Post by etoile on Jun 28, 2009 17:03:56 GMT -5
“I’m home!”
He gets home earlier than usual – Caroline has just started on dinner, she explains as she greets him with a brief kiss and then vanishes off into the kitchen again – and so he takes the opportunity to check the mail. Bill, spam, bill, wrong address, and... Mew damn it. He’d forgotten about these.
He opens the large Pokemon Association-logoed envelope and tips it out onto the sideboard in the living room, frowning as a printed form and pre-paid return envelope slide out. The Leader evaluations every year are accompanied by a questionnaire, and he hates them with a passion. Still, he reasons, he has time. Might as get the stupid thing over and done with. Casting a cursory glance over it as he fumbles in the drawer for a pencil, it looks different to the one from last time. Well, he’ll see.
Sitting down heavily on the sofa, he sets his feet apart and leans forward to lean on the coffee table. Now, to begin this thing.
My Parents call me...
Is this supposed to be asking his name? It’s... going about it in an odd way. What do his parents have to do with anything?
His parents are dead anyway, have been for a while. He does think about it for a little moment, hears the quavery voice of his mother in his head asking him if there was a date for the wedding yet – it makes him give a brief little smile, before he turns his attention back to the form.
'Norman Senri', he writes in squarish, slanted, slightly untidy print. Not that they don’t know that already, but maybe it’s just part of the evaluation.
My Friends call me...
That elicits a pause. His friends call him by his name. His wife, more often than not, calls him by his first name. Nicknames and pet names annoy him, and most of the people who know him know that. When was the last time that anyone actually didn’t use his proper name? That... Hey, that would have been years ago, when he’d done that brief stint training with the Goldenrod Gym and the female gym trainers had insisted on calling him ‘Norm’ constantly. But that, that didn’t matter.
'Just Norman. No nicknames.'’ And if anyone says different then they’re asking to be taught how it really is.
I'm not an it! I'm a...
An ‘it’? This is just... he’s more confused than he has been in a long time. Nonetheless, he puts pencil to paper and writes down... well, anything that comes to mind.
'I am male,' Well, of course he is. 'which is probably sort of obvious given that the name printed at the top of the sheet and written further up is, strangely enough, Norman.'
And, well, it’s true. And anyway, if there are any female Normans walking around looking like he does, then the world is better off not knowing about them. Is that enough to write for that? He can’t really be bothered with any more under that. Mew only knows what the rest of this weird thing is going to ask.
I am a...
... The entire point of the form is that he’s a Gym Leader, isn’t it? He actually finds himself wondering aloud, "What the hell is this?" It’s completely... idiotic, is what it is. Did the other Leaders get something like this? He has a hard time imagining Winona answering this crap. He’s got to humour it, though, otherwise there’ll be snippy letters and phonecalls and he doesn’t particularly find himself excited at the prospect of more ‘INSUBORDINATION! SENRI YOU ARE USELESS WE WILL FIRE YOU ONE OF THESE DAYS’ messages.
'Gym Leader,' as the Association already knows, 'and specialist trainer of the Normal type.' That they know as well, considering the Gym actually has a pile of Association order forms for Moon Stones tucked away somewhere, and anyone with even some slight knowledge of Pokemon would have the sense to figure it out. What, exactly, is the whole point of this stupid evaluation anyway? It definitely doesn’t seem to be going anywhere remotely sensible. Trust the Association to be wasting his time again.
I don't need wrinkle cream! I'm...
Somehow that one doesn’t come as a massive surprise. Not for any particular reason, but he’s pretty sure that they’re just trying to screw with him now. Keeping his answers straight will probably minimise any weird kick that anyone might get from reading this.
'37 years of age.' He probably looks it too, given that he’s never been near an ‘anti-aging product’ in his life and has instead spent most of it outdoors and/or being very stressed. But given the choice of looking maybe five years younger than he is or being able to kick down heavy doors and hike the hour round trip from Littleroot to Petalburg and back every day, he’d stick with the one he’s already taken.
He takes a moment to shuffle the forms back into a neater pile before allowing his gaze to move further down the page, letting out a heavy sigh through his nose.
Do you think I need a diet?
He stops and reads that one again, pausing. The piece of paper. Asked him if it needed a diet. A muscle twitches in his suddenly clenched jaw.
What.
This is just getting absolutely ridiculous... he’s going to have to check this. He turns his head, raises his voice – "Caroline! Where’s the phone?"
At his wife’s prompt he gets up and goes over to feel under the end table, swearing when he bangs his hand on the leg but finding the handset nonetheless. He puts the pencil in his mouth to dial the number, but takes it back to twirl in his fingers as the other end of the line rings. It’s answered quickly by one of the underling trainers, who scurries off pretty damn quickly when the gruff command to fetch the Leader’s issued.
“Hello, this is Ro-”
"Yeah. Roxanne. It’s Norman. The evaluation you got didn’t have anything in it about diets, did it?"
A brief, mystified pause. “No. I got something about ‘please provide your measurements in case the Association needs to send you something’, but... diets? What do you –“
He doesn’t hear what she says past that, because the handset’s casing shatters into crunchy bits of plastic and the circuitry is thrown against the wall with a solid slam, at the same time as his other hand comes down hard onto the sideboard. There’s a faint noise of exasperation in his wife’s voice from the next room, but he’s slightly more occupied with noticing that he’s snapped his pencil into three apparently identically-sized pieces.
It gets better and better.
He sits down again, heavily, and yanks back the red sleeve falling over his writing hand. This is just... classic. Being given, what... a joke test? He narrows grey eyes at the form. So this should be a sizing question, for Association-issued clothing... But what fault of his is it for their stupid question?
Goddamn Association. They think they can get away with everything. This is why he doesn’t bow and scrape, all this crap that they pull. He lets out an angry sigh at the thought, running a hand over his short dark hair irritably. Next thing he knows it’ll be falling out with this stress, never mind the fact that his hairline naturally looks like it’s receding. Better and goddamn better.
He looks for the pencil before he remembers having snapped it, and gets up yet again with a roll of his eyes to get another one out of the sideboard’s drawer. He doesn’t want any of the shit the Association might send anyway – like what, come to think of it? Hoenn Gym Leader team jackets? He’ll stick to his normal clothes, as uninspiring as the zip-up and dark jeans may be. They’re comfortable, and that’s what counts. And anyway, it tends to be difficult to find things that fit him – he’s broad, solid, but not huge, so it tends to be trying to find a balance between the too-small normal clothes and the too-big stuff for fat people.
He’s properly annoyed as he finds a new pencil to write with, a frown etched onto his stern features as he takes several tries to shut the drawer. It’s awkward as it is – standing over a little six feet, as he does, means that it sits a little under his comfortable reach – but being quite as... frustrated by this stupid questionnaire thing as he is, his forceful shoves are making the wood stick. After thumping it shut, finally, he has to take a minute to actually compose himself, gripping the edge of the dresser. His knuckles show white through the scuffed skin across them, red in turn against the rest of the tanned hand. A few calming breaths later he returns to the sofa, about to sit down before thinking better of it and toeing off the brown leather boots he hadn’t bothered to take off when he got home. Now he can sit properly, folding a leg under himself and leaning forward over the form on the table. Now. Let’s see about this damn thing.
'I have no clue who ‘you’ are. And I don’t care. This question is irrelevant.'
My emotional disposition?
Oh for –
How the hell is he supposed to know his own ‘disposition’? He doesn’t doubt that this one has a root in the real evaluation as well, there’s always something like that. Not that it has a real point – everybody lies, even if they don’t realise it or not.
‘Focused on the task at hand.’ He’s not going to write any more because it would be redundant given the psych work-up he knows they have on him. It had been a requirement for the Johto Leader test, and he knows exactly what it says and that it all still holds true a decade later. [Severe, driven, a perfectionist. Easy to anger.] That he could have told them himself, of course. It proves itself week in, week out at the Petalburg Gym, where the young female trainers are regularly driven to tears by what Norman himself sees as constructive criticism. It’s normally more of a verbal attack, dissecting every weakness that he sees and laying out in no uncertain terms why a good trainer wouldn’t be making those mistakes. They come back because he knows when to stop, letting the subject lie when his trainers vanish for a while to come to terms with that insecurity and being there to pick up once they feel that they can. He has that much mercy, even if he never apologises for speaking the truth.
The think that irks him is that the extension of ‘angry’ into ‘violent’. Yes, he’s prone to breaking things. He does it with enough regularity that there’s an allowance in the Gym budget for it. But he doesn’t seek out fights or enjoy beating the ever-loving crap out of anyone, no matter how much they piss him off – he will always do his best to shut every last bit of anger away in the event that he does strike someone. Every time he lays a hand on his son it is discipline, never his own personal feelings. He won’t let it turn into something as base as abuse.
And that profile had continued along the lines of [Cares very little about what other people think of him, little regard for rules.] That he doesn’t agree with, and not even just because his first instinct is to disagree with everything that the Association might want to say about him. He has plenty of regard for how other people see him and for rules. What he can’t stand is the pointless, useless bureaucracy that comes from having his every action regulated and his every decision scrutinised by a bunch of desk jockeys who wouldn’t know good combat sense if it bit them in the ass. He’s all for authority, but to have to take orders from morons is just an indignity. He follows the rules because he owes it to the trainers that come to the Petalburg Gym to give them a battle with honour, not out of any obligation to the governing body. But he’s got his own ways of doing things, and people can keep their opinions on that to themselves. He doesn’t need anyone to agree with him any more than he cares about people criticising his methods.
And what had that last one been? [Alpha-male attitude] or something along those lines. It sort of amuses him, actually, that concept. Not that it isn’t kind of true. He’s fiercely protective of everything that’s his; family, gym, Pokemon. And if that means having to hurt what he loves – and he does, he really honestly does even if he’d never say so – so that someone else won’t have the chance, then he’ll do it in a heartbeat.
But they know all that. And if they expect him to write any of it they’ll be waiting a long time.
Things that are Groovy:
... ‘Groovy’. The word made him roll his eyes. It was like they’d studied what he’d find annoying and just thrown it all in without any regard for common sense.
Just what are his favourite things anyway? Difficult to say. Is he supposed to mention his specialist type? Somehow writing ‘Normal types just cause’ doesn’t seem like it would work. Going into depth on the versatility and simplicity of his chosen type would make him as bad as... well, Juan or something. Waste of time on this piece of crap anyway.
... There’s food, he guesses. Proper cooking, not anything that has an accent or more than three syllables in the name. Or anything with ‘mousse’ in the name either. His wife’s is particularly good, although he can’t put his finger on why. It’s gotten to the extent where he will willingly walk all the way back to Littleroot for dinner and then head right back afterwards for a late training session.
Then again it’s not just the food. He’s not home very much, and any time that he can actually spend with Caroline is worth the time spent hiking there and back. He only wishes that it wasn’t just her at home.
Frowning, he puts a diagonal line through that box on the form and moves onto the next one.
Things that aren't so Groovy:
This one, he could be here forever. What does he hate most in the – wait.
Okay, what does he hate most in the world that isn’t the organisation of jackasses that he works for?
People pretending that they’re something they’re not, and vice-versa? That might be it, actually. It comes as part and parcel of his hatred of pretension. He wouldn’t mind coordinators so much if they just admitted that they were either mostly too weak, too lazy or too scared for competitive training. And the ones who don’t fall under that bracket are lying to themselves to even call themselves a coordinator in the first place.
He hates things being overly fancy - clothes, food, strategies, anything. He hates being cold. He hates the period of his life where he was doing nothing but glorified weather study, and he especially hates the creature that he had to do it to follow. Technically that’s misguided, but to hate Rayquaza itself means that he has more of a focus for his ire. Sure, he respects it, but that doesn’t stop it being an incredible massive pain in the ass.
After a moment of thought, he crosses out that box on the form as well.
But..I'm afraid!
With a sigh, he turns the pencil in his fingers. Well, he isn’t going to answer this one properly either, he knows that now.
The mundane one is losing his job, which is rather unwise to put on a work-related form. Seven damn years to earn the damn thing, despite what he knows was one of the highest aptitude scores in the last twenty years for the Johto region, is a huge thing to waste, especially when he has a home to keep.
The one that he genuinely finds frightening is the thought of what could happen to his son out there. The kid seems to have this amazing ability to get into trouble wherever he is, and even if Norman finds every little interaction with the kid exasperating these days – contests, yes, he knows, and accepts only very very reluctantly – he doesn’t want him to get hurt. If someone does so much as touch him then Norman is happy to go right out and end the bastard.
But while he’s missing out the important things, here goes.
‘Clowns,’ he writes, resisting the urge to roll his eyes as he does so, ‘and Metapods.’
...The sad thing is, those are both true.
I like to...
‘No real hobbies. I enjoy training at the gym, both myself and my underlings.’ He wouldn’t really call it /enjoying/, come to think of it, but he can’t ever really seem to express the concept in words. He feels accomplishment and pride for doing it, for guiding others and guiding his pokemon.
‘Pokemon battles, Gym-sanctioned or not. Above that, the Pokemon themselves.’ He knows that people say he ‘lives for Pokemon’ and that’s not far off. It’s... not something that he ever tries to explain either. He’s only tried once, that one argument he’d had with Caroline shortly after their son had vanished, when he’d gotten the inevitable accusation that his job was worth more than his child to him. This is him, his passion, he cannot imagine not being so involved in Pokemon, and he has attempted to reconcile that with being a father for this long. It makes him pushy and maybe a bit selfish, he knows, but, well. Not being a Gym Leader any more would be like not having a leg any more. Work for the Association has made the idea of his son... far more distant than he is comfortable with. Enough to make him feel guilty about it, but there is little he and do about it.
He thinks a bit more. Can he really put anything else down?
... Well, hey. If they want to think then let them. To be fair he probably is.
My reason?
My reason is to kick your ass, he grouses internally. Is this thing nearly finished yet?
It all ties in to what he was just thinking, doesn’t it? He does it because it’s what he is. Not in the same sense as the sick morons who organise Snubbull fights because they get off on the thrill of watching Pokemon go at it, but it’s... well it’s nature, isn’t it? Being as strong as you can, putting all that work into raising a team – or, if you’re Norman, several teams in order to offer trainers an actual challenge when they come to you – to him that should be the only reason to be a trainer. To prove yourself. Because you love Pokemon.
‘I’m a trainer because it’s all I’ve ever wanted to be. No more and no less.’
He isn’t even sure if that makes sense, but it sounds sort of okay.
Mandatory Angst:
Angst? Ugh. Whatever. They know all of his official data, don’t they?
‘Kanto-Johto licensed trainer at 15 years.’ Not counting, of course that he’d been made responsible for two Pokemon the moment he turned ten - His mother’s young Chansey and a newly-bred Tauros. Now they’re two of his strongest team members, two of the staples of ‘serious, life or death’ battles.
He’s aware these days of just how much he is like his own father. The same intense passion for Pokemon, the general approach to people. The same parenting style, even, but maybe that can’t be helped. He does what he knows, right? He turned out just fine.
‘Won eight Johto badges over one year.’ He’d never bothered with the League Championships, hadn’t seen the point – rather spend time that he would have used sitting around Indigo Plateau and scheming about potential opponents to actually do something worthwhile. So he’d done more training around the region, before deciding that he’d take a look around Hoenn.
‘Obtained a Hoenn trainer license at 17, challenged three gyms.’ And by the time he worked his way through to Petalburg, having no clue he’d see a lot more of it in the future, well...
He’s long had the suspicion that things are somehow magnetically drawn to him while they fall from the sky. It has to be the case. The whole Metapod thing is because of that half-dead one he’d had dropped on him from above by a Pidgeotto outside Goldenrod when he’d only just turned seven. Altogether a lot more favourable was the thoroughly asleep Slakoth that had fallen on his head when he was heading through the Petalburg Woods. He’d taken such a liking to the lazy little things that he caught two, a male and a female, which have sired all of the ones he owns now.
Come to think of it meeting Caroline had been because of things falling on him as well, her scarf blowing out of a first-floor window when he’d been on his way back to Slateport for the ferry. Rather than prompting a lifelong irrational fear or new favourite species like the others, that particular instance had prompted his trip to run over time for about two months and for an entire year afterwards he didn’t like going too far from a Pokemon Center in case he missed a letter from her.
‘Upon return, won eight badges in the Kanto region.’ In the time it took her to finally decide to move over, he made a full round trip of the Kanto region as well, again skipping the League. After that he wasn’t that reluctant to restrict his movements to the Goldenrod area, near the apartment they got together.
That had proven too small following the... somewhat surprising ‘I’m pregnant’ announcement – surprising enough that he’d almost become something falling out of the sky himself, narrowly avoiding tripping through the window after the rather nonchalant way she told him – and steady work had to ensue, for the sake of an actual house. Hence underling work at the Goldenrod gym, and a violent twitch that flared up every time someone called him Norm for about two years.
‘Five years worked in Goldenrod Gym before taking the Johto Leader test.’ And he still acutely remembers that disaster – Rayquaza’s escape and his sentence to recapture it paling in comparison to the sick worry over ‘that was a Salamence and it got my kid’. That... had been hard. Having to leave. For the first time in more than ten years he’d have to go somewhere where he wouldn’t see his wife daily, and have to leave behind his son.
The rest they know because he was reporting to them every two days without fail – the ad hoc tracking, having to learn what the hell the squiggly lines on barometric charts were after not having given a crap when they’d been glossed over years back in school, and then having to map the whole Sky Pillar by himself when he couldn’t get inside the top half of the thing.
And then finally – finally! – being granted that Gym Leader status, the position back in Petalburg, it had been without his family for the longest time.
And, just his luck, it had felt like barely any time at all before that phonecall and the words ‘He’s run away’.
He looks down at the form, frowning. Screw this, he’s done.
Oh and by the way...
He lets his pencil down and lets out a breath through his nose. And by the way go screw yourself, Association, preferably with something that’s going to give you internal bleeding. He folds the form sharply and literally stuffs it into the supplied envelope, throwing it onto the table in mild disgust. He swears, if they send him one like that next year he’s going to feed it to one of those desk rats and see how they like it then.
Speaking of feeding. "Dinner ready yet?"
I'm just a proxy for...
It's your favourite Etoile! (and the only one I hope :B)
I swear I’ll start actually RPing after this. I’ve actually gotten a lot more comfortable with the idea of posting over the (far too long) process of apping with Norman, so, um... yay?*dance*
Here's some of their writing!
He feels so incredibly tense, body wound so tight it’s a wonder that his arms don’t just twang back down to his sides as he stretches. The last few days have been... well, soul-destroying is perhaps a little harsh but that’s the way he feels about it.
A Rayquaza. Seriously. They had a Rayquaza in a tube. Personally he thinks they were inviting trouble just for that, but it’s not for him to say. Apparently, it’s for him to chase the damn thing across Hoenn until he finds out where it lives instead.
He resents that, being forced away from his family, but he would take the blame again. He doesn’t know what would happen if he didn’t, but he’s pretty damn sure nothing good would come of it, them knowing just what happened.
He lets himself into the room silently, able to navigate through the room strangely easily. Just last week it was covered in ankle-deep mess, and now the floor is uncluttered, clear in the faint glow of the blue light in the corner. He can’t help but wonder if the whole encounter has... done damage. The lasting sort.
It’s hard not to worry about that as he very carefully sits on the edge of the bed, turned at the waist to watch his sleeping son curl in a little tighter on himself. His face is peaceful, calm, but it’s the thick white gauze pad that draws his attention. He’s seen the wounds under there – two deep, nasty gouges that he’s told are going to scar badly – and can’t help but think if there isn’t something he could have done. Anything. Even just bringing the kids along to the test, something. He wouldn’t have cared about a minor distraction if he knew that this was going to happen.
Slowly, very lightly, he touches his fingertips gently against the boy’s cheek. Having to leave... it’s hard to swallow. It’ll ruin this relationship of theirs, he’s sure – there’s a reason that the Association are sending him, and it’s so they won’t have to waste years of their own time, years that he won’t have to spend with his family. He is smiling, though, watching Ruby sleep. If he can turn this, just these ten minutes or so, into a good, clear memory it won’t be so bad. It won’t feel like being too alone, will it?
In the end his ten minutes turn into nearly three quarters of an hour, hand gentle against one of the small shoulder, content just to watch him breathe. After all, this is probably the last he will see of his son for a long time.
Finally he brings himself to stand up, carefully, and cross to the nightlamp and turn it off. He leaves the room as quietly as he came in, shutting the door behind himself. But it’s with utmost reluctance that Norman moves from that spot in the hall to go to bed himself.
He really is sorry.
