Gold and Silver: No Words Required

Chapter 8

After Gold had hugged Silver for a solid half-minute, only letting go when the redhead started to squirm in discomfort, the newly formed trio headed out of Elm's lab, making sure to watch out for the police officer they just psychologically traumatized so that they could make sure to avoid him.

Thankfully for them, it seemed that the officer had high-tailed it out of the town as fast as physically possible. As they walked, Crystal found large gouges in the dirt path outside, and after a few moments of inspecting them, she said they were from an equine Pokémon's hooves. It made sense for an officer out on patrol in a rural area to have a horse-like Pokémon to travel on, Silver admitted internally- He wouldn't go complimenting Crystal for common sense though-

"Aaand..." she continued, cutting off Silver's train of thought, "...the Pokémon was heading towards Cherrygrove! You can tell because of the direction the crescent is pointing." She gestured in a curved line with a finger, and Silver tilted his head to get a better view- and as she said, it was pretty easy to tell when you knew what to look for. "If I could see a clearer middle of the hoofprint, then I'd be able to tell if it was a Zebstrika or Rapidash, but it was running too fast to leave that..."

Gold signed something at her with a smile on his face, and Silver tried in vain to understand him just by looking, but Gold's hands moved very quickly, and some signs weren't going to be deciphered just by looking at them... Crystal laughed at whatever Gold had said to her. "Thanks, but I'm not that good!" Silver's eyes narrowed in frustration, silently cursing his father for teaching him nothing useful... sign language would have been a better use of his time, rather than the constant badgering to pay attention to the economics of the city around him! To be fair, the only person who needed to use sign language to communicate he knew so far was Gold, but... even if he was only one person, he still needed to- well, at least wanted to know what he was saying!

Granted, Giovanni probably hadn't expected Silver to just leave Team Rocket in the dirt where he had left it, and he probably never thought Silver would even lay eyes on someone like Gold or Crystal.

Crystal jogged back up to them, and then settled into a normal walking pace next to Gold, while Silver stared off into the shadows cast from the trees bordering the route, trying to avoid getting lost in thought. Whenever he tried to make sense of what went on in his dad's head, he always ended up losing himself...

"I'm pretty sure it's probably a Rapidash. Zebstrika are usually too aggressive for normal police to use, and they're hard to get from Unova I've heard...It'd be rare to see one here in rural Johto." Crystal kept explaining out loud to Gold, who was obviously very interested in the new information, while Silver... At the mention of Zebstrika being "rare", his mind felt the need to contradict that, and it flashed back to a memory of his days back home, despite Silver's best efforts to resist it.

Silver had been staring at a group of people in heavy riot gear, who were sitting atop the backs of black and white equines that shrieked instead of whinnying. Electrical sparks had danced violently in the thickly ozone scented air, and the white stripes on the Pokémon's bodies flashed blue and yellow as they reared up, their sharp grey hooves lashing at the newly formed wall of assorted stolen Pokémon. Team Rocket was quickly being pushed back by the vicious assault, but the grunts main purposes were to give his mother, father and him time to escape the base, not to fend the police off completely. After they escaped, they spent a few weeks lying low, safe in a claustrophobic bunker that had made younger Silver crave desperately for the sun. When it was safe to leave again, every Rocket grunt that had thrown themselves into custody for Giovanni had been quietly released by their employees in the force, and the team went back to business as usual- instead of cowering in the shadows of some bleak and empty concrete hole in the middle of nowhere, Giovanni was cowering in the shadows of a well-furnished concrete hole in the middle of a bustling city.