Work Text:
"He really doesn't let that boy get a word in edgewise, does he?"
"I guess not - but he's really quiet anyway, so maybe he doesn't mind."
How frustrating.
His words aren't theirs to hear, that's kinda the trick about all this. He was so young when mom taught him that he could communicate without a voice, and it so quickly became second nature, so quickly became his that he hardly considers going back to any "normal" way of talking to people. Mom has insisted still that he speak every now and again, that's how you make friends, honey, but he has one friend, and he made this friend without a voice, and that's enough friends for him, thank you very much.
Those spoken words are unnecessary. The only one who needs to hear him will hear him.
"I'm gonna have a Charmander," Green says, speaks aloud, to his quiet friend. "And then I'm gonna get a Rattata, and a Pidgey, and an Eevee, and we're gonna be the best team in the world! I think I want an Abra, too. Can your mom give me an Abra?"
We're psychics, not breeders.
"Yeah, but she could always talk to an Abra and get it to join my team! I bet I could train one really fast!"
They only teleport away from battle at first. Training them is hard.
Green stops, thinks, then answers. "Or, um, how about a Kadabra?"
They're harder to catch.
"I could do it, you'll see! You're gonna regret it when you see my Kadabra and I in action!"
He hears murmurs from Green's family, wonder if the kid is even listening to him, and of course he is, but they don't need to be eavesdropping. He doesn't want - doesn't need - anyone else to hear him. If he's meant to be heard, he will be heard.
That's why he chooses to speak without his voice.
I want an Espeon, he tells Green, and Green's eyes light up.
"I know how you do that! You need to get super friendly with an Eevee, and then it needs to evolve during the day! I bet you'd both be a good team. Espeon are really quiet too, you know."
"Green, be nice," Daisy calls, and Green pouts.
"I am being nice! I'm saying him and an Espeon would be a good team!"
Daisy just shakes her head, and Red sighs. So presumptuous.
Red makes it halfway up the tower when he spots Green.
His head is killing him. The ghosts in the Pokémon Tower are very aware of him and he's been trying to protect himself from their intervention. Mom warned him that ghosts are like that, that they'll eat away at you, that the channelors in the towers have been possessed because they were simply too arrogant, so sure they would be safe and yet they are very much not, no one is safe from the spirit realm with these powers.
He's been clutching the charm his mother made him the entire time, trying to ward the spirits off, hoping for any sort of reprieve, and then he sees Green.
It's Pikachu, who's on his shoulder, who calls out to Green first. It's hard for Red to communicate here, given the ghosts and the energy and just - ah, so tiring, so hard to "speak" through the noise. Pikachu calls out for Green, and eventually, Green catches Red's gaze, and he looks away, back at a headstone, and Red already knows what's happened, even as he walks closer to investigate. He already knows.
"...they said it happens a lot to Raticate," Green hums quietly, low, sad, sad, Green is never feeling too bad but now he's quite upset. "Sometimes they inbreed and then the Rattata isn't supposed to live that long. They said she lived longer than they expected."
Red nods, quiet as ever. He wants to offer condolences but his "voice" is hitting the waves of everything, everyone else, his words are a fish and this places a tangle of plastic and fishnet.
"I didn't know."
He wants to offer condolences but he opens his mouth and no sound comes out.
"...whatever. Not like it matters to you, huh?" No, wait - "Let's battle."
Green likes to battle and so does Red.
Neither of them are happy when they walk away from each other that day.
"I don't wanna talk to you right now," he said, moments after Red walked back out of the Hall of Fame. "Not like you talk anyway."
Why are you being so mean?
"Why are you being so mean?! You just had to go out and beat me, didn't you? You knew I wanted this more than you did! What does it matter to you?!"
I just -
"Are you gonna say anything?!"
He opens his mouth, and no noise comes out. Green sighs heavily, bites his tongue, blinks back tears.
"...it's fine, whatever. I'll… I'll see you later."
Not smell ya later, no pep in his step, no cheer, no charming arrogance. Just a promise that's meant to be broken. He can't imagine Green will ever want to talk to him again if he's walking away like that, flying off with his now-healed Pidgeot. He always flies on Charizard but during their battle Charizard had missed an attack and Green has shouted what are you doing under the blast of electricity from Pikachu, it just, he just…
Red thought he'd be happy when he won.
He thought he would be happy.
He never said much, Green told her, so that's why no one knows where he went. He didn't tell me, either.
I thought you two used to talk, though.
We did. We got in a fight and then he was gone.
Kris hiked her way up here with the intent of researching the Pokémon that live on Mt Silver, but then she sees him, and her heart stops.
He looks like a mess. His hair is overgrown and his skin is pale, tinged blue, he looks like he's mostly bones and his vest is wearing thin. Even though she came here to research and even though he looks minutes away from death, she just… wants to. Maybe it's a bad idea as the snow kicks up but she desperately wants to.
"You're Red, right?" She calls out to him over the wind, and he looks shocked, as if he didn't expect her to speak, as if he forgets what a human voice even sounds like, and since he's been missing for three years, maybe he has.
He nods once, affirmative but shocked, confused. She nods back.
"My name is Kris." No answer. "Do you wanna battle?"
One affirmative nod.
And it's a flurry of action, her Typhlosion goes down in a few swift moves from his Blastoise. The battle is loud and aggressive, every one of his Pokémon holds their own, his Venusaur poisons the battle field and his Charizard shakes the mountain and threatens to melt the snow into an avalanche, but her Alakazam withstands the toxins and Suicune catches the melting snow and makes it their own. There's crashing lightning and shuddering rocks and all manner of just, just, absolute disaster in the battle, she's never felt her blood pump so hard or her heart pump so fast and, and -
You're good.
And she swears she hears his voice over the wind, as if he were speaking right in front of her.
His Espeon is the last to go down, this quick, impossibly strong cat, and it takes attacks from everyone on her team to eventually take her down. It's the venom from one of her Gengar's attacks that does the trick but Ampharos manages to tank enough hits to stall her out. It works, though. She wins.
You're really good.
His mouth isn't moving when she hears his voice. She must be imagining it, but…
"Thank you."
...thank you, too. It gets boring up here.
He… he is talking. Not - not talking, but communicating somehow. Telepathy, maybe? She heard rumors that his mother was a psychic trainer, and that maybe he could have been the same, but she had chalked it up to just rumors.
"Why are you up here, then?"
It takes some time for him to answer, nearly so long that she thought she was losing her mind.
I got tired of everyone, is his answer, and then he adds with a timidness, and Green didn't want to battle anymore. So it was boring.
"Oh."
You're good, though. She nods once to him, affirmative.
"...are you staying up here?"
I am.
"Why? It's freezing up here, and you look, um," and there's no way to say this politely, "tired."
He glares a bit, offended. Why would I leave?
"So you could see people again...?" And not die up here, she thinks to herself, and she's not sure if he heard that or not, but she means it either way.
...doesn't matter.
"Green misses you."
He's looked dead this whole time, but with those words, suddenly Red looks alive.
He's actually here.
When he heard Red's voice call him, he was sure it was just his imagination. Green has been struggling to cope with the fact that Red was just goddamn gone and for months he kept swearing up and down he heard Red's voice, and he'd rummage through the brush and trees and woods where the fuck are you, and he never found him because Red was never here.
But now he is.
Green, quiet, tender, almost afraid. When Green turns to face him he sees he's accompanied by Kris, that girl who kicked his gym's ass a few weeks back. He'd told her you're pretty good, you look a little bit like him, yeah, just a little, whatever, but when he mentioned Red he didn't expect her to go right out and find him.
"Red?"
Hi. Silence, so deafening. How - how are you?
"How am I? Doing peachy over here, why do you look dead? Where the hell have you been?!"
Red winces. Kris flinches just a bit but Red crumbles a little into himself, as if Green were a thunder clap next to his ears, loud, so loud. Red is quiet but he's never been quite so jumpy and it just - he just -
"C'mere, dumbass, you look like shit."
Kris accompanies him, mostly because she has about as much medical knowledge as Green does, and Red needs some rest and healing and he knows, surer than anything, that Red's not gonna be able to get himself healthy on his own.
"Where was he?" Green asks, as if Red couldn't answer, but he doesn't totally trust Red to be honest or even entirely lucid. He seems dazed, seems like he doesn't really know fully where he is or what's going on.
"On Mt Silver," Kris answers quietly, and she's a calm kid but he hears the unease in her voice. "Is he going to be okay?"
I'm right here. Even inches from death, Red sounds pouty as ever. Green wonders if he realizes that he could've died before he was even an adult.
"Probably, if he's cooperative and doesn't do anything stupid," Green answers, half-glares at Red, and Red glares back, but they're hand in hand nonetheless. "You've always been reckless, but seriously? Disappearing to a mountain?"
No one else could battle me like you did.
He's flattered. Hurt, still, thinking back on his loss, but flattered that he's the only one who was good enough for Red.
Hurt, knowing he's the reason Red could've been gone forever.
You look really pretty today.
Green grins at Red, raises his eyebrows a little, but says nothing.
They're in the middle of a meeting. Lance is on about something or other, battle events in other regions right now. There's an event happening over in Unova, plans for a new style of battle in some far-off place called Pasio, rumors of a planned sort of battle tower over in Alola that's yet to come to fruition. The Unovan tournament is up first and that's caught his attention, but Red, Red keeps pulling Green's attention away again, pulling the string of his knitted thoughts and unraveling them and winding Green's mind around his fingers.
I'm getting bored.
Always bored. Always looking for a good time, never quite finding it unless it's with the absolute top-tier trainers. Green is definitely one of them, sure, but he's a little preoccupied trying to plan for a trans-regional flight.
Green.
"Go battle Kris or something," Green whispers, low enough not to bother anyone.
I wanna battle you, though.
Green nods his head over toward Lance, who is still talking. Be patient, he means to say, unable to communicate as Red does, but Red knows Green's little gestures and nods well enough to understand as if he were telepathic too.
I want you, Green.
"Patient," he mouths out.
Red puts his hand on Green's thigh, and now Green feels impatient too.
"Yeah, I'm basically gonna be the strongest trainer in the world!"
"Oh, you think?"
She's this bright eyed girl with a floppy red hat and a dragon in tow. Something about her feels a little bit like Green; the arrogance, he's sure that must be it. But she does have promise, he knows she does, she's Alola's undisputed champion and she handled that Aether Foundation without so much as a skipped heart beat, he's been told. She's chipper but there's fire in her eyes, and he feels like she'll be enough of a spark to be worth battling.
"I don't think; I know," she grins, smug, energized, ready. "I'd battle you, but I already know Red beat you before."
"Excuse you, brat," Green frowns.
She's not wrong.
"Sure she's not, but whatever!"
You're never gonna get over that, are you?
"I'm absolutely over it, thank you very much. It's everyone else who can't get over it."
You're pretty irritable for someone who's over it.
"Y'know what?! Hey, kid - Moon, was it?"
"Yeah…?" Confused, of course, over the fact that Green is able to speak to someone who won't speak back, unable to hear Red when he doesn't want to be heard.
"Moon, right. Do me a favor and kick his ass, if you really wanna prove yourself."
"No sweat!" She turns to Red, looks at him, and seems to sink just a bit into herself, a sudden oh wait, this is that legendary trainer, the sort of look everyone gives him, because he's known to be powerful and he's known to be silent and he's not truly known, no, nobody really understands him at all.
Nobody but Green.
He does battle her, and good god she's an absolute menace. He remembered struggling a bit when he battles Kris, but he feels like either he's losing his touch, or - no, definitely not, it's just that these kids are so much more ambitious, or maybe it's something particularly about her. She's got some fire to her and it's not just the Incineroar, no.
She knows what she wants.
So did Green. And so did he.
...she reminds him a bit of himself, too, this quieter, younger version of himself. She's got Green's heat but her eyes are as dark and focuses and intense as his own.
Lurantis, Gyarados, Mimikyuu, her Pokémon are fast and when they hit, they hit hard. Red's eyes dart to meet Green's gaze and he looks thrilled, almost a little sad that he's not in the action himself. Red wants to comment on the battle but he can't bring his attention away from the girl's team for long enough to get his voice to Green.
Drampa, Incineroar, the deity of the moon itself, Lunala, she's impressive. She's almost intimidating, if it weren't for the touch of affection he has for this new generation of trainers. It's nice to see a kid not only know what she wants but know exactly how she's gonna get there. It's nice to see a kid with such a deep affection for her Pokémon that they can fight and fight hard and - and -
- and win. She's absolutely winded and she's trembling, her Drampa at her side is gasping for breath and shaking off the dirt from Pikachu's last attack but she won.
And she looks as if she doesn't believe it, and Red didn't believe it either when he beat Green.
She's better than I expected, he tells Green.
"No kidding," he answers Red. "So, Moon! That wasn't as easy as you expected, now was it?" Green taunts.
"Please! I-It was a piece of cake!"
Hope that wasn't too boring for you.
Moon jumps, turns to face Red, and Green laughs, because he knows exactly what just happened and the poor girl is clueless.
"S-Sorry, what did - did you say something?"
No. Didn't say anything, no.
She blinks once, twice, and it doesn't click yet. Green bursts out laughing and Red pats her head and she manages to grin through the confusion. It's only after some praise from Green that Moon gathers herself enough to dart off to wherever it is kids go when they have too much energy to burn through, and it's only as she runs off that the thought occurs to Red.
Have you ever considered adoption?
"You really wanna have a kid who could kick both our asses in a heartbeat?"
What, are you scared?
Green laughs. "Come on! Guess it'd be better to have a kid who can keep up, huh?"
Red nods, grins, leans a bit against Green and lets the Alolan breeze wash over them.
…wait, is he actually considering parenthood?