Chapter Text
It's early in the day when he sees her again. He's slow to recognition, with the way she's dressed in buttons and heels, hair done up so pristine she looks like a billboard out in Levincia. Larry turns over their last encounter, a year ago at least — two at most. Having crossed paths in this same hallway, pleasantries and a brief conversation he doesn't quite recall.
Juliana looks different now. Something far less unfettered about her disposition; regrettable, he thinks, given her previously contagious vitality. Most notably, the raw lack of fear amid her battles; rather, the impunity to its effects.
Now she's loitering in the hallway of the League, her hands fidgeting at her front. A visual bundle of distress and nerves, evident in every aspect of her person. Her leg shakes, heel clicking incessantly along the tiles beside the only thing he recognizes — black leather backpack, gold accents. Vivid to him, oddly enough, as he recalls his gym badge being tucked away into the frontmost pouch.
Rika steps out from Geeta's office, a gloved hand pulling from her pocket to pinch at the bridge of her nose. She exhales, apologizes, then sets a grip to Juliana's shoulder with a semblance of reassurance. And the younger woman nods, a clear facade of confidence shifting her posture as they exchange brief words, unintelligible from his distance. Rika leaves for the elevator, and Juliana stares off into nothing.
The most recent league announcement was detailed heavily in their last conference, pertaining to changes in administrative structure due to La Primera's retirement as champion. There'd been clarification that she would be focusing on her career as Director of the league; similarly, the academy. Resultantly, a replacement would be considered, restricted to the candidates of Geeta's specific endorsement, strictly qualifying at champion level. Which inanely narrows the pool of opportunity to an underwhelming amount of two.
An ideal way to decimate a friendship, in his opinion.
He speculates that Juliana is here for that reason. And wonders, given her clear dejection, if she'd been rebuffed in favor of Nemona. The favoritism, he easily admits, has always been apparent.
Larry approaches gradually, hands in his pockets with a steady gait. She hears him first, cadenced steps resonating off the tile and glass. Then catches him in her peripheral, looking up from her state of poignancy as she recognizes him. She smiles, as if a bit relieved, which tugs at something in his jaded heart akin to fondness, alike to empathy. Then he begins to wonder if the walls close in on her like they did when he was younger. Before routine had him fatigued to the odd sort of desolation this place instills, ruinous to anything with juvenile enthusiasm.
Not her, though. She won't wilt in this place like he has. Not so soon.
"Hi, Larry," she says, hands still threaded at her front, voice hushed to keep the echoes off the walls. Her leg has stopped shaking. He's close enough now to notice the delicate jewelry along her ears and neck. The hints of makeup to augment the color of her eyes. Prim and proper.
He's surprised she recalls his name.
"Juliana," he greets simply, direct with a nod. Risks a fleeting glance at Geeta's office door, frosted glass maintaining obscurity. "Are you interviewing? To fill La Primera's shoes?"
She pauses, mouth parted, response delayed. But recovers quickly, thoughts catching up. "No, actually. I was already accepted."
Odd, then. The whole circumstance. Her blatant misery, suffocating within the hall. Separate from the thought that he's always the last to know anything around this damn place. Not a single text, no email. Still, she exposes a contradiction, perhaps a dichotomy in her success. Then he encounters the more obvious realization — that she has no desire to be Champion.
"Why so nervous, then?" He glances back, catches her worrying into her lip, toe of her heel twisting so firm against the tile she might wear it down to the grout.
"Just…excited, maybe." A potential lie, loose and indefinite. Then redirection, which he plays along with for her sake. "I haven't seen you in a while, you know?"
She puts up a convincing facade, hides it all when she deems it necessary, when she remembers to. But he sees her, then. The vulnerability, the terror in indecision and lack of direction. It weighs like grief or loss, and he supposes there's legitimacy to the analogy — the loss of future, signing your life away via contractual obligation. She knows he sees her, can read it by the persistence of his attention, by the fact that he's maintained the conversation at all. Juliana shifts, one foot to the other, the aching nervousness resurfacing in her gut. The realization of her own transparency is something unnerving, downright scary.
"We've all been busy," he claims, soothing the tension. It's true, partially.
She smiles and it's polite, obligatory at best. She wants him to know it, focus shifting from the floor and back. "I'm sure."
He won't allow silence, feels the precarious nature of reticence like he were standing at a precipice. He speaks to fill the void between them despite how unnecessary it is. "Will you be—"
Then she steps close to interrupt him, beyond the line of what is proper distance. The solid click of her heels forces him abruptly mute, resonating down the hall.
Larry tenses, posture promptly rigid, idling in response. She looks up, attention cautious from his tie to his eye-line, her hands still set carefully at her front. Then he realizes he'd been holding his breath, his teeth clenched, a muscle taught in his jaw. Felt like a damn heart attack, right from his gut to his throat. Partly from the stupor, partly from the smell of florals — some wildflower bullshit Tulip upcharges by six hundred percent. And he'd be lying if he said Juliana wasn't lovely, all smothered voracity, sharp eyes like polished cherry that dig emphatically into his stoicism.
He hates this vulnerability, suddenly. It exists beyond his realm of prediction or control. It seethes from her with demand for apperception and he can't step back, refuses to.
She swallows, her lips press to a line and focus falls past his collar as she rethinks her question. She's not looking at him, now — not the way he's looking at her. Laced with some odd sort of disbelief, hardly perceptible given his natural indifference. Then she mumbles, barely audible in the diminutive space between them. "Is this place as miserable as I think it is?"
He sighs, adjusts his tie, loosening the knot to combat the abrupt sense of suffocation. Then glances to Geeta's closed doors and back, careful to provide her his full attention. "Do you want the truth?"
She meets his focus, looks into him for an answer. Juliana is terrifying, he realizes. Perhaps as much as she is terrified. He just doesn't know why.
"You wouldn't lie to me," she says, exceedingly serious. Almost like a goddamn dare.
He clears his throat, adjusts his tie. "Not like this, no."
She's tense, most evident by the sudden rigidity of her shoulders. Withholding whatever emotion had overtaken her then. Concealing it behind that very thin veneer of calm sustainability, already fractured at the edges.
Then her phone pings. He scrutinizes the slight shake of her grip as she bends for her pack, pulling the device from a pocket. Her thumb swipes to open the notification, a second ping implying delivery of another. Her eyes scan it twice before finding him again, that prim and proper disposition overtaking her like the flip of a switch.
"La Primera's ready for me," she says, shouldering her backpack. Then steps away, turning towards the doorway with clear reservation. Her trembling hand idles on the metal handle before she smiles back at him, something a bit more real to her, then. "I'll see you, Larry."
She opens the door, crosses the boundary, and he feels her afflictions filter from the hall. The fog is lifted, having followed her alike to a prophetic curse.
He feels winded, like he'd nearly tripped.
"See you, Juliana." He mutters it to no one in particular.
Geeta only allows smoking on the rearmost balcony. It's a shit rule (it's not). If he's chosen to gradually kill himself (he hasn't), it should be allowed wherever he pleases (it shouldn't). Yet it's somehow more lenient than his own gym, where it's prohibited entirely. Thus, during the time he's to be present in the League, he smokes on the rearmost balcony.
The habit has persisted for the last ten years, unchanged during the off-seasons when he's not bound to Medali. Where he isolates himself on said balcony with an astoundingly mediocre view, partially inhibited by cliffs and rockface, intending to decompress on his breaks. Then two weeks after encountering Juliana in the hall, he finds her loitering within his sacred place. Turned away, with her arms folded along the railing, legs crossed at the ankle as she sips at a coffee.
He stagnates at the doorway. Debates walking away, abandoning his routine for the day. He could smoke a cigarette in a bathroom stall like he's seventeen again, wave at the billows with a newspaper and pretend it's effective. But the chaos of the ordeal as a whole is unappealing, and Arceus forbid Geeta find out by the smell of the hall.
Then Juliana turns, eyes glossy like she'd lost something, dominant grip wrapped about that cardboard coffee and the other crumbling the remains of a sandwich wrapper. She pauses like a deerling in headlights, sees him through the glass of the door and windows. Where he idles with one hand in his pocket, the other hesitating on the handle as if caught mid-movement.
He commits — pulls open the door. It sets her in motion, an invitation to start closing that formidable distance. She begins to make her way back inside, so he holds it wide until she's finally passing through. Until he catches that perfume again, vague and brief like apparition.
"Hi, Larry," she greets, her hands wound tight around that coffee.
He nods, his pulse unsteady. No idea why. "Hello, Juliana."
She thanks him briefly for holding the door. Then walks through, and she's gone. Until the next day, where the exchange is precisely the same. Then again the next, and the preceding days after when he's not in Medali. It's how Larry learns she's prompt. That she functions on routine, just as he does. Same time, same coffee, same sandwich. Mundane and consistent.
So to encounter her in the elevator, running fifteen minutes behind and without coffee, was an uncomfortable oddity. She smiles at him when he holds the door, laced with the same underlying intensity she manages in every meaningless interaction. Then she idles to his left, index swiping persistently at her phone as the doors automatically ease shut. His knuckle presses at the button for their intended floor, then he re-pockets that same hand as they wait for the ascent.
"You're running late," he notes.
"New schedule," she clarifies. Then tucks away her phone, dress slacks pressed right down to the hem, heels glossy and patent leather. Her blouse has frills like a frosmoth, absurdly elegant. "You're not in Medali this week?"
"No." He doesn't turn to speak, not the way she does, invitingly with social practice. Instead he finds intrigue in the reflection off the doors, distorted in plain stainless steel. "Quarterly meetings every day until Thursday."
Then Juliana remembers he's in the Elite. And maybe she thinks herself a fool, forgetting he's required at every conference. A nervousness strikes her, knowing she's presenting tomorrow — some repetitive bullshit on the restructure of administrative procedures. Slides Geeta insisted she'd do fine to outline for the sake of experience.
"Right. I'd nearly forgotten. Not many changes, at least from what I understand," she says.
Larry scoffs under his breath, nearly imperceptible. Then mumbles, still refusing to look her way. "Probably a waste of time, then."
He can see something brief and akin to a smile in his peripheral. Where the corner of her mouth twitches upwards, an underlying snarkiness apparent in its irregularity. She huffs a laugh, bitter and dry. "It's all a waste of time."
"Give it a year," he reassures, the hand in his pocket pulling out a half-empty pack of smokes. They're one level away from their shared destination, and there's a strangeness in knowing they won't be walking separate ways in the hall. "It'll start to feel productive at some point."
She nods with that taught look of obligatory politeness, the facade she thinks has good intentions. "I look forward to it."
Then he turns to her fully as the elevator begins to level out from the ascent. Where he sees through her again, palpable in the stilled, momentary reticence. They are confined within the shared space, his awareness of something wild constricted in those heels, the hems and frills and slim jewelry. There's a pity welling in his chest, an awareness of her contempt and captivity. A curiosity as well —why she walks as if her wings are clipped— which makes him momentarily bold.
"Do you?" He asks, inherently monotonous, but no less skeptical. A direct confrontation, aimed at her apparent dishonesty.
She looks at him, meets his eye-line with an almost incredulous offense. He doesn't care, he realizes, until her expression eases into a slow, formidable grin. Something real, sparked up from the deepest recesses of her amusement. Then she takes a single step close, the distance eaten away by those extra couple inches on her heels, where she idles as she did before within such close proximity. He doesn't move, pulse abruptly like rapid fire, putting strain on his chest like desperate compressions.
But she's a bit too young, he thinks, to be looking up at him like she does. Twenty-something with clear voracity, a goal in mind that he can't quite decipher. He can only see so far through her charade, the layers of it less pellucide past the initial veneer. She's a predator in skillful, superlative disguise. With ambiguous intent, camouflaged by her diminutive disposition. Her hands are secured along the strap of her bag, with a fluttering upward focus that flatters her smile. Small, delicate in her way of dress, careful with words as if she were stumbling through her position, her achievements. As if he wouldn't know better, having lost to her in battle.
The elevator dings, announcing their arrival.
Larry opens his cigarettes by the shift of his thumb, easing one up by the filter to the top's edge. But his focus won't deviate from her attention, even as he brings the pack habitually to his mouth, where he pulls the one free with his teeth in preparation. Then settles the rest back into the pocket of his slacks, their exchange unbroken.
"Those'll kill you, you know?" She leans up further, gaze fixated on his readied smoke. Close enough that he could count her lashes, map out the freckles across her reddening complexion. His focus gradually traces her cupid's bow, lips parted, barely pursed. He comprehends the danger, then. Where crude realization, deleterious self-awareness, abruptly takes his heart in a committed grip and tugs until he's reeling. Winded again, and contemptible, as if she'd not pulled the air from his lungs with that playful insistence.
"I'm aware," he mutters past the unlit cig, jaw taught, teeth biting harsh into the filter. He persists unmoved, unamused. As mundane as he'd been when she'd first followed him in.
Juliana grins, then — all teeth and threats like a lycanroc. An unspoken implication somewhere on the tip of her tongue. "Are you?"
The doors had slid open what felt like an hour ago. They begin to close, jolting back once his arm extends out to trigger the sensor. He looks away first, dismantling the tension as he side-eyes the empty hall. Then she takes a very smug step back, calmly turning to cross the threshold as he holds the door. She leaves the elevator, then he follows, escaping the ineffable suffocation constricting his chest. Where he exhales through his teeth, relief apparent, listening as her heels click along the tiles towards the balcony.
Larry idles to clear his throat, smooth out his lapels, then adjust his tie. Unclenches his jaw, finally, to relinquish the unintended bite upon his cigarette as he rifles about his pocket for a lighter.
His heart's still racing, rapid and unsteady as if worn from lack of use. Heavy palpitations, alike to rhythmic cadence he'd forgotten twenty years prior. The shape of her lips is something he shouldn't have memorized. The pattern of freckles along the bridge of her nose should not be committed to remembrance. His pulse beats even faster when he considers her own fluster, evident initially along her clavicle, running beneath her necklace up the skin of her throat. She'd been shaken, just barely unsteady in those glossy heels.
Juliana is terrifying, he knows — as much as she is terrified. He's finally beginning to understand why.
End Chapter One.