Unadulterated rage and despair pierced the air like a dagger.
Shin had no clue how long he had been walking for, nor did he care at all. His surroundings began to urbanize and become completely unfamiliar to the usual abundance of plant life that had grown around his hometown. Rows of buildings seemed to stretch on endlessly in both directions and cast shadows on the asphalt with the faint orange glow of the streetlights.
Not far behind him, Anonymous followed hastily behind his friend as he kept a worried gaze at the boy's angered face, hair bristling uncontrollably. Anonymous' expression held great amounts of distress for the boy and his well-being; he did his best to suppress the increasing amounts of dread the hung around him from the unknown territory. Somehow, the streets gave off an unsettling aura to him, as if an evil spirit had haunted each building, each looming object tucked within the cover of night. The pup wanted nothing more than to escape immediately.
Anonymous desperately yipped at Shin's feet as if he were begging him to turn around and go back home to his mother. However, Shin, blinded by his own fury, kept storming forward. He breathed grudgingly to himself as tears fell like a broken stream, mumbling to himself. "A monster...! He's not a...! How could...?! Why would she...?!"
Finally, Anonymous bared his fangs and bit firmly around the material of Shin's sneaker, causing him to jerk to a stop. He whipped his head to face the Pokémon with a vexed look. "Stop it, Anonymous!" the boy snapped, agitated. "Just leave me alone!" Anonymous growled defiantly in response, letting out a short bark as if he were scolding Shin. Shin grit his teeth. "I'm not going back there! She doesn't want either of us, she doesn't get either of us!"
He flung himself around and flounced back on his trail, gaining some distance. Incoherent whispers soon began to escape his mouth before he caught sight of the Rockruff bounding in front of his path, halting him. Shin did his best to find another method to get Anonymous to back off, but his mouth began speaking other words. "You and Dad... Both of you can't be like what Mom said! Dad would never force those Pokémon like that! He would never beat them up! He would never inject them! Dad wasn't a monster!" A lump in his throat suddenly crushed his voice into a pulp at the morbid memory of his mother's words:
"...Your father was killed by a monster."
Shin could feel each pulse of his heart begin to collapse. His face was stale with dark circles, deprived of even a drop of hope in the entire universe. "Dad... can't be...!"
The child didn't know why he was telling this to a Pokémon who wouldn't even understand his situation. He didn't even know why he was saying these things at all at the moment. It was as if the heat of his body started pushing the words right from his brain and out of his mouth, an inevitable erupting volcano that cried tears of obsidian and molten magma rivers.
His wet violet eyes then focused on Anonymous, who had pacified his stance to cautiously study Shin's abrupt change of behavior. Was his mother right? He found himself asking nobody. Had he been, for his whole life, surrounded by monsters he had never cared to acknowledge? The thought possessed him, sapping his essence away from its sheer morbidness that he wanted nothing more than to cease.
But at that moment, it dawned on him. Who was ever born a monster? Did one become one so simply by doing an appalling deed? Did they ever really want to in the first place?
And just because of Anonymous' collar, the Pokémon had been deemed as a twisted mirror of someone else's mistakes?
It wasn't his fault. He refused to believe it was true. Anonymous could never be like those demons his mother had explained to him before, not after Shin had spent so much time with him teaching him about the world. No, he was a being with a heart and soul, like any other Pokémon. Anonymous was a Rockruff, just like how his father was human... Just like how his mother was human... Just like how he was human. The poor pup had probably understood what his mother had said, never noticing that none of her words were true about him. How much the boy wanted to assure his friend gutted him from the inside. How much he wanted to give back to the pup for being there for him as another individual suffocated his chest.
YOU ARE READING
Anonymous {2nd Place in Miscellaneous (PWA 2018)}
FanfictionAll Shin Harper had ever wanted was a Pokémon by his side. As an only child living with his mother in the empty outskirts of the Alola region, isolation was a common plight. Shin longed for someone to share his memories with for the rest of his day...
