Chapter 10

Sam had just finished putting away the dishes, and he looked around the kitchen. Spotless again. Ever since Tommy’s stroke, he had gotten pretty good at keeping the house in order. It wasn’t so hard, he thought, it was merely just about keeping your promises to yourself that you would do it. If Sam made sure to vacuum and dust and wash the dishes just a little each day, it only took a little bit of his time, and things never got out of control. Besides, it was his job to clean up now that he was the man of the house. He was the only one in the house, at that. 

He set his dishtowel on the rack next to the sink and turned the knobs to the stop the water pressure, but the water didn’t let up; he tried again, but the knob just spun loosely in his hand. The water was unstoppably filling the sink, and he knew soon it would fill his home. The drain wouldn’t be able to handle the deluge, and it would overflow and fill the kitchen and then the living room and then whole house and then his lungs–

A noise from the living room distracted him. It was the sound of someone moving about. Sam poked his head around the corner of his cyan-colored divider wall and saw Tommy up and out of his hospital bed. He was disconnecting all the wires and machines that had been monitoring his health.

“Hey, Tommy. You can’t do that. You’re in a coma; you have to take it easy.”

“Am I?” Tommy asked, looking down at his hands and then up his forearms. “Am I in a coma?”

Sam nodded.

“I don’t feel like I’m in a coma. I think I’m dead. Is that why you can see me? Am I dead?”

“You might be.” It did make sense to Sam. If Tommy was dead, then that would explain why he could see and talk to his older brother. 

Tommy pulled the last IV out of his arm and came forward to hug his brother. Sam felt the tears well up in his eyes as he burrowed his face into Tommy’s shoulder. For being dead, Tommy felt really soft. Sam wished his brother wasn’t so dead.

“I’m sorry I died, Sammy. I really didn’t want to leave you.”

Sam’s tears were an irresistible force, and they flowed into the sleeve of Tommy’s favorite sweater, the blue one with the grey, horizontal stripe he wore twice a year at Thanksgiving and Easter. Sometimes on Easter it would be too warm for a sweater, so Tommy would pull it out of his closet anyway put it on a third chair at their dinner table and tell Sam that the sweater wanted to celebrate anyway. They would always put a plate of food in front of it and joke that the reason it didn’t eat was because it didn’t want to burst at the seams. It was really funny.

“Sammy, you have to go to school soon, so I think you should go get a bath.”

Sam agreed. Now that his brother was dead and awake, Sam could start going to school again. He would tell Miah Vanderbelt that Tommy came back to him, and no one in Miah’s family would do that for Miah. That would really get him good.

He rushed up the stairs and turned the bathtub on; it seemed to take a long time to get the water temperature right. No matter how much he fidgeted with and manipulated the knobs, the water still came out extremely cold. Sam studied the water pouring out of the tub faucet. It reminded him of something from earlier, but he couldn’t remember what. He tried to think…after he came home from school, he did the vacuuming. What else?

“Is the water right?”

Sam was startled out of his thoughts by his brother’s words. He ran his hand under the spout one more time. The water was warm now. “Perfect,” Sam answered. He turned the water off and hopped over the wall of the tub into it. His hand scooped water up and run it over his other arm, rubbing it clean through his shirt sleeve. 

“Is it making you clean?”

“It is. I feel a lot better, Tommy.”

“Is it washing away your sin?”

“What sin? What are you–”

Sam’s words were cut off by Tommy’s hands around his neck. His brother’s face was flush with red now, and his pupils were tiny. His blonde hair was completely disheveled. Arched eyebrows punctuated his rage. “You forgot about me!”

Sam tried to argue that he never did, but Tommy’s hands cut the words off at his throat and they died there, unspoken. His brother continued, “You were supposed to stop me from dying, but you didn’t! You went all the way to another country because you promised me you’d get the legends, but instead you went chasing after that bird.”

The bird. Sam remembered now. Tommy made him promise to catch the legendary pokemon, but he forgot about it and started trying to find it instead. The legendary pokemon would have woken Tommy up from his coma; what would that stupid phoenix have done for either of them? 

Tommy’s hands forced Sam under the bath water, and the tub spout was running again. There was too much water above him and too much weight pushing him into it. All he could see as he looked up was Tommy’s malice weighing him down. Sam wondered if he’d still be able to see Tommy now that he was dead.

---

Sam sat up suddenly and gulped the air around him. He swallowed one sharp breath followed by another, followed by another. There wasn’t enough air in the white room to fill his lungs; he needed more! Something… there was something in his nostrils. He yanked the plastic tube out with force; it was coming between him and the air that he needed. He needed all of it. Sam heard words, but they were nonsense. To his left, he saw Barry. Barry’s mouth was moving and words were coming out, but none of it made any sense to Sam; the speech was garbled and hollow. Rowan’s assistant’s head turned and he began shouting his echoing gibberish to someone else. Several people in white uniforms flooded his vision and pushed Sam flat back onto the bed in which he lay. These were the same people that couldn’t help Tommy back home, and they were here now to not be able to help him, either. He just needed air; he just needed to breathe, so why were they resisting him? Something pricked Sam’s arm, and he felt his opposite hand slap one of these people. They were trying to put him back to sleep; they were trying to take his air away. Sam wanted to continue swatting at them, but there must have been weights attached to his hands now, they were so hard to move. The people positioned the object back into his nostrils while Sam begged them not to. He heard one of them start counting, and then Sam’s world faded to black.

When Sam’s eyes opened again, he immediately realized he had no idea how long it had been since he was awake the last time. The fluorescent bulbs gave no hint of the daylight (or lack thereof, Sam pondered) outside. Another hospital room full of artificial light and artificial life; Sam’s body shuddered. 

“So are you going to spaz out again or what?”

Sam turned his head at the sound of Barry’s voice and was surprised at how sore his muscles were and how much effort he had to exert just to get his neck to cooperate. When he had woken up last time, he moved with much less discomfort. The joys of adrenaline, he thought. “No. No, I’m sorry about that. I was really out of it, I guess. Where are we?”

“Snowpoint Hospital.”

“How long have we been here?”

“Not that long, really. Maybe a day?”

Sam’s mind refused to stop sending in questions as he rubbed the IV in his right arm. The feeling of the catheter under his skin was unsettling, but it was hardly at the forefront of his mind. A lot of things must have happened since Barry’s surf attack. “Let’s just skip ahead and I’ll ask one question that is all the questions: What happened?”

Barry nodded. “I might have underestimated the potency of that wave attack back on the boat.” Barry let out a chuckle and rubbed the back of his head. “It knocked the whole thing over on its side. I had Prinplup–” Barry paused and looked upward for just a moment before meeting Sam’s eyes again. “I guess that’s ‘The Artist Formerly Known As Prinplup’ at this point, but I had him round you and those other guys up and take us all to shore. It took a few dives to get all of them, but it wasn’t tugging at my heart to make them wait a few minutes while I saved you and me, you know?”

“Did you get them all?” Sam knew firsthand what being in that water was like, and he wouldn’t have wished it on anyone.

“Dude, are you auditioning for sainthood or something? I did, but damn. Okay, the first guy that Monferno chucked I messed up on and felt bad about. But after that, they jumped us without any explanation. Screw’em.”

“Where are they now?”

Barry shrugged. “Don’t know. Don’t care. Not all of them were in shock and half-drowned like you were, so I just left them on the shore to fend for themselves. If I stayed there and played junior paramedic with them, I was running the risk of… well, something happening to you. I put as much distance between them and us as I could, and then I called the ambulance.”

Sam wanted to ask Barry how he could have left people who were soaking wet out in the freezing weather, but he found it extraordinarily hard to scold someone who’d just busted his hump to save Sam’s life. “Thanks,” was all that he could get out.

“Think nothing of it. Hey, did you catch that part where I oh-so-subtly hinted that my Prinplup evolved after all this? It was awesome! I mean, he did beat, like, fifteen pokemon at once. Oh, and you. He beat you, too, I guess.”

The thought of Barry’s pokemon shocked Sam to attention and reached down to where his pockets should have been. He found only the warm skin of his thigh, uncovered by his hospital gown under the bed sheets. “Where are my balls?”

Barry froze, his tongue caught beneath his teeth, staring at Sam reaching downwards under his sheets. A smile spread across his lips. “… Heh heh…”

“My friends!” Sam corrected, the thought of what he just said dawning on him. “The balls with Bree, Vlam, and Chispa. Where are those?”

Barry pointed to a tall, narrow closet next to the restroom door. “You had them secured. They’re with your clothes in there.”

Thank god, Sam thought. He clearly remembered recalling his friends into their transportable form, but he hadn’t any idea if he managed to hang onto their pokeballs during the wave. Relief settled the panic inside him as quickly as it had arisen just seconds ago. 

“The good thing in all this is that those guys aren’t making it to Lake Acuity. So that part turned out well, right? I guess we can let Rowan know that we put a stop to them in that regard, (let’s not tell him how, though). I wonder if we should think about heading to Lake Valor next and see what the odds are that they’ve got guys working there by now…”

Barry trailed off, now pondering their next move to himself. Or maybe it only seemed like Barry got quieter as Sam went into his own mind. He had come all the way to the northern-most area of the continent, and now Barry wanted to leave without ever having visited the lake. Uxie, the second of the Sinnoh lake guardians and the being of knowledge, could be right under his nose, and already Barry was planning for moving on. Knowledge. Sam recalled Tommy in his hospital bed, unable to think or remember anything about his life. 

“Barry, I–”

“No, I got this already. We’re not going to stress you out. I’m going to call and book us some bus tickets. Nice and leisurely this time. Getting on that boat was a stupid idea, and I coulda got you killed. We’re gonna do this next one the right way.”

Sam wanted to reply, but what could he say? This was important to Professor Rowan, and the professor had already done so much to help Sam. He set Sam up with Barry, he gave him the rental car and supplies, he treated Sam’s mad plan with respect after it was explained to him. And couldn’t these two plans come together? Sam could always come back to Lake Acuity later if he needed to. Until then, going with Barry could only ensure the safety of the third of the guardians, Azelf. Really, what was the downside of continuing on with Barry?

“You forgot about me!” The words from his dream earlier echoed in his mind. Sam rationalized to himself that it was not that he was forgetting about Tommy–he was doing this for Tommy, in fact. The goals were not mutually exclusive. 

Barry was lost in his thoughts, probably preparing for the bus ride he’d mentioned, so Sam sat and fidgeted with the oxygen tube in his nostrils. Even now that he had his wits about him, it was annoying and uncomfortable. Sam felt embarrassed by his outburst earlier. What was he supposed to tell the nurses when they came back in? Sorry I tried to assault you; I thought my comatose brother was trying to murder me in a bathtub for breaking a promise to him. Yeah, that’d go over gangbusters. He’d probably get an all-expenses-paid trip to the psychiatric ward for forty-eight hours. 

Sure enough, shortly after that thought, a pair of young nurses did enter the room to check Sam’s vitals. He was humbled yet again when he realized he was so caught up in himself earlier, he had no idea if these two were there when it happened. He elected to just say nothing and try not to dwell on it; it was surely not the first time hospital staff saw a patient erupt like that. The shorter brunette nurse said something about his blood pressure being a little high; Sam couldn’t help but laugh. After that, they asked him to fill out the paperwork he obviously was incapable of doing when the paramedics brought him in. As Sam filled in his insurance information, he wondered if any insurance company in the world would ever touch any children that he might ever have. He imagined his family’s last name would be on every insurance company’s blacklist for the next three generations. We’re sorry Mr. Stark, an insurance company would tell his hypothetical son, but apparently car accidents, strokes, and falling in the ocean are all pre-existing conditions in your family. 

Sam was pleasantly surprised when the nurses informed him that he was healthy enough to leave whenever it suited him now that he was awake and aware. His body had recovered from the state of shock, and there was no frostbite damage. It had been far too long since any medical staff gave Sam good news, so he didn’t question it. Sam announced he was going to change into his clothes–which the hospital had so kindly laundered for him, he was told–and Barry couldn’t get out of the room fast enough.

“Did I tell you Prinplup evolved?” Barry called out from the other side of the door as Sam pulled his polo shirt over his head.

“You actually did.”

“It was pretty awesome. It beat, like, twenty pokemon at once.”

“And me.”

“Yeah, he beat you, too. Hospitalized you! So you better think twice before you mess with me, buddy. More where that came from.”

Sam heard the smile in Barry’s voice, and it lifted his spirits. Barry was happy that Sam wasn’t badly hurt. And not just in the sense that he was generically happy he didn’t accidentally kill a man; there was something more to it that Sam couldn’t put his finger on. 

“All right, I’m done,” Sam called as he pulled up his zipper. 

“Are you sure?”

Sam stared at the door between them, incredulous. “No, I forgot to put on my underwear and pants, oops. Yes, I’m sure. I know how to dress myself.”

“Can’t be too sure,” Barry said as he opened the door and walked back into the room. He plopped himself down in the chair that was next to Sam’s hospital bed and seemed engrossed in his phone. He must have felt Sam’s eyes on him, because he held up the device and just said “Ordering bus tickets.” Then he went back to work on the keypad.

Sam grabbed the three pokeballs in his pocket. He had no clue what he would have done if he hadn’t managed to fasten them before the wave hit. It’s possible that Prinplup would have been able to recover them just as it had rescued Sam, but if not… the thought was too awful to continue. Sam redirected his brain. Next time it came up in conversation, he needed to ask Barry the genders of his friends; Sam felt bad just calling Prinplup an ‘it’ in his head. 

A knocking on the door to his room pulled him out of that thought.

“Come in; I’m dressed.” Sam winced at offering that. It made it sound like there was a perpetual valid concern that he might not be.

The man who walked through his door was not hospital staff. Immediately, Sam noticed he had the same skin tone as the men from the two crews he and Barry had encountered. He was clearly not any kind of laborer like they had been, however. He was flawlessly dressed in a pinstriped grey suit and solid red necktie. His thick black hair was meticulously styled to the right side, arching slightly upwards as it parted. No, this man certainly never worked a day of his life on a construction site. He was tall, too; at five-foot-eleven, no one had ever accused Sam of being short, but this man was a solid three or four inches larger than he. He had no facial hair, but he did have a glowing smile.

“Mr. Stark and Mr. West?” As Sam and Barry affirmed his inquiry, he continued. “It’s a pleasure to meet you boys. For transparency’s sake, I will let you know I am here in direct opposition to my lawyer’s advice. But I am certain we can discuss whatever it is we need to like the civil gentlemen I’m sure we all are. I told him I had every faith we could sort all this out.”

Lawyer’s advice? What was going on here? “I’m sorry, sir; I’m a little confused. I must have missed your name…”

The man blinked slowly and bobbed his head. “No, I’m afraid I forgot to give it. My apologies. I am Henrique Alonzo. I am the President of Phoenix Shipping Corporation.”