Cyrus had wanted to destroy the world… and Napoleon hadn't stopped him.

The voices had assured him that he would get another chance after waking up in Hearthome. He had believed them then; every other obstacle he'd faced during his journey had allowed him to try and try again, even when he was fighting in the Galactic Headquarters against executives who had no clear reason to keep battling him no matter how often he lost.

But Cyrus was still in that strange distorted shadow world, trying to change the very fabric of reality… and Napoleon, the only one who seemed able to stop him, had lost the fight and passed out.

The voices didn't seem concerned, but then again, they rarely did. Rather than confront Cyrus once more, they made him catch more Pokemon, send yet more Pokemon into and out of the Daycare, and engage in pointless battle after pointless battle. The usual pattern, really.

All but one of his Pokemon had fainted, with only his Flareon left alive. For once, the voices had a plan of sorts, going to heal the nearest place they could. Napoleon entered the healing house, lay down in bed…

…and didn't get up.

The voices sounded muffled, distant, mere echoes of their usual loud and chaotic presence. For a moment, a brief, beautiful moment, Napoleon thought that he had been freed from their control, that they had given up and let him do as he pleased. Napoleon tried to stand up, to cry out in celebration… and found that his body had locked up.

The minutes and hours dragged on. In a house where the lights always stayed on, he couldn't tell how much time had passed. But the aches and pains that had accumulated over the course of his journey only seemed to get worse the longer he rested there. The voices had abandoned him briefly before, but even if Napoleon couldn't keep track of exactly how many hours it had been since he last moved, he knew that this pause was far, far longer than those before.

The bed had felt comfortable at first, with smooth clean sheets and a soft plush mattress… but now it felt like a prison, a mass that enveloped his body.

And as the voices grew quieter, another sound took their place. An unearthly monotonous hum, loud and shrill and screeching, now filled his head.

He never thought he would long so much for the return of the voices.

From what little he could still hear over the sound of the neverending hum, the voices didn't seem pleased over this turn of events either, though that came as little consolation. Their talk grew frantic as their commands grew faint, their panic almost rivaling that of Napoleon himself as they speculated wildly about why he was now paralyzed. But one repeated claim of theirs made his heart sink more than anything:

Napoleon is dead.

We killed him.

This wasn't how Napoleon had pictured death, though he'd never really been sure what happened afterwards. Turning into a ghost, perhaps, or entering some kind of abyss. But as he lay in immobile stasis for hour after hour, that screeching filling his head, he could see that this fit the bill as well as anything else.

And it made a sort of sense, didn't it? Twelve days he had spent on this journey, twelve days without food or water and with only a few seconds of rest… It shouldn't have been a surprise that his body had given out.

And then, there was the madman trying to destroy the world, the madman he had failed to stop… Perhaps Cyrus had decided to start by eliminating the one person who had stood up to him, one who had already been in a state near death…

Perhaps. Perhaps… He didn't know. He couldn't know. But the reason for this torment didn't matter all that much, not really.

Was this the end, then?

Was this what death felt like?

As Napoleon's vision faded, and his thoughts grew dim and confused as he was engulfed in pain and noise and darkness, he started to make peace with that possibility.