Second part of the Pokemon AU! Many thanks to @digdipper09 for her art (and for her tears) I’ve tagged it long post so blacklist it if you want lol
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Steve is too sick to sign up to get a Pokemon.
“I’ll wait for you,” Bucky offers, but knows that Steve will not accept. They’ve heard Steve’s ma say he might not ever be healthy enough to go on adventures like a normal kid. “I’ll send you tons of postcards.”
“Thanks, Buck,” Steve says, and then coughs, breath rattling in his chest.
Bucky goes off and gets his Pokedex and a Charmander, and Steve waves him off, doing a good job of keeping how bitter he is about it to himself. He wishes he could go with him. Wishes he could get a Pokemon and go out and do battle. Wishes he wasn’t born so broken.
Steve spends a lot of time after Bucky leaves sulking. Bucky had been his only friend, really, and with him gone, he doesn’t have many people to talk to. He also doesn’t have a lot he can do by himself. When Bucky had been there, Steve’s ma had trusted him to make sure Steve didn’t overdo it too much. With him gone, Steve has to admit he’s gotten a little reckless.
Still, he eventually gets so annoying that his ma snaps, “Fine! Go out and catch your death and prove me right!”
Later, they’ll both feel guilty and apologize. But now, Steve takes the out he’s given and stomps out of the house. He goes into town and buys a loaf of bread he knows his ma likes so he can take it home to her later as an apology, then decides that if he’s in for a penny, he might as well go in for a pound and go to the river. He’s not supposed to go to the river, because the damp aggravates his asthma, but Bucky’s not here and Steve doesn’t feel good anyway, so off he goes.
They’re putting in a new bridge to the city, because the old one got flooded too often and people couldn’t get to the hospital. Steve hadn’t really known what that entailed. There are lots of big machines up and down the banks of the river, all cold and dark because work had ended for the day a few hours ago. The banks of the river are all ground up and muddy from the machines’ wheels, from being dug up to put in support beams, from the feet of dozens of workers tromping across it.
There are crushed nests visible. Since Blastoise buried their eggs, no one had known about the nests until it was too late.
“Poor little guys,” Steve whispers, and coughs. They were already building a protected wetland further up the river, though, trying to make it appealing enough that the Blastoise would nest there instead of anywhere that might be developed later.
He stumbles upon a couple of nests that aren’t too badly ruined, and he takes pause. Some of the eggs are broken, but some of them aren’t. If he leaves them, they’ll surely be run over or trod on. He hesitates before pulling the bread out of the bag he’d been given, wrapping it in his sweater so it won’t get dirty. Then he shovels some sand into the bag, carefully picking through the eggs and grabbing whichever ones look whole, six or seven eggs in total. He shovels more sand in on top of them, then grabs his sweater and hustles home, feeling like a thief.
There’s an old sandbox behind the house, something the previous owners had bought and left behind because they couldn’t be bothered to take it with them. Sarah had covered it up to keep the wild Meowth from pooping in it. Steve waits until after his ma has gone to bed to sneak out with the bag of eggs, carefully lifting the tarp to examine his supplies. He decides to make it as much like the river as possible, grabbing a bucket and wetting the sand before he digs out a hole. He puts the eggs in carefully and smooths the sand back over them. He wets the sand one more time before carefully covering the sand with the tarp again.
“I think I’ll go to the library today,” Steve says the next morning, and Sarah spews her tea in surprise.
The book he finds about Blastoise isn’t very helpful. It mostly focuses on Blastoise who live by the ocean. ‘Dr. Stark should really have expanded his horizons,’ Steve thinks accusingly as he dumps water on the eggs again.
“Steve,” Sarah asks tiredly a few weeks later. “Why is Mr. McMeniman telling me that you’re going out in the middle of the night and watering the sand?”
“I found some Squirtle eggs by the river and thought they might hatch,” Steve admits.
Sarah looks angry for a moment, but then she just looks sad. “Will you be okay if they don’t?”
“Eventually,” Steve says.
Sarah puts her hand on his head. “Well. Water the eggs before bed then. I don’t want you catching a cold.”
Steve catches a cold three days later. He watches from the window as his ma dumps water on the eggs for him before and after work.
Only one egg hatches. It’s the one he hadn’t been sure about, an egg with the finest crack along the top of the egg. The Squirtle is positively tiny. It curls up in his hands, wet and small, eyes still shut. Steve’s hands shake a little. He carries the Squirtle into the house and calls his ma.
“There’s an old eyedropper in the medicine cabinet,” Sarah says, and then, “Go slow. It’ll stop eating when it’s full. All babies do. I’ll get it proper food on my way home.”
Steve warms some juice from the fridge up and feeds it to Squirtle drop-by-drop. Squirtle is ravenous and doesn’t stop eating for several minutes. When it’s finished, it curls up in Steve’s hands again, and he holds it until his ma gets home.
Aside from being perhaps the tiniest Squirtle anyone in town had ever seen, Squirtle thrives. It opens its eyes after three days, starts crawling around the next day, and then a week later skips walking to run instead, and doesn’t stop moving until it’s time for bed--or until Steve coughs, breath rattling in his chest, and then it curls up against him wherever it can reach, preferably in his hands so that it can spread its little arms across his breast, as if to try and soothe the ache inside it. Steve has to admit that the first time it happens, the tears in his eyes are not entirely from pain and frustration.
Squirtle grows slowly, but what he lacks in size, he makes up for in spirit.
“He sounds like you,” Bucky says once Steve has finally stopped babbling about his new Pokemon. “All heart and a whole lot of aggression issues to go with it.”
Steve opens his mouth, then closes it again, shrugging. Bucky hadn’t been the first to make the comparison. He feels Squirtle crawling up his leg and reaches down to help him up.
“Holy shit, is that it?!” Bucky blurts out. “That’s so tiny! Steve,” he says seriously. “I will die for him.”
“Squirtle!” Squirtle gasps in affront, and sprays a stream of water at the screen.
“Shit,” Steve mumbles, before Nurse Joy shouts and chases him out of the center.
Sarah, tired of Steve and Squirtle getting into trouble, finally caves to Steve’s begging and signs him up for a martial arts class. She despairs when that first day she starts getting spammed at work with texts. She hadn’t expected Steve to get kicked out so soon. So she’s very surprised to pull out her phone and find picture after picture of Steve and Squirtle carefully practicing katas together, Squirtle balanced atop Steve’s head. “Fuck,” she whispers, clutching her chest.
Steve is thirteen when Sarah finally decides to let him go compete in the conferences. Squirtle is still small but he’s grown some, and they’ve been working on his water gun and bubble beam. And they’d taken their martial arts very seriously--Squirtle may lack the strength to back up a headbutt or tackle, but he’s become very good at repelling attacks.
No one really takes them seriously, but that’s okay. No one’s ever really taken them seriously. It just gives them the upperhand, which Squirtle and Steve take shameless advantage of. Steve is only sad that he doesn’t get a picture of the other trainer’s face the first time Squirtle sweeps the legs out from under a Nidoran twice his size and then blasts her with a bubble beam.
Steve meets people on his journey, people who don’t look at him and think ‘how cute’ or ‘poor guy.’
People like Tony, who’s followed closely by a Meowth he calls Max. Max wears a hat. It’s cute. Tony’s cute too, but Steve tries not to think about that. Tony’s really smart and knows a lot about Pokemon. He thinks about that instead.
“He could probably do with some shellfish enriching his diet,” Tony says of Squirtle, who had not appreciated being poked and prodded, but every time he’d opened his mouth to use water gun or bubble beam, Max had appeared from behind Tony’s leg, face impassive to Steve’s gaze but apparently threatening to Squirtle. “Most health food stores will have powdered Shellder shells on offer. You could try sprinkling a little of that on top of Squirtle’s food. If nothing else, it’ll help strengthen his shell!”
Steve is pretty sure he’s in love even as he says, “Okay.” He knows for certain he is when Tony promises that they’ll definitely meet again when they’re at the top of their fields. Tony’s the only person who’s never doubted him.
He meets Bruce, too, a boy with an Eevee. They’re being harassed by a group of Rattata, and Squirtle makes quick work of them with his bubble beam. Bruce thanks them. He’s quiet, and his Eevee is shy, but they both look at Squirtle warily, which automatically puts them in Squirtle’s good books.
“Thanks for the berries, Bruce,” Steve says as he tucks them into a safe pouch in his bag. “You really didn’t have to, though.”
“Well, you guys did get us out of a pinch,” Bruce replies, lifting his phone to take a picture of the tiny Squirtle.
Squirtle notices, but instead of getting angry, he poses atop of Steve’s head. Bruce snorts.
After that, he meets an older boy named Thor, who has a Pikachu, and like an idiot he challenges him to a battle.
“What the hell? No,” Thor chokes out, bemused.
“That’s probably for the best,” Steve admits, and grabs up his Squirtle before he can try and push the issue. It’s really a good thing Thor refused―they would have gotten their asses handed to them by the electric Pokemon.
He’s even more grateful that Thor refused when they hear a frantic, “Move! Move! Get out of the way!” and Thor gets slammed into by a Tauros that doesn’t quite come to a stop fast enough.
“Thor,” a girl Steve learns is named Jane gasps.
“This is fine,” Thor wheezes. He doesn’t get up off the ground for a while though.
Jane is really cool. Steve likes her.
Steve and Squirtle meet a boy named Clint, too, who has a Pidgey that does incredible tricks. Steve buys Clint a sandwich and they sit and eat them while Pidgey and Squirtle scuffle in the dirt. Steve waits to make sure they’re not actually battling and are just playing with each other before he begins to eat.
“So you do this every day? You don’t ever think about battling?” Steve asks, watching as Pidgey begins scratching at the dirt and smiling when Squirtle copies him.
“I mean, I get pretty good money off of it, so I don’t see a reason to,” Clint says thoughtfully. “And besides, catching Pokemon sounds hard. I didn’t really catch Pidgey. I just found him in a trap and rescued him.”
Steve scowls. He’s heard of people trapping Pidgey and putting them down because they were considered a nuisance, but he didn’t think it was okay. “I’m glad you could help him, Clint.”
“Me too,” Clint admits. “It was getting kind of lonely all on my own. ...Is…” He pauses, letting his hands rest against his lap, incredulous. “Is my Pidgey teaching your Squirtle how to use sand attack?”
Steve jerks his gaze back to the Pokemon to see Pidgey blowing sand up with his powerful wings, then turning to watch as Squirtle plants his front feet into the dirt and begins kicking dust up with his back feet. Yes. Pidgey is indeed teaching Squirtle how to use sand attack.
“What the fuck,” Clint breathes with a slightly hysterical giggle.
Steve sighs and continued eating his sandwich. He drops some money in Clint’s bucket as he leaves when he knows Clint isn’t looking. Clint and Pidgey are good at what they do, and he thinks Clint needs to eat more. He figures his ma won’t mind.
Steve catches other Pokemon on his journey collecting badges. Spearow first, and he doesn’t know who it surprises more―him or the Spearow. But Spearow is just as aggressive as Squirtle, and when they’re not butting heads, they get along well. He catches a Jigglypuff next, and this time he’s certain because he surprised the Jigglypuff by not falling asleep as she sang; he’s almost deaf in one ear from his illnesses, so her lullaby didn’t affect him. She’s not aggressive, so much, but if Squirtle and Spearow annoy her, she has no problem double-slapping them.
Steve finds Scyther right after, he assumes, it has been exiled from its swarm. It had been injured badly, but Steve had captured it and immediately taken it to a Pokemon Center. Scyther is pretty aloof until it sees he and Squirtle faithfully practicing their katas in the morning, and slowly warms up to Steve as it practices with them. Scyther proves its loyalty by beating the absolute shit out of a Mankey that steals the bag of berries Bruce had given them. Steve catches it mostly out of pity because wow, Scyther didn’t need to go that far. He also catches a Rhydon just by… throwing a pokeball at it? It had been in the middle of the road, and Steve hadn’t wanted to go tromping through the grass on one side or the stream on the other, so he’d just… chucked a pokeball? And caught it? He doesn’t really know how to feel about that.
Steve is just passing through a forest on his way to Vermillion City when he stumbles across a girl, and a lake, and a Magikarp. The girl has bruises on her arms, and a split lip, and ballet shoes on her feet that do nothing to protect her against the cold, or the wet rocks that the Magikarp is leaving at her feet. Steve’s ma had always told him not to get his feet wet.
“Here,” he says gently, offering her a pair of socks that his ma had made for him. They’re wool. They’ll keep the chill off even if they get wet. “So you don’t catch cold.”
The girl stares up at him, distrusting, and Steve is sort of scared of her for a minute, but then Magikarp drops one of the rocks on her toes and she lets out a startled ‘ow!’ before her eyes begin to fill with tears. She doesn’t cry though, just tightens her jaw and swallows it down. Squirtle seems to take offense to this, pops out of Steve’s hood with an angry ‘Squirtle squirt!’ and dives onto Magikarp. He bounces off harmlessly into the water. Magikarp does not look as if it noticed, just dives back under the surface. Steve purses his lips and wonders why this is his life.
“Can I see?” he asks instead of lamenting why his Squirtle is so full of vinegar. “I don’t want you walking around on a broken toe.”
The girl is still distrusting, but she’s staring at his Squirtle, and eventually offers him her foot. Steve unlaces the slipper and carefully pulls it off of her foot, examining it. Her big toe is a little red, and it’ll probably bruise, but she’s already curling her toes as if to check whether they’re broken for herself. Steve feels up and down her foot for good measure. Nothing feels wrong, and she doesn’t flinch except for toe. The only thing he doesn’t like is that it feels really cold. Steve puts the wool sock on her before she can argue.
“It’s important that your feet stay warm,” Steve promises her, handing her the other sock. “Or you could get sick, and then you wouldn’t be able to come see your friend.”
Magikarp surfaces with another rock. Squirtle begins yelling at it loudly. Steve and the girl watch as Magikarp sets the rock down and then rolls it the rest of the way to shore, so it doesn’t accidentally drop it on her again. Squirtle nods firmly and gives the Magikarp a pat. The Magikarp does not seem to notice this either.
“Your Squirtle’s really small,” the girl says after a moment.
“Yeah,” Steve agrees, watching as Magikarp dives again and Squirtle paddles around on the surface. “He’s gotten bigger, though. He used to be really tiny.”
“He looks like he gets into a lot of trouble,” the girl continues.
Steve laughs, rubbing the back of his head. “Well, I get into a lot of trouble, too. But we take care of each other, so I think it’s okay.” He smiles, leaning back on his hands. “I saved Squirtle when he was just an egg. I think Squirtle’s saved my life a few times, too. Who knows what I’d be doing if I didn’t have him?”
“You don’t think less of him even though he’s really small?” the girl asks.
Steve doesn’t take offense. She’s young, and she’s probably sheltered. He hasn’t seen anyone else out here, after all. He glances at the bruises on her arms before looking back at Squirtle. “I guess I was lucky, because people have always thought less of me, too. I used to be really sickly and small, too. But Squirtle… Squirtle showed me that if you’re determined, you can do anything your mind is set to. I didn’t have to be ‘that sick kid.’ As long as I knew my limits, I could do anything. Sometimes it takes me longer to do things than other people, because I have to take more breaks and stuff, but I get them done, and that’s what matters.”
“Oh,” the girl says, and picks up one of the rocks, examining it. Then she turns and looks back up at him. “What is it that you’re doing?”
“I’m getting badges for the tournament,” Steve says, and pulls out the box he’s keeping his badges in. “I’ve already earned the Boulder and Cascade badges. I’m on my way to Vermillion City to get the Thunder badge now.”
The girl stares at his badges for a long time before looking up at him. “You and Squirtle are really small, but you’ve won badges,” she says slowly.
“I think you could win badges too, if you wanted to,” Steve replies gently. “You can go on adventures and win badges no problem.”
The girl looks thoughtful, returning to looking at the rock she was holding. After a minute she hands it to him. “You can have this one. I only like the red ones.”
“Huh?” Steve says dumbly, and takes the rock. It looks like a rock? But then he turns it over and sees a shard of blue so vivid that it knocks the breath out of him. “Oh. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” the girl says, and picks up another rock to examine it. “You should go before it gets dark.”
“What about you?” Steve asks, concerned.
“I know this forest,” she replies, shrugging.
Steve frowns, but she looks unconcerned. He worries about her, because of the bruises, and the split lip, but he gets the feeling that insisting he go home with her will do more harm than good.
He also gets the feeling that she has no problem with making sure he doesn’t follow her, either.
“Okay,” he says, standing up and dusting his pants off. “Hand-wash those socks, okay? Otherwise they’ll shrink.”
“Alright,” the girl says, setting the rock to the side and picking up another one, clearly dismissing him.
“It was nice meeting you,” Steve says as he scoops Squirtle up. “I hope to see you at the stadium someday.”
The girl just nods. Steve takes it at the dismal it is and leaves. He hopes she’ll be okay. He’ll mention it at the next Pokemon Center, he thinks. He hopes his ma won’t be too mad about the socks. He was kind of outgrowing them, anyway.
