The Powers That Be Ship Thee Brendan x Wally (Loverivalshipping)

Bonus One-Shot: A Porcelain Ralts

Me: "This is one of the few fanfics I have that hasn't gifted you guys a bonus one-shot, so I thought I would write one for you. I don't know how good it is because I've been reading some sad things lately that kind of inspired me to make something artsy, but I hope you like it anyways. I know I've definitely been just as slow updating this fanfic as with my others that have gotten bonus one-shots, and then I started that privatization of chapters thing, so you guys definitely deserve this, which just makes me hope you like it even more." *Nervous smile* "It's not a happy one-shot, and it's not one that focuses on romance, but I still think it's something to read anyways. I'm dedicating it to call-me-ricky because the basic bones of the plotline wound up following a story of his that I read recently. Well, here you go:"

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Once upon sometime, somewhere, there was a room. And the room had many, many shelves with a lot of dolls and a lot of figurines. There was a woman, a toy enthusiast, collecting them. She cared for them deeply—her sole hobby—so she dusted them often, added to her collection, and one year, when she had had a child and did not understand how people could imagine up bedtime stories out of thin air, she pulled a rocking chair into the display room. She sat down, tucked a short, brown curl behind her ear, and cradling her infant son with one arm, picked up a clay Sableye with the other, her favorite. The purple glaze was slightly off-color and his right eye was bigger than his left, and he had a chip in his foot, but he was her favorite. And she knew the perfect tale to tell—of a darkened labyrinth of caves where exotic jewels would glimmer and shine at the slightest hint of light.

There were whole walls and pillars of aquamarine and clear crystal, even a pool of cave water dripping down over eons of time from the stone ceiling to its amethyst depths, glowing purple. This was the lair of a crippled, creeping thing—not well-shaped, overly small and too sharp to the touch. From the rocks it was formed and in the darkness—birthed of the dank, musty earth to live a life devoid of the sun. Its eyes were the clear crystal in the walls and in the pillars. Its body was the amethyst from the depths of the waters. And embedded in its back lay two shimmering fragments of aquamarine. But at the center of this forlorn creature's chest—the heart of Sableye as it was rumored—was a stone not outright found in the caves—a ruby deeply glowing red.

The creature whittled away its countless time—with no moon or sun to measure the days—searching for these stones. It dug in the earth, scraped its amethyst claws against limestone and marble, and raked its crystalline eyes over what it uncovered. Not much luck: the image of a curled shell in the rock, fossilized remains, a bed of emeralds discovered being lorded over by one of its seldom-seen brethren strangely glinting golden. But every so often, on a rare day—or was it night—a clod of earth would be ripped away and a pulse of red would reach the unblinking crystal eyes. The creature would cock its head at an angle, astute and cautious, wary of garnets; pluck up the gem with clinking claws sending out twinkling sounds into the virtual abyss of sightlessness and noiselessness; and then very quickly, all at once, gobble down the spot of red with crushing teeth of diamond, shattering it and spilling crumbs of scarlet crystal to the earth below. It was in this way that Sableye sustained itself and spent its days.

Oh, the hours it combed the earth—it was like a living stone, timeless and immortal, only a steady ebb of water could erode it away. Or at least that's how it seemed until a bright beam of light shone upon the cave one day. It scanned the ground—back and forth, back and forth, moving forward, occasionally stuttering up to the ceiling, then back to the ground. And then it passed over a twinkle and a shimmer—more than one color so close together—and it stopped because it recognized that this was no wall of crystal or pool of amethyst but something even rarer, as rare as red in the darkness. The light crept forward, closer and closer, until it stopped and shone clearly upon an immobile statue, veins running dry with clay over time as the last pulses of red beat through its body. The ruby in its chest was dull, but otherwise the corpse was as perfectly preserved as crystal—when time had ended for it, no one would ever know.