AN: Warning: the angst-train has pulled into the station. All aboard!
Ash never really thought about dying.
In the blissful, worry-free life of a ten year-old, such dark contemplations were reserved for a time later, when he was older and understood the world in all its jaded glory just a little bit better.
A week before he was due to receive his first Pokemon and begin his personal journey to become the best trainer in history, Ash went to bed at a decent time, spurred by the scolding of his mother, Delia Ketchum. Curled up under the blankets, he found his thoughts turning, as they had been for the past month, to the long path ahead of him. He could hear his heart beating rapidly in anticipation. His skin itched with impatience. He thought he might explode before the fated day would roll around.
His mother kissed him goodnight on the forehead. Ash wrinkled his nose and pretended not to secretly love her tight hug and fond caress of his bangs.
"Remember, sweetheart," she said, pulling on her jacket, "I'm helping Professor Oak with a project tonight, all right? If something happens, you have my number." She kissed him again.
"I'm ten, mom," he groaned self-importantly, "I'm too old for that stuff!" But on the inside he was smiling, his heart buoyed by good feelings. All was right with the world. Her footsteps tapped down the stairs. A level down, Ash heard the front door swing open and shut. Another regular Monday evening.
He fell asleep with dreams of stadiums and cheering voices.
He was woken up abruptly by the town's sirens and flashing lights through his window.
Someone was knocking on the door.
Fuzzy with sleep, and startled by the sudden clamor, Ash stumbled out of bed on legs that weren't yet properly awake and ran down the stairs. The alternating red and blue flashes pierced the darkness of his living room, seeping in through the glass window semicircle in the front door.
Ash threw the door open to a nightmare.
Pallet Town was tiny, and even so, Ash lived in the sector where most of the important businesses and buildings clustered. Professor Oak (a dear family friend) practically lived in his lab, which was visible from the Ketchum front porch. Which was why Ash immediately saw the entire lab engulfed in flame, a bright smear of livid yellow and red snapping and roaring in defiance at the night sky. There was a helicopter droning in the background, its metal underbelly illuminated by the immense bonfire that was slowly spreading among the houses. Black-suited silhouettes dashed back and forth in from of the flames. One swiveled, the shiny leather fabric of his jacket stretching and catching the light. Ash saw a large red 'R' printed across its expanse.
Someone grabbed his shoulders and shook him. Ash ripped his wide eyes from the horrifying scene. His neighbor, Mr. Martin, was holding him and shouting in his face. The volume was just another stimulus thrown at him within the span of seconds. He couldn't compute the questions spoken with the movements of Mr. Martin's lips.
Eventually, the words sank into his head: "It's a Team Rocket raid! Ash, where's your mother? Is Delia home? Ash! Where's your mother?"
Where's your mother?
"She–she was helping Professor Oak tonight," he said blandly, his tongue clumsy. Mr. Martin blanched. Ash watched the blood drain from the man's face. A terrible sense of vertigo began buzzing in his ears.
Suddenly forcefully calm, deceitfully so, Mr. Martin wiped at his shiny forehead and said, "Ash, you need to come inside. The police are working together with the fire department. We need to be where it's safe. I need you to wait inside with me, okay? Okay, Ash?"
"No, my mom's in there," Ash said a little louder, pointing at the awful blaze. The fire seemed demonic, roaring and snapping and screaming shrilly with a fierce wind. A window exploded on the second floor of the lab, the sound of shattering glass warped by the intense heat. Ash's feet started carrying him forward, and Mr. Martin immediately herded him back towards the front door.
"My mom's in there, we need to get her–"
"Ash, get inside please, it's okay–"
"It's not okay!" Ash screamed. "Let go!" He bit Mr. Martin's hand when it came up to rest on his shoulder. Yelping, the man ripped his arm away and staggered, giving Ash room. The ten-year-old was gone in a flash, his legs speeding him down the driveway and towards the scene. The black-suited figures had leapt onto a ladder that trailed from the helicopter like a gut from a wound. The helicopter was just pulling away when Ash ran past them, uncaring, his eyes fixed on the untameable mass of spitting fire. The fierce wind stirred by the blades battered at his clothes and hair, summoning instinctual tears.
A circle of firemen had staked out the scene. A ring of Squirtles were positioned in front of them, providing a steady stream of water guns onto the blaze, but even those proved ineffective. Their backs turned to him, they had no idea of Ash's presence. He burst through the ring and kept running, ignoring the team's startled shouts and screams.
He was screaming "Mom!" over and over. He wasn't sure when he started it, but he couldn't make the awful keening stop. The cry sucked the breath out of his chest, and every inhalation carried less and less oxygen. Smoke reached down his throat and closed tightly around his lungs. He couldn't breathe, and he felt lightheaded from the smoggy air.
The heat was blistering. Pain introduced itself to him, in a greater quantity than he had ever known before. It seared along his exposed arms and face. He paced back and forth in front of the blaze, struggling to press closer, but the field of heat pressed him back.
This wasn't real. Things like this didn't happen in Pallet Town. This wasn't real.
Another window exploded, and Ash felt a shower of sparks and smoldering debris pepper his skin like tiny stinging Beedrills. He cried out, shielding his face too late. His body screamed at him to go back but his mind and heart willed him onwards. Acute panic had wiped away rational thought. Maybe his mother would come stumbling out of that flaming entryway, coughing and soot-stained but alive–
A gloved hand seized his shoulder and dragged him back. He fought viciously like a cornered Rattata, biting and clawing and writhing. His eyes were wide open. He didn't understand—couldn't think through the fog of terror and fear. Why wasn't his mom walking out of that doorway? Did the firemen already pull her out? Where was his mother?
Images burned themselves into his retinas–the bright white-orange fire clawing at the sky, black-suited figures darting back and forth like flickering shadows, the cold gleam of the moon far above him–
At last, somebody ordered desperately, "Kadabra, Hypnosis!"
A pressure exerted itself on his mind, undeniable. The touch, while not painful, was alien and firm like velvet-covered steel. Sleep, a sympathetic, echo-y voice ordered. Ash was a house of cards. The voice plucked the trembling card from the bottom, and Ash was suddenly imploding, falling and curling in on himself and fluttering into a thousand pieces.
He gave himself over to the blackness.
He had second degree burns all over his arms and face. The doctors didn't tell him this; he had to read it upside down on the chart posted by his bedside. The doctors barely told him anything beyond the necessary stuff. They tended to smile softly and speak with slow, short sentences, like Ash had suddenly experienced a sharp loss in IQ.
For the most part, Ash stared out of the window.
His mother was dead. His mother was dead, and there wasn't even a body. It had burned in the fire. They only knew because they recovered her old trainer ID amongst the rubble, and her favorite steel bracelet. Both items sat in a box tucked out of Ash's vision in the corner of the hospital room.
The smallest thing sent him into a hysterical fit or an hours-long period where he barely spoke a word. He cried at random intervals. Once, a nurse was helping him out of bed and tears just began dripping down his face silently. The nurse handed him a tissue and stroked his back, but it wasn't the way his mother would do it, so Ash shrank away from the touch. Another time, he woke up with the uncomfortable sensation of tears drying on his cheeks, his eyes blotchy and red. Still yet, he shifted too quickly and his burns screamed at him, prompting a long, sobbing breakdown, even though the physical pain wasn't really that bad.
An overwhelming sense of dark helplessness pressed down upon him. The doctors controlled every aspect of his world now, which had shrunk to the pinpoint of his hospital room and the attached bathroom. There was nothing he could do to fix the scenario. He couldn't bring his mother back. He couldn't hurt the people responsible for killing her. He couldn't force himself to heal faster. He couldn't even wrest control of his emotions. He was just hurt and helpless.
He hated it.
But most of all, he hated Team Rocket.
Professor Oak had survived the ordeal.
According to the story the local authorities finally gave Ash, the Professor had stepped outside to take a call just before the first explosion had occurred, and the force propelled him out of the field of danger. He lay in a thicket, unconscious, but safe. After the initial bomb used to break through the east wall of the lab, Team Rocket invaded the building and stole all of the Pokemon and research data. When they had taken all they wanted, they started the fire and left.
Miraculously, the policeman said, Oak had survived with just a broken arm and some scrapes and minor burns.
The Professor came to visit Ash after a week had passed, when his own clearance from the hospital was allowed.
"I am so, so sorry, Ash," the man said, tears in his eyes. He clasped Ash's limp hand, mindful of the bandages wrapped around the limb. "I'm so sorry. It should have been me. It should've been me."
Yes, Ash agreed, but he was ashamed to think it. It should have been you.
They released him from the hospital after another week. Since Ash had no other relatives, Professor Oak took him on as a temporary ward. Someone had gathered up Ash's belongings from his house and brought them in the form of a few duffel-bags. Ash stared at them as he slipped the strap of the first over his slim shoulder. It was strange how easy it seemed to compress his entire life into just a few containers.
"Do you want to go to the house and grab anything else?" Professor Oak asked gently, his good hand on Ash's shoulder. People tended to do that nowadays–touch him constantly and unnecessarily, as though all the might of their well-wishings could rewrite the tragedy.
Ash thought of the empty house, soot-stained and mockingly hollow. Thinking of his home–his old home, now–brought with it a strange disconnection. Happy Ash had his mother and played in the field behind their home and obsessed about Pokemon battles and fanciful dreams and went to bed every night at ten o'clock and kissed his mother in the morning when he came downstairs for breakfast. It was like reading a fairy tale. An intense longing for it gripped his heart, icy with the fact that he couldn't have it. Could never have it. Team Rocket had ripped out all the pages and burned them in a fire.
"No," he finally muttered. "I don't want to go back." I want to go back. I want to go back so badly. I want my mom to be waiting for me in the kitchen. I want her to get up and smile and hug me and kiss me. I want her to not be dead.
Don't let her be dead.
Oak looked like he wanted to say something, but nodded understandingly and squeezed his shoulder.
Gary was, surprisingly, subdued and quiet. He helped Ash unpack and left out the customary insults and "Smell ya later!"s and even didn't say anything when he saw Ash crying once. It was almost like when they were smaller and still best friends, though the enormity of Ash's grief automatically made any explorations of the relationship awkward.
They also avoided the topic of his late mother like the plague, which simultaneously disturbed and relieved him. On one hand, it was like his mother had never existed, and he didn't want that. His mother was too much of a presence to go unignored, even in death. She'd been his sun, his source of life, his constant friend and mentor. Ripping her out of his life by the root like that only left a ragged hole in her wake, one that nothing seemed to fill.
As the days dragged by, he began to crumble apart. He was tired all the time, and unmotivated. He slept throughout the day in irregular intervals. Sleep was nice because he didn't dream at all and didn't have to think and remember and hold himself together and muster up a smile. Shutting himself in Oak's spare bedroom bought him a level of isolation that he had never sought before. Oak tried to pull him out by offering to share his discoveries, or show off his old Pokemon team, but even then Ash could barely stay downstairs for an hour at most without fleeing.
The much-enthused day for new Pokemon trainers was pushed back several months while the extensive damage to the lab and surrounding houses was repaired. Nobody complained. An event of such horrible magnitude had never soiled the town's reputation before, and no one was prepared to deal with it. It was as though the appalling terroristic act had sullied the town's very foundations, and an invisible cloud seemed to hang low over the tops of the buildings every day. Police cars slipped into the town constantly, their tires carving deep ruts in the dirt path. A few officers tried to get a statement from Ash, but Oak turned them away with respectful but firm negative. Ash watched them plod back to their car from the upstairs window.
Ash finished his meals dutifully under the watchful eye of Professor Oak and his aides. He felt too soul-sick to argue or turn them away. The food might as well have been coals in his mouth for all the appeal it held, but he choked it down somehow. Gary made sure to tempt him with snacks every hour, but Ash politely denied the offering whenever he could. He wasn't trying to starve himself, he just had no appetite, and no patience for the act of eating.
As the weeks after the incident stretched on, Gary began to flip-flop between his cocky and crass personality, and his suddenly helpful, understanding side. Sometimes he made a cutting remark and then cringed, as though waiting for Ash to throw himself out of the window. Other times, his overtures of companionship and aid were so overpowering that Ash finally demanded to be left alone, at least for a little while.
After the three month mark, Oak brought in a therapist.
Her name was Mary, and she was very sweet and kind and soft-spoken, just like his mother. She had also once been a trainer in her youth (she was now 62), and when Ash showed the slightest bit of interest in the information, brought in her old Espeon. Espeon was the most exotic and intelligent Pokemon Ash had seen yet. She liked to curl up on Ash's lap and let him stroke down her velvety spine while she dozed.
Oftentimes, they just talked about whatever–Ash's favorite Pokemon (undecided), his favorite food, what he liked to do in his free time, his friends, his goals. When Ash talked about them, he felt hollow.
"I feel like they're not mine anymore," he confessed. Espeon stretched and purred in his arms, sending out a pulse of soothing emotions. He was grateful, as it allowed him to speak without his throat closing up. "Like they belong to somebody else. I'm not sure how they fit me after–you know. I don't find joy in them anymore." He looked away immediately after finishing. Maintaining eye contact was difficult these days. He felt like people could see the sorrow written plainly on his face. It made him feel uncomfortable and exposed.
"You don't find joy in them anymore, or you don't find joy in the thought of them anymore?" Mary asked, hands folded primly in her lap.
Ash shrugged. "Both, I guess." He scratched at the base of the jewel embedded in Espeon's forehead. The psy Pokemon rippled her large ears in contentment at the petting.
She arched an eyebrow. "Oh, really? Come on, Ash, when's the last time you created your own custom Pokemon team? Watched Champion Lance battle on television? Played outside with Gary?"
Ash shrugged again, feeling defensive. "I don't want to do that stuff anymore. It feels pointless."
Mary leaned back in her chair with a tired sigh as her old bones creaked. "When I was six years old, my father took me to the local pool to teach me how to swim. I didn't want to. I was scared of the water. But after I learned, I realized I loved it. I can still probably swim laps around you young Magikarps," she finished with a wheezy cackle. Ash couldn't help his grin at the mental image.
"What you need, is a goal. I want you to think of what you want out of your life, be it a Pokemon trainer or something else. When our next session rolls around, you share with me those things, okay?"
"Okay," Ash agreed. Espeon lightly leapt down from his lap and twined around Mary's heels as she stood up with him and patted his shoulder with a wrinkly hand. He didn't mind the touches so much anymore, as he could recognize them as expressions of earnest goodwill, instead of simpering affectations.
That night at dinner, Professor Oak set down his fork and knife and cleared his throat. "So, Ash," he started awkwardly, "how are you feeling?"
Out of the corner of his eye, Ash saw Gary wince and smack his forehead.
Chasing a green bean with his utensil, Ash shrugged glumly and opened his mouth to offer a lame monosyllabic reply, but the words caught in his throat. He crooked a brow, staring unseeingly at his plate.
How was he?
Mary's words came flashing back to him. What you need, is a goal.
Direction.
Purpose.
He looked up. Some of his inner confusion must have showed on his face, because Professor Oak smiled encouragingly and leaned forward.
"I–I think I'm–I need something to do," he said slowly, figuring out how to phrase it. "With my life now. I don't know what I want anymore. I need to find that out."
"Well," Oak answered as he crossed his arms and smiled wider. Gary was glancing suspiciously between the two of them, as though waiting for someone to start screaming. "My colleague, Professor Elm, sent me a clutch of Eggs to examine this morning. Would you like to help me catalogue them?"
Ash said yes.
He thought about it that night, and the next day, and the next. What did he want out of his life? It almost seemed ludicrous to think that far ahead. He'd taken to minimizing his life into mere baby steps, one drudging day at a time, hour by hour. To project himself an idea of a future in the next few years seemed vastly incapable, almost as surreal as his life before the raid. It was difficult to envision himself ever rising out of this dark pit he'd fallen into.
The answer came to him almost a week later, as he lay in his new bed staring upwards at a ceiling that still didn't quite register as home, panting and sweaty from a run of grisly dreams. Sometimes he had nightmares where he met faceless goons in black dragging his mother away. A recurring theme in his dreams was a crushing sense of helplessness. He'd run and run but a fire would relentlessly pursue him, devouring everything in its path, and just when the flames overtook him, he'd wake up with a scream on his lips.
He wanted revenge. The rage hadn't dulled one bit. It had coalesced in his chest, a solid weight, and he felt its ache beating at his ribcage every time he took a deep breath. Sometimes it was blinding, hot and agitated. Usually it was a seething burn, pressurized into a black diamond of hatred that he kept safe and nestled next to his heart.
But such a goal was very broad and unspecific, and even Ash could admit that it would lead him down a dark and mentally-ill path. Mary and he had tentatively discussed such desires, and he knew the facts of reality, however difficult they were to swallow; he was ten years old (almost 11 now, how strange) and inexperienced in virtually everything. Meanwhile, the Pokemon League, powerful adults and Pokemon, had stepped up their focus on the activities of criminal organizations. For now, he would leave it to them. Maybe revisit it when he was old enough.
So he simplified his goals a little.
He wanted to be strong.
Strong enough that no one would ever again hurt the ones he loved and cared about. Strong enough for himself and other people, strong for the weak, brave for the timid, determined for the unsure. Taking the gym challenge would be a good way to gain power and test his skills. If he was able to beat the gym leaders, and the Pokemon league and maybe even the Champion, then surely no one would ever be able to so much as lay a finger on him again. He would be the strongest, best trainer in the world.
To do that, he needed Pokemon.
He re-applied for his trainer's license a month later.
AN: If you hate Ash receiving a different starter, hit that nice little back button now. Sweet biscuits, I personally can't stand Pikachu.