The air was fraught with tension, tight enough to snap. The interloper’s little brown rat was taking slow, stuttering steps towards him, snarling up a foam. Likewise, Onyx is drawing closer to his prey, almost without realizing it-- but that’s the aim of the game when you’re a carnivore. You get as close as you can without the target noticing, saving your energy for the final burst, for the kill.

Not that Onyx was planning on killing anyone today. He’d done it before, of course; there was no moral high ground left for him to stand on. But prone to violence he may be-- and he was quite skilled at it-- the actual taking of a life was a tool in his kit he preferred to leave unless he absolutely had to.

Jett had always turned the other cheek when it came to his rumbling; she’d died before she could watch him become a murderer.

He’s close enough now to see the perspiration on Andres’ skin, and the whites of his eyes; there’s a glassy sheen to his gaze that isn’t because of the situation. It isn’t the look of a man on the verge of panic, but instead, the vacant gaze of the already deceased. Onyx can tell he’s reliving something-- a distant memory brought forward to be so real, so recent, it’s like reliving it.

He has his own nightmares.

There’s a strange… something, like a tendril of warmth, snaking up through his gut that makes him want to reach out and… comfort the poor bastard; Onyx grinds his teeth and pins that feeling to the inside of his stomach for the acid to dissolve. That feeling is not welcome here.

He holds still when the rabid beast takes a chomp at his ankle just for her trainer to reach down and grab her up; Onyx thinks, for the briefest of moments, it’s amazing what can be said about the loyalty of Pokemon wherein she doesn’t just turn her savage fangs on her trainer-- but then she does, the glass shatters.

The first thing Onyx thinks when he realizes who it is he’s just stumbled upon is god fucking dammit, he’s taller than me now?! Scathing, incandescent rage boils through him, burns him clean, and turns his eyes blood-red with wrath. He wants to reach out and strike him, this pathetic excuse for a human being; wants to see his head snap backward and his milky, pale skin color under the force of his blows.

But he also… he also doesn’t want to acknowledge that he’s here. He doesn’t want to let Andres in again, in any capacity. That was a different him. A different Onyx. A different life.

Lips pressed bloodlessly thin, Onyx spits on the quivering man’s shoes.

“Get the fuck out of here,” he snarls, making long eye-contact with Chuchi, because Andres isn’t looking at him.

He rolls his shoulders and turns away, returning to the poor sods he left stuck to the tree.

Zia opens and closes her beak in nigh-on disbelief.

We’re just letting them go?!

She doesn’t move from their path.

andres buenaventura

☉

Zia nonchalantly lifted herself up to her full height, head cocked to the side; her pupil dilated as she focused in on Andres, like a blood-red camera lens; she gave her tail feathers an innocent flick, as though daring him to try her. She cants her head at an angle to look down at the growling Eevee, more curious than threatened.

Onyx thinks nothing of the snarling creature; Zia’s picked her teeth with Pokemon three times Chuchi’s size. What Onyx has in pure, chaotic malice, Zia is organized terror. She’s worse than he is on a good day, let alone a bad one.

Which is what this skinny knucklehead is about to be having.

“Lunch, huh?” he asks, using one finger to pull thin tendrils of black hair out of his face. “I might have to take you up on that invite. What’s on the menu?”

Here’s a hint, it’s you.

It’s not really like Onyx needs to do anything to the unfortunate interloper-- he’s under strict instructions to keep things clean and neat, because that’s what they’re trying to do in Hoenn. Dragging unwanted parties into the thick of things is the antithesis of both clean and neat, but Onyx is an old-school kid in a new-age environment.

He takes a step closer as Chuchi whirls on her paws and focuses on him, now. Like his raven, Onyx lifts one eyebrow, examining the threatening Eevee with a less than impressed air.

Still, he can’t shake the feeling that something about this seems… familiar.

andres buenaventura

☉

Onyx stepped into the cool evening air, hands stuffed into the pockets of his jacket. Above, Ziadem cast a long shadow as she patrolled, ever-watchful; she always took everything to the one-hundred and tenth degree, even if his mission was just to rough up some old-bloods who had issues with the way the new Rocket was going.

To be honest, Onyx couldn’t care less, given that he was, himself, the pinnacle of the ‘old Rocket’ mentality: beat people bloody and they can do little besides die, or submit. But he wasn’t even really wrapped up in the Rocket preachings, new or old; he was just really good at punching the daylights out of people.

Following slightly behind Zia’s leading shadow, Onyx ducked into the alley where he was supposed to meet his second on this mission-- another superfluous detail, he though, but one he had been assigned nonetheless.

“Sup?” He asked the other guy, made clear by his alleyway lurkings that he was the one Onyx was meant to meet. “You see ‘em yet?”

Gerald Kaiser

☉

It had been an accident-- well, more of a miracle, really.

They’d tried to run-- Onyx hated it when they ran-- and one had tripped over the other and fallen against the tree, all rubbed up with sticky honey. Eyes whale-wide with terror at their inability to free themselves, they’d grabbed in a panic for the second mark, who’d beat at them with sheer fright to make them let go-- honestly, by the time he’d caught up, they’d done most of the work for him.

He’d knocked the free guy to the ground and slipped one foot under his kneecap, like a stirrup; lifting with that foot and stomping with the other levered the man’s leg nicely to hyper-extend it backwards, the joint popping free with a crackle like radio static. Onyx muffled the downed man’s pained howl by stomping his foot into the soft, loamy soil-- perfect for growing berries and clogging throats.

He stepped up to the poor sack still stuck to the tree-- he’d almost unstuck himself by shedding his shirt. Unfortunately for him, almost only counted in horse-shoes and hand grenades. Onyx pressed his head back to the tree by his cheek.

“You shouldn’t have run,” he said, face spiraling into a grin, as the pummeling began.

He was equal-opportunity muscle, one-half part technique and one-half part pure brutality. For this one, it was the latter.

When he was done, his mark was unconscious; the guy with the now-bum knee had crawled a short ways away, unable to rise because of his aforementioned bum knee. Onyx stretched as he walked unhurriedly after him, grasped him by the ankle, and dragged him back, kicking and screaming, and stuck him to the tree.

“Hey, this stuff is pretty handy,” he said with glee, standing back to admire his work. “I gotta get me some."

Then he wound up and soccer kicked the dude in the groin.

Amazingly, the guy didn’t faint. He did vomit, however, shoulders rolling as he spat bile and remnants of what looked like… corn? All down the front of him.

“Gross,” Onyx said with a laugh, waving his hand in front of his nose as if to ward off some terrible smell. “Ugh, how embarrassing.” He wound up to kick again when--

Oh.

He froze, mid kick, foot falling as he turned in the same motion. His first thought, as he locks eyes with the unwitting stranger, is his face looks familiar.

There’s a half a heartbeat before the guy starts moving, and Onyx knows he can’t have that. He gives an almost imperceptible nod of his head; immediately following, a shadow swoops above them.

Ziadem lands in front of Andres with all the menace a seven-foot-tall armored raven could produce. Not immediately in front of him, so as to pose a direct threat, but enough so that his path was blocked. She lines up an eye with him, beady red beam mirroring Onyx’s own-- though some would say far more intelligent.

“Going somewhere?” Onyx drawls as he pushes his way through the underbrush, nonchalantly examining his cuticles. He flicks a speck of blood from beneath one of his fingernails, bored.

andres buenaventura

☉