Work Text:
The distortion world has never been this full before.
Giratina looks around its broken realm, taking in the destruction left in the aftermath of its success. Forests fall one by one, trees toppling one right after the other until only a few remain. Flowers shrivel up and wither away, lush, vibrant gardens rotting away in the blink of an eye. Marshlands dry up as quickly as the crashing waves of Arceus’s seas, turned overhead and leaving mud and saltwater bubbling and congealing in the air. Ice melts off towering ice glaciers and from inside complicated tunnels beneath the ice’s surface as snow hovers, static and unchanging, from above. Mountains crack, and crack, and crack, until they explode into nothing more than bits of rock and gemstone and dirt, never to be whole again.
Giratina watches as the few, meager civilizations that lie scattered across Hisui crumple and fall apart before its very eyes, and it thinks, a little wistful, that it should feel satisfied. Proud, even, of what it has accomplished. Of the destruction it has unleashed.
It finally got to do what it wanted to do all those centuries ago. It finally got the chance to enact its revenge on Arceus, to punish the deity for ever rejecting it and discarding it like it was nothing, leaving it trapped and bound to a lifeless husk of a world that takes and takes and takes and gives nothing but pain and misery in return. It succeeded in enacting that revenge, too, the renegade Pokemon watching its creator’s most prized creation rot and decay within its broken shell of a home. Finally, finally, its creator can feel the same hurt it has felt all these years, the same sense of betrayal, the same loss and anguish and rage.
It has done what it had planned to do the moment the human Volo sought it out and asked for its help in finding and conquering Arceus—and now, now is the time for celebration. One that’s been a long time coming, as far as it’s concerned.
And yet, Giratina looks upon the remnants of Arceus’s precious world, and all it feels is an overwhelming sense of guilt.
This…this was not what it wanted. Not really. It had wanted Arceus to hurt, yes, had wanted it more than it itself could properly quantify, but this—this widespread destruction did not accomplish that. It did not even touch the divinity that was Arceus, this dying world before it so mundane and plain compared to the Original One’s brilliance.
No, Giratina has not punished Arceus at all for hurting it for over a millennia’s time. All it has done is kill and destroy countless of innocents, both humans and Pokemon alike, and that—that does not sit well with Giratina at all.
And Giratina knows that the human called Volo is speaking with Arceus now, creating a new world as Giratina watches over the world of old, one that is free of pain and grief and misery—but it does not change that there was still a world that proceeded that one, and it is that world that now resides in Giratina’s realm, falling apart at the seams.
Giratina feels a roar build in its throat, but it keeps it contained deep within its chest before it can escape, afraid that if it were to release it then the world around it would only disappear faster.
How could it ever have thought that this would be worth it? How could it have been so foolish, so selfish?
How could it have fooled itself so easily into thinking that it could ever change Arceus’s judgment of it by acting in such a careless, devastating manner?
Giratina lingers from the sidelines, watching as Pokemon and human alike are torn apart from the inside out, so unused to the distortion world’s atmosphere. It listens, though it does not want to, to their screams.
This…this outcome cannot be allowed to be the permanent one. Surely, Arceus will step in and save its creation before it is lost to the distortion world, working together with Dialga and Palkia to reverse what has come to pass and allow a better outcome to take its place. Surely, Arceus would not abandon its first world to the likes of Giratina, the child that it wanted absolutely nothing to do with the moment Giratina rebelled against its guidance.
Surely Volo can work out something so that the two worlds can coexist, even if only separately, allowing Volo’s dream to come to pass while the original world is allowed to live on, the damage Giratina and Volo have wrought reversed until it is exactly as it was before they enacted their plan.
Giratina can do nothing but watch, surrounded by remnants of trees and rocky mountain cliffs and floating, congealing sea tides, waiting for the world to stop splitting apart and for its people to stop screaming. Waiting for Arceus to step in and save them.
And it waits.
And waits.
And waits.
And waits…
…
…
…
(But, when the distortion world finally settles and the screaming stops, giving way to harsh wind and cold, unrelenting silence, Giratina is still there, surrounded by the remnants of Arceus’s creation. Giratina realizes that Arceus either cannot or will not save the world it lovingly made from scratch, leaving it just as abandoned as Giratina. Writing it off as just another failure for Giratina to watch over. Another mistake that Giratina has to be punished for.)
(And Giratina looks upon its realm of ruin and discarded ghosts, what remains of the Pokemon and human’s corpses staring up at him with haunted, empty gazes, and Giratina thinks, for the first time since its imprisonment, that perhaps it would be better if it did not interact with Arceus’s creations, after all.)