All I ever wanted
….
~Ruby~
Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby!
That was the sound of my name.
Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby!
The sound of thousands of adoring fans with logic shoved so far up their asses they didn't know who I was. They knew my name and that was all.
Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby!
I was disgusted. Repulsed. Absolutely one hundred and ten percent done with this shit. The media. The fans. The posers. I was so fed up with society itself I found it hard to breathe.
Tonight was like any other night. With cable TV turned on to watch this channel all over the region of Hoenn. It was people waiting, fans howling, management and paparazzi and rules rules rules that made me want to have a fit. These people don't know who I am… all they know is a name.
"Ruby! Time to go on! Go!" the hands of my mother were shoving me towards the stage entrance. And like the last three months I dug my heels into the freshly waxed wood floor hoping that they would catch and I could hold my own against my mother's strength. I swear she has accumulated more muscle mass hauling a stubborn mule like me around for far too long.
"Stop it! You know you have to go on! Don't fight with me."
"MOM!" I fought back anyways, with the crowds roaring and the music starting on cue. It was my "theme song" though no one in their right minds should ever pair a teenage boy up with the hysterical and much too popular song of Justin Beaver. I felt sick to my stomach every time I had to hear that first chord.
I was not a hopeless romantic, or a lady killer, or anything else they wanted to call me. The only thing I was worried about being was a hot mess, and that's exactly how I felt right about now. Seventeen years old and going against the grain for the first time in my life.
"NO!" I snarled and broke away from the woman that turned me into this. I was tired of pokemon contests. I was tired of pretending to be something I'm not.
"Ruby, get your butt out there now! I'm not fooling around mister! You know what you have to do! So do it!" she jabbed her menacing finger at the doorway that reeked of stage sweat and cologne and piss.
"NO!" I repeated, shaking my head. "I'm not performing anymore! It's not fair!"
"I'm setting your life up for you! Do you want a job? Do you want to have a good life? You need to do this!" She gripped me by the shoulders tightly and glared at me with her dark brown eyes. It was a look I saw rarely growing up, because I had always been such an easy child to handle. But those days were over.
"I want to be happy!" I yanked myself away. "That's the life you want to set up for yourself!" then with a snort I turned and stormed into the nasty doorway. I cast a sidelong glance back, but revealed nothing. My mother couldn't handle it, she hated that I hated my life. And I hated her for not giving me the chance to choose. So I was done. Done with this shit that had been piled on me for so long.
I threw open the door and let it slam against the wall, a squeak beyond the sudden bursting of the crowds. They moved in unison, proud of their hometown idle being the youngest as well as the most popular, well loved handler in the world. None of them knew I wanted to be a trainer… none of them knew that the pokemon I preformed with weren't even my pokemon.
They expected the usual opening act from me, the one where I let out that pathetic excuse of a skitty onto the stage and watch it send a shower of pink glitter onto the crowd. But that's not what I did. No…
Under the harsh blue spot light I raced across stage to the center. There was a secret button that was activated when you kicked it with your feet, and I avoided it profoundly, unlike any other times. The crowd was growing silent, in awe, bright eyed and excited for my new act. Little did they know that I wasn't acting at all. Beaver stopped playing suddenly, and I twisted the dial on the microphone attached to my ear. It screeched to life.
"Ladies and gentlemen." I whispered in a cruel voice, shaking violently. "The show is over."
Gasps of shock grew across the crowds, and lights flickered on and off as my editors and sound producers tried to find an appropriate setting. The lights were still in sink to what the show should have been doing. Silence brought with it the whirring of those lights. They blinded me like usual.
"And why is that my boy?" a judge, the guest judge actually, unfamiliar with me but having heard so much about me, asked with a nervous smile. It was obvious he, like the audience, was trying to understand just what was happening. He leaned forward in his seat, hands folded under his chin and blinked at me with those old baggy clam eyes.
I was breathing heavily, hating everything and everyone.
"Ruby?" A consistent judge, which also happened to be one of my managers tapped his microphone for an answer. I could see him mouthing "what the fuck?" to me as well.
A female judge just shook her head in knowing. She out of all of them amused this would happen one day. It was her that said children didn't belong on stage in the first place. I glared at the two of them as well as the guest judge. They didn't understand. No one would ever understand.
"Ruby." He said again.
"Ruby." The female judge said.
"Ruby!" someone in the crowd whined.
"RUBY!"
Started a roaring of my name across the whole damn concert hall. My nail dug into my palms as I heard my name for the last time. I could go a million years without hearing another person say my name and it would be too soon.
I ripped the microphone from my ear and held it directly up to my lips.
"THE SHOW IS OVER!" I took it and threw it on the ground in front of me as hard as I could. It screamed in distress, making the crowd squeal and flinch in unison. Everyone grew quiet again. The lights finally settled.
No one dared say my name as I turned, without a word, and walking with an echo, calling out to all the fans, that this was it. Ruby was over. Their beloved, their famous, their overrated Ruby was gone, and was never coming back. I walked out the emergency exit door and slammed it with a thud.
A black hallway lead me to the outside world where I had left Flygon waiting. He was in on it, as one of my first pokemon, and knew what I planned on doing from the start. He knew I had left him there waiting so that I could run away and escape, but he didn't know—no one knew until I made the split decision—that I was going to ruin my mother's, my judges, and my manager's lives. Just now, I ruined everything.
And fuck did it feel good to climb up on my dragon and know that this chapter of my life had involved ruining the lives of people I disliked. I was even happier that this chapter was over though. Right now, as I could still here the crowds from inside the concert hall that made me famous, I never felt more alive.
"Let's go." I said to my pokemon before my mother could come running out and try to restrain me. She would lock me up and put chains around me if she could. She didn't care who I was as long as I held the name Ruby. To her that was all that mattered. But I wasn't going to be Ruby anymore.
I was just going to be me.
