Renji lay in his bed, already awake, his eyes pointed to the ceiling, anticipating the day that was to come.
Today is the day.
He had waited a whole year counting down every day, just for today.
As thoughts surfaced in his mind, the sun's purple rays of dawn sneaked into the shared bedroom through the wooden window that was falling apart.
Time passed, and the other children in the orphanage gradually awoke, their biological clock synchronised with the opening of the dining hall.
The first kids who had stirred awake, woke up the other children, and then left for the dining hall, their bulging, malnourished stomachs hungry for whatever scraps they could get their hands on.
Renji was among the last ones exiting the shared bedroom. He navigated the damp and moldy corridors of the orphanage, careful not to get splinters into his naked feet where the wooden pavement sported holes or decay. He looked at those corridors with hate and disdain one last time. He opened the door to the cafeteria, went to get his breakfast— a stale piece of bread harder than his teeth— from one of the orphanage staff that was on shift andsearched for an empty table far away from the rest of the kids.
He sat down, letting his eyes travel around, capturing the situation, as they shone with calculation and cynicism.
Roughly twenty kids, twenty two to be exact, sat in the dining hall. Their ages ranging from five to thirteen year olds, their gaunt and bruise filled bodies the only thing in common between them together with the fear in their eyes.
Today, differently from usual, everyone ate in silence instead of fighting each other for rations. Everyone had gloomy and somber expressions, their eyes darted left and right tinted in fear, with newfound desperation once they came across the ten thuggish looking brutes that were the orphanage directors goons.
The five older looking kids in the hall, around thirteen years old, were especially filled with dread, their frantic fearful thoughts crashing onto Renji's own as he ate the bread slice ignoring them.
Even after everyone finished their meager breakfast, nobody left. The orphans stayed and chatted together, at the tables,all the normal hierarchies between the orphans momentarily forgotten as bullies and bullied empathised with each other, whispering to one another with tones of comfort and empty reassurance, as sadness and fear coloured their voices. The touches they exchanged were fleeting and gentle, filled with unusual care rather than the usual distinct, brutal violence that characterised the life of every kid in the orphanage.
Tch…it almost seems genuine.
He supposed it was, actually. That was the strange part. The hierarchy here was built entirely on who could hurt whom, and it worked, mostly, because pain was the only language anyone had learned to speak. But then a day like this came along and something else surfaced — the part of them that had been children before they'd learned to be cruel. It didn't change anything. When tomorrow came, the ones who were left would go back to what they knew. But it was there, and it was real, and he noted it the way he noted everything: without sentiment, without judgment, as a fact about what people were.
Renji looked at them in mild disgust as fear and cameraderie had grouped everyone together.
He wasn't like them though, he wouldn't forget—he never did— what his life had been like at the orphanage.
Not the vicious solitary confinement or starvation, nor the near death beatings he had to endure through the years.
The chilling cold in his eyes, faded away together with the memories, gradually giving way to his usual cynical gaze filled with calculation.
Suddenly, Renji's eyes narrowed and his pitch black eyes grew a shade darker as he straightened on his chair.
So it begins…
The greasy, filthy texture of a psyche he was now used to, coming into contact with his own, preceded the old creaking door swinging open with such force it almost came off its hinges.
Two men came in.
A man with glasses and a pot belly, the orphanage director, walked into the dining hall with his usual fawning smile and his arms open as he spoke to another man. Renji barely even glanced at the director, his focus completely on the other man.
The man was tall. He wore black, no insignia, the kind of neutral that wasn't really neutral. His face had a scar along one cheek, old and straight like it had been made deliberately, and his eyes had a quality Renji had only seen a few times before — a flatness, like there was something behind them that had burned out a long time ago and left only the habit of looking. Four pokéballs sat on his belt, evenly spaced.
His thoughts, when Renji touched them, felt like cold water.
Recruits. Five decent ones maybe. If the results don't meet quota, I'll hear about it.
Not cruel, exactly. Renji had known cruel — the director was cruel, some of the older kids were cruel, cruelty was sadistic and took place between those whose life were warped by misery. This man wasn't cruel. He was just measuring.
"These ones are this years batch." The director turned around to gesture at them, then he stopped, his fat cheeks trembling from anger. "What the fuck are these scum doing in here!? — get everyone who isn't thirteen out of my sight, now!—"
The ten goons paled. they scrambled towards the orphans, tightening around them in a circle formation. They grabbed the orphans who weighed almost nothing and hurriedly tossed them outside the dining hall, hitting them left and right to quell any and all resistance, whilst taking out their anger on the orphans for their own mistake.
The man didn't bat an eyelid as the mess got sorted out.
The director started apologising profusely for the inconvenience, yapping incessantly, to which the man shifted his expression for the first time, his brows furrowing in mild annoyance as his lips outlined a scowl.
The director immediately shut up, and cleared his throat.
"Six this year." He said while rubbing his hands together and greed in his eyes. "As I was saying, the price—''
The man's gaze hardened, and the director stopped talking.
"The association will make an appropriate donation in the coming days." the man said.
He looked at the six of them.
His eyes moved along the row and then stopped.
"That one." He nodded at Renji. "He looks small."
The director's thoughts spiked. Renji kept his head slightly down, his face neutral.
"Malnutrition, the funds were tight so his growth stunted, but he's thirteen, I assure you, it's simply the circumstances—"
"Hmm."
The man looked at him a moment longer. His thoughts read by Renji as he tuned his psychic frequency to his.
liability, probably. Waste of a slot.
Then they moved on.
Renji let out a slow breath through his nose.
The man had gone back to appraising the other five — he seemed satisfied by the hunger in their expressions, the coiled readiness that came from growing up in a place like this and the caution that violence instilled into them. Renji too had tasted what they had lived.
The survival instincts and endless desire to claw their way forward, grasping at anything to gain power, were characteristics that united them.
One year of work.
Renji thought, keeping his face down.
The effort it had taken was massive — it wasn't a single secret gesture that he had done— No, nothing like that, it was months of careful repetition, planting the same small suggestion in every mind in this building, nursing it, adjusting it, coming back to reinforce it before it faded and people noticed the dissonance in their thoughts. Treating each person's thoughts like a garden that wanted to grow back wild. He'd done it every night while they slept. He was tired in a way that had settled somewhere behind his eyes and hadn't left in months.
The director had said he's thirteen and believed it completely. The man had heard it and moved on.
It had worked and nothing else mattered.
***
He had been six the first time it happened.
He remembered the yard. He remembered being on the ground, and the oldest of them standing over him demanding his bread, and the feeling that came just before he lost consciousness — not pain anymore, just a vast roaring pressure behind his forehead like something trying to get out. Then nothing. Then the boy on the ground beside him, nose bleeding, eyes closed.
Everyone assumed the boy had slipped.
Renji had said nothing. He'd sat up, retrieved his bread from where it had fallen in the dirt, and sat with it in his hands for a long time. His head felt cracked open and empty. He hadn't eaten.
It came back, after that. Not all at once — first just flickers, fragments, the emotional sediment of other people's thoughts washing over him at unpredictable times. The headaches were bad enough that twice he'd bitten down on his own arm to keep from making noise at night. He had scars from that, still.
But he learned. He always learned. He learned to close off the noise, to reach for a single mind and read it, to plant a thought and step back and see if it held. He experimented quietly and constantly, the way other lonely kids might have filled a journal. It was the only thing that felt like his.
One year ago, when the man with the scar had last stood in this cafeteria, Renji had touched his thoughts for the first time. He'd been nine and he'd been careful, afraid of what someone with pokemon could do if he found out. But careful was enough. He'd seen the island that awaited them outside the orphanage. He'd seen, approximately, what happened to the ones who survived, he learned who the man was and who he worked for, since then he'd spent a whole year preparing.
***
"Right," the man said. "Let's go."
No ceremony. No speech. He walked back to the door and expected them to follow, and they did, light leaving their eyes, as they knew no one ever came back.
Renji followed last.
The corridors of the orphanage went by the way they always did — the cracked plaster, the smell of damp and old cooking, the sound of the smaller kids somewhere behind closed doors. He didn't look. He'd spent years memorising this building and he had no interest in it anymore.
The main door opened. Outside light hit his face.
He'd forgotten, almost, what morning looked like from out here.
He kept walking.
The man ahead of him didn't know that Renji was the only one in this group who knew where they were going, or what they'd find when they got there. The director didn't know. The five kids around him, who were genuinely thirteen and genuinely afraid, didn't know.
He was ten years old and he was the only one with a plan.
That would have to be enough.