Setting his shoulders and trying his hardest to remain outwardly calm as he moved over to the slowpoke, opened his backpack, and convinced it to slip inside, where it shuffled around a bit and closed its eyes after eating one of the two potato things Leo had.
With a grunt of effort Leo slipped his bag back on, standing and gripping the hilt of his skarmory feather as he nodded to the absol.
It held his gaze for a moment, then promptly loped off downstream.
…
Leo followed as best he could, legs burning as he struggled to keep up.
He could almost feel the absol’s urgency with the way it constantly circled around Leo, leading him downstream and pushing him to go faster when he started to slow.
Even when his legs threatened to collapse under him and his body coated itself with sweat Leo forged ahead, crawling hand-over-fist when the river valley got too narrow to travel next to the water, and forcing his way through dense brush.
A couple times he did let the slowpoke out to travel alongside him as the day wore on, but it was slow and had a tendency to wander when Leo wasn’t paying attention.
This, in turn forced the absol to circle back and push Leo harder.
Close to evening, Leo finally caught a glimpse of what he thought had the absol so worried.
Dark grey storm clouds were rolling in from the northwest, the barometric pressure dropping as quickly as the temperature.
His breath was coming in ragged huffs as he leaned against a tree, a fourth wind – as he had already blown through his second and third winds earlier in the day after stumbling across another berry bush – spiking its way through his system riding a wave of adrenaline as he watched the storm.
“Look, either you get me to where I need to go soon, or I need to start hunkering down to try and ride this storm out,” Leo panted, leaning against a boulder and relieving his shoulders of the weight of his backpack by resting it on said boulder.
The absol let out a long, slow whine, poking Leo’s hip with the tip of its horn and making him yelp.
“Alright, I get it!
Let’s keep going,” he huffed, standing upright and almost falling over as he unbalanced himself.
He cursed his own tiredness but followed the absol anyway.
Night fell and the stars disappeared behind clouds as Leo stumbled through the tree-covered valley, chasing the white shadow that was absol.
Even his own exertion wasn’t enough to keep him warm, a chill settling deep into his bones as he worked his way through the darkness.
A howling wind carried daggers of frozen air with it, tormenting Leo’s bare-chested form.
Somewhere along the way he dropped the skarmory feather, leaving it abandoned in the forest as his fingers numbed up.
He would’ve missed his salvation in his exhausted haze had the absol not howled at him from the door of the long, low wooden cabin built nestled in a grove of tall pines.
A fully intact cabin, with a stone chimney and windows – though no light came from inside.
Leo almost sobbed in relief as he stumbled through the unlocked front door, the absol vanishing immediately after he passed the threshold and collapsed onto the floor.
For a solid ten minutes he just lay there as he gathered his wits, closing the door behind him with his foot.
It was a small, one-room cabin with a double bed close to the wall next to the cold fireplace, blankets draped over the bed itself and piled in a basket at the foot of the bed.
The slowpoke crooned from inside his backpack and Leo rolled it off his back, forcing himself to sit upright.
Here, he might be able to survive the storm.
He’d just need to get a fire going, which was easy enough with the split logs and kindling stacked neatly next to the fireplace.
Leo didn’t sleep in the bed though, instead stripping all the bedding off and throwing it into a pile before the fireplace, curling up into a ball in the huddle of blankets with slowpoke wrapped up inside with him.
His eyelids grew heavier and heavier as the wind howled outside, warmth returning to him as shadows danced on the walls and he drifted off to a dreamless sleep.
That night, it snowed.
…
Leo woke to the sound and smell of something cooking.
The heavenly aroma had him salivating even before he sat bolt upright in bed – and when did he move into the bed?
Last he remembered he was on the floor – eyes wide open and searching for the food being cooked.
It only dawned on him after he locked eyes with the other inhabitant of the cabin that someone had to be cooking the food.
“Glad to see you’re alive,” the woman said gruffly, raising one eyebrow at him as she stirred whatever was in the skillet she was holding, the mix of veggies and meat tossing grease and flavor into the air.
Leo could practically taste it with his eyes, though the fact he had finally met another person took immediate precedence.
“Um,” was Leo’s eloquent response as he took in the sight of another human being.
She was tall and muscular, with long brown hair pulled into a rough ponytail and wearing a black t-shirt that showed off the whipcord strength in her arms.
A furrett lay draped across her shoulders like a living scarf, its beady black eyes watching Leo as the woman focused on what she was cooking, eyes facing front.
A fire crackled in the metal oven, not the fireplace, and filled the small cabin with a steamy warmth.
“You’re a smart brat, you know that?
Mew knows why you’re all the way out here but you would’ve died had you not gotten that fire started…and curled up with all those blankets, and your slowpoke.” she continued, removing the pan from the heat, setting it to the side and fixing Leo with a stare that spoke volumes as to what she was thinking.
Her almost charcoal-colored eyes bored straight into Leo, and he just smiled at her.
“Thank you, but I probably would’ve died had that absol not shown me to the cabin,” Leo said, scratching the back of his neck and kicking off the mess of blankets covering him.
Sunlight filtered in through the cabin window, and Leo took a deep breath.
“You know what an absol is?” she asked.
“White furred, scythe for a horn, and a canine?
Said to herald disasters, but came to warn me of one?
Yes, I know what an absol is,” Leo said, raising one eyebrow at her.
“Well that explains some things at least,” the woman murmured, scratching the furrett behind the ears and making it coo in response.
“I’d been tracking a non-native species through the mountains for a few days now, and imagine my surprise when the tracks of a young human join up with it.
Followed them here and arrived an…hour or two after the snowstorm hit?
Pokemon tracks vanished off into the night, not that I was going much further in a snowstorm, and you were sleeping in front of the fire.
But an absol, of all bloody things…what on earth convinced you to follow an absol?” she demanded.
“It led me here,” Leo said, furrowing his brows in confusion.
“There was a snowstorm coming, I’m shirtless and had no supplies, and figured I had to try something to survive.
The absol seemed to want me to follow it, so I did,” the woman nodded, folding her arms and smiling when Leo’s eyes darted to the still-sizzling pan of food.
“Well, we can talk details later.
First, it looks like you need to eat,” she said, and Leo couldn’t agree more, ignoring the aching of his limbs as he leapt to his feet and sought food.
He demolished the entirety of the food she had prepared in record time, inhaling the divine goodness that was salt and pepper – sprinkled over the mess of veggies and diced meat liberally – and swearing up and down that it was the greatest thing he’d ever tasted.
The woman – who named herself as Victoria only laughed and told him to try it again after he’d eaten real food for a while.
“Everything tastes better in the wild,” she said, which while Leo could confirm that, he didn’t much care.
She apparently was not famous for her cooking, a joke which had Leo coughing on his food while he struggled not to laugh.
…
A/ N: The Story Needs More Power Stones 😉