Full Circle

a pokemon fic by tobu ishi


A Pokemon trainer and a Gym leader walk into a bar.

That's how the joke starts, right?

It's a joke, all right, Misty thinks, staring helplessly out of the corner of her eye and wondering if the cloud of violent mental invective she is exuding is visible from where he's sitting. Shitshitshit, whatthehellisHEdoinghere and howfastcanIleave!?

It's just so stupid, is all. She only walked in here on a whim. She was thirsty. Isn't a woman allowed to be thirsty anymore without running into folks she hasn't seen face to face in years and never really wanted to again? She just wanted a lemonade. Now she's thinking gin and tonic, though she's far from a drinker herself. She could become a drinker. She's a Gym Leader, her motto is There Is Always Time To Learn. Put it on the rocks, she thinks, staring at the menu to avoid staring at him. Hold the tonic. Is he looking? She doesn't think he's looking. He's looking at his menu, seven seats away, and his face is turned away from hers but she'd know him in her sleep, she'd know him by touch if he was close enough to punch.

She's seen him on TV, of course. Everybody's seen him on TV. It's been a decade, it's been impossible not to see him on TV. Somehow Ash Ketchum has managed to stay an up-and-coming young trainer for ten years. He just keeps coming up.

Flip on the idiot box and there he is, smiling over a microphone like it's an ice cream cone somebody just offered him and he's five years old and hungry. He never does commercials like the other big-name trainers, it's always just interviews. People talk about how pure it is of him, how he doesn't sell out, how it's all about the Pokemon with him, all about the training and the bonding. Misty has her doubts--he's Ash, he probably doesn't get the point of doing commercials anyway. He's probably so busy tramping through the back ends of nowhere, scaring up Zubats, that he doesn't have time.

(He makes an exception for Professor Oak and his Pokedex, at least; they all have little blurbs on the box now in fine white print, 'Officially Endorsed by Ash Ketchum of the New Interregional Pokemon League'. They sell like hotcakes and she read in a magazine once that his mother has a new house now, with white window boxes for her flowers. Typical.)

She hopes the Zubats enjoy his company more than she did. Ten years, and it's still all about the Pokemon in the end.

Her sisters had used to tease her about it, asking her how on earth she'd managed to spend her adolescence running all over the continent with the most decorated Pokemon trainer in history and yet never pounced on him when she had the chance; which was embarrassingly easy to explain, because (as she had frequently informed them) Ash Ketchum had been a dolt in his preteens, the kind of boy who gets his head stuck in buckets, whose mother calls him constantly to remind him to change his underwear, who needs long words like 'carnivore' and 'arachnophobe' defined for him. She had borne witness to months upon months of him finding out the exact electrical conductivity of everything on the planet, including himself, by crude trial and error. How was it possible, she would laughingly round up the argument, to develop a crush on somebody like that?

(Except of course for the fact that she had; oh, jeez, it's too stupid to admit but somehow, just a little--it didn't really mean anything, of course, but there had been something about his totally ridiculous pigheaded stubbornness and those huge earnest dark eyes and the way he grinned like the kid he was...no. Too stupid to even think about, so she hasn't, not for years. Not forever.)

Ash Ketchum is an idiot. He's a total twit. He's a lame, overhyped excuse for a hero with a skull as hollow as an eggshell.

He's looking at her. Oh, mother of hell.

Misty plunges instantly down in her chair and shields her face with one hand, conducting an impromptu experiment on how tightly a human spine can fit along the contours of a cheap barstool's back and seat at the same time. Something creaks dangerously amongst her ribs, and she winces--

--and then he's there, out of his seat in a few long strides and sliding comfortably onto the barstool to her right with an effortless nonchalance, for all the world as if he hasn't noticed her desperate attempts to hide as much of herself as possible under an eleven-inch protrudance of counter. Maybe he hasn't. That would be vintage Ash, she thinks grimly, too dense to recognize the frenzied signs of someone frantically trying to avoid him.

Propping his elbows on the bar, he leans in curiously to look past her nervous fingers, still clutched across her face like a kid playing peekaboo. His dark brows are drawn together in puzzlement. Please, she prays, let this not be happening. This is not happening. Maybe he doesn't recognize her...

She never gets time to squirm further under the bar--he thumps a hand down on the counter and smiles like the sun coming out in full force, open delight scribbled all over his face like the work of an angry Jigglypuff. "Misty!" he exclaims, loud enough for half the bar to hear, so that she flinches back, a little horrified at the idea that anyone else might witness this. "I haven't seen you in ages! Where have you been?"

Where has she been? "Same place I've always been," she retorts, a bit needled. Needled is good--angry is much less embarrassing than mortified. "Cerulean City Gym, doing my job. If you left your calling card in the last eight years, I must have missed it."

His grin doesn't falter, blithely ignoring or completely missing her sharp tone--oh, god, she thinks, he really hasn't changed since he was twelve--and he shrugs expansively. "Sounds like you're having fun," he says, cheerful to a fault. "You wouldn't believe how busy I've been! I keep figuring I ought to visit, but...well..."

Sheepishly, he scratches the back of his neck, giving her an awkward little forgive-me? grin that's as familiar to her as the Pokeleague swoop on his long-abandoned old hat. It still melts her resolve, she notes with dismay, already sitting forward a little. Ash has that effect on people, she belatedly remembers. They gravitate towards him without knowing what they see in him, other than a dumb kid with a cute hero complex and a serious thing for Pokemon training. It was always kind of...inexplicable.

Inexplicable or not, he's still got it.

"Barkeep!" Ash shouts, waving one arm in the air to get the man's attention. Still watching him surreptitiously, she's startled by the pull of muscle in his arm when he raises it. That arm doesn't belong to a scrawny kid in bluejeans, it belongs to a young man, tanned and laughing and ordering them both drinks. The barkeep is obviously a fan; dimly she hears something about drinks being on the house and a ladyfriend, but she can't even rise to the bait. She's too busy staring.

When did Ash have the gumption to grow up while she wasn't paying attention? The television Ash was a giant boy. He's shrugged off his jacket--it must be the short sleeves.

He turns and looks at her again, leaning on the bar like he's a regular. Maybe he is--she's never been here before. It would be just her luck to walk into the one bar in Cerulean City that gets regular business from Ash Ketchum, the Boy Wonder That Was. Or maybe he's just grown into his skin and the world too while he was at it.

"So what've you been up to?" he asks, so friendly. So Ash, with his thick dark eyebrows raised for her answer, and so not, because since when does Ash Ketchum care what a girl does in her free time if it doesn't have to do with Pokemon?

That must be it. He means the Pokemon. "Training, mostly," she says, trying for a light laugh and sounding, to her own ears, like a Mudkip trapped in an accordion. "Gym Battles. The usual. I'm surprised you don't have your own Gym by now, you've got the experience."

"I guess," he says, unenthusiastic. "Everybody says that, but...it ties you down, you know? I like seeing new places, catching new kinds of Pokemon. Meeting new people."

"Well, you know what they say about old friends," she says, biting off the words as she remembers the interviews, his many, many traveling companions. The barkeep slides their drinks across the bar, something yellow over ice. She doesn't recognize it. There is always time to learn.

"Yeah, new and old, silver and gold," he shoots back, surprising her with the quickness of his uptake, and raises his glass in a toast.

"Silver and gold," she says, slowly, reluctantly, and holds up her glass to be clinked.

He takes a sip without flinching and she cradles hers in her hands and waits for the opportune moment to put it down. She can smell the fumes from here. She wishes she had that lemonade. A Pokemon trainer and a Gym Leader walk into a bar...

"I heard you're doing pretty well," he says, still smiling. "Do you think you could take a look at my--"

And suddenly she does not want to hear it, to hear about whatever superpowered Water Type from the other side of the world he's about to ask her advice on. And suddenly she breaks, slams her drink down and snaps at him like they're preteens again, half-rising out of her seat.

"Yeah, I'm doing fine, no thanks to you!" she shouts regardless of logic and propriety, "How do you pull this shit off? How do you just sit down and say hi like we saw each other yesterday? I've, I've seen you on TV, you haven't been living in a cave all this time, so how come you never had the time to just--to just drop by and say, Hi, Misty, how's the bicycle, I just thought I'd check and see if you were still alive or not!"

After all that has poured out of her, she stands there breathing hard, glaring down at him, and sees that he's shrunk just a little. He isn't cowed like the child he was, but his eyes have widened, his shoulders are drawn in. He's on the defensive, thank god, finally, and his mouth falls open and he says in the smallest voice he can manage:

"Sorry. I...didn't think about it like that."

She misses a beat and stares in awe. Ash Ketchum is apologizing. To her. Sort of.

"I saw you on TV, too," he adds, awkwardly. "Sometimes. You looked...good. I mean, good like you were doing good, not like...well, that too." He manages a nervous grin, then finishes into the thick silence that is eating the bar alive, "Uh, please don't kill me?"

And...

And she can't hold it, not in the face of his sheepish thoughtless alarm, and she packs it up and laughs. She sits down and rests her forearms on the bar and her face on her forearms and laughs and laughs, because the more things change, the more they stay the very same.

After a while, he pushes at her shoulder, tentative, impatient, with the flat of his palm. Am I forgiven? his face says, when she turns her head and glances up. Yes, she gives him with a quirk of her mouth, grudgingly, and that's it. All those years, under the bridge and away.

And he grins again, the same old hundred-watt smile, and she feels herself slipping further down the slippery slope where everybody follows him in the end, one way or another. When he was little, they called it gumption; they said he was spunky or cute or a stubborn li'l cuss. Ash isn't little anymore. He must be six feet tall if he's an inch, and the planes of his tanned face are friendly and inviting and starting to border on maturity. God help her, but he's grown up and turned charming...

Charming?

"Sorry," he's saying, still tossing helpless conversation over the brink. "I was just thinking--"

"Well, don't," she says, and gets up like she's been stung. "I--I just saw the time, I have..." It is nine o'clock at night. "...a late appointment. At the gym. I have to go." She can't stay here; she can't do this again. She was never in love with him as a girl, she had maybe the tail end of a schoolgirl crush and that was it, but it was enough to leave a little piece of her hanging cold for years and the barkeep is giving her dirty looks for being rude to his hero but she doesn't care. She is done with him. "It was nice seeing you!"

"Yeah!" he agrees--he's bewildered, she can see that, but determined to keep trying. "Hey, are you free tomorrow night? Maybe we could meet up then! I've got some great new Pokemon I could show you."

If she drinks here again, she suspects the barkeep will spit in her glass. If she drinks here again, anything could happen. She is done with Ash Ketchum, finito, owari, done and buried.

Her mouth opens on its own like a flower under the sunshine of his stubborn friendliness. "Yeah, sure." She is gathering up her purse, her jacket; she isn't looking at him. "That'd be nice."

Why is she still talking?

"Same time tomorrow?" he asks, twisting to rest an arm on the back of his seat and follow her with his cheerful dark eyes, with his hundred-and-ten-percent smile. He's a trapper at heart, instinctively. He never thinks about what he's doing, but still, nothing escapes Ash Ketchum. Nothing and nobody, when all's said and done.

Misty smiles back, flustered with her jacket pulled up over one arm only and hanging down her back. She has forgotten where her purse strap goes and it's hanging off her elbow and bumping her calf as she walks out backwards like a Krabby, trying to squirm free.

"Same time tomorrow," she agrees, and waves with her jacket sleeve flopping loose off her hand. She turns and has a brief scuffle with the screen door and then struggles out into the cool night air at last. The defeated door bangs shut behind her.

Misty runs a few token steps out of sight, stumbling quickly to a stop in the parking lot with her red hair hanging loose around her face, braces her hands on her knees and takes slow deep breaths until the world makes sense again. Then she straightens up, squares her shoulders back, and strikes out for home.

Maybe she won't show up. That would serve him right, the irresponsible brat.

The moon overhead, she realizes suddenly, is gibbous and waxing like the white half of a full Pokeball. There are a dozen things she could have compared it to, but that's what leaps to her mind, and that's when she knows, with bubbly crushing finality.

She's gonna be there, all right. She's doomed.

A Pokemon trainer and a Gym Leader walk into a bar...and the Gym Leader says, "Why didn't you warn me?"

A/N: Over ten years ago, before Google was in wide use, a preteen girl ran a Yahoo! search for Pokemon information and stumbled across the first net-published fanfiction she had ever seen. The rest, as they say, is history.

It's been a very, very long time since I've even touched this world, or these characters, and I admit to being a little self-conscious about posting this fic at all. Still, it seems like time to pay a little tribute, after so long. Those who have advance-read it, liked it, hated it, encouraged it, slapped it around, and generally helped me pick off the warts until I felt confident enough to put it on display are more than I can count on one hand, but special notice goes to Chuui, to Nym, and to Tak, who took the last swing at it. Thank you, all of you. -tobu