#five is playful and listens to his siblings pokemon more than them honestly | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

in-tua-deep · 3 years

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Going through ur master list of AUs and celebi incident? For gym leader AU? Please tell me more

okay i definitely tried to asnwer this the day it was asked and then my response was lost in a tragic incident and i lost all motivation but TAKE TWO

so what happened was this: the Umbrella Academy lived pretty isolated in the pokemon au. Like think big spooky manor on the edge of a smallish town, not far away from some really deep and fairly spooky woods populated by all sorts of pokemon.

Anyway, when the kids were 10 they obviously were like “fucking finally, we can leave and go on our pokemon journey and escape” or at least were prepared to Go Forth and Make Father Proud or whatever. Except Reggie was like “yeah, no y’all aren’t leaving just yet”

To which Five, of course, rebelled pretty spectacularly and threatened to run away

“You’ll come crawling back within a day.” Reginald dismisses, because Five doesn’t have a pokemon and you pretty much have to travel through woods crawling with pokemon and trainers in order to get out of town.

Five says “oh? bet” and runs away anyway, deep into the woods

Does Five run into pokemon? Yeah, of course he does. However, he can also teleport and is a feral child who is ABSOLUTELY willing to wrestle a zigzagoon with his bare hands

and Five camps out in the woods with 0 supplies and 0 preparation and look, pokemon are pretty intelligent, right? They can usually tell the difference between a Child and an Adult of a species. Five is also intelligent, and so he absolutely follows the poochyena to the berry bushes which are edible, and gets himself a good meal out of it.

Five is stubborn, and determined, and furious, and he’s going to live in the fucking woods if that’s what it takes because to go back is to admit defeat and that is not an option

So he does live in the woods. The pokemon adapt to him being around. He bunks down with bidoof or sleeps in the trees in nests of taillow and has an ongoing rivalry with the family or purrloin over who can find the best berry bushes

and then he meets celebi

Five is smart, but he’s young and he hasn’t exactly been deep diving into myths and legends in what little spare time he has. He doesn’t know about the mythos surrounding celebi, all he knows is this weird little onion fairy is friendly and lives to play tag - so they do. Five teleports around the woods and hides and jumps out and laughs when he manages to tag the little creature

and one day Five and Celebi are playing, and they get ‘home’ and find... nothing. The family of purrloin are gone, the pikipek who plucked twigs out of Five’s hair in the evening has vanished, the pidgey nest is in pieces

and then they hear voices, and Celebi looks at Five and grabs his hand right before they could be discovered and -

They’re in the woods again. Well, they is a strong word. Five opens his eyes, and Celebi is gone. It’s just the woods. Curious and wary faces poke out of the trees and the bushes, but none that he recognizes. A family of ratata are in the hollow that serve as the purrloin’s home. The trees aren’t arranged right. The paths aren’t the same. The woods look different and Five... panicks just a little bit okay

So he runs through the woods and everything looks familiar and also different, he can spot the craggy rocks where the pidove like the make their nests, but the berry bushes aren’t where they should be. The canyon is only half as deep as it should be, and the graveyard of bikes stolen from various trainers is absent

Five does the only thing he thinks he can do: he goes home

Which would be much more significant if there was a home to go to. Five gets to where he’s absolutely sure his village should be, where the manor should be, where his siblings live, and just. Keep finding more woods. He figured he must have taken a wrong turn at the caves, but when he backtracks it’s where it’s supposed to be. He’s in the right location, but the wrong... time

Celebi did this, he is sure of it, and so that’s who he has to find

Except Celebi is nowhere to be found, and Five looks. He trecks through the forest for miles every day, plucking berries from bushes with nimble fingers and curling up in nests of moss at night. The pokemon of this time aren’t especially wary of him and indeed often come chittering up to sniff him and ask him to play. Five wonders if they’ve ever even seen a human before.

(Honestly it seems half the pokemon have decided he’s a weird variation of abra or ralts? demonstrating his teleportation makes one concerned ursaring scoop him up and leave him at the feet of a gardevoir with grunts of diapproval but Five is a strong independent young human who doesn’t need pokemon parents)

Years pass, and Five learns the ebb and flow of the woods even more in depth than he did before. He makes friends, the various pokemon running around and helping him look for Celebi but who also tempt him into playing with them and helping them and just living

(sometimes, Five wonders why he’s even trying to get back. he wonders why when he’s curled up and soft and safe, when he knows in the morning that he’s going to go to the river to play. then he remembers his siblings, who are still stuck with Reggie as far as he knows)

He grows up in the woods with pokemon as parents and siblings, grows taller and older and is very good at mimicry. He hoots softly to the pidgey and barks with the growlithe and dances with the hoppip, learning a million different languages as he runs recklessly between the trees racing electrike to the lake with laughter on his lips

and then he finds Celebi again, on an unremarkable day when he’s challenged quilava to a game of hide and seek tag

and Celebi extends their hands to him

“I haven’t said goodbye.” Five protests, but Celebi extends they hands again and Five knows that if he leaves now he might not ever find the little creature again

(He thinks of his siblings and takes a deep breath and reaches out and -)

He’s back in the woods again. Alone again.

(He looks down at his hands, and startles, because they aren’t his hands. They’re too young, caked in dirt but without the calluses he’s gained over the years.)

He runs, he runs back to his village and almost bowls over a drainer on his desparate sprint. Even the sight of a person is so strange that it almost halts Five in his tracks, but instead he sprint until he’s standing in front of a sight he hasn’t seen in years

He’s at the manor. But it’s different still. The lawn is in minor disrepair, which isn’t that much but it’s still wildly different from Reginald’s exacting standards of perfection. Maybe the old man let things go looking for Five? Did Five’s absence affect things so much?

He hears arguing, and without even thinking about it he jumps and suddenly he’s in front of - a bunch of strangers?

“Five?” One of them says with a voice that wobbles, and Five immediately backs up.

“Who are you?” Five asks, but he’s pretty sure he already knows. There are six people here, after all, all who look hauntingly like the siblings he left behind if they’d been allowed to grow up in his memory.

“Five, Five it’s us. What happened to you?”

“No.” Five denies, “No. I’m back. This isn’t right. This is wrong.”

That’s how the siblings end up having to deal with a physically eleven year old Five crashing Reginald’s funeral or whatever looking like he’s been living in the woods for months or maybe years? Five tells them he’s older than 11, that he lived in the woods for years but doesn’t know what Celebi did to him. At first he wants to go hunt Celebi down again and demand he be taken back to where he should be, but Vanya stops him stating that they lost him years ago and they need him to stay now

So they get the fun honor of having to raise a half-feral pre-teen who hasn’t really had human contact since he was 10 and who seems more comfortable with pokemon than he does with people. Most of the fam are well on their way to setting up gyms/already being gym leaders/working their way up and so Five ends up as the dragon gym leader when he’s physically 13-years-old

His siblings are all like “haha yeah we’re all the same age I think? unclear” and when people point at five they’re just like “haha yeah celebi time travel bullshit is the worst amiright” and no one has the balls to challenge them on it

(Five didn’t become a gym leader at physically 11 because he had to be taught to reintegrate into society. He still naps in piles with his pokemon and has to be bribed into using a bed/sleeping indoors but he actually speaks to trainers instead of dropping from the ceiling and ambushing them for gym battles so improvement)

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