Beyond The Walls

Chapter 37: Road Trip

Gary sighed dramatically as Ash started yet another story from his two years of training in the Sinnoh region. It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that Ash had been going on like this for the past two hours and his excited voice drowned out the speakers of the Camaro. It was certainly starting to wear on Gary's nerves, especially since he hadn't been a trainer for nearly four years. The last thing he wanted to hear was another story involving the creatures that Ash worked with when he had stories of his own from that same time period that involved far more than battles, badges, and travel.

Part of him pitied Ash because he never spent enough time in one place to actually settle down somewhat and do things that normal teenagers would do like hang out and watch movies for hours while making fun of the acting, or going to parties and watching friends make idiots of themselves, or even just putting aside thoughts of what city you were going to next or how much more experience your pokemon needed before it would evolve. Another part of him envied Ash. The boy had gone to so many places, had so many adventures, gained so much experience in many aspects of life. He had proof of those things too: badges, newly acquired or evolved pokemon, a trail of new friends throughout different regions…

Then again, he supposed he had done similar things… He'd been to many places that he doubted Ash had been to, even if they were mostly in Pastoria or nearby Sunyshore City: the university, the diner his friends hung out at on Saturday afternoons while they recovered from hangovers, the half-dozen bars where his friends bands played, the local concert venues… There were countless other little places hidden all over the cities where so many memories had come to life and the sense of familiarity that those places had held a certain allure that he had always longed for while traveling. He was sure even Ash felt that sense of longing during his adventures.

As far as new friends went, that was the whole reason behind this drive in the first place: helping four friends move to a new place. He'd gained more friends than he had imagined having and that surprise party his grandfather had planned certainly proved it when nearly twenty people showed up from Sinnoh. Ash may have had proof in the way of badges and pokemon, but Gary had proof of his experiences too – pictures, ticket stubs, text books, a diploma… a ton of new scars…

"Gary, hey – earth to Gary!" Ash suddenly chirped from the passenger seat.

Gary glanced at him to see his friend casting a slightly worried and annoyed look his way. "What?"

Ash shook his head with a small, triumphant grin. "You weren't even listening," he said in that cheerful voice that had been chatting Gary's ear off over the course of the entire drive. "I asked you about Pastoria."

"What about it?" Gary asked, turning down the volume of the stereo slightly.

Ash huffed, looking slightly exasperated. "What was it like? You had to have done something other than school work the whole time."

"Why do you want to know?"

"I dunno," Ash shrugged as he watched the trees go by. "Curiosity, I guess. I mean, I did just tell you all about training in Sinnoh. I guess I just want to hear about the other side of it all."

"Curiosity killed the cat."

"Good thing for me I'm not a cat."

Gary frowned. "One person's blessing is another's curse."

"Oh, come on! Give me a break – I could always up the level of annoyance, you know."

Gary's frown deepened as he turned the stereo back to its former volume. Now that the topic of conversation had switched to him, he wanted Ash to go back to rambling on with his stories.

In truth, Gary was enormously torn about this return trip to Sinnoh. He was thrilled at the thought of seeing his friends, especially the few that hadn't traveled to Pallet, and the New Year party that was to be held at Beth's house was something he was particularly looking forward to. Surprisingly, it wasn't the idea of drinking enough alcohol to forget about all of his troubled thoughts before slipping off to screw around with Anna that he was looking forward to; it was actually just being around everyone that he was most enthused about.

Still, he was worried. He had been in Sinnoh for two weeks after leaving the hospital after his suicide attempt before moving home and those two weeks were foggy. He was worried about how he would feel when he returned to the house now that he had finally accepted what he had done. He was nervous about sleeping in the same room, in the same bed that he laid on when he swallowed the handful of pills that one night in July.

Would he even be able to set foot in that room without his breath catching in his throat? When it came time to sleep, would he end up reliving the panic attack from Halloween? And then what if Anna had plans – would he be able to perform for her? The thought of not being able to please her made him even more apprehensive. He would feel so horribly embarrassed if anything like that did happen. Other concerns were weighing on his mind – far smaller but still existent…

There was one thing about Sinnoh that was enticing him and that was the notion of music. That was the thing truly drawing him to Pastoria and his friends there.

There was something in the way everyone would play and feed off of each other's energy that was more alluring than anything else he could think of. There was something magical about it; there was simply no other way to put it. The feel of his hands moving across keys and along strings could make his mind go blank faster than Anna's hands trailing along his bare back. The sheer energy that would fill a room as several people played together could create a fog greater than the one vodka or tequila would drown him in after several shots.

There were many things that were bound to happen in Pastoria, certain things that happened all the time when he lived there. There would be a party at Beth's house and everyone would get drunk and then everyone would run into each other at the dinner the next afternoon – most likely when Dave and Ben would be working while nursing their own hangovers.

He would go to Alex's house for a few hours and would certainly hear either Logan's loud music coming from the house next door or Tim playing guitar across the street. He would go over to Damien's house and Damien would try to teach him how to play drums and Jon would play Led Zeppelin loud enough for everyone to have to scream if they wanted to be heard.

He would go over to Tim and Charlotte's house and would either hang out with Charlotte and whoever had decided to come over or go into the recording studio in their garage and help Tim with something. He would flirt with Ashley, kiss Andrew, pick on Shawn, purposely annoy Chris, break up a fight or two between Nick and Andrew… These were all things that happened frequently.

Maybe something different would happen. Maybe he would help Tim do something for one of his bands – hell, maybe he would even stay in Pastoria and make that something that would happen frequently… Maybe he could just move back and bring Anna with him; they could leave behind everything in Pallet and he could forget about research and school and just play music with his friends all of the time…

'Damn Alex for putting that idea in my head,' Gary thought to himself as he shook the thoughts out of his head. If there was one thing his grandfather would not approve of, a music career was it. Besides, how long would it be before he got sick of being around his friends nonstop? How long would it be before the homesickness hit him?

Next to him, Ash sighed softly, apparently under the impression that Gary had begun to ignore him. That wasn't really what was going on – he had just been bombarded with a massive amount of thoughts that his brain was still processing as he kept his eyes on the road.

Several more minutes passed in silence and Gary found himself wondering if Ash was truly interested in his experiences from his time in Pastoria. Few people seemed to care about it in general; May didn't want to hear the stories from parties because they always involved him drinking, his grandfather only cared about how he was doing in school, talking to Alex had always seemed to lead to a lecture, Anna didn't care about school, and Kate just wouldn't be able to understand anything about his friends. Tracey was the only one who had really shown any interest in it before. Now Ash was seemingly interested, but he was sure that there were many things that the younger teen wouldn't want to hear.

"Do you really want to know about Pastoria?" Gary asked quietly after a few minutes. Ash nodded with an expression that said he was a bit annoyed with how closed off Gary was being. "What do you want hear about?"

Ash gave him a slightly confused look before he answered. "Everything," he finally said with a small shrug of the shoulders.

Gary glanced at him. "Why?"

"Why does everything have to be so difficult with you?"

"Will you just answer the question?"

Ash sighed and glared out the window for a minute before turning back to Gary. "I want to know why because I'm curious about what you've been doing for the past two and a half years. The only thing I really know about is being a trainer, I'd like to know about other people's experiences. Can't you just drop the barrier and talk for once? What do you think I'm going to do – run off and tell your grandfather about everything you've done? Because that's not what I'm going to do."

There was another moment of silence before Gary finally nodded. "Where do you want me to start?" he asked finally.

"I read online that you have to be sixteen to go to that school. Why did you go when you were fifteen?"

"It sounds like you're doing an interview," Gary muttered under his breath before heaving a sigh. "I didn't want to go when I was fifteen," he admitted.

"And?"

Gary rolled his eyes. "When I stopped training, I was planning on just going home and helping out Grandpa in the lab and going to high school with the girls and then going to a regular university like everyone else does. I just wanted to do what normal kids did and I told Grandpa that too," he paused and slid the right sleeve of his shirt up to his elbow and pointed out two faded scars. Ash paled slightly at the sight of the scars. "Obviously he didn't listen. He said that it would be a waste of time since Alex tutored me until we left."

"That was only for three years –"

"Do you want me to tell you or not?" He waited until Ash fell silent before continuing. "Yeah, it was only for three years. Fuck, I'm going to have to go back to explain everything; fair warning though, I don't remember much from then. After the accident, I stopped eating and I wouldn't do anything other than sleep for… a long time. Grandpa had to put me on an IV drip and I apparently almost died because I was so sick but, once I was better – "

"Does that have anything to do with why you don't eat meat anymore?"

Gary closed his eyes briefly at Ash's interruption. "Yeah, it does actually. Meat's harder to digest than vegetables and carbs and it made me sick when I ate it. So I stopped eating it. Anyways – if you interrupt again, I will pull this car over and make you walk back to Pallet!" Ash closed his mouth, keeping his next question to himself. "After I was better, Alex taught me every day, until I became friends with Anna, pretty much from the time I woke up to the time I went to bed. If he wasn't teaching me, I was either playing piano or learning cello. After Anna started coming around, he started doing it when everyone else was in school so I could actually be around other people."

"Didn't Anna's dad kill himself around then?" Gary nodded hesitantly. The last thing he wanted to do was let the conversation subject turn to Anna's past, especially when he was one of the few people she had trusted enough to tell. "Do you know why?"

Gary sighed softly. "Yeah, I do," he answered regretfully. He knew, but Anna had sworn him to secrecy and he wasn't about to betray her trust on something like this. "But it's something really personal for Anna and her sister so it's not my place to tell… I will say that she still gets upset about it sometimes and whenever she does, there's nothing I can do to comfort her because she won't let anyone touch her. And it really kills me when she's like that. Back to topic… Alex taught me pretty much everything I would have learned in high school and Grandpa had me take the test to get a high school diploma when I came home after Johto. Then he somehow managed to get me an internship at the research center on Sayda Island – it's not too far from Hoenn, they do a lot of research on extinct pokemon. Or at least, they did; some of those pokemon aren't exactly extinct anymore – don't ask.

"I was planning on staying there until I was sixteen and then start applying to universities or something like that. Then, of course, Grandpa got the idea of me going to the school in Pastoria since he went there and taught there, and my parents went there, and Alex started teaching there. After a while I figured I would go there once I turned sixteen but, typical Grandpa, he got me an early admission. I was still going to stay at Sayda but I ended up getting really homesick and I came home and the next thing I knew, he was on my case about accepting the early admittance. In the end he got so annoying that I not only accepted it but I moved up there a month early just so I could get the hell away from him!" He frowned as he turned onto a small highway in Johto that would take them to the northeast of Blackthorn City. "So that's how I ended up in Pastoria when I was fifteen. Good enough explanation for you?"

Ash nodded, a bit stunned from the amount Gary had told him. "Where did you stay when you went there?"

"When I went to Pastoria?" Ash nodded again. "With Alex. He has a house with Monica near the school, it's actually pretty cool – a bunch of my friends live in that neighborhood. I moved in with Andrew, Chris, and Chelsea during my first summer there."

By this time Ash had turned in his seat so that he was facing Gary and it seemed as though he were hanging onto every word. "I take it you want to know how I met them?" An excited nod was the response from Ash. "I met Andrew somewhere in Kanto actually, he was a trainer and he beat me in a battle – I wouldn't be surprised if you battled him at some point too. You guys would have gotten along really well, he was exactly like you as a trainer… Only he knew what he was doing," he added as an afterthought in a teasing way.

"Hey! Who was the one that made it further in the – "

Gary cut him off by showing him his arm again. "I think I know that, Ash!"

"Oh chill out! I was joking, jeez, bite my head off why don't you…"

"I wasn't biting your head off!"

"Yes, you were."

"No, I wasn't. I wasn't – don't give me that look."

"What look? You were biting my head off –"

"Oh, shut up!" Gary exclaimed. Glancing in the rearview mirror, he could swear Umbreon was rolling her eyes at their bickering.

"You shut up!"

"Make me!"

"You're such an egotistical pain – will you watch the road!"

"I am watching the road, just sit there and shut it."

"You're doing like a hundred miles an hour! You're gonna kill us!"

"I'm only doing seventy – holy fuck, Ash! Stop with the backseat driving!" Ash had commented on the speed limit only being sixty.

Ash's grin faltered for a moment. "But I'm sitting in the front seat…"

"Oh my god, I hate you," Gary groaned. "You're more annoying than Andrew, and that takes effort!"

"It takes talent," Ash replied cheerfully.

Gary stayed silent for a few minutes as they drove on the nearly-deserted highway. How had that little argument started in the first place? He tried to remember what they had been talking about before they had somehow reverted to their childish behavior.

"Did you want me to keep talking?" he asked after a moment.

"Only if you're going to be nice," Ash muttered.

"What's the fun in that? Stop glaring at me; I won't pick on you as long as you don't interrupt with anything stupid. Deal?" After a moment of hesitation, Ash nodded in agreement. "We were talking about Andrew… I remembered him when we met at school but we didn't really get along."

"Why? Were you too good for him or something?"

"You know, this nice thing has to go both ways. And no, it wasn't like that," he sighed. "It actually wasn't anything like that. Andrew, along with a lot of other people, thought I was a suck up that only got into the school because of my grandfather. Chelsea and Chris were different though. Chelsea was the one person I met at the school that didn't say anything about me being the grandson of the brilliant Professor Oak – everyone had to comment on it! I had been in school for two days and already want to leave because I got so sick of it. It was all anyone cared about, no one actually cared about who I was; except the maybe five friends I had there… The only thing that kept me there were my friends and the fact that Grandpa would be on my case again the second I got home, which is exactly what happened, by the way."

"Sheesh, Gary; a bit bitter?"

"You wanted to know, I answered honestly. Don't ask if you don't want to know."

"You've just never been a bitter person before… What about things other than school? You can't have been miserable your whole time in Sinnoh."

"No," Gary agreed. "It wasn't exactly terrible, and despite being a bit bitter about it, I don't regret it because I made more friends than I ever thought I'd have and I did a lot of things I never thought I'd do."

"Like kiss another guy apparently."

Gary laughed softly and shook his head. He found Ash's ignorance to be mildly amusing. "There were other things too. Though since you brought up kissing… There's something serious that I actually kind of want to talk to you about."

"Okay, what is it?"

Gary hesitated, unsure if he was entirely willing to talk about one of the things that had been on his mind all day. "Well," he finally began after a few more minutes had passed in silence. "To put it simply, Alex is getting ready to ask Monica to marry him and it's pretty much up to me when he does it."

"What do you mean?" Ash asked slowly.

"I mean he wants me to tell Anna that I love her before he does it."

"Really?" Gary nodded in response. "Do you love her?"

"Do you realize what a complicated question that is?"

"Yeah, do you realize what an easy answer it is?"

"Yes, I do, and before I answer the first question; what do you think of Anna?"

Ash noticed Gary cast an anxious glance his way as Ash pondered the question before answering slowly. "I always thought Anna was weird, to be honest; and I never got a very good impression of her from Kate either. When I heard that you two were going out, I couldn't understand why you possibly go out with her because you always seemed so different from each other. Then I saw you at the party and then I saw the way you acted and you two really aren't as different as I thought you were. You seem great together and you seem happiest when you're around her."

Gary nodded slowly as he mulled over what Ash had said. "So what do you think I should do?"

"Well, do you love her?"

"Yeah."

"Then stop being a chicken and tell her! I don't know why you're sitting around and be so serious thinking about it – you're just making a bigger deal out of it than it really is. Maybe if you thought a little less you wouldn't be such a wuss!"

"You're saying for me to be more like you?" Gary asked in disbelief. He and Ash were vastly different; for starters, Ash never thought before he acted while Gary always did. He never acted without thinking things through… Perhaps that was his biggest problem.

"Yes! Next time you guys are together alone and you feel like you love her, tell her," Ash said firmly.

Gary couldn't help but think that this might have been the best advice he'd heard. Something about hearing Ash tell him to do it set things in motion. Maybe it was the fact that Ash was his best friend from so long ago or maybe it was the fact that this advice was coming from someone his own age and not someone older than him and his friends.

Maybe he would actually take the advice.

… … …

::Author's Notes::

Well, I have to admit that I had a hard time with this chapter. I had some serious writer's block despite having soo many ideas for the next couple of chapters.

Thanks for reading!

Arch-trainer: Reading your latest chapter to It's Never Easy really helped me get past my writer's block with this chapter! Thanks to you, this story can finally move along a bit more! That makes me so happy. : )