DiScLaImEr: Don't own pokémon!

A/N: Blegh. It's here. ::throws a fistfull of confetti:: THANK YOU COSMIK!!!! THANK YOU MIROKU-GIRL!!!! Been watching American Idol and OmG!!!! It's sOoOoOoOo funny!!! And mah stupid little sister keeps taking up all the time on the downstairs comp so I'm stuck in my room writing this on wordpad. Blegh. All right then. Done now. Shut up, brain. pLeAsE rEiViEw!!!

* Kasagi Onaso *

It WaS

* In a Time of Pain *

In the covering darkness of the dimmed room, a figure sat hunched in a black office chair. His face was shadowed and a hand covered with golden rings fitted with rubies and diamonds stroked the head of a purring Persian. In the shadows, his mouth curved into a sneer.

In the shadows, he waited.

"Well?" he growled as the door creaked open. A timid Rocket officer shuffled in, his polished boots scuffing against the shining tiles. "Speak!" the man demanded and the Rocket flinched. "Is all going as planned?"

"Y-yes sir," stuttered the Rocket officer, staring through the shadows at the back of the office chair.

"Very good. And Sabrina…how is she holding up?"

"She tells us that she can't alter their minds much longer because she is weakening," said the officer slowly, trying not to say anything that would make this man mad at him. "But…"

"But?" snapped the man, the office chair creaking as he shifted in anticipation.

"We think she's lying."

"Make her go as long as you can," snapped the man and the Persian yowled as the bejeweled hand clutched the nape of its neck roughly. "And when she refuses…" The officer's mouth twitched slightly and he bowed at the waist.

"Yes sir." The man let the grip on the Persian's neck loosen, the cat glaring at him with great yellow-amber eyes, and balled his fist. With a squeak, the office chair spun around.

"Go now," growled the man. "We can't let those twerps meddle our plan. With the Gym Leaders under our power, no one can stop us."

"Yes sir." The Rocket backed out of the room and the man's laugh was booming as he laid a wide hand on the Persian's head.

*******

Run, run, run!

She screamed for her legs to move faster, take longer strides, anything. She was flying over the land but wanted to be above the trees.

You can't run…run…run…

The words echoed in her mind and a branch lashed out and streaked a cut across her forehead. The pain was second-sharp and then faded as the wind dotted the cherry-blood into her turquoise hair. She didn't bother to reach up and brush it away, though.

Was he still behind her?

Behind you…above you…not…not Duplica…take Ditto…police?…police…?

Yes...his breathing...so raggid...and his footsteps...so...light...

Her heart sped, a bird in a cage, and she was blinded by fear as she heard a twig snap behind her. With a horrified cry, she tripped and went sprawling into the dirt below her.

Get out of my head.

Her nose felt as if it was rubbed off and she could feel and taste blood upon her lips but she dare not stir except for her hands which gripped the dirt around her with anxious, tentive hands.

Don't...don't touch me...

Come here...won't...I won't...hurt you...

A knife...glinting in his hands...police?...not...hurt...her...

She squeezed her eyes shut, branches seeming to crack above head and twigs snapping all around her. Was he...trying to confuse her?

There is was. At the right.

A pair of boots stood and she saw a glint.

Let...let it end now...

Hello? Police?

********

Grab my hand, Mayers, and we'll get out of here together!

Mom...where's...Mom...all my toys...

They were gone.

The flames had devoured everything that night, just as they would devour him. He could smell them as a trickle of sweat dripped down his face. The hot, steamy smell of char, ash. Their skin had flaked off like tree bark and fluttered to the ground.

He hated them.

Professor? Professor Oak?

Yes. That's me. May I help you, officer?

Fire...fire...too many...flames...char...in his nose...burning his lungs away, peeling them like oranges.

He wanted to cry but tears were so hot. If only he could cry ice. To have chips of frozen water slide down his face...

Take care of them?

Orphans...what a dirty, dirty word...

Jus' me 'n you, May. Jus' me 'n you.

Where...where's Mommy then? Hmm? Where is she then?

Silver lining...

He slid against the tree, the bark cutting roughly through his shirt, and sutffed his face in his hands. Sounds were blurry now. He couldn't understand...just the crackling...

There was a searing pain on his arm as a flame dared to dance close enough to touch his skin with a taunting, flaming finger and it skittered away, cracking a saronic laugh with sick glee. He gritted his teeth.

Would he die here?

********

Brock laughed, his teeth glinting in the dim light of the prison. Before him were five people with five similar countanances of bafflement. Richie rolled his eyes to the cieling and bought his hands up to rub his temples gently.

"You think I have any idea what to do?" he asked, holding his hands out to them. "I'm as in the dark as any of you."

"That's not true," snapped Richie, glaring at Brock. "You've come up with wonderfully brilliant ideas before, haven't you? And as far as I'm concerned, it's your turn anyway."

"You just can't 'take turns' in something like this, Richie!" Brock growled.

"Why not?" challeneged Richie, cocking an eyebrow.

"Would you two please stop?" pleaded Erika, her hands clutched beneath a trembling chin. "I'm afraid we're loosing more and more time even as we speak."

"Time?" repeated Lily, her red eyes wide.

"I'm afraid they're using Sabrina for something horrible," whispered Erika, her white hands sliding up the sides of her face to cover her ears. "Something horrible."

"Let's jus' wing it then," Richie said gruffly. "What've we got to loose?" Blank stares greeted this suggestion until Blaine finally spoke.

"I agree," the old man said, adjusting his glasses. "Let's wing it."

*********

Blood ran down her arms and her fears were contained within each drop, black in the dark; they spiraled through the air, a glorious red when the moonlight hit it, and then sank into the grass. Her fingers clawed at her arm, her fingernails subconsciously digging away her skin, where the shards should have been...

The shards...

"Why'd you do it?" she asked the ground as she bent over her knees, which were folded beneath her, until her nose touched the red-sprayed grass.

We could have been happy...without you...

A sob racked her body which seemed so frail now, a brittle bone trapped beneath a quaking earth.

You won't die...I promise you, Misty...you...won't...

How quickly her life had slipped from her fingers, like the blood that had run through her hands caused by the shards meant for her...

You...killed...her...

Calm now, Misty... Be calm, child...

His hand was warm  upon her head but she screamed louder, clutching a draining body to her with white hands. She had seen the lights that day. Red...then blue....the siren squealing louder still until it rattled the window panes...the panicked look on his face as he gazed upon them...his sobbing daughter...dying wife...

Could have been...happy...

He was yelling again. Except this was different somehow. She had ceased her crying as his yell pierced the air, a mournful sound, and he had looked pleadingly upon her.

Go now.

Her words had scared her, scared her father, and she watched his eyes widen as metal rings were clamped around his wrists.

She hated him.

How angry she had been, how hurt, until that one day...she had released some anger by...going fishing...

That had ended everything she had felt; the pain, the shard in her heart...

...For a while.

*******

Cradling his split knuckles to him, blotting the blood on his shirt, he thought he could hear nothing...until...

Someone nearby was crying, the fluttering of a caught bird in their chest, and it easily reached him though he could hear no other sound except the own thudding of his heart. With a gasp, he sat up, the breath pumping through him, making him pant heavily, and everything around him faded.

He...he was gone...

Where had he gone?

He felt a sudden shiver raced through him, a feather on the wind, and he slowly rose to his feet, his split knuckle protesting as it was bent.

Where was he?

Viridian Forest. Now he remembered! Why was he here? His vision blurred against as blood rushed to head, dotting his sight with black and metallic purple spots until only a small part of the path before him was visible.

It led him right to the exit.

He took a diving step forward, the momentum nearly carrying him to the ground, but he caught himself and looked determindly, if not a bit dizzily, at the exit. Unsteady step after the other, he made his way along an invisible path, feet dragging beneath him, and as he neared the exit of the forest, the crying grew louder.

It...it was odd, but the crying seemed familiar, somehow.

Ash chuckled and shook his head, the exit slowly drawing closer. Sweet, cool air pressed against his face and he was closer to freedom, inches away; he wanted nothing more than to pass through the exit of the woods.

And there it was.

The tall, looming HQ was dark before him, half of a gibbous moon peering over its proud roof. The seed of excitement that had been planted at the mention of such a glorious find now swelled within him, a flower, and a slow but steadily full smile stretched across his face.

He had made it. He was here.

Suddenly, a sob broke through the stream of thoughts and his head turned sharply to the right.

The flower wilted, then died.

*******

"Wing it...exactly what is meant by that?" Erika asked politely, her deer-eyes dark with confusion.

"No plan," sniffed Richie, tweaking his nose with his thumb as he grinned at her.

"None?" Violet repeated, her own eyes widening.

"None, nada, nil, zilch," Richie recited.

"I see," Erika said over a short period of silence. "Well...it can't hurt, right?" she asked, clapping her hands together half-heartedly.

"Oh, it can," Lt. Serge said through clenched teeth.

"Oh," Erika meekly replied.

"Who cares?" asked Richie. "Come on. You said it yourself that we hadn't a whole bunch-a time then, didn't you, Erika?" The dark-headed woman nodded slowly, eyes on the other. "Then let's get this show on the road!"

"Um, like, that was way, like, too cliched, Richie," Daisy protested, hands on hips. Richie rolled his eyes.

"Let's go," Brock said and Blaine nodded beside him.

"That would be good," the old man said, his bifocals glinting in the dull lights abovehead. For a moment, the group stood there, crowded in the dim room, baffled as to what they were expected to do.

"Wing it?" repeated Richie, holding his hands up.

"Right," said Lily and, taking a deep breath, the group dispersed into the dark HQ, searching for a certain someone with deep violet hair...

*******

How suddenly she had gone from being emotionally alone to being emotionally bombarded like bombs from the night sky. She had felt someone's eyes on her back, felt their presence which so easily sent her in their wake.

Gone fishing.

Two words on a bright post-it, stuck carelessly upon a countertop half-hidden, and a lust for the outdoors had done her wonders and damned her in one.

Now the center of her reckless damnation stood behind her; she knew his presence like her own if not better. Yet she refused to acknowledge it and ignored it instead, willing it back into the forest it had stumbled from.

"Why are you here," she said, none too surprised by the dullness, resentment, bitterness moistening her voice. But, to her mild surprised, he wasn't either judging by the equally well-matched tones in his own voice.

"I should ask the same."

They let silence envelop them for a moment and Misty buried her face in the grass which sprouted just before her bent knees.

"I should be asking the questions," she whispered, her eyes narrowing angrily. "Not you." She heard him snort, probably, she thought, from disagreement, something they had both encountered frequently.

"Go ahead then," she heard him said bitterly. "Ask your question." Question? As in the singular form of the word? Ah, but there were so many she wanted to ask. But, if all he wanted was one question, she could think of only one word...

"Why?" she asked softly.

"Why what?" he countered. Her head jerked up from where it had been bent at the neck, like a submissive animal, and her face, which had been hidden in the blood-specked grass, now turned to glare at him, her skin ghastly pale in the bright moonlight.

"I think you know what," she said crossly.

"I don't."

"You do, Ash," she said, tears spinging to her eyes, furious tears. "I'll bet if you thought about it real hard you might know what the hell I'm talking about." He didn't look taken back the slightest by her sarcasm and gazed cooly back at her.

Misty wondered if he could hear her heart pound.

"Why what, Misty? Huh? Why you had to tell me...er...that and ruin a perfectly good relationship?" he asked shrilly.

"For a moment, Ash," she whispered. He could barely hear her. "For a moment after I told you, I saw your eyes, Ash. I really saw them. And what you say you felt wasn't in your eyes, Ash."

"A moment all the difference, right?" he snapped sarcastically but she could see she struck a nerve with her words, though the nerve seemed to be rather small. "What we had was fine, Misty. It was. We were best friends. All three of us. Why did you have to..."

"It was," she whispered. "Or was it?"

"Of course it was," Ash snapped. "I see no questions to ask anymore. All of this is clearly your fault." She tried to imagine what might have happened if she hadn't opened her big mouth and ruined it all, as Ash meekly put it.

This wouldn't be happening, that's for sure.

"It's not my fault," Misty said, anger swelling up inside her. "Who was the one who suggested we just forget it, huh? Who was it, Ash? Could it have maybe possibly have been me?"

"I couldn'tforget it," Ash said, his voice slightly whining.

"Why not?" Misty said, stiffly rising. "Ah, there's the question again."

"What do you mean, 'why not'?" Ash asked.

"If I meant nothing to you above a friend, Ash, then it should have been easy for you to forget it," Misty said and began to slowly circle him. "You should have been willing to forget it for our friendship, what we had behind that one little blemish, right?"

"No--" Ash began to say timidly but Misty quickly cut him off.

"When you said you didn't love me, Ash, I believed you," Misty said. "But I didn't."

"That makes no sense--"

"None of this does!" Misty shouted, once-pale face flushing with anger. The moonlight was slowly fading into a small flow of dim white light as rainclouds rumbled in like a river. "You really are a selfish bastard," she growled, her arms coming up to hug herself just as the first raindrops fell. Ash flushed, his eyes darkening, clouding over, and for a moment, in the gray light  of the moon, Misty didn't recognize him and it scared her.

Were those tears or raindrops rolling down her cheek?

She reached up to angrily brush them away as the rain came down upon her head, firm but soft.

"I was so scared," Ash said suddenly, his voice small and low.

"What?" Misty said, blinking at him with surprise. His hands came up to rub his face tiredly.

"I was so freaking scared," he repeated, the pounding of rain all around them. It was suddenly very odd how they were here after nearly five years of silence, seperated by love, brought together by crime, and here they were, in front of the HQ owned by the suddenly most feared corperation in all the nation for the time being.

"Until then, I had wanted nothing but to be the best of the best," he continued, shoving his hands in his rain-darkened jeans and raising his face to the rain like a flower to the sun. The drops plastered his dark hair to his face, making it glisten, and she watched as he closed his eyes painfully. "I was thirteen, almost fourteen, not honestly into girls, but not totally uninterested." His nose wrinkled, sending a bead of rain which had been so carefully poised upon it to trickle over his lips.

"I felt...something..." He stopped, his eyes opening, and he continued to stare pensively into the sky. "When you said you...you...loved me," he choked. "I did. I felt something. It was odd, wonderful, but scary. It was...a feeling I had experienced before but never so strongly and damn, Misty, I was so scared. How would things turn out if I responded this way? That way? My experience with such a feeling was nonexistant and I didn't know what to say." His head came down, bangs splayed from his forehead, and his eyes immediately turned from her, a hand coming up to massage his neck.

"So I said the only thing I thought safe. I was terrified of failing you, disappointing you, so I told you I didn't love you, hoping I could take my answer. No, it couldn't have been the same, Misty, because I think I did love you and I couldn't tell you. You being around...it was...so painful...I...couldn't take it..." He stopped and licked his lips, his eyes rimmed with red.

Truth be told, Misty had no idea what to say to this. It seemed he had just poured his heart out to her and she was thuroughly shocked. Falling to her knees, she stared at him, eyes pain-filled and sorrowful, eyebrows knitted together with confusion.

"That fight was terrible," she said suddenly,  a small smile coming to her lips.

"Yeah," he agreed but there was no mirroring smile, only a deep frown. There was another period of thoughful silence, the sound of rain lulling and pounding around them, and the air smelt of damp earth.

"What now?" she asked, looking at the ground. She didn't hear him approach her as she looked up, his sneakers were right before her, his soggy, dirt-covered sneakers and she looked up. Raindrops clouded her vision but she could see him, face shadowed and tan, eyes white in the grayness surrounding him and  lips smiling slightly, hands still jammed in his pockets.

"It might be too late," he said softly.

"What are you saying?" she asked slowly, her eyebrows knitting together once more in confusion. Gradually, he lowered himself before he knelt before her, one knee bent beneath him and one up and propping his arm.

"It might be too late," he repeated, his eyes searching her face. A shaking hand wandered up the side of her body to touch her rain-soaked cheek. "To tell you that I love you."

"Only four years," she whispered lightly, slid her hand over his, and pressed her lips to his.

*******

A dark figure stood, pressed tightly against the trunk of a tree, while a pair of eyes triumphantly surveryed the scene before it.

"Go get Brock and Richie, tell them to stop running around," the person whispered, lips curling into a smile. "Tell them I've found her and the time to act is now."

Gawd I know this took a VERY, VERY, VERY, VERY long time to finally post  but I have a vast variety ::coughTWOcough:: of reasons of why this is so late. If you care, read on (note there is no second choice. Hrm.) Because of that nifty new way of logging in, I am no longer capable of accessing my account because I can't log in (everyone thank the marvy Amaya for posting this by reading her story. Now. Only kidding! (Partially, anyway)... Oh, oh, and thank Miroku-Girl for sending me the ninth chapter ASAP so I would @ least have a small idea as to what I was typing!!!) and this chappie had been completed and EVERYTHING only to become tragical food for my computer (Dramaspeak Trans: The computer ate it).

Grr.

All right then, you've gotten your chappie and your explanation, now go and review while I work on recipricate equations...math...argh...

** Kasagi Onaso **

~*~*`` AAMRN FOREVER ``*~*~

Oh, and the next chappie WILL BE THE LAST, I THINK. BE PREPARED.