Disclaimer: I do not own the Pokémon franchise.

Rating: for mentions of death and some implied adult themes.

A/n: I have two confessions here. The first is that I got the idea for this from reading but that was infinities ago by alpha aquaria (which is very well-written and certainly worth a read). That fic approaches the idea of the protagonist becoming immortal from a different angle but it's what made me think of this one. The second is that I know the rules forbid writing stories in the second person. I did try this in the third person but I didn't think it worked as well as writing it in the second (and it's even worse in the first person). I think that rule is aimed at forbidding interaction rather than a writing style so, unless anyone feels especially strongly about this, I'll live on the dangerous side and stick with this style for this piece. I hope you enjoy!

Even the Stars

At first, you talk only of victories and battles. You allow people to take photos. You give talks. You promote products. You sneak out of events and challenge your friends to battles. No one ventures back to Geosenge Town. More importantly, no one talks about what happened deep underground and you are glad for it. The scenes haunt your dreams enough without having to dog your waking moments.

The first time anyone thinks about it is one year on. You meet with them to remember all who fell in Geosenge Town. Afterwards, Calem remarks that it was scary, in the blast, but at least no one was hurt. Then Trevor remembers Lysandre, who no one has seen since that day. And then Calem remembers that you were the last one out of the room when the blast of energy was released.

"But you weren't hit, were you, Serena?" he says.

In your dreams, you still feel the heat of power upon your skin but you say, "I don't know." Then, to lighten the mood, you add, "I guess we'll find out if I'm still around in 100 years."

Everyone laughs and that's the end of the matter.

A second year slips by and then a third. You are still Kalos' champion, still in the public eye, and it is the press, rather than friends or family, who note that, even three years on, you retain your youthful looks. Why, it's as if she hasn't aged a day, one newspaper states. When you see that, you are on a street in Laverre and you keep your face calm right up until you enter your room in the Pokémon Centre and look at yourself in the mirror. The paper is right. You thought you looked the same because you see your face nearly every day. That isn't the truth – you look the same because almost nothing has changed.

Shauna speaks up about it first. Everyone else has grown in some way or another – Shauna and Calem are taller, Tierno, leaner. Trevor has begun to grow a beard. All of them except for you.

This time, you don't try to shy away as much. When she asks when you're going to grow, you say, "I think maybe never." You think of AZ and his inhuman height. "Or slowly."

It is Trevor who finds his voice first. "The ultimate weapon?" he says, his voice too gruff in a way you will never get used to. Everyone looks at you with sympathy and hope – hope that this is another joke. And suddenly you want to cry but you can't because you're Serena, hero and champion of Kalos, the best and strongest of them all.

After a few seconds, Calem says tentatively, "Would it be so bad? Living forever?"

"Well," you say into the silence, "AZ didn't seem that thrilled about it."

"But that was because of what he did."

"It's ridiculous anyway," Trevor says. "Even the stars don't burn forever. You have nothing to worry about."

He says it with authority and you want to believe him so you nod again. Everyone smiles. Trevor's right. No one lives forever. Even AZ will die one day.

Two years later and you look a little older – seventeen, you think, but at a push and it's not as though it's different from looking sixteen. You wear more make-up than before, style your hair in certain ways (and your hair grows even when you cut it and you can't work out why that grows at a normal rate but the rest of you seems to be growing slower), wear different clothes and you can get away with looking like a baby-faced twenty-one year old.

Your friends don't realise it but they sometimes talk to you as though you are a teenager. Never mind that you're older than Trevor and Shauna – they can't get past the innocent look on your face. Your mother does it as well but she's your mother and you suspect she would have done so if you looked seventy rather than seventeen. Only Professor Sycamore treats you as an adult, but this is how he has always treated you.

It's not just them though. You notice it now that Calem and Tierno have girlfriends and Trevor has recently broken up with someone while Shauna is chasing someone. In the first couple of years, you had your share of offers, some of which you took up and others of which you rejected. Now you find that you are attracted to people your age but few are attracted to someone they think is seventeen or eighteen. It's not much of a problem now but you wonder what will happen in twenty years when, if you age at your current rate, you will still look as though you are in your twenties.

The first upside you see is when someone comments that it's remarkable that your pyroar is still so strong. It must be nearly ten by now. They usually start to slow by then.

You've never thought about it before but now, seven years on from Geosenge Town, you inspect your pokémon in detail and realise that yes, they look as they always did and no, they shouldn't look that way because at least three of them are pokémon with much shorter lifespans than humans.

"I guess that blast was strong enough to go through Poké Balls, huh?" you say to Chesnaught, who swipes at you affectionately. You don't know if they're aware that they aren't growing but other things come back to you – their battle injuries never extend past being knocked out, although they haven't been hurt often. None of them have fallen ill since that day. And yes – none of them have changed appearance, apart from growing fur.

Impulsively, you hug Pidgeot, the first Pokémon you caught. You'd told Pidgeot and Chesnaught that they were now a team. You all were. Pidgeot – a pidgey then – had pecked your shoulder gently. For every team member, you made that speech and each pokémon responded in their own way.

"We'll be a team," you whisper into Pidgeot's shoulder. "No matter what."

Pidgeot gently pecks your shoulder and you know that it means now what it meant then. Of course we are. Always.

You lost your champion title a while ago but you start to leave the public eye when you're twenty-five. The comments on how youthful you look are beginning to sound confused. One day, someone will put two and two together. For some reason, you're sure you don't want to be there when that happens.

Your friends have started to drift from your life. They don't mean to but they have their own lives now. Calem is married with a child already. Tierno is a famous dancer. Trevor is making his way into the world of academia. And Shauna travels. She invites you along but she is tall now and her confidence hasn't diminished – she wants life and parties whereas you are starting to long for darkness and quiet.

When she returns, she orders you to cheer up. "You're looking at this the wrong way," she says. "You can do anything and be fine. Live a little. Explore. Party. Find someone nice."

You take her advice partly because you're scared that you're constantly impeding on your mother's life because you know she will always have time for you. You've travelled around Kalos a lot – even spent some time being taught rhyhorn racing by your mother on various terrains – but now you go further into woods, higher up mountains, deeper into caves. You go beyond where people normally go and find yourself in isolated areas with only your pokémon for company. And it's nice. It is. You can test yourselves out here and your pokémon don't expect things of you.

But it's not for you. Not yet. If you have all the time in the world, you can do all of this later. For now, you think, you should be spending time with your friends and family. They are the ones you will lose first. Not the world.

You pretend to be ill on the tenth anniversary of the Geosenge Town disaster. Your youthful immortality is too painful a reminder to the people who lost everything.

You try your hand at pokémon breeding on the theory that: a) your pokémon should be allowed to have a life; and b) if you're not going to be able to mother your own children (and although there have been people, you are thirty and look about eighteen. One day, your children would look older than you) then you can at least mother your pokémon's children. It's a success and when you look at their babies, you feel a rush of joy.

It's not quite the same, of course, and you know that. Your friends refer you to their children as their Auntie Serena – they're young enough not to question why their parents are friends with someone nearly half their age – and you love them deeply but you can't watch them grow up. It's similar here – you can watch these pokémon grow up but they're not yours. Not really. You're just Auntie Serena.

Nonetheless, you are always around to check that they don't fall ill, that they have enough food, and to help them train. You give them nicknames and, once again, you think that maybe Calem is right. Maybe living forever isn't so bad.

Tierno comments once that you must be having a fantastic time, learning what you want and doing what you want. You smile sunnily at him and perform a few, terrible dance steps.

"Always more to learn," you say.

Your mother falls ill when you're thirty-four. She's not old – barely even sixty – but the illness is strong. You sit by her bedside, day and night. You hold her hand and plead with her not to die.

She slips away with her hand in yours, gazing at the face that you inherited from the father you've never met. There is no one else in the hospital ward.

When the doctors come to cover her body, they ask your relationship to her. Everyone knows Grace, the rhyhorn racer, and everyone knows her adult, hero daughter.

"Granddaughter," you say. "My mother is ... unwell."

You attend the funeral in the guise of Astra, granddaughter of Grace and daughter of Serena. You tell everyone that Serena is still unwell and when the coffin is lowered into the ground, you wonder how many more funerals you will have to sit through.

You regret the lie shortly afterwards. The papers have occasionally run Where is she now? pieces in relation to you and now there are two pieces of juicy gossip: that you are seriously ill; and that you had a child, hidden from the public eye, when you were sixteen or so. A child who is the spitting image of you.

You do a couple of interviews, in which you "reveal" that you have never met your father and that your mother lives somewhere quiet. You have no plans to become the League Champion. You are just a rather uninteresting teenager with a famous mother and grandmother.

Shortly after one of the interviews, Tierno meets with you. He still dances but he choreographs more than performs now, partly due to a recurring injury in his right leg. He updates you on his life and you do the same.

"You know we're all here for you, right, Serena? You can talk to Trev or me or Shauna or Calem or…"

You nod. "I know. It's just … hard. She wasn't supposed to die. Not yet."

"It was her time. Everyone has to go eventually."

He jolts and looks at you guiltily. You look down at your pokémon. Most of his are unfamiliar to you, having grown too old to venture outside or even died. Yours, however, are the same as always.

He leans across to hug you around the shoulders. Quickly. You are in public and there are strange implications when a man in his mid-thirties hugs a teenage girl, even if he can now pose as an "uncle". "Have you cried?"

"No."

He nods. "You can, you know. You should."

"I have to be strong."

"Why?"

You stroke Pyroar's fur. "Because if I'm not strong now, what will I be like in 100 years?"

Some of your team's children die from old age. For the first time, your pokémon are unable to comprehend how this could be when they are still young and strong. You start to realise why people always say that it is a terrible shame when the parent outlives the children.

The children have had children and that's fine but you know that none of your team will ever breed again.

Cities and towns change. You learn a new language and become an accredited pokémon groomer. Champions come and go. You watch another criminal gang rise up and another group of trainers put them down. You don't go to their parade but you watch it from a TV in Coumarine City.

You don't feel jealous, you realise. You've never liked attention and, if anything, you're glad there are more heroes in the world.

So you sit back with your pokémon and watch.

Professor Sycamore passes away when you're forty-five. When you attend the funeral, you're startled at how old your friends look.

On the thirtieth anniversary of the Geosenge Town disaster, you meet with your friends. Everyone shares what they have been doing and theirs sounds mundane. Then they turn to you. You pause to think.

"I took up berry mixing in Lumiose. Worked for some time there."

"What happened to rare stone analysis?"

You shrug. "I got the accreditation but I can't set up shop." Aged forty-six, you were thrilled when you finally stopped looking like a teenager. You're sure you'll be equally thrilled when you hit twenty-five, which, you think, is likely to be in fifty years, unless your growing slows down even further. "So I thought I'd learn berry mixing."

"You don't want to settle down at all?"

You think of waking up each morning to the same person, going to the same job, sitting with children, and shrug. "I settle. For years at a time. That's enough for me."

After all, it has to be.

When Trevor turns fifty-four, he is struck with a disease that makes him begin to forget. You are travelling again, unable to cope with the sedentary lifestyle of your friends because your body wants to move and your pokémon want to battle, when Calem writes to you to tell you. You return but Trevor still knows you, and Shauna, feeling guilty that you have cancelled your travels, says she will let you know if he worsens.

You occasionally drop back but you continue to wander with your pokémon. You have changed styles and colours again and started to enter competitions. Your usual team is too strong for most competitions but their progeny are not. Or their progeny's progeny. You take a certain delight in your success and even your team, usually frustrated at being unable to show off, seem happy with their family's results. You deliberately throw the last match to ensure you don't win. There are only so many teenage pregnancies which bear lookalike children you can fake into your family.

Then, one day, you return and Trevor has forgotten his family. He remembers his friends but he does not recognise them. He recognises you, however, and eventually, his son asks that you do not stay.

"We're sorry, Auntie," he says, being thirty years younger than you and looking older than you already, "but it's too upsetting. He doesn't recognise us. Only you. It's…"

"I understand," you say huskily. "Let me know when…"

"I promise."

You fly on Pidgeot's back to an isolated corner of Kalos that you found when you were forty-nine and sit, stony-eyed, staring at stars for the entire night, with Malamar and Tyrantrum guarding you.

When the son contacts you, it has been two years since your exile and six since the first message. You sit at the back of the funeral hall and leave as soon as the service is over.

You want to see more of the world. You feel as though you have explored all of Kalos and seen all it has to offer. Your pokémon seem excited by the idea although you wonder now whether they should be allowed to go free. You are a team, a family, but pokémon are rarely expected to stay with the same trainer for an eternity.

You pose the question to them. Chesnaught instantly refuses and you are unspeakably glad. They say the bond between the trainer's starter and the trainer is the strongest and you know that if he had even hesitated, justified or not, a part of you would never have recovered.

Pyroar shakes her head and crawls over to you. Blastoise growls. Malamar, usually the most reserved and contrary of your team, wraps tentacles around you. Pidgeot flutters over to your side. Only Tyrantrum has not reacted.

"I understand," you tell him, and you do. He lived before and was fossilised only to be revived for you. If any of your team deserves their own time, it is him.

He fixes his gaze on you and then steps forward, lowering his head and whining. You pat it and he opens his jaws in a grin.

Pidgeot pecks your shoulder gently and you can't help it – you bury your head in your pokémon as you hug as many of them as you can.

It is decided then. When there is nothing left for you in Kalos, you will move on. It could be in thirty years but, somehow, thirty years doesn't feel long to you anymore.

Your friends become less energetic and your visits begin to tire them. They have grandchildren now, in some cases as old as you look. These children still know who you are and for that, you love your friends.

"I'm kind of jealous," Calem admits on one visit. His hair is short now and he leans on a walking stick. "I wish I could keep travelling. My youngest grandchild's just started – I gave her my Mega Stone." He sighs. "I don't have much left from those journeys, you know."

"Come with me, then," you say on impulse. "One last journey."

He laughs and then coughs, his whole body shaking with it. "Not for me, Serena. You're young, yet. I won't be able to keep up."

"I'm as old as you are."

He grins. "I am seventy-four years old. You are seventy-four years young. Lysandre would have been jealous."

No one has spoken of Lysandre for decades.

"I don't mind," he says, misinterpreting your look. "I said long ago that I'd stop competing with you."

"Oh, Calem," you say softly.

Trembling hands pat your shoulder. "You can go now, if you want. We won't mind."

"You think I'd abandon you all now?"

He laughs again. "Seventy-four years young and you haven't changed one bit."

Tierno is the first of them to die. Calem passes away the following year. In both cases, you attend the funerals and sit at the back, stony-eyed and silent.

Shauna is still alive at eighty-three. You visit her – frail, short of sight and short of hearing, she looks a mockery of herself when you travelled together. Her mind, however, remains sharp.

"You haven't changed at all, have you, Li'l S?"

You smile because no one has called you that in years. Decades. "Calem said the same thing years and years ago."

"I don't know who's got it worse," she said. "I feel horrible but you…"

"I'm fine."

"What was that?"

"I'm fine," you say, louder.

She nods. "And where's home for you now, Serena?"

She sounds like you imagine a grandmother would sound like, if you had one.

"I've been living around Snowbelle for the last ten years or so," you say. "My team and I craft ice sculptures."

"Never settled down?"

"Where could I settle down? Even in Snowbelle, I've had to become a recluse. People grow suspicious when you barely age."

She peers at you. "You look older."

"Yes," you say dryly. "If I buy a drink, the chances of being asked for ID has decreased to about sixty per cent. Of course, my ID says that I'm eighty-four. I've been arrested twice for forgery."

She cackles. "You're forgetting that time the police caught you drinking with us and we had to bail you out."

"I was twenty-nine, wasn't I?"

"Your face was a picture. I think Calem even took one. Wish we'd found out what he did with it."

She cackles again and despite your indignation, you can't help laughing. When you both stop, she says, "Ever thought about finding AZ?"

You've thought about it several times. "Once or twice. But how are you, Shauna?"

"Getting by, getting by," she says. "Still playing with my pokémon, you'll be happy to know."

She yawns and you can see that she's tiring so you say your farewells.

She passes away just three days later.

You set off for Unova shortly after Shauna's death. You like to think she was happy when she died and that they've all found each other in death. What you don't feel is a release. You've seen Kalos change over the last few decades and, selfish as it was, part of you had been eagerly anticipating a change.

You start to explore Unova. You make some new friends – admittedly, mostly friends who are fifty to sixty-five years younger than you but they remind you of Calem and the others when you were young – but after a few years (and it alarms you that you now consider a year to be but a moment of time) they start to ask the same questions: how do you look so young? Why don't your pokémon ever fall ill? Why do you use different pokémon in gym battles than you have in your normal team? You let them battle your team once and then there is a new question: how did you get such powerful pokémon and why aren't you a regional champion?

You don't fight crime syndicates. You don't hunt legendries. You simply journey together.

When they start to settle down, you move away from them because you have been in this cycle before and what happens next is something you cannot bear to live through again. Despite this, you can't stop yourself from checking in on them from time to time but once again, they start to die and you have to attend funerals, sitting quietly at the back.

You need a purpose, you decide. You have all of the gym badges. You've explored all of the conventional routes. So you investigate the isolated peaks once more and wonder what to do once you've done that.

Over the years, you've tried your hand at many different hobbies. You sing well. You play four different instruments. You speak five languages, you can carve, you can knit, and you can perform several magic tricks. You know six dancing styles and three forms of martial arts. Once you've explored Unova from inch to inch and watched more crises rise up and be solved, you search for a reason to stay. Not counting the time with your friends, you only spent 25 years exploring. If you continue on like this, without trying to live more lifetimes, you'll have explored Sinnoh, Hoenn, Johto, Kanto and the Sevii Islands within 125 years and then what will you do?

Of course, that's nearly a lifetime away, you think, but there are only so many skills someone can master, only so many people you can meet. Because the sad truth, you think, is that people are more similar than they care to realise.

You decide that in 125 years, if you're done exploring, you can return to Kalos and start the cycle all over again. Things change in decades. You won't be back in Unova, hopefully, for at least another 150 years.

Sometimes, you hate your team and they hate you. You're a family but you've now been together for over a century and a half – even the closest of groups get sick of each other. There are days when you refuse their help and days when one or more of them threaten to abandon you. They argue among themselves and you shout at them. Once, in a true fit of anger, Chesnaught swings at you. You duck and he only knocks you out. You wonder later why you ducked. But you've had broken bones before and they heal. You've never tried actively killing yourself. Now, you wonder whether you should.

Chesnaught apparently catches your mood because he's instantly by your side, mewling at you, helping you up so you hug him and say you're not going anywhere. And you know that's the right choice because it's your fault they were exposed to the blast so if they can't leave then neither should you.

In Sinnoh, you take up study. You throw yourself into histories, into maths, into science, into anything you can. As you go from town to city, from corner to corner, you pick up more qualifications and understanding. You do the gym challenge with new pokémon and, despite your intentions, you do it with new friends. You tell yourself it's because living lifetimes kills time but when they start to ask questions, you leave them. All except for one of them.

You have a sudden brainwave and decide that maybe immortality can be cured. Your trusted confidante agrees to help you study it and, together, you research it for forty years. She retires after that and you continue for a little longer but you decide that it's fruitless. The only thing you've discovered is that your rate of growth is slowing. Height-wise, you may never stop but body-wise, it is likely to become so slow that you may as well not be aging at all. Whatever runs in your veins, however, will not be leaving anytime soon.

When your friend dies, you leave Sinnoh.

In Johto, you take up swimming, cycling, triathlon, gym and any other sport you can think of. Your pokémon have a great time, training you rather than you training them. You take the gym challenge again under your new ID but this time, you do it alone. You don't attract attention and no one questions you.

You climb up to the top of Mt. Silver – now a tourist destination apart from the very top levels – where the infamous Red was once said to have waited for years until his defeat by Gold.

When you first heard that story – you think you were thirteen but that's a guess by now – you thought he was crazy, wanting to stay in a freezing cold mountain just to wait for defeat. But when you get up there, you think you can understand it. There's something nice about not having to do anything. Just train and wait.

But the difference is that Red thought he had all the time in the world to do that. You know you do.

In Hoenn, you learn to sail. You are bored of battling now but you enter the contests. Too quickly, you master those. A volcano erupts while you're there but you're too far away to be affected.

In Kanto, you sightsee. Kanto has a fascinating history and one might argue that the best trainers came from there. You tutor people, you help children train their pokémon and you keep moving, always moving.

In some ways, it's fun, being able to take as long as you like and try anything you want to, without the fear of losing time. But on other days, you feel every one of your 290-odd years and all you want to do is sleep. You are ashamed to admit that you lost count somewhere around 200 – it was in the middle of your epic study into the cure for immortality in Sinnoh – and that you can't bring yourself to care.

You grow bored too quickly in Kanto. You see the Sevii Islands and the Orange Islands. At a loss, you go back to Kalos, to see what has changed in the last 230 years or so.

Kalos is more high-tech. Buildings have been torn down and rebuilt. You don't recognise anything but whether that's due to redesign or memory, you cannot say.

You repeat the cycle, adding in a few more countries, except you don't spend a fruitless forty-odd years studying immortality in Sinnoh this time. You look for AZ but wherever he is, he's there at different times to you.

You return to Kalos to discover that, for political reasons that you haven't bothered to keep up with, there is a day in Kalos that is now named after you and those Kalos friends of yours – Calem, Shauna, Tierno and Trevor. Apparently, it has been 450 years since Geosenge Town. At first, it's bearable and even funny but you haven't heard their names for at least two and a half centuries – you haven't even thought about them for a century or so – and after a few hours, you hide away, shaking, because you can't remember what history is true and what history is extrapolation and rumour.

Once the day is over, you return. The posters claim that only the location of Calem's body is known for sure and the biggest mystery (of course) is how you died and where you're buried. You are surprised to realise that even if you don't recall their lives, you remember where each grave is and so you make your way there. The stones are weathered or disappeared; in Shauna's case, removed completely to make way for a road; and all you can think is that at one point, these people filled your every-day life but now you can barely remember what they looked like and there isn't even a marker to remind you of them.

You place flowers where the graves should be and then, for the first time since you were … since before you became a trainer, you feel tears slip down your cheeks. At least no one is around to see.

You sit in that isolated spot you discovered when you were young. Your team sits with you in silence. None of you have spoken for maybe two or three years. Maybe longer. Not because you're angry with each other but because there is no need.

When you were young – and you mean properly young, not just in your first century – people told you that as long as you had pokémon, you would never be lonely. They were wrong. You are lonely. Not lonely in the sense that you are alone but lonely because you crave people. You could do that – slip back into crowds, make friends, even let yourself pretend for one night that you are forty-two rather than however old you are now – but then they will grow old and die and you are sick and tired of that.

Your pokémon are lonely as well. They miss the battles and the constant companionship of other people.

"Oh dear," you say aloud, shattering the silence. "How much longer do you think we'll be at this for?"

"Ches."

You nod. He knows by now as well as you do. For as long as the world exists.

"I'm so tired," you say and you can feel the rumble of their agreement through the embrace.

You are near the ruins of Vaniville Town, destroyed in a war some time ago, when you were in Hoenn again or maybe it was Unova, when you realise that you can't do this. Not anymore. In the space where you think your house used to be, you send your team out.

"I'm going to walk," you say. "I'm just going to walk and walk and see what happens. No precautions. Nothing. If my body is destroyed, I won't be alive, will I? If it burns in fire or I lose my head or someone eats me. It can't work like that." You pause. "I'm sorry," you say, "I'm so sorry. But I need to rest."

And once again, Chesnaught is by your side, paw on shoulder. "Chesnaught."

"You too?"

"Ches," he says, nodding slowly.

Pyroar and Blastoise walk next to you. Tyrantrum shrugs his shoulders and indicates that he was a fossil before. Malamar makes as though to glide away before laughing and dropping next to you. And finally, Pidgeot pecks your shoulder gently.

You touch each of them in turn.

"Come on then. One last journey," you say softly, looking up at the dimly-burning stars in the night sky. "Let's go have an adventure."

Fin