A/N: This started out KIND of focused, but I don't know what happened at the end. But aw, I really like Yellow. It's my first fiction, and I'm still trying to work out all the upload kinks. Such as the lack of paragraph indentation...
She's not sure how this happened, why all she can see is the dusty, dirty ground, an inch away from her face. Why a film of maroon distorts her vision, why dark red blood pours from her, on her hands, from her legs, congealing in a sticky pool around her.
She can't seem to remember much, and only her most recent memories. She remembers a trip with her three friends. Red, Blue, Green. It wasn't something they did too often; she had been excited. But then, the Onix, the fiend that struck blindly at everything in its path. And the gritty fumes that filled the air when the cliff collapsed.
She remembers her name too. Or, she thinks she does. Yellow. Wasn't it? It's starting to get harder to concentrate. All she wants to do is curl up and go to sleep, like she does every day in the Viridian Forest.
But those times, she was with her pokemon. They can't help her here; they're stranded within their cracked and damaged pokeballs, trapped within the rockfall that broke her legs and put her here.
Her powers can't get her out of this one. Though she is known as the Healer, Yellow of the Viridian Forest, the only person she can't heal is herself.
Yellow tries to shake away her exhaustion, and only partially succeeds. The shadows recede, but she knows they will return.
Where is she, anyway? Yellow tries to look, but it's a stretch even to turn her head away from the ground. Her vision's starting to blur, but she can see a hat of straw resting some distance away. Her hat.
It's not on her head where it usually is, which is incentive enough for her to reach out for it. But she's dully surprised when her arms and legs refuse to move, numbed and useless.
It's no use. She can't run, she can't call for help. She can't even get up.
But the next thing Yellow knows, someone is kneeling within her field of vision. It's a boy, a boy she knows. Messy black hair frames a pair of shocked red eyes as he stares down at her. Though his lips move, she can't hear anything except the uneven beating of her heart.
It's getting weaker by the moment.
Dimly, Yellow feels herself being lifted from the ground, hanging limply from someone's arms. She almost wants to apologize for the inconvenience, but now the darkness has crept in, turned her vision utterly black. Her eyes are open, she knows they are, but she's blind.
So she can't see, can't hear, can barely feel. She might as well be dead.
And she knows, deep inside, that soon she will be.
Yellow rests in her hospital bed, chest barely moving, the monitor weakening with every unsteady pulse. They got her to the hospital, but it wasn't enough to save her. She's been like this for three days, and it is now that she takes her final breaths. Red, Blue, and Green are clustered around her hospital bed with her fisherman uncle, and Pika and Chuchu fidget worriedly at her bedside.
She woke up an hour ago, just enough to see them all there before falling back into an exhausted trance. And now, she dreams.
She floats in empty space that reminds her of the time she freed Suicune, Raikou and Entei in the void beneath the Burnt Tower. She sees them all over again, reliving her journey with Pika, her fight against the Elite Four on Cerise Island. She remembers sneaking aboard the Team Rocket airship, and waking up at the Battle Frontier with her fellow dex holders and friends.
But soon, the memories fade into a blank. She hangs in empty space; a blank slate, and there is nothing left for her to hang on to. As the time seems to stretch on, she lets go of herself, floating into a brilliant white light that seems to spring out of nowhere….
The heart monitor hiccups for a brief second, and then falls silent. Yellow no longer twitches, no longer whispers, no longer breathes.
Her friends all react differently to Yellow's departure. Red's cap shadows his eyes as he stares at the ground. Green, standing next to the wall, is stoic as Blue starts to sob on his shoulder. Pika begins to comfort Chuchu as the mouse stares forlornly at the motionless figure, while her uncle turns away, the first tears falling from his cheeks.
A nurse walks in, sees the heart monitor and the people gathered around it, and backs quietly out.
That day, the sky turned the color of blood.
It seemed like ages, or perhaps millennia, before the black behind her eyes began to shift. She groaned, felt her body curl into a ball as she began to awaken.
She cracked her eyes open. In a moment, they shot wide open in wonder, revealing a pair of sunny yellow irises that gleamed brighter in the light of day. Before her was a sparkling golden beach, with waves rushing upon it from all sides and a yellow-red sun that rose high in the sky, a unmarred expanse of blue. Hundreds of feet away, green shoots of long grass waved lazily in the ocean breeze.
She struggled to her feet, and found herself on four paws. In the back of her mind, she wondered. Did she have this many feet before? She sat up on her haunches and found that more natural. She twisted over behind her and saw a zigzagged lightning bolt tail tipped with brown. Finding this even more peculiar, she curled the tail around to her front so she could examine it more closely. Funny how even the body she was in felt strange, as if it wasn't her own… but what was she, if not this?
It was too bad she didn't even know what this was. And what was that sound echoing in her head…
"Hey! Hey, you! Are you alright?"
She turned around to see a rather strange creature approaching her - a quadruped creature with stout, green legs speckled with spots of a darker green. It had a saurian head and a light green bulb mounted on its back.
It reached her and collapsed, gasping for breath. But soon enough, it got back up and shook itself free of sand. The creature, which she deduced to be a male based on voice, smiled sheepishly. "Sorry about that. So, hey, are you alright? I was walking up over that sand dune there - he motioned to a rather large sandy hill some distance away - and I thought I saw you lying there! You don't see Pikachu around every day, so that's what got my attention - otherwise, I would've thought you were sunning yourself on the beach or something like that. So I came down to help! Of course, by the time I got down here, you had already woken up, but…." He trailed off sheepishly.
So she was a pikachu? Was that the name for what she was? She couldn't help but giggle at the creature's rushed speaking. She realized the other creature was waiting for her to respond, and obliged.
"It's nice to meet you," she offered in a quiet voice, smiling a bit when she looked up to meet his eyes.
The saurian creature immediately cheered up. "You too! Wait… waah! I forgot my manners. Sorry about that, let me introduce myself. Most people call me Bulbasaur, but Red's good, too. What's your name?"
The pikachu thought for a second. While everything else seemed to be a blank slate, a word seemed to come to her - a word that rang as naturally as if she had grown up speaking it.
She smiled, feeling a burst of unexpected happiness radiating from deep inside her. "I'm Yellow!"
Somewhere far away, a black-haired boy dreams that he journeys alongside one of his closest friends, a gentle pikachu with cheerful yellow eyes. And as one adventure ends, another begins.