#i love the part at the end where it's just one after another toshiro rowena glynis all getting called out by each other

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

1, Angel Rose. ;3c

I hate how, despite you having never read a piece of the canon she exists in, I’ve told you enough about her that you can just drop me a prompt that dead-on nails the essence of her being.

1. “It wouldn’t be the first time you broke a promise.”

Angel is one of my Pokemon OCs infamous for being a fuckup, and this writing piece below is just purely self indulgent because there is literally no other person, living or dead, in the world who can fully understand everything I’m picturing here. Like most of it’s referring to old stories I’ve written and will never share beyond the one (1) person who read it back when I wrote it, but then the setting is a concept I’d been floating for myself if I ever wrote in my Pokemon universe again.

Anyway this is 2.5k words of a bunch of idiot teenagers and 20-somethings with grudges yelling at each other and being dramatic soap opera idiots while the end of the world looms so maybe (I hope) it’s funny even without full context.

“You can't shut me out of this!" Rose - Angel - whatever the fuck her name is - snaps, rounding on Glynis, and Rowena leaps to her feet and swiftly places herself between them. Sure, she's pretty sure that if a fight starts, it will have been Glynis who started it, and Glynis who emerges the victor, but it will still be the absolute last thing any of them need now. Plus, if her sister starts throwing down with the lying two-named stranger in their midst, something will probably get broken, and Professor Rowan is very protective of his laboratory equipment and knows that if a brawl starts, Rowena tends to be the instigator, so even if for once she isn't, any damage will first get attributed to her. And that is something else she would like to avoid.

"And why the fuck not?" Stacey demands. She is standing back behind Glynis, a wheeled office chair overturned behind her when she flung herself up out of it when Rose - Angel - made her confession.

"I know more about the Distortion World than anyone," Angel says. She shakes her blonde hair back - is that or the blue her natural color? Is Angel or Rose her real name? "And all of this" - she jabs a finger at the scanner printouts that they have all crudely scrawled upon the past several days, at the monitors and further details updating themselves faster than Rowena's eye can take in - "is about the Distortion World! If you're messing around with any of that you need me!"

"Being stranded there for five years doesn't an expert make," Glynis says dryly. "Maybe you got real good at figuring out a pattern to the screwed up gravity but what the hell do you actually really know about about its fundamental makeup, the way it's connected to our world, and how portals to it keep spontaneously opening!"

Rowena knows it wasn’t five years but that’s so far from relevant, and will just spark a hundred problems, so she lets it go.

"And what do you know about that, then?" Angel asks. She folds her arms and shifts her weight back and forth from one foot to another. "You know even less than I do." She doesn’t correct Glynis on her timeline either.

"Glynis - Stacey - all of you, listen," Toshiro says. He stands like he's trying to command everyone's attention, sounds like he's trying to be authoritative, but something of the picture is broken by the way his Joltik is firmly clinging to his forehead. "Rose is right. She -"

"Do you know what she did?" Glynis asks. "The whole, actual, goddamn story?"

"Yes," Toshiro says. "She told me. I know."

"She tried to piss Arceus off enough to destroy the entire universe," Rowena says. "Just - just to reiterate the main point. Like I dunno how she tells it but that's fundamentally the point: she nearly erased all of us from existence. Like do you get that?"

"Yes, I do get that," Toshiro says. At the edges of his words, Rowena can hear his patience starting to fray. "And she helped us - me - in Unova. I trust her. She helped us stop -"

"Hey, not to, like, start shit," Brook calls from where she and Storm are sitting on one of the lab tables, "but -"

"Please don't start more shit," Jenny says. "Please do not start more shit."

"But - I'm gonna start shit, sorry - I think I remember you two mentioning that didn't Toshiro join up with Team Plasma once?"

Angel's mouth his half open and then without a word she closes it. 

"For two months - it was a mistake," Toshiro says. "I know it was a mistake -"

"Yeah and it wasn't so much of some warning flag, like yeah we've all been dumb and helped people we shouldn't have" - Rowena knows that Glynis will be staring directly at the floor right now, and probably half of the others have turned to look at her as Brook says this - "but when you put you with her, and her really really really really really big mistake of trying to blow up the whole world..."

"You'd think Professor Juniper could've found better lab assistants to send us than Team Galactic and Team Plasma's rejects," Stacey says loudly, to no one in particular.

"Yeah sorry but the Heroes of Truth and Ideals are otherwise engaged," Toshiro snaps. He has given up his veneer of pleasantry.

"Isn't one of those two Heroes the leader of Team Plasma?" Dawn asks. "I wouldn't trust them either."

"Hey, no, he wasn't the leader of Team Plasma so much as -"

"Rose, now's not the time -"

"- he thought he was and thought they were working toward a different goal than -"

"So a guy with a super powerful legendary dragon is a gullible idiot instead of evil?" Stacey asks. "Super great."

"He is not -"

"Rose, now’s not the time" Toshiro repeats. "Rose. Seriously. I guarantee you N does not give half a fuck about whether you defend his honor or not. I promise you he doesn't care and we're already so far from the argument we're trying to make that -"

"Oh, good, you're on a first-name basis with the leader of Team Plasma too," Glynis says. "My confidence in your credentials increases by the minute."

"Glynis," Angel says, looking past Rowena, "please. Please, trust me. I swear I can help, I promise that I -"

"It wouldn't be the first time you broke a promise," Glynis says coldly.

Angel recoils, just momentarily, and for a moment Rowena is willing to entertain the idea that she is sincere. And then she looks at Rowena and Rowena can recognize the girl from half a decade ago. She almost looks nothing like her - time has twisted the face in Rowena's memories, undoubtedly, but she remembers someone paler, almost sickly, skeletal, blue hair half in tangles all around her face. But her eyes, her gray gray eyes, are the same, that same look, and something in Rowena's stomach hardens into ice. 

Rowena almost wonders if Angel will go pleading to each of them in turn, but of course - if she can't win over Glynis again, she'll go to the other one out of them all that she knew best. "Rowena, you trust Darkrai, right?" She doesn't leave time for Rowena to answer the rhetorical and continues, "He trusted me - he let me go, he told you that he let me go -"

"What?" Glynis asks.

And the roulette wheel of confessions, gone from Angel to Toshiro, now rolls to Rowena. "You knew?" Glynis asks. Rowena finally looks away from Angel, still not sure that the woman won't morph into some sort of monster as soon as her eyes leave her, to her sister. Glynis looks... not angry, like Rowena expected, but hurt. "The - Darkrai told you? When?"

"About a week after everything went down," Rowena admits. So much for avoiding this conversation.

"Time doesn't work the same in the Distortion World," Angel says. "It felt like years."

"A week?" Glynis repeats. "And for five years you didn't - tell me?"

Something inside Rowena's chest snaps and she is twelve years old again, a stupid angry child who hates her older sister. "Well first I didn't tell you because you were already moping so much about your sad stupid crush on her -"

"You had a crush on me?" Angel repeats blankly. 

Throwing Glynis under the bus was one way to shift the roulette ball out of Rowena's own slot, and she's certainly mixed her metaphors well. "- and then as time went on and the world didn't end I figured that you know, maybe Darkrai was right that she was sincere!"

"Ignoring that the world did almost end in Unova, two years after that," Stacey says.Rowena rounds on her. "And what, I figured, and you would have too, were the bloody fucking chances of her having ended up in Unova?"

"So you trust Darkrai," Angel says, a little desperately, "so you'd trust -"

"I trusted Darkrai then," Rowena says. "Now's like..." She wiggles her hand back and forth. "Eh."

Angel's face falls. "Sometimes I think I trust him,” Rowena continues, “and more often I'm pretty sure he just thrives on the chaos and only stopped you because if the universe got destroyed he'd be gone too and wouldn't have any entertainment."

"You know," Angel says, and she still looks sad, but her lips almost twitch toward a smile, "I hate admitting it but you're probably right about that one. He's an asshole." She closes her eyes and presses a hand to her forehead. "So you won't trust me either."

"I'll tentatively trust you," Rowena says, and Angel's eyes snap open, something like hope transforming into suspicion. "Conditionally, as in - the world is already fucking ending and we're gonna have to take a chance somewhere or other to save it, probably."

"That sounds like a terrible idea," Stacey says.

"You know what else sounds terrible?" Rowena asks. "Sinnoh gets sucked into an alternate dimension because Giratina or some fucker keeps opening portals and no one stopped it. That sounds bad."