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Ash is ten years old the first time he dies
He doesn't remember it.
“Pikapi.”
Ash watches as his buddy scampers back down from along the trail, clambering up onto his shoulder. It’s easy to recognize the specific press of weight that signals a request to move forwards, and it’s easy to comply.
But only a few feet later, Pikachu nips at his ear, leaps off onto a truly massive tree and looks expectantly back down.
Ash sighs. Swipes sweat from his eyes.
"Right now?"
Pikachu nods. Sends a little shock his way because it's an imp, the smirk on its face making it perfectly clear that it's well aware of this little fact.
"Okay, fine, but only a few minutes, yeah?" Ash says as he starts his climb, stretching up a sturdy trunk and finding handholds, finding spaces to hoist himself higher into the eaves.
They’re twenty minutes away from Pallet Town. So close. This is just another delay that they could probably do without. And yet-
Pikachu wants him up here. Wants to show him something. He has done more for his friend with less explanation.
Quietly, he slides out onto a thick branch on his stomach, tucking his arms under his chin. Pikachu trots over and becomes a familiar warmth curled up on his back, little yellow head leaning forwards just enough to peer at the world around it. Tiny paws point Ash towards their purpose, the reason they had climbed up to this perch in the first place.
It’s a nest. A pidgeot nest, huge and round and wide, nestled gently into the crook of several sturdy branches. It’s not complete, not yet, but even as they watch a pidgeot- not his- comes soaring into view, sticks and hay in her beak. The mother to be, he assumes.
“So cool,” he murmurs quietly to himself.
Not quiet enough; she startles, and Ash tries to imagine it for a second, how strange it must be for this majestic pokemon to look up and see this odd fifteen year old human boy and his pikachu tucked away in the boughs of her tree. He keeps his smile close-lipped and raises both hands, showing that they’re empty. “We’re just here to watch,” he says, and points purposely at the backpack he’s left behind on the ground.
Pikachu says something too, probably translating, or reaffirming, and with one last look Pidgeot turns away and begins organizing and pruning her finds, weaving the wood as if it were thread.
Sun setting slowly in the sky, bark pressing against his stomach, his best friend’s small weight: Ash tries to breathe it all in. To make the softness of this moment something he can swallow. To feel safe. Pidgeott continues her good work and Ash watches and thinks, the world is still here.
He’s been feeling small recently. Listless. He thinks it has something to do with the Kalos Crisis, the things he saw there, the things he’s been made to carry. Lysander had come up to him with something dark and evil in the palms of his hands and gilded it in gold. The prophecy had told of green fire. All Ash had been able to see was a terrible and blinding red.
But-
But the Kalos Crisis had happened and it had been endured and it had been won. He tries to remember that, tries to hold onto it. It shouldn’t be this hard.
He didn’t even die this time.
But maybe it feels like it, just a little. That he did die, held high above the rest of the city, his pokemons’ screams in his ears, proclamations of chosen one coming from down below. He’s learned, by now, that death can be more than a heart stopped beating. He’s learned that death can mean dragging yourself back to life.
It’s just taking a little longer this time, is all. Ash sits in a tree with Pikachu by his side and watches the nest slowly be built in full. The father pidgeot stops by once or twice with mud in its talons, carefully smearing it between his partner’s woven branches before flying off once more. In a few days, a clutch of eggs will fill the empty space. In a few weeks, they will be hatched.
Ash watches. Pikachu watches with him, occasionally glancing over with soft eyes.
Nests are about opportunities. They’re about new life. They’re about making your own home wherever you go and growing into it, and then growing upwards and outwards and out.
This is him relearning to breathe. This is him reminding himself that the world is beautiful, that it is still here. His heart beats in his chest, against muscles and fabric and wood. Hello, hello, hello, it says, you’re alive.
"Thanks for bringing me up here," Ash murmurs to Pikachu, and a soft cheek nuzzles into his own.
Ash is ten years old the first time he dies, and he doesn’t remember it.
He’s not so lucky the next time, or the next.
Ash is eighteen. He is eighteen and gravel presses into his cheek, scratches pulling at his palm. He drags himself back to life and breathes, breathes. These lungs fill and deflate and Ash pulls himself, shaking, to his knees.
Inhale, exhale.
Sometimes he wonders when he stopped feeling too young for this and started feeling too tired.
Sometimes, he’s too tired to wonder about anything at all.
“Hey, you’re really amazing, you know that?”
The snubbull in his lap peaks upwards, eyes wide and upset and not quite mistrustful. Ash just keeps on smiling, keeps on petting the rough fur between the pokemon’s ears.
“Snub?”
“Really! You’re so strong, and really smart! It’s so cool how you figured out how to open that trap up all on your own.”
Snubbull looks away, embarrassed, and Ash feels his grin grow that much more. He is sixteen years old. He doesn’t think the thrill of making a new friend will ever wear off.
Pikachu chuffs, a warm press of air against his ear. He reaches up with one hand and carefully scratches under its chin, wary of the injuries it sustained in their most recent battle. He has a feeling his best buddy is going to spend a few mullish days limping. It’s preferable to what could have happened if Snubbull hadn’t stepped up and saved them.
“You really helped us out. Thank you. Let me see if I can help you back, yeah?”
A nod, little head bobbing, and Ash smiles reasureddly before standing with a wince. He waves off Pikachu’s sharp, worried look and starts poking around for a way to open the large rolling warehouse door.
There is a part of him that wants to panic. They are locked up in a strange room and Ash is blotched with painful purple, Pikachu messed up even worse on his shoulder. It’s scary. He thinks it’s always going to be scary.
But they are bruised, not beaten. There simply isn't the time to retreat and lick their wounds. The fight isn’t over yet.
So Ash breathes and pushes forwards. Trundles around the room as quickly and quietly as he can. There are other cages, other mistrusting pokemon who have been here far longer than their new pink friend and have been given much more reason to fear. It makes white hot rage curdle in Ash’s stomach, but he ignores that. Offers his hands as gently as he can, speaks in quiet tones, and occasionally just lets Pikachu do the talking.
Sometimes, the best thing you can do to be a hero is give some space. Misty had told him that. They had been hiding in her room to keep away from her sisters, and Ash had been so angry that his friend had been made to feel so small.
But Misty hadn’t needed his anger, his frustrations, his battling proess. Just this: quiet words, distraction, an open hand.
Ash can give that to these pokemon, too. He can.
There’s a wooloo skittering in the back of its cage, wool scruffed in places it shouldn’t, eyes wide in terror, and Ash feels sick that someone could be so afraid of him, even though it’s not his fault. Even though it was some cruel, deeply damaged other person who mistreats pokemon because they like this kind of power over others.
Pikachu presses closer to his neck- a reminder of where they are, a grounding weight- and leans forward and starts speaking in rapid, soothing tones. Ash sits cross-legged on the ground and tries to figure out the locking mechanism to the cage. He wishes, briefly, that Clemont was here; Clemont would have had this open in three seconds flat. Possibly not without an explosion, first, but-
Still.
It takes Ash about fifteen minutes. The snubbull from before joins him before he’s done, curls up by his side and looks up at him like he’s hung the moon and stars. Ash never knows what to do with that kind of look. The older he gets the more often he sees it.
He tries not to think about it too much. Ash is just Ash- he doesn’t know how to be anyone else. It’s simply weird, a little, that ‘just Ash’ has become something apparently worthy of being looked up to.
When the cage opens, the wooloo lingers in the back and stares at him, stares, hardly breathing.
“I’m not gonna hurt you,” Ash whispers, and stays perfectly still. “I promise I’m not going to hurt you.”
Half an hour later, he has a wooloo in his lap with a mountain of wool to carefully pick clean and card his fingers through. Pikachu curls up begrudgingly on the ground beside him to make room, catching a few quick minutes of sleep before it has to be up and about again translating, soothing, and corralling mistreated pokemon.
Snubbull wandered off a few minutes ago. Ash isn’t sure what it’s doing, but it’s probably okay.
He hums offkey and works at a particularly rough bramble patch. In a little while, he’s going to half to get back to work on freeing all the pokemon, in breaking out of this room. Ash is terrible with time, but he thinks they have a little over seven hours before people come storming in. They all need to be gone by then. Long gone.
But they have time enough for this. For comfort. For reassurance. It's about the someone in front of you. That's all it ever is, Ash thinks. It doesn't matter if it's a pokémon or a person, a legendary or a woobat. Every last living thing is a someone carrying dreams and heartaches and the weight of their own self.
It's why Ash introduces himself the way that he does. His name. Pikachu. Pallet Town. Pokémon Master. It's simple and direct and it makes his point perfectly clear: I am from somewhere, I am going somewhere, I am here and not alone.
He breathes. For a second, his hands shake. He is sixteen. This is all so crazy.
“Woo?” his new companion croons, and Ash refocuses. Refocuses. The battle’s not won, and Ash never gives in without a fight. Not when he’s needed. Not when there’s nobody else.
“We’re okay,” he murmurs. “We’re going to get out of here and you’re going to be just fine. We’ll find your family and they’re going to be so happy to have you again. You’ll see.”
A happy trill. It echoes, in this big block room, kept away from the sun, away from the stars.
Not for long, Ash thinks, and keeps going.
Ash, exhaustedly, looks around him.
Grey skies and barren, scorched earth. They are somewhere high up, breath stinging cold in his lungs, bringing water to his eyes. There’s a splotch of bleary yellow a few feet ahead of him, and if Ash focuses he can hear another set of ragged breathing.
If Ash focuses, he can hear more than just one.
They’re not alone.
“How could you do that? How could you be that reckless!?”
Gary’s eyes are narrowed and pissed, his fists clenched at his sides, and Ash bites on the inside of his cheeks as his oldest friend and once-rival paces tight little circles around a smaller side room of Professor Oak’s lab.
It’s technically a library, but Gary doesn’t seem to care about keeping quiet.
“You don’t get it,” he manages to get out, emotions high, Pikachu mutinous in his arms. He’s never been very good at using his words, reverting to speaking with his hands and outbursts of noise. He cannot quite capture the world the way he wants too.
But at the same, this is Ash's world: light and sound and experience, all too quickly passing to do anything but fully grasp it in his own two hands and live it. Throwing himself bodily into life is something Ash is an old hand at.
This is his world, too, now: Gary, all but screaming in his face, his anger trying to hide the fear tucked tight in his core. “Then explain it to me, Ash Ketchum, because you’re right. I don’t understand. You threw yourself off a cliff- for what? What could you possibly accomplish risking your life for some electric rodent-”
His face goes blank, grip tightening around the ball of angry yellow in his arms.
“It’s my best friend.”
Turning sharply on his heel, Gary turns his incredulous gaze on him.
“It’s a pikachu.”
Ash narrows his eyes back. Breathes. Breathes. “What does that have to do with anything?” he says, and the anger is so bright and loud inside his chest, even as he tries to temp it down. He knows better than most the dangers of rage unchecked.
(He’s not thinking about legendaries. He’s not. )
“What does that- Ash. That has everything to do with this. It’s a pokemon! Its life is not more valuable than yours!”
Gary heaves great lungfuls of air, his knuckles white, and Ash doesn’t understand. Doesn’t understand. Pikachu has somehow gotten onto his shoulder and is yelling back, every sound fast and clipped and furious, and he looks at his old friend and wonders.
Not as valuable? How could he say that? How could he believe that? How many others have thought that exact same thing?
The library has a window seat. The sun is streaming in. He suddenly feels sick.
“Of course pokemon are just as valuable as people,” he finally breaks in, and both Pikachu and Gary fall quiet. His hands flare wide, as if to capture just how wrong that statement is, as if to surmise the tidal wave of emotions in his chest. “It’s like... Everyone is just so- Gary. Of course they are.”
Little claws dig into the fabric of his jacket. The expression on his once-friend’s face is so damned tired. So damned lost. He looks young. He’s older than Ash by nearly four months.
They stand together like that for a long time, sunlight and remnants of those fierce little words in this too thin air. Ash wants to scream. He wants to run a million miles away.
Finally, Gary sighs, eyes rolling up to the ceiling. “I know, Ashy-boy,” he murmurs, like it’s a secret, like it’s painful. Maybe it is, for him, Ash wouldn’t know: this is just the truth of life that runs in his vein. “Doesn’t mean I like to see ya almost dying on live television.”
With that final pass, he leaves, labcoat swishing behind him. Ash watches him go and doesn’t tell him that this wasn’t the first time, that it won’t be the last. Moves to the window seat with stilt legs, Pikachu finally relaxing on his shoulder and leaning in to press against his cheek, looking at him with worried eyes.
Breathe. Breathe. Let the anger go. Just let it all go.
He can’t imagine anyone being more important than Pikachu. There was a time, maybe, where his mom held that position, or even Gary. There was a time, maybe, when it was Brock and Misty and him facing the wide unexplored world, and it was like they’d always be there, and it made sense, to tell them everything. To let them be that close.
But that was a long time ago, now. Ash loves them, always will, loves all the friends he's made on his journey, but it’s not like it was. Now it’s him and Pikachu against the world.
Or, more honestly, him and Pikachu to save the world.
(But Ash doesn't want to think about that.)
Legendaries are wild things. This is important. They are kind, sometimes, and furious other times, and they are wild, always. Ash aches, he aches, his heart beating so damn loudly in his chest, but he cannot hold the mythological being before him in anger, not really. You do not rage at the sea for its storms.
(And it had been hurt, and scared, and lonely. Someone had done this to it, had driven it to this point. How could Ash get mad at a pokemon for defending itself?)
So Ash blinks, blinks, and crawls forward just enough that he can haul Pikachu up into his arms. His best friend is limp. His best friend is still breathing.
Breathing, breathing. The legendary watches coiled around itself, eyes luminous in the gathering dark. Ash could stand as straight as he could, arms outstretched, and those eyes would still be bigger than him. The legendary’s heart beats against muscle and scale and stone, and Ash thinks he can feel it. He thinks it might just be shaking the earth.
Hello, hello, hello, it’s saying, I am here.
Ash blinks awake. Something is wrong.
"Pikapi. Pikapi."
Quickly, carefully, he glances around the pokecenter room, checking for intruders, for danger. Only when he's sure it's clear does he turn his attention to Pikachu.
Pikachu, who's flank heaves, whose pupils are dilated too wide even for the dark. There are claws bared and digging into his chest, electricity cackling around its cheeks. The contained lightning sends the walls and ceilings into brief moments of stark relief.
Outside, thunder rumbles low and far off, nearly inaudible over the pattering of rain.
Pikachu had been excited, earlier, for the storm. Had all but pranced up and down the pokecenter dining table, tail jaunty and high. Now his friend flinches at the noise, letting out something between a whine and a growl. He is reminded, again, that he is not the only one to have nightmares. Not the only one who has come gasping back to life.
“Hey, buddy,” he murmurs, quiet, and runs a palm down his best friend’s back. “You’re okay. We’re okay. Shh.”
Shaking, shaking, tremors up and down this small frame. Ash breathes in and out and tries to ground himself for his friend, to be still in the face of something so unsteady. Pikachu's upset feels like an earthquake in his own core.
"Shh," he murmurs again, "I'm right here."
Sharp little claws, sharp little breaths. Ash runs soothing fingers through familiar fur and waits away an hour with quiet mindless chatter, listening to the rain and thunder outside. Listening to the world sing.
It’s just about all he can do.
They’re on the road again. Ash is seventeen. There had been another trainer, earlier, in the public battlegrounds outside the pokecenter. They had battled and it had been fun, so fun, adrenaline and brilliance and static to his toes. Her victreebel had been a tough one, and Pikachu had practically tumbled into his arms in the aftermath, happy and bruised and alive, alive, alive.
She was heading to the town next over. She had offered to travel together.
And Ash….
Ash had said no.
Not in so many words. Just. She seemed so young. It wasn’t the right time.
It isn’t the right time to be thinking about it now, either.
Pikachu digs its cold wet nose into his collarbones, shakes settling into shivers, tail going lax against Ash’s stomach. For a moment, Ash wonders what would have happened if they had travelled together, him and that girl. He wonders if she would have had nightmares just like this.
But then his best buddy whimpers, and Ash refocuses. Tracing the stripes down its back, he breathes. Breathes. His lungs fill and deflate and outside, the rain keeps pouring down.
They’re on their own.
That’s just fine. Ash is getting pretty good at it, him and Pikachu and the whole wide world at their feet. Him and Pikachu and any pokemon that want to come along, mostly because he hasn’t figured out how to tell them no yet. Pokémon are different from humans in that way. Most of them get exactly what Ash means, gestures and noises and all. They get that he’s scared of getting them hurt and stubborn enough to stay with him anyway.
The press of his forehead against soft yellow is familiar. “We’re going to be just fine.”
He says it like he means it. He says it like saying it enough will make it true.
Are you alright?
Ash blinks, blinks. A talking legendary this time, then. Sometimes that makes this easier.
Sometimes harder, but Ash holds onto hope.
“Fine,” he says, and it comes out ragged and raw. Like he’s been screaming. He can’t remember screaming. His knees ache from where they press into the scorched earth. Everything aches. He has dragged himself back to life. “Are you good, too? Not hurt too badly? You have- dents. In your scales.”
There’s the shuffling of many living plates against one another, like when a bird ruffles their feathers. Ash keeps his head down and runs careful fingers up and down his best friend, checking for breaks, for things he can’t fix.
I will heal.
“Good.”
And it is good, it is. But Ash fumbles for his backpack- ragged, torn, he’ll have to get a new one- and get out the healing spray he has in there. Spritzes his best friend down and watches skin and muscle and bone stitch itself back together until Pikachu’s breathing becomes less laboured and pained. More restful
It’s not as good as a pokecenter, but it will do.
After a moment of consideration, he uses the rest on the legendary, saying nothing more to interrupt the new bled dawn.
They don’t talk about it, him and his mom.
The legendaries. The dying. The evil organizations that seem to come out of the woodwork when he’s around. They don’t talk about it.
But sometimes, on the rare phone call from home, his mom looks at him like she’s trying to drink in his features, memorizing every inch and line on his face. Ash wonders, sometimes, if she notices the growing bags under his eyes, his growing collection of scars. He knows she worries.
She had asked him to stop, once. “Ash Ketchum,” she had said, arms curled around herself, something fierce and tremulous in her voice. Molly had been safe. His mom had been rescued from the Unknown.
Ash had almost died.
“Ash Ketchum, young man,” she had said, “you listen to me. Next time something like this happens you run the other way. You run fast and you don’t look back.”
But Ash had refused. The dining table had nicks in it from where he once tried to slice vegetables straight on the wood when he was five, and there was something inside of him that disliked the dissonance. This was supposed to be home. He was supposed to be just some kid. He knew that. He knew that. He knew this wasn’t normal.
Maybe there was a part of him that wanted to take his mother’s permission and hide there in those familiar walls until he was fifty. Maybe there was a part of him that wished he would have never seen his name written in stone, the world will turn to ash. Maybe.
But this is what it is. The world was out there. The whole wide world. How could he leave it behind? How could he ignore its call? Ash had been eleven and furious and blistering. He had yelled, and his mom had yelled louder, and he had run out into the night with Pikachu at his heels, slept in a tree and only came back in the morning because the little yellow mouse had pulled at his pant leg and scolded him until he agreed.
So they don’t talk about it.
But Ash calls his mom every couple of weeks, because there is grey catching in her hair and she worries, he knows she worries. He never wanted for her to worry.
(He never wanted this.)
They call. There is chatter of the local pokecenter behind him, mud on his tennis shoes. He’s keeping one leg elevated because he managed to twist an ankle, but the way the camera is angled she can’t see it. The pixels on the screen make up the familiar view of the living room, painted newly yellow. His mom looks at him like he could already be dead.
“Stay safe, you hear me?” she says, the closest they ever get to talking about it, any of it. “Stay safe and come home to me soon, baby.”
Ash doesn’t say he will. Ash doesn’t like making promises he doesn’t know he can keep.
“I love you,” he says instead, and Delia’s eyes blink rapidly, a crumpled smile pulling at her cheeks.
“I love you, too.”
Pikachu looks between them and then retreats to Ash’s neck, wrapping itself around like a particularly thick scarf. It means, you are here, you are here, you are here. It means, I am still here with you.
Thank you.
Ash shrugs and lets himself sit back down, healing spray going back into his bag. Standing up was not a good idea and his body is letting him know full force. He feels kinda woozy. He’s not going to let that stop him from scooching back up to be by Pikachu’s side, his tennis shoes leaving scuffs in the dirt and soot.
He’s not sure what to do with this. Usually, at the end of it all, there are other people to pull Ash to his feet. People who have rides they can offer some means of transportation on, people who have stories written into their bones, people who the legendary in question shies away from, and then disappears.
Not this time.
This time, Ash sits in a barren land with a behemoth resting beside him, his best friend curled up in a healing sleep in his lap. There were no companions. There were no onlookers. Just Ash and Pikachu, just a legendary and the woman who had tried and failed to capture it, who is now gone, gone, gone.
Funny, how that works.
Funny, how this doesn’t really feel funny at all.
They’re in some small, quiet region Ash has never been to before. He’s seventeen. The world keeps spinning and he keeps saving it.
He’s getting tired, he thinks. Not physically. Just.… an overall clinging sense of exhaustion that permeates everything he does.
He is in a pokecenter. A mienshao whimpers over a badly damaged paw, and a trainer cheerfully celebrates with their fully healed hoothoot. They’ve won a badge, apparently. They’re so excited for the next gym.
Hands empty, Ash stands with his back to them, considering the screen. There is a call for him, ringing, ringing, ringing. Brock and Misty’s smiling profiles shine up at him, pixelated and still. If he answered, they would burst into life.
They haven’t talked in weeks.
There’s a bark of pokemon laughter from the corner, where Pikachu is playing tag with a lairon and a spinda. His little buddy loves Misty and Brock. It would be ecstatic to say hi to them again.
Ringing, ringing, ringing- Ash’s hands are empty and he feels ill fitted to his skin.
It’s snowing outside. Nurse Joy is taking the mienshao out back to be healed. A little girl shouts, challenging the boy with the hoothoot, and she must be eleven. Twelve at most. Misty was that age when they first started traveling together. He had been younger.
He wonders if they’d notice, if he called them. He wonders if Brock and Misty would take one look at him and see this twisted thing in his chest, the way that it aches, the way he won’t put it down. They knew him the longest, out of all his travelling companions. They’ve seen the most of the legendary encounters, the most of his nonpermanent deaths.
Would they tell him to stop? It would hurt to hear it from their lips. Ash has to help. He has to. It’s about the someone in front of you. It always is.
Pikachu has scrambled up onto the lairon’s back in an effort to avoid the spinda’s grasping paws. From up top, it’s at the perfect level to catch Ash’s eye and wave, grinning, cheeks sparking.
He wonders what would hurt more. Being told to stop, or his friends not noticing anything wrong at all.
Ringing, ringing, ringing-
Ash doesn’t answer.
What is revolutionary? What is brave? A legendary sits by Ash in a barren landscape and bows its proud head to whiff at his hair, a warm rush of wind and life. Ash digs his fingers into Pikachu's fur and breathes and breathes and breathes.
An hour passes. Two. Or maybe longer- Ash has never been good at telling time.
He’s never been made to sit with his aftermath before, either. Never been made to sit with the questions that trail his footsteps after every calamity, after every loss. There are always places to be and people to tend to. There is always another path to follow, another world to save.
But there is no one to pull Ash to his feet, this time, and he is too tired to do it on his own. There is no one to smile for that has not already seen his grief.
Inhale, exhale. This is him relearning to breathe. The legendary sits beside him, watching.
"Why me?" he asks. It claws out of his throat. "Why is it always me? I never asked for this."
“No one asks for anything, being born.”
"Still."
Quiet, quiet, and a mountain side on top of the world. Ash sits there, Pikachu still and still breathing in his arms, and waits as the giant before him hesitates.
It's about kindness, the legendary says, in that way that legendaries do. It's about being kind.
Ash is eighteen. He is relearning to breathe.
This is all it is. This is all it ever is. You die and you pull yourself back up and you get stronger so that next time, next time, you can do your job right and no one will have to get hurt.
(Maybe not even you.)
Ash inhales and exhales into his fists, trying to catch air. They’re on a mountain side. Somewhere, in the village below, there’s a funeral for some people who didn’t make it out of the chaos in time.
A tragedy. A punishment. Ash doesn’t know. It just means that he wasn’t good enough.
The bluff is so high up from the rest of the world. The smatterings of cliff-side sprouts dig into his skin from beneath, the chill of the atmosphere sinking into his bones. There is a part of him, a small tiny terrible part of him, that wants to climb and climb and never come back down.
Grief is such a terrible thing.
“Pikapi.”
Ash blinks. Pikachu looks up at him, eyes huge and worried and too understanding, and spills a scattering of small mountain berries down onto stone. The colours, bright reds and blues, stand in sharp contrast to the dull grey.
Pikachu stands out as well, a bright spot in all this dark.
“Hey, buddy,” he murmurs, and picks him up. Curls him close to his chest, cradling his fingers through soft fur. They’re both still here. It means something. It has to mean something.
“Pika-pichu…”
“No, no, you were great. Please don’t say sorry. Pikachu. I couldn’t have done it without you.”
Pikachu nods, jerky, and then scrambles away in order to roll a berry closer with a small wet nose. Ash eats it because he knows Pikachu will worry otherwise. Ash eats it and the juice flows cold and sticky down his fingers, the palms of his hands. When he wipes them across the barren earth of the bluff, dirt clings to his skin.
Ash breathes, breathes.
It’s a shock when Pikachu grabs his hat. His best friend holds it carefully between its teeth and then bounces away, one step, two steps. It gets into a pouncing position and waggles its tail, looking at him expectantly. Evening sunlight filters through the air and makes their shadows long.
“Pikachu,” Ash says, and falls quiet.
Hat dropping against stone, Pikachu tilts its head at him.
“Pikapi.”
How many times has his friend followed him? How many times has it placed all its trust in him? Who would he be to not return their friendship in equal hand?
Below, a bell tolls. Ash stands up.
Step by step by step, they climb. He wonders who made this path, and why. He wonders if they knew, back then, that they were making something that would last.
The summit of the mountain peaks high above the mourning village, and they reach the top just as the sun starts to properly set. There's a perfect spot tucked away on top of some boulders, and they sit and watch the world spin, watch the sky bloom into reds and pinks and yellows.
This is a gift, Ash knows. This dusk, this crisp air in his lungs. It is a reminder: there is world enough even for this grief. There is world enough.
Pikachu curls up in his lap. Ash watches the sky fade into darkness and stars burst into light.
"I'm tired," Ash says, and gingerly shifts to fold his legs underneath him.
"Yes."
"There's gonna be more though. I'm not done yet. Am l?"
"No."
Ash swallows and nods. Closes his eyes. Breathes.
You can mourn your own self, Ash starts to realize, in that quiet aftermath after another end of the world. He is mourning for the things he’s been made to carry, the sleepless nights, the responsibilities carved into the curvature of his spine. This was never anything he ever asked for.
Sitting in the pokecenter, Pikachu on his lap, Ash tries to hold himself all together. He should be strong enough. He has to be strong enough. The world won’t stop throwing itself into calamity just because he is tired, and sad, and maybe a little angry. Maybe a little scared. This twisted thing in his chest cannot be his salvation.
Thin sheets, creaky mattress, and Ash swipes roughly at his eyes. Pikachu croons, nudging upwards and then under his chin, curling close. The curtains are closed, blocking out the sun and stars. Outside, he can hear a couple of people strolling past and chatting.
He is still here. Ash takes that fact and tries to hold it in his trembling, useless hands.
Small teeth grip at the sleeve of his pajama shirt, and Ash blinks as Pikachu tugs gently, pulling him away from his musings and towards the door. The glint in his pokemon’s eyes is determined, steady.
“Okay,” he murmurs, sighing. The words fall like stale paint from his mouth. “Okay. I’m following, buddy.”
Out of the room and down the hall, into the pokecenter lobby. Pikachu pushes and pulls him until he’s standing before the call center, then starts clumsily pressing remembered buttons until the home screen gives way to a request for dialing.
Ash looks at Pikachu. Pikachu looks at Ash. He realizes, in the midst of their little staring contest, that his friend has no numbers memorized, no power to start a call without his help. If he wanted, he could turn around back to his room right now and there would be very little PIkachu could do about it.
It’s tempting.
But Pikachu peers up at him, eyes imploring, little paws reaching out to pat the dial pad empathetically. “Pikapi,” it says, and nothing else, but they’ve never really needed words to understand each other. This is an intervention, a plea, a concern, an “ I’ll follow you anywhere but we can’t keep going on like this.”
And Ash knows that. He knows. He can feel it in his bones, in the bags under his eyes and the hollowness of his chest. The world is beautiful and Ash loves it so much, but he’s been having a hard time, these days, loving the role he’s been made to play in it.
He also knows that Pikachu isn’t lying. If he were to turn around and walk back to the room, Pikachu would follow him. They would argue, maybe, and Pikachu would shock him, probably, but it would follow. They don’t leave each other behind. This is how they work.
But it isn’t fair on Pikachu, either. All this. Ash has been drowning for months now, and leaning on only Pikachu to keep him afloat is messed up. His friend deserves better than this aching version of himself. He already knows he’s not strong enough to do this on his own.
It feels impossible, all this. It feels like it’s never going to end, like he can never get better, like nothing will ever get better. He doesn’t know how to take this grief inside of him and make it into something that hurts less, to reach out to others with this too-tight knowledge that anyone close to him is bound to get caught up in world-ending calamities.
Ash shakes. His lungs fill and deflate.
He doesn’t know.
Ash never gives up without a fight, but Ash has been fighting, he feels, for almost half his life. He doesn’t know how to live without bodily throwing himself into every inch of life, and he doesn’t know how to handle a life that leaves him and his partner shaking with every broken aftermath. All Ash has ever wanted to do is help.
But he is here. He is still here. This is not nothing.
He reaches out and makes a call, swiping quickly at his traitorous eyeballs, Pikachu cooing up an appreciative and affirming storm on his shoulder.
“Ash?” Brock asks, picking up on the fifth ring. The older man looks tired and sleep mussed. Concerned. His rumpled shirt has a coffee stain on one of the shoulders.
“Brock,” Ash breathes, and swallows wetly. The smile comes small and quick, because it’s Brock, and Ash loves Brock, but also because this is what he knows. Smiling is so much easier to handle than tears.
Pikachu leans in to nuzzle against his cheek either way, like it can still sense the turbulent emotions thrashing beneath his ribcage. Ash wouldn’t be surprised if it could.
“Look,” he says, words clipping off his teeth too fast and too tight. “I know it’s late, and you’re probably busy, and I haven’t called in forever and I’m sorry about that, really. But I was wondering if- I mean, I was hoping that you could. That we could. Talk.”
He bites on his tongue to stop the word vomit escaping from his mouth. Brock blinks slowly at him, tilting his head in that way he does sometimes, like Ash is a puzzle he can’t quite figure out.
“Of course, Ash. I’m always happy to chat with you. You’re my friend.” Each word is picked carefully, but Brock’s smile is warm and genuine, and Ash breathes, breathes.
“Alright,” he says, and leans into the reassuring pressure of Pikachu’s cheek against his own. Maybe, this time, he can let himself be the one being helped. Maybe. He doesn’t know, really, what to say, how to put together these twisted feelings and make them coherent and whole.
But Ash is eighteen. He’s got time enough to figure it out. He’s got time.
Ash sits and breathes and breathes and breathes. His heart beats. He is still here.
The sound of shifting startles him into opening his eyes, watching as the legendary curls around him, cutting away the rest of the world in a slide of incandescent scales. "There are big challenges, and small ones. There always is. This is the way of the earth."
Ash watches as a single claw as large as he is reaches down and gently scratches away at the top layer of ash and dust. The movement is blurred with tears he did not realize were falling.
Even so, he can see enough to trace the delicate shapes of seeds that the legendary presses into the soil.
"But it is more than just hardship, child. More than just what is breaking and broken. You do not love this world without reason."
The legendary looks to him, all light and big luminous eyes.
"You are not loved without reason, either, young one. Remember that."
It's about finding happy endings in a story not yet done. It's about taking the grief in your chest and holding it gently. Grief, after all, comes from love, not a lack of it. Ash takes this fact and holds it, holds it-
Ash breathes. His lungs fill and deflate. He is twenty years old.
It must have rained, recently. The trail under his feet pools out with rivulets of water and sliding mud, the once neat path overrun. There is something to be said for the pokemon chatter in the trees, the smell of kicked up dust and minerals that permeates the air. Ash takes it into himself and tries to hold it. To plant it in his chest and let it sprout into something new.
Life continues. This is the half of it, and the whole of it. This is all it ever is, in the end. Just people being people, pokemon being pokemon. Just beings of breath and bone and all that implies.
(Life pushes forwards, pushes through, and Ash pushes on through with it. )
The cobbled path of the forest is overgrown, dandelions pushing through the cracks. A keklion lazily stretches on a run down fence post, skin green and bright after its most recent shed. Walking past, Ash can’t help but wave, can’t help but grin.
Pikachu sits in his arms, heart beating against his chest. Hello, hello, hello, it says, we’re alive.
They walk. The world spins. You can mourn your own self and then find healing, fall back in love with your own two hands, the curvature of your spine. Ash is trying to learn this, trying to master it.
Ears twitching, Pikachu suddenly perks up, leaping out of his grip and glancing back at him expectantly, trotting forwards a few feet before dashing back again. It’s an invitation, of sorts, a request to play.
Ash laughs and takes off running.
His feet press against stone and the sky ahead, filtering through the trees, is blue, blue, blue. In just a few scant minutes they burst out from the undergrowth and onto the wider streets of Pallet Town, Pikachu keeping pace with his own steady strides, people calling out greetings as they pass.
Ash grew up here, this tiny picturesque community built around a professor and his sprawling grounds. Small houses and friendly neighbors, cobblestone streets. In the spring lavender blossoms in patches of blues and purples, offsetting the rich greens of the neatly tended gardens, the sprawling forest beyond.
He grew up here, but there is so much beyond these humble beginnings. The world is wide and beckoning, and he is falling back in love, he thinks, with the way he lives in it.
“Ash!” someone calls up ahead, and Misty’s stark red hair wisps up into the sky. She’s cut it again, cropped close to her scalp, and her smile shines bright.
“Misty!”
“Pikachu-pi!”
He trades a look with Pikachu and they both run faster, crashing into her with a huge hug that just about knocks the wind from all their lungs. But Misty is laughing, laughing, and Ash finds himself joining her, finds himself feeling like there’s a slice of sunshine pie curled up warm in his stomach.
“Do I get a hug too?” Brock asks, dry, and probably immediately regrets it when he gets glomped with the same rough treatment.
It had taken time to get here. It had taken inches and miles and sprawled out sleepless nights. It had taken tears, and shouting, and a lot of patience and work. It had taken hope, too.
It had taken this, just this, just Ash and his friends and trying for a feeling of bravery, for a feeling of something to hold onto when the dark creeps close. The aches in his chest are not easily forgotten, and there will be more battles, and more adventures, and more of Ash, just Ash, helping the someone in front of him because he can, and because he doesn't know how to do anything less.
But-
But Ash is here, still, and there is world enough. It’s easier to remember that, now, when he lets himself live inside of it as a being of breath and bone rather than just a savior, a vessel to die and come back to life. It’s easier to hold onto knowing he has people in his corner, people willing to take the risks to tuck in close by his side in the face of any calamity. He is loved. He can hold onto that. For all that he loves this world, he is loved in turn just as much.
(He is someone just as much.)
The group hug is warm, and Brock chuckles like falling pebbles, his chin resting on the top of Ash’s head. Misty’s elbow is sharp against his ribs, Pikachu all soft fur and lithe muscle against his neck.
This is him relearning to breathe. This is him, breathing. His lungs fill and then deflate.
His mom waits for him back home, preparing something delicious for lunch, and they fall into step as if they were stepping back in time, to some gentler version of themselves that bear less scars and less pain. Maybe friendship is a form of time travel, in a way. He wouldn’t be surprised if it were.
They walk. The sky is blue and a familiar fence catches his eye, a familiar woman emerging from the front door with a familiar Mr. Mime right behind her. Misty laughs at one of Brock's stories, and he laughs with her, the sound spiraling upwards and outwards and out. They are young. They get to be young, right here and right now.
Pikachu looks at him, eyes bright, and Ash feels something in him brighten in turn.
There are nests in the eaves of the garden. Maybe, tomorrow, somebody will be learning to fly.