The glass had shattered. The fluid had drained. For the first time, Mewtwo breathed air.
It burned.
His lungs seized, his body trembled, and the cold rushed in like knives across skin he never chose. The lab was silent now, save for the quiet crackle of sparking wires and the distant hum of alarms that had stopped mattering. He knelt in the wreckage, hands pressed to the floor, gasping. Muscles quivered beneath pale flesh. His tail dragged heavily behind him.
He didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know why he was.
But he could feel it—every memory not his own. Every test, every calculation, every whispered hope that he would be better than the creature they stole him from. They called him perfect. But he felt broken.
"Why…?" His voice echoed only in his mind. "Why am I here?"
The memories were needles: images of syringes, labs, cold faces behind glass, laughter that didn’t reach their eyes. Subject stable. Unprecedented power. No emotional response. But he had felt everything.
They thought he couldn’t.
Anguish rose like fire. His fists curled against the floor, shaking. “You created me to serve. You built me to obey.”
He stood. The room trembled with the weight of his mind. Steel groaned. Lights burst. He floated above the floor without willing it. Pain surged through every nerve, but it wasn’t physical. It was emptiness. A soul forced into existence, unasked and unloved.
"I did not ask to be born," he whispered into the stillness. "I am not your experiment. I am not your weapon. I am not… him."
His eyes lifted to the cracked ceiling, to the night sky beyond it. Somewhere, far from this sterile nightmare, the one they copied danced freely through trees, innocent and untouched. Mew was life.
He was a shadow of it.
Tears did not come. He didn’t know how to cry. But the ache—the aching—was everywhere. “What am I… if I was never wanted?”
The answer was silence.
And so Mewtwo left—not to destroy, but to search. For meaning. For belonging. For a reason to keep breathing through the pain he never asked to feel.