#casually mentions the timeless family tradition of hurling dragons like nobodys business for fun and fitness and general bonding

[randomwriteronline]

@fraymotiif fo yo fren

At first, the twins alternated between following him everywhere like Duckletts that accidentally imprinted on a Seadra and skittishly disappearing behind walls or corners the moment he tried to turn towards them.

Figuring out the steps of the dance they were tentatively leading around him was proving to be a bit of a careful balancing act, one he wasn’t quite used to - at least not to this degree. Marshal had been awfully frightened by him when he’d first met him too, after all, but he was three years old; the boys were fifteen, almost sixteen by now, and yet they still behaved like toddlers interacting with someone they know only vaguely.

Touch was far from a problem, that was certain: as soon as they’d figured out they could lean onto him whenever they wanted they had no trouble holding onto his arms or bumping into him so that he’d ruffle their hair.

The trouble seemed to start from their room.

They were horribly nervous about anything and everything that could have been inside of it - although he knew it couldn’t be much, let alone anything to be embarassed or secretive about, since most of their belongings he’d already seen when they’d emptied their backpacks and they’d really been barely more than the bare necessities.

Drayden knew better than to snoop around in a Dragon’s den uninvited, so he would let them sit there for hours on their own, doing who knew what.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t curious. But he couldn’t really just ask them.

He’d tried!

The answer had been a couple uncoordinated shrugs and a quick ‘nothing’ meant to distance him.

In the end, he supposed the only way to find that out would have been for them to decide to make him participant to whatever they did back in there and simply tell him upfront by themselves.

“You can’t!”

“Why not? What’s so wrong about it?”

“You can’t! You can’t!”

Or for them to argue loud enough, that too.

“If you just repeat that I can’t understand what the wrong part is!” this was Ingo.

“You can’t!” and this was Emmet. “It messes it up! Messes everything up!”

“What does it mess up?”

“Eelektrik!”

Ah - that explained why he was so upset; he loved that levitating lamprey almost as much as his brother, or trains. He adored parading it over his shoulders like a sentient scarf, and once or twice Drayden had even seen him fearlessly hold that terrible mouth close to his face as he slept, without a single worry.

“Oh, well, of course it messes him up. That’s the point.”

“You can’t do that!”

It seemed weird that Ingo would want to hurt his younger twin’s ace, though.

Unless it was a matter of battling, in which case he would have definitely run that poor thing over without hesitation or second thoughts.

“Yes I can!”

“You can’t! You can’t!”

“Yes I can! It’s a strategy like any other!”

“It’s not! It’s not! This one it’s not!”

“You just say that because it's really powerful and it neutralizes your favorite!”

“Yes!”

Drayden’s citrine eyes fell through the crack of the slightly opened door: he caught a glimpse of the heavily scribbled page of a notebook, red and green ink all over the paper, upon a stark white black-lined background between folded legs that were clearly getting more and more agitated as the squabble went on.

“Something the matter, boys?” he asked as he knocked gently.

The door slid open a little bit at that. He barely had the time to peek through that the notebook was gone, spirited away with a slight of hand that maybe wasn’t particularly graceful but certainly honed by practice.

Both twins, sitting half hunched and crosslegged on the beds they’d pushed together as they often did, turned to him with near matching innocent expressions, honestly surprised by his appearance but feigning ignorance. They raised their chins at him in tandem in a silent candid question.

“Thought I’d heard you arguing,” Drayden explained.

Emmet shrugged - a fluid motion that shook his arms outwards.

“We were just reading,” Ingo replied, straining his voice into sounding calm as he patted a large book of their on the history of trains in Sinnoh.

Hm. They probably used that as a desk.

The man shook his head lightly, playing a little into their pantomime: “Then I must be getting old and hearing things. You sounded like you were discussing battle strategies,” and before they could startle he changed his tone to reassure them of whatever they were worried about: “If that were the case, I would have been happy to help you figure them out.”

He looked at the twins a little longer, waiting as it dawned on them that he was, indeed, a Gym Leader, and asking him for help on the topic would have, indeed, made sense, while hiding it away from him very much did not.

They retreated a little sheepish into their own shoulders.

Finally the eldest shyly pulled out the battered notebook from beneath himself and presented it to their uncle, who carefully entered their domain to take a seat by them in the way one tiptoes their uninvited way through the den of a very disgruntled mothering Hydreigon.

“We were, uhm... We were planning our teams,” the boy showed him, pointing at his narrow red calligraphy and his twin’s blockier green handwriting.

Two mirrored columns divided in six rows were compiled with a few Pokémon names, other spaces instead left blank; two more had a label above them which read ‘type’, followed by another couple labeled as ‘ability’, then another pair bearing the sign of ‘item’, and finally much larger two meant to house the party member’s moveset. It was an incredibly meticulous job, Drayden noted with his fair share of marvel.

“You’re real thorough,” he nodded thoughtfully.

Emmet smiled, very much proud of their work; Ingo cleared his throat, adjusting his seat a little to try and not let his fluster show: “And we - and we got to, to this point here - see? This slot here. I was - I thought, I wanted to get - uhm...”

“Earthquake,” Drayden read aloud: “A powerful move.”

Embarassed by his stuttering, Ingo just nodded.

“Paired with... Mold Breaker? For an ability?” his uncle continued with an encouraging tone: “That’s a very good combination.”

“He can’t use it,” Emmet instantly butted in, very piqued.

His brother snapped out of his mortification to glare daggers at him: “Yes I can,” he rebutted.

“No!” and he threw a pen at the elder.

Drayden caught it inn midair without thinking, handing it back over to Emmet: “And why can’t he?”

“Because he can’t!”

“He’s just mad that it would put Eelektrik on the ground to get quaked.”

"Eelektrik has no weaknesses! I want him to keep having no weaknesses!”

“An opponent with Gastro Acid could do the same thing,” their uncle noted.

“But they’d waste a turn!” the younger whined: “Maybe they wouldn’t have Ground moves. Or Eelektrik could paralyze them. Or K.O. them. Mold Breaker is instant! It’s not fair.”

“It’s plenty fair!” Ingo argued.

“It’s cheap!”

“No it’s not, it’s a good strategy!”

“Cheap!”

“Boys.”

They both immediately fell quiet.

He ruffled their hair to reassure them he was not mad at them; they leaned against his palms.

“There’s surely plenty of ways to counter that, or at least minimize the damage,” Drayden said, watching Emmet pout and huff as he validated the fairness of Ingo’s plan. “I should have a Fraxure around your partners’ level who’s just the gal for this. We can try out some counters with her right now, how’s that sound?”

“Oh!” the eldest startled a little. He searched for his brother’s matching surprised eyes: “Right - right now?”

“I mean, if you have time.”

“No, it’s--”

“We need to plan,” the youngest explained.

Their uncle furrowed his brows, puzzled: “Plan what?”

“Counters!”

“We can’t battle if we - if we don’t figure out how to do something first.”

“We need to plan.”

“Otherwise we’ll end up failing and losing, and we’d have to start over again.”

“Yup.”

“It’s to save time.”

“Yup.”

Save time... Save time...

Drayden tilted his head: “Save time for what?”

“For battling.” Emmet repeated.

Ingo twisted the pen in his hand: “We don’t get many occasions.”

Well... As open-minded as he might have been, that sounded a little silly.

It really wasn’t the hardest thing in the world, trying to find someone to train with. There were plenty of over-enthusiastic juvenile trainers running about cities and routes, anxious for any chance at a good battle against anybody who happened to meet their impatient eyes - as a matter of fact, he was fairly certain that if they’d taken a stroll down the park instead of staying cooped up in their room it wouldn’t have taken long at all for them to find an opponent each. Hell, if they spent just thirty minutes there they would probably get their schedules all filled out with battledates from other eager kids.

Were they scared of something? Or were they just particularly sore losers? The younger might have, with how fussy about Eelektrik he was. He could understand not wanting to see a favorite defeated, but acting like that wasn’t going to do him any favours if he was looking to become a gym leader.

Why would he want to be a gym leader. He never mentioned anything about wanting to be a gym leader. Why did he think that. This wasn’t the time to think about successors. Stop that. Bad Drayden. Bad.

“So you two haven’t found a moment to practice at all till now?” he asked.

The twins held his gaze for a moment as their heads timidly retreated into their shoulders like those of Tirtougas before their eyes fell on the bedsheets.

It took him another moment for it to click.

Ah.

His sister had always been fairly irritable when it came to battling, after all.

Of course she’d dictate whether or not they’d be allowed to best her.

Or even at least try to.

And he didn’t really know what that hack of her husband was like, but certainly he wasn’t a shining example of fairness either.

He clapped his wide hands gently, quietly, just to get the boys’ attention back on himself: “Well,” he commented in a jovial tone, “I reckon you should have all the time you might need to do what you want nowadays, wouldn’t you say?”

He looked at the words being processed in real time on the twins’ faces.

A moment more...

Oh.

Oh! Yes.

Yes, they did.

They could practice, now.

Whenever they wanted. Or almost, at least - there would be times when they wouldn’t, due to force majeure, like homework or meals or sleeping or other things, but - they could practice. They could train.

Whenever they wanted.

“You should get some exercise yourselves too,” Drayden noted, “You’re all skin and bones, poor knuckerlings. But nothing some wrassling and good food can’t fix. I can help with that too, don’t worry.”

“Too?” Ingo repeated. “As- as in you - we can, we could train our Pokémon with you? Too?”

“Wrassle?” echoes instead Emmet. ��We wrassle?”

“Yes one and yes two.”

If they’d been a little meatier, they would have tackled him right off the bed and into a possible concussion on the floor with that hug. So on one hand, good; on the other, since he barely even budged, he needed to start scheduling regular sessions for them as soon as possible. With the first one today, hopefully.

He picked them both up effortlessly, their langly legs dangling a few inches from the floor: “So! You wanna try out some of those counters now?”

His ears rung for a hot second from their response.

“And then we wrassle you?” the younger insisted.

“Sweet Dragons, not me! I’d knock you clean out!” their uncle replied, hoisting them up on his shoulders like sacks of flour so he could fetch their notebook and Pokéballs while they dangled up there safe from danger: “Fraxure’s gonna show you the basics!”

“Isn’t that dangerous?” the eldest argued.

“If it were, I don’t think the Lophiris family would’ve survived as long as we did!”