bright like the sun, i love you

tropical cinnabar, just south of pallet town, burbling magma, hot, active volcano to mt silver's frigid dormancy. the eruption after red disappears. blue lingering there in the deathly post-cataclysm stillness, what was once there on their journeys wiped clean like it never was in the first place. the awful things red found in the pokemon mansion gone, too. the freaking OST!!!! (once lively and hopeful, now quiet, resigned and peaceful, a lullaby.... or maybe just all the island can muster after the explosion, spent......)

Okay. How are we going to headcanon (or I guess, follow the actual canon atp! [of]) red as nonverbal, yet still make red being GENUINELY more widely, generally liked by others than blue a part of the conflict in their relationship?? If blue feels that way, it must be a cognitive distortion, because people DO NAWT fucking like you if you don’t speak! Abled people do not like disabled people! At the very least I am talking about people being offput by him even if tolerant of him. (Another disclaimer: kind people, of course, do exist.)

Like I get the “mysterious coolguy champion, man of few words” appeal (and ‘few’ does some HEAVYYY lifting here), but for people who have actually interacted with him, who bump up against the fact that he does not speak AT ALL, they would not, generally, like him.