Chapter Text
Chapter One
People broke promises. This was something Red had known from childhood. His father had left. Green had started hating him. Red himself had abandoned the championship to climb a mountain, and stay there for three years.
People disappointed. They were disappointed.
This was a fact of life.
At fourteen, he came down the mountain and went to Viridian City Gym.
Green met him at the door, an Eevee he hadn’t had three years ago playing around his feet. When he looked at Red, it was with a composure far removed from the eleven-year-old child he’d been at the Indigo Plateau. Then, even through the bluster, the arrogance, and the condescension, Red had always sensed a brittleness waiting. His childhood friend, hiding behind the face of someone he no longer recognised.
“Lance told me that he’d sent someone up to challenge you,” Green said. “Someone with a good chance of getting you off that damn mountain, from what he described. Someone a lot like you.” He raised an eyebrow. “Not that I thought there was much of a resemblance. Ethan was much chattier, for one thing.”
Green was chatty, too. Always said more than he needed to say, and half of it meaningless anyway.
“Your Pokemon at the Pokemon Centre?”
Red nodded.
“Well, you should be in a hospital yourself, if you ask me,” Green said. “Good thing I had the fore-knowledge to close the Gym today, right?” He whistled, and Eevee bounded up onto his shoulder. She blinked bright, brown eyes at Red, and tilted her head. Fluffy ears twitched; her coat gleamed silky smooth in the sun.
Red reached out a hand.
Green caught his wrist, face dark.
They were both fourteen. Taller and lankier than they’d been. Their wrists as skinny as the rest of them.
But Green’s hand, Red registered, was strong. The fingers slender, deft, just like when they were children and their fourth-grade teacher suggested they both take piano lessons. Something to take their minds off Pokemon, she’d said. Something to remind them the world was bigger than battling, and training, and mastery.
In comparison, Red’s hand was stringy, nearly skeletal. The skin was reddened and rough with cold and hard living, and his fingernails were bitten to the quick.
Green sucked in a deep breath. Suddenly, he looked a lot older than fourteen. The shadow passing over his face, something not unlike the determined cheer in Red’s mother’s voice, in the messages she’d continued to leave on his PokeGear over the years.
“Let’s go,” his friend said, abruptly.
(Were they still friends? It was a question Red had never let himself examine too closely.)
A Pokeball launched into the air. Arcanine prowled its way around one of the tall, vine-wrapped pillars lining the way to the gym.
Green didn’t let go of Red’s fingers, only nudged him toward the Pokemon. “Get on. We’re going to the hospital.”
Red had made it down the mountain, to the Pokemon Centre, and all the way here just fine. It wasn’t like he was ill. He had a minor headache, but that was normal. He was tired, but that was also normal. He was cold, which was a little strange at the tail-end of the summer. And when he’d dropped off his Pokemon, the nurse had tried to hold him back, concern bright in the cadence of her voice.
But as kindly as she’d spoken, as gently as she’d taken his Pokeballs from him, Red couldn’t bring himself to speak to her. To even look at her.
Everything in the Pokemon Centre had been too bright. Too loud. The walk between the Centre and the Gym had been little better.
The hospital would mean more lights. More noise. More people like the well-meaning Pokemon Centre nurse who had asked him question after question, expecting him to answer.
“Your face is doing that thing,” Green said, sharply. “Look, I’ll do the talking, all right? Or if you don’t want me to do that, you can sign. You can nod and shake your head.”
Red hadn’t signed in years.
“I’ll do the talking,” Green repeated. “Please, you need to –” His jaw clenched. “Red.”
It’d been a long time since Green said ‘please’ about anything. The last time, it’d been the year after Green’s parents died, and Professor Oak had come to Red’s house. Sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. Before his mother had even looked at him, Red was already gone. Out the kitchen door and across the street. Up the stairs into his best friend’s room.
Knees drawn up to his chest, stuffed Raichu clutched in his arms, Green hadn’t looked up when Red sat down beside him.
Red touched his arm.
It’s been ten months, his friend said, slowly. They never left us with Gramps for longer than eight, before. He seemed to curl into himself. Please don’t talk.
People made promises only to break them. Red, at ten years old, had made no promises. He’d only sat there, on his friend’s narrow, Magikarp-patterned bedspread, and said nothing while Green cried noisy, wordless tears.
Arcanine nosed at Red’s arm. Then barked excitedly, as if it recognised his scent.
Red sank his stiff, painful fingers into its soft fur. Okay, he didn’t say. The words wouldn’t form in his mouth. The sign stuttered, alien after so long.
But words were unnecessary. All he needed to do was act.
That Red didn’t speak was something Green had accepted as fact, natural, part of how the world had worked since they met. As a matter of fact, it was more inarguable than when, exactly, they’d met. Daisy liked to say they’d known each other since birth, but that wasn’t possible, because Green had been born when his parents were travelling through Kalos. Gramps didn’t remember.
Delia, Red’s mom, probably had it right. She said that they’d met when they were four years old, when Green’s parents had decided he was old enough to be left together with Daisy at Gramps’ while they travelled. Delia and Green’s dad had been close friends as children. It’d only been natural that Red and Green, the same age, neighbours, and Pokemon-obsessed, followed in their footsteps.
Red didn’t speak. It wasn’t because he couldn’t. Green knew, because his friend spoke to him just fine.
Red didn’t speak to other people. That was fine; maybe he didn’t want to. At least, that’d been how four-year-old Green interpreted the situation.
As the kid who’d had a Kalosian accent for six months, whose grandpa was the Pokemon professor, and who was dropped off at said grandpa’s place for months at a time – Green knew what it was like to be different.
He’d defended Red, and his friendship with Red, with a ferocity that frequently got them both into trouble.
Until Mom and Dad went to far-off Unova, and didn’t come back. Green, nine, and Daisy, fifteen, were left at Gramps’ permanently. A man who liked his research better than children who needed to be fed, and watered, and sent to school and given attention. A man who couldn’t remember Green’s fucking name.
At first, Green waited. He hid on the day of the funeral, so that not even his sister could find him. He ignored the adults who tried to be kind, and punched the kids who taunted him for being an orphan.
And when, after ten months, Mom and Dad stayed gone, it was only then that his pathetic attempts to paper over the cracks of his world went up in flames. The world burned; Green burned with it. And so did his friendship with Red. Because when he was on fire, Green was the kind of shitty, desperate person who went around trying to set everyone else on fire too.
You were ten, his sister had said, when he told her all this one day, two years after Red disappeared. They’d been having tea in the garden behind the house. At half three in the afternoon, Gramps was busy in the laboratory, and Daisy’s line of customers was thinning. She handed them over to her assistant, a sixteen-year-old boy from Johto.
Eleven, when Red won the Championship, Green corrected. Won the Championship, brought down Team Rocket, and caught Mewtwo. He picked up his mug of green tea. And what did I do? Taunted my best friend from Pallet all the way to the Indigo League.
Green.
Ignored the suspicious-looking grunts all over Celadon City.
They were the League’s responsibility!
Held onto the Championship for – he tilted his head. Twenty-six minutes? Less?
She stared at him, jaw tight. And what else? Are you going to blame yourself for Red disappearing too? You weren’t even here.
He sipped at the green tea. It was too cool to burn his tongue.
He set the mug down.
Oh, Green, she said.
Nine, and his parents were dead in some distant land.
Ten, and he ignored Red in school, watched with cold eyes as their classmates goaded him.
Eleven, and he sped through his Pokemon journey, faster and faster and faster, as if the speed, as if each subsequent victory and poison-barb thrown in his ex-best friend’s direction – as if all of that would silence the noise in his head.
Twelve, and he was humiliated. He took ship to the Sevii Islands, devoted his every waking hour to catching Pokemon to fill his Pokedex, and pretended there was nothing else in the world. Until one day, he made it to the Pokemon Network Center on One Island, and Celio was waiting for him with a message from Bill. Green, the message said, in Gramps’ typically terse manner. Red is missing.
Thirteen, and Lance offered him the Viridian City Gym. Lance had taken back his position in the Champion’s Room. Had spent the past year and a half cleaning up both Red’s mess, and the remaining Rocket cells. When Green, who didn’t like him, couldn’t like him – after all, he’d always been sure that Lance didn’t like him, and now he’d let Red run off to who-knew-where – asked, aggressively, confrontationally, why he hadn’t gotten rid of Team Rocket himself in the first place, the Acting Champion only shook his head. And said: He’s on Mount Silver. He wanted you to know.
Fourteen, and Green handed an Earth Badge to a trainer who, chatter aside, reminded him of someone he hadn’t seen for a long time. Ethan waved good-bye on his way to the Pokemon League, and Green called Lance.
Lance said: I’ll let you know.
Two weeks after that, and Red came to his door. Half-dead, wordless, alone.
Green put his ex-best-friend on Arcanine, and took him to Viridian City Hospital. Once they were there, he spoke for Red. It was like exercising an old, little-used muscle. Sometimes, the motions were stiff. Unnatural. Almost painful. Made more difficult by the fact that Red wouldn’t speak to him either. Wouldn't even sign.
Green wondered why it surprised him. They hadn’t been friends for a long time.
But he could still do it. Interpret from Red’s expression, or his posture, if he was particularly uncomfortable. If he was confused. If something hurt, or didn’t hurt. As for straightforward answers like yes, no, and maybe, they were easy enough if Green got him to pinch him once, twice, or three times for each possible answer.
“Has his anxiety always been this severe?” asked the counsellor who visited Red’s room after the physical scans and tests were all done.
“He can usually gesture,” Green said, shortly. He’d never liked talking to adults about Red’s situation. Even doctors. Sometimes especially doctors. “Nod, shake his head, point and whatever. And when he’s comfortable, he can sign.”
The counsellor’s fingers flickered quickly.
Red’s hands, chafed, stick-thin, and stiff with tension since they entered the hospital, curled hard into the sheet.
“He’s not comfortable,” Green snapped.
After a few more questions, the counsellor left.
Another hour, and Delia arrived.
She folded her son into her arms. Whispered to him. Red turned his head into her neck, said something equally quiet back.
Green said, stiffly: “I’ll head to the Pokemon Centre.”
“Thank you,” Delia said.
“He came down on his own. I didn’t do anything.”
Before she could argue, or worse, thank him again, Green made his escape.
On the way out, he saw Gramps and Daisy conferring with one of Red’s doctors. He lifted a hand at them, and speed-walked in the opposite direction.
He already knew what the doctor had to say. There were new things like: malnourished, hypoglycaemic, poorly-healed injuries; and old things like: stress, depression, anxiety disorder. There were questions no-one could answer.
At the Pokemon Centre, Pikachu sparked at him unhappily. The other five Pokeballs were like lead weights in his hand.
Before heading back to the hospital, he dropped by the Gym to pick up Eevee. Pikachu could do with the distraction. No point in perfectly good hospital equipment getting electrocuted just because one scrawny yellow rat didn’t like the way the doctors looked at his trainer.
After a moment of hesitation, Machamp’s Pokeball went onto Green’s belt too. Machamp, despite her size and strength, was the single one of his active Pokemon team besides Eevee who could be trusted to be careful around an injured human. And Red, who’d probably only fantasised about having one, would be fascinated by her.
Most people, after all, needed to speak to someone before they’d agree to trade them their prized Machoke.
He sat at Red’s bedside. Machamp used two of its four hands to shake both of Red’s. Eevee allowed herself to be patted, then scratched behind the ear, before wandering away to sniff interestedly at Pikachu.
Pikachu slapped her on the nose.
Both Pokemon bristled.
Red reached into his backpack, a faded, patched thing, and withdrew a squishy, blue-and-yellow ball. With a flick of his wrist, the ball flew in Pikachu’s direction.
A glare of death at the inanimate object, and then Pikachu twitched its tail in resignation. He turned to Eevee. “Pika-pika chu.”
Eevee’s ears fluffed. “Vui.”
Green tore his gaze away. They’d play just fine with each other. “Your other Pokemon healed well,” he told Red. “The Centre will email more detailed reports later, but the worst any of them suffered was a couple of half-healed scratches here and there, and I expect those came from the battle with Ethan.”
Machamp wandered away to play cards with Mr. Mime.
Green’s eyes drifted to the flowers on the bedside table.
There was a tap on his arm.
“What?”
A pinched expression.
“Look,” Green said. “I may have done great with your pokers and prodders earlier. But there are some things that just don’t compute.”
Machamp came back with a note-pad and pen. Mr. Mime waved.
Red tore off the first page, already scrawled over in terrible handwriting. (Neither Red nor Delia bothered with pretty, or legible.) He wrote: Ethan.
“What do you want to know?”
Red’s pen didn’t move.
Green was fourteen, not eleven. He was a Gym Leader, responsible for all the Pokemon-related matters of a good-sized city. He swallowed his irritation. “Ethan is fine. Made it down with his Pokemon two hours after you did. If you’re asking about the Championship, well, sorry to break it to you, but he was inducted into the Hall of Fame before he even climbed that blasted mountain.”
His skin itched, the way it’d been doing since the immediate urgency of everything had gone. Taking Red to the hospital, calling Red’s mom, interpreting Red’s silence to doctors and counsellors, and picking up Red’s Pokemon – once all that was done, what the hell was he still doing here?
It wasn’t like Red needed him. He’d survived three years on the highest mountain in two regions.
“Lance is Acting Champion, remember? The Championship’s got nothing to do with you anymore. The official induction ceremony, the one with the media circus, I’m sure you remember, still has to happen though. Maybe in a week. You’ll probably be invited.”
And then Green wished he’d bitten his tongue. Red hadn’t stuck around long enough for his own official ceremony. Neither had Green. There was nothing to remember.
Red’s bone-thin fingers flexed around his pen.
Green’s jaw clenched.
Another word scratched out onto the page. Media.
“They won’t get inside the hospital,” Green said, without inflection. “And when your mom takes you back to Pallet, Gramps and Daisy will make sure they don’t get at you there either.”
The pen nib pressed deep into the ‘a’ in ‘media’.
“You are going back, right?”
Pikachu’s little ball game with Eevee had somehow ended up with them knocking their heads together.
“Where else would you go?” Green could hear the sudden tautness of his voice. “If you’re going up another mountain –”
Red paused. Then began to write slowly, laboriously. His dark hair had been longish, but not too long, when Green saw him earlier. As if, in the three years he’d spent on Mount Silver, Venusaur had been persuaded to serve as barber. Now, though, it was newly washed and cut, probably by Delia or a nurse while Green was gone, and the combination somehow made Red look younger. Thinner. His face, sun-dark and gaunt, framed by dark hair as soft and fine as it’d been when he and Green were children.
You look like a girl, the village children had liked to taunt Red. Your hair is so pretty. And then they’d turn around and accuse Green of exactly the same thing, for different reasons. Apparently having thin, long fingers was girly. Wearing a pendant, even one that’d been a gift from his father, was girly.
I’m a girl, Daisy had said, when Green came crying to her, fists bleeding and furious because Red had, like he always did, just stood there and taken it. At least until they insulted Green, and then Red had jumped the bullies, and Green had followed him, and now they were both in trouble with the headmistress. Is it so bad to be called one? Next time, find a better reason to hit them, okay? Tell Red the same thing.
Sometimes, Green thought about the world, and all the reasons it gave him to be angry, and he would understand why his parents had spent his and Daisy’s childhoods travelling. If there was no good place, and few good people, maybe it was better to just keep moving, one good person at your side. Better, in that way, to stick with what you knew, and what you couldn’t know for long enough that it became important.
“Red,” Green said, and did not think of the pendant, the gift from his father, that he still wore around his neck. “If you go up Mount Silver again, I will drag you down myself.”
Eevee wound her way around Green’s ankle, flicked her ears in that way she always did when Green was distressed.
He wasn’t distressed.
Red finished writing, and took his arm off the sheet. He looked up at Green.
Green read the ill-formed words. Why didn’t you come?
Come? Come where?
And then, Green understood. Lance had told him that Red was on Mount Silver. Him, and maybe only one other person. One of them, Red’s mom, couldn’t have gone up a mountain populated with the kind of high-levelled wild Pokemon that Mount Silver would have.
One of them just hadn’t wanted to.
Why didn't you come? Green could fill in the blanks.
There were multiple possible answers. Did you want me to? Neutral enough, maybe even a conversation-opener: what did you need me to do? What do you want me to do now?
Or if not that, then something like: When your own mother couldn’t? Because that would have pointed out the appalling lack of filial piety Red had demonstrated by disappearing up the mountain in the first place.
At the very least, Green could have just told him the truth.
I wanted to a hundred times. I couldn’t.
Instead, what came out of Green’s mouth was sharp, accusatory, and not helpful at all. “Why didn’t I climb a mountain to see you? Well, why did you stay up there for three fucking years in the first place?”
When the hospital discharged him, Green appeared to take Red home.
Red was surprised.
Over the past three weeks, Green had sometimes sent Eevee or one of his other Pokemon with Daisy on her daily visits. He’d never come himself.
“I’m sorry,” his sister had apologised the first week, as she ran a careful hand through Red’s hair. There was a frown on her face, probably at the functional, but not particularly neat cut Mom had given him. “With the formal induction ceremony for the new Champion and everything, Green’s been a bit busy with League stuff. He’ll be by someday soon.”
Red had let her take a pair of scissors to his hair shortly after. He didn’t like people touching him, with the exception of his mother. Still, Daisy had deft, quick hands. And she made no sudden movements. Chattered as she worked; a quiet stream of easy, warm chatter that flowed like a foreign language into one ear and out the other. She expected no answer.
Since Mom had come, on the heels of Green’s message the day Red came down the mountain, Red had been forced to practise his rusty sign language. He didn’t want to speak to his mother in the hospital, not when nurses and doctors and the steady stream of visitors could hear them. He liked Misty and Brock. Lance was okay too. Red had enjoyed his visit more than he’d thought he would. Mostly because the older man had brought his Dragonite and seemed content to just sit on the hospital rooftop while their Pokemon flew lazy circles above them.
Still, he couldn’t speak to them. And he couldn’t stand the idea that they, or the hospital staff, might hear him speak.
Even just to his mother, Red’s words felt dusty, disused. Somehow dangerous. As if he were opening himself to an attack he wouldn’t be able to turn aside.
Sign language was slow, hesitant. But he had managed to use it with Mom all right the past couple of days.
Daisy would probably remember.
He signed to her, as she set her scissors down: Thank you.
Green’s sister was like Green in a lot of ways. Red didn’t think he’d ever seen her cry. (He’d seen Green cry.)
She took Red’s hand. “I’m glad you came home.”
On the last day, it wasn’t Daisy who came. Or Red’s mom. It was Green, Eevee on his shoulder, and a handful of Berries for Pikachu.
“Eevee insisted,” he shrugged, as he held his open palm out to Pikachu. “I think she likes the little yellow terror. Can’t imagine why.”
Pikachu sparked a little, then grudgingly snaffled the berries.
“Come on,” Green said. “Your mom is waiting.”
They took Pidgeot.
As the bird Pokemon soared above Viridian Forest, Red looked down into the sunlit canopy of close, dark trees. It had, he remembered, once seemed mysterious and impassable; an unknowable rite of passage. The mystery was gone, now. There was only memory, fading at the edges, crumpled with the knowledge of what came after.
He tightened his grip around Green’s waist.
His friend shouted: “You okay?”
Red couldn’t answer.
The hospital counsellor had come back one more time in the two weeks Red had spent in the hospital. Green hadn’t been there, but Mom had been, and she had interpreted for Red. The counsellor would ask questions; Red would write his answers down on a note-pad, and Mom would read aloud the messy scrawl.
There is speech therapy, the counsellor had said.
It’s an anxiety disorder, Mom had said, before Red could answer. Not a problem with his speech. He can speak fine.
Then perhaps therapy for anxiety.
Red had shaken his head.
His records show that he saw a therapist from ages four to six, and that he progressed from speaking only to his mother to speaking to neighbours and close friends. What retarded his progress?
Please don’t use that word, Mom had answered, sharply.
Red wrote on his note-pad.
Mom read it out for him: School.
The counsellor’s face, young, tired – there weren’t that many counsellors employed in the government hospitals, and her hours must be long – scrunched up a little. Probably, she was thinking that Red didn’t talk much even in writing.
School, the counsellor repeated, after a moment. Are you saying that the social anxiety became worse in school? She looked at Red’s mother. Was his selective mutism explained to his teachers and classmates? Did he not continue to see his therapist?
At that point, neither Red nor his mother had felt like explaining to the woman that in a Kanto school, like in any other Kanto school, being different wasn’t something that any amount of explanation could fix.
Or that, more simply, when Red was six years old and the alimony payments stopped coming, seeing a therapist regularly enough for it to make a difference had stopped being possible.
His mother’s knuckles had been white. She blamed herself, Red knew, for Red’s inability to speak. She thought she should have intervened more at school. Worked an extra job or two so that they could pay for continued therapy.
It was exactly that self-blame that, sometimes, made Red resent her.
As if he didn’t have to enough to feel sorry for.
Two weeks later, and Viridian Forest, with its once-promise of possibility, was a gleam of green and shadow beneath the broad expanse of Pidgeot’s wings.
Green said: “Are you okay?”
And Red couldn’t say anything at all.
Whatever he said, it would be a lie anyway.
Green let him off at the gateway to his house.
Red tipped his cap in thanks, stood with a hand on the gate to watch his friend fly away. Probably, it was polite.
Pikachu drummed his paws on Red’s head, as if reminding him that even if the doctors had declared Red fully – and miraculously, they’d emphasised –recovered, they’d also said that he was weak, and far from healthy. A few months at home, regular check-ups, physical therapy sessions and counselling sessions – Red’s mother had looked at the hospital bill, and at the list of recommended treatments, and closed her eyes.
Green slid off Pidgeot, called his Pokemon back into his Ultra Ball, and regarded Red for a minute. “I said I’d visit Gramps. You want to come with? I’m going to ask one of his researchers to check over my team for me while I’m there. You haven’t met a couple of my current roster.”
Red paused, and then nodded.
“Arcanine can take you.”
Red wanted to walk.
He managed fifteen steps, and then sat down on the pavement.
Pikachu’s weight slid from his shoulder into his lap. Meaningfully: “Pika.”
“Arcanine it is,” Green said. Took a Great Ball from his belt. “You know, no-one expects you to make a miraculous recovery or something. Cut yourself some slack.”
Three years ago, Green would have been first in line to mock Red for any kind of slack.
The thought was sudden, and bitter, and uncharitable. Green had brought him to the hospital. Interceded with the doctors. Called his mom, and taken care of the Pokemon Red had left at the Centre.
Green had closed the Viridian Gym for a day just to fly him home.
Three years had passed since Red last saw his friend, white-faced with fury and shame in the Champion Room as Lance proclaimed a new Champion, twenty-six minutes after the first one had won his title.
Of course, Green’s fury and shame had smoothed into blank marble when Professor Oak barged in and congratulated Red on his victory.
Green’d always been like that. All bright, brittle, violent emotion, which he would suddenly, without explanation, without warning, shut down behind sky-high, iron-fast walls. The walls reflected the harsh arrogance of a noon sun, but revealed nothing of what lay behind.
Red had once thought he knew how to read all the cracks in those walls. The fine, hair-line fractures that told a story if one only knew how to look.
And then Green’s parents had died. A year had passed. And one month before Red’s tenth birthday, his best friend stopped speaking to him.
Green was inexplicable. Impenetrable. Untouchable. A friend, and then not. Someone who didn’t wait for Red to speak, but accepted it when he did, and that with the same ease that a fish might accept a river winding out into the ocean.
Someone who’d promised to journey with Red through the mysterious promise of Viridian Forest. Who’d promised they’d go together. Instead, he’d left on his own.
Looking at him now, Red felt that old, bitter fury rise like the sea inside of him.
He ignored Arcanine, who’d started nosing around his folded legs with the caution of a Pokemon warned against jostling an injured person. He picked up Pikachu and put his friend on the ground, so that he could get himself up.
Pikachu made a noise of alarm.
Red ignored him to take one step. And then another. And another.
He’d lived for three years on top of a mountain.
He’d beaten every trainer that came to battle him. Ethan had been the only exception. The only Champion who’d beaten Lance, instead of having been beaten by Lance and then sent to Red for the experience.
Still, Red had beaten all of the almost-Champions easily. And the loss to Ethan had been close. Between the two of them, Red had made it back down Mount Silver first.
The point was: Red had survived on his own. He’d fought on his own. He’d chased Team Rocket out of Kanto on his own.
He could make the twenty or thirty more steps to Green’s front door on his own.
His foot scraped over a rock.
Arcanine yelped. Pikachu leapt between him and the ground.
A hand grabbed his arm, and yanked him upright. “What do you think you’re doing?” his childhood friend snapped. “Didn’t you hear me? I just said cut yourself some slack!”
Red stared up into his friend’s face. And then he ducked his head.
The grip loosened.
Between them, they managed to get Red sitting on the bottom step of the stairs to Green’s house. Just a step before the gate.
Green called Arcanine back into his Pokeball.
Pikachu climbed back into Red’s lap.
Green crouched in front of him. “Hey,” he said, eyes wary. “What did you think you were doing?”
In three years, Lance had been the only one to visit him atop Mount Silver. He’d flown up on Dragonite about seven months after Red made it to the peak. He’d brought supplies with him, and batteries for Red’s PokeGear. He’d said: Your mother got your letter, and they’ve called off the search. I just came to check on you. And then, when Red’s only response was to shake his head, in some futile attempt to get him to leave, Lance had nodded, and said: Red. Your letter was clear, and no-one besides me and your mother will know where you are. But I was thinking: how would you feel if I sent some promising trainers to you? I won’t tell them your name. It would give them a challenge, and you something to do.
Red had thought about it for two days after Lance left. And finally, waking up one day to a dead fire because Charizard – Green’s Charizard, which he’d left with Daisy for Red before departing for the Sevii Islands – had fallen asleep and forgotten to relight it, Red had sent a missive to Lance with his agreement. If anything, battling had never made him feel cold.
To the agreement, he’d added a note, despite himself. When Green gets back, please tell him where I am.
Even now, Red didn’t know why he’d written that note. Only that, fingers numb, his childhood friend’s Charizard puffing warm air in his direction, this Pokemon that’d been left to him with neither explanation nor apology, Red felt like he was drowning.
He’d wanted to see Green. Green would only make him feel worse. But Red had wanted to see him anyway.
A year later, and he heard from Lance that Green had come back, and taken up the Viridian City Gym leadership. That Green knew that he was on Mount Silver.
A year after that, and Ethan climbed the mountain.
A month again after that, and here Red was, sitting on the stone step in front of his childhood friend’s closed gate.
Pikachu swept its tail over his arm, as if trying to soothe crackling fur.
Green, crouched in front of him, eyes pale brown with the afternoon sun, face closed but not hostile, reached out a hand.
Red knocked it aside.
He didn’t mean it to parallel what Green had almost done, that first day Red came down the mountain.
He could see the echo in his friend’s face anyway.
Why didn’t you come, Red had made the mistake of asking.
Why did you go up there in the first place, Green had fired back.
This was what Red told himself every day. He might not be able to speak. He might lock up when adults asked him questions, and when children taunted him. But words hadn’t been necessary, charisma had been unimportant, when it came to defeating Giovanni and Team Rocket. When it came to winning the Championship.
This was what Red told himself every night. He might, sometimes, not want to get up in the mornings, because getting up was too hard. And maybe, just maybe, he’d come down Mount Silver not because Ethan defeated him, but because on the morning that Ethan had defeated him, Red had woken up and gone to the edge of Mount Silver’s peak and contemplated, not for the first time, what it would be like to take a step, just one step, into thin air. And on that morning, too, he’d realised that what he was contemplating, on the edge of the peak, Pikachu determinedly clinging to his shoulder – it wasn’t just idle speculation.
Five hours before Ethan came up the mountain, Red had looked down at his skinny, cold-chafed arms, at Pikachu’s claws digging into his faded jacket, and he’d felt a spark of fear. At what he was doing to himself.
But Red told himself, whatever the reason he’d gone up Mount Silver, and whatever the reason he’d come down again, it didn’t change the fact that he was capable. He was resourceful. He couldn’t do a thing besides win battles, but he could win them.
So, he lifted his chin. Looked his childhood friend in the eye, and said, without words: Get away from me.
Green blinked, once.
And then he stood up, and back. “Get up yourself then,” he said. “I’ll let Gramps and Daisy know you’re here.”
Victory tasted like nothing in particular. After the gate swung closed, Red kept sitting on the step. Pikachu squirmed a little in his lap, nosing with something that seemed like disapproval at Red’s face.
Don’t you hate Green? Red gestured at him. A tilt of his head, a twist of his mouth.
Red didn't hate Green, Pikachu pointed out with a dismissive tail-wave. So what point had he been trying to make, by slapping Green’s hand away like he was a Pichu touching a Berry that wasn’t good to eat?
Red didn’t have an answer.
A soft, warm weight landed abruptly on his shoulder, and then a tangle of brown fur tumbled onto Pikachu’s head.
Pikachu squawked.
Eevee righted herself, patted at Red’s Pokemon with something like apology, and then turned large, dark eyes onto Red. She’d been sent to make sure neither of them did anything stupid, she conveyed with a twitch of fluffy, perfectly-groomed ears.
When Red had seen her, that first time at the Gym, he’d thought her the most well-cared-for Pokemon he’d ever seen in Green’s company. It was why he’d wanted to touch her. To see if she was real.
Now, of course, after seeing Arcanine, and Machamp, he knew that the level of care was the new standard for all of Green’s Pokemon.
It made him wonder if Charizard should go back. If Charizard was meant to go back.
Green’s curt note: Keep him, had never explained why, or how long.
Oh, Red thought, as pain trickled from his tired, weak limbs to his centre. He and Charizard had gotten used to each other, after three years. Venusaur and the rest, they’d warmed up to him too.
Red would miss him, if he went back to Green.
Red had missed Green too.
All of this old, tired anger, it wasn’t anything new, or different. It was just what had taken root years ago. Green didn’t need him. Well, Red didn’t need him either.
Three years, and that hadn’t changed.
Green kept away for the next couple of months. Red had made it clear that was what he wanted, so who was Green to deny him.
“The two of you, really,” Daisy sighed, the tenth time she brought it up, and Green reiterated that he wasn’t going to force himself into Red’s space. She put her brush down, patted Eevee on the head, and proceeded to give him the usual fortnightly update. Green could never quite bring himself to stop her, not when she sometimes mentioned issues or problems that he was compelled to try and help solve.
The first time Daisy had come to Viridian after Red’s hospital discharge: Red’s mom was worried about how she would afford the hospital bills for his care, and the subsequent treatments.
“What about the Championship winnings?” Green suggested, after a heroic effort at not speaking and not interfering, because Red had made it clear that he didn’t want Green anywere near him, and that probably included his business.
“Delia won’t want to take them,” his sister had answered. “You know how she always says that Red is her child, and she’ll take care of him and not the other way around.” And then Daisy had looked thoughtful. “But as long as it’s his medical expenses and not the household bills, maybe it’ll work.”
It did work. The next time Daisy came, she told him that combined, the interest on the Championship money plus the winnings from Mount Silver amounted to more than enough to pay the hospital fees, the physical therapist, and the counsellor.
“A counsellor,” Green echoed.
Daisy smiled at his instinctive distaste. “We found a good one, don’t worry. He’s worked with other children who have selective mutism. Pikachu hasn’t electrocuted him yet.”
Green didn’t remember much about Red’s therapist when he was a child.
He did remember that the school counsellor, with his constant, thinly-veiled scepticism that Red could speak, he just didn’t want to, so that couldn’t be anxiety, it had to be some kind of behavioural disorder. Acting out, perhaps, because his father had left the family, and his mother wasn’t providing enough discipline.
They weren’t at school anymore.
And it wasn’t as if things could go on the way they were. The physical injuries, the sharp and obvious deterioration in what had once been passable communication skills aside, Green had only had to look at Red, the last time, to know that his childhood friend was skating the edge of some kind of thin, invisible line.
So he kept his mouth shut, led his sister into the clothing store she’d agreed to visit with him, and enlisted her help in finding a suitable tie for Ethan’s induction ceremony the next week.
Red didn’t turn up at the induction ceremony. He did send a nice card to Ethan, the terrible scrawl on it suggesting he’d written it himself, and which said something along the lines of: You’ll do great. I hope you enjoy being Champion. Green could just see the media trying to wrangle that into something dramatic: a petty jab, a grand challenge; and decided to intervene before they could settle on a narrative. This took the form of a hearty back-clap, and a long, charming, and utterly boring speech about how much of Red’s best qualities there were to see in the kid. Half-lie, half-truth, but the press soaked it up. At the end, Green gave Ethan his number. In case you need shit, he said. Really need it. Don’t call me otherwise.
Three months after they’d found a solution to the financial problem, Daisy dropped by Viridian again to see a regular client of hers in the city, and to deliver the news that Red’s health was improving nicely. He could walk longer distances; he was gaining weight; and though he wasn’t speaking to anyone besides his mother yet, he was starting to sign to Daisy and Gramps with something like the regularity of the past.
“Also,” his sister said, waving over the waiter at their favourite Viridian katsudon restaurant, “he wants to know if you want Charizard back.”
“Obviously not,” Green snapped. “What the heck?”
Daisy gave the waiter their order. Then said: “Isn’t Charizard your starter? Red’s already had him for three years.”
“Charizard’s my starter,” Green said. “That’s precisely why he’s probably happier with Red than he’d ever be with me. Do you remember the little shit I used to be?”
His sister said nothing for a moment. And then she clasped her hands together on the wooden table. “Is that why you have so few of your Pokemon from your trainer days?”
The subject-change made his head spin. “What?”
“You used to switch them out quite frequently, I remember,” Daisy said, tranquilly. “But you’ve kept the same team for years now. I’ve been meaning to ask.”
“I use different teams all the time for gym battles.”
“All new Pokemon,” she said. And then, at his look of incomprehension: “Alakazam and Raticate, your oldest Pokemon aside from Pidgeot, are both with Gramps. Exeggutor and Gyarados are with the Daycare in Johto.”
“They were part of my Championship team,” he said. “They’re too strong to deploy against baby trainers. And I’m hoping Exeggutor and Gyarados will each befriend a nice, well-mannered Pokemon and produce interesting Eggs.”
“You released Heracross when you got to the Sevii Islands.”
“He liked the Berry Forest.”
“Rhydon was traded to a trainer in Kalos last year.”
“Rhydon got to evolve into Rhyperior, and I got Larvitar. He’s a Pupitar now, actually.”
“And Charizard has been with Red since you lost the Championship, and left not a week after.”
Green scowled. “Charizard can stay with Red.”
“So of your current primary team,” his sister said, “Pidgeot is your only Pokemon that you took with you to challenge the League. The others you actually use are Arcanine, who you caught when you were eleven but never trained; Machamp and Eevee, who joined your team after the Championship battle with Red; and Pupitar, who you traded for.”
“You forgot Aerodactyl,” Green said.
“You’re still waiting for the people at Cinnabar Lab to revive him.”
Green didn’t know why he felt like he was being backed into a corner. He was having dinner with his sister, in a perfectly nice restaurant, surrounded by customers and flanked by a lovely night view of Viridian Forest. “I had to use six Pokemon against Ethan. There’s Tauros.”
“You use Tauros when five Pokemon aren’t enough,” Daisy tapped her fingers against her glass of green tea. She didn’t take her eyes from Green’s face. “But you only use him then.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I’m trying to ask you, Green, if all the Pokemon you had when you were eleven – are they all somewhere else? What about Sandslash, Cloyster, Magneton, and Ninetales?”
He hadn’t known his sister had such a memory for his old Pokemon. “All with Gramps.”
“Why did you keep Pidgeot?”
He didn’t answer.
“Green,” she said.
“Does it matter?”
“It matters,” Daisy said, with the terseness that she’d learned from Gramps. “Because you’re my brother, and I wish you would stop punishing yourself for being an angry, grieving child.”
He didn’t answer that either. His sister left soon after, climbing onto the Fearow Green had given her after he got to Lavender Town. She completely spooked at the Ghost-type Pokemon in the Tower, he’d scoffed. Pidgeot’s good enough for a Flying-type, and stronger. I won’t be rotating them out anymore, so you can have this one.
Afterward, he’d climbed the Tower a second time, met Red on the way back down, and lost yet another Pokemon battle.
Just more proof that at eleven, no matter how many battles he won, or Pokemon he caught, levelled-up, and evolved, Green could never beat a kid who clung to his own Pokemon team with all the ferocity of a child to his dearest friends. A kid who couldn’t even speak.
“Hey,” Daisy said, as she settled herself onto Fearow’s back, “How much sign language do you remember?”
“Beats me.”
Her gaze suggested that she knew that Green had never quite forgotten it. There were plenty of people who used sign language who weren’t Red, after all. No point in wasting a perfectly good skill.
Watching his sister fly away on her beautifully-groomed, glowingly-healthy Fearow, who still never failed to greet her old trainer with a friendly nudge or a trill, Green felt a sharp sting in his chest.
He turned back towards the gym.
Over the next two to three months, his sister’s updates kept coming. The doctors had cleared Red to train actively with his Pokemon again, instead of standing at the sidelines. He would occasionally speak to Daisy, if not to Gramps. He was working with Gramps on a research project, surfing in the waters by Pallet Town to observe Tentacool and Tentacruel migration behaviours.
Finally, Green came back to his Gym one day to find his trainers, all of them competent, highly-skilled, and confident in a crisis, in a flustered mess.
He glared at Red, who had taken up residence on a bench in the main battling hall, Pikachu on his head and Eevee in his lap, and said: “Tell me no challengers came and saw my trainers behaving like star-struck idiots.”
Red tipped his hat in greeting. His face was utterly blank.
Bonita cleared his throat. “His Pikachu said he came to see you.”
“His Pikachu said –” Green sighed. “All right, you lot, clear out.”
Arabella said: “What about the crisis Mr Yoshi came to ask you about? Was it resolved?”
“It wasn’t a crisis. It was his grand-daughter wandering off into Viridian Forest again. Now, scram. And tell me if a challenger comes.”
Salma coughed. “I don’t think Viridian City knows what to do with a present gym leader. They’re getting you for all kinds of things, these days.”
“Shut up, I’m much more present than the first guy.”
“And not the boss of a criminal organisation,” Elan grinned. And then, presumably remembering who’d dispatched that particular criminal organisation, his gaze skittered sideways to Red, and he squeaked.
Ida clapped her twin brother and battle-partner on the back. Sent her Porygon dashing off around, between, and over everyone else’s feet. “Come on, guys. I think our fearless leader wants to talk to his friend.”
“Red and Green are friends,” Bonita said. The most star-struck of the lot, clearly. “I didn’t know that Pokemon Champions had friends.”
“I was a Champion too,” Green said. “What are you trying to say?”
His trainers looked at each other, and let Porygon corral them out of the hall.
Green turned back to look at Red.
His – friend heaved Eevee off his lap, stood up, and signed: Your trainers like you.
What was Green supposed to say to that? Of course, they were supposed to have hated him? This was why he hated Red, sometimes.
(His sudden spike in temperature had nothing to do with the fact that Red had just signed to him. Nothing at all.)
“Yeah, well,” he cleared his throat. “I’m a good Gym Leader. Just ask Lance. I’m here at least two-thirds of the year.”
Where do you go?
“Where do I go?” he echoed.
He saw, from the twitch on Red’s face, that Red thought the repetition meant he was going too fast. Maybe Green didn’t know sign language anymore. Maybe it was rusty. Red looked sideways at Pikachu, who twitched its tail towards the note-book discarded on the bench.
“No, I understand you,” Green said, hastily. “I just –” I just, what? He was pathetic. “I don’t go anywhere specific. Sometimes I help Lance with League business, though I guess I don’t know if I’ll still be doing that now that Ethan is Champion.” Come to think of it, he didn’t know what Lance was going to do, full stop, now that he was no longer Champion, or Acting Champion, or Perennial Champion. “And sometimes I help Gramps with research stuff. Or, you know, I just don't feel like being here, is all, and I leave.” Usually when the shadow of Mount Silver, or the proximity of Pallet Town, got to be too much, and he had to leave.
Red looked at him. Expressionless.
Green said: “Why are you here?” When he was younger, maybe he would have signed it too, because not being the only one signing between them made Red feel less alone. But he didn’t know if this Red, post-friendship Red, would appreciate Green putting them on the same level. In the same space. “I thought Daisy said you agreed to stay in Pallet with your mom. At least for a couple more months.”
Red glanced down at Pikachu, who looked back. Eevee wound herself around Green’s feet, and then climbed expertly up his leg, his arm, and onto his shoulder. She bit his ear.
“Ow,” he snapped. “What?”
Pikachu’s tail twitched. The little bastard.
Red signed: I am staying in Pallet. And then his fingers stiffened, briefly, as if he would fold them into fists. But he continued: I’m sorry about last time. May I meet your Pokemon now?
Green blanked for a minute. And then he remembered. Before Red had pushed him away, made it clear he hadn’t forgiven Green for their childhood, and wanted him nowhere near him, Green had offered to show him his Pokemon.
“Right,” Green said. “Sure. They’re out back. Only Eevee is wild enough to keep running everywhere around my Gym when I’m not here.”
Red frowned.
“Don’t look like that. Most of them are out back.” He tapped the Pokeball at his waist. “But Machamp is right here. Give me a break. I’m a Gym Leader; I’m not stupid enough to go out into the wild grass without at least one Pokemon.”
That expression was unconvinced.
Green sighed. “I am perfectly aware of the need to protect myself from the hordes of little yellow rats in Viridian Forest, all of which would love to Thunderbolt me to death.”
Pikachu’s head tilted, as if attracted by this prospect.
Green glared at him. Then made himself look back at Red. “This way.”
They left the main battling hall, and took one of the internal side corridors that was closed to challengers.
As they walked, Green said: “Did you bring yours too? I haven’t seen Charizard in a while.”
Pikachu answered, not his trainer. A series of squeaks.
“Right,” Green said, and threw open the door to the expansive backyard. He waved his arm around at the grassy area, warm with afternoon sunlight. The retractable glass roof was down today, to let the Pokemon enjoy the breeze. “Here. Oh, give me a minute.”
He put his fingers to his mouth.
The whistle brought a rumbling of movement.
Green said: “You know Pidgeot.” The Pokemon was already leaning down to pick up Red’s cap in his beak. “And Arcanine.” A fiercely wagging tail. Pidgeot let go of Red’s hat to tug Arcanine back before he could jump him.
Pikachu chirped in greeting.
“You don’t know Pupitar.” The Pokemon waved its compact shell-body back and forth in welcome, and then went to hide behind Pidgeot. “He’s shy for someone who’s set to evolve into one of the least subtle Pokemon in existence.”
Pidgeot let go of Arcanine’s tail.
“And then there’s Eevee and Machamp.” A click of the latter’s Pokeball from his belt, and Machamp was roaring in a friendly way at Pikachu. “So I guess I was wrong. You’ve met mostly everyone, really. It was just Pupitar. Sorry you had to come out all this way.”
The humour was beginning to grate on Green’s nerves, not least with how easy it was. As if four years mattered little in the grand scheme of the universe.
Green, Red, and Pokemon shouldn’t, after everything, equal to anything but tears.
Red stretched out a hand to Machamp, who shook it. He looked at Green.
Green didn’t know what the anticipation was for. And then he did. “Oh. It’s just these five, really. I have other Pokemon I use in gym battles, depending on how many badges a trainer has, how many journeys they’ve been on, that kind of thing. But this is my primary team.” He pointed in a vague way toward the back of the yard. “I also have a Tauros I use sometimes. But he spends a couple of months with Gramps every now and then. Prefers being in a herd, and all that jazz.” He didn’t know why the back of his neck was burning. Why he felt uncomfortable under Red’s sharp, precise gaze. “And I’m planning to add an Aerodactyl to my team. I got an Old Amber from the Cinnabar Island folk. But he isn’t here yet. So, y’know. This is all I’ve got, at the moment.”
Silence, or stillness, really, as Red glanced at the five Pokemon in front of them, and then at Green. Finally, he signed: What about the others?
“What others?” Green snapped, and then regretted it. “What do you mean?”
When we were eleven.
His chest was tight. Breathing hurt. Where did Red get off, coming here after months, after telling Green to get away from him, really, literally, and then asking the same exact thing that Green’s sister had asked.
Green hadn’t known, until Daisy’d said – he hadn’t. He hadn’t realised.
“I didn’t get rid of them, if that’s what you’re suggesting,” he heard himself say, hands going to the pockets of his jeans before he could stop them. A classic defensive gesture. Even Red could read the hell out of that one. “You’ve got Charizard. And you’re keeping him, so don’t even think about giving him back. And the rest, they’re just – somewhere where they’ll be happier.”
Red didn’t say anything. Well, of course not.
But he didn’t sign anything either.
Pikachu made a trilling noise. Inquiry. He climbed up Red’s leg, and nudged at the Pokeballs on his trainer’s belt.
Red reached down. Patted Pikachu’s head. And then plucked the first of the Pokeballs, a blue Great ball, tossing it into the air with the same efficient, authoritative air he’d had when he was eleven. (Watching him, Green was willing to bet that, even malnourished and freezing up on that bloody mountain, he’d started off each new battle with exactly that same confidence-destroying ease.)
Red pointed to each Pokemon as they manifested.
Lapras blinked bright eyes. The sun gleamed off its perfectly polished shell.
Snorlax turned over and went back to sleep, its bulk nearly flattening Arcanine.
Venusaur eyed Green with distrust. Fair enough. Venusaur had been Red’s starter.
Blastoise looked around the enclosure with interest.
Charizard looked straight at Green, and lumbered over to nuzzle warm breath into his hair.
“That tickles,” Green said, and shoved the great orange head away. “You look good.”
Smoke streamed into the air. Charizard watched it spiral with interest.
Green studied all of them. All healthy, strong, perfectly recovered from their three years up on the mountain. He knew that already. He’d been the one who’d gone to the Pokemon Centre to pick them up, after all.
But there was a question he didn’t know the answer to.
He turned to look at Red. “I figured you just didn’t think Espeon would like the cold up there, or something. Where is he?”
Red’s face was blank. And then he signed: Six Pokemon.
“Sure, that’s official League regulation,” Green rolled his eyes. “But no-one bats an eye if you carry around an extra one or two. As long as you don’t use them in League battles, it’s just good sense to have another one along in case some trainer knocks out all six of your team.”
Red stepped away from him. Waited at Pidgeot’s side for Pupitar to poke his head out curiously. And then he waved.
Pupitar looked at Green.
Green said: “You traded him away. Or released him? Come on, it can’t be a state secret.”
Red’s shoulders were tense.
Pikachu climbed up onto Snorlax’s stomach. Beckoned Eevee up too.
Red turned back to Green. Signed: Released.
“Okay.”
But Red’s fingers didn’t stop moving. Couldn’t stay on mountain. Couldn't be sent to Professor Oak. So I released him.
“You couldn't send him to Gramps? Why?”
That look on Red’s face. Green had hated it even when they were children. The discomfort. Worse; embarrassment. Shame. Because Red couldn’t do what other ‘normal’ people could do. His friend hesitated. Couldn’t go into a Pokemon Centre. Tried.
“So what, you released Espeon while you were on the mountain?” Green said, trying to process the improbable sequence of events. “Espeon don’t live on mountains in the first place. Why didn’t you give him to Lance to give to Gramps?”
Red started to sign, then stopped. Then signed again: Before Lance found me. Charizard took me to the base of the mountain. Released him there.
That made sense. That was reasonable. Espeon was high-levelled; he was evolved; he’d taken Green’s own Pidgeot out more than once without much trouble. Whatever the apparent issue with walking into a town and finding a Pokemon Centre, Red would never have released one of his Pokemon into the wild if they were vulnerable.
Red had released one of his Pokemon.
It was hypocritical. Green had released dozens, maybe hundreds of Pokemon. Weak ones he needed only to fill up his Pokedex, battle-shy ones he’d given up on training, even ones with just the wrong combination of stats to really make his team into the perfect battle team. Releasing a Pokemon was an ordinary, completely acceptable course of action for trainers who were still working out their preferences, their battle styles and objectives. There was nothing wrong with it.
But Espeon had been with Red since Celadon City.
Espeon had won the Championship with Red.
Red saw all his Pokemon as friends, even family.
Eevee had jumped off Snorlax and come to nose around Green’s feet. He bent down to pick her up, stroke her ears the way she liked it.
When he lifted his head, he saw Red looking at him. With anticipation. Resignation.
Green said: “You must have been in a really bad place, huh?”
His friend’s hands twitched, stiff at his sides. The white brim of his cap tipped forward to hide his eyes. On his right wrist, the black sweat-band that he liked to wear as some kind of attempt at colour symmetry with the watch strapped around his left, slipped forward. Still loose on a too-skinny limb.
Green made himself meet his gaze. “You want to know why I’ve still got Pidgeot?”
All of his own Pokemon, except Eevee, in his arms, and Pidgeot, waiting patiently for Pupitar to stop hiding and say hello, had already started to disperse. The Gym was their home, after all. And they’d met the person Green’d wanted them to meet.
Red’s Pokemon stayed where they were. This wasn’t their home. And to everyone except Charizard, Green was a threat.
He spoke each word clearly. Because, somehow, this was important. That Red should hear what Green was telling him.
“Charizard was my starter,” he said. “And you know already – I didn’t pick him because I wanted him. I picked him to spite you. It’s really that simple.”
Eevee licked his cheek.
He tried not to tighten his grip on her. She would bite him. “But Pidgeot, Pidgey, he was the first Pokemon I ever caught. And when I caught him, sure, I was thinking – look, a Pidgey, I need to fill my Pokedex. Still, he was the first Pokemon I’d ever caught. I was excited. I was happy. I was thinking – maybe this will be everything I ever thought it would be. As exciting as it had to have been, for my parents to do it over and over again. Keep doing it, until they stopped coming back.”
Red was silent.
Red was always silent.
Green didn’t think he’d heard him speak once since they were nine years old.
Wasn’t that Green’s own fault? His fault, for pushing his best friend away, because of some stupid conviction that – what, if he hurt Red, he himself would stop hurting?
Daisy was wrong. He’d been a grieving, angry child. That didn’t mean that forgiving himself would fix anything.
“So I kept Pidgeot,” he finished. “I’ve still got Pidgeot.”
Eevee was a heap of warm, soft fur. Eevee was anchoring him to this spot. Eevee, and Pidgeot, who tilted his head as if he understood everything that Green was saying.
Red watched, unblinking, as if he understood what Green was not saying.
It was unnecessary. After three years, after four, really – and added to that, all these months staying away from Red as if he could apologise by not existing – Green was done with forgiveness. He was done with wanting it.
Anyone who would forgive him was already gone. There was just Pidgeot. And Red.
So, Green said: “I know you’re angry at me. I’m angry at me, for the little shit I was when I picked Charmander to beat your Bulbasaur. When I used my Pokemon like they were tools to win myself fame and glory. When I stopped being your friend.”
A muscle moved in Red’s jaw.
“But I’m angry at you too, now. You climbed up that fucking mountain. You went up there first, and you didn’t come back.”
The sunlight beat down on their heads. It’d been winter when Red came down the mountain, and now, nearly six months later, it was spring. Even on a particularly bright and sunny day like this one, the breeze was still crisp enough to cut into Green’s skin.
“Why the hell would I climb it after you? So you could spook and go somewhere else? You didn’t need to go up there at all. You won. You beat me.”
He wasn’t shouting. He wasn’t. He knew better than to shout at someone who, even at eleven, wouldn’t flinch from a Team Rocket Grunt, black-clad and armed with poison Pokemon.
“You won, you didn’t need to leave.”
Did you? Red signed, with precision.
Green set his jaw.
Between the two of them, Green had always been the one to hate the cold more than Red did. Red would wear short sleeves to school in the winter, even though Pallet Town was by the sea and its long, rocky coast was often whipped with freezing winds in the cold months. Green wouldn’t be caught dead outside his house without a nice, thick jacket. Sometimes, he’d even wear one of the long, warm cloaks that he and Daisy’d inherited from their mom. They were adventurer’s cloaks, Daisy had explained, and they’d been the fashion in Kalos when their mother was young.
Red was wearing short sleeves now.
Green was wearing a jacket.
Red’s expression was as still and quiet as snow.
There were a dozen different responses, some of them constructive, some of them not. Green thought of his sister, flying away on Fearow across the expanse of Viridian Forest, and found himself saying, honestly: “Yes, I did.”
Red blinked, as if in surprise. Then, his gaze flickered sideways, toward Pupitar. Pidgeot. Pikachu, who’d scrambled off Snorlax to plant himself firmly by his trainer’s white-and-black sneakers.
Red adjusted the brim of his cap.
Green waited.
Thin, but stronger, haler fingers than when Green had seen them last, sketched out a reluctant, but unmistakeable message into the air. I did too.
It wasn’t anything Green didn’t already know. Hadn’t already guessed.
But it made his teeth grind anyway. “What happened?”
Red paused.
Pikachu hopped up his leg, and onto his shoulder.
Red looked at his Pokemon for a long, silent moment. And then he turned his head back to Green. Do you know, his hands stilled. And then shifted into finger-spelling. The katakana weren’t familiar.
“Aion,” Green echoed. “What’s that? Some foreign word?”
It means time.
“I don’t know it.”
A vague wave of his hand. Red hadn’t either.
“Well, where did you hear it?” Green began, and then lost patience. “What are you getting at?”
Red’s mind, Green had learned from childhood, worked in strange, often random, and apparently illogical patterns. Their teachers had often thought it was part of his selective mutism, like anxiety made you crazy.
Green knew that it was just Red. And whatever made Red, y’know, Red.
It wasn’t as if other people, including their dumb teachers, were paragons of rationality.
Snorlax let out a snore loud enough to shake the branch above him.
Red looked down at his hands. Seemed to find something suddenly uncomfortable about signing. He pointed upward instead, and patted Pidgeot’s wing. Gestured in an ambiguous, expansive way at his own Pokemon, still sitting – or sunning, in Venusaur’s case – in a half-circle around them.
Green wasn’t psychic.
He was great at guess-work. “You want to go back up Mount Silver. No way.”
Red’s hands twitched. And then he patted Pidgeot’s wing again, more deliberately.
“You want to go together.”
A short, sharp nod.
Guessing, Green knew from experience, didn’t mean he understood a fucking thing.
“Wait here,” Green said, curtly. “I don’t have anything in the kitchen, so I’m going to call delivery. Pizza all right?”
Red glanced at him.
His friend gestured Eevee to stay, then took his PokeGear from his pocket and left the kitchen.
Anger carried around for a long time was hard to get rid of. This was what Aaron, the counsellor Red’s mom had found, had said, one of the few times Red had brought himself to talk about Green. Usually, they talked about other things. Practical things. Red’s anxiety. Red’s three years on the mountain. Why Red had gone up the mountain was another topic they’d only skimmed over.
When they didn’t talk, they did exercises, or challenges, like re-learning sign language. Then using sign language more frequently with his mother. Then using it in public with his mother. Then using it with Daisy.
It was slow, painstaking progress, slower than Red remembered with his first therapist when he was six.
“It’s not a League challenge,” Aaron said, when he expressed this frustration. “Or a linear graph. You don’t need to do it better every time. You don’t need to do it faster. We can go at your pace, whatever that is.”
Red stared at him, and wondered how to explain the obvious. Since the age of six, or seven, really, because Red had been born in August, and gone to school the April following his sixth birthday, everyone had told him that he needed to do better. He needed to learn faster. Even his mother, who’d never reproached him for not speaking, had, sometimes, when she was tired from working or anxious about their living expenses, asked him if he couldn’t grow up more quickly. All children in Kanto left home at the age of eleven. They had to be adult enough, mature enough, to survive on the road for at least a year.
Aaron’s gaze flickered, and he smiled. “Do you know, there are three concepts of time in ancient mythology? Kronos, kairos, and aion. Kronos is empirical time, and so it is divided into past, present, and future. Kairos is opportune time, the moment when the right action will lead to success. Kronos is quantitative; kairos qualitative. Kronos is observed, and kairos is judged. How do you think aion is defined?”
Red had never been much interested in school, beyond what he needed to know for his Pokemon journey. Some of his classmates had studied harder, intending to join those children who would go journeying for the usual minimum period of one year, and then return to enter middle schools. So he only shrugged.
Aaron said: “Aion is time unbounded. Neither observable, nor judged. Neither linear, nor limited. Aion is time in and of itself.” His Crobat, hanging upside down from the rafter above Red’s bed, opened one eye, then closed it. “It’s okay to think of time as just time, Red.”
Two weeks after that conversation, and after the doctors had cleared him for training again, Red took Charizard and went for a flight around the coast of Pallet Town. As the wind rushed through his hair, and Charizard spread his wings broad and gleaming, Red looked down at the shadow the two of them cast, a patch of darkness that skimmed the long grasses and clear waters surrounding his hometown. And he reflected: it’d been nearly three and a half years since he’d flown in winds this warm, or in sun this forgiving.
The skies above Mount Silver were beautiful but harsh, sharp and brittle with cold and immense height. The winds were strong, and the light blinding.
Green had flown him back on Pidgeot weeks ago, after the hospital discharge, of course. But Red had been paying attention to other things. Discomfort, exhaustion, the spectre of failure that loomed always behind, and above, and right in front of him.
Aion is time unbounded, he heard Aaron say in his head.
Charizard swept low to the ground, clawed feet brushing the tips of the grasses. Red heard himself laugh.
Caught himself, the sound high, and brittle, and unexpected, and nearly tumbled off Charizard’s back in surprise.
Green’s Pokemon surged upwards in an attempt to knock Red back into place.
Arms locked around a long, warm neck, face pressed into leathery hide, Red felt again like he was suspended on that line between despair and normality.
But this time, the line was broader. It was wide enough for him to dig his feet into the earth, and breathe.
Three weeks after that, the Tentacool and Tentacruel project concluded, and Red summoned the courage to gather up his six Pokeballs, attach them to his belt, and fly to Viridian. He’d considered walking, but there was part of him that still shied away from even the happier, simpler moments of his Pokemon journey. As if they were the tip of an iceberg he wanted to remain beneath the sea.
He met all of Green’s Pokemon.
He told Green how he’d had to let Espeon go.
And when Green got angry at him, Red didn’t know what to say, because he was angry too. He was angry; he’d been angry. A petty, childish fury, at not just Green, but at the children who’d mocked them both, at the man who’d left Red’s mom, at himself.
It wasn’t just Green.
That didn’t make it better.
Time is just time. Aaron was wrong. The only place that time could be just time - where there were no people to watch it pass by; and as it passed by, count the minutes, the hours, the days, the years that Red didn’t measure up to standards – was a mountain high enough to pierce through clouds, and cold enough to rattle bone.
Red hadn’t been angry on Mount Silver.
He’d been alone.
And so, when he’d replied Green’s own anger with: Let’s go up Mount Silver together, it’d felt somehow inevitable.
Unexpected, but inevitable.
Green’s agreement was the same.
The evening light shone through the kitchen windows. Red watched Pikachu and Eevee draw patterns on the glass with their paws.
Green appeared back in the doorway to the kitchen.
“Hey,” he said. “I ordered pizza. Pineapple, the way you like it.” Then he hesitated. “Right?”
Red watched him.
The pendant at Green’s neck was on a shorter cord that Red remembered. Its glassy, cloudy surface glimmered in the fluorescent lights of the kitchen. The white-painted walls, and darker wood cabinets, the same as the walls and furniture in the rest of the apartment, gleamed too. Neat, clean lines, pendant and apartment both, just as neat and clean and organised as the rest of Green’s new life seemed to be.
In three years, Red had become a rumour, a shadow of a memory. He’d kept all of the Pokemon he’d trained from the age of eleven, with the exception of Espeon and Mewtwo. Even the clothes he wore were the same cut, design, and material that they’d been when he first left Pallet Town, because he’d wanted them to be. He’d worn the same three outfits on Mount Silver for years, after all. There was a comfort in familiarity.
Green was different. In three years, Red’s childhood best friend had changed from the angry, carelessly-arrogant and sometimes-cruel child he’d been to someone else altogether. A gym leader whose subordinate trainers seemed to like as well as respect him; whose community sought his help; and a trainer whose Pokemon looked well-fed, well-rested, and happy.
Fourteen-year-old Green lived above the Gym where he worked, in his own apartment. He travelled. He gave his Pokemon away, and kept only his second-oldest.
He’d stayed away for six months because Red asked him to.
If it weren’t for the pendant still around his neck, and the particular challenging slant of his grin, he could have been a stranger.
Time is just time, Aaron had said.
That in itself, Red thought, was a broken promise. A disappointment.
Because even when Red had lived on a mountain where time often seemed not to exist, it’d continued to flow on below the mountain.
And Red, as always, had been left behind.
Green was waiting for his answer, a hand stretched out to pet Eevee, and gaze skimming between his Pokemon’s ears and Red’s face.
Pineapple is fine, Red signed. And, because he couldn’t make himself sign ‘thank you’, he pulled down the brim of his cap instead.
His friend gathered Eevee into his arms, and nodded, tightly. He said nothing at all.