Kantonian Persian: "Loss"

[brightberries]

She knows the road by smell long before she feels its heat; old rain trapped in cracks, iron dust, the sour breath of rubber, something sharp like wet metallic materials. Viridian’s afternoon light lies flat on the blacktop, pooling in the shallow dips where tires have chewed it soft. The calico meowth waits in the gutter’s shadow, yellow irises set in white scleras, thin with calculation. Two kittens press against her belly, ribby and warm: one—bold, always bold—edges out first, whiskers testing the air like reeds.

A metal-beast screams past and is gone.

Wind slaps her whiskers back. She flattens, then rises, working the math of it again. She has crossed here a hundred times: between the dumpster’s fish-reek and the alley where the bakery throws crusts, past the drain that smells of cold water and old soap. She knows the rhythm of the flow, when the car-beasts bunch up, when they release. Today the rhythm fails.

The sound comes wrong—too fast, too near—and by the time her muscles decide, her bold kitten is already a streak of reddened fur and the light’s edge is already on his back, and she is already extending her paw to hook him back and—

Silence afterward is a hard, merciless stone.

She does not cry out. She does not understand crying. She understands scent—how his milk-sour kitten breath is cut off, how the air around him goes heavy with hot metal and a thin curl of something scorched.

She steps out when the beasts pass, head low, ears tight to her skull, and nudges. His whiskers do not twitch. His little paws are still in the silly way of sleep, but he does not pull them under himself, does not playfully scold her with that tiny mrrp. She nudges again, stubborn, then again, less so, then simply folds around him, ribs shivering with it, and noses the crown of his head until the city’s dust traces her tongue. She does not care that she can get hit just as easily now, doing this.

People pass by and look, some hissing in sympathy, others apathetic. None of them come close. She was born feral, never having known the touch of a kindly human, but her blood, her heritage, remembers houses and hands; even so, she will not let them near. Her hackles rise. Humans flit away along the edges, murmuring, wary of an angry pokémon. Somewhere a door opens, bread breath sighs out and dies on the hot air. The bakery. Everyone in it is living their life uncaring of what was torn from her.

A meowth does not bury.

She drags him anyway, mouth gentle at the scruff the way she would when he went where he should not. She brings him to the verge where the weeds dare, under a bent sign that smells of rain. She licks him into order because there is nothing else to do, because the world is still going forward while a piece of her has stopped. The other kitten waits in the grate’s shadow, pupils blown black; she is the one with the kinked tail; she gives a lost little chirp that has always brought their bolder sibling running. He does not come.

She mourns.

The girl-kitten will, too, later. Once she’s old enough to understand.

The city looms larger than it did this morning. The road is wider. Everything that could take what is hers feels closer. The heat from the blacktop soaks into her pads until they hum with pain. She looks from the body, then to her now sole kitten, and something inside her draws tight, thin as wire.

Experience is not a number, unlike what many thoughtless humans believe. They have a measuring system in some kind of machines they carry around, meant to tell them how much “experience” a pokémon possesses. But she knows the truth. It is carried in the body, in scar tissue under fur from the time she misjudged the broken bottle, in the way she learned which roofs refuse paws, which doorways give water, which humans bend low and which reach too fast. It is in the days she has hunted around hunger and the nights she has not slept because an ekans or arbok had been seen close by. It is in this: in this heavy, necessary decision that does not care whether she is ready.

A pokémon does not choose to evolve. It happens to them.

Light-warmth gathers along her spine, not the friendly pad-warmth of sunlight, but a rising, internal tide. She mistakes it for bristling, initially, until she realizes bristling has turned to something else. Her calico is bleaching at the edges, color sinking back like tidewater leaving a shore; the black, the ginger, the white un-weave themselves, and draw tight around a similar pattern with the same colors that were always underneath, stretched along bigger muscles and proportions. The girl-kitten hisses, then shuts up, then creeps closer on bent legs, because the smell is still her smell even if her shadow is changing shape. Bones speak. Not in words, but in a deep, thrumming ache that lengthens them, a pulling string through each limb. The world sharpens, harshly, even the distant train note sounds more exact—and then softens as her head lifts without effort to a height it has not known, before. Her whiskers stretch, fine-tuned antennae flicking with the traffic’s current. Under the thin skin of her forehead, something cool and dense pushes outward, a small weight seeking air, then settling with the calm certainty of a stone at the center of a river: a gem, as inevitable as teeth. Probably crimson. She’s never seen a persian without forehead gem some shade of scarlet.

She does not glow like the stories. The air around her does not flare. She just unfolds into a shape that fits what the world now needs from her. What her little daughter requires of her.

When it is finished, she is larger. Sleeker. Her paws place themselves without making a sound. The shine of her coat catches the light like pressed silk, the black sections of her pelt clean as ink. She breathes; the breath comes deeper. The city does not look smaller, but she looks it in the eye, with bitterness.

Her last kitten approaches, low and uncertain, tail hitching with instinct. They sniff at her chest, at the damp fur at her jaw where she has been licking bloodied grief, and then her body melt against hers in the old arrangement, finding the smell she has known since breaking out of her eggshell. She lowers her head to her and answers the little chirp with a sound she has not made before: a quiet, steadying purr that vibrates all the way through her. It is not a meowth’s purr. It is distinctly…more.

She nudges the girl-kitten under the bent sign’s shade…and goes back to the still one. She does not drag him somewhere again. The city reclaims what it takes in its own ways. She gives him to the weeds and the hiding Bug-type pokémon and the wind that moves merciless grit along the curb, and before she leaves, she presses her forehead—new weight and all—against the coin of his forehead that she has cleaned, brief and absolute. Final.

Across the road, the bakery throws out its crusts; a cart rattles; somewhere a human laughs, the sound bright and brainless. She measures the traffic. The metal beasts surge, then lag. The air cools a breath’s width. She gathers her living girl by vocalization, and by push of shoulder, and chooses a moment so thin you could slide a whisker through it.

They run.

The road’s heat rises like a warning; the breeze off a passing bumper lifts her ear-fur; a dribble of spilled soda clings to her paw for three steps, a puddle on the ground from a discard can. The far curb climbs under them.

They tumble into shadows, intact.

On the far side she counts—one—pressed to her ribs, the absence an exact weight in her chest where another paw once poked at when he wanted attention. In the alley, fat brown pidgey sidestep and mutter; a window unit breathes obnoxious, damp air; a human tongue calls to another human about nothing that matters to pokémon. She leads her kitten to the bakery’s bin, now on the same side of the street as they are, because food is food, and this is what she can control.

When the sun lowers, and the road’s heat bleeds back into the sky, she takes them to the roof she trusts, the one with an overhang structure and the rusty ladder that shakes but never breaks. Their…usual routine. Up there, the city is a patchwork of scents and stenches layered thin, hot stone, far fish ‘mon, of rain preparing to fall. The kitten inhales-exhales; she’s been noiseless since it happened, and her mother drapes over her protectively, larger now, covering much more of what is hers. The gem on her forehead is a cool orb attached to her skin, answering light with light whenever a neon sign considers it.

She closes her eyes.

The newness of herself remembers the stature she wore mere hours ago, the way a healed scar remembers the cut: not forgetting, not undone, but carried. That road will still run. No one considers this a tragedy except for her. The vehicle-beasts will still rush. She is not done being small in a big place. Will never be done. But when the predatory pokémon come, or the fearow flurries around, she will stand and not feel like she must make herself seem larger.

Experience is in her stricken maternal bones. Loss sits beside it, unmerciful and exact.

She breathes between those two feelings, and the breath goes out into the city and comes back warm.

Comments

[emeraldflame]

congrats on finding your memories <3 I'm not too much on pokemon but the only thing I could compare pokemon evolution to is when I started my period. I went from normalcy to not knowing my body and had to adjust to a new body in that way.

[brightberries]

I get that! <333 Thanks for commenting!