Warning: strong language, violence, violence toward children, and racial themes. There may be mild sexual themes in later chapters.
Damian liked it when he and his father took things out of the cars near stores.
Or rather, he liked it more than taking things out of cars in parking garages, or in neighborhoods. The garages were dark and frightening, like caves, with looming walls above and no lights anywhere. The neighborhoods felt too exposed and open, and also gave him a sick longing for living back in his house, like they had when his mother had still been alive.
(Damian didn't remember her dying, as his father had said. He strained his mind sometimes and could only recall that his mother had tucked him into bed one night as always and then had suddenly been gone.)
Things had changed a lot since his mother had died. Damian remembered, a little less each day, how he had once lived in house instead of a shelter, and had gone to school, and had slept at night instead of during the day. Now, he spent his nights with his father, looking for cars that had things in them.
He didn't realize, exactly, that they were stealing.
Damian knew stealing was wrong. Stealing was when you took something from another person, something that didn't belong to you. He didn't realize that it was the same thing, when he and his father rummaged through parked cars and took the valuable things out. That had always been accompanied by an uneasy feeling of danger and guilt, but he didn't exactly know that it was wrong, or at least wouldn't have been able to explain why.
(It's okay, his father had said once, sometime early on when they had only just started. This is fine; this is fine. And Damian had believed him, of course, but the sinking feeling in his stomach wouldn't fade when he saw his father looking furtively around to make sure they were alone before opening the car door.)
—
Damian fidgeted while his father rummaged through the back seat of an unfamiliar black car. It was late, and cold, and he was bored. So far, it hadn't been an enjoyable night, or an unusual one, but the boy was pleased that the two of them were in a parking lot instead of a parking garage or a neighborhood. He made a game of counting the street lamps visible from where he stood: one, two. Neither of them gave off any light. He wondered whose job was it to fix them.
His father handed him something as he emerged from the car, and Damian took it, then looked at it. It was small and very light, a beige plastic box with a handle, rounded corners, and a lock on one side. It felt empty. Damian immediately tried to open it and found that he couldn't.
"There's money in that," Damian's father said confidently, smiling. The man locked his hands behind him and stretched with a wide yawn. "Check underneath the seats, okay? Daddy's getting too old for this."
It had been meant as a joke, but Damian nodded solemnly and climbed into the car on his hands and knees, still holding the closed box by its handle. Once inside, he placed the box on the seat and began to run his hands over the floor of the car, searching for anything his father might have missed. He didn't feel anything other than the texture of the carpet, not even crumbs or bits of plastic like most other cars had.
There was a distant shout from the middle of the parking lot, but Damian, distracted, wasn't paying enough attention to hear it. If it had registered more quickly, he might have panicked, but he was too caught up by the novelty of the black car and its strange tidiness to be alert. Damian's father, however, recognized the sound instantly for the threat it was, the threat of getting caught.
He swore, and that did catch Damian's attention. Heart hammering, the boy turned and began to crawl back toward the car door to get out, but something in his father's expression stopped him. Their eyes met, for a split second, and as Damian watched his father shook his head once—and only once.
And then there was another man outside, walking toward them in long strides.
The mere presence of another person made Damian's anxiety and worry turn into real fear, but he didn't make a sound. The car door was still open, so the boy could see everything, including the ugly expression on the stranger's face once he got closer. The man was white, and dressed in black clothing, both of which made Damian nervous.
"You get the fuck away from the car!" the stranger shouted, pointing at Damian's father, who flinched, throwing his hands up in a gesture of surrender and backing away as directed. However, despite the previous command, the stranger immediately ran forward and seized Damian's father to keep him from moving further away. Damian's insides clenched in fear, but he still didn't dare move.
"I'm sorry, sir, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," his father babbled, speaking quickly, but the man didn't let him go, simply pulling one arm back and backhanding him across the face.
"Don't give me that crap, kid," the man hissed, and it took Damian several terrifying seconds to realize the stranger wasn't talking to him. In fact, the stranger hadn't even seen Damian yet, it seemed. Damian didn't understand that this was more than luck, that it wouldn't be easy to see a dark-skinned boy in a black car with tinted windows in an area with no lighting.
The man continued to speak, practically spitting in his rage. "Who sent you? How the fuck did you find out?"
The questions made no sense to Damian, although he was so afraid that he could barely comprehend the words at all. However, Damian's father didn't seem to understand, either, pleading, "No one, I'm not working for nobody! Please, I'm so sorry, I didn't take anything, please let me go!"
"Liar! Little fucking punk, you think you're going to lie to me? I'll send them your head in a box! You don't fuck with Team Rocket!"
There was a shout in the distance, and then another one, cries of warning. Like before, Damian didn't register them, his eyes frozen on the man holding his father. As he watched, the stranger reached into the pocket of his black pants, pulling out—something. A ball. It was split into two colors, red and white.
Before Damian could wonder what it could possibly be for, the man suddenly shoved Damian's father away from him, out of the boy's line of vision and away from the car. Then he threw the ball to the ground, with a laugh that made Damian want to cry; although he didn't, remaining still and concentrating hard on breathing quietly.
The ball didn't bounce. There was a sound almost like an echo, and a faint smell of smoke, but all that was completely driven from Damian's mind less than a second later when he saw another figure appear outside the car.
A beast, a monster, had suddenly materialized before him on the pavement, a terrifying horned silhouette barely visible in the darkness. With a roar the creature charged, and Damian heard his father scream, and then a horrible crunching sound. There were several more cries of agony and then Damian heard something squelching.
The stranger stood still for the moment, breathing heavily. At some point he had to have picked up the ball again, because he was holding it in one hand. He tossed it toward the point outside the car where the sounds were coming from. The inhuman growling suddenly halted, and now there were only the strained sobs and groans of a dying man. Damian felt numb. Something in him had shut off: all he could do was breathe, and he was barely managing that. So he didn't immediately register the pounding footsteps and raised voices now echoing outside the car.
"No-no-no-nononono-noooo—!" a woman was saying, trying to keep her voice down and failing. "Mikey, what did you do?"
The man sounded bitter when he replied. "You know you're not supposed to call me that."
"Mikey—"
"Who was he?" came another female voice, flat and far more controlled. She had a noticeable accent; Damian didn't recognize it as Japanese.
"Little shit wouldn't tell me. I thought someone must've sent him, but now I don't know anymore, he might have just been carjacking…"
Damian tried to focus on the words, or on his own breathing, or on anything but the oppressive silence that had now replaced his father's gasps for air. Their words slipped through his mind almost as soon as he heard them, but he listened anyway.
"You didn't find out." There was no change in the Japanese woman's tone, but her words were followed by a quick sigh of irritation.
"Look, it'll be fine. It'll be fine, right?" the man asked, the faintest beginnings of real panic beginning to creep into his voice. "There was no one around. No one will give a shit about another murder in this part of the city."
"Mikey, you killed someone," said the first woman, voice trembling.
"She's right," said the second woman. "That's not how we do things, Gimbal. Especially not with a pokémon. We cannot afford to have this traced back to us, do you understand? How many weapons leave wounds like that?"
There was a pause. Damian, still curled on the floor of the black car and focusing almost every ounce of his concentration on trying not to cry, didn't care. The conversation meant little to him anyway. Damian had never heard of pokémon, let alone seen one. For a child his age this was unusual, but not unheard of.
"God. Fuck. I just got so…mad," the man finally said, sounding defeated and nervous.
"You're not a very good liar," spoke another voice, a man, also with an accent, one somewhat more pronounced than the woman's. "You left it in the glove box, didn't you? After you swore up and down you had it locked it in the undercompartment before we left."
"Look, the guy didn't get it, alright? Will that make you happy?" the first man said, stepping toward the open car door and into Damian's line of vision. "Your precious parcel is still in the—oh, shit! Oh my God!"
Damian screamed, terrified, hands still clenched around the plastic box as he threw himself as far as he could to the other side of the car. He'd been seen.
