Chapter Text
Blue is Kanto Champion for thirty-nine minutes.
That’s it. Technically, he’s part of the Hall of Fame, technically he’s an accepted Champion. Technically, the title was his once, so it will always be his. Technically, he can’t lose it. He just loses being the present Champion.
He also, briefly, held the Kanto record for youngest ever Pokemon League champion. That was until Red, three months younger, caught up to him.
Really, Blue hadn’t even been surprised.
The news goes absolutely crazy over them for days. The two youngest champions in Kanto history, two boys from Pallet Town, a little coastal village that had only ever produced one Champion in the past. Not only that, but one boy was Professor Oak’s grandson, and his rival the mysterious, taciturn boy that had single-handedly brought Team Rocket to its knees.
Blue’s tiny house in Pallet Town is swarmed with reporters day and night, desperately catching photos of the disgraced victor. Two over-eager women interview him, doing everything short of pinching his cheeks. There is a photoshoot of him, Gramps, and his Pokémon team outside of the laboratory. He gets fanmail, from trainers aspiring to be him, fans aspiring to marry him. He receives long angry screeds from adult trainers bemoaning that the state of Pokémon training had fallen so low that two preteens had bested the Elite Four.
He gets letters mocking him for being the shortest-lived League Champion in history. Every time he reads one of those, he stiffens, bites his lip, and then as nonchalantly as he can, tears it to pieces and throws it away.
After a while, the fuss around him dies off. He becomes aimless, hanging out at home, occasionally making the trek to Victory Road for some battles and some training. Gramps suggests he travel to Johto, or maybe Hoenn, and try to further the Pokedex there. Blue shrugs and says he’ll think about it. It’s not untrue. He is thinking about it.
It’s just a bit tricky – you get everything you always wanted at age 11. Then what? People rave about your story for a few weeks. You have interviews, TV appearances, photoshoots. You shake hands. You answer fan-mail. You write pieces for magazines. You budget your time and your new prize money. You answer questions about your career, and try to give answers other than ‘What?’.
You try to fit into the shoes of a grown man, and realise too late that they don’t fit yet.
But eventually people move on. Aside from his age and his grandfather, after all, Blue isn’t that interesting a Champion. Haughty boys with teams of big, imposing Pokémon and even bigger egos are dime a dozen in the Hall of Fame. There’s only so much to say about him.
Red, though. Red is interesting.
Red is the boy who doesn’t speak, who brought a criminal organisation to its knees with just his Pokémon, and a whole lot of tenacity. A stony-faced child with a grown man’s disposition, but he still keeps an unevolved Pikachu in his team, of all things. He has intrigue. People can make up whatever they want about him.
One tabloid speculates that Red is Giovanni’s long-lost son. He snorts and leaves it on Red’s front step.
One day, the tabloids show a photo of Red, one arm up, hand half-covering his face, expression still. Pikachu stands by his side, her fur bristling.
Blue stares at it. Anybody else would just see the stoic Kanto Champion, reclusive and mysterious as ever, holding his privacy more dearly than any other Champion to date. Far more dearly than that arrogant idiot neighbour of his.
Nobody else spent as much time deliberately attempting to torment Red as Blue had. Blue recognised the crease in his forehead, the way his fingers were curled tight, almost into a fist. Red was freaked out.
The next day, Blue goes to the lab.
“Yo, Gramps, still need someone to go to Johto?”
Red could talk. Physically, that is. Blue has heard him talk before. Yes, no, thank you, please, Pokémon names and types. He’d never exactly been a chatterbox, but Blue was sure that when they were little, Red had talked way more. Blue couldn’t exactly remember when they had played together – only that Daisy, Gramps and Red’s mother insisted that it had happened – but he wasn’t sure it had ever happened. After all, Red had always been a social pariah in school. Blue wasn’t sure he’d ever been able to bear the idea of being friends with him.
Then, it seemed, he just started to go quieter and quieter. Teachers despaired with him in class – he answered the register by shooting his arm straight up in the air, before immediately ducking back down to reading whatever advanced training materials he’d brought in that day. He answered questions by nodding or shaking his head. Nothing they plied him with worked. Nothing they threatened him with worked. Red remained silent.
Blue found himself talking more and more, as if attempting to fill the space his silence left. He found himself following Red on the playground, jabbing a finger into his chest, over and over, telling him to just ask him to stop if it hurt. He never did.
But he did punch Blue in the face and gave him a split lip and a bloody nose.
Red was taken out of school.
Gramps sends Blue to a colleague of his – something Elm, because apparently professors are really committed to their weird tree gimmick. Blue is determined to change his last name as soon as he’s able. Elm isn’t much like Gramps – Gramps is all stern grandfatherly lectures, stony glares, and pristine labcoats. Elm jumps out of his skin when Blue turns up in the lab, drops the notes he was carrying, and babbles excessively. He fidgets, bounces on his heels, and smiles at lot.
Like Gramps, though, he doesn’t make much eye contact and isn’t exactly the smoothest operator in the world. Blue thinks that professors may all be like that.
“Well, Blue, I’m glad you’re here. We need a good trainer to help us with this next piece of research,” Elm says, pushing his notes into the arms of a harassed-looking grad student, and facing Blue with a broad smile on his face, adjusting his glasses, “We have received a mysterious egg that just appeared some day at the Day Care centre near Goldenrod –“
Blue snorts. Elm blinks at him, thrown off-script, and Blue can see him struggling to formulate what to say next. Blue smirks, resting his hands behind his head and cocking an eyebrow.
“Hey, Prof, maybe drop the baby trainer talk? You’re dealing with a Kanto Champion, okay, not some little doofus angling for a starter in exchange for some field work,” he says, if only to take mercy on the professor, “’Mysteriously appeared’. Honestly.”
“Er. How old are you?”
“Thirteen,” Blue says, “Old enough to know what happens when a Mommy Pikachu and a Daddy Pikachu love each other very much.”
“Ah,” Elm replies, his cheeks a little pink, and then breathes out, “Well, yes, it didn’t exactly mysteriously appear. But we do need someone to take it. Keep it with you, safe, among active Pokémon. Record any changes.”
“How many trainers you got out doing this?” Blue asks.
“Ah. Uh. It’s a decently sized sample,” Elm admits. Blue rolls his eyes. Every trainer who wandered in here probably got the same spiel. About what a good and talented trainer they were, this was a very special task, yadda yadda yadda. Blue had seen Gramps do it a million times before.
Citizen science, Gramps called it. Child labour, Blue could argue.
“Right, right. Well, I’ll take it. Hey, raising a Pokémon from the egg might make it stronger long-term,” Blue says, “Lower level the Pokémon when you start training it, the stronger it is maxed out, right?”
“That…that is the theory,” Elm says, looking at Blue with surprise. Blue has the feeling that Gramps didn’t exactly advertise his grandson as a bright, studious type.
“So, what are the parents?” Blue asks, as Elm gestures for an assistant to fetch the egg. Elm looks at him, smiling again. The guy smiled way more than was necessary or normal. Like he was just absolutely desperate to seem friendly. Trying to compensate for social awkwardness, and only making it worse.
“Wouldn’t you prefer it’s a surprise?” he asks, as an aide passes him the egg. It’s big, size of a coconut, with a pale shell mottled in earthy green.
“Eh, surprises are overrated,” Blue says, flapping a hand.
“…Well, er, it’s a double-blind procedure. And, eggs of different species are oddly indistinguishable from one another, so…”
“You don’t know, I’m not allowed to know, and there’s no real way to figure out,” Blue says, and takes the egg. A number was printed on the shell. “Go fig. Can’t see how that’d affect the Pokémon though.”
“We were concerned about trainers treating eggs differently depending on whether they think it’s going to catch into a Rattata or a Larvitar,” Elm explains. Blue cradles the egg in his arm. Against his expectations, it feels warm. He can almost imagine a pulse beating under the shell. He looks back up at the professor, and shoots him a wry smirk he perfected for the sake of his Hall of Fame photograph.
“Hey. I got beat by a Pikachu. Trust me, I’m not about to underestimate a rat any time soon.”
After taking him out of school, Red’s mother began bringing Red to the lab to study instead.
The thing was, Red wasn’t an idiot. His grades sucked, sure and he never answered a single question in class, so the other kids (and most of the teachers) assumed he was a moron.
Blue knew better. He was descended from eccentric geniuses. He noticed the way Red knew type match-ups better than the other kids knew how to spell their own name in kindergarten. He noticed how Red listened, squinting, out in the playground at the distant sound of a Pokemon’s cry, and then flipped his notebook open and scribbled down a name, a Pokédex number. He noticed when Red helped an injured Spearow behind the school, coaxing it to him silently, communicating without saying a word.
Most of all, he noticed how effortless it all was to him. While the rest of them were memorising rhymes and acronyms to remember that flying was effective against fighting, that Weedle evolved into Kakuna and then Beedrill, about TMs and HMs and the history of the Pokémon league, Red already had it in his head. He knew everything already, and more than that, he knew exactly how to apply it. So school had no point to him.
It made the other kids hate him, and, infuriatingly, he didn't even seem to realise why.
Blue asked him questions, loud and intended to humiliate, and Red’s eyes would go out of focus, as though accessing a secret computer in his own brain, and within a second he would spit out the right type to use, the level that Pokémon evolved, on average. Blue would laugh, the other kids would too, at this weird child with a computer for a brain.
Red would stand, mouth hanging open, looking from laughing face to laughing face, clearly clueless as to what he did wrong. That made them all laugh even more.
Those little games were the most Blue ever managed to coax Red into speaking. Maybe that was why he kept doing it, kept pushing him, pushed him until he fell silent and wouldn’t come to school again.
But just as Blue noticed Red’s intelligence, Gramps did too. Naturally, Gramps decided that Red was a genius, and took him under his wing, had him in the lab until late helping him with research Blue didn’t even understand the basics of.
Blue insisted to Daisy that he didn’t care, threw something at his door when he came in to check on him, and went back to the trainer’s manual in his lap, trying to get the information to stick into his head.
It did and it would, eventually. Blue would be a trainer who balanced his teams perfectly, caught hundreds of the same type to find the best IVs, trained EVs strategically, planned move-sets, saved up for vitamins and items and subscribed to battle magazines and tried every new training regime and technique he came across.
Red, however, would be the trainer who could just pick the Pokémon he liked best together, and still managed to win. Blue supposed that natural talent would always win out, in the end.
Blue begins his hike around Johto, armed with his Pokémon, a bag full of Pokéballs, and the egg in a padded bag on his back. He catches every new Johto species he encounters, sending them back to Gramps for study.
He’s not as mobbed by fans as he’d hoped – the occasional bolder trainer rushes up to him to ask for an autograph, or a battle, but other than that, he travels through Johto with his Pokémon for company. He battles Falkner and Bugsy, adding the Zephyr and Hive Badges to his collection easily.
Emerging from Ilex Forest, Blue sees his first glimpse of the Goldenrod skyline; the peak of the Radio Tower, the towering bulk of the department store, still lit up even at the dead of the night, all the lights of the skyscrapers and the creeping lights of cars. He passes by the Day Care centre, the doors locked for the night. He hears the rattle of the Magnet Train as it rushes through to the station, bringing weary travelers from Saffron City.
Blue always liked Saffron City. He liked the vastness of it, all the districts, the subway sweeping beneath it, invisibly connecting all the pieces of the sprawling city together. He liked the thrum of crowds, the laughter of schoolgirls at the crossroads, the trainers battling on the street.
It was better than claustrophobic Pallet Town. Gramps’ lab was the only interesting thing in the whole dull place.
Red probably hated Saffron City. Blue could imagine Red, shoulders narrowed and face pinched, striding through the clamour of Saffron’s wide streets. He couldn’t even imagine Red on the subway, hanging onto some loop from the ceiling, pressed under the arm of some salaryman, a trio of chattering tourists at his back. He probably took one look at the underground and bolted.
Goldenrod was busy even at night, the skyscrapers bulging with izakayas and all-night arcades and thriving restaurants. He passes by two trainers battling in the middle of a road, surrounded by a cheering crowd. A blue-haired girl with a bulky Ariados, the other trainer dark-haired, commanding a Pikachu.
Pikachu had really exploded in popularity after Red won the Championship. He has to wonder if Red even understood what a big impact he’d had.
Blue walks on before someone recognises him – even he didn’t have the energy to be adored after such a long walk.
Approaching the Pokémon Centre, Blue feels a shaking from his bag. He stops, crouches, and takes the bag from his back, tugging the cords open. Inside, the egg rattles to and fro with increasing desperation, cracks forming bit by bit across the shell.
A fuzzy paw smashes a hole in the shell, followed by another, and then a head, with closed eyes, long ears pressed to the sides of its face. Blue pulls away the pieces of shell and wipes away the fluid, bringing the Pokémon, small and downy, into his arm. It mewls.
An Eevee. Huh, Blue thinks, and he would usually make calculations about the balance of his team, check the Pokémon’s stats with his Pokédex, calculate whether to keep it or send it to Gramps, and if he was going to keep it, how.
He checks the Eevee’s stats, and feels disappointment lodge hard in his throat. She’s a total weakling – not the right disposition at all for a championship team. He assumed that any egg he raised would be a fighter.
“Looks like you’re going to Gramps, buddy,” he mutters at her, tickling her chin.
The Eevee mewls again, opening her eyes, and then catches Blue’s finger between her forepaws. All those usual calculations fly right out of Blue’s head.
“An Eevee?” Elm asks down the Pokégear.
“Yeah,” Blue says, scratching Eevee’s ear as she fidgeted in his lap, “The Joy took her in for the rest of the night for a wash and some check-ups, but she’s as energetic as any grown Pokémon, that normal?”
“From what we’ve seen, it is,” Elm says. Blue hums, as the Joy (Joy Karen or something, he never really bothers remembering their names) brings him a cup of coffee and some breakfast. Seemed weird to Blue, that a Pokémon was born practically grown-up already. Eevee’s fur is a bit downier than usual, and she’s a little on the small side, but Blue thinks he could probably begin battling with her today.
“What level is it?” Elm asks.
“One. Duh,” he says.
“And you’re certain it’s an Eevee? Not another form of Eevee?” Elm continues.
“Yeah? Seriously, doc, I’m not an idiot. I know what an Eevee looks like,” Blue replies, scowling.
“Hm,” Elm says, “Well…would you mind continuing to train it? I have a post-doc researching Eevee evolution lines, it would be interesting to see one raised from the egg…”
“Well, if I have to,” Blue drawls, feeding some of his oyakodon to Eevee.
“Blue?” says a deep, familiar voice. Blue looks up from the Eevee in his arms, and sees a man with red hair gelled into careful spikes staring at him. For a second, Blue doesn’t recognise him without the stupid cape.
“Lance? The hell are you doing here?” he asks, hanging up on Elm with a quick ‘Smell ya!’. Lance frowns, glancing across the room.
“I’ve had some…issues that required my attention,” he says, and then looks back at Blue, “Although it’s good I ran into you. I have something I’d like to discuss with you. Are you able to meet with me later today? The department store rooftop should be an appropriate spot.”
Why did so many Pokémon trainers talk like this?
“Hey, long as you’re not wearing that cape, I’ll meet with you anywhere.”
“So, what was the issue?” Blue asks, opening a can of soda as he sat opposite Lance. Lance looks at him carefully, appraising this arrogant, irreverent child, but apparently comes to the conclusion that Blue’s status as league Champions trumps his status as cocky kid with Grandpa issues.
“There has been some unfortunate rumours of Rocket activity in Johto as of late,” he admits, shaking his head at Blue’s offer of a drink. Blue resists the urge to sigh – Rocket news, of course. Boring. He had never quite been able to bring himself to care. Sure, they were evil, sure, they did illegal things, sure, they stole Pokémon. But, hey, they’d never done any of those things to Blue, so who cared.
“Sucks,” Blue says, ending the conversation before it can begin. He wasn’t Red – organised crime wasn’t any of his business, and he had absolutely no intent of making it his business. “So what about what you wanted to discuss with me?”
Lance’s frown deepens. Apparently he expected Blue to immediately offer to help stop Rockets, however, he could. Blue shrugs and eats a piece of his sandwich. He got the wrong Pallet Town boy if that’s what he wanted.
“Well…we have been struggling to recruit a new Gym Leader for Viridian City,” Lance begins slowly.
“Gramps won’t do it,” Blue interrupts. Lance blinks at him.
“Sorry?”
“Gramps won’t do it,” he repeats, “All he cares about is his research. He’s not gonna waste his time fighting trainers and handing out gym badges.”
“That wasn’t the proposition,” Lance says, “We were going to ask you, Blue.”
Blue chokes on his soda, sending Eevee bolting from his lap with an indignant yowl. He thumps his chest, twice, and then finally manages to compose himself. He tries not to stare wide-eyed, tries to look haughty and arrogant, as though he thought it was only a matter of time before the Elite Four decided to give a teenager his own Gym.
Then again, he can’t be much younger than Bugsy. It wasn’t that strange. Blue feels himself begin to grin.
“Well, I can’t say I’m surprised, bu –“
Blue’s speech is interrupted by a shrill ringing from his belt. He frowns and grabs his Pokégear, and then grins again. He answers.
“Hello?” Daisy says at the other end, her voice hoarse.
“Daisy? Ha, finally! You called your little bro! Johto’s great. Lot of cool Pokémon, some tough trainers, though, ha, not as tough as yours truly,” Blue says, glancing at Lance’s extremely irritated expression, “Having lunch with Lance right now. Really rude of you to interrupt.”
“Blue –“
“How’s Gramps? How’s Red? Still the golden boy?”
“Blue –“
“I know, I know, you miss me. Gonna buy you some fancy tea from Ecruteak when I –“
“Blue! Shush!” Daisy barks down the phone, and Blue falls quiet, unused to his usually serene sister raising her voice. Daisy takes a breath, and then says, “Red’s missing.”
Somehow, the only response Blue can summon is:
“Hunh?”
“He’s missing, Blue,” Daisy says, “He and his Pokémon are gone, no explanation, nothing. Nobody Grandpa contacted have seen him.”
“So? Guy’s probably just off training in Victory Road or something,” Blue says, but suddenly he isn’t sure. Red had been practically caged up in house by his own fame since winning the league. He’d probably been losing his mind.
“I’m not sure that’s it. Since you left, he’s dropped by a few times to get his Pokémon massaged. He looked awful, Blue,” Daisy says, “He would have let Grandpa or his mother know if he was going somewhere. We’re worried.”
Blue looks out across Goldenrod, and sees the Magnet Train snaking through to the station, touches Pidgeot’s ball still clasped to his belt.
He lets out a long, agonised sigh, letting Daisy know what a pain it was.
“Fine, I’ll come back,” he says, and glances at Lance with a smirk, “I do have a gym I should be looking after now.”
“…What?”
“I just don’t understand why he wouldn’t tell me,” Red’s mother repeats, for what felt like the thirtieth time that afternoon. Blue resists the urge to roll his eyes. She didn’t make such a big fuss when they left home to travel around Kanto unsupervised. “He would normally leave a note or something.”
“I’m sure Red is fine, he just likely wants a chance to get away from it all,” Daisy says soothingly, refilling her cup of tea and rubbing her upper back. She takes a sip from her tea, hands shaking hard enough to make the cup clatter in her fingers.
“Yes, I received a Pokémon from him recently, as well as an update on one of his Pokédex entries,” Gramps agrees, “Although we haven’t been able to pinpoint his location, he seems alive and well. Don’t worry, Masami.”
She nods, then fixes Blue with a look that makes him squirm.
“You were my son’s best friend, where do you think he has went?” she asks, and Blue could laugh. Best friend?
Adults were useless. It was no wonder they relied on eleven-year-olds to tackle national crises.
“Please? Anything,” she says, desperate.
He shrugs. He really has no idea.
He lets them use Pidgeot to look for him, though. Figures that he could at least do that much.
Red stays missing.
Blue isn’t surprised, or even really worried. If anything, that’s proof more than anything that he’s fine.
After all, only Red could possibly keep himself that well-hidden. Blue tells himself this as he sits up late, working through a stack of paperwork for the Viridian Gym, Eevee in a basket by his feet.
He’s not worried. At all.