Time was passing. It was the only way Levy could put the feeling into words. His father had found a job in town at the supermarket and he was progressing in his therapy, told that the weights put on the metal insert would soon become the real leg. Cathy had smiled, and Leverette found he should copy her, stretching his mouth to fit her expression. He earned a pat on the knee – the real knee. Mrs. Reid invited the Bonnaire’s over to dinner at least once a week after the run-in with Molly. He always accepted with a polite nod and would help with the dishes before watching the girl feed the kittens, showing her the proper way to hold them and rub their stomachs afterwards to prevent any more stomachaches.
Time was passing, but it wasn’t moving forward. Leverette went out to town occasionally, to the pokemon center with Molly or to the caves to check on the Liepard who established her residence there. But the same time outside was spent, double, curled up in the bedroom, watching shadows creep up and down the halls. The meals eaten at the Ried’s apartment were quiet. Cathy had to call the apartment when he didn’t show up at the hospital, walking to the caves to bury in Khoshekh’s fur instead of walking a pre-determined line.
The days kept moving, as it always had. The season kept passing. The clock in the kitchen kept ticking. And the man kept to himself in the corner of the house, just as regular as it always was.
“Mr. Bonnaire? Mr. Bonnaire?” Leverette’s eyes were fixed on the metal limb, hands folded and fingers intertwined in his lap, knuckles white. His elbows dug into pelvis to fight off the urge to toss the leg away, rip it and it’s attaching rob out of him, go back to being just a cripple in Kalos where at least everything was still normal. The apartment complex wasn’t normal. The hospital wasn’t normal. The leg wasn’t normal. It didn’t even look like a leg. It was a series of think hollow pipes, wires crossing around joints every so often and circling around the pink bolts. He focused on the color and worked his way around that with much reluctance. His favorite color wasn’t making any of this easier. “Mr. Bonnaire. How does it feel?” Cramped fingers finally unclenched and he forced tensed arms to move forward and run light digits down the sides. He shivered. The metal was cold, empty. He pressed his palms against id and squeezed his eyes closed. It was his.
“Leverette?”
The hesitant sound of the vowels, the rough, forced roll of the consonants made him blink up at the aging woman. Her colors were easier. She had thinking brown hair – no gray yet but there were threats of white beginning to make their move – that rolled down to her shoulders in loose curls and were swept out of gray eyes softened by years of happy home life. Her name was Cathy. She was his new nurse now, his therapist. What else did he know? He tried to push out the thoughts of the prosthetic with meaningless facts about his doctor. She was Hoennese. She was smiling, now that his hazel eyes, honey turned dark in his apathy, were finally turned on her. “Leverette?” she called again. She couldn’t say his name right.
“Levy.” He didn’t want her to keep saying it. He didn’t need her accent to remind him of where he was, how far from normal he was and how he needed to make all this strangeness his new normal. Hoenn had to be normal. The cold, empty, metal limb had to be normal. This was his normal, so he found the small part of him that was left, spared by the coldness seeping in from the metal and the emptiness ringing in the air with ever little tap of the metallic heel against the chair and forced his mouth into a smile that was everything except normal. It would become more normal, though, he was sure. “Please. Call me Levy.”
Her gray eyes softened even more and he took it as a sign that he’d done something normal. “It’s nice to finally meet you, Levy,” she said, though they’d met an hour ago, with his father in the waiting room. They’d talked about therapy dates, times, prices, plans. They’d talked about his prosthetic. He hadn’t truly been there, had he? Just like now. Too caught up in the tide of acclimation. She motioned at the prosthetic again. “How does it feel?”
He’s spent as much time as he could walking the narrow streets and browsing the few, small stores, but it’s not long before he fins himself back at the apartment, the hospital’s afternoon shadow towering over him and reminding him of why he’s there in the confusion and the strangeness in the first place, and though light has no weight he feels like the mass of the entire building is settling on him like a dark blanket.
It had been time to leave the apartment. Maybe it was time to face this too.
Leverette was afraid. The elevator was rickety, the carpet frayed at the edges, the buttons worn with time, and every floor greeted him with a new screech of wheels and a flickering light above the sliding doors. The room had gotten too small, nothing more than one room full of dry looks hiding the frustration and pity just underneath and a quiet that echoed with unspoken worries held inside by a fear of breaking what false, fragile normalcy was forming in the home. The courtyard had him trapped between the wall of the mock home and the rest of the world and he was going to stay pressed up against the harsh, cold bricks of the apartment with its empty promises of a hopeful future if he didn’t do something.
Leverette was hesitant. He had to accept where he was, he knew that. It didn’t mean he was ready. He wasn’t ready to move forward, away from everything he knew. He wasn’t ready to accept that this wheelchair was his life now, that there was no going back. He wasn’t ready for the world to accept it, to show that he was broken and act like it was normal.
A pounding of footsteps echoed the muted ding of the opening elevator doors and Leverette’s wheelchair wobbled as a small girl crashed into him, toppling forward into his lap. The girl cried out, first in shock, then in fear, and Leverette didn’t think his empty pant leg or his uncombed hair or unwashed face was all that scary, until he spotted the tiny Skitty in her arms, occupying no more space than the crook of her arm. Its sliver of a mouth parted in a mewl its new vocal chords weren’t ready to make in a protest of the noise. The girl squirmed in his lap, arms close to her chest and afraid to disturb the kitten any more, and slipped to the ground when Leverette finally wheeled himself back. She wasted no time in rushing the rest of the way to the door, but the time in which she spent, startled, caught by Leverette, a Gardevoir rushed down the stairwell and grabbed at the girl’s shirt to pull her back.
Leverette watched, unable to get around the two and very okay with sitting, still inside and away from the world, as the two glared at each other, mouths unmoving but eyes flicking from face to pokemon to face again.
…sick. P...Mit-n…center. No- Lulu’s sick…
The blond’s eyebrows rose before furrowing, his mouth pressing into a thin line. The Skitty was sick? Why was the Gardevoir preventing her from getting treatment? Fingers curled around the arms of the chair and he found himself leaning forward, shoulders hunching. “Is she okay?”
The Gardevoir looked at him first, unaware of the other presence, and the girl followed her gaze back to the man she fell into before dropping her eyes to the floor, pressing the Skitty closer to her chest.
She’s sick. But Molly cannot go out on her own.
His jaw tightened. “You’re with her.” The Gardevoir shook her head, a sigh escaping in a series of chimes. Leverette rolled his chair closer. Molly backed up and shook her head sharply when he held a hand out. “I’ll go with you.”
Molly Reid sometimes sees a thin man sitting on a bench in the courtyard when she looks out the bathroom window to count the number of Taillow sitting on the wires as she brushes her teeth in the morning. Molly Reid sometimes sees a blonde man sitting on a bench in the courtyard when she brings Mittens out to play, Nana in tow. Molly Reid sometimes sees a man in a wheelchair rolling back to the elevators when she goes to school.
Molly Reid sees his missing leg, and thinks that maybe her missing ears aren’t so scary anymore.
There’s still containers of food left sitting on the kitchen table, warming and drying and spoiling, when Christophe comes back to the apartment. Half is too far gone to be kept, the others unable to last another day. Leverette hadn’t put them away, hadn’t looked at them, hadn’t left his room since the last neighbor’s introduction.
Christophe finds a number written on a torn corner of paper stuck to the fridge with a magnet from his house and calls. A nurse from the hospital across the street answers and leaves a message for a Dr. Kathy Ringstad. It’s not a good day to begin either.
The apartments are situated around a fairly large courtyard, benches against each wall to face a mat of green dotted with the yellows and purples and blues of well-tended to flowers. It’s a good place to sit and become adjusted, blocked off from the rest of the world on all four corners by brick walls to completely muffle the sound and shock. Sometimes Levy sits outside for hours. Sometimes he can’t find a reason to even look outside. And sometimes he goes back inside when he sees the small girl chasing after her Skitty, too afraid to spoil the bit of happiness.
Leverette hadn't left the bed. His crutches leaned, still unused, against the side-table that wasn't his next to the bed he wasn't used to. Petalla had offered to get the wheelchair when Christophe called breakfast, but he'd denied that too. The chair barely fit in the small room and, even after managing to get the wretched thing in the room and out, what would be the point? He was in other hospital. It looked like an apartment complex, but it was a poor disguise. The clean white walls and white jacketed staff carrying white trays of white pills to other 'residents' weren't trying to hide the fact that other patients were living on all sides of him.
Leaving the room wasn't going to do anything. He was going to end up back in there at the end of a day sitting around waiting for his nurse to show their face.
Maybe Hoenn wasn't any different from home. Maybe it was exactly the same.
