as he flung open the door and ran out. "Jake!" She yelled one last time, but her son clearly didn't want to talk about this.

He ran until he came to the edge of the woods that surrounded his mother's home; the same house he had been raised. The same house he had woken up to find that he had cried in his sleep over his supposedly deceased father. His mother was yelling to him again, but didn't hear it. The only things he could hear were the drumming of his heart as it hammered in his chest and the incessant noise of a wiggling pokeball as he reached into his pocket and grabbed it.

He instinctively maximized the ball and activated the self destruct system with a simple twist and push of the button/knob on the front of the ball. He cocked his arm back and threw the ball with all his might, all his desire for what he had just been told to be a lie, a cruel joke of his mother's.

 The ball exploded in a burst of light as its occupant was released. An Infernape that looked just past his prime fell to the ground, ready to fight. He looked around and noticed that there was no enemy to fight, so he turned around and faced his trainer, his son, with the same look of paternal care that was thankfully easy to dismiss as the look of a loyal partner. But when he turned to see his son in his distressed state, he instinctively moved to go and comfort the boy, but stopped when he words that he thought he'd never hear from his son.

"Stay back!" Jake yelled, his heart beating a mile a minute and breathing hard as adrenaline pumped through his veins. "Stay back! You're not my pokemon, and you're not my damn father!" He yelled, more-so to convince himself than to convince the Infernape before him. But hearing those words, from his own son, broke something inside Blake, whether they were intended to or not.

"Blake!" Jake's mother said as she ran up to her lover. The embraced, then looked to their panicked son. "Jake, I know it's not something easy to accept, but it IS the truth; Blake IS your father!" She said in a last ditch effort to convince her son.

"No! NO!" Jake yelled, his face in his hands as he dropped to his knees. Blake approached his troubled son, but stopped when his head shot back up and he spotted him. "NO! Stay back! Stay back!" He yelled as he scrambled up to his feet and backed away a few feet. The Infernape gambled on another step towards his son, but for every step Blake took forward, Jake took three back. "You're not my father! YOU'RE NOT!" Jake yelled as he turned and ran towards the road, tears starting to accumulate in his eyes. He got to the road and began to run down it, not caring where he ended up as stumbled across the asphalt.

His mother moved to chase the running form of her son, but was stopped by Blake. He gave a solemn shake of his head, and welcomed the now weeping woman into his arms. No, this wasn't what either of them imagined their first night as a real family again would be like at all.