It's been six months, three days and one and half hours since he'd gone, left everything behind...
Left the boy with sharp jaded eyes and waves of milk chocolate for hair.
X-X
What Green couldn't get over, was that he had left him for that place in the sky that froze even the most fiery of hearts and drowned and sucked emotions. It wasn't the other way around this time.
For all his life, the boy with green eyes and brown hair had always distanced himself first from the teen with inky hair and cochineal eyes (not because he hadn't liked him… oh no! It was never, ever because of that) and now… it was a strange, hollow feeling that embraced his chest everyday he returned home to an empty apartment. He had gotten used to seeing that face of lusciously pale skin sitting on the coach when he got back from Viridian Gym… but he wasn't there anymore.
He shouldn't be surprised, really. The boy (he would be a man now, his eighteenth birthday passing while he was lost to the world and Green) was never truly happy. He had been quiet. Been so with the passing years… Had been since he had lost the innocence of youth along the way.
So he shouldn't have been surprised.
It was always silent when he got home. Always silent when he went to the gym. And it was silent when the other left.
Green had not known the boy was lost to him at first. His things were still in the right corner of their shared bedroom (Green liked the way that sounded, when he said it aloud…but it was never true, the way the words wrapped around the room). But he wasn't. Neither were his Pokémon. Of course he thought nothing of it (as with all bad clichés he was, as they say, blissfully unaware). It was one in the morning the following day that he finally realized that something was terribly.
Irrevocably.
Wrong.
Green had waited each day (without fail) for the other to return. He did not touch the forgotten personal possessions. Did not contact any of the pokédex holders to see if they knew where he went. After all, he was the one that the boy with locks of night and eyes of the finale sunset lived with. If he didn't know the other's whereabouts… who else would?
And so he waited. And slowly slipped into a mind clawing cloud of numbness. Waking each day, eating, working at the gym until his fingers were raw and bled (not blood but salty droplets of hydrogen dioxide that spilled from his eyes), and coming back home to stay up until one exactly the next morning and finally falling onto the sheets exhausted (more mentally than physically, for he felt he could travel the world in a day for the other). The process would repeat for the next six or so months.
X-X
After all this time, Green could not take the strain anymore. The other dex holders were getting annoying, asking when they could see him, where he was, what he was doing…
How he was.
The last hurt. He didn't know. Couldn't know. Hadn't known for a long time. The final glass shard had been pulled from the green eyed boy's heart when they asked him that, and he poured over the blacked haired boy's items like a man lost in a dessert; happening upon a murky, clouded puddle of life liquid.
He found a journal the next day and did not sleep.
X-X
The first page bore a single quote:
Tout est bien aujourd'hui, voila l'illusion. –Voltaire
Everything's fine today, that is our illusion.
There was not much to read on the pages, mere single lines or words written at random (surely they would have made sense to the author!), except for one page.
He's let me stay at his place. Always first at something- first to be a gym leader, first to own a place, first to settle down… first to move on.
There are only two instances that I know of that I beat Green at doing first:
I beat him in our battles, and…
I am the first to fall in love.
I wish he had beaten me at doing either of these things, so that I wouldn't have to feel this choking.
I have to leave. I can't stay.
I need to be somewhere else. Somewhere I won't have to be reminded. Somewhere my mistakes aren't.
Somewhere he isn't.
...Mt. Silver
Green was out the door in less than five minutes… At three thirteen on a Saturday morning.
X-X
It had been warm when he had run out, in his silk heliotrope boxer shorts and a flesh coloured tank. A hastily thrown-on olive jacket with a fake-fur lined hood rested sloppily on his shoulders and a pair of knee-high tan boots had somehow made their way onto his feet.
It had been devastatingly cold when he had started to ascend. His legs had puckered and blued, and he was sure that certain aspects of his anatomy had retreated. He wished he could curl up into a ball and sleep (yes, sleep would be good now, as the faint licks of tempting syrup poured over the tips of ice cream cones and cotton candy), but he pushed on. After all, he hadn't brought any Pokémon.
It was six when he made it to the bastardly cave that had evaded him for the past hour. He greedily stepped inside, wanting to avoid the specks of hell that were pelting him. Under the outcrop of rock, it was terribly dark, and terribly cold. The only difference from outside was that golf balls of ice weren't raining.
Green stumbled blindly about for the next sixty minutes or so.
X-X
He never did find the boy with inky black hair and cochineal eyes. Curled up into a tight ball and fell asleep in the damp darkness, finally giving in as his body yearned for sleep and his body growled for sustenance. He was exactly one meter from the other boy. One minute more and he would have found him.
But maybe it's better that he didn't reach him.
On the other's lap, they was an open page, date pronouncing it to be July 11 (nearly a month that the pages hadn't been turned, stuck in their last positions ever more). There were only a few lines in black ink; the pen still caught between the others bloodlessly white fingers.
I loved him first. I loved Green.
I couldn't stay. I can't love him... He can't love me.
On the previous pages there were similar laments of a troubled mind… and on the first page? A name was neatly scribbled down.
It's a word we all know and hardly think of. A primary colour that kindergarteners learn before their parents names or even their own...
Red.
That was the name of the boy (he was a man now, wasn't he?) who sat stiffly on the lonely rock, pen in hand, book on lap. Red was the name of the boy who thought he wasn't fit to be first. Fit to be a trainer. Fit to have emotions. Fit to love his best friend.
He had died loving him, though.
And even though Red was the first to love, doesn't mean that the other did not learn how. He had learned to love. It had not been the same as with how he had not beaten Red in battle. Green had been late, but he had learned. He had loved the boy with the black hair and sunset capturing eyes.
He too, had died loving something dear.
But this shouldn't have happened. Red was not supposed to have loved first, (or really at all, it seems as the scene plays out in its quite way) in the grand scheme of things. He had loved Green first. And Green… he had loved last.
One had loved to early.
The other had loved too late.