Chapter Text
Riley Ketchum was not the strongest of his friend group - that would be Red. He was not the most moral - that would be Blue. Giovanni was the most cunning, the best planner. His sister was the most outgoing, the best with people. All of them had great character traits that came together to make a rag-tag band of people who could probably stare down Arceus and win.
Which, every so often, led to him feeling a bit inadequate. Until someone, usually Delia, sat him down, told him he was being an idiot, and he remembered he was the one with the most unquantifiable talent. Which was why he was outside, in forty-degree weather, sitting in an empty field with Riolu. Because something had just tugged him to the middle of nowhere. Some great sense that took over his bones and told him: “Stay here. Stay put. This is Important".
The last time this feeling had happened, he’d found Delia and Blue dumped in the side of a ditch after a fight against Madam Rocket’s goons. The time before that he’d found himself in a police station explaining that all of the people who tried to kill him weren’t actually that dangerous. Before that, he’d wandered into a small room in Professor Oak’s lab on the day they were getting starter pokemon and ended up with Riolu.
So yeah. Maybe he could make rocks explode by filling them up with weird blue energy. And maybe he could talk to pokemon. And, perhaps, he was growing wings that were getting harder to hide underneath his jacket by the day. Maybe he was terrified of how he could tell how each of his friends and family felt each moment, how he could tell if someone was good or not just by being near him. But at least he knew to listen to his instincts.
Still though. He had been here for an hour and a half already, and both he and Riolu were beginning to freeze.
Fifteen minutes later, when Riley was just certain that he’d misinterpreted his feelings, a boy and girl wearing nearly identical white robes fell out of the forest, and dropped unconscious.
He and Riolu ran forward at the same time. A pressing energy radiated from the boy - strong enough to almost make Riley choke. It burned a bright golden, even as he was out cold. The girl just felt weak. Burnt out and tired. He reached them in a second, looking with his actual eyes now.
The boy had white hair, and was covered with bruises and cuts. A burn ran down the base of his neck, and there was a bite from some canine pokemon on his arm. Something pinged in his head at the sight of the wounds. Something that didn’t quite line up with expectations that he couldn't pin down. The robes - basically pants, a shirt, and a flowing jacket/poncho/cape thing were cut and torn in a million places. He was curled around a charmander that Riley hadn’t noticed before, also unconscious but in better shape than his trainer.
Something, that same pulling sensation, tugged him forwards at the base of his gut. Begging him, for some unknown reason, to reach out and brush his hands against his forehead. For the first time, Riley ignored his soul screaming at him, focusing on the med kit he’d brought.
The girl was mostly untouched. Scraped up, sure, but it seemed more like the dirt and grime you got from running through the woods. She hadn’t been attacked in the same way as her (assumedly) twin, but her long brown hair was still tangled.
As Riley began to open up the gauze and the hydrogen peroxide, he noticed Riolu reaching a hand out to the boy. Emphatically, Riley shook his head. “You can’t fix him,” he explained, not even sure how he knew.
Once, when he’d been chasing down two of Madam Rocket’s goons with Giovanni, his friend had gotten an ice beam to the face. Riolu had poured some of that blue energy into the ground-type trainer, healing up Gio. For the rest of the day Riolu had seemed dimmer when Riley had looked at his partner. The blue energy, which he now knew enough to know was some kind of life-force wasn’t, infinite.
“He’s missing too much,” Riley continued. It was insane to think of, the boy was burning so brightly. But it was all percentages. How much blue (it looked like molten gold for his unconscious patient, but that was Future Riley’s problem) would he have already lost to knock him down so much? It felt like a lifetime's worth. “Heal up the girl and the charmander, I’ll work on him. I’ve got more blue than you.” Also, he could use a medkit better than Riolu. His partner was just too small, for now.
Leaning forward, Riley rolled the boy over onto his back, thinking that would make it easier to treat the bites and such. Sure, the burn was bad, but it wasn’t actively leaking blood. He’d risk making that worse to help the pressing issues. But what he saw made him jolt backwards in shock and horror.
There was a lot of blood around the boy. He’d registered that. Apparently, being the designated medic of a team full of reckless decision makers hadn’t prepared him for everything he’d come across. Because he’d thought all of the scratches and the bite would have accounted for all the blood. Instead, what he was immediately confronted with were three stab wounds that went straight through the boy’s chest.
How in the entire universe was he still breathing? Hell, the wounds were bad enough, one went into the boy’s heart. Riley could see it beating. That was not good. It was very not good. It was also biologically impossible. And very, very concerning.
Also, the boy’s blood was gold. Not red. Not even the dark purple of some pokemon. But golden. It didn’t move like gold - the metal. At least he doubted it. It moved like actual normal blood. But it was gold.
Riley wasn’t sure how he hadn’t noticed that yet, but now it was staring him in the face. And things were beginning to connect in his gut. Golden blue energy. Golden blood. White hair. He had no idea what this was, what any of this meant. And yet he sort of did. Something powerful and important. It felt like the inversion of himself in a way that he couldn’t put into words. Not bad. Just…just opposite. And so very important.
That pulsing, tugging, feeling was back. It wasn’t asking him politely to reach out anymore. It was ordering him to take off his gloves and pour energy into the boy. The logical, rational, part of Riley was screaming at him that he was dealing with things he shouldn't mess with. That he wasn’t even sure if his blue would be compatible with the boy’s gold. That there was a mystery here.
But the thing that went deeper inside of him than his mind or his heart, and maybe even the instincts that were screaming at him to heal and protect was calm. It had a practiced, alert confidence that whispered “You have done this before. You can do this again”. That thing inside of him was ancient, and on the surface level it felt like something other inside of him. But it really wasn’t, once he looked a little deeper.
“Okay,” Riley whispered to himself. “Okay, this is a really, really bad idea.”
Methodically, much too slow for the situation at hand but slow enough to stave off the panic that was screaming at him that everything was about to change, he took off his gloves.
And then he rested his hands on the bare skin of the boy’s neck.
Friede, he realized without realizing, his name is Friede.
And then everything went blue.