It had been six months since he took the mission.
Silver Lupo had never taken so long to eliminate his targets. In his defense, he was not a mercenary as one would think but a spy who specialized in gathering the most confidential information. He would take what was required and make a quick getaway, leaving no traces. Unfortunately, this often meant dealing with anyone who could be classified as an informant or witness. It was a dark job, but he knew no other. His position was his and his alone from the day he was born. He was Silver Lupo, son of Giovanni Lupo and heir to the Lupo mafia. Until his father's death, he would remain as a simple information gatherer.
His current mission had started simple. The redheaded agent had been told to add the Indigo Plateau to his list of targets. His requirements were few; he was to collect information on all members of the Elite Four, amass status reports on every single Pokémon in their possession and finally, to gather anything and everything on the young Champion at the head of it all. Donning a dark navy blue jacket and light lavender jeans, he looked as any other challenger would to the highest peak of the Tohjo continent. With this disguise, he stepped inside of the glass doors and waltzed in unchallenged. His mission started the moment the guards inspected his eight acquired badges and walked in the first pair of doors.
He made very short work of the Elite Four. Each one fell to his superior strategy and raw power. Silver found them increasingly boring as he progressed; for being four of the strongest Pokémon Trainers in the entire continent, they were too weak in willpower. They were too soft, too unassuming. They were wasted potential that was too weak to even try and put up a fight. Each battle was won with hardly a scratch and he moved on to the Champion herself.
At first glance of the young woman inside of the room of velvet crimson and gleaming gold, Silver had taken the whole thing as some elaborate gag. The Champion was roughly his height with childish brunette pigtails and sickeningly sweet hazel eyes. The only thing that could possibly denote any possession of power was the slick black leather jacket and worn denim jeans she insisted on wearing. As he walked up to her battlefield, he found himself struck by a small detail he had missed, one that made him shake his head and do a double-take. The brunette held a firm stance that radiated a sense of power, a threatening aura that made even his iron stomach swirl with uncertainty. On second glace, her eyes were filled with an undertone of orange and shimmering with determination and ferocity. The redhead found himself smirking at the sight. Perhaps the Champion was not the perfect porcelain doll the media adored. Perhaps, there was something under the beaming smile and sugary eyes.
"My name is Lyra Soul," the young woman announced from her end of the battlefield. "I welcome you to my chamber. You've done well to make it this far. It takes hard work to conquer all four members in one go." She put her right foot forward and smirked just as the undercover operative clenched his fist and mentally scoffed at the so-called challenge he had utterly decimated before reaching her. "I'm afraid I will not topple so easily," she shouted and the battle started with a burst of white light and the screech of a Skarmory.
Surprisingly, the brunette was right. She was of an entirely different caliber than her predecessors. While they might have been mere grape juice, she was an entire bottle of perfectly aged red wine, rich in battle finesse and smooth in her delivery of defense-shattering attacks. His well polished team of raw power fell to her hand in under a half hour, leaving him standing before her, breathless at his loss. His heart dropped at the sight of her gentle smile and her swift recall of her triumphant Mismagius. Never before had he lost in a Pokémon battle, especially with his future target. As he slowly picked up the pieces of his loss, the victor strutted over to him with a casual smile.
"You did very well," she breathed when she finally reached him, as if she was low on oxygen from their fight. "Challengers usually only manage to last for around half the time you did." Silver abruptly realized that her voice was burning with life at this very moment, her speech at the beginning of their battle seemed dull and forced compared to the gleam in her eyes. "You must have trained very hard with your team."
The redhead just nodded at her with awe written clearly across his face, making the young Champion chuckle at his shocked expression. This...Lyra Soul had a brilliant aura of power seeping out of her very presence, commanding attention and captivating his eye. He lifted his chin and stood tall, scanning her quietly. He could immediately tell why his powerful father had felt threatened enough by the Champion to directly order her elimination; she was a majestic force to rival his entire empire, filled with the battle-lust of a wildfire but as controlled as a freshly dipped paintbrush in the hands of a master artisan. Silver wasn't one for poetry, but his trained eye could easily spot power. He had inherited his father's lust for power upon his very birth. He could detect it and focus solely on it until he knew that he himself was in possession of the object or creature of such influence. He didn't not want to admit it to himself, but the way his heart was clenched in his chest meant that he was clearly captivated by the sheer amount of power her thin frame contained. He wanted her strength for himself, even more than he wanted to complete his mission and please his father.
Dare he even think such a thing, but he was intrigued by this young Champion.
When the young woman tried to befriend him by making uninteresting and awkward small talk, Silver simply mustered up the concentration he required and humored her. He was not going to refuse the chance to gather what he needed for his report and perhaps find the secret to her strength. He placed his own desires above the requirements of his mission and that was what sealed his fate in the end of it all.
Lyra Soul was much like a precious gemstone. It took a very fine and skilled hand to discover just what the young man wanted to find under the hindrance that blocked the true brilliance from taking center stage. Within a month he had brushed away the majority of the soil from the surface of the metaphorical jewel, leaving him with only Lyra herself. The persona she had adopted dropped to the floor and the redhead was left with a fiery, determined and battle-loving young woman. She was proud and cocky because she knew of her amazing talent. Her very blood was filled with power and she was very aware of it. To his confusion, she did not flaunt her impressive skill as many others would do in her place. Instead she suppressed it and let her person shine through, her human qualities. Silver Lupo learned not secrets to her battling prowess but the things you would ask someone you had plans to get attached to, such as their favorite food, favorite color and general hobbies. Lyra Soul happened to love chocolate in any form, the entire color family of blue along with the color silver and her most normal hobby was to watch terrible romantic comedies and laugh at how poorly they were written.
Instead of becoming frustrated with the lack of progress on what he wanted to achieve, he simply fulfilled his criteria for the Elite Four and waited. To keep the growing bonds of trust between them, he offered similar facts about himself. He admitted that he enjoyed chocolate as well but strawberries were a very close contender for his favorite food, found the darkest shades of blue and turquoise to be the most interesting of the cool colors but had a very special place for the colors red and orange and revealed that his common pastime was simply to train his Pokémon or to read a book on foreign history.
Towards the end of the month, he contacted headquarters and told them that using a gun was the worst way to eliminate the Champion. The noise from even the quietest of pistols would draw the attention of the entire Elite Four and then he would have no choice to dispose of the entire lot of them, and the loss of the five strongest Trainers in all of Tohjo would draw far too much attention. Archer, head of the intelligence branch of the Rocket organization, complied and his signature handgun was replaced with an unassuming switchblade pocket knife.
By the second month, Silver Lupo was starting to learn bits and pieces about her talented team of Pokémon. Only, he wasn't learning what made her Pokémon so strong. Instead he was learning things such as her Meganium being her first Pokémon, her starter's flower being connected to his stress levels in that the more stress he had the more wilted and withered it would look and that her Skarmory preferred spicy Poffins, despite his species generally preferring dry or sour ones. He also learned that she smiled the most when he was talking about the smallest of things, even when they mattered nothing at all. He also learned that her genuine smiles were contagious, commonly making him smile right along with her with a wheeze of a laugh that only succeeded in making her laugh. When caught off guard by something she deemed funny, she released a slight snort that sounded like a confused Gible. It was oddly endearing in a way. It was an imperfection on the standard of perfection among Trainers. It gave him a slight amount of hope in his chest, making him believe that he too could achieve her greatness.
He couldn't let the strong tread they were weaving together fray and wear away, so he of course gave her more information. Silver told her that his Weavile was his first Pokémon all the way back as an egg, that his star Pokémon's head of feathers was actually very high maintenance and required daily grooming and that his Typhlosion only ate things that were sweet, even though he was a Fire Type Pokémon.
Silver called Archer again at the end of the month. He informed base that the knife he had received would not be able to defeat Lyra Soul. Headquarters responded by sending him a special taser created and designed by Team Rocket to be lethal to humans. He redhead took the weapon he was given and gave them information on the layout and blueprints of the Indigo Plateau itself. The organization would need to know what the building was like if they wanted to capture it later on.
Three more months passed much quicker than Silver had anticipated. In that seemingly an instant in time, he grew ever closer to the young Champion. Lyra Soul now included him in her closest circle of friends, giving him the much desired position of being near her nearly constantly. The young mafia spy knew exactly where her mother lived and what was inside of her own private apartment in Goldenrod City. He had become acquainted with some of the most personal aspects of her life and had even been told by Lyra Soul herself that she trusted him above all others in her life. It was an informant's dream, but it only succeeded in him feeling more distant from his original goal. The burning desire to steal her power for himself slipped from his fingers and instead a new desire dropped in his palms.
Silver Lupo wanted to simply be with Lyra Soul.
He no longer wanted something as selfish and consuming as the reasons behind the fire in her eyes. Instead the redhead stared into her hazel eyes and found every fiber of orange he could find. He sat beside her just to have her near him, not to listen even closer to what she was saying. He talked to her not to search for new information but to just hear the sweet melody of her voice. He felt his heart squeeze when she called his name and those busy hours of her simply sorting through paperwork in her office went by in a blink of his eyes.
Silver Lupo found himself aching when he had to leave her alone for even a few minutes. The magnetism that had drawn him to her power was now drawing him to just her entire being. It grew to the point that Lyra offered him a place as her roommate and he accepted almost too eagerly, making her laugh at him with that slight snort of surprise. He relished in every second he spent with her, with every breath she took.
Silver Lupo had become captivated with Champion Lyra Soul in every way but for her power.
He ended up spending so much time with her that even the media had caught on to his existence. He was photographed multiple times beside her, his hand gently holding hers as they wandered around anywhere she might take him. He started receiving calls from Archer, complaining about his appearance in the news or the tabloids or the latest gossip magazines. He warned him about blowing his cover and urged him to deal with her quickly. Giovanni Lupo was growing very impatient with his son and he demanded that the Champion be eliminated. He always gave the same answer. He was simply gaining her trust in order to make this seem as if it were an outside job. People would suspect him less the closer and more open he was with her. Archer would just grumble at him and hang up on him, leaving him alone to bask in the brunette's presence.
It was towards the tailend of those three months that Silver realized that the throbbing in his chest was not caused by stress but by simply being around her. Somewhere along the line he realized that he had fallen helplessly in love with the very woman he had sworn to eliminate.
If this were any other mission, he would have been horrified. Doing such a daunting thing was against an unspoken and unwritten rule of the job. Such a thing resulted in messy operations that were never finished. Surprisingly, Silver didn't mind. Instead he was perfectly content in his slow realization. He pushed instead of pulled back and dove straight in to just loving Lyra Soul, removing himself from the entire idea of killing the Champion. He would never bring harm to her. Her very existence was something special, something precious. He would protect her with his own life if necessary.
On the night of the last day of those three months, while Lyra slept soundly in her plush bed, Silver received a final delivery from headquarters. This time he was given a small and unassuming bottle of poison. His heart stalled as he recognized it as the special poison Team Rocket had created from ten different species of deadly, venomous Pokémon. Alongside it was a note from Archer, begging him to slip it in the Champion's drink before his father took violent action against him, his own son. He promised that the young woman would not feel a thing and it would simply taste like a Watmel berry.
Burning bile rose in the back of his throat as he clutched the petite glass in fingers. His mind was kicking and screaming as his heart cried and fought, begging him, pleading with him to stand against the threat of his father and hurl the vial far away. Deep inside him there was a flicker of fear. His father was the strongest man he knew. If he truly took action against him, how long could he realistically live? He swallowed the thoughts and turned away, tucking the vial in his back pocket and disposing of the note.
He did not know how long he would survive if his father started a manhunt against him. He only knew that he genuinely loved Lyra, and that he would not let any harm come to her, least of all by his own hand.
The sixth month of his assignment was December, bringing a strict chill to the finality of what he sought to do. He was seated in Lyra's office again as the young brunette strained on her toes to try and find some important files she had misplaced, the papers concerning a list of recent accidents in the Mount Silver area. Lyra mumbled to herself as she looked on the top of her bookshelves, making Silver's heart swell with joy at the sound. He had somewhere along the line reached the stage where he thought that nearly everything she did was adorable. The things he did not think fell in that category instead fell within a different one he had labeled as alluring qualities. For a young woman who was supposed to play the role of a sugary sweetheart to an entire continent, there was a surprising amount of things that fell in that category.
Somewhere between his obvious staring and listening to his heartbeat throb in his ears, Lyra turned her head and asked him to check on her hot chocolate. He simply smiled at her and rose from his seat, not finding a single problem with such a motion.
He walked inside of her little office's kitchen area to pull both his black coffee and her hot chocolate off of the stovetop. He smiled at the sight of the shriveled marshmallows swirling in her mug. Silver had finally discovered the proper temperature to heat her drink without murdering her beloved squares of pure sugar. He was just about to lift their mugs and take them back to her desk when he became hyperaware of the weight in his back pocket. He had thrown on the same pants he had worn that night in his haste to get around and now he realized that he was carrying around the very thing that could kill his beloved. He swallowed hard before shaking off the invasive thoughts of Archer's pleading and what would possibly happen to him if he did not slip the liquid into that very mug.
He walked back and placed it on her desk with a smile, hiding the horrible things that had visited his mind just heartbeats ago. Lyra eagerly turned around and reached for her mug but Silver abruptly stood up and stared at his shaking hands. He knew in that very instant what he had to do.
"Lyra," he murmured, his mind preoccupied with the plan he was forming. Lyra responded with a him of interest and smiled at him, waiting for him to speak. Silver took a deep breath before stepping away from his chair and tucking his hands in his pockets. "I need to go use the restroom."
The brunette gave him an amused look before chuckling that he most certainly could go to the bathroom and that it was still in the exact same place it had always been. He nodded in response and walked out her office door, heading straight for her private bathroom. Silver ducked inside and locked the door behind him, his hands shaking.
Silver Lupo slowly removed the poison from his pocket and popped that cork off from the tiny vial. He the held his breath as he dumped it inside of the toilet and the purple liquid merged with the water. He then took a bottle of toilet cleaner from the cabinet and poured a heavy amount in, destroying the acidic material. He then flushed it down the pipes and sighed as his hands stopped shaking and his breathing returned to its normal pace. He the angrily slammed the empty vial into the trash, watching as it shattered and imagining it destroying his flawless career as a Lupo family spy and his future as the heir to Team Rocket. He then returned to Lyra's office and a smile on his face, all thoughts of being associated with Team Rocket in any way, shape or form gone from his mind.
The night of the first day of December, he turned in his letter of resignation to Team Rocket in his monthly letter. He boldly declared that he had fallen for the brilliant Lyra Soul and that nothing could ever make him harm her in any way. He sent it off with a smile, feeling fearless at the thought of what his father would do to try and amend his choice. He then crawled in beside Lyra and fell asleep, enjoying the slight sounds of her breathing beside him.
On the sixth month, Silver Lupo forfeited his position as Team Rocket's greatest spy for a single woman. He threw away a secure future of money and power for just this one thing he had been ordered to destroy. His perfect record was marred, tarnished and obliterated, never to be mended. Instead of him giving her a deadly poison, he himself had taken a sip of one far more powerful, a taste of love and affection.
Silver wouldn't have it any other way.
Author's Note: I wrote this after receiving a prompt/idea from Silver Blackquills on my tumblr account. I've thought about Silver being a mercenary before, so when I received a prompt of him being a spy and falling in love with Lyra even when he was ordered to kill her, I couldn't resist. I was so eager to write it that I started writing like the second I saw it and didn't stop until I finished. I'm very pleased with what it became. I hope you enjoyed!