Pokémon: Guardian Angel (G)
Guardian Angel
Dawn and her best friend Barry’s shared sense of adventure had gotten each of them into more than their fair share of trouble, and when they got together the feeling only got exponentially stronger. Today, for instance, the two grade-schoolers were playing by the edge of Lake Verity. They had clambered down the grassy ridge overlooking the shoreline and were walking through the sand with their socks tucked inside of the shoes they had taken off and were now carrying.
“Boy, I can’t wait until I can be a pokémon trainer like my dad!” When Dawn muttered something that sounded like “Here we go again,” Barry rounded on Dawn and raised his free hand into a fist brandished at his friend. “What was that?” he demanded to know.
Instead of answering the blonde boy, Dawn stuck her tongue out at him and then screamed in happy terror as Barry dropped his shoes so that he could tackle her to the ground. “Stop it, stop it!” laughed Dawn as she beat her little hands against the chest of Barry’s striped shirt. “Get off of me, you jerk!”
“Not until you say ‘uncle,’ Dawn!”
“Don’t call me Uncle Dawn!” she laughed again, and then the dark-haired girl abruptly stopped trying to hit and push Barry off of her and started crying instead. “Barry! Stop! You’re getting my clothes all dirty!”
Barry’s body stopped jerkily like he had to fight his own momentum to do so. “Oh, jeez, Dawn, I’m sorry,” he said. “Are you okay? Are you hurt? Are you-?” Whatever else Barry was going to ask his friend was cut off by the ugly “oof” of air being forced out of his lungs as Dawn took advantage of his lowered guard to flip Barry onto his back. Now he was looking up at Dawn, whose wicked smile was showing her missing tooth. “Hey, no fair!” Barry shouted. He tried breaking free of Dawn’s pin, but that got him nothing except more laughter from Dawn. “You tricked me!”
Dawn’s smile only grew wider and she said sweetly, “You say that like it was hard.” Then she laughed some more at him.
“Aw, come on, Dawn, let me up! My mom actually will be mad at me if I get my clothes dirty!”
“You shouldn’t have started it then,” countered Dawn, but she hopped off of Barry and watched him stumble back to his feet. Both of them were smiling at each other now, and Barry exclaimed, “Boy! Imagine how much fun we’re going to have fighting when we’ve got pokémon, too!”
Daw’s smile turned into a smirk as she said, “You better hope you’re better at pokémon battling than you are at wrestling.”
“Aw, I was just taking it easy on you because you’re a girl!” That was precisely the wrong thing to say, because Dawn slugged Barry’s arm hard enough to make him yelp. “Ouch! I was only kidding! You’re not a girl!”
That got Barry an even harder punch and Dawn sniffed, “Why do I even put up with you?”
Barry grinned through his pain. “Because I put with you, too.”
Dawn stuck her tongue out at Barry again and giggled nervously when he pretended to lunge at her in response. “So, what do you want to do?”
“How about a swim?” suggested Barry, and he had already started taking off his polo shirt before he had finished speaking. “It’ll be fun!”
“I don’t have my swimsuit,” Dawn said tartly, and, when Barry ran into the shallows of the lake instead of replying to her, she cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted, “Hey! Did you hear me?”
Barry turned around with a wild grin and mocked Dawn by mimicking her and shouting through his own hands, “Yeah, I heard you! Too bad! You can just watch me!”
Dawn watched her friend hoot and splash in the water for a few moments before annoyance won out over her disbelief. “Jerk,” she grumbled and went off to find a stick with which to draw in the hand.
Even though she tried her best to ignore him, Barry didn’t make it easy for Dawn. He splashed and shouted at her, and even sang rude songs to her until Dawn found herself drawing sketches of different horrible things happening to a cartoon of Barry’s head in the damp surface of the sand. “Stupid Barry,” she grumbled to her stick. Then, she heard that Barry was trying something new to get her attention.
“Dawn! Help!” the boy yelled when he wasn’t sputtering and sinking beneath the lake’s surface.
“Stop it, Barry! I’m not falling for it!” Dawn snapped, but when she looked up she saw that Barry was much farther from the shore than he had been when she had last checked on him. Worse, his head was disappearing into the water more and more frequently and every time that he came up he was gasping for air. Under the blonde hair plastered to his head, Barry’s eyes looked wide and fearful even from where Dawn was squatting on the beach.
“Dawn!” screamed Barry again, and Dawn moved without thinking.
She forgot all about getting her clothes wet or dirty as Barry’s cry for help crowded out everything else in her mind. She ran into the water and kept swimming as the lake soaked the denim of her overalls and tried to hold her back with its weight. “Barry, hold on!” she shouted and then Dawn took a huge breath of air and dived into the lake.
Growing up in Twinleaf Town so close to Lake Verity, it was only natural that Dawn had taken some swimming lessons and, in fact, she considered herself to be a pretty strong swimmer. She beat Barry in their frequent races more often than not. But all of that past experience hadn’t adequately prepared her for today. Instead of pacing herself with deliberate, precise strokes, Dawn was flailing through the cold water in her desperation to reach her friend, and instead of wearing a swimsuit Dawn was wearing what now felt like a weighted canvas wrapped around her body. Her soaked overalls made it so that Dawn had to expend just as much energy to keep from sinking as she did to propel herself towards Barry, and so she was tiring twice as quickly. When she finally, by some miracle, did reach her distressed friend in the middle of the lake, Dawn was in no position to help him. It took all of her remaining energy just keeping herself afloat.
Even so, that didn’t stop her from trying to help him. “Come on, Barry,” panted Dawn, but the added exertion from speaking made her refrain from doing so again. Instead, she grabbed a hold of the thrashing boy’s arm and tried to pull him up when he started to sink again. Barry looked around wildly without seeming to see Dawn, but he was aware of her presence such that he clutched the heavy straps of her overalls.
The two friends kicked their feet hard to try and stay above the deceptively calm surface of the lake. There was a small island in the center of Lake Verity and Dawn was frightened to find that she and Barry were closer to it than to the shore. How had they drifted out this far, she wondered before deciding that their best bet was to try and make it to the rocky outcropping before it was too late.
But it was hard to drag her and Barry’s tired bodies through the water, and with every half-hearted paddle that the two friends managed towards dry land, they both felt themselves sinking deeper into the lake. There was no way that they would make it, Dawn realized, and through her rising panic she felt Barry’s grip on her wet clothes slacken and his legs stop kicking. He let go of her and slid into the water, unconscious.
“Barry!” Dawn screamed, inviting a mouthful of lake water. Then, she plunged below the surface after her friend. But the trail of bubbles streaming from the blonde boy’s nose were hard to see underwater, especially as Barry drifted deeper into the dark heart of Lake Verity. Still, Dawn swam after his sinking body and even managed to grab his hand. Even with this new surge of desperate strength, however, Dawn could only slightly slow Barry’s descent, and she was sinking, too. She looked up at the mottled sunlight playing on the lake’s surface overhead and was terrified at how far away it seemed.
It was a hopeless situation, but then, incredibly, Dawn caught herself feeling giddy. She knew that she had to be cracking up. How else could she explain this sudden desire to laugh, not bitterly or deliriously, but honestly and happily? Why else would she be thinking that she was seeing a pink glow, faint at first but growing stronger until felt like it was lighting up the whole lake.
Was this was dying was like? The question was a horribly morbid thing for a young girl to catch herself thinking, but it didn’t seem that way with Dawn feeling so inexplicably chipper. When Dawn saw a strange gray and pink figure, not swimming but seeming to fly through the water, as a part of her deepening delusions, Dawn almost started laughing and she even let go of Barry with one of her hands so that she could wave to the phantom.
Weakening her hold on Barry should have made him sink even faster, but, incredibly, the two children were steadily being lifted up through the cold water as if being conveyed on the palm of a giant hand. A fresh wave of giddiness washed over Dawn and she had to grin at the pink and gray creature which was circling around her and Barry. She wanted to keep her eyes open to see just who or what was helping her, but Dawn was exhausted and when an alien presence spoke directly into her mind and told her, in impressions rather than words, to sleep, Dawn did so.
What made Dawn open her eyes again was Barry coughing up water next to her. The two children were lying in the surf and the gentle lapping waves of the lake slapped against Dawn’s legs and feet as she got up and hurried over to Barry to roll the blonde boy onto his side. In her hurry, Dawn’s memories of what she had seen and felt in the depths of Lake Verity ebbed away as quickly as if she were waking from a dream. By the time that Barry had expelled the last of the lake water from his lungs, Dawn had only the faintest recollection of what had happened.
But the guardian of the lake didn’t forget. It watched over Dawn for the rest of the day, and for years to come.
