#yes I am still mildly upset about the direction they took him in season two

[theladyofrosewater]

I swear all my good Viktor drawings have to start out as paper sketches or they won't look right

[catflowerqueen]

How about something for The World's Treasure verse with Stars?

citrus-chickadde said: (Oh, and I forgot to specify character(s), but how about Dusknoir for that prompt I sent you?)

Here you go! 

Stars

           “…Are you all right?” the ghost-type asked of his redhaired friend as he approached her cautiously. After the exhausting “day” they’d just had, as well as the fact that she was mildly injured, he would have expected her to be in bed, rather than sitting dangerously close to one of the broken ledges that were so numerous around what remained of Temporal Tower, staring up at the dark, dismal sky. Her hood, for once, was actually up and covering her fiery locks, and while this normally would have pleased Dusknoir—because, really, that shade just made her that much more of an easy target for the pokémon who had completely lost themselves to the madness of the dark world—at the moment it was just further proof of how really not all right she was at this moment.

           The woman gave a start, briefly glancing at him in surprise before turning her gaze back skywards. “Mm. I’m fine,” she said mutely—and rather unconvincingly. Her voice, after all, still sounded rough and hoarse from all the screaming she’d done earlier. Dusknoir raised a brow, and even though her back was turned so that she couldn’t see his expression, the two knew each other well enough by now that she could definitely tell she hadn’t fooled him. He didn’t even have to say anything before she sighed, flipping her hood down and half-turning around to make the inevitable conversation easier. “I am… still a bit upset at Dialga for how he acted today.”

           Dusknoir winced himself at the reminder. As aware as he was of the massive amounts of cruelty his master possessed, he still hadn’t expected the sheer brutality of the slaughter that took place earlier—especially the fact that Dialga, for once, didn’t listen to any of Little Imp’s pleas for mercy—even going so far as to physically push her to the side, which resulted in her mildly-injured state—until she outright attacked him herself. It wasn’t enough to save the adults of the sableye tribe who’d had the misfortune of incurring Primal Dialga’s wrath, but…

           “You managed to save the children,” Dusknoir reminded her.

           “For a given value of saved,” she spat. But he just raised a brow again and she sighed, scrubbing her face with her hands. “I’m sorry, you didn’t deserve that. None of this is your fault, and this whole situation… it’s put you in a rather tight spot, as well.”

           Dusknoir frowned before sighing himself and moving to join her. “It will be… different,” he acknowledged, “but on the whole… I can’t say that it won’t be nice to hear children roaming about again. Given how large my family was, growing up… well, it’s a sound that I hadn’t realized I’d been missing until I heard it again.” He paused here, wincing a bit, “Ah… The unfortunate circumstances immediately following it aside, of course.”

           “No… I know what you mean,” Little Imp said, her hands moving from scrubbing at her face to propping it up as she briefly leaned to look over the edge of the ledge they were sitting on before raising her gaze once more to the sky. “You never really know how much you’ll miss something until it’s gone.”

           At that, Dusknoir raised his own gaze to the dark, gloomy heavens. “…That’s true enough, I suppose,” he agreed, a bit of caution to his tone. Considering everything that his friend had given up in order to be here now, those were some very loaded words.

           The Little Imp blinked at his tone before giving an airy chuckle and rubbing her neck, a slight blush of embarrassment rising to her face. “Oh, no,” she said, “it’s probably nothing like you’re thinking, just…” she gave a wistful sigh. “Back at the orphanage, after putting all the children to bed—especially if one of them was having a bad night—I would go out and look at the sky,” she explained. “And while the circumstances here are obviously… different… I just… well, I fell back into old habits, and… I just hadn’t realized how much I missed doing that. Taking care of a group of kids, and then going to look at the sky…” she paused again, not noticing the pained look on her friend’s face as she worked through her thoughts. “Of course, none of the children back home were orphans due to such extreme circumstances as this. And they all still understood that they were children first and foremost, and not… not what Dialga wants them to be, for me.”

           That last part had devolved into an angry mutter, so Dusknoir didn’t quite catch it. Not helped was the fact that he was distracted by a different part of what she’d just said. “Yes…” he agreed, rather distantly, “the sky… it must have been very pretty. All those stars…the history in those constellations…”

           He was abruptly startled out of his longing when his friend gave a rather undignified snort. He turned to her, mild hurt in his expression, where she sat trying to muffle her laughter.

           “Sorry, sorry,” she said, not really sounding all that contrite, even though he could tell she was trying. “It’s just… I never really saw the appeal in constellations.”

           Dusknoir was surprised. “But… given how much you like paining… I would have thought—the concept of pictures painted in the night sky, wouldn’t that—?”

           “Well, sure, when you put it that way,” she waved him off. “But… that’s probably the core of the problem.”

           “…Explain, please?”

           “Sure,” Little Imp said, a wry grin on her face as she flopped down, flipping over her stomach and doodling in the dust that was ever-present on the Tower, despite her many attempts to clean things up a bit and make it more habitable—especially today, given that there would be children living there.

           “Okay,” she said as she finished, sitting up and dusting her palms off on her cloak. “Imagine this is the night sky, and tell me what sorts of pictures you can make out by connecting the dots.”

           Dusknoir looked at her in confusion momentarily before deciding to humor her. Looking down at her work, he studied it for a moment before connecting a series of six dots, declaring, “Here—a girafarig.”

           “Are you sure?” His friend asked, a smirk on her face.

           Dusknoir scowled, irritation clear on his face. “Yes. These two dots, here—they make up the head and snout. And then connecting them to these…”

           “Ah, but are you sure those two dots make up the head of a girafarig, rather than a krabby’s claws?” she asked rhetorically, tracing a different path with her fingers that, yes, did vaguely resemble a krabby. “And then this dot, here, that you seem to think make up a tail… in actuality, don’t they really resemble a farfetch’d’s leek? Or a—”

           “Yes, yes, I see your point,” Dusknoir said, a frown on his face as the dots and their many possibilities swam in his vision.

           The human shrugged before taking pity on her friend and wiping the dots away. “I agree that it was fun to make pictures in the sky, and that the view was really lovely, but… given where I was, and who I was with… I lacked the context for true constellations.” She shrugged again. “Some of the more fanatical worshippers, especially those were conversions, or became worshippers later in life, claimed that the stars were ‘perfect representations of Relatia’ or ‘her thousand eyes that watched from the skies,’ but… that really couldn’t be farther from the truth. It’s true that, depending on where you were, you could use the stars to navigate your position in space, but… going too far in one direction or another changed the context of the constellations; not all stars can be seen from both hemispheres of Earth. And even the closest star—the sun—wasn’t necessarily a good measure of the time depending on where in the world you were. Go too far north, for example, and the sun didn’t even rise at all if it wasn’t the right season.” She paused here. “Of course, ‘rise’ isn’t really the proper term, seeing as it wasn’t the sun that was moving. It was actually—”

           “Yes, I get it,” Dusknoir said, rolling his eye. “We’ve had that particular conversation before.”

           The Little Imp smiled. “Relatia always found those ideas amusing, though. Her favorite stars were actually the dead ones, believe it or not—she always said that she felt bad that I would never be able to experience what it was like to travel through a black hole. Apparently the journey makes one’s stomach feel ‘pleasantly swirly’ and ‘it’s fun to see where the white hole spits you out.’ Assuming, of course, that you could actually survive the trip. Alas, that is not something that mere mortals like us can experience.”

           Dusknoir shook his head, amused despite himself, and the two lapsed into pleasant silence for a while, looking out over the barren landscape.

           “…You know,” the Little Imp finally admitted, “This view isn’t really all that different from some of the stuff I saw at the orphanage.” At Dusknoir’s stunned look, she explained further, “Relatia hid her islands within the folds of time and space, you know? So the view… it was always changing. And depending on which timeline we were closest to… well.” She leaned back on her arms a bit. “What people tend not to realize is that a lot of times, when they think they’re seeing a star? It’s actually just a ghost image; it takes about eight minutes for the light from Earth’s sun to reach the planet, so just imagine how much longer it takes for the stars that are so much farther away. By the time that their first rays of light actually reach Earth… the star itself may be long dead.”

           “So sometimes the timeline you were closest to would be so far in the future that the stars were long dead and gone?” Dusknoir surmised.

           “Or that they haven’t been born yet.”

           “Still, that’s rather… sad. And the fact that many of the stars are actually ghosts…” Dusknoir shuddered.

           “Hey, now, what’s wrong with that? Some of my best friends are ghosts, after all,” Little Imp said, a wry grin on her face as she shoved Dusknoir playfully, making him blush. “Besides… I actually think it’s rather heartening, y’know? To think of all those ghost stars… still giving the Earth life, and a myriad of opportunities for constellations, even long after they’re gone…”

           “I suppose, putting it that way…”

           “And then of course you have shooting stars, which aren’t even stars at all—just bits of space rocks and meteors, rocketing out of nowhere and giving us a brilliant display, even as the journey burns them to nothing in the atmosphere—unless they get lucky and land as meteorites.”

           “Now, that sounds interesting—I don’t think you’ve told me about those before.”

           “I haven’t? Well you’re in for a treat, then! You know, some theorize that it was a meteorite which led to the extinction of the dinosaurs—or at least, the dinosaurs which Relatia and some of the other Panthoen members didn’t save or move elsewhere…”

           “What are dinosaurs?”

           “One story at a time, Dear Friend! First, let me…”

           The two friends would converse for quite a while, long after they both should have been asleep, and neither of them would notice that a tiny sableye head would occasionally peek around the corner, from where one of their new charges had snuck out of bed.

           And “years” later, as Dusknoir fought alongside his former enemies, Grovyle and Celebi, as he tried to save the past and change the future… he couldn’t help but compare himself to those ghost stars, still shining and spreading their light despite being long dead… or to a shooting star, burning brightly for a purpose even as it assured its own destruction in the task.