Chapter Text
The city doesn't know what's coming, she doesn't feel the heat—
Red is five years old when the Rockets come to Pallet Town.
He can't really remember it, because he was too young, but this is all he has: the door bursts inwards—his mother screams and tries to drag him to the back room, but isn't fast enough—his father lunges for the Poké Balls at his belt, shouting "Get out of my house"—the Rockets reach their Pokémon first, and his father falls in a shower of blood.
A man in black rips Red from his mother's arms and throws him over his shoulder, driving the breath from his lungs. He struggles to cry out, but can't find his voice, and the last thing he sees is his mother on her knees, weeping over her son and her husband, her apron stained in spreading crimson.
He doesn't speak again.
--
Professor Oak was a small-town boy who had dreamed too much and reached too far.
He'd thought that his sleepy, isolated town was safe from the organization that was spreading across the continent. And it would have been, if not for him, and his research, and his unending desire to know more. He'd damned them all; first Red's family, the mother's screams like gunshots in the pre-dawn light, and then his own. They'd taken his daughter and promised her safety as long as he worked.
So he works.
Professor Oak sits alone in the gleaming lab, the latest technology at his fingers, a brilliant red R on his chest. Professor Oak writes papers on his findings, discovered at the expense of the lives of Pokémon that are discarded on the once-pristine seashore. He does this because it is not his life at stake: it is his daughter's life, and his grandchildren's lives, and he will do anything to make sure they are safe.
He lifts the scalpel with trembling fingers, seeing the pulse quicken at its throat, seeing the eyes roll in the poor creature's head. "Pi," it begs, "Picha—"
"For Daisy," he whispers.
He closes his eyes and the scalpel descends.
--
Green hasn't breathed fresh air in six years.
Daisy tells him stories of a town where they have air that isn't stale, light that isn't artificial, food that isn't preserved, water that isn't rationed. Part of him knows that he once had a life before everything changed, but it was so long ago that it feels like a fairytale. It would be easier to believe that this iron-walled room is all there is, but he can't forget what it was like, before. There's a promise there that he can't give up on.
Green spends his life reading the books that cover every available surface of the tiny room. He learns about the world outside through the thin pages that turn in his hands, memorizing pictures, battle strategies, charts and graphs. As he grows older there is a rising sense of urgency. He paces, and plans, and trains his body so it grows lean and strong. Daisy says nothing, but watches him with worried eyes. She pulls his head into her lap and strokes his messy hair with chapped, work-worn hands and whispers the old stories to him, but they don't bring him peace anymore. When he dreams, his dreams are full of fire.
His grandfather visits them once a month. Daisy keeps careful track on the calendar, crossing out each day in her struggle to maintain normalcy, but to Green, this is normalcy: fading memories of the surface and preparation and the threat always hanging over them both. Professor Oak unlocks the hatch that separates them from the surface and brings them supplies, hugs them both and sobs and says "My children, my beautiful children," but Green pushes him away—Oak is his captor; Oak won't set him free.
"You're safe here," Oak roars when Green demands again to see the surface, the sun. "They'll kill you if you go up there, don't you understand?"
Daisy grabs Green's hand and turns frightened eyes upon him, but he tears free. "We're never going to get out of here, are we?" he screams. "We're going to die down here—" Professor Oak slaps him and his voice abruptly quiets. Daisy leaps between them, pleading.
"After all I've done for you," Oak snarls, "The least you can do is let me take care of you."
"I've never asked you to do anything," Green shouts. "I hate you—"
But Oak is already climbing the ladder, leaving presents of canned food and water behind him. Daisy treats his bruised cheek, her eyes shining with unshed tears. When she's done, Green retreats to a corner and punches the wall until his knuckles bleed. There's earth on every side of him and he won't be buried down here.
He has to get out.
--
Leaf stands when ordered and falls when she's struck until she's dizzy with pain and her legs won't hold her weight any longer. The Rocket kicks her experimentally, watching as she curls up in to a ball, and leaves.
She learned to swim here, in this water; she learned to run here, on this sand. She remembers a time long ago when the dawn brought excitement, not dread, when she flew from her house to the seashore to play with the two young boys who lived in the houses next door.
Now bodies litter her childhood playground, heaped in piles higher than she is tall, choking the shoreline and drifting in and out with the tide. The sand is stained black, the ocean is dark with blood, and amidst the carnage Leaf feels like she doesn't exist.
Her mother is dead and her father continues to help the Professor in his lonely research lab. Leaf, however, has no skills, so she's left to do the work of men, hauling the corpses of Oak's failed experiments to the shore. The bodies rot and lure more Pokémon, ghosts and other mysterious creatures that drag the workers screaming into the dark if they're not careful. The Rockets don't bother to save them; they can always get more grunts. It doesn't matter to them if Pallet Town is decimated. But this is all Leaf has, this town, and every morning she watches her father leave to take more innocent lives, and every day she sees the people around her buckle beneath the weight of the dead.
Leaf tries to stand and realizes that she can't. This isn't the first time this has happened. She knows her strength will return if she is patient, so she tries to relax and waits.
Just as she's about to close her eyes, she sees something move.
She holds her breath, terrified, and starts to reach for the knife hidden in her boot, a defiance common to most of the workers. She prays that it's not a ghost Pokémon, but if it's a Grimer or a Rattata she might have a chance—
It moves again, a tiny quiver in a nearby heap, trapped beneath the dead weight. Leaf's hands close around the hilt and she waits.
There's another tremble, and then she hears a weak, fluttering cry.
The knife falls from her hand as her eyes widen, and she's on her feet before she realizes it. Leaf staggers towards the heap and hurls herself against the soft, decaying flesh. It shifts horribly beneath her, but death has long since lost its terror, and she's too preoccupied with the faint response from the creature trapped inside. There, again, is the cry, weak and despairing. "I'm coming," she cries with a raw voice she doesn't recognize—and then she remembers the knife.
She falls to the ground in her mad dash for it, sand stinging her eyes and tangling in her hair. In a moment she returns to the pile and begins hacking through the soft bodies, gagging at the putrid smell that rises from the ribboned flesh. She plunges her hands in as far as they will go, shuddering at the slick feel of entrails—she reaches, slashes, reaches—shrieks when something bites her hand.
Fueled by adrenaline, using all the strength she has (and some she doesn't), she pulls.
The creature is ripped free and falls on top of her, choking on blood and covered in guts, squirming, slippery in her grip. "No, no, I've got you," she gasps, desperately trying to clear its eyes and help it stand. Leaf recognizes it, from her father's books; a grass-type Pokémon, given to children on their journeys before the Rockets came. She reaches out and her fingers trace down the seed pod on its back, and when it shudders, there's the sound of rustling.
Leaves.
It opens its eyes at last and stares into her face, and its terrified, childlike expression breaks her heart. She scoops up the Bulbasaur and hugs it tight. "You'll be okay, you're safe now," she whispers, and then realizes she hasn't heard the words okay and safe since she was five years old.
"I've got you," she whispers again, and the Bulbasaur seems to understand her, burrowing into her shoulder. It's so loving, so unexpected, that she starts to laugh, and then to cry, and then she is bent double over the Pokémon whose life she's saved, sobbing and gasping into the dirt.