Green & Love

The professor had once said that Green had forgotten what it was like to fight for someone else's sake. It was a blatantly untrue statement even if at the time it seemed perfectly justified. The truth itself was much harder to see and thus much more complicated.

There were a few great loves in the life of Green Oak, Viridian City's occupant Gym leader and ex-league champion extraordinaire.

The most dominant one of them was obviously his love for all pokémon and anything and everything connected to the marvelous creatures the world knew so much, yet so little about. It was a passion that went all the way back to when he was a barefooted toddler running on his grandpa's lawn, trying to catch a butterfree with the bug catching net his big sister had lent him for the afternoon. He loved pokémon—and that, was the unchangeable basis for his life that had never truly crumbled, no matter how hard it had been shaken.

The second love, he grudgingly had to admit, was his family, small and dysfunctional as it was. That included his parents, ever absent in distant lands, sending him gifts and cards for birthdays and other celebrations, rarely paying a visit.

For the longest of times he resented them for it.

Then he simply let it go.

He could love them from afar like they had always loved him, and that was enough.

Daisy, his older sister, was probably the one person in his family most worthy of his love. She had been, after all, the one to take care of him in their parents' absence. The professor, his grandpa, also had a special place in his heart, even though the men in the Oak family never got along. There were misunderstandings and grudges between them, some of which would never fade away, but at the end of the day they both respected and loved each other, because that was what family did.

After counting the members of his family by blood, if he squinted, there was one more person left. Leaf, the girl next door, whom he had more or less hated in the beginning, resentfully accepted as his equal over time, and finally grown dependant on during his years of loneliness. She was a precious beacon of light in the darkness of his life—someone Green considered his best friend, a sister, as well as the only girl he'd ever truly love, romantically, even if that period had been brief and far too desperate to hold much meaning.

Thirdly he loved nature. Loved the outdoors. Loved trees.

He was a goddamn hippie tree-hugger, but hell if he cared. There was just something about the way simply being outside could help him clear his head after a stressful day. In a way, his love of nature was the most important factor in helping him forgive his parents. They'd spent their whole lives roaming in forests and deserts and the like, and that was something Green could relate to, something he could understand.

The fourth and final great love in his life was… well, the love of his life, if he was being totally honest with himself. But that was a rare occurrence and so it took him over a decade to come in terms with how things were and how they were going to be.

There was a story to it.

Once upon a time Green had been four years old and his parents had brought him and his sister to Pallet Town to meet their world famous grandpa. What Green hadn't known back then was that right from the start his parents had planned on leaving the siblings in the professor's care, first for one, then for two and in the end for seven long years, until Green was old enough to head out on a journey of his own.

So there he'd been, stranded in a little old country town, bored out of his mind, when his foot had struck a goldmine. Or more accurately, he'd tripped over a black-haired boy sleeping on the field behind the lab. Green had maybe cried a bit, because his knee really hurt, okay, while they boy had just stared with a perplexed expression on his face, before digging up a wrinkled, charmander-print band-aid from his pocket and offering it to Green.

Cliché or not, it was love at first scratch—at least on Green's part.

Then again, it has already been said that it took him far too long to accept it.

Red was the only constant in his life for the first half of it. They would go to school and Red was there. They would play on the fields and Red was there. Daisy would make rawstberry crumble and Red was there. Green would boast about all the marvelous and exciting things he'd do once he was old enough to get his first pokémon and Red was there.

And then he was old enough to get his own pokémon and suddenly Red wasn't there, because Green had more or less pushed him away in his own inability to deal with the fact that he wanted more from the other boy than just simple friendship.

It all went to hell very fast. From the few years he spent traveling around Kanto he remembers the feeling of being so fucking alone in the world. It would only figure that the one thing he'd wanted to do since he could remember would go awfully wrong for him.

Still, there were no regrets—not about the journey.

The things he regretted were the things before and the things after. The things that estranged him from the one person he'd thought would always be there.

His reign as a champion ended just as rapidly as it had begun. His throne crumbled and he was left to sweep the remains under the carpet. Being the ex-champion of Kanto was something he'd thought he could one day wear with pride, but in all sincerity it was only humiliating.

He spent good another year then, touring the routes he'd thought he'd memorized. After that he went back to school for another and finally accepted the post as Viridian's Gym leader, merely because all the others after Giovanni's fall (now wasn't that a shocker) had been utterly incompetent.

Red came to visit him then, official business only. It was his duty as the league champion. Green might've been a dick—he doesn't really remember the details. It hardly mattered anyways, because in the end, he had still begged for Red to forget everything, to stop wasting his time with the league and come home.

Two months later the boy disappeared.

It was quite a commotion—the league was closed for a whole six months. Six months during which there were large search parties and more than a few police interrogations for Green. Six months, after which they gave up.

Green, on the other hand, did not.

So love, trust… all those things the professor had deemed Green incapable of expressing—they were still there. Buried deep in a box bolted three times over. But still there.

And so, it was acceptable to say he hadn't forgotten how to fight for someone else.

Every day, every moment of his life, ever since they stamped a 'case closed' onto his file, he was fighting for Red.

Fighting, so that one day, he could face the man again and stand up for the things he'd done and things Red had done, too. Heaven knows the boy deserved that from him. And if that wasn't enough for the old geezer, then… well, in that case Green didn't give a damn.

End

A/N: This is, once again, a prologue-ish part I've extracted from a longer story in the making. And since it functions fine as a smaller tale of its own, I decided to jus post it. I rarely write from Green's point of view, but I adore him, and so for once, I wanted to show the kind of back story I imagine for him. Many others have written about this, but I hope I brought something new on the platter.

Anyway, thanks for reading, let me know if you enjoyed this!