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Chapter IV: Orders from the Top

The sky was rapidly turning orange above their heads and a lavender blush was creeping from the edges of the horizon. The wind stung against the small cut in Dodger's neck where the ninetales had forced his own knife against his skin, but he was too shocked to really register the distant pain. The fire fox's eyes glowed brilliantly as it forced the Team Rocket agent's hand down and allowed him to drop the blade.

Choose, the voice in his head commanded, none too gently. His eyes went towards the pokemon's bleeding tail and he cursed again. He wasn't the one who had trapped this pokemon. He had freed it! And now he was faced with either a 1,000 year cursed life or death after a week of what—atoning for sins? What the hell did that even mean?

"What kinda deal is that?" he snapped at the ninetales, who had apparently allowed him to speak while refusing to allow his body to get up from his forced kneeling position. His broken shin was killing him. "I either get to live a sucky life for a thousan' years and die, or live for another sucky week and die?"

Most humans would not have been offered this mercy, the ninetales reminded him. I can just as easily turn you into a pokemon and have over with it. Would you rather I do that?

"You're sayin' you're gonna kill me in a week and I should be happy about it? You're outta yer mind!"

Very well. The glow in its eyes grew brighter and its tails suddenly fanned out behind it, catching the light of the setting sun. Do you prefer jynx or tangela?

"No, no, just be quiet a second! I don't wanna be no pokemon, but I don't even know what'cher saying. Atone for what, exactly? That means fix, right? What do I gotta do?"

The ninetales frisked its tails over its back and then settled onto its haunches. What do you think you should do?

"I think I should stop bullshittin' with a pokemon and go home, is what I should do!" Dodger complained. "What have I done that I gotta be sorry for?"

The pokemon turned its head and scratched the ruff under its chin with its uninjured back paw. Much.

Dodger made a face. "Okay, so if I go put flowers on that dumb marowak's grave, you'll leave me alone? That still doesn't solve the problem that you're gonna kill me!"

The ninetales's back paw came down sharply on the ground with sound like a gunshot, and Dodger found himself suddenly blinded to his surroundings. He could tell his eyes were open because he was blinking frantically, but he wasn't seeing the ninetales or the clearing around him. He couldn't even bring his hands up to cover his face; he was frozen in shock when he took in the sudden change. He knew he was in the clearing because he could feel the grass under his hands and could smell the fresh air carrying the smell of the sea, but he wasn't seeing it.

Instead, in his head, he was back in the Team Rocket underground auditorium, standing on the stage and sweating underneath the harsh lights. Out in the audience were hundreds of black-clad agents, looking as he must have looked to the new recruits that morning: faceless and impassive. In front of him, Giovanni was holding something dark out towards him, and his mind's eye saw his hand come up and take it. It was a black market pistol, and it was loaded, and suddenly he knew where he was.

The power of the ninetales forced his gaze down and he found himself looking into the face of his best friend. Silken white head, twitching whiskers fanning out around a squishy black nose, lustrous eyes gazing adoringly up at him—

His name was Water Whip, right? the ninetales asked mercilessly.

And his hand lifted and he squeezed the trigger. Twice. The dewgong flopped to the floor and the audience erupted into applause. He felt sick, sicker than before, sicker than he actually had been twenty years ago when he had committed the act. The words I'm sorrywere stuck in his throat and instead he laughed, a harsh, bitter sound.

Then his vision shifted and rewound itself and he was looking up with Water Whip's eyes into his own young face, and he felt the love that his pokemon had had for him melt in a surge of confusion and fear as the first bullet grazed his cheek and the second entered the space above his temple. The anguish in his heart would have been enough to stop its beating if he had actually known what Water Whip had felt.

The sequence rewound itself again and repeated from his own point of view. And repeated. And repeated. And repeated. Over and over until eyes were streaming with tears and his whole body trembled with grief so poignant it was physically painful.

This, for the rest of your cursed existence. One thousand years of this.

When he came to, his throat was raw from his furious screaming. He opened his eyes with a start and found that the sun had long since set and the air was cold under the starry sky. Groaning, he turned over and flopped onto his back. He was too tired to note that the mind control that the ninetales had had over him was gone, and he reached up and dragged his hand over his face, removing the blades of grass stuck to his scruffy jawline. His entire chest ached from emotion he hadn't felt in decades. The ninetales sat in the same place on the grass in front of him, patient as still as a statue.

"Awright," he croaked miserably, mortified because he was seconds away from bursting into tears. "Awright, I geddit. But whaddaya want me to do? I can't go back in time and not kill 'im. Unless you can bring 'im back somehow?"

The ninetales tilted its head. Was that hope in your voice?

"Ah, whadda you know?" With much grunting and effort he managed to stand up, putting all of his weight on his good leg, looking around with bleary eyes for his crutches. When he spotted them on the ground, he bent over, lost his balance, and landed in a flailing heap. The ninetales danced away, tails swirling, tossing its head in an imitation of laughter. Dodger gathered his crutches in his arms and stood up again, cursing.

"Do you do this to everyone or just the fellas that are down on their luck? Or maybe you do it to the ones who you hold a grudge against for SAVING YOUR LIFE!"

The ninetales was trotting, favoring its injured leg, towards the line of trees. I do it because I like you, it told him.

"Wait, come back! Ya haven't told me what I was supposed to do!"

Be creative. The golden vision leapt over a tall hedge and was lost to him in the darkness. We'll be in touch.

"Be creative, it says," Dodger muttered. He spotted the snare lying in the grass and, with some difficulty, managed to pick it up. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

Elliot was pissed, to put it mildly.

It was dawn the next morning. Dodger had barely had time to shower before he had to drag himself back to work. There were huge circles under his eyes and his hat had a rather obvious grass stain. His arms ached from his "sprint" from his apartment to the hideout. Wearily, he watched Elliot pacing up and down in front of his carved tiger maple desk, the length of black snare wire in his tightly clenched hands.

"Tell me again what happened," he said, too calm given his pinched expression, "and this time listen to yourself when you tell me."

"It's like I said, boss. I got to the spot marked on the map and there wasn't no pokemon there. It pulled the snare out somehow and it ran away. So I picked up the snare so's I could show ya that I wasn't lyin'."

Elliot strung the wire between his fingers. "What kind of pokemon do you suppose set it off?"

"I dunno. Spearow?"

The vice president's face twisted into a grimace. "You're trying to tell me that a bird pulled a twelve-inch iron stake out of the ground, Dodger?"

Dodger shrugged, staring at the plush carpet under his feet. His pants were wrinkled beyond belief.

"Dodger! Pay attention!"

Dodger snapped into a straighter stance, even though it was mostly a result of getting yelled at and not because of any shared respect. He was happy enough that his hat was pulled down far enough over his eyes that he didn't have to endure Elliot's withering gaze.

"This trap was planted for a specific purpose. We needed whatever was in that snare, Dodger. We're several dogs short to sell to the growlithe mill that supplies dogs for the cage fights." The Rocket exec wound the snare around his fist a few times and then dropped it into the wastebasket beside his desk. Sitting down in the black leather chair, he pulled a piece of paper out of a file and uncapped a pen that was lying next to his closed laptop.

"I told you that you didn't have any room to mess up, Dodger, and guess what you just did? You messed up. It's getting to be a little ridiculous and I don't know if I want you in my division any more if this is the way you're going to work."

"Wasn't my fault," he muttered. Elliot's pen paused for a millisecond before he continued to write busily on the form.

"I'm writing you up for dereliction of duty in the face of a specific order. I'm being nice, because you've got a busted leg and probably feel pretty bad. You're being docked pay for the week and don't think you're going to be doing anything but paperwork for the next couple of months." He signed the form with a flourish and tore off a sheet underneath it. "Read it over and think about what you're doing next time, Dodger. You will be cut the next time this sort of event happens."

Elliot offered the slip to Dodger and smiled as he took it. "Now get out there and try not to embarrass me any more."

"Dodger!"

He looked up from his write-up, his face dark. Jilla stood in front of him, twirling the keys to the storeroom on her gloved finger. "We've got chow duty today, buddy," she said. "C'mon, I got somewhere to be after this."

Grabbing his crutches, he followed her out of the in processing room and down the stairs to the sub-basement. Jilla was whistling and skipping a little. "Somebody recently caught an ekans for the poison pool, but remember, you can't feed it. Today's only its third day and you can't spoil it. It has to last at least two more nights without food."

He mumbled something that might have meant 'okay'. Jilla looked over her shoulder and beamed. "Aww, don't worry about the write-up, Dodg. Everybody gets 'em. Hell, Kev got demoted for what happened to Al, even though he brought in a huge load from that lapras. Not getting paid for a week sure beats having to scrape rocks at Mount Moon!"

"Stop trying to cheer me up, Jilla. It's making it worse."

The woman laughed, a stabbing sound that hurt his ears. "I had a bad streak of luck today, too," she said, unlocking the storage room to retrieve the food carts. "Got challenged by some little asshole from Pallet and he whooped me pretty good. He had an Eevee. Where the hell do you even get those things?"

They filled the stainless steel bowls on the carts in silence. Since none of the ground types in her assigned pool were carnivores, all Jilla had to do was funnel dried berry pellets into the bowls on her cart. Dodger added a dead pidgey in each of his bowls along with a handful of dried berry pellets, and they both walked towards the cage halls where the Rocket's pokemon were stored.

"Remember to lock up when you're done," she said, handing him one of the keys off of the chain. He unlocked the door and, with some difficultly, pushed the cart into the narrow hallway with his good knee. The door slammed behind him.

The hallway was dark, but it was always kept this way. He felt around on the wall for the light switch and flipped it.

There were twenty cages, ten on each side of the narrow aisle. Each cage had a hungry occupant staring at him with empty eyes. He sighed and grabbed the first bowl. "Yeah, yeah," he said, unlocking the first cage and shoving the bowl towards the zubat hanging there. "Don't gimme that look, ya freaks."

He moved down the line until he got to a cage with a red label tied to the lock. The ekans inside was curled into a tight purple knot, but when Dodger peeked inside, it raised its head and hissed weakly at him. He scratched his head and looked around, and then stole the pidgey out of another pokemon's bowl, unlocked the cage and tossed it into the cage, surprising the ekans, who slithered after it as he closed the door.

There. I'm atoning for stuff. I guess.

But as he continued to feed the pokemon on each side of the aisle, he got the feeling that he wasn't quite doing enough. So when he finished feeding the last one, he got an idea.

And he hated getting ideas.

He pushed the cart outside again and came back in to double-check if he had locked all of the doors. The pokemon in the cages stared out at him, their soft chewing sounds the only things he heard, and suddenly he became defiant. Elliot wrote me up and said I was lazy. Well, I'll show him. I'll work against him as much as I can. After all, I only have a week to live, right?

He walked down the aisle and unlocked every one of the twenty cages. Most of the pokemon were busy eating, but a few of the zubats flew out and fluttered around the light near the ceiling. The starving ekans was still gradually swallowing its pidgey.

"There," he said when he finished, limping towards the door. "Now you can run free and do whatever the hell you do when you're in the wild."

He closed and locked it behind him, feeling supremely clever, and went to return the empty cart to the storeroom. Jilla was waiting for him and put her hand out for the key.

"What took you so long?" she asked, irritated.

"I, uh, hadda bash one of em on the head a couple times to let go of a pidgey. It tried to bite me so I didn't feed it."

"Oh." She walked next to him as they ascended the stairs. Then she grinned quirkily. "You really are a nasty bastard, aren't'cha?"

The rest of the day passed slowly, with Dodger brooding over his impending fate. Be creative, the ninetales had said. But he wasn't creative. He wasn't even smart. The only thing he could think of would be to paint 'Giovanni sucks' on the walls of the Game Corner, but that wouldn't be atoning for anything, would it? And since when did he become so calm about dying in a week, anyway? He winced when he thought of what the ninetales had made him see. To live forever, with that playing over and over in his mind…he would never be desensitized to that. But to be killed in a week just for saving that stupid pokemon's butt was something he couldn't stomach. But he had to stomach it. It was what he chose.

What if releasing pokemon from the pool was enough? Sure, they could always catch more, right? But it wouldn't be his problem. He would have tried.

He had to say sorry for what he had done, and he didn't even know what he did. And apparently he didn't have a lot of time to figure it out.

He left work late that afternoon, close to sundown. He pulled on his black coat over his uniform and, fixing his hat at a jaunty angle over his ear, he ascended the stairs, exited the Game Corner, and was immediately smashed over the head.

"You murderer!"

The cane cracked down on his skull before he had time to react. He floundered, instinctively reaching up to grab his head and nearly dropping his crutches in the meantime. He spun around in fury and saw a wrinkled old man in suspenders leaning upon the twisted cane that he had just been struck with. The man's weather-worn face was screwed up with grief and anger.

"What was that for, ya crazy bastard! Ya could'a given me a concession!"

"You killed her!" the old man accused in a wheezy voice, poking him in the chest with a gnarled finger. "I know Team Rocket work when I see it! You invaded our town's pokemon memorial tower the other night and ruthlessly slaughtered a mother marowak!"

Oh, jeez. He swept off his hat and scratched the back of his head, looking sheepishly around for any bystanders that might be listening in. Thankfully, it was late enough in the quiet afternoon that most of the citizens were either at home or enjoying themselves too fully to be listening to specific conversations. "Look, old man, I dunno what you're talking about—"

"That poor cubone is an orphan because of you! You killed her in cold blood! You didn't even give any thought to why she was running, did you? Marowak usually fight when their territories are threatened, but this one was running because she had just given birth!"

"Look, even if I was part of Team Rocket, what would I want with a marowak?"

The old man was growing redder in the face. "You don't fool me. You didn't want anything to do with the marowak—you wanted to slaughter her offspring! People like you make me sick. No, you're not people, you're monsters! You should love and respect pokemon and take the time to train them—"

Oh boy. I've heard this speech before. "Look, old man, tell you what. I'll tell some of my buddies to go over to the tower and apologize, awright? They might even bring some flowers for ya. Now will ya please get outta my way? I got a lot of stuff to think about."

As he limped away, the old man crowed after him, "I wish she could have broken both of your legs, you heartless fiend!"

Dodger turned his head over his shoulder, too surprised to think about how the man knew that he was the one responsible for the creature's death. "Yeah, well, she didn't get the chance to, did she? I made sure of that, didn't I? Now beat it!"

He hobbled home, muttering curses the entire way.

His apartment was on the second story of the building next to the department store, and the only thing he liked about it was that the window faced the woods towards the north, so the constant vibrant lights of the city didn't come into him room at night. It was nothing special: single bedroom, with combination kitchen/dining room/living room and a bathroom that encouraged him to stay slim if only for the reason that he couldn't fit through the door otherwise. The papered walls were bare and there were only three pieces of furniture in the entire place, including the bed.

Once he closed the door behind him and bolted it, he threw his crutches down and hopped the three steps' distance from the door to the bathroom. His leg and head were aching. He felt like he'd been hit with a wrecking ball. He leaned over the sink and tugged open the medicine cabinet, popping the top off of a labeled orange bottle and emptying two pills into his palm. Stupid old man, he thought. Stupid marowak, stupid starmie, stupid ninetales….

He closed the medicine cabinet and caught sight of his face in the mirror. He had deep wrinkles under his gray eyes and running down to the corners of his mouth, which seemed chiseled into his face in a perpetual slight frown. His short hair was graying at his temples; he was nearly forty, after all, but he felt so much older. Here he was, already an old man, and he hadn't done anything with his life. He wasn't even a Rocket executive. Just a grunt. A flunkie that most of his superiors could kick around whenever they wanted. He didn't even have any pokemon that actually belonged exclusively to him. That fact smarted just a little bit more than the other reasons that he was a complete failure.

He popped the painkillers and swallowed hard, turning on the tap to wash them down with a mouthful of water. Leaving the bathroom light on, he hopped towards his couch and collapsed facefirst onto the cushions, waiting for the medicine to start working. A write-up, no pay, my head hurts like hell and I'm going to die in a week, he thought, feeling sorry for himself. And if they find out that I'm the one who left all those doors opened, I'll be in trouble. Well, he considered after a moment of thought, more trouble that I'm already in, anyway.

You are wasting time!

The voice was like an air horn going off in his head, and he started so badly that he practically fell off the couch. "How'd you get in here?" he bawled at the ninetales, who was sitting across the room on his open balcony. Its golden fur fairly shone against the indigo blue of the evening. Its ninth tail was no longer bleeding and the pokemon looked hale and hearty as ever, if not extremely angry.

I told you we would be in touch. You are mine, human. You have taken advantage of my mercy!

He crawled back onto the couch and reflexively reached for something to throw at the intruder. He dropped his arm when he saw the ninetales's lip arch up in a snarl. "What's the problem now?"

You have six days to live and you have not acted on your word.

"Whaddaya mean? I released alla them poison-types when I went to feed 'em! I could get in a lot of trouble for that, y'know! I'm trynna do that atoning thing you told me about!"

You released them, but you didn't open the outer door for them to escape back into the wild, you infant! The ninetales suddenly jumped up from its calm sitting position and spat out a lick a flame into the air, which fizzled out into embers on Dodger's carpet. You do not have the luxury of being lax in your efforts!

"I'm doin' all I can do, jeez! Do you think it's easy for me?"

You're not trying hard enough.

"So? I'd try harder if I knew what the hell I was supposed to be doing! Jeez, ya gotta spell it out for me cuz I can't read yer mind, ya son of a bitch!"

I am not telling you to apologize for another human's sin. I have charged you with the task of apologizing for your own! You must right the wrongs that you have directly caused.

"How? I only do what I'm told. I don't make any of the decisions in Team Rocket."

No! The ninetales's nostrils were emitting smoke in thin tendrils. It is not something you have been commanded to do!

"I dunno what you want," Dodger said stubbornly, crossing his arms over his chest. "I ain't done nothing."

The ninetales barked at him, leaping nimbly through the balcony's open door and landing with legs braced on the low wooden table in front of Dodger's couch, knocking several unfinished cans of warm beer and a stack of magazines onto the floor. Tales flared and a growl rumbling in its throat, the fire fox's next words squeezed the air out of Dodger's lungs with the force of their command.

The seel trade, human! I am telling you to shut down the seel trade!