Oh. A step in the right direction at last. Char still felt unbearably gross, the act of contact still sat a little unnaturally with him, and the smell of flowers, though fundamentally different from the overwelming perfume of Vinnie's earlier Overgrow, was still similar enough to make his stomach do a weird little squirm. He couldn't say with any degree of certainty just how much this would change anything, or if Bulba's smiles would still be scarce in the days ahead... but still, the fact that he'd somehow stumbled his way into offering Bulba a little comfort was enough to lift a heavy weight off his shoulders.
He... wasn't entirely sure how much was enough. Then again... that wasn't a decision for him to make, was it? So Char simply stayed put, keeping his brother in his arms until Bulba decided he'd had his fill of slighly-too-warm dragon embraces.
"God, leave it to us to take something friggin' simple and turn it all complicated, huh?" It was frustrating, just how often things seemed to never quite fall into alignment, how they just seemed to be stuck taking turns being miserable, how every faltering step forward had immediately been buried under three backward steps for four whole years. It was hard to keep swimming upstream this long; bonds like this weren't natural for a Charizard to begin with, and when his track record was so studded with failure, there was a nagging sense of futility to the whole thing.
It was so alarmingly impossible for him to even tell if what he was doing was a mistake or not. He'd never known a father, his short time with his own siblings wasn't much more than a handful of faint, scattered memories, and he tended to simply shuffle all his teammates into basic categories: Little Brother, Girlfriend, and Competition. It wasn't really a void he'd ever felt, but times like this, it came a little close -- maybe this would have been easier if he'd had someone to show him what "okay" was supposed to look like. He was ready for it, so ready -- the lying, the secrets, the clearly-drawn line in the sand keeping him safe and separate and alone had long since grown too exhausting to keep up. But the problem always seemed to be the same: intention alone was meaningless. At a loss, entirely unable to make sense of where he was going or if he was even moving at all, the old pattern of hurt just kept creeping back into everything time after time.
If it'd just been him getting stung, it wouldn't have mattered. That's what being a fire-type was about, after all: drawing on your own strength, and yours alone. If he had nobody to turn to, then that was because all the answers he needed were within him, and it was just a matter of stumbling through until he found them. When every single misstep seemed to make a once-jolly Pokemon lose a little more of his brightness, though, that was another story entirely. Another layer of complication on what was, at its core, still something remarkably simple.
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He... wasn't entirely sure how much was enough. Then again... that wasn't a decision for him to make, was it? So Char simply stayed put, keeping his brother in his arms until Bulba decided he'd had his fill of slighly-too-warm dragon embraces.
"God, leave it to us to take something friggin' simple and turn it all complicated, huh?" It was frustrating, just how often things seemed to never quite fall into alignment, how they just seemed to be stuck taking turns being miserable, how every faltering step forward had immediately been buried under three backward steps for four whole years. It was hard to keep swimming upstream this long; bonds like this weren't natural for a Charizard to begin with, and when his track record was so studded with failure, there was a nagging sense of futility to the whole thing.
It was so alarmingly impossible for him to even tell if what he was doing was a mistake or not. He'd never known a father, his short time with his own siblings wasn't much more than a handful of faint, scattered memories, and he tended to simply shuffle all his teammates into basic categories: Little Brother, Girlfriend, and Competition. It wasn't really a void he'd ever felt, but times like this, it came a little close -- maybe this would have been easier if he'd had someone to show him what "okay" was supposed to look like. He was ready for it, so ready -- the lying, the secrets, the clearly-drawn line in the sand keeping him safe and separate and alone had long since grown too exhausting to keep up. But the problem always seemed to be the same: intention alone was meaningless. At a loss, entirely unable to make sense of where he was going or if he was even moving at all, the old pattern of hurt just kept creeping back into everything time after time.
If it'd just been him getting stung, it wouldn't have mattered. That's what being a fire-type was about, after all: drawing on your own strength, and yours alone. If he had nobody to turn to, then that was because all the answers he needed were within him, and it was just a matter of stumbling through until he found them. When every single misstep seemed to make a once-jolly Pokemon lose a little more of his brightness, though, that was another story entirely. Another layer of complication on what was, at its core, still something remarkably simple.