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"A grass type, maybe, for me," said Kakyoin.
"Like Hoppip. Or Seedot," said Jotaro, deadpan. Star Platinum shuffled the pack again, blurred perceptive hands, and then redrew a card. Kakyoin had been creasing together a few wobbly tracks, vaguely hard-angled, through the spread of the bedsheet in the last two minutes.
"I'm not putting Staryu on my team," when Star Platinum set out another card, and Kakyoin escalated to drawing spikier stars.
"I was thinking Starmie actually," the idiot said. "You know, for generational effect."
"I'm not putting Staryu on my team," Jotaro said again. He had Star Platinum flick Hierophant Green in the wrist with the precision of a fruit knife blunted on pear skin. "What are you trying to build? A color theme?"
"Even though it’s an integral part of ocean life? Okay," which was barely Kakyoin acquiescing or relenting. He slanted his chin when he didn't want to politely go sparring in another dispute. "Green is a color that's been with me my entire life, so it's staying with me for whatever's left of it. What about psyduck?"
Spirits that grew with you: it was a slow, unworked thought. Halting. Hierophant Green spanned Kakyoin's whole life, growing longer, growing competent, growing like effort that had figured out how to be practical and mundane and a partner. Jotaro did not imagine Star Platinum to be by his side after this, post this, when Dio died–not if. Because Star Platinum grew into existence with its mouth bared, stinging from an ancient inheritance. A child's form of it did not exist. It had not grown--it showed up and took its shape: evolved, and finished, formed as if to get the job done and meet its match in a one on one.
It didn’t matter that Jotaro was seventeen. Death battles were part postmemory and part hand-me-down.
"Psyduck," repeated Jotaro. The pokemon that was a psychic duck: psyduck. Getting a headache at the thought of using its powers: psyduck. Giving up instead of catching up; laying down instead of waddling ahead--that psyduck. Star Platinum didn't flip over any cards, its hands the only seams of it that did not seem to be see-through, the rest of it dipping out of clean perception, ducking back under bleached coral. Wherever place with or within Jotaro it was housed, unknowable like the oceanic midnight zone.
"Yeah," and here Kakyoin pointed with Hierophant's finger at one of the facedown cards Star Platinum had laid out. "Lying around, skipping battles, doing nothing. Sounds like something we should do eventually."
Hitting a wall and not trying to climb it. Disappearing instead of showing up. A slow, aimless groove, an limitless kind of refusal. It sounded -- not bad.
“Psyduck is not green.” Jotaro said instead, when the minute that eclipsed eventually demanded it. That, and he felt Star Platinum carefully extrapolate another card, laying it down with the rest. There was a fire turtle in there somewhere, a sea slug, a pink coral, a mushroom in stubbed shoes. It wasn't hard to divine his spirit. "Thought you might want a snake or something. That spits jewels."
“If I stay alive long enough I will," because there were no green rock-type pokemon out yet in the first two generations. Out of the couple hundred pokemon released with the first and second generation lineups, there were few snakes, and fewer that were up to Hierophant's color theme. Kakyoin rolled over and Hierophant seeped back into the air, clearing out and showing a smile small and set. "Nintendo is kicking off. And this will be over in less than fifty days. More than enough time to release news of another lineup. Who knows, maybe there'll be a sneaky baldie out there just for me."
If they stayed alive long enough. “That’s not a question,” Jotaro said. It was a question of when. And how soon. Dio would have to be dead by the end of this. Kakyoin hummed, unconcerned. "Yes," he said, unserious like he knew Jotaro wasn't talking about pocket monsters and its licensed game company, serious while holding onto the fringes of it, like he was trying to hole it in like a charm for later. "I'll get my dream team."
Star Platinum hadn't moved to collect another card, hands hovering where the rest of them lay, scattered over the carpet. Jotaro knew without looking what they were. He felt them under his hands, not friendless but as suggestive as a trap. There was a future in it, he read, unrealized: studying the ocean, the water that sucked up carbon, the plankton that manifested from what could be thin air if thin air didn't have pinky promises with every kind of element that paved life, the currents curled up into depth more unspeakable than space, the turtles that only sometimes survived, the coral that breathed through its symbiotic ties, the deep sea vents that howled, the birds that swam and drowned and brutalized clams, the films of foam gurgling towards shore, the breams churning, the pH levels growing inhabitable, the hybrid crawlers that liked the feeling of working water and dirt, the heat trapping egg warming sand and rapidly receding shoreline, the recycled shells and reused carbonite. His spirit did not sing; it simply caved around what it already knew. More, more. Anchors were not the only things the ocean hugged and kept watch over.
"Your dream team is gonna be fish full of microplastics," said Kakyoin, barely with a snicker, bared like offering a handshake.
"Yours will be disgusting," came the answer. His mouth was probably limp with smiling. Jotaro forgot what his spirit did without him and his permission. “Ooze, slime and other messed up liquids. Nobody will ever want to be friends with you.”
Kakyoin cocked his head, the conviction there aching like teeth grown back without missing a beat, shaky with honed child's wear, steady with unrepentant use. "Soon."
The future humming under hand, crystalizing it just because they said so: "Soon."