“Thanks, doll.” says the man with the voice full of rusted nails. With a snap of his fingers, he conjures a wet handkerchief from one of his flunkie’s pockets, wiping the blood from his hands. He does it with long, careful strokes; over and under his fingers, his joints, his fingernails.

When he’s done, his hands look clean, almost virginal. Only then does he place them on the desk’s top, carefully, for fear of staining the polished oak wood. Absent-mindedly, he straightens the cuff of his jacket. He looks uncreased, brand-new, proper.

Had it not been for the blood spatter on his chin, you almost wouldn’t be able to tell that he was just done beating the man tied on the desk chair opposite from him to within an inch of his life just a couple minutes ago.

The man with the 5,000 pokebucks suit and the solid silver brooch on his jacket looks at the man on the desk chair, his face now a uniform red gash, punctuated by a single eye and a mouth sporting only half its teeth and says:

“I’m sorry, Brendan, but something came up. I’m afraid we’re going to have to cut this short. Gus and George, escort this man outside.”

“Yes Boss, Mister Giovanni.” They say, as the man leaves the room. Brandon lets out a few pitiful screams, begs through split lips and a bloated tongue. The thunder of a gunshot across the hallways puts a stop to it the very next instant.

Stupid bloody Viridian city thugs Giovanni think, as he passes by one of his men, hard at work leafing through a smut magazine with his back leaning against the door. He shoots up straight as an arrow soon as he sees him, of course. Does his best to present a salute, even.

“Evenin’ Boss.”

Never could get things done right. Shoulda listened to Pa on that one Giovanni considered, as he was making his way up a flight of stairs, under the harsh glare of halogen lamps. He remembered how much his father had hated those:

Too bright for their own sake. Too cold. No character in them, you know? His father would complain over dinner, looking for some inadequacy in the modern world that would assuage his fears of growing older. He’d been a construction worker, his father; union man, honest, hard-working. But he couldn’t handle progress worth a damn, though. Giovanni hadn’t learned much from his father, except for two things:

You keep what you build with your own two hands and never trust a Viridian man to do a proper job. He’d followed the first one to the letter: made himself a fortune, turned himself from a construction worker’s son into a millionaire by the sweat of his own brow. But he had let Viridian men into Team Rocket. How bad could they be? Giovanni had thought.

And then Vince happened.

As Giovanni exits the stairway (hidden behind a tool storage) and enters his private elevator, the thought of the black-topped pokeball and the mess in Viridian City and the prospect of his grunt having somehow ended up in police custody sends shivers up his spine. His man won’t squeal, of course. But the pokeball will reveal its secrets, under scrutiny.

As the elevators dings, announcing that he has arrived in the study room, Giovanni sees his personal guard scrambling about, playing at vigilance. The second he puts his foot down on the thick carpeting, the study room phone rings, shrilly. He freezes, mid-step.

The phone rings once again before it’s picked up. There’s the pitter-patter of tiny feet across marble tiling, wooden boards, Johto rugs, before his secretary reaches the hallway and presents him with the receiver. She mouths a name, but Giovanni already knows it.

“Mister Fuji.” Giovanni says and he can’t stop himself from gritting his teeth.

“I know where your boy is.”

***

I wake up screaming, thinking of chalk-white covered in bits of red hair, matted with blood. I try to reach out, to touch my face and trace its shape, make sure it is still my own, but I can’t move my hands.

Something’s wrapped round my wrists, cold and unyielding, biting into the skin. I know they are cuffs, but the scared little monkey in my skull won’t acknowledge them. Instead, it claws and screeches, pissing itself in the process.

Something touches my shoulder, soft and warm and I daren’t open my eyes for fear of looking into Joey’s eyes and seeing a madly grinning reflection of my own face there. I try to scream, but my throat’s closed up and dry. My tongue’s a lolling, dead thing that flaps around behind my teeth.

“Stop struggling” a voice speaks, millennia-old and unfathomably kind. I want to believe that I’m dead and that I somehow got into Heaven. I keep telling myself: the ambulance crashed and you got your head smashed against the grating. The nurse messed up while they were bringing you here, pumped you full of too much sedative and your heart stopped. The driver took a wrong turn and you got ejected out into the street and got run over by a car.

“It’s okay, you’re safe” says the voice and my delusion begins to peel away, in layers. The voice is no longer angelic; it sounds bitter and so, so tired. The hand that’s resting on my shoulder is calloused and its grip is rough, intended to hurt me so I’ll wake up. I keep telling myself: please God, let me be in Hell. Let me open my eyes and see them shove me in a furnace and burn me until I’m little more than a crisp. Let me see them shovel dirt on my face. Let me be in a coffin six feet under with nobody around that can hear me screaming.

Because I know that if I wake up and I’m still alive after all this, then I am worse than dead: I am just garbage with an opinion.

I open my eyes and she’s standing over me, grinning a shit-eating grin. Her eyes are like orbs of turquoise, veined with black.

“Easy now. We’ve cuffed you.” Officer Jenny says, her tone of voice the one Persians use to address cornered Ratatas. “You’re in the hospital. You’re going to be fine.”

“I want my lawyer” I mumble.

“You’ll get your lawyer.” Officer Jenny says, pressing her thumb down on my shoulder, pinching a nerve. Numbness begins creeping down my right arm.

“I ain’t talking until I get my lawyer,” I say, putting on my best tough-guy impression.

“What were you doing in Lavender town, Vincent?” she says, pressing down harder, rendering my right arm completely useless.

“I got rights.”

“You were my first bust, Vincent. When I got on the force? You probably don’t remember me.”

Something in me slides off its usual place and plops into my stomach. Were I standing up, my knees would have probably given way.

“You’d been charged with battery. Beaten some trainer half to death. You got off because your lawyer had passed it off as self-defense. He said the trainer had set his Hitmonlee on you. That you’d had every right to bash his skull in with a crowbar.”

His name was Troy. I want to tell her. And he’d thought he could pull a fast one on me. I want to lie to her, but I just can’t. She’s staring into my soul right now, peeling away at the lies and the denial and seeing the violent little scumbag that pulls the strings.

“I remember the look you gave me, when you left that courtroom. Like you were the smartest man in Kanto. You’d looked at me like I was garbage, Vincent. I bet you felt like a solid gold bomb, didn’t you?” Officer Jenny says, letting go of my arm. “And back in Vermillion, earlier today, when I was carting that poor kid with the mangled face to the hospital, I saw you. You’d known who I was, didn’t you?”

I only nod.

“I can hurt you, Vincent. I can beat the living shit out of you right now” Officer Jenny says, taking a canister of pepper spray and setting it on my bedside table. “Or I can just spray this whole can of mace in your eyes until they burn out. And no-one would stop me. And since there’s no official report by any doctors, no one would be able to prove I’d done it to you.”

I try to move, but there’s only the clanking of cufflinks on the side of my bed. Jenny knows I’m scared out of my skin but doesn’t seem to acknowledge it.

“I could destroy you, Vincent. But I’d rather see you carted out of prison, shanked by one of your buddies.” She says, getting up. “Oh, who am I kidding?”

The nightstick’s in her hand before I even know it, crashing down on my chest, knocking the wind right out of me. The second hit gets me in the stomach and I retch bile. Jenny’s about to smack me in the eye, when the screams start.

“What the hell’s going on?”

Somewhere in the distance, someone begins screaming: a staccato tone, with a dash of panic. Something roars, scared and oh so familiar. Glass crashes and I know the shape of the arm that’s crashed through it as if it was a wet tissue.

“SSSNNNOOORRRLLLAAAXXX!” it roars and I know that things can’t possibly get any worse.