There he is again. Your little glass boy. The boy who's tearing down your entire organization with a flick of his wrist.
The boy with the terrible eyes.
Most of the men tried to run when they saw him coming. They only know that your boy is dangerous; they don't know him like you do, don't understand what he is and what he can do. The admins forced the grunts back in line to defend the building, but it was pointless to even try. None of them slowed him down at all.
Not your boy.
You didn't try to run when you heard the screaming start downstairs. Silph Co. is a big company with a lot of floors, but you know he'll find you eventually. All you have to do is wait.
He's so thorough like that, your little glass boy. He never leaves any stone unturned. Never leaves any one grunt alive.
Honestly, it's a miracle you ever made it out of Mt. Moon. He'd come in like a hurricane with his one-monster apocalypse, tearing your friends to bloody pieces and just looking on as they'd screamed, whips falling out of their hands to the cave floor. It was dark, but you thought you just make him out in the darkness, him and his dead eyes glowing with hate in the nonexistent light.
And you'd thought, Do they make bombs out of glass? Because he looked so damn fragile even as he fought, like he might break if someone were to push him the wrong way. That blank expression of his, you don't see that on people, only figurines. So you'd said to yourself, I'm a dead man anyway, and you went over and put your hands on his face and turned his chin up to look at you, so you could search his eyes in vain for whatever it was that kept him from falling to pieces.
That was a long time ago, though. You'd thought he'd be broken to pieces by now—it's a harsh world out there, for someone already so shattered, so young—but no. He's back and he's here, your awful little glass monster come back to you like a faithful pet.
You hear the soft footsteps approaching from the other end of the hallway and don't even flinch.
"You were always mine, you know that?" you tell him quietly. You're leaned up against the wall, staring dead ahead into space, because if you look around you'll see all the bodies. You don't want that to be last image burned into your brain before you die.
There's a small noise at your side, so soft you wouldn't have heard it if any of the grunts were still alive and relaying orders. Some sick part of you can't deny him, so you finally sigh and turn to look, resigned. Your boy is staring back up at you without any expression at all.
He's just as you remembered, small and angular with those same wide, guileless eyes, the color of blood if you catch them in the right light. Terrible eyes. The eyes of a murderer. You just don't understand how he can possibly be so fragile.
He's waiting for you to continue, so you do, reaching out a hand to stroke his face, your thumb grazing over a delicate cheekbone. "I knew you'd come back, eventually," you say, noting absentmindedly that his skin is soft, deceptively soft. "I wasn't about to let you go so easily."
His breath hitches, shuddering under your fingertips—no, no, now you've gone and made him cry. You lean over and wrap your arms around his thin frame, tugging him close, and as he tries to squirm away you smile sadly, not letting go because he's burying his face in your shoulder, too. Instead you cling tighter, wondering what on earth must have happened to sear that awful look into his eyes at such a young age. You just want to hold him and protect him, keep him for yourself as he burns the world.
But you can't hold him forever. You already know why it is that he's shaking so hard with silent sobs; now, you both know how this is going to end. If Rockets could tame monsters, they wouldn't have become thieves in the first place. And right now, you're operating on borrowed time.
You murmur an apology into his ear and then kiss him, hard, because if your little glass boy is going to kill you, you want to make sure that you at least have the chance to carve your initials into his soul. He's yours. Forever. He always was.
The moment passes, and the two of you are still standing there; you, and this dead-eyes child you've got wrapped in your arms, trying to shield him from a world that destroyed him long ago.
"Do you even know my name?" you ask him, wistfully.
He looks up at you one last time, inscrutable, and finally untangles himself from your arms as you reluctantly allow him to pull away. He doesn't answer the question, doesn't have to answer: he merely shakes his head and points to the crimson R on your uniform.
That's it, you think, and suddenly there's a faint crackle of static from behind you and the world turns to sheer agony.
You can barely make out the shape of him as you tumble to the floor, vision blurring, your heart jerking out of rhythm because it wasn't built to handle so many volts. Now he's reaching down to pat his pokémon on the head. Now he's reaching down to kneel over your twitching body.
I'm not sorry, his smile says, but his eyes say I had to do it.
You look at his eyes.
— — —
Giovanni finds them there, still settled motionless in the middle of the floor. The boy, Red, he's sitting with his legs crossed, cradling a dead grunt's head in his lap. The hallway is lined with corpses on either side of them.
"Are you really so familiar with my men?" Giovanni asks after a moment, voice quiet in the utter silence of the building. Red looks up at that, his dark eyes terrible as he meets Giovanni's gaze.
"Not yours. Mine."