A small can flew toward Sabrina’s face who, exhausted, barely managed to catch it with one hand.
“What’s this?” she asked. The can was pleasantly warm.
“It’s called coffee,” replied the man with the cross, sitting alongside her on one of the hanging steel beams, struggling to open his own. They were alone in an abandoned construction site west of the Gym. The sun was starting to rise. “You’re drunk. No wonder you’re often mistaken for a man; you drink more than one.”
“That can be fixed,” Sabrina muttered, warming her hands with the can. Autumn kept trudging on, promising a winter more ruthless than any before. “Your stupidity, on the other hand…”
The man was a complete mess. Drenched in blood, clothes torn and cut in various places and sporting a split lip and a black eye he’d surely be unable to open in a few hours.
Yet that stupid smile was still stuck to his face, only hidden when he raised the can to take a sip of his coffee.
Stolen story; please report.
“...Why did you do that?” Sabrina finally asked. “Sneaking into a party packed full of the most important and dangerous people in Saffron… just to fight me? I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt here; I want to believe you had some other reason for such idiocy.”
A shrug was the man’s simple response.
“I couldn’t attend our duel today,” he explained. “And I promised I’d challenge you every day, didn’t I?”
Sabrina stared at him, dumbfounded.
“...God.”
“He’s a great guy, yeah,” he sighed dreamily.
“In any case… Why didn’t you defend yourself?” she asked. “You obviously weren’t going to win against such numbers, but with Pokemon like yours you could’ve taken down a few of them before they beat the shit out of you like that.”
“Hm… I wonder why,” he whispered, scratching his bruised cheek with a finger. “Maybe because I knew you’d stop them before they killed me. I knew you’d intervene, hehe.”
Sabrina’s eyes grew wide, and she immediately looked away with a ‘Tch!’, setting her eyes on the fire of the rising sun.
“I just felt sorry for you, like one does for a lame Growlithe. Don’t get any ideas.”
“Ha… bit late for that, I’m afraid.”