Title: Midnight Oil
Author: Shadow/Phantomness
Pairing: Championshipping (Lance x Ash/Red)
Fandom: Pokémon
Theme: #44, Coffee
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Pokemon belongs to Nintendo and Shogakukan Comics. This non-profit, non-copyright infringing fanfiction belongs to me under international copyright laws and taking it is plagiarism. Thank you. *Phantomness bows*

Notes: <> for telepathy, ** for thoughts, italics if a pokemon talks

Warnings: Shonen-ai

Red doesn’t like the taste of coffee. He finds it too bitter, and always screws his eyes up when he drinks it, but he has understood the need for caffeine.

Lance makes mild green tea and never looks the least bit sleepy. Red wishes he could be like Lance, but he’s sure it’s something genetic.

They both work together, almost feverishly, scanning through piles of heavily inked paper, and clicking through endless web pages covered with pointless statistics.

“Did you find anything?”

Red shakes his head, and feels depression crash down upon his head.

“Let’s take a break.” Lance suggests, and before Red knows what’s happening, Lance has dragged him to Charlotte’s all-night coffee shop, the best in Kanto, and he’s sitting in front of a coffee-flavored sundae with chopped nuts and whipped cream topped with a maraschino cherry.

He eats the sundae as Lance smiles across the table at him, and feels his spirits lift considerably. Misery loves company after all.

“You always know how to make things better, don’t you?”

His friend grins, and after they leave, sneaks a kiss beneath the lamppost.

“Come on. We’d best be back before we’re missed.”

All of his guilt slams back in, but before Red can sink back into the morass of angst, Lance kisses him again.

“Everything will be all right. Trust me.”

So Red does, and despite all of their frantic searching, they still have enough data, boxes and boxes of it, collected over a nerve-wracking week of study, to defeat the new draft law.

“See?”

And Red does.

End Fic

Completed 8/20/06

I like drabbling. Also, my characters seem to do a lot of time doing paperwork. I guess I think of the Pokemon League as a bureaucracy…