Totodile

Silence. That was all there was. He crawled out from under the seat he had hidden beneath when the chaos had first erupted. Silence? No, that wasn't quite true. He could still hear his breathing, shaky and barely audible, but still he could hear it. For a brief instant he thought he saw Lady Golduck's body blink. He looked at it hopefully, feeling his heartrate rise, a mad thought rushing through his head that perhaps if she was alive he'd be able to get out of there alive too. But no; she was dead, a fleshy hole in her stomach and a puddle of red around her.

Totodile backed away again, but not before glancing back up at the stage. The stage, where two bodies lay, their final resting places, the place where time would take their bones and eat them, because there was no way those bones would be buried in the dirt. Slowking lay at the back of the stage in a bloody, unrecognizable heap. But the body that meant more, the one that stuck out more than that of the hero who had tried to kill his father, was Greninja's. It hung partway off the edge of the stage, unmoving, dangling, blood still dripping from his open throat. Totodile could only look at it for a second before he had to turn away.

He could still hear them in there, lumbering about. The Balstoise were going around to all of the bodies that were struggling and jamming their swords into them as many times as it took to stop them from moving again. Totodile knew this because Simipour had been crawling towards him, one of her legs having been reduced to a stump, a bleeding wound across her beautiful face, whispering words of hope to him as she crawled, telling him they could still get out of there. Then the falseness of her statements had been crushed as a Blastoise swung his blade down on her crippled body, once, twice, three times, and then she was still, nothing more than a bleeding mass that had once housed a soul.

The Blastoise had seen him, but it had done nothing to him. Perhaps his father thought he would be able to convince him to stay, to reason that it was all for the best, that he was doing this for Totodile. That was a heaping pile of shit, and Totodile didn't need anyone to tell him otherwise.

His father; his voice broke through the silence of the room. "Everyone!" he heard him shout, and no longer did that voice bring Totodile joy, but rather fear, a cold fear that gripped his heart and turned it to ice. This was not the man he had lived with for so long. This was not the father that had cared for him after his mother's death, that had told him he was one of the most precious things in the world to him. This was not that man. This was a monster.

"Can I have your attention please?"

Cautiously, Totodile raised his head up. He looked around for the location of the voice, but all he could see were Blastoise dotted around the room, most of them near the exit. Suddenly seeing that, the room became stuffy and warm, as though it was about to start shrinking, closing in on him, suffocating him with its might. He felt dizzy, felt the stress of the situation suddenly weigh upon him. As if it wasn't bad enough something like this happened whenever things became too stressful. Now his father had destroyed him and broken him down. Was that what he wanted? To break him down, make it harder for him to escape? Maybe. But he had to escape, at any cost. This was his life that was a stake, the only thing he had left.

Feraligatr was lumbering onto the stage, making a beeline for the microphone. Totodile prayed to Arceus he would just drop dead of a heart attack on his way there, but of course for someone as fit as his father it wasn't something that was going to happen any time soon. Feraligatr was drenched in blood, whose blood Totodile already knew; he'd seen Feraligatr go for Piplup, Froakie, and the others from the Fire and Grass Nations, and had watched in awe as Slowking had leapt from the darkness in a brave attempt to save them all, dying in the process. It had not been in vain; they were gone. Totodile had seen them run outside. He only hoped they had made it.

Feraligatr kicked Greninja's body off the stage, where it landed on the ground with a thump. Then, he began. "Now, as many of you know, tonight was a productive night. But, and I need to stress this very much and I need to make it very clear, this night is not the end. First, of course, we have Senator Suicune, who is currently in Riversville and therefore, duh, is not here. Then there's the matter of Crawdaunt who, surprise, is also in Riversville with Suicune. We all know why, now, don't we?"

Dry laughter broke the silence, and it filled Totodile's heart with fear. Feraligatr continued. "Now, we also have the problem of the children. You know, the most important part of this whole thing? Now, we do have Empoleon. That is true. But, as Garchomp's told me, he won't work as well when it comes to bringing Him back."

Him. The word stuck out to Totodile. Something about it was important, holding an air of necessity and of greed and of something else, something much darker than anything that could be described with the words the world had at its disposal. Not even menacing or dangerous or vile could describe it, just the one word of familiarity and the way his father used it; Him.

"But I'm not worried," Feraligatr revealed. "No. We will find them again. They can't escape us. You know it, I know it. We all know it. We are everywhere. We come in the day or the night, sun or rain or snow, here to make the world a better place. Here to get rid of all we've ever known, because what we've known isn't good enough for the one that made this world in His image. We are the truth. We are the chosen. We are the Reapers!"

The crowd cheered. All at once, Totodile felt his body go into overdrive. With one burst of energy he was gone, rushing past the Blastoise that tried to get in his way, that tried to reach out and grasp him and drag him into the fold of the Reapers, whatever the hell they were, but he reached for the door and threw it open, even as his father was shouting after him something he didn't hear because his mind was too panicked because the thing that had stood on that stage and had massacred everyone and everything in that building and had reduced Aquarius to a ghost town and if there were still residents they wouldn't be there no not anymore not when the Blastoise came to get them and he Totodile he wouldn't allow it to happen to him he wasn't about to be the nameless victim of a war he hadn't signed up for and so he ran and he ran and he…

He stopped.

He was near a tree, so he leaned against it. He wanted to cry so badly, but the fear and the adrenaline rushing through his body made it impossible. He looked up at the branches above them, staring into the dark leaves that obscured the dim light of the moon. He felt no protection beneath them. He felt no protection at all. He had been safe. He had been home. But his own home had torn his home away. His own family had taken his family away. How was that? How could that be?

He wasn't going to sleep. He was filled with too much energy. His legs jittered continuously, begging to run. So he did. He ran into the night and didn't look back. And after an hour of running he did find the strength to cry, and his tears left tiny spots on the dirt.