Pokemon Fan Fiction ❯ Placing The Pieces ❯ Misplaced ( Chapter 4 )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

Part Four
"Misplaced"       James gripped the steering wheel of his car tightly with determination. Using the phone book last night, he was fairly sure that "Clara" was not both her first name and her last, but there was no time for more confusion than he already had over Sky's lack of memory of him. The only thing that mattered was that he had succeeded in finding the stranger's address, which he had quickly scrawled on the small slip of paper at his side. The blinding sunlight spreading warmth throughout James's car seemed to mock the seriousness of the situation he had been thrust into.

      As the empty road took a sudden curve towards the right, James arrived upon the lonesome driveway, surrounded only by acres of grass and trees touched lightly with the warm colors of autumn. Turning off the ignition, James stepped out of the car and quietly closed the door, gazing up at the sight before him.

      The address had taken him to a large mansion.

      Magnificently looming above James, all he could do was stand there for a moment, absorbing it all. Shaking himself out of his shock, he finally stepped up the driveway and to the door, not quite sure what he was feeling at that moment. James then rang the doorbell and waited, neither nervous nor calm, for the possibility of some answers.

      The door opened widely, and James was surprised to find himself having to look down to stare into the face of the arrival. The small girl gazed up at James through wide round eyes with an expression of large surprise. "Are you Clara?" James asked.

      "Yeah," she replied, apparently unable to say much more, slightly speechless. It suddenly dawned on James that she had been looking directly into his eyes the whole time - usually when people first met him, their eyes were first drawn to the large scar disfiguring the side of his face.

      James addressed her emotion of surprise. "I'm sorry about arriving here unexpectedly. I tried to call first, but nobody picked up and there was no answering machine." He never took his glance away from Clara's face, intense but polite. "My name is James."

      The expression etched on Clara's face changed into a cheerfully chipper one as she lost all previous speechlessness. "Well then, hello there, James!" she replied with a bright smile. "Come on inside." She pulled the door open a little wider and eagerly beckoned him to follow.

      Taken aback by her willing openness towards him, James tenderly stepped inside the mansion as Clara quickly shut the door behind him. The room was large and open, with a high towering ceiling holding a hanging crystal chandeleir above their heads. A grand staircase curved up to a higher floor. Clara ran forwards to the center of the room and then turned around, facing James with an expression of delight. "Welcome to my home!" she told him, holding her arms out wide as if to embrace the world.

      "Thank you. It's... beautiful," complimented James, whom was actually focusing more on Clara herself than on their surroundings, which were of little importance to him at the moment now that he had gotten over the initial shock of her extreme wealth.

      "So what brings you here?" Clara asked as James walked up closer towards her.

      "I believe you know my girlfriend Sky," James started, his heart taking a sudden jerk at his own words. "Something.. happened to her.. and you were the last person she received a call from two nights ago, before it happened."

      "Ah, yeah, I do know Sky," Clara replied, beginning to slowly walk around the space absent-mindedly. "What is it that happened to her?" It occurred to James that she didn't sound very curious.

      "She doesn't know who I am anymore," he answered, the familiar cold sinking feelings returning to his insides.

      Clara remained silent for a moment, continuing to slowly randomly step away from James, her back towards him. She stopped and stood still, then suddenly whirled around to face him with an expression of honest curiosity this time.

      "How would you feel if I told you I erased Sky's memories of you?"

      The two of them stood facing each other blankly. "I don't know," James answered honestly.

      "Well, how do you feel right now?" Clara asked, smiling without emotion.

      James didn't answer. He only gazed at Clara feeling like the world was either growing more distant from him or crashing down upon him all at once, yet he tried to hide this feeling in himself as he always did. He only managed to speak aloud one word. "...How?"

      "You see all this?" Clara gestured to their wealthy surroundings. "This isn't my parents'. Well, it used to be, though it wasn't from their own money. This is from me - I may be only thirteen, but I'm really great with pokemon." She seemed impatient to get off the topic of her home, but apparently it was necessary to be mentioned.

      "So do you do a lot of the championship pokemon battles?" James asked, not really sure where she was getting at.

      "No, I don't really do battles. I'm talking about handling pokemon and taking care of them." Clara took a pokeball from her pocket and tossed it into the air. "Come on out, Hypno!" The yellow creature emerged from the bright light, staring up at both of them through narrowed eyes. Clara set a hand on top of the Hypno's head with fondness.

      "Do you use that Hypno to...?"

      "Yeah." Clara bent down and poked with a small finger at the pendulum hanging from the Hypno's hand. "It's just a hypnosis. Completely painless. It's a skill that you can have a Hypno do if you receive the correct complex training. This skill was passed down to me a couple years ago.... I'm the only one who knows how to do it," she explained.

      "The only one? What about the person who taught you?" James asked.

      Clara glanced back up at him. "They made them self forget through the same skill that they taught.. The skill allows you to make the Hypno erase certain memories from anybody's mind. The human mind is a complex many-layered thing, though. The easiest task to do is erase the memories of all interactions with a certain person through their mind. Depending on how that person came to know them, they may still know of their existence, but not that they ever communicated with each other. After the person taught me, they wanted to erase all memories of the skill from them self, which also included having to forget me because all of their time interacting with me was spent teaching me."

      "So you erased Sky's memory of me."

      "I never do it without the person's consent first."

      "So you called her over two nights ago and persuaded her," James replied. It wasn't a question.

      "Yes," Clara admitted.

      Silence pierced the air. Suddenly finding himself overcome with light-headedness, James sat down on a cushioned sort of bench and buried his head in his hands, showing weakness for once. Dizzy, he could hardly even see the ground clearly through his spread fingers over his wary face.

      "Do you hate me now?" Clara spoke softly.

      "No." James slowly tilted his head to look back up at her through the eyes of a man who had lived through too much. "But... why?"

      Clara didn't need to ask to know what he was wondering. "I know about the incident that happened in the past. Sky's been so overcome with guilt, it was making her depressed. She hated her job, but she did it anyways for you." She leaned forward. "You were killing her from the inside, James."

      James had already known about Sky's extreme guilt. You could see it on her face and the way she moved, you could hear it in her voice, you could feel it through her touch and taste it in her kiss. He hadn't known that she disliked her job, though. James felt guilty himself; almost responsible for the pain Sky had to go through. Perhaps that was why he felt no harsh feelings towards Clara and could not place any blame on her, even if he had wanted to.

      "And so you used that to persuade her," James choked out, surprised at his rare inability to speak clearly.

      "It was for her own good. Or else I'm afraid of what might've happened to her if it went on for too much longer. It really was destroying her."

      James didn't know what more to say, and neither did Clara for a little while. They just stood there, now staring off into different directions, the atmosphere tense.

      "Hey, let me show you something!" Clara suddenly spoke up, softening the tenseness through the sound of her eager voice. The previous conversation seemingly forgotten, she began to prance up the stairs, beckoning James to follow.

      Clara led him down a long window-filled hallway and into a fairly small room with a large table placed in the center. On the table lay a smooth brown frame. Small connected puzzle pieces were placed together within the sides of the frame, forming a small mass of blue and yellow, but the majority of the space within the frame was still blank. The rest of the tiny puzzle pieces lay in piles according to color on top of the table but outside the frame.

      James gazed down at the unfinished puzzle. "How many pieces is it?" he asked.

      "One thousand!" Clara answered eagerly. "Huge, right? I just started it not too long ago."

      "What picture is it supposed to form?"

      "I don't know, maybe some pokemon - it didn't show the picture on the box it came in. But that's how it usually is, right?" Clara spoke slightly softer, turning from the puzzle to look over at James. "Not with puzzles, I mean. With.... everything."

      "What do you mean?" James asked. He couldn't quite tell if she was trying to be serious or not.

      "When things.. or people.. are supposed to be connected to each other." She gently ran her fingers across the surface of the puzzle pieces that were already within the frame. "You've got to correctly find and place them first. And you don't know what picture the whole thing forms until they're all placed together how they're supposed to be." Clara cupped her hands together to pick up an amount of the piles of pieces lying outside the frame. "You could always put the pieces together in whatever order you want, and it'll still form something..." Lifting them over the frame, she let go of the handful of pieces and they all scattered down, filling in the once-empty space. "...But they will form the wrong thing. Just a mass of confusing shapes."

      Both of them gazed down at the filled space of randomly clashing colors.

      "So, how do Sky and I come into this?" James asked softly.

      Clara appeared to be thinking hard for the right answer. "I don't know." For the first time since James had met her, Clara seemed unsure. "But either you two had become misplaced and I unattached you from her, or you two were correct all along and now I've misplaced her."

      James was thinking too, trying to make up his mind and separate it from the stabbing pain in his heart, but failing. He began to pace back and forth across the room, once again showing signs of distress, a rare action from him.. "Okay." James prepared his decision. "I love Sky. I really do." Or maybe he was just persuading himself to make a decision. "I'll start all over again.. I'll find her and get to know her again. She doesn't have to know she had anything to do with my injury at all. Even if it takes years, I'll start over for her." He continued to pace the room.

      Clara was watching him carefully. "Alright. Good luck," she replied. "At least it'll probably be easier to get a hang of her. Now that she's forgotten, she's freed from any of the restrain she once had preventing her from quitting her job." *****************************************************

       Sky arrived at work that morning only realizing she had forgotten to visit Jason after it was already too late - she had been looking forward to work - well, interacting with Darien - too much that day. The feeling, unfelt for so long, felt strange to her. But upon arrival, her expectations for action were not let down.

      Almost immediately after stepping inside the building, a male officer hurried towards Sky with a stressed expression on his sweaty face. "Oh good, you're here. The gym leader's been kidnapped by Crescent's organization!" he burst out.

      "What?!" Sky gawked at him. "Why kidnap the gym leader, of all people? Just for the pokemon? Kidnapping isn't really necessary for that.."

      "We're not exactly sure either. But we do know that our city's gym leader has strong connections with the mayor," the officer replied nervously.

      "There we go, that one makes more sense." Sky composed herself calmly. "Do I need to go into the field work?"

      "Yes. The crime's already happened, but we need the scene investigated. You should probably take someone with you, too." He spoke the last part sternly.

      Is it really that noticeable that I prefer to work without these guys? Sky wondered. She smiled to herself, ready for the surprise. "Yeah, you're right. I'll bring Darien, the new officer." *****************************************************

 &n bsp;    Eventually Sky found herself steering a police cruiser across the city streets, blurs of color soaring past the windows. Darien was sitting quietly at her side in the passenger seat, gazing out his window at the skyscrapers towering above them.

      Through the corner of her eye, Sky could see Darien then turn away from the window to stare at her. "Why did you choose me to bring along?" His velvety voice was intense.

      "Well, since you're new here, I thought this would be good hands-on experience for you," lied Sky.

      "I could've given predictable answers like that during the interview too." The corner of his mouth turned up.

      Halting the car just as a stoplight turned red, Sky turned to look into Darien's smooth face. "What are you talking about?" she asked. But, her stomach lightly bubbling a little, she thought she knew.

      "It seemed like predictable answers were boring you. I'm not surprised - judging by your lack of giving me a proper interview, you're not usually assigned to tasks like that. You probably enjoy physical field work a lot more. Well, I gave you something more interesting." He never once looked away from her.

      Sky found herself gawking more than she had upon the news of the kidnapping. How could Darien interpret so much about her already? Damn, he's probably one of those people that can tell practically everything about everybody just by looking at them, she thought wildly. But she was surprised to find herself almost eager to find out what more Darien would be able to tell.

      "The light's green," muttered Darien.

      "Oh!" Shaken out of her trance, Sky turned her head forwards again as the car behind them honked and began to drive again. She was determined to almost fight back against Darien, though. "It sounds like you didn't want to give anything."

      "No, I usually don't," Darien admitted without seeming to care about this fact. But through the corner of her eye, Sky thought she could see a slightly interested expression etched on his face. "But at least you gave me something in return."

      If she didn't have to concentrate on the road, Sky would've turned to give him a skeptic look. "What? A lousy interview?"

      "No." The corner of Darien's mouth turned up again. Sky found that she enjoyed receiving this look. "I'd like to find out why you have the need to protect yourself."

      So he remembered her slip of words. Sky remained silent after that.

      After a few more minutes, they arrived in front of the Pokemon Gym. Stepping outside the police cruiser and into the light wind, Sky gazed up at the large building. Yellow caution tape hung on sticks thrust into the ground, surrounding the perimeter of the building, as those still left inside were quickly ushered out by officers that had already arrived upon the scene. The road leading to the gym had been blocked off, preventing anybody who wasn't of the police or another authority to enter.

      "Alright, our task is to go up to the top floor to check things out. That's where the gym leader usually stays," Sky informed Darien. She turned to look at the other pokemon trainers exiting the building. In the distance, an officer signaled to her. "Yeah, looks like they're all out. Let's go in."

      Both of them stepped inside the empty building, keeping a pokeball ready at hand. The lower floors seemed undisturbed, but they continued to keep a cautious pace in their ascent. "You learning how to protect yourself... is that the only reason why you're here?" Darien asked quietly, continuing their conversation from inside the car.

      "The only reason?" Sky didn't look at him and avoided directly answering. "I take it you've guessed I don't exactly enjoy my job?"

      They began to step up another flight of stairs. "Yes. Why don't you enjoy it?" Darien continued to look at her even though she didn't return his gaze back.

      "I'm... kind of anti-authority."

      Darien raised his eyebrows. "You're anti-authority, but you joined the police?"

      "To try to exercise control in myself," Sky explained, mentally wincing.

      Their conversation was interrupted by a change of scenery. Arriving upon the higher floors of the building, signs of a disturbance were now showing clearly. Some windows on once-locked doors had been shattered, leaving small pieces of sparkling glass sprawled across the ground. They crunched beneath their feet as Sky and Darien slowly entered the gym leader's room. The room was almost empty except for six pokeballs lying on the ground in the center, easily catching the two's attention with their startling red color. Sky came closer and bent down to observe. All of the pokeballs had a tiny engraved symbol, signaling that they had belonged to the gym leader.

      "Well, looks like they left her pokemon behind." Sky had predicted no less. She furrowed her brow. "Though, this may just be a trap. Because they've been engraved, they're obviously not Voltorbs in disguise, but..."

      Darien gazed down at the pokeballs calmly. "What are you going to do?" he asked.

      "Ask you to stand back - way back - for a moment," Sky muttered, a determined look seeming to cloud her forest-green eyes.

      His face was expressionless as Darien obediently stepped backwards until he was within the doorway, carefully watching Sky.

      "You're being reckless."

      "I know."

      And with that, Sky stood and picked up the nearest pokeball as she did so. Upon pulling the pokeball up into the air, Sky felt a slight strain pulling backwards. A black sort of wire had been attached from the bottom of the pokeball to the ground, where a small flat mechanism lay.. Sky's eyes widened with realization.

      "Shit! Shit! Get out of here!" Sky shouted towards Darien.

      She quickly pressed the button on her own pokeball held in her other hand, releasing her particularly large Jolteon with a flash of blinding light. Swinging her leg over the pokemon's back so she was sitting on top, Sky pressed her body close against the Jolteon as she held on tightly, riding it away from the room. Just as she did, a loud explosion sounded behind her, sending air blowing against her long light hair. Not too far in the distance Sky could spot Darien riding what appeared to be a Houndoom.

      But after the first explosion, another one sounded from somewhere behind her yet closer, and then another one, growing more intense and destructive with each burst. Sky let out a stream of curses. Damn, they're all connected to each other! She grinded her teeth as she lead her Jolteon faster into a wild sprint, the adrenaline rush flowing through her whole body. Only after six explosions did her Jolteon take a final leap away from the largest and final blast, sending both of them tumbling to the ground a few yards from where Darien sat atop his Houndoom, waiting. Rolling across the ground as she fell, Sky quickly leapt back up to her feet in one swift movement.

      Breathing heavily, Sky turned to look at him. "I admit I didn't think it would be that destructive," she breathed.

      "But you seemed to enjoy this," Darien observed smoothly. He narrowed his eyes and smiled without showing any teeth. "Thank you for answering my previous question."

      "Yeah, whatever. Instead you should be thanking me for this." Sky took something out of her pocket. It was the one gym leader's pokeball she had picked up, triggering the mechanism bombs. A ripped wire remained attached on the bottom. Sky grinned at Darien's fairly surprised expression. "I don't think they expected anybody to still try to take the pokeball after setting off the bombs. But now the other five have surely been destroyed."

      "Open it." Darien stepped closer.

      Sky didn't need to be told. She pressed the small white button and watched as the top flipped open. But no blinding light was released from within - the pokeball was completely empty.

      "So they took her pokemon after all? But aren't containing them in pokeballs?" Sky stared tensely at the object held in her hand, slightly confused.

      "It looks like it." Darien began to walk outside the building and into the wind once again, which had grown stronger since before they had entered. "By the way, I don't know if you could call me anti-authority, but I don't like being told what to do either."

      So they shared something in common. Sky sighed as she closed the pokeball back up and placed it inside a clear bag, zipping the top closed. As she slightly jogged to catch up with Darien, she noticed the rushing feeling that had flowed throughout her during the action had only disappeared for a brief moment.

      It was still there, pulsing inside her, triggered like the bombs had been, except by Darien instead of herself.