There wasn't any way around it. He had killed her. He had killed both of them. Murder, they had called it. It was self defense, his friends had pleaded. Surely not murder, they had cried. Manslaughter, perhaps, but never murder. But it was the simple truth. Two were dead. One was guilty. "They were Team Rocket!" the Gym Leader of Cerulean Gym, Misty, exclaimed over and over, to the press, to the jury, to anyone who would listen. "They attacked us every day!" "I remember one time when James even tried to kill Ash..." another acquaintance of the accused, Brock, the Pewter City Gym Leader, recalled to a reporter. "He threw a bomb at him while he dangled over a waterfall..." "Team Rocket, the most infamous crime organization in the history of the world," the defense lawyer would be remembered for years to come to have put so eloquently at the trial, "has plagued our world time and time again with their heinous deeds. Now, when an innocent victim defends himself against two of these criminals, you, the jury, can even begin to contemplate sentencing him to a cruel punishment in jail?" The lawyer may have had a point, but the truth was still there, cold and unforgiving: two young adults, not even in their twenties, killed before they could show harmful intent. No harmful intent meant there was no way the killing could have been written off as self-defense. "They didn't need to 'show' bad intent," Misty protested in vain. "They showed bad intent every day! Over time, we just came to expect them to fight us whenever they showed up." A practical excuse, but a futile one, nonetheless. Jessie and James of Team Rocket were laid to rest, side by side, under unmarked stones in a common-place graveyard. Misty went back to her Gym ("I can't handle this," she was heard to remark before she left. "I need some time to collect my thoughts... I can't believe this has happened."). Brock did the same. ("Where else can I go? Keep journeying? Never again. This has ended everything. My place is home right now.") As for Ash Ketchum? He has recently beaten the Elite Four, earning himself the title as Grand Pokémon Master. "I've achieved my dream!" he happily told a reporter later. "I can't believe it... I thought what's been going on recently would ruin my chances to get to the top, but I persevered! And look where it got me!" And in a jail cell currently being shared with Leon, the infamous Hitmonlee rapist, a small, electric mouse sits on a dirty cot. It sits, totally oblivious to the cruel world it, from the Officer Jennies' pushing food under the doors, to the occasional visit of one of two unhappy Gym Leaders. The Pokémon has been known to sit in the same position for hours, tiny hands placed protectively over its marred cheeks, where its electric sacs were removed to prevent any discomfort for prison guards, and eyes wide open, glittering with tears and staring at everything, but nothing at all. "Pika... chu."
