He’s fiddling with the coffee machine in Elm’s otherwise vacant lab when Silver comes in. It won’t work, and anyway doing something with his hands is a good distraction, less from nerves (which seem to be reserved solely for seeing Green), and more because Sam is fairly confident he’s promptly going to put his foot in his mouth and ruin any chance at satisfying his own curiosity.
Maybe the best approach is to be honest? But plain honesty has never come easy to Sam, it’s easier to carry these ulterior motives, even if it’s with something mundane as this--a simple curiosity about Giovanni’s son, disguised as a meeting about Silver’s Pokedex.
He’s only met Silver on one or two other occasions, when the boy had been younger and Giovanni hadn’t been in the picture to connect them. He’s heard plenty from Elm and his stories about the Johto Pokedex kids of course, but despite that and their brief previous meetings, it’s still surreal to turn around and see...
How much Silver looks like his father. He doesn’t have the dark hair and eyes, but the resemblance is there, in the planes of his face and the angle of his jaw and the curve of his mouth and nose. Maybe it wouldn’t be as pronounced nowadays, but Sam had known Giovanni as a teenager and it’s strange, it makes him pause, makes him a little sad. Like the first time he’d seen Amber all grown up and came to the startling realization of how much she looked like Agatha. The heartache is the same.
Sam still gives him a bright smile, tone welcoming, warm.
“Good, you’re here! Thank you for agreeing to a little meeting, it’s been quite a long time since I’ve seen Elm’s infamous Johto kids. I’ve been looking over your Pokedex data and it seems you’ve progressed a lot! Goodness, how old are you now? Sixteen, seventeen?”
