Lance's Charizard

As far as Lance was concerned, dragon-taming wasn’t taming at all. A dragon could not be tamed. A dragon was a wild and unpredictable creature, something that needed to be feared in order to be satisfied. When Lance took the time out from people to train his dragons, to ‘tame’ them, he didn’t use a praise/punishment system like other Pokémon trainers might do for their less wild varieties of creature. Lance’s training had nothing in common with non-dragon training in other trainers, other than that he shared the same, if not very similar, end goal with them, and that was to be the best – be the champion.

But, of course, he was champion now, and everyone who didn’t know him seemed to think that he reached this goal using a measure of self-discipline seen only in fighting-type trainers, for instance, like Bruno had. He didn’t, not one bit. If anything, he had less self-discipline than the most novice of trainers. He was purposefully wild at heart, and this was because he knew what he was doing and he was good at what he did, and he knew that in order to connect with each individual dragon, in order to understand them, one must become a dragon. In front of people, Lance wasn’t any different from the next person, but the moment he was in one of the caverns with his dragons, not only was he a member of their pack, but he was the alpha-male of it.

Lance didn’t roar and scratch and bite, though. It didn’t go quite that far. He didn’t behave exactly like they did, not by a long stretch; he simply behaved like them in context of a human being. In other words, if a dragon roared at him in challenge, he would yell back – the equivalent of roaring in human behaviour. If he kept his stance around the dragons and asserted his dominance over the group, they might just understand him back, and in turn, obey him. Really, it was way simpler than many young dragon-tamers in training thought it to be, and they could all have been saved a lot of wasted time if Lance had the time to explain to them what they should be doing instead, but he simply didn’t.

“Hey, relax.” He petted Garchomp’s head roughly – the only type of treatment appropriate for a creature with such thick skin – and absently tapped its large, muscular leg with the toe of his boot. He was sat on a stone ledge in one of the spacious caverns below the Plateau, and Garchomp was peering down close to him, seeking his attention. It was restless tonight. “Hey.”

From across the room, Charizard blew smoke at him, but the distance was too great for the cloud to reach him. Aerodactyl swooped down from an upper ledge and invaded Charizard’s personal space for a few moments, hovering a foot or two in front of its nose, squawking noisily, provoking the larger dragon. The red beast lashed out, but too slow – Aerodactyl darted out of the way and dust rose into the air, lifted by the force of the prehistoric creature’s wings as they beat fiercely, and a further mass of dust was lifted too as Charizard’s more impressive wings also came to action to bring the dragon close onto Aerodactyl’s heel. Garchomp quickly lost interest in Lance in favour of taking part in the dance of dragons above, leaving Lance and Dragonite on the side lines to view the spectacle in peace. Dragonite, surprisingly, was the exception to almost all of Lance’s theories on dragons. In terms of behaviour, Dragonite wasn’t a dragon at all. It was calm, intelligent and obedient to any trainer who had raised it from its birth as a Dratini without fail, and it loved interacting with humans. Most dragons had a tendency to abandon all pretence of being obedient to their trainer when they evolved, but Dragonite had grown closer to Lance each time it had evolved, first from a Dratini and then from a Dragonair. Dragonite was practically Lance’s best friend – a constant.

Charizard was, basically, the total opposite of Dragonite. It was the most dragon-like of any dragon Lance had interacted with. It was aggressive, wild and insanely powerful, and the latter never helped when training Charizard – there was nothing worse than a dragon with an ego. It had taken Lance the longest to train and with the most committal effort on his part. Lance had been told by his Master, when he was very small and still only just learning the basics in Blackthorn, that no dragon could be fully dominated, and that no matter how much you tried to be the dominant one, you, as a human being, always had the weakness of merely being human. You were not physically one of them, and dragons were intelligent, and they always knew, really, that you weren’t.

Lance loved Charizard all the same, even if it was a pain in the back and in other places. It was powerful. He didn’t really know where he’d be without her. That was, of course, until it became apparent that if he didn’t have Charizard, he wouldn’t have been hanging upside-down from a beam in one of the stables five minutes after he was supposed to have locked the dragons up for the night. He didn’t believe that creatures as large as them should be confined to their balls, no matter how much the people at the research laboratory told him that the Poké balls were perfectly comfortable for Pokémon no matter of their size.

He never thought he would, but for the first time ever, he wished that his bodysuit weren’t as tough-sewn as it was. A large splinter of the wood beam had pierced the fabric and was digging into his ankle; he was sure his leg would be bleeding, but he couldn’t really tell, because he wasn’t paying much attention to his leg. He was more concerned about the manner in which Charizard was now pacing back and forth in front of him, as if she was weighing up her options, deciding how she could play with him. Lance was frightened, to say the least, but he wouldn’t show it. Charizard was trying to test him. She’d done it before, all of the dragons had, but none of them had ever done it to this extent. As long as he kept his cool, though, he would be fine. His stance was important and he had to maintain it, but that concept is easier said than done when you’re hanging upside-down.

There was an ominous creaking of the wood above him, and he felt the pull as the beam began to give way. He was looking forward to meeting the ground again, but Charizard seemed to have other plans. In one swift motion, just as the splinter snapped and Lance began on his descent , she caught Lance in mid-air. Lance wasn’t immediately aware of why he hadn’t felt the ground slam into him; he had his eyes squeezed shut. But then he opened his eyes to see what the hell the ground was waiting for, and the first thing in his vision was a sideways view of Charizard’s neck. The next thing he was aware of was pain. Lots of pain, digging into his side, and he thought a rib might be broken, and he studied the situation a little further, trying to clear his mind from the confusion and the pain and trying to find some calm, some control, and realised with a sudden shock that the pain was coming from Charizard’s sharp fangs, embedded into his ribcage, and that he had been caught between the large dragon’s jaws.

He screamed in pain, all notions of control and calm abandoned as he struggled for release, struggled for his life. His reaction was instantly answered by a violent snarl, and his head snapped backwards as Charizard thrashed sharply with her neck, flinging Lance violently. Her jaw clamped down with more force, and Lance’s screams began to echo. Charizard stayed still for a moment, and Lance noticed out of the corner of his eye that Garchomp was watching from a corner, completely still, and if Lance had any sense at the time, he would have known that the shark-like dragon was almost as shocked by the situation as he was. He gasped for air, his breath wheezing. His lungs felt they were creaking, ready to burst on every inhale. He probably had several cases of internal bleeding by now, and he made one last attempt to gain control, because instinct was telling him that if he didn’t just try, it would be way too late for him. He tried to calm his breathing and took the opportunity of the dragon’s unusual stillness to ignore the pain, gritting his teeth and slowly freeing up his arm, which was gently wedged inside the dragon’s jaw. With such a gentle motion that if he’d moved any slower he would have stopped, he placed his palm onto Charizard’s snout and just breathed. Charizard was watching his face, looking for expression. Her eye was huge from where Lance was, and he could feel heat on his torso from her rapid breathing. She stared at him, and he stared back in challenge. Challenging her was the last thing his instinct was telling him to do, but the expert in him was throwing away the concept of surrender. That would not be a good idea.

After a few minutes of silence and staring, he decided that he was going to attempt to speak. This was the deciding moment. This was where he either won the battle and escaped from the death grip, at which point he could leave the stable with haste and lock the doors tight before seeking an ambulance, or where Charizard’s mood snapped back into calamity and his approach was completely rejected.

He brought his right hand up from where it had been hanging useless behind him and gripped Charizard’s horn tightly and forcefully. She snarled and her eyes narrowed, and he said, “Put me down.”

Her entire head reared up. Lance was half a metre from the beam that he was attached to earlier, and his entire body tensed up as he prepared for whatever dreadful reaction she might have, praying that she would be obedient, praying to *God* with all the faith he’d ever had, because if she wasn’t, he was probably going to die, and he’d never been this scared in all his life. Mere seconds later, her thoughts were clear when she blew a cloud of smoke from her nostrils and Lance felt heat rise from the back of her throat, and Lance stopped praying that she would obey him, because that possibility was far gone. Instead, he prayed that whatever she did next, he lived.

Lance was barely aware of the motion as she released him from her grip with a sharp fling of her head and he was catapulted across the room and collided against the brick wall opposite, before falling to the ground into, thank God, a pile of hay. He felt several of his bones crunch at the impact, and pain wasn’t even a factor anymore, he could ignore the pain. Right now, all he cared about was getting away, and fast. But Charizard was approaching him again, and while he might have thought he could ignore the pain previously, his mind soon changed when he tried to move into a sitting position. Sharp pain shot up his spine and he felt an ache in the back of his neck so agonising that he couldn’t ignore it, and he collapsed back into the hay, defeated. His leg was broken, as far as he could tell, and most of his ribs, and Charizard was right in front of him, peering down at him with her teeth bared, snarling. She blew smoke into his face and he coughed, sending further wracking pains through his body from the movement of his chest and he moaned weakly.

Charizard wasn’t done with him. She roared and took his leg – the one that was probably broken – into her jaws and clamped down, harder than she’d done to his torso; one of her anterior canines sliced right through his calf, and, before he even had time to scream from the pain of that injury, she was lifting him into the air by his injured leg. By this point he didn’t know what else he could do other than be. He wasn’t thinking straight, his mind clouded with agony, just trying desperately to block out the pain, all hope of escape gone. If he could think clearly, he might even say he’d given up hope, was simply waiting for death.

He felt himself hit the ground again and was left in an uncomfortable position with his face in the dirt and his arm trapped horribly underneath his torso. His discomfort was short-lived, though. He was lifted again, this time by the other leg, before he had time to consider anything. Charizard shook him up and down, and he felt a crack in his hip before he was thrown down again, this time with more force. His forehead hit the solid ground with an audible thud, and then there was silence.

Is it over?

He couldn’t tell. Everything was dark and he couldn’t hear much, only a loud buzzing in his ears, but then he heard the sound of breathing. He recognised it after a few seconds as his own – it rattled and seemed to be in synch with the pulsing pain in his chest. It wasn’t over. He could still feel pain and he was still alive. But he couldn’t hear his attacker anymore, but it didn’t even matter anymore.

He must have been lying there for ten minutes or so before he made some attempt to move, but it could have been longer, he couldn’t be sure. It hurt too much to lift anything. He resigned himself to slowly turning his head in the opposite direction, and immediately Charizard was in view. She was lying down, her head resting on the floor a few metres away, but she wasn’t asleep. Her eyes were bearing right into him, and she glared when he made eye contact, so he squeezed his eyes shut. Seconds later, he considered opening them just to provoke her, because he knew she was just playing with him. She had gained dominance after Lance had made one minor slip in his training, and Lance was in no state to get that dominance back, not now. Maybe if he provoked her, she would get everything over and done with, do all the things she planned to do and God would decide if he lived or died. It would all be over. He wouldn’t be expecting anything more.

He considered it, but he rejected the idea in favour of staying alive. He kept his eyes closed, and waited.