Alan + Manon - that Essentia!AU (consequences of 'I can't get stronger with your around', yada yada >>)
She twirls the helmet between her hands, trying to think about this, trying to hesitate, trying to be a sensible and mature girl, but she knows she has already made her decision.
Just to be sure, she asks: “This’ll help?”
“It will make you stronger,” uncle Xerosic promises with a warm smile.
—
“Has Manon-kun visited lately?” the professor asks, concerned.
She hasn’t; Alan can’t blame her.
“I hope she’s fine, there have been a lot of random attacks and Pokémon thefts in the city recently…”
—
She wakes up even more tired than when she went to sleep, and her limbs ache, and her head is empty or full of cotton, and Hari-san is looking worried
but uncle Xerosic says she did great, and the suit is working, and she gave him a lot of data, and she’s a good trainer, a good battler
and she helped.
—
“I know who the thief is,” Pachira says, and then, for some unfathomable reason, she looks at Alan, her sharp smile blunted, embittered. “Someone’s learned from you, kid.”
She doesn’t even need to say one more word for the words, his words in Manon’s voice, to echo in Alan’s mind: I’ll become strong.
—
if I’m with you, Alan, I can become stronger
but if being with Alan is dangerous, and if Alan can’t be strong with us there, then
if I become stronger, Alan, I can be with you
—
He’ll be ashamed of this weakness later, but at the moment, shocked, dazed, grieving because something of Manon has been lost, he lets the whisper escape his lips: “I deserve this, don’t I.”
“Oh Arceus,” Pachira exclaims, rolling her eyes, “boy, this isn’t about you. That girl went to old Xerosic for herself.”
—
It’s only when Alan sees the mysterious thief with his own eyes and recognizes that silhouette for himself, that tuft of messy red hair peeking out of that helmet, that he realizes he got it wrong (again) (of course): she does still care about him.
The thing is he did learn, he’s understood that he had to stop taking on all the burdens on himself, had to stop pushing people away to try to protect them — and Manon knew that, Manon was always smarter than that, but he hasn’t exactly given her a lot of other options, has he.
The professor keeps saying Alan is free and safe now, that his past doesn’t matter, but that’s not true, when it keeps catching up to him and it continues to hurt the ones precious to him.
—
I want to protect you, too
if I’m strong, will you let me?
—
She beats him up and steals Lizardon’s Monster Ball.
Hari-san cries and squeaks at her until she snaps back to consciousness.
Xerosic, unbelievably, repents and lets himself be taken into custody and leaves her the suit and his team of Pokémon. Pachira is satisfied and somehow still not arrested nor fired from anywhere.
Manon and Alan both need a thousand more hugs, but this one is a good start.
