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Frostbitten ghosts gnaw at his extremities, even under the heavy duvet of a five-star suite in Ecruteak.
Blue stares at the ceiling, watching shadows from the swaying paper lanterns outside dance across the plaster. It is three in the morning. The heater has been on for almost twenty minutes but Blue's skin feels a different temperature. He shivers, a violent tremor that starts in his chest and rattles his teeth, born not of the room's ambient chill but of a hallucination so potent he can almost taste the snow from its blizzards.
He is in Johto for a week. Official League business. Meetings in the morning, lunches with various Gym Leaders, more meetings in the afternoon. It is bureaucratic busywork. It is a distraction.
Because to the west, looming like a jagged tear in the fabric of the night sky, sits Mt. Silver.
Blue rolls over, dragging the sheets with him, burying his face in a pillow that smells of lavender and expensive detergent. It suffocates him. He wants it to smell of snow and pine resin. He squeezes his eyes shut, but the geography maps itself behind his eyelids with agonizing clarity. He knows the topography better than he knows the lines of his own palm. He has studied the maps for three years. He has traced the contour lines with a finger until the paper wore thin.
He is not going.
The resolve sits in his gut, heavy and indigestible. He has the Pokémon to do it. Pidgeot could crest the lower foothills in minutes; Arcanine could melt the permafrost blocking the upper caverns. But he won't. To ascend that mountain is to admit a defeat far more total than the one that stripped him of his Champion title in minutes. To climb is to beg—
Red.
The name is a splinter in his mind.
Blue kicks the covers off. The heat of his frustration wars with the phantom cold. He swings his legs out of bed and walks to the window. Ecruteak sleeps below him, a painting of ink and amber light. The Bell Tower stands stoic, a needle threading the clouds, but Blue's gaze drifts past it, drawn magnetically toward the horizon where the darkness deepens.
The Silver Massif.
In his mind, he is already at the base. He projects his consciousness outward, escaping the hotel room, drifting over numbered Routes, crossing vast waters, and landing on the crushed scree of the mountain's skirt.
The air there is different. It lacks the heavy humidity of the lowlands. It is thin, sharp, a razor against the lung tissue.
He imagines the ascent he refuses to undertake.
The lower slopes are deceptive. They lure travelers with a false sense of pastoral beauty. Here, the tree line has not yet surrendered to the altitude. Stands of mountain ash clutch the rocky soil, their berries clusters of blood-red warning against the gray stone. Interspersed among them are gnarled sessile oaks, their roots twisted like arthritic fingers gripping the earth, holding the plateau together against the threat of daily avalanches.
Blue knows the plateau. In his waking dreams, he walks it. The ground is uneven, hidden beneath a carpet of coarse sedge and tufts of wiregrass that slice at ankles. It is a place of ambush.
He pictures an Ursaring bursting from a thicket of hazel, claws dripping with sap and violence. He imagines the snap of Arcanine's jaw, the flash of Flamethrower turning the brush to ash. He wins the fight in his head, but the victory brings no dopamine hit. It is just an obstacle.
The climb continues. The trees change as the elevation spikes. The deciduous canopy fails, choked out by the ruthlessness of the conifers. Stunted black spruce and wind-sheared firs dominate the mid-level ridges. They are skeletal things, stripped of needles on the windward side, flagging like tattered banners surrendering to the perpetual gale.
He misses Red.
The thought arrives unbidden, a sickening lurch in his stomach. It's not a sentimental missing. It's not the longing of a friend for a friend. It is the ache of a planet that has lost its sun and is drifting into the dark, frozen void. Blue defined himself by the chase. He ran faster because he could hear footsteps behind him. Then, he ran harder because he saw a back ahead of him.
Now, the back is gone. Red hadt just beat him at the Indigo Plateau, but thoroughly dismantled Blue's entire worldview. He proved that arrogance and pedigree were flammable trash, and then, instead of sticking around to let Blue claw his way back to parity, Red vanished. He ascended to the roof of the world and pulled the ladder up behind him.
It was the ultimate dismissal. Red deemed the world below—deemed Blue—unworthy of his presence.
Blue presses his forehead against the cold hotel glass. His breath fogs the pane.
"You asshole," he whispers to the window, to the mountain, to the empty room.
If he went there, if he actually packed his gear and trekked past the reception desk at the base, he knows what he would find. The caverns first. The crushing claustrophobia of the tunnels.
He imagines the sound of the dripping stalactites, a water-torture rhythm counting down the seconds of his sanity. The darkness in Mt. Silver is not merely an absence of light; it is a physical weight. It presses against the temples.
And the noise. It is never truly silent.
Golbat.
They are not the nuisance Zubats of Mt. Moon. These are apex scavengers. He visualizes them peeling from the cavern ceilings like wet leather strips, four distinct fangs glistening in the beam of a flashlight. Their wingspan is terrifying in the enclosed space, beating the stagnant air into a frenzy. They are leeches . They swarm in a chaotic vortex, screeching at a frequency that bleeds from the ears.
In his mind, Blue sends out Alakazam. A wave of psychic force shatters the swarm, pinning them against the walls. But there are always more.
Deeper still. The waterfalls inside the mountain, cascading into abyssal pools where blind, albino Goldeen swim in aimless circles. The air grows colder, dampness turning to rime ice on the rocks.
Then, the Misdreavus come.
He hates them. He hates them more than the cold. They are the manifestations of the mountain's malice. They float through the rock as if physics were a suggestion they politely declined. Their cries sound like human weeping. They mimic the voices of failures.
"I'm disappointed in you," they would whisper in Gramps's voice. "Smell ya later," they would echo, twisting Blue's own catchphrase into a eulogy.
He would have to crush them. Rhydon would crunch the stone beneath its feet, a Sandstorm scouring the ghosts from the air.
Blue steps away from the window and paces the room. The carpet is plush, beige, inoffensive. He hates it. He wants the danger. He wants to feel the burn of lactic acid in his quads as he hauls himself up a vertical chimney of rock, fingernails splitting against the granite.
He wants to stand before Red on the roof of the world and demand an answer to a question he doesn't know how to ask.
Why was I not enough to keep you here?
No. That's too vulnerable.
Why are you hiding?
Better. Accusatory. It fits the narrative he constructs to keep his pride intact. Red is hiding because he's afraid to lose the title. Red is a coward freezing on a rock because he knows Blue has gotten stronger.
Blue checks his Pokégear. No messages. No signal from the summit, obviously. Red doesn't have a phone. Or if he does, it's frozen solid, a brick of circuitry buried in a snowdrift.
Blue sits on the edge of the bed, head in his hands. The visualization pulls him back. He can't stop it. He is past the caverns now. He is breaching the surface, emerging onto the upper slopes where the air is too thin to support anything but the most stubborn lichens.
The transition from the cavern darkness to the blinding white of the summit is a physical shock. The wind here is a weapon. It is a katabatic torrent, rushing down the slopes at hurricane speeds, stripping heat from the body in seconds.
Here, the world is simplified to binary colors: the white of the snow and the black of the exposed basalt. The cliffs are sheer drops, vertical precipices that plunge thousands of feet into the cloud layer below. One misstep means certain death.
He sees the vegetation struggling here, the last gasps of life. The bristlecone pines, ancient and gnarled, their wood polished to a golden sheen by the ice storms. They look like driftwood thrown up by a frozen ocean. They are dead, yet they stand.
And there, at the very apex, where the crust of the earth tries to touch the stratosphere, is the crown.
It is a desolate arena. The snow is untouched, save for a single set of tracks that never seem to fill in.
And him.
Blue closes his eyes tight, visualizing the figure. Red stands with his back to the entrance, looking out over the sea of clouds that obscures Johto and Kanto below. He wears a ridiculous vest, the sleeves short despite the sub-zero temperature. The hat is pulled down.
He is a statue carved from the ice of this godforsaken mountin.
In the fantasy, Blue screams at him. He commands Blastoise to fire a Hydro Cannon that freezes mid-air, shattering like glass before it hits. He demands acknowledgement. He wants Red to turn around. He wants to see Red's eyes. Are they the same? Or have they gone flat, reflecting only the emptiness of the peak?
But in the fantasy, Red never turns. He releases a Poké Ball—usually Pikachu or that lumbering Snorlax—without a word. The battle begins in silence.
That silence is what breaks Blue. It's the silence of a god looking at an insect.
"I'm not going," Blue says aloud to the hotel room. His voice cracks.
He stands up and walks to the minibar, grabbing a small bottle of water. His hands are shaking. He cracks the seal, the plastic ring snapping loudly.
He remembers the last time he saw Red. The Hall of Fame. The confetti hadn't even settled. Professor Oak had been praising Red, glossing over Blue as if he were a footnote in the history book of his own life. Red had looked at Blue then. Just for a second. There was no triumph in his face. No gloating. Just a terrifying, placid neutrality.
It was the look of someone who had looked behind the curtain and found nothing there.
And then he left. Without a word to his mother, without a word to the press, without a word to Blue.
Blue drinks the water, the cold liquid shocking his throat.
If he went to Mt. Silver, he would have to admit that he has spent every day of the last three years training for a ghost. He would have to admit that every Gym Badge he polishes, every challenger he crushes at the Viridian Gym, is a performance for an audience of one who isn't even watching.
He humbles himself every day by caring this much. He won't humble himself by making the pilgrimage.
The wind outside the hotel picks up, rattling the window pane. For a second, it sounds like a screech. A Misdreavus? No, just the Ecruteak wind funneled through the alleyways.
Blue glances at the clock: 3:45 AM.
He goes to his suitcase. It's a sleek and leather and expensive. Inside, neatly folded, are his Gym Leader clothes. But underneath the false bottom, tucked away like contraband, is a heavy parka. Thermal leggings. Climbing crampons.
He stares at the gear. He packed it. "Just in case," he had told himself. Just in case there was an emergency. Just in case the League needed him to investigate a disturbance.
Lies. He packed it because he is a moth and Red is the zapper.
He runs his hand over the even texture of the parka.
Then Blue slams the suitcase shut. The sound is like a gunshot.
"No."
He will not give Red the satisfaction. Even if Red wouldn't care. Even if Red wouldn't smile. Especially then.
He forces himself back to the bed. He lies down, staring at the ceiling again. He tries to think of tomorrow's first meeting. The Mahogany Town Gym. Pryce. The old man is as cold as the mountain, but at least he speaks. At least he exists in society.
But the mountain is jealous. It demands attention.
His mind drifts back to the geography. The trees of the lower slopes fade, replaced by the brutal geometry of the cliffs.
He imagines the path leading up to the final chamber. It is narrow, a goat track glazed with verglas. One slip and you tumble into the ravine, bouncing off outcroppings of shale until you are nothing but meat and fabric.
He wonders if Red sleeps. Does he curl up against Snorlax's belly for warmth? Or does he stand awake, keeping vigil over a world he conquered and discarded?
Blue feels a stinging in his eyes. It's exhaustion, he tells himself.
"I hate you," he whispers.
He hates the hold Red has. He hates that the entire region of Kanto feels smaller because Red isn't in it. He hates that he is one of the strongest Gym Leaders in the combined histories of Kanto and Johto, the gatekeeper to the League, and yet he feels like a placeholder.
He imagines the morning light hitting the peak of Mt. Silver, the alpenglow turning the snow to burning rose and violet. It must be the most beautiful sight in the world.
He imagines standing next to Red, watching it. Their shoulders brushing. No words needed. Just two titans looking down at the map they redrew.
The longing is a physical pain, a cramp in his chest.
He rolls over, burying his face again. He will not go. He will attend the boring meetings. He will smile for the cameras. He will sign autographs. He will go back to Viridian City and wait for challengers.
But tonight, in the safety of his dream, he climbs. He places his boots on the rime-covered rock. He battles the screeching Golbat. He weathers every blizzard.
He reaches the top.
And in this dream, unlike in those he consciously conjures up in the daytime, Red turns around. Red tips his hat. And Red smiles.
"...?"
"...Blue?!"