Until the Day

Pairing: Ash/Misty

Genre: Romance/Drama

Rating: T (language, violence, coarse language)

Summary: After years of separation and argument, Misty gets into an accident that brings Ash back to Kanto in a panic. Unable to cope with the potential loss of his companion, he seeks to turn back time—can he save her? Pokeshipping,

Until the Day, chapter 1:

They were at a Christmas party

Still kids at the time, Ash was seventeen and Misty was eighteen. Delia was in the kitchen preparing Christmas cookies and punch, though Ash and his friends were collectively gathered in the living room, avoiding the mistletoe. That would be the least of his fears today, as Ash wasn't opposed to the idea. Except, there was only one female he wanted to meet under there—and she had fiery red hair and a look that could kill. Misty always came to visit his family on Christmas, it had become something of a family tradition—sometimes, even her sisters would attend the party with her, but most of the time, she came alone.

In the most recent years, she came alone primarily because she and her sisters were not always on good terms because she was the sole owner of the Cerulean City gym. Gone were the days when she would clean up after them and house their every mistake—now, they were forced to act like adults, and the Waterflower's of Cerulean City, became the lone flower known as Misty.

However, Ash sought her out for other reasons now that they were older, and he was properly aware of his emotions. Thanks to Brock, and Dawn, and Drew, and Gary—Ash realized that somewhere between all their little fights, the long nights and laughter, Ash fell in love with the proud, passionate, loving woman.

With his heart skipping behind his chest, he turned the corner that would guide him into the kitchen where a dolled up Misty spoke with Dawn and May. Tonight was the night, after much encouragement from Brock—and maybe a little too much of his mom's cider and pikachu's musing, he was going to tell her how he really felt. They had been, after all, friends for over seven years; it was a natural progression. They talked, they called, he sent a letter, she sent a letter—eventually, the feelings were mutual, right?

"So you mean to tell me you have never had a steady boyfriend?" The voice was Dawn's, crass and objective. Practically snarling.

"Never." Misty said confidently. "I haven't needed to."

"And why is that?" Dawn followed up with a slump Ash recognized as her casual hands-on-hip pose. He grinned at Misty's confession, further bounding with confidence. Ash couldn't see the blush that crossed Misty's face but she turned on her heels to look at the woman.

"Because he would need to be a better pokemon trainer than me—no," She gasped, "He would need to be a pokemon master. I can't date someone I can't view as an equal."

"Oh?" Dawn challenged a comical turn to her brow, her mouth twisted into a grin while she leaned on the counter. Ash froze.

"What about Ash, then?" She accused. "Isn't that his goal?"

Carefully, with the tact and skill of someone used to denying such an accusation, Misty stuck out her tongue.

"Ew, gross. Ash is just a friend." She snarled in denial, and while Dawn and May shared a very knowing look, understanding Misty's denial as a way to protect herself and her friendship-

Ash's entire perception of the female broke, and he turned away at the door. Recalling his most recent defeat in the league—he had been lucky to compete and obtain champion in at least one league—but that was still a far cry from pokemon master. It was very much a work in progress. A very heavy work in progress.

Gasping for air he fled the doorway right as Misty exited through the second door with a roll in her eyes. She hadn't looked, so Ash stumbled directly into her.

"Ash!" She groaned, prying him away from her. "Watch where you're going, would you?" She grumbled when he looked back up at her with deer eyes.

"Uhh.." he started, glancing away from her awkwardly. "Yeah, sorry." He muttered, preparing to leave when she snatched his arm.

"Are you okay?" Her mock tone turned into one of confusion as he spun around to look at her once more.

She wanted to date a pokemon master.

Ash inhaled. "Yeah, I'm fine." He grinned.

HE could do that. In fact, it only gave him one more thing to add to his list of reasons to obtain the title.

XOXS

Flash forward seven years, and Ash barely remembered that night at his mother's house. Such a silly, inconsistent thing seemed... unnecessary now. She was happier back then, when they were younger. Now she was... This couldn't have been happening.

Ash groaned, his mind full of unwanted, happy memories, blurring with all the fights the last seven years instilled between them. The silent warfare, the screaming matches. Everything that he ever wanted to grow out of was staring him in the face—choking him.

Years after traveling together, his mom was still her emergency contact. Brock was listed as her second, but her sisters were no where to be seen. They probably never made up—and only now was he kicking his ass for not asking about it.

"What's your relationship to the patient?" the doctor asked in a monotone voice, looking at Delia Ketchum.

"Close family friend..." Delia squeaked out, rubbing her sore throat. She had screamed over the phone for so long, it had almost turned raw.

"Does she have any relatives?" He asked secondly, flipping through some charts. She had undergone emergency surgery before completing her paperwork; they got the necessities: what she was allergic to, if she was pregnant, an alcoholic, or suffered any illnesses. Now they were asking the hard questions. The ones no one wanted to talk about. She would answer for herself—or at least that would have been an option if she was conscious.

Delia paused for a very long moment; "A fiance, I think? And three sisters."

The brown eyed doctor pointed to Ash, and cocked his eyebrows. The doctor tossed a thin finger his direction, and a careless shrug.

He had clearly been sleep deprived himself when he looked at Ash. "Are you the fiance?"

Ash's mother interjected right away, "No, this is my son. They're childhood friends."

No sooner than the words left Delia's mouth did Ash snap, bolting out of his chair in a huff.

"He cheated on her! She might as well not have one at all!" Ash bellowed loudly.

His voice was a sharp pitch that echoed down the white walls of the hospital where he, Brock, and his mother Delia were seated in the lobby. Green plants poked around every corner, and brightly colored, cheerful pictures hung against the walls, taunting him. Ash's fists shook at his sides, but luckily, his dark skinned friend, Brock, stood beside him to grab his shaking fists and guide him back into the seat where he threw Brock off with a flip of his arm, and stormed away from the surprised doctor, and a worried mother.

"I'm sorry..." Delia said, but the doctor told her not to worry about it as he continued his questioning.

Ash needed air, there was no other way to explain it. He felt the adrenaline in his veins, pushing him well past the point of exhaustion. His entire body ached, from head to toe. Ash hadn't slept in over twenty four hours. He was in north Sinnoh at the snow point when his mom had finally gotten a hold of him. Being a pokemon master now, Ash was on a routine trip to the region to investigate a level of complaints fitted with the appearance of a legendary pokemon, however, he had been not one foot out of the jeep he shared with the regional professor when his phone started to buzz constantly.

Twelve hours later, he was in the urgent care unit of the hospital where his mother waited expectantly for Ash's arrival along side Brock, who had been at the hospital since the start of her emergency surgery.

Head Trauma. Three broken ribs. Internal bleeding. Bruised abdomen. Neck trauma. Laceration of the left calf. Numerous bruising.

Immediate surgery. Shrapnel. Possible spinal injury. Concussion.

Head on collision.

Ash felt his head spin and his guts lurched, trying to recall everything the nurse had informed his mother of when he was present after the surgery. She checked out okay. They told them that she was a fighter, made it through the surgery like a trooper, and she was hanging on.

Barely the nurse added as an afterthought with a face scrunched up to say otherwise.

Barely, was right. The other guy, the bastard who hit her purple-blue impala, went through the windshield at the point of contact, brains spilled across the floor of the asphalt, a blood splatter here, a crushed bone there. Ash was fortunate enough not to see the accident, but the description from Officer Jenny was more than enough to paint the horrible picture in his mind. She had been barely conscious when they found her, slipping in an out of awareness. Leading belief of a head injury was the innate lack of works, but her eyes worked, the men and women who called in the accident said that she smiled at them. She was alive before surgery. She was alive after. She was a fighter.

Selfishly, a part of Ash believed that she wasn't fighting hard enough. He slipped, down to his knees at the railing. His vision was blurry and he wasn't sure what he didn't eat that day was going to stay down. Ash was twenty-four, he should have been well aware that people died. After all, his own father passed away when he was just a boy, but he couldn't bare the thought that one of his friends, his best friend was.

Clear bile spilled onto the pavement below the balcony Ash hunched over. While he wiped his lip, a shudder ran through him while he chided his inability to withstand the news—here he was, feeling sorry for himself, and he wasn't the one strapped to some hospital bed with foreign objects piercing his skin, keeping him alive. He wasn't the one that spent six hours in surgery. He wasn't the one who was his head on at 6:00am in the morning on a daily routine to work.

Ash was healthy, generally happy, he didn't have a lot to complain about—but now this, oh this, he thought with a scrunch of his nose. His throat burned as if someone placed a match to the insides of his mouth. This was too much.

XOXS

Ash returned thirty minutes later after a quick stop in at the bathroom where he washed his face and rinsed his mouth. In his anger, he had all but forgotten about pikachu who was curled pathetically on Brock's lap while Ash straightened and adjusted his cap, before removing it in respect for other patients in the waiting room.

His mother paced the floor, the gentle tap of her heels creating a soothing affect in his otherwise hostile, crazed emotions. He slumped into the blue, leather seat beside Brock, and exhaled.

"Feel any better?" Brock asked worriedly, looking at him with stroking pikachu's worried head. Ash had profound respect for Brock, being about to stay so calm in such a horrible situation.

Without speaking, Ash shook his head to indicate that he did no feel better—in fact, puking made him feel worse. His tanned skin was a pasty white, his lips were raw and dry from dehydration, and his eyes had dark rings around them, more prominent than his lightning bolt scars. Every sound in the hospital silenced his beating heart, made his fist that he properly lodged into her fiance's jaw sting more, and made his pocket burn where she called him three hours prior to her accident, and he ignored it.

Intentionally. He ignored it intentionally..

How he wished he could take back the snark-the bitter remarks they shared. He would trade them, as well as his beating heart if it meant she would just open her eyes.

XOXS

Forty-eight hours in, she was unresponsive to medication; the only indication she was still alive was the faint whisper of the heart monitor stationed at the corner of her room. No one was allowed to go in. too frail, too weak. They could hurt her if they moved her arms. The damage to her internal organs, her bones were worse than they thought. Most people, they kept telling the trio, would have already been dead. But she hang on. She fought on.

Hearing that anyone else would be dead didn't make Ash feel any better though while he placed his forehead against the glass that separated them from the patient's room. Her red hair was matted to the sides of her neck—it had grown out past her shoulders, but now looked like heaps of yarn placed delicately over her pale flesh. She wore the traditional white hospital gown, with blue polka-dots, had the comfortable pink bedding that she would have made jokes about.

"I don't like the color pink" she would complain when they were kids. Ash's face scrunched up. He stared at her face the longest, the hollow, sunken cheeks—the yellow above her right eye indicating the start of a very deep bruise, and the white bandage over her forehead. The left side of her head had been shaved for surgery, and was wrapped with gauze and tapped down with the best tensor bandage they could find. Gone was the natural light from her flesh, the rosy cheeks of determination, and the fiery complexion of her eyes. She was gray, and dying.

Her arms were littered with IV needles, and she had an oxygen tube or something shoved into her throat to keep her breathing. They had reconstruction the frame of her body to keep her ribs from crushing her lungs, and her internal organs had been twisted to the point that what couldn't be salvaged was removed and patched up.

At the start, Ash joked that when she woke up she would love only having one kidney and half a large intestine: but that didn't seem so funny now that he was looking at her gray skin. Forty-eight hours, and her results which were hopeful at the start, were dwindling. Lab results ran on her brain and nervous system were coming back worse, and the faint of her heart beat was worsening by the minute.

A whisper.

His eyes slipped closed as he exhaled, his breath mashed against the window, fogging a small portion of it up while Delia slipped her hands onto her sons shoulders. None of them had left, or showered, or eaten since they arrived, and so the older woman's hands shook when she grasped him.

"We should get you some sleep, or food, dear." She whispered, but Ash dismissed her with a shrug and lowered eyelids.

"I'm fine." he said weakly. "I'm not leaving until..." the words wouldn't come. Until what? Until she woke up? Until she... No! He couldn't think it, couldn't feel it; couldn't be tempted by it. His stomach turned at the idea.

He swallowed, looking into his mother's hazel eyes, and she dipped her head forward and hissed him on the cheek before looking over at Brock.

"We're going to go grab some breakfast and coffee then... We'll be back shortly. Call us if anything changes." his mother said sweetly, calming even the most riled of Ash's nerves. He exhaled and nodded to her while pikachu bounced back from standing near Brock, to Ash's side loyally.

Brock couldn't take it, if anyone was handling the situation as bad as Ash, it was him. They had all been friends for years, best friends. Brock wasn't as brave as Ash, he wasn't as strong as her. So when he looked at Ash with those hurt, defeated eyes. Ash wanted to lash out and tell him to quick thinking in such away.

She wasn't going to die!.

But Delia had that look, too, as if she already accepted it. Ash turned away from if his mother and friend, to look on, back at the woman laying in bed. Pikachu popped onto his shoulder with little ease and nuzzled his trainer on the neck comfortingly. The warmth couldn't penetrate his heart now, though. Ash was slipping, tired, angry, unreachable.

The doctors said it wasn't good. Said if she did wake up there was no telling what the damage to her head was like—they found blood spotting in her cranium. Fractured skull, but still breathing. It was bad, Ash knew that. He also knew that she was a strong, insanely independent woman, and she wasn't going to die.

When the thought reached him again, his teeth grit hard, and while tearing his gaze away from her limp body, he pressed the palms of his hands against his face and exhaled. Salty tears would have dripped if he had anymore to cry. Instead, they pooled in his eyes and went no further. Why did this have to happen to her? She was the safe one!

She had the same job everyday, she trained younger students, she attended swim meets and track meets—and she volunteered at the pokemon center. She stayed in the same city, she didn't branch out, and she didn't travel—Ash spent a majority of his life scaling dangerous mountain sides, falling over twenty feet cliffs, falling into water at unreasonable distances, being nearly blown up on several occasion, sky diving without parachutes—he was the most likely to die by accident.

Not her, damn it!

Heart rate slowing, stifling the tears that had built up, he placed a shaking, swollen hand against the glass and spoke.

"I'm not ready to say goodbye, Misty."

Now sooner than the words left his mouth did the faint sound of the heart monitor deplete, and he knew for certain this was only the beginning. Without hesitation, he shot away from the window looking into her unit, and screamed for a doctor. Not yet.

….Not yet. Ash could still fix this. He could save her. He wasn't sure how, or why. But he was going to, damn it. He could.

He would.

Author's Note:

This was a request from Mrs. Nose that I sort of turned into a larger story!

It's been a hell of a last few weeks for me, so I'm sorry this was so late. I know I didn't change much from the Mad Season Chapter, but I didn't want to.

I'm using the "Flashback" method of writing as practice! It will be fun to try something a little different. So bare with me.

~Updated weekly

NINT