People had seen Red as a sob story from the very beginning.

Well, not the very beginning. He had a few brief years to enjoy beforehand, though he had no way of knowing then that those would be possibly the happiest years of his young life.

The fever struck when he was barely old enough to comprehend what a fever was. While the other children played outside, Red was stuck in bed for months, with family and doctors as his only companions, his world defined by an illness that nobody could quite explain. The fever very nearly killed him, and the young boy was left blind- and, after a number of shouting fests and smashed dishes, fatherless. And the young boy's life was changed forever.

But Red never saw himself as a lost cause. It wasn't, as some claimed, that he didn't remember what it was like to live with vision, to be what they stubbornly insisted on calling normal; he still recalled the time before the fever, though only faintly, like a passing dream. Yes, Red needed a cane to help him examine his surroundings. Yes, he couldn't connect the name of a color to its appearance, all the more frustrating for a boy named Red in a region with towns named Indigo and Fuchsia, names meant to evoke hues that he would never fully recall.

But more than not being able to envision the faces of his loved ones or take in the visual beauty of a sunset, Red hated the pity that his condition incited everywhere he went. Strangers would go up to him on the street and say how sorry they were for him, how tough it must be to live like that, or how inspirational he was… for what? For existing, for daring to go out in public while blind? Red had never asked for his mere existence to be inspirational.

At least he had Green, who was as irreverent about his rival's blindness as he was about everything else, frequently joking when Red beat him in yet another game that maybe they should try playing hide-and-seek instead (and one day they actually did, and Red quickly proved more capable than his rival had imagined, knowing every nook and cranny of their houses like the back of his hand, able to make out Green's hiding spot based on his breathing or fidgeting every time, letting the other boy know that he had been found by smacking him with his cane).

But Red wanted more than to be stuck at home for the rest of his life. As Green's tenth birthday arrived, the boy had talked nonstop about his grandfather giving him a Pokemon so he could be a Trainer. But when Red told his mother that he wanted to be a Trainer too, she laughed and ruffled his hair and told him not to be silly, that he was young and it was dangerous and he shouldn't think about that just yet. But he had enough experience to decode her seemingly-kind words, and knew that it was just another way of saying that he was weak, incapable of taking on the responsibility that his best friend took for granted.

Red came up with elaborate plans of how he could disobey his mother, ways to run through the tall grass north of town and get to Viridian City, where he would somehow convince a Poke Mart worker that he was already a Trainer and just needed a fresh supply of Poke Balls. Or maybe he'd befriend a wild Pokemon when he walked onto the route, and he wouldn't need a Poke Ball at all, that the little critter would bond with him so that no formal capture would be necessary. He was, admittedly, a bit fuzzy on the specifics of the plan's success. All he knew was that it would lead to something, something different (a few people used that word, trying to dance around naming his disability- he was "different", that was all, as though every person wasn't in some way different from others) than the days and weeks and months spent at home doing a whole lot of nothing. Whatever that meant, it had to be better than this.

And then the day came when Red woke up and heard thousands of people talking all at once, and he moved as they told him to move, bumping into the walls that he knew so well, breathing heavily as he bounded up and down the stairs. And when Red finally went downstairs for good and managed to squeeze out the words to ask his mother who all these people were and why they were here, she didn't say anything, just tapped the table as those strange new voices kept talking. Several long minutes later, his mother told him that there weren't any people there, that he must be imagining things; then he noticed that there were no footsteps or breaths or heartbeats, just voices, voices without bodies to go with them, and that's when Red realized that something was terribly wrong.

And the boy went into the grass north of town, just as he always wanted, and Oak gave him a Pokemon when Green got one, just as he always wanted, and Red knew that maybe he should have been happy about going on such a grand adventure. But he couldn't be happy about much of anything when he couldn't walk on his own, couldn't utter a single word, couldn't even stop to grab his cane as he left home. He thought it was the fever at first, some part of it still in his system back to wreak havoc. And maybe it was. But if so, it was a very strange sickness, one that led him to do things he never could have done otherwise, pushing his body to its limits and then well beyond them.

Red had thought he had a good sense of direction, but then again, he'd never had the opportunity to test it out much; the boy had only left Pallet Town a handful of times, going to the nearest Poke Mart and coming right back home, with his mother holding his hand the whole way. The voices constantly commanding him to spin around or walk in circles didn't help Red orient himself, either, and he soon lost track of what direction he was headed. And the voices, tens of thousands of voices screaming in his head at all times, drowned out all but the loudest of noises.

Red ended up relying on their chaotic shouts to avoid total disorientation, even though the voices quickly proved to be unreliable narrators, because everything else had been taken from him. Only the voices knew for sure that the ledge he'd spent hours trying and failing to surpass was only a few short feet from the Pokemon Center next to Rock Tunnel. Only the voices knew whether what he was tossing at a wild Pokemon was a Poke Ball or an Ultra Ball, since Red had never before had the privilege of touching either one. Only the voices knew that the waves crashing into the shore, on a beach where the air was salty enough to make his eyes water, lay on the other end of the sea from his dear Pallet Town. And only the voices knew that they had accompanied Red for eight days now, or eleven and a half, or fifteen; only the voices knew whether the journey was almost over or had just begun; only the voices knew when they would cede control, when he would finally be able to take a well-deserved rest.

Only a few small gestures were able to remind Red of life outside of that bestowed upon him by the voices. First he began to idly grasp a stone that the voices had made him pick up off the cold damp floor of a cave, turning it over in his hand, focusing his attention on its smooth rounded surface in an attempt to focus on anything besides the chaos that constantly filled his mind- but the voices were fickle, and when he once absentmindedly dropped the stone, they made him run away before he could retrieve it, fleeing the scene even while some mourned its loss. They let him keep the boat ticket that he focused on next, though, which was made of rough paper that he scratched away at with his nails and words with indented letters that he could feel as he brushed his fingertips along the ticket's surface.

But the most comforting object of all, that prized possession which grounded Red the most during his seemingly-endless journey, was a fossil containing the remains of a long-extinct ammonite Pokemon, one which he had picked up in the same cave where he had found the smooth stone that he had loved and lost so long ago. Red spent hours stopping in the middle of battles or long treks to brush his hands against the hard stone, soon learning the pattern to the helix's spiral and ridges, memorizing the placement of the divots and bumps that the palm-sized fossil had acquired in the places where time had bolstered rather than smoothed out the irregularities of the once-living form.

And every once in a while, when the boy was growing especially homesick, he would run into Green- sometimes literally, as the voices grew reckless with their impatience to battle Red's childhood rival. For a while these meetings were a welcome reminder of the time before his journey, as Green was his usual obnoxious self, not treating Red with kid gloves, even using his customary tongue-in-cheek farewell of "smell ya later" when they inevitably had to part ways. But then, as their meetings grew more numerous, Red began to notice the occasional hesitation in his rival's voice, and how it now contained a tinge of pity, and the boy knew all too well why this had come to be. Under the voices' control, Red now appeared to be the stereotype that he had well and truly grown out of several years ago, stumbling into minor obstacles and ramming into walls and seeming oblivious to his surroundings.

He worried that Green would never see him as anything but that pathetic, pitiful, bumbling figure ever again.

And just as Red began to grow attached to the companions that had been chosen for him, recognizing that they too were unable to escape his inexplicable predicament, the voices released his beloved teammates one by one. The ammonite fossil that had kept him grounded for what seemed like an eternity was transformed into just another of these companions, as vulnerable as all the rest. The other items that he desperately sought solace in were soon thrown away or hidden within the confines of the dreaded computer system which had taken away so many of his allies, and he was forced into a cycle of challenging the region's strongest Trainers, an unending trek in one direction that seemed forever destined to end in defeat.

And at the end of it all… he had to confront Green.

Red lost the battle against his long-time rival the first time around. His own Pokemon were strong, immensely so, but Green had grown to be quite the skilled Trainer, and his coordination was more than enough to finish off Red's team, already weakened from long and painful matches against the rest of the Elite Four.

Red lost the second time around, too.

And the time after that.

And the time after that.

But he kept going, taking the same basic route through the same small area over and over again. He didn't have a choice. Each footstep had become a herculean effort as the days had worn down his body, but the voices made him take step after excruciating step, still wandering in circles, still bumping into walls. If anything, the chaos seemed greater than normal, with the voices shouting over one another more loudly than ever before.

Finally, miraculously, one battle broke the pattern set by all the rest.

Red won.

The boy could distantly hear that Professor Oak was saying something to him, but the professor's words were lost in the chorus of rejoicing voices that now filled his head. The noise was so great that the boy felt as if his head was going to burst open, and it just kept growing and growing…

And then, in an instant, without warning, the voices were gone, the din turned to utter silence.

The pain that they had created during their journey, however, remained all too present.

The boy fell to the ground, now constrained not by some inexplicable entity's possession but by the weakness of his physical form.

All was quiet.

The fall threw him against a patch of hard sleek tile, but when he woke up he was surrounded by scratchy blankets and hard pillows. There were voices, but only two or three, ones that spoke in full sentences and whose shoes squeaked against the ground with every plodding step. They spoke not of his journey but of his condition, his chances of survival, speaking as if he were not present.

It took Red quite some time to realize that he was once again able to move of his own volition.

Every twitch of the finger led to a burst of pain, but it was his, his choice to move, the display of freedom well worth the agony that followed. And when he first spoke, his voice was hoarse and soft from lack of use and each word made his throat ache, but it meant that he was able to communicate with the outside world once more, to prove that he was more than a mere automaton.

Slowly, the pain ebbed away, and those surrounding him spoke to him rather than of him, and were concerned not about his survival but about the journey that would follow. He became able to sit up, then to stand, then to walk. Eventually, after- days? weeks? months? it was hard to tell- he was able to leave the room in which he had been trapped, to return to his home and whatever awaited him there.

As he first stepped out the hospital doors, he was greeted with the click of a multitude of cameras and dozens of voices shouting over one another, asking questions that all seemed to meld together, to which he could muster only the response of shaking his head and walking all the faster.

The boy had hoped that, after all was said and done, he would be able to retreat into his bedroom and spend some time working out what had happened for himself, and he would return to a life of quiet normalcy.

He was wrong.

Because Red was Champion now, and Champions didn't get to hide away at home. There were battles and interviews and conferences to keep him busy for every second of every day, such that he rarely got a moment alone, let alone the long expanses of free time that he so desired. He'd never imagined that being a Champion would be so much work.

And when he told his story during the interviews, when he spoke of the voices that had guided him to his newfound position of power, nobody ever believed him.

The world didn't just see him as a poor blind boy now; they saw him as a poor delusional blind boy, now all the more deserving of pity.

Mothers (it always seemed to be the mothers) told him how inspirational he was, how their children who were blind or insane or both looked up to him, how he was living proof that the disabled could make a difference in the world. And maybe all that was true. But Red had never asked to be a role model, to be an inspiration, to be Champion.

If he had a say in the matter… well…

Things would probably be different.

Not that he'd ever know for sure.

Several months passed by. He fought countless challengers with the Pokemon that had been bound to him during that strange and terrible journey and managed to best them all, his combat strategy now working to his advantage as much as his sheer strength. He gave speeches and went to conferences, and eventually he stopped trying to convince the world that he hadn't wanted any of this, not really.

Whenever he got a moment, he'd try to talk things out with his mother and Green, the two people in the world who seemed to accept his story (though part of him still wondered if they were just indulging him, if they laughed at his belief in the voices behind his back). But those moments were few and far between.

After months of this, Red had had enough.

He couldn't say what had set him off, what was the straw that had broken the camel's back. But one night, the boy packed up a few necessities into a dirty, worn backpack that had grown dusty from lack of use, grabbed six Poke Balls and a cane, and ran off into the wilderness, hardly caring where he was heading as long as it was away.

The hours flew by, and before he knew it, Red could feel the warmth of sunbeams against his now-grimy skin. As his running turned to walking, he found a small wooden signpost, its smooth Braille marks announcing that he stood at the base of Mount Silver.

Mount Silver… So he wasn't even in Kanto anymore. He didn't know much about the mountain, save that it was tall and rocky and remote, but that didn't matter. It was as good a place as any to start fresh.

And, as easily as that, the boy adopted Mount Silver as his new home.

He had expected search parties of some sort to track him down; he was Champion, after all, and they wouldn't let him leave that easily. But, as far as he could tell, none ever came. Maybe they didn't think that he could travel that far. Maybe they didn't expect him to navigate such treacherous terrain. Maybe they thought that he would come crawling home after a day or two, having learned his lesson about the perils of the outside world.

But, with some work, he grew to know the area, grew to survive in it. He learned the location of every ledge and cliff in the area, figured out which he could surmount and which he had best stay away from. Trial and error taught him which berries were edible and which would leave him sick for days on end. He gutted Parasects and cooked Golbats over small, hot flames. He hid from the handful of other inhabitants of the mountains, often staying inside its deepest cave, where none of the rest dared to venture.

And, throughout it all, he struggled to figure out what had brought him here in the first place. Why had the voices chosen him of all people? Were people right in thinking that he had imagined them all along? Should he go back to Kanto, to being Champion, to a life that was dictated for him, to a throng of voices that clung to his every word and called him brave and strong and an inspiration to them all?

Were Mom and Green worried about him?

Should they be?

Days turned to weeks turned to months, but much as he pondered these questions, the answers never came. Perhaps they never would. Perhaps that was how it was meant to be.

The boy grew in other ways. He grew stronger, taller, until he had to string together patches of skin and fur to prevent his old clothes from tearing apart altogether. He grew tougher in both body and mind, grew accustomed to the scrapes and bruises that he so often accumulated on his treks across the mountain. He grew closer to his team of Pokemon, the ones that the voices had initially chosen for him, but that he now had chosen to bring along when he left the world behind. The seven became one, to the point where a whistle or a wave was enough to guide a gust of wind from his Pidgeot or a jolt of lightning from his Zapdos. (Words, Red decided, were overrated. Red had heard enough words to last a lifetime, words filling his head until he couldn't hear himself think, words spilled out until he couldn't tell one apart from the next. He didn't care to add to the muddle.)

He whiled away the time, waiting for some epiphany to give him a purpose in life once more, but none came.

Until, one day, while he and his team were occupied with a meal of juicy berries as they sat in the far reaches of the mountain's deepest cave, Red heard footsteps.

They were distant at first, distant and rapid and irregular, interspersed with the sound of rocks sliding and falling on the hard cavern floor. Several times, the boy could hear the intruder smash into the cave walls or the jagged ledges scattered throughout that had cut open his ankles and knees many a time, but the newbie never uttered a word or gave off so much as a single groan from pain.

He tried to think nothing of it at first, though something about it made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. It was a spelunker, probably, another curious tourist poking about before retreating to the safety of the nearby Pokemon Center. But they didn't retreat. In fact, over time, the footsteps just grew louder.

Whoever it was, they were getting closer.

It wasn't a steady progression, to be sure. The volume of the footsteps waxed and waned as their source wandered about. But, soon, the interloper grew close enough that Red could hear not only their feet pounding against the stones that lined the area, but also their deep, fast breathing, their frequent zipping and unzipping of their backpack. and eventually, even the racing of their heart.

More bumping into walls. More ramming into ledges. More checking the backpack…

Red felt a pit in his stomach as he realized where he had heard this all before.

He had run away from it all. He ran from the Championship, from the Elite Four, from the reporters. He ran from all of Kanto. He ran from his best friend, from his own mother.

But, in the end, he couldn't run from the voices.