“We’re gonna have a winter like salt on a wound, huh?”
The man with the cross looked at the inside of the Gym through the frosty, grimy windows outside while Sabrina finished locking up the front doors.
“Weren’t you leaving?” she asked, exhausted. “We already fought today -another humiliating defeat, by the way- and I have other things to do.”
“You fucking brat…”
Already narrowing his black eyes with anger, producing a Pokeball in one hand, the man paused all of a sudden as he noticed the dirty-looking bandage on the Gym leader’s hand, uselessly trying to hide a nasty-looking burn mark. A product of one of her most recent battles.
“...What, you don’t like the cold?” he finally asked, voice softer.
With a final click and a lock, Sabrina stood in place, pensive. Then, with some doubt in her voice, she answered.
“It’d be nice if it snowed. Then again, it hasn’t snowed in Saffron for over fifty years, so…” She realized what she was saying and tensed up. “Not like it makes any difference to me,” she quickly added.
“Ha! You are a brat, see? You wanna play in the snow, don’t you?”
“Shut the fuck up.”
With a gesture so casual it took Sabrina’s brain a while to process, the man laughed and patted her on the head, rubbing her frazzled wool hat before turning and walking away. By which point, of course, he was too far away for Sabrina to insult him.
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The Gym leader saw him slowly disappear, and a minuscule, almost invisible smile formed on her lips as one of her hands went to her hat.
“Wow! Are you really Sabrina!?”
“W-wh…!?”
Once again, just like a whisper, like a sudden winter chill. Sabrina turned around on a dime, and found Azure’s face only inches from hers, those bicolor eyes of him drilling into her very soul.
“A-Azure…”
The smile on his lips didn’t extend to his eyes. “You were running late, so I came to check on you… Hehehe…”
“Don’t… Don’t ‘hehe’ me,” she sharply answered, pushing him away with a hand. Her expression had quickly hardened again. “And don’t act like you’re my nanny. You don’t have to worry about me.”
She dug her hands into her pockets and started walking away from the Gym, its shadow giving way to the last of the day’s sunlight. Azure followed, of course, his footsteps as quiet as the grave.
“I’m afraid I can’t help it. You’ve changed a lot, you know?” Azure commented with a singsong-y voice. “Those eyes of yours aren’t the same as when you showed up here three years ago… there was a certain sharpness to them. But now they’re more… human.”
And as he said that last sentence, though his expression didn’t change in the slightest, his voice dropped an octave or two. It was enough to send a chill down Sabrina’s spine.
“Stop wasting my time,” she said. “My shift’s already over, but you need something from me, don’t you? What’s the job gonna be this time?”
“Hehe, but of course.” There was a pause as Azure inhaled. Sabrina didn’t know why the gesture felt so out of the ordinary. “I’ll get to the point; there’s a certain… favor we’d like to ask of you. A new facet of the job, you could call it.
“We… want you to help us kill someone.”
And Azure’s smile, in that moment, was wider and colder than ever before.