(A/N): Hello, this is a small piece I wrote a while ago, but never got around to posting. I hope you enjoy, it's just a short piece experimenting with an idea I had. :) Feel free to drop a review, good or bad.
Afterthought
In another life he is just a boy. He's not a trainer, or The Chosen One, or any other form of a precocious prodigy- pokemon don't even exist.
This boy has a habit of sleeping in too late, and of playing for hours on end a silly game that allows you to train monsters, and of staring outside as the verdant countryside swallows the sky whole.
In another lifetime the stars aligned, and amid the chaos of elemental combustion, and starbursts of heavenly bodies his fate was decided. So he wore this string wrapped so meticulously around his wrist, and waited for the day when everything would break loose.
"Red," the teacher calls, her voice sharp and demanding, the words meant to hurt. They fly in his face like some kind of attack, leaving behind deep lethal lacerations. "Pay attention!"
"Yes Ma'am," he apologizes, wide eyed and alert.
Later the class will push him down on the playground, and laugh at his name, and shove his face hard into the dirt until his nose begins to bleed. The teacher will only shake her head, before calling his parents to her office while he'll be forced to sit on the hard plastic chair outside.
"He's agitated in class," she'll say. "He can't focus. He's getting in fights!"
His parents blame it on the ADHD, giving him pills to wash down after every breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and being the obedient child that he is, he takes them without complaint, even though he knows it's just making things worse.
Sometimes he'll cover his body up with blankets, and imagine that he is the blank spaces between the printed words in books, a white expanse like snow, wiping the slate clean.
In another lifetime there was a glitch, and the boy with the dreamer's eyes wasn't given a full stitch. So he starred on as the world ran its course, and saw the things that others didn't (could never) see.
"Your parents must really hate you," says the neighbor kid, staring down at him with a sneer. "I mean, naming you Red, it's like they're asking for you to get beat up."
Red says nothing, but stares at the kid with wide eyes instead, like he's suddenly been to the ends of the universe and back. This of course, only infuriates the kid more.
"Hey, I'm talking to you!" He pushes Red down hard into the dirt, and holds him there so his body can't even squirm.
"Green," Red says, the word slipping out of his mouth without a second thought. Red doesn't know why, but it stirs something within him; twists his stomach around in a knot of vengeful fury, and leaves nothing behind but a sour, vile taste. He locks eyes with the neighbor kid, who looks down at him like he's crazy.
"What?" the kid snaps, pushing him harder into the dirt.
Your name is green, he wants to scream.
Instead he goes silent, and doesn't move, not even when the kid bangs his head on the ground over and over again, and splatters of red begin to taint the soil.
In another life, memories were never fully erased, but printed into his mind instead, like long forgotten photo albums waiting to be uncovered. They loop and swirl around his mind in dark purple hues, placing themselves in the nooks and crannies of his inner workings, and tumbling over one another in an angry clash of restless energy. Sometimes he'll paw over them in his sleep, dreaming of frantic battles, men in black uniforms proclaiming their loyalty to the red R, and days spent awash in snow.
"Hey, isn't your grandfather is a professor?"
"How did you know that, freak?"
In another life, he's waiting for something. Waiting for a man with power to swoop down and beguile them into his beliefs, his silver tongue laced with words that pierce through his lion-heart like a bullet. He's waiting on the KING to take up everything he ever held dear, so he can be the HERO and slay the black hearted man who acts like a GOD.
But there is no king, no one to fight, nothing to fight for, so he is not (will never be) a hero.
His father screams, his mother cries, and he does nothing.
He tries to ignore it; the short smacking sound of skin on skin, and the gut wrenching echo it leaves behind in the house.
Pretending and ignoring are what he does best.
He pretends that the downstairs cabinet isn't filled with alcohol, and that he can't smell it on his father's breath every time the word disappointment leaves his mouth.
You were destined to do great things, he hears a voice in his head say, soft and melodious like a siren's song. You were destined to save people; to defend them!
In an older life, he would have.
Instead he pretends that the voice is nothing more than a whisper. He can't hear it no matter how loud it screams.
In another life, everything was different. He wasn't well known, wasn't praised, wasn't sought after- no one envied him. There was never a boy with golden eyes ready to challenge him, never a girl with a soft steady gaze and the bluest aura he'd ever seen, never a man with dragon scales etched into his very being, and there was sure as hell never a reason to believe there should be (except he did believe, god he believed).
In another life there was a void yet to be filled, and his body suffered for it. There were no flames, no sparks, no razor sharp leaves, no canons of water, no shards of ice, no ground shaking snores, and no gusts of wind to ever change that.
He goes through life like a shadow. He disappears through the hallways, into the maw of the crowd, the farthest point back in the classroom. He sanctions himself away from others, until his name is nothing more than a passing thought, until his face is just another one in the crowd, until people actually believe he never was there in the first place.
High School is spent tucked away in the smallest corners he can find, attempting to seep into their walls and become one with their shadows, because if he does this enough times maybe one day he'll disappear forever.
He'll erase himself from existence if he has to.
In another life spent in some newly created body containing his soul, he walked the line between fiction and reality, never quite knowing which one was real, so he begged, and pleaded, and prayed for a chance to remember; the times spent before he came to be, before he had been born anew, before everything changed.
He is not crazy, he tells himself, wanting to believe that there is still some amount of sanity left in him.
In another life it's not so simple.
When he is older and quieter, he meets a man on top of a mountain, the snow falling down around him, and the ice blowing across his face. He doesn't know why, but it feels like he belongs here, like he is supposed to stand side by side with the man, staring out into the dark abyss becoming one with the cold.
"Why do you stand up here?" Red asks him, curiosity overtaking his normally blank expression.
Something pulls him, roots him down to the snow, and calls for him to stay
Red should feel cold, but he isn't.
"Because," the man answers after some time, his voice gruff from lack of use, "there's nothing for me down there." His response honest, and simple, and true. It's so much like him.
Red nods, and because he understands, because he feels it too, he takes his place beside the man.
His fingers graze his being as he tumbles down like water into the void of nonexistence, and the man disappears.
In every life, he is drawn back to that prison.