Kill the Sun

A/N: Aside from a scrapped project I attempted a while back, this is my first truly long project! This first chapter may seem short, but that's because it's the prologue and not an actual first chapter — but I promise the subsequent chapters won't be quite so short!

Disclaimer: I don't own Pokémon, as much as I'd like to.

(Prologue edited 8th June 2019 - minor tweaks - AO3 and FFN only)

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" When one with honeyed words but evil mind

Persuades the mob, great woes befall the state. "

— Euripides, Orestes


[Excerpt from a wiretapped conversation between Wataru Lance, Dragon Master of the Johtan and Kantonian Pokémon Leagues, and Rocket Boss Giovanni, a week before the completion of the Rocket conquest of northwestern Johto:

"…ion. But Lance, you know as well as I that I never intended for this little war of ours to go on for so long. In truth, I have always considered you a man of great esteem and intelligence, but this… you are making decisions in haste, and it shows. Your people are dying. Your League is in shambles — don't lie to me. I was a part of Kanto's once, if you recall. I know when a League is on the brink of collapse."

"Give me one reason why I shouldn't kill you where you stand."

"You know exactly why you shouldn't. And you know you can't, Lance, drop the pretences. Give me what I want, painlessly, and we can end this tiresome squabble on agreeable terms. I'm sure we can come to a compromise if you cooperate. If not…"

"Don't threaten me, Giovanni. I'll remind you that I defeated you once at the Indigo League; I can defeat you again here. If you think you have the upper hand because of that, then you're wrong."

"Perhaps, then, you'd be more responsive to an incentive; you always have been rather like a dog. Listen to me: in four days' time, Olivine will fall. Hundreds — maybe more — will die in the chaos. And for what? Your pride? Face it, Lance: this is a battle you know you can't win. Your soldiers aren't disposable, Lance; mine are."

"And if I call your bluff?"

"You'll lose an entire city. I'll give you time to think on it. You have four days: I hope you'll choose wisely."

:Excerpt end.]


You see, the biggest and most common misconception about the Rocket conquest of northwestern Johto is that Rocket victory was achieved because they were inherently stronger than the League's forces, or maybe because they were more numerous. I'm not the best at maths, but I know for a fact that non-Rocket Johtans vastly outnumbered Rocket's forces by at least a hundred to one when the skirmishes took place, and if you think that the sheer awesomeness of Lance and his dragonite isn't capable of crushing any number of Rocket admins with ease, then you're sorely mistaken.

Yeah, Lance could've ripped any task force sent to eliminate him to shreds, and you and I both know it. Oh, don't mess around — he's not the Champion for nothing. That dragonite of his is at least one and a half times the size of any normal beast, and I've seen the power of its outrage. You saw that broadcasted League match against the guy with the mega scizor, didn't you? His team fell like dominos against that dragonite. It's a berserker, and it's completely loyal to its master.

Anyway, Rocket didn't win because of skill or strength. Rocket won because its people and pokémon are fucking fearless. What? It's true. You're all maniacs, the lot of you. For Rocket Grunts, death is just another part of life, another blip in the system. Their brothers collapse all around them, crumpling under League sanctioned pokémon, and they barely bat an eye. You barely bat an eye. You just move to bring your opponents down and keep marching on through enemy lines.

And I'm no philosopher, but that sounds pretty soul crushing for the Johtan resistance force. How do you keep fighting against an enemy that keeps getting back up no matter how many times you strike it down? At what point do you accept that it's an unwinnable battle?

Giovanni's a nasty son of a bitch, but he's not afraid to accept big losses for what he deems "bigger gains," and his men are expendable. He knew that if he kept throwing them at Johto's walls, piling up the corpses, then the region would crack eventually. It wasn't a matter of intelligence and it wasn't a battle of wits. It was endurance, patience, the ability to stomach the sheer amount of death incurred in the struggle for freedom.

At some point, you're going to just give in, right? You're going to do whatever it takes to stop the pain. Use a tourniquet, amputate the damaged limb if you must. In this case, the "damaged limb" of Johto was its northwesterly quarter. In this case, the bonesaw that severed it was the unending stream of Rocket martyrs.

For the League, I think Olivine was what did it. After Giovanni's nidoqueen crushed Jasmine's steel type army beneath her earth shaking feet, bringing down half the city with them, Lance just… stopped fighting, and northwestern Johto was surrendered to Rocket control.

Did I ever think it'd be a permanent retreat? No. Lance isn't stupid — there's no way he'd give up Olivine, half of Ecruteak, the National Park and the Battle Frontier complex to a businessman with a god complex. But he needed to bide his time, store power and strike where it counted.

Not to mention the nasty scar over his dragonite's eye, a permanent reminder from Giovanni's persian that cats never played fair. Dragon skin was among the toughest of any organic creature, and for a mere normal type to slice it to ribbons in such an effortless manner—

Lance was right to be cautious. Giovanni was, after all, a former Champion, and he'd been Kanto's eighth gym leader, her last line of defence before the Pokémon League, and Lance, who'd been an ally of his for so many years, knew of the devastation he was capable of causing when pressed.

But none of that matters now. Lance pulled through, didn't he? He always does.

Don't look bitter — you can't have thought you'd hang on forever. You look like a smart man; you know the raw power Lance and his dragons possess. Dragon types aren't known as both the gods and their killers for nothing, after all.

When I was seven, five years after Rocket dominance had been established over northwestern Johto, I saw TV footage of a couple of grunts setting their rabid arbok on an Olivine man because he'd spat at their feet. They laughed through his dying screams, recalled their monster of a pokémon when it finished and sauntered back the way they'd come, leaving no evidence of their crime.

All that for a pointless, forgettable act of defiance. He probably had a family. A wife, maybe, or a husband. Kids, too, I reckon. A whole host of people circling around him like planets orbiting a star — and in the blink of an eye, they were flung into deep space, untethered and spiralling.

Yeah. It sounds cruel, doesn't it? No? Wow. You're sicker than I thought.

But after that event, the wider Johtan population learned not to mess with Rocket. We also learned that Rocket would leave you alone so long as you kept your mouth shut, your head down and your anger to yourself. They never gave a shit about our loyalty: they only expected our fear. And we were fucking terrified, even in the southeast, where Rocket's influence was reduced to the occasional pocket of poaching.

You know how it is. Nobody knows a Rocket Grunt, not personally, but everybody knows somebody who's been victimised, whether by having their pokémon stolen and sold on the black market or being beaten within an inch of their life for stumbling across something they weren't meant to see or making eye contact with a Grunt who was having a bad day.

What changed our fear, you ask? Nothing. We were all scared 'till the end. Some of us are still scared now. Giovanni being gone for good and Giovanni being hidden and plotting his return are two very different things, and that man, whether you like him or not, is a genius. You might struggle to keep a good man down, but smothering a tyrant is downright impossible.

And it's not like Team Rocket are defeated. I'm not sure you ever will be.

Let me tell you something— when Professor Elm discovered pokémon eggs — and thereby solved an age old mystery about the truth behind pokémon breeding, which had, beforehand, been seen entirely as a mystery — he also unlocked the truth behind their colossal power. Pokémon eggs are practically indestructible; even inactive, dead eggs refused to crack under immense pressure, blazing heat, freezing cold and harsh chemicals. From his various experiments, the professor surmised that pokémon eggs may very well be made of the strongest material in the world.

You know what actually makes a pokémon egg hatch? It's not the environment, nor external stress. It's love.

That sounds cheesy, but there's a reason why every pokémon species studied after Professor Elm's discovery, no matter how doting they were as parents after their offspring hatched, stayed around long enough to see their babies hatch. Sure, heat can accelerate the duration of incubation, but all that's for nothing if the egg doesn't feel your aura pulsing with devotion.

Why do you think Orre's shadow pokémon can't breed properly? They don't suddenly lose all memory of their basic biology and most primitive instincts: all their eggs are useless without their parents' adoration. And the people in Cipher controlling those pokémon don't care enough to act as surrogates and show the eggs the care they need for them to grow and blossom into living, breathing creatures.

Pokémon biology is fascinating, you know. Years and years of studying and still nobody can crack it in its entirety. (Yes, that was an egg pun. No, I won't say sorry.) Like any living thing, some aspects of pokémon life are easy to explain — the food chain, the diets of those that eat tangible, nutritious food, the initially simple but now vastly complex coding of the porygon line. But other parts are still mysteries, and maybe always will be — the breeding conundrum, and the "what came first, the torchic or the egg?" paradox concerning the charmander line and their tail flame. Does the death of the pokémon cause the extinguishing of the tail flame, or does the extinguishing of the tail flame cause the death of the pokémon?

Nobody's got enough of a callous lack of empathy to actually test either hypothesis.

What's that? You don't give a shit about my ranting? You just want me to tell you everything I know?

There was a point to all that rambling, believe it or not, but alright. Suit yourself. But we've got to start from the beginning — the very beginning. I get it; you don't want to hear about the ifs and the maybes. You want the truth. My truth. My story.

And you want to hear about Lance's child soldiers. My team. We'll get to them eventually, I swear. But nothing will make sense without the build up, so you'd be better off if you stopped pacing and actually took a seat.

I'll be upfront: when the Rocket Uprising took place, the League's biggest mistake was underestimating Rocket's ruthlessness, their blatant lack of fear in the face of death. Afterwards, Rocket's biggest mistake was complacency, foolishly believing that the key to holding eternal power was simply to secure it.

I know what you're thinking. How does a nobody from the south challenge an empire?

Don't you remember? It was a nobody from the south who started it all, years before I ever set foot into the wonderful world of pokémon.

Of course I'm talking about Red. Red, his seemingly invincible bitch of a pikachu, and his army of legend slayers. He defeated Kanto's gyms, tore through the Indigo League and very nearly ended Giovanni's entire career. His only downfall was that he genuinely believed that Giovanni could change — or cared too little to stop him from leaving on that false promise.

What's my name? You've seen my trainer card. You know what it is. Don't look at me like that — you can't have thought I'd give you any more information. You know the importance of a code name; you're using one yourself.

Who am I really? I'm Rocket's second helping of ass kicking. I'm Red, but cooler and younger and louder. Sheesh, have you ever tried to talk to him? He never speaks, not anymore. Some say it's part of his persona, but you and I know the truth, don't we?

But I digress. Who am I really? I'm Johto's saviour. The second Champion of my region's independent League. Summoner of Ho-oh, lord of the legendary beast and bird trios.

Does that sound dramatic? Good. I've always been one for theatrics — ask Lance. Let's turn it up a notch.

I'm Gold. And I'm Team Rocket's worst nightmare.

If you thought Red was bad, you ain't seen nothing yet.

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A/N: Chapter one should hopefully be up soon. I hope you enjoyed this in the meantime!

Reviews/comments are always appreciated! I try to take all constructive criticism into account so I can improve any future writing I do.