Chapter 2 – Breaking Ground
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David woke to the sound of something rattling against glass.
For a second, his mind supplied the roar of a stadium, the crackle of a PA system announcing his name, the hiss of a Poké Ball opening—
The quiet scrape came again. Not a roar. A beak.
He blinked at the ceiling. The farmhouse ceiling. Yellowed paint, hairline cracks, making a map he didn't recognise anymore. His neck ached from the way he'd slept, half on his side, half curled, one hand still close to where his belt usually hung.
The rattle repeated, more insistent.
He pushed himself upright. The room was smeared with early light, pale and grey-blue. The air had that particular chill of a country morning before the sun got serious.
Something pecked the window again.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and padded across the old floorboards. A Starly hopped on the sill outside, cocking its head, bright eyes darting. It pecked at its own reflection once more, then startled backward when it noticed him.
"Morning," David muttered.
The Starly chirped something offended at being spied on, fluffed its feathers, and took off in a burst of beating wings.
He watched it go.
The last time he'd woken on this farm, he'd been seventeen, about to leave for Oreburgh and his first Gym challenge. Back then, his heart had been pounding with nerves and excitement, the future a wide-open sky. Today, all he felt was stiff and older than thirty.
He looked at the time on his Pokétech: 5:13 a.m.
'Good enough,' he thought. Farm work didn't wait for decent hours.
He dressed in the clothes he'd packed, knowing, even if he hadn't admitted it, that he wouldn't come just for a funeral: tough trousers, long-sleeved shirt, worn boots. The Champion's uniform stayed folded in the bottom of his bag, just like it had for months.
In the tiny bathroom, the mirror showed him a man with two days' worth of stubble and shadows under his eyes. He splashed cold water on his face until he felt awake enough to be annoyed by his own reflection.
"Right," he told himself quietly, meeting his gaze. "You said tomorrow. This is tomorrow."
Downstairs, the kitchen felt larger than he remembered, emptier without the clatter of his grandfather's morning routine. He opened cupboards until he found coffee grounds in a tin, hard sugar cubes in a jar, and a half-loaf of bread that was starting to go stale but not yet tragic.
While the kettle heated, he opened the back door and leaned on the frame.
The farm lay in a muted pre-dawn hush. A thin line of pale gold glowed along the horizon, outlining the distant hills. Mist clung low over the fields, pooling in the dips and along the streambed. The air smelled of cold earth and wet grass, with just a hint of the sweetness buried in the soil.
He stood and listened.
Nothing but some early birds, the faint chitter of something small in the orchard, and the distant hum of town: no crowd, no announcer, no stadium lights.
It was…peaceful.
It was also a lot of work waiting to happen.
The kettle whistled. He made strong coffee in a chipped mug patterned with faded berries, sat at the kitchen table, and pulled out a pad of paper from his bag. It had once been filled with notes on opponents' teams and move sets. Most of that was crossed out now.
He turned to a fresh page and wrote, in block letters: STONEBROOK – DAY ONE.
Below it, he started a list.
-Walk fields, assess damage
-Check tools/equipment/shed
-Mark working / dead berry trees
-Look at fruit orchards (prune? clear?)
-Follow stream, find best spots for ditches
-…figure out how to not screw this up
He stared at the last line, then underlined it twice.
Coffee finished, lungs filled with cold air, nerves only half cooperating, he did the one thing he knew better than anything else.
He stepped out into the yard, took his Poké Balls from his belt, and tossed the first into the morning light.
"Swampert, let's go."
The white flare of release cut through the mist, resolving into blue and orange bulk as Swampert materialised, landing with a familiar solid thump that sent a little puff of dust from the yard. The big Water/Ground-type blinked, gills flaring once, then twice, before focusing on him.
"Swam," it rumbled, voice deep and slightly questioning.
"Hey," David said, and the word came out softer than he'd intended. "We're home."
Swampert's orange eyes flicked past him to the farmhouse, the fields, the far line of trees. It shifted its weight, heavy tail making a low scrape on the packed earth.
"…pert," it said eventually, as if tasting the idea.
David chuckled. "Yeah. Not exactly how we imagined coming back, huh."
He tapped the next ball off his belt. "You're up, Flygon."
Another burst of light, and Flygon unfolded out of it with a sweep of emerald wings, hovering for a second before touching down. In the half-light, her red-lensed eyes whirred faintly as she took in the yard, the house, the horizon.
"Nido."
"Nidooooking!"
He kept going. Nidoking appeared next, stocky and imposing even half-asleep, then Excadrill in a little plume of dirt, stretching claws wide. Krookodile erupted with a flash of red and black and a yawn full of too many teeth. Gliscor dropped into being from an arc of light and immediately flipped upside down, hanging from the sagging porch roof by its claws to peer at him.
Six sets of eyes. Six familiar presences that had stood with him in stadiums across Sinnoh and beyond. Here, in the yard where he'd once played with a Mudkip and weak little wild Pokémon, they looked almost…too big.
He took a breath and let it out.
"Morning, everyone," he said. His voice sounded steadier with them here. "I know this isn't where you thought we'd be after…everything. But this is where we're needed."
Krookodile tilted his head, lightly bumping Gliscor's tail with his snout. Gliscor waved it around irritably, nearly smacking Flygon's face.
"Hey," David said. "Eyes on me, guys."
Six heads turned back to him.
He gestured with his chin toward the fields and the distant berry orchard rows. "This is Stonebrook Acres. My grandfather's farm. He's gone. The farm's dying. If we don't do something, someone else will buy it and…well, probably not care what happens to the land."
He hesitated, feeling foolish for giving a speech to Pokémon that already knew the shape of his thoughts. But that was a habit too; he'd always talked to them like teammates, not tools.
"This is going to be a different kind of battle," he went on. "No Victory Road, no tournament bracket. Just…" He swept a hand out to encompass the sagging fence, the weed-choked fields, the skeletal orchards and berry trees. "This."
Nidoking grunted, crossing his arms. Excadrill flexed its claws in the dirt, already itching to dig. Swampert's gaze slid back toward the low line where the stream cut through the land.
Flygon trilled softly, wings lifting in the cool air. Gliscor clicked its pincers once, eyes glinting with mischief, as if to say, 'New terrain. Interesting.'
Krookodile just grinned, teeth sharp, tail swishing. "Krook," he rasped, almost amused.
David felt something in his chest ease. They weren't disappointed. They were ready to work, same as they'd always been, even if the enemy was weeds and erosion instead of Garchomp and Weavile.
"Okay," he said. "Let's start by getting the lay of the land. Swampert, you and me are going to check the stream first. The rest of you—Flygon, give us an aerial scan of the fields and the berry and fruit trees, see where the worst damage is. Nidoking, Excadrill, Krookodile, Gliscor—do a slow sweep. Stay clear of the structures for now. Mark anything that looks like it's about to collapse or anything living and angry that we need to know about."
They scattered with the smooth coordination of a team that had spent years acting on his commands. Flygon rose with a low hum of wings, gaining altitude until she was a shadow against the brightening sky. Gliscor launched from the porch and glided low over the nearest groves. Nidoking and Excadrill stomped and tunnelled toward the fields. Krookodile trundled off toward the far fence, half-sliding down a gentle slope as if surfing the soil.
David let himself watch them for a second, a small, pride-filled warmth in his chest. Champions lost and titles relinquished couldn't touch this: six Pokémon that trusted him enough to walk into an unknown fight without hesitation.
Then he turned to Swampert.
"Let's go see how bad the stream is," he said.
Swampert rolled his massive shoulders and trudged alongside him, each footstep leaving deep impressions in the earth. As they walked, a couple of wild Bidoof, emboldened by months of quiet, froze at the edge of a collapsed ditch, staring. One took one look at Swampert and bolted.
The stream looked slightly better in the early light than it had the evening before, but that was an illusion. The dampness of the air made what little water there was seem more generous. Up close, the problems were glaring.
Clumps of grass and reeds choked the shallows. Fallen branches and rocks had lodged in the narrowest parts, forcing the water into thin trickles that wound around the obstacles. In some spots, the bank had collapsed, sending soil slumping into the water. In others, old boards and stones marked where a bridge or a crude sluice had once been.
Swampert rumbled low in his throat, crouching to scoop up a double handful of water. He let it run through his fingers, gills flaring.
"Yeah," David said. "Not ideal."
He knelt, fingers digging into the damp earth at the edge. He could almost see his grandfather here, boots muddy, pants cuffed, complaining about wet socks. He looked up the line of the stream, tracing where it bent and where it intersected with the old ditches that had once fed the fields and berry trees.
"We're going to need this," he said. "For everything. Fields, orchards, berry rows, whatever we do with the lower land."
Swampert nodded, as if that were obvious.
David pulled the pad from his pocket, flipped to a blank page, and sketched a rough map. Stream. House. Barn. Fields. Groves. He marked the worst choke points as he saw them.
"Today, we clear what we can by hand," he decided. "Just enough to get the water moving a bit more. Later, we'll talk about bigger changes."
Swampert huffed. 'Later,' in Swampert, usually meant 'can we smash it now and tidy later.'
"Controlled later," David amended. "We don't even know what's upstream yet. I don't want to flood the entire farm because we got enthusiastic."
Swampert made a thoughtful noise that might have been agreement, might have been mild disappointment.
They worked their way along the stream for the next couple of hours. David pulled out smaller clumps of grass and reeds, cutting them back with a borrowed sickle from the barn. Swampert handled the heavy things: lifting logs, heaving aside bigger rocks, bracing collapsed bank edges with his body while David shifted debris.
Mud caked David's boots, splattered up his legs. His shirt stuck to his back with sweat despite the morning chill. His shoulders burned with the ache of effort he hadn't asked his body for in a long, long time.
It felt…good.
Honest, in a way that made his last few exhibition matches seem thin and insubstantial. No cameras. No commentators dissecting his every move. Just him, his Pokémon, and a stubborn piece of land that needed tending.
After a while, he heard the rhythmic whump-whump of wings and looked up to see Flygon descending in a slow spiral, dust blowing in little swirls as she landed on the bank.
She chirped a greeting, then scratched at the dirt with a claw, drawing crude lines as she trilled and whistled.
David crouched, watching.
"Fields…weak here?" he guessed, pointing to one squiggled patch. She bobbed her head. "Dry? Or overgrown?"
Flygon hummed and etched a rough pattern of vertical lines over the patch, then added tangled scribbles over some, smooth arcs over others.
"Okay, overgrown but some structure left," he interpreted. "We can salvage those rows. And this bit—" he tapped another patch she'd shaded with careful, even strokes, "—isn't as bad?"
A satisfied chirp. She tapped yet another section, then mimed wind blowing something over.
"Damage from storms," David murmured. "Probably when the stream started failing. Alright. Thanks."
Flygon leaned down and nudged its shoulder with its head. He scratched the base of one fin absently.
"Where's everyone else?" he asked.
She angled her head toward the orchard and berry groves, trilled low. He glimpsed Gliscor swooping in the distance, briefly silhouetted against the sun as it finally cleared the horizon. Nidoking's roar carried faintly from somewhere uphill, followed by the muffled thump of something big hitting the ground and staying there.
"Right," he said. "We'll regroup soon. Swampert, one more choke point, then we'll take a breather."
They finished clearing a particularly stubborn tangle of debris where an old board had wedged crossways, creating a miniature dam. Water gushed through the newly opened gap with a satisfying rush, deepening the channel by a fraction of an inch.
It wasn't much, in the grand picture.
But the stream looked…more alive already. It was less like it was dying by inches.
By the time he and Swampert trudged back up toward the farmhouse, the sun was properly up, burning the last of the mist away. Sweat had dampened David's hair at the temples. His arms and back thrummed with the pleasant kind of exhaustion that promised sore muscles tomorrow.
Nidoking was waiting in the yard, arms folded, foot tapping. Excadrill's head poked up from a fresh mound of dirt nearby, nose dusted with soil. Krookodile reclined under the shade of a leaning fencepost, looking unbothered. Gliscor dangled from an overhanging beam on the side of the barn, swinging lazily.
Flygon settled onto the packed earth behind David, folding her wings like a cloak.
"Report," David said, mostly because old habits died hard.
Nidoking snorted and jabbed a claw toward the nearest field. David glanced that way and saw that someone—well, several someones—had marked spots with simple symbols carved into spare bits of wood and thrust into the ground near issues.
He walked over, the team trailing or circling around him.
The first marker had a crude drawing of a tree with a slash through it. The berry tree beside it was almost completely dead, branches brittle, leaves brown. A few shrivelled berries clung high up in the canopy like forgotten ornaments.
"Right," David said. "Dead. Clear it."
The next marker had the same tree shape, but with a circle. The tree beside it looked sad, but not gone yet—leaves pale, branches thin, but new growth nubbing along some of the smaller limbs.
"Maybe salvageable," he murmured. "Prune, feed, water. Keep."
He found similar markers throughout the first orchard block—some X'd, some circled, some with question marks that made him smile despite himself. Gliscor must have done those; the question mark lines wobbled.
Beyond the obviously dying trees, there were stretches of ground where weeds had taken over entirely—thistles, wild grass, and creeping vines. A few berry saplings poked through here and there, stubborn survivors.
He adjusted his mental map.
"This, we can fix," he said aloud. "Not in a day. Not in a week. But it isn't hopeless."
Krookodile snorted, scooping a clod of dirt up lazily with his claws and then letting it crumble between them, as if to say, 'Looks like a playground to me.'
"Don't even think about burrowing under my remaining trees," David warned him. "We need their roots."
Krookodile had the grace to look at least half-offended at the implication.
He spent the rest of the morning walking in widening loops from the farmhouse, checking fences, noting broken posts, sagging stretches of wire, gaps where wild Pokémon had clearly come and gone at will. In the fruit orchard, Gliscor had wrapped a couple of dangerously cracked branches with old rope, crude but effective splints to keep them from dropping on anyone's head until proper pruning could be done.
Some trees were completely dead—bark peeling, no leaves, even where there should have been buds. Others were overgrown but bursting with potential, branches tangled with wild, small apples left from last year, shrivelled but clinging on.
Flygon perched on one of the sturdier branches and trilled down at him, wings shading him from the brightening sun.
He made another page of notes.
Orchards (berry + fruit):
-Dead trees: remove (use wood?)
-Overgrown: prune, clear undergrowth
-Maybe plant new saplings
The list grew, the neat columns turning into cramped scribbles as he ran out of room.
By midday, with his stomach growling and his legs starting to protest, he called a halt.
"Alright," he said, gathering his team in the shade of the farmhouse. "We've got a picture now. It's ugly, but I've seen worse battlefields."
Excadrill made an unconvinced little noise. He hadn't, in fact, seen worse battlefields. Stadiums didn't count.
David sank onto the bottom step, back against the porch post, and let his team gather around him. Flygon sat to his left, tail flicking. Swampert settled heavily to his right, leaning just enough that David could feel the heat of his bulk. Nidoking and Krookodile sprawled in front, half-blocking the yard. Gliscor hung upside down from the porch roof like some enormous bat. Excadrill's claws rested on the ground beside David's boot, tracing little circles in the dust.
He rubbed a hand over his face.
"You remember the first time we walked into the Sinnoh League," he said, eyes half-closed. "Any of you?"
Krookodile grunted. Flygon chirped softly. Swampert exhaled a slow, rumbling breath.
"I thought we were going to die," David said. "Not literally, but close enough. Every trainer in that building looked like they were carved out of stone. Every Pokémon felt like a mountain to climb."
He opened his eyes again, looking at the sprawling mess of his inheritance.
"This feels similar," he admitted. "Except the opponent doesn't have a face. Doesn't get tired. Doesn't react to feints."
He shifted, leaning forward.
"But we didn't walk into the League thinking we'd beat it in a day," he went on. "We chipped away. One battle at a time. One decision at a time. We learned. Adjusted. Took some hits, gave some back."
Swampert's gills flared in what he chose to interpret as agreement. Nidoking thumped his tail once, solidly.
"This is the same," David said. "We're not going to fix Stonebrook in a week. Or a month. Maybe not even this year. But today, we cleared part of the stream. We mapped what's alive and what's dead in the berry and fruit trees. That's…a start."
Silence sat with them for a while. Sunlight warmed the porch, cutting the morning chill. A light breeze stirred the leaves in the nearest trees.
His Pokétch buzzed faintly against his wrist.
He glanced at it—a message from a number he recognised all too well.
-You made it to Stonebrook?-
No name attached. None needed.
He stared at the text a moment, then tapped a reply with dirt-scratched fingers.
-Yeah. Got in yesterday. Funeral's done.-
The response came quicker than he'd expected.
-How are you holding up?-
He huffed a short, humourless laugh.
He considered answering honestly: I'm tired. I'm angry at myself. I'm standing on a dying farm pretending I know what I'm doing.
He typed: -Working. It's a mess out here.-
A pause. Then:
-Send a picture.-
He rolled his eyes, but found himself standing anyway. He walked a few paces out into the yard, turned in a slow circle, and snapped a couple of shots—fences, fields, the house, the distant line of the orchards and berry rows. He hesitated, then stepped back enough that part of Swampert's bulk and Flygon's wings edged into one frame.
He sent that one.
For a moment, there was nothing. Then three dots appeared.
-Wow.-
He smiled despite himself. There was no judgment in it—just an honest reaction.
-You sure you're ready to trade stadiums for…that?- came the next message.
He looked at the yard again. The worn boards, the leaning fence, the incomplete work they'd done that morning, the long list in his pocket.
'No,' he thought. 'But I'm here.'
He typed:- I have six very opinionated coworkers. We'll manage.-
A little pause. Then:
-I've seen you make worse matchups work. Keep me posted, Ryder.-
He could hear her voice in the words, all dry humour with a warm undercurrent.
He stared at the screen a heartbeat longer, thumb hovering over the keys. Then he typed: -You should visit sometime. Could use someone to judge my berry rows.-
Three dots. A longer pause this time.
-I might, came the answer. When things calm down here, don't let the weeds beat you before I get there.-
He huffed, the sound more like a breath of relief than amusement, and slid the device back into his pocket.
"Alright," he said, looking at his team. "Break's over. We'll grab some food, then start on the nearest orchard section. Just the worst weeds today. Light duty."
Six pairs of eyes stared back at him.
"What?" he asked.
Excadrill chittered something that sounded suspiciously like, 'You call that light?'
He snorted. "Fine. Light-ish duty."
They dispersed again, this time with less of a scouting feel and more of a 'we live here now' gait.
As he headed back toward the house to rustle up something resembling lunch, David glanced once more at the faded sign by the road. The letters of STONEBROOK ACRES were worn, but still legible.
"Tomorrow we start," he'd told the fields last night.
Turned out, tomorrow was today.
And they'd started.
It wasn't much. It was barely anything at all.
But it was more than standing still and letting the weeds take everything.
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