DISCLAIMER: I do not own Pokémon.

It seemed that people liked the whole 'plotting/scheming' premise of A Deal's a Deal, so I decided to write another one in a similar vein. This one leans a bit heavier on the romance side, as the title might suggest, but there's still plenty of humour scattered throughout.

Think of this as a kind of two-part oneshot - a 'twoshot', if you will, or, at the very least, a oneshot with a little introductory chapter. Part Two is the main part of the story, and is quite a bit longer than this chapter as a result.

Romancing the Ash

PART ONE

In the soft evening glow of the Ketchum residence's cosy living room, two squabbling teenagers sat at opposite ends of a large sofa, blocking each other from view like a pair of pouting children.

"I just don't get any of this," the boy at the left end groaned towards the television.

"Ash, will you shut up already?!" exclaimed the girl on the right. "I haven't heard a word of this since I put it on!"

Ash lowered his hand from his face and looked around to face her. "How can you watch this stuff, Misty?" he asked in disgust. "It's garbage and you know it."

"No it's not, it's lovely!" she retorted, also turning to face him. "This is the part where Edwin and Ophelia reunite after years, and he gives her a pokéball that has a diamond engagement ring inside! Oh, I'm choking up just thinking about it!"

As she expected, however, the boy just shrugged. "Waste of a pokéball if you ask me," he muttered. "I'd have used it to catch that articuno they rode to the palace a while ago."

Misty poked him hard in the chest, gasping smugly. "Aha, so you have been watching it!"

"Chaa!" squeaked Pikachu as he and Azurill hopped up and down excitedly on the cushion between their two masters.

Ash scratched sheepishly at the hair beneath his cap. "I have not!" he huffed. "I just, er, looked up when that bit was on, that's all."

"Oh yeah, sure," she mocked before turning back to the TV. About a minute of quiet passed, allowing Misty to briefly re-immerse herself in the soupy atmosphere of the scene before her – that was, until another snarky comment inevitably made its way over to her ears.

"This is dumb," Ash grumbled. "Why is everything always so lovey-dovey in these kinds of things?"

It was at times like these when someone listening in on their arguing would usually say to Misty, "Just ignore him and maybe he'll stop"; she wondered if, one day, she would actually listen to their advice.

"Ash, love is like an art form," she began, her impatient tone gradually giving way to one of hazy, dream-like infatuation, "and an art form must be expressed as perfectly and as beautifully as possible, which is why we have masterpieces like this," she pointed towards the TV screen.

"They don't just cram it in for the sake of it. I think love stories are sometimes crucial to a good work of art. You ought to know, you've starred in some yourself."

Ash raised an eyebrow. "I have?" he said blankly.

Misty pulled her legs up onto the sofa, resting her chin on her knees. "Of course you have, stupid," she said. "Remember when we helped Cleavon Schpielbunk shoot that movie about the two pokémon in love, the one he flew us all the way out to Hollywood just to see?"

"Oh yeah…" he slowly recalled, a process that ended with a dramatic snort of laughter. "Wait, you're calling that piece of trash a work of art? I've seen more artful things come out of my snorlax! And besides, we weren't even in it, remember? Our scenes were cut!"

The young redhead chuckled bashfully. "Okay…bad example. But what about the radio drama we did in Johto where you played Prince Goldenrod?"

"What about it?"

"Don't you think that was leading somewhere before Team Rocket sabotaged it? Somewhere…romantic?"

"Not really," the puzzled boy admitted.

"Oh come on, it was almost exactly like this movie here!" She gestured towards the TV once again. "The main character strolls onto the scene, saves the day, then gets the girl at the end; it's a classic formula!"

Yet, Ash just smirked, shaking his head dismissively. "That's ridiculous, Misty," he eventually said. "There were only two female characters in that radio thing. Who were they gonna pair me up with? Jessie? As if!"

Misty's face fell, and she quickly looked away to cover up the embarrassment burning in her cheeks.

"Never mind." She sighed emotionlessly, prompting another look of confusion from the pokémon trainer. A few seconds later, she added with another sigh, "Honestly, I don't understand this phobia you've got of anything romantic."

The boy frowned in irritation. "It's not a phobia," he grunted. "I just don't see why people make such a song and dance over it. If you love someone, why wouldn't you just tell them instead of skipping around it with all this 'romance' stuff?"

Misty gulped, her pale face turning almost as red as her hair. Her best friend was not the deepest of people, so to hear him say anything remotely profound was always a shock to the senses, but this particular nugget of wisdom seemed alarmingly…relevant…to its recipient, and not in a nice way either.

"B-Because…" she began shakily, "because people, er, want to feel special, you know? Sometimes just telling them isn't enough; you have to show them, too."

"How would you know?" Ash probed. "You've never been in love."

Another awkward shudder pulsed through Misty's body, and she bit her lip to keep herself from gasping in surprise. By the way he said it, she could tell that Ash's question did not come from a malevolent place, but the words stayed with her nonetheless, taunting her in ways that the oblivious boy clearly had no understanding of.

Despite this, it seemed that Ash had, at least, picked up on her sudden silence. "Wait…" he started, his eyes widening, "have you?"

For some reason – perhaps the secret dishonesty of it or the fact that her stomach was currently onto its tenth nauseating somersault – Misty could not bring herself to voice her vehement denial this time. Instead, she simply leaned forward to grab the remote on the coffee table and aimed it straight at the TV, her eyelid twitching irritably with every violent click of the volume button.

"I told you," she snarled in an ominously low voice, "I'm trying to watch this. Go and find something to do if you don't want to stay here with me."

Though Ash was somewhat stunned by his friend's evasion of the question, he nonetheless did as he was told, slumping back into the seat and letting his eyes glaze over in front of the now excessively loud film. Misty remained visibly irked by the previous conversation, and tried her best to sink back into her fantasyland, but it seemed that her racing mind had other ideas, resulting in the occasional sigh or growl of annoyance from the young girl. After a few more minutes of tense silence, the programme cut to black and was replaced by images of hair products and smarmy-looking salesmen.

"Oh thank god, a commercial break," Ash said groggily as he stood up and stretched out his back. "I'm gonna hit the shower before bed."

"Uh-huh," Misty mumbled, only half-listening to him. Once he had vanished up the stairs, she sat forward and rested her chin tiredly on her arm. Pikachu seemed to sense her discomfort and tugged at her yellow shorts concernedly.

"Pikachupi?"

She smiled warmly down at the small electric mouse. "What am I going to do with him, Pikachu?"

As she scooped up the two small pokémon onto her lap, the advertisements came to an abrupt end, and she shifted her focus back to the film in an attempt to distract herself from the fluttering feeling in her chest. At the back of the room, a tall, tanned man leaned against the kitchen door, shaking his head in mock exasperation.

"You know Ash is an idiot, don't you?"

His question caused the unprepared Misty to jump in fright, and she whipped her head around so fast that her side ponytail almost hit her in the face.

"H-Huh?" she squeaked, having not fully taken in the words she had just heard.

He smirked slightly before continuing. "And idiots aren't exactly known to respond well to subtlety."

This time, she heard him perfectly. "Brock, what are you talking about? How long have you been standing there?"

"Long enough." He chuckled. "Quite the interesting conversation you two were having, hmm?"

Misty instantly turned scarlet. "It's not what you think!" she insisted frantically. "I was just trying to educate him on something he knows absolutely nothing about!"

"So I could tell." He smiled as he made his way over to her. "But, to reiterate the first thing I said, Ash is, well, a bit on the hard-headed side, wouldn't you agree?"

Though she shot him a look as if to say, "Well, duh", she knew her older friend had to be going somewhere with this. "Yes, and in other news, the sky is blue. What's your point?"

"My point is he's never going to react to your little hints if you keep being so…hmm, what's the word I'm looking for…delicate…with your answers."

A spark of panic appeared in the pit of Misty's stomach. Brock had better not be referring to that. "What do you mean?" she continued to play dumb. "Hints about what?"

Brock sat down beside her on the sofa and smiled across at her. It was a look that simultaneously conveyed notes of incredulity, humour and silent understanding.

"Are you really going to make me say it?"

Misty froze in place. Clearly, her attempts at subtlety had not extended to her pokémon breeder friend. He obviously knew – but that did not mean she was going to go down easy.

"It's not true!" she growled embarrassedly. "You've been saying this for years, and it's just…no! Ash and I aren't…y-you know! Aarrghhh!"

Brock had fully expected such an overreaction, but nevertheless shuffled cautiously away from his volatile young friend.

"Okay, okay, I believe you," he spoke calmly, trying his best to sound sincere. Misty simply huffed as she rested her cheek on the arm of the chair.

"But let's just say – hypothetically, of course – that you did feel, you know, that way about him…why not amp it up a little bit?"

The gym leader sighed, knowing that she would probably regret uttering her next few words. "What are you saying?" she squinted at him suspiciously.

Brock's expression turned slightly more serious. "I'm saying that, from my experience, at least, if you want to teach Ash something, you can't be cryptic about it; you have to use total brute force."

He stood up from his seat and proceeded to mime along excitedly to his commentary. "You've got to saturate him in it, shove it right in his face, bludgeon the guy over the head with it until you finally get the point across! It's a technique I've perfected over the years, if I do say so myself.

"And romance is no different. If you want to get through to him, you've got to dial it up to eleven, baby! Woo the crap out of that little imbecile!"

Misty reached out and pulled the flailing Brock back down to the sofa with a soft thump. At the very least, his 'performance' had made her laugh.

"Brock, calm down." She giggled before adopting a sterner disposition. "No-one said anything about, erm, 'wooing' anyone here. All I was trying to do was teach him about the different ways people can express their feelings."

It was unclear whether or not he had listened to her, however, as he proceeded to speak again the second she had finished. "Picture this," he emphasised with dramatic hand waving, "a romantic dinner for two, followed by an evening of the cheesiest, soppiest, most worn-out romantic clichés in the book, knowing full well that he's never come across them before and won't know how they play out at all."

Picture it, she did, and the images made her feel weak at the knees. "Th-This is all still hypothetical, r-right?"

Yet, once again, Brock skipped right over her comments. "Ash would never consciously think about this sort of stuff, that much we know, but if you put the idea in his head by being completely over-the-top romantic around him, then that just might wake him up, don't you think?"

The more he revealed of his strange theory, the redder Misty's face became. In a certain light, what he was saying actually made a lot of sense. Although…

"What if it doesn't?" she asked without thinking.

"Then everything will just carry on as normal, I guess." He shrugged. "But isn't it worth a shot?"

"No, I meant…" Her blush intensified, and she looked down at the ground. "What if he doesn't feel the same way? Er, h-hypothetically, that is."

Though Brock was sure there was nary a chance in Hell of that being the case, he did not feel it proper to give the game away to the flushed redhead.

"Hypothetically, you shouldn't think that way. After all," he added with an impish wink, "I thought you said you were just in it to 'educate him'."

Dammit! Misty screamed internally. Over the years, she sensed that her efforts to cover her tracks had become sloppier and sloppier, and this was a prime example of that. She tried to hold in a frustrated growl, thinking that another outburst would only accentuate it, and redirected her attention to petting Pikachu and Azurill absentmindedly. Eventually, she turned slowly back towards her narrow-eyed friend, hoping to change the subject – at least, marginally – with her upcoming words.

"So…romantic clichés, huh?" she asked innocently. Brock nodded his head.

"Mhm. I'll bet you've got a ton of them in mind already." He smiled. "Ooh, ooh, you should do the wine trick!"

Misty dreaded to think. "The wine trick?" she inquired hesitantly.

"Yeah, it's a classic! You know, when you're drinking red wine and you move closer to him suddenly, and you get a spot of wine on his shirt. Then you're all, 'Oh my god, I'm so sorry, you'd better take that shirt off before it stains!' and he's like, 'Oh, don't worry about it, I'm sure it'll come out', so you splash the rest of the glass on him and go, 'Well, that's not gonna come out', which is when he strips off and you go in for the-"

"Alright, alright, I get the picture!" the blushing teenager pleaded, trying her hardest to expel the images of such a scenario from her mind. Then, after she caught her breath, she managed to squeak out, "So, not including the, er, wine trick…do you really think this would work?"

"Probably not," Brock stated almost immediately after, the matter-of-factness of which made Misty frown in disapproval. "What?" he followed up. "I'm just being honest."

"Then what's the point?" she replied. "I might as well just go back to banging my head against the wall like I was before you came in!"

As Brock began to sense his friend's growing distress, he decided to lay off the playful tone in his voice.

"I'm not just saying all this to wind you up, you know," he reassured her with a friendly smile. "Even if Ash doesn't respond to anything you throw at him, the worst that can come out of this is that you'll get to spend a fun night with your best friend who you see maybe once a year at best. What have you got to lose?"

Misty pondered what he had said for a moment, idly picking bits of lint off her maroon top as she thought. "I…I guess," she finally said. "But why are you saying all this stuff? Why do you care so much?"

The pokémon breeder feigned offence. "Is it so wrong for me to look out for my two bestest pals?"

After a light-hearted eye-roll from the young redhead, he smiled again. "In all seriousness, though, I've noticed you looking a little left out ever since Ash, May, Max and I came back to Kanto, and figured some more time alone with Ash might be just the ticket. Also, and don't kill me for saying this, but there's no telling when you'll next see each other after the end of this week, so don't you think you should take this chance to let him know about certain, um…things…before he leaves again?"

Misty absorbed his words with the utmost concentration, and although her first instinct was to mallet the bejesus out of him for his unashamed boldness, she also could not deny that he had, to her embarrassment, pretty much hit the nail on the head. Just then, the creak of a door followed by the soft thuds of footsteps sounded from the floor above them, creating a welcome but equally harrowing distraction from her inner conflict.

"Sounds like Ash is on his way back down," Brock remarked. "I'd better get back to helping Mrs. K out with the dishes."

She nodded limply, and the pokémon breeder hopped to his feet, shimmying through the gap between the coffee table and Misty's legs. A few strides towards the kitchen later, he turned back around to face his friend.

"So, are you going to ask him?"

A groan of both fear and annoyance escaped from the young gym leader's mouth. "I'll think about it," she muttered, then hastily added, "but ONLY as an experiment, you got that? It's not because I, you know…like him or anything…"

But Brock just grinned, chuckling to himself as he disappeared swiftly around the corner. Meanwhile, a revitalised, pyjama-clad Ash Ketchum came pattering down the stairs, making his way over to his previous spot on the sofa and plopping down next to his dazed best friend. Pikachu purred out a sleepy "Pikapi" before curling back up tightly against the soft cushion.

"Er, Mist, you know you're watching static right now, don't you?" he said, looking towards the hypnotising display of grey and black on the TV screen.

When she failed to answer, he waved a gloveless hand in front of her face. "Hello, Earth to Misty! You okay? You look like you've seen a gastly."

Shaking her head rapidly, Misty was suddenly plunged back into reality. "Huh? Oh, y-yeah, I'm fine."

Yet, despite her shaky affirmation, Ash remained staring at her. His deep brown eyes seemed to bore straight through her, and his mouth was slightly parted, a face that Misty had always found unbearably alluring. As the breath began to leave her body, she flicked her eyes briefly over to the side in the hope of regaining some semblance of self-control, but in that moment, her mind snapped suddenly back to hers and Brock's conversation of two minutes ago, and her mouth seemed to switch itself involuntarily to autopilot.

"Ash?" she murmured somewhat timidly.

"Yeah, Misty?"

"Do you maybe, erm, wanna have dinner together tomorrow night?"

"Uh, I thought we already were? I'm not leaving for the Battle Frontier until-"

"No, not like that," she cleared up, twirling a strand of orange hair coyly around her finger. "I meant, er, just the two of us."

To her surprise, the boy's face instantly contorted into a crooked smile. "Sure, Mist, sounds like fun!" He beamed. "We haven't done anything as a duo since we were travelling together; it'll be just like old times!"

She nodded warmly, all of a sudden feeling much better about this whole situation. Brock was surely right about one thing; getting to spend time alone with Ash was an opportunity that came by so rarely, and regardless of what form it happened to take, she would be a fool to pass it up. The pair slipped into a tranquil silence as Ash switched the TV over to something pokémon-related, and Misty allowed her mind to wander straight to the following night's potential 'activities'.

As a self-proclaimed romantic, she prided herself on her knowledge of hackneyed tropes and techniques, but which ones would be right for Ash? Though overdoing it was the whole point of this little experiment, Misty decided that there still had to be some level of order to the chaos, and so began to slowly map out a rough itinerary for the long-awaited evening with her secret love, all the while making sure to steal the odd glance at the person in question. Ash may have been as sharp as a slowpoke concerning matters of the heart for as long as she had known him, but maybe, just maybe, tomorrow night would change all of that.

A few feet away in the kitchen, two older figures stood over the sink, conversing pleasantly while they worked.

"So, how did it go?"

"You're never going to believe this, Mrs. Ketchum, but it seemed like she actually agreed to it."

"Really? Oh, how wonderful! I can't wait to get started on the preparations! However did you manage to convince her?"

"I don't think she needed that much convincing, to be honest. She might have been trying to hide it, but I got the feeling she was sold right from the get-go."

"Well, whatever the case, I'm sure it will be a valuable experience for the two of them. Do you think this will actually work, Brock?"

Brock stopped cleaning to stroke his chin. "No idea, but we've tried almost everything else. And, like I said to Misty just now..." he turned to his left, shrugging his shoulders, "it's at least worth a shot."