Disclaimer – I don't own Pokemon, I don't own anything.
Firstly, I want to thank you all for the excellent response. I wasn't sure how well this story would fare considering that the Westlife thing but it seems to have managed all the same.
Now as for me, myself and i – well for starters your one to talk (me should have a capital and so should I) and secondly I fixed the summary. I hope you're happy with it but I also feel that it's rather rude to criticise such a thing, in a summary you are given a limited amount of space to get in as much information as possible and hook readers into a story. The reason I had 'r' and '&' was to fit more in, it was not laziness, and I put a 'grammatically correct' summary in the beginning of chapter one which you obviously must not have read. Perhaps you should think about these things a bit more before criticizing the grammar of a summary or at least consider your own a bit more while reviewing. Even my five-year-old cousin knows to make I a capital.
And now that I'm done bitching, a must for every story, enjoy!
Pretend to be Nice – Some Kind of Disguise
A few days later, a familiar trio of friends and their Pokemon companions walked through the beautiful lush forest just beyond the town of Sienna.
Ash, as usual walked ahead leading the way and Brock and Misty behind him following their fearless leader.
It seemed the only thing different today might be the stony look across Ash's usual cheery face and the look of pain that flashed through his eyes every now and then when he heard her laugh as if someone had just slapped him in the face.
Or maybe it was the way that Misty and Brock walked together, Misty laughing falsely every now and then at one of his corny jokes or pick up lines and pretending like she wouldn't rather be talking to Ash right now.
It seemed everyone had been in a rather grey mood since Misty had begun to set the foundations to pull off Jesse's little task.
Everyone except Brock, of course.
Mr. No Eyes seemed to be rather ecstatic to say the least. He had always considered Misty to be off limits because of Ash and the whole mutual love thing they had going on. He was genuinely flattered and couldn't help but develop the tiniest little crush on the tempestuous redhead.
He couldn't be happier. Finally someone had noticed him, and wanted him rather than Ash, it was something he had never expected to happen, especially when this someone was the one and only Misty Waterflower, but it wasn't like he was complaining.
Misty on the other had was simply wearing a mask of happiness, one that covered up her own inner turmoil of emotions as she simply flirted with Brock but wished it were Ash. She laughed at the things Brock would say even though half the time she would rather slap him in the face. She lightly tapped him on the shoulder and pretended to be slightly amused when he went too far even though she would rather give him a black eyes, kick him where it would really hurt and yell obscurities at him.
She giggled and flicked her hair and battered her eyelashes like some retarded twit as she resisted the urge to gag or tear the eyes out of the person she was pretending to be.
These last few days she hadn't even been able to look at her own reflection in the mirror. She was just too disgusted with herself to look at the person she had become for a few measly tickets.
I guess what worried her most was whether she'd be able to go back to how it used to be once it was all over. She was afraid that if she looked into a mirror she wouldn't recognize the person looking back at her.
Ash certainly didn't.
Ash was the one most overshadowed by the dark cloud that was absorbing himself and Misty. He didn't hide the fact that he was in an awful mood and probably wouldn't have been able to even if he wanted to.
He had always been the sort to wear his heart on his sleeve and it was obvious right now that it was breaking in two.
All along he had thought that maybe he had at least the tiniest chance with her but now he knew the truth.
She didn't want him. She could never want him. What would someone like Misty want with someone like him anyway? He was 6 months younger than her. All girls like Misty wanted these days was someone mature, someone older, someone who could deal with responsibilities.
Someone like Brock.
She wouldn't want some Pokemon obsessed twerp like him. He wasn't responsible or mature or romantic or smart or any of the things Brock was. He was just himself and that wasn't enough for her, she deserved better.
He guessed all along that had been what she wanted: the older, wiser man somewhere in this world who would whisk her away with romantic words. She wanted Brock.
He'd always known that someday Misty would find the man of her dreams and he would be left alone, but why did it have to be so soon? Why did it have to be Brock?
He was such a player. He would break her heart. He was his best friend.
Ash could probably think of a million different reasons why he wished it wasn't Brock.
Brock wasn't good enough. Brock wasn't this; Brock wasn't that, when really there was only one that really mattered.
'It should've been me,' Ash thought to himself sadly as a tear fell from his pained dark amber eyes. He wiped it away quickly before anybody else got the chance to see it and tried his hardest to keep looking straight ahead.
It was all he could think of as he caught glimpses of his two best friends from the corner of his eye pretending he wasn't watching them, pretending that he didn't care.
But how could he not care?
He was in love with her for god's sakes and this whole thing was simply killing him to see her with someone else. The fact that this someone else just happened to be one of his oldest and most trusted friends just made it worse.
Pikachu looked on at the group of humans her own eyes reflecting her master's pain.
She had never really understood humans all that well, they were always so complicated especially with all the games they would play, but it was the emotions that threw her off so much. She would spend long nights just trying to make sense of all these sensations that they held so sentimentally.
First there was the whole friendship thing. That had been a hard concept to grasp but eventually it did click.
Having friends was like having a family or pack, she supposed. Everybody looked out for each other and they all cared for each other whether they showed it or not. Pikachu had always seen it that in their pack Ash was the alpha male and Misty was his queen.
But friendship wasn't even the worst of it. There was greed and lust, and jealousy and pride, and thousands of other emotions that these humans barely even had words for that tore at their souls like poisoned arrows.
It almost seemed like a waste. The human's put so much value on these primitive emotions while she and her kind would suffice with only the basics of anger and happiness, she didn't see the point.
But that was until he learnt about love.
Misty had been the first one to tell her about love. She held it at a higher esteem than she had seen any human hold anything. She saw it like a precious gift given to an selected few that made all their other petty emotions look like trivial words.
She acted like it was the one thing that kept everything going. As if without love the grass wouldn't grow, and the birds wouldn't sing and the world would simply stop turning on its axis. Perhaps it would, but she hoped that her friends would never find out.
But it still didn't make sense. No matter what, Misty would never give her an exact definition of love. She would tell her about how it made the sun shine brighter, or her heart beat faster and many other things that made very little sense, but always she would avoid the direct question by telling her it was too hard to put into words. That it simply was.
Pikachu didn't like words either.
The humans had so many different words and sounds; she wasn't sure how they would be able to get by with just repeating their own names in set patterns. She couldn't see how a species that had that many different words simply to describe a tree could have so many things left to explain, left unsaid, that they simply couldn't find the words for.
So Pikachu went to Ash. Ash had always been good at explaining things on terms that she could understand despite his inarticulateness at times. He was the one who had come up with the idea of a pack in a first place.
"Typical girl," Ash had chuckled at her naïve curiosity as he stole a glance in Misty's direction when he was sure that no one was looking. "Always on about romance," he added in a teasing tone. "I suppose that's what I get for letting you hang around Misty so often."
Pikachu's ears had peaked at the way he had said Misty's names, almost in the same whimsical tone Misty used to describe love. She was surprised she had never noticed it before, the sort of reverence you could say that filled his voice whenever she was brought up.
"So what's Myst been telling you?" Ash had then asked his tone suddenly becoming oddly hopeful.
Pikachu then went on to repeat everything Misty had told her as best she could. It was hard for her to explain it with her lack of understanding but just saying the things a loud allowed things to become clearer in her own mind.
Ash chuckled once he had taken it all in shaking his head.
"She's got it all wrong Pik," he replied warmly petting his prized Pokemon's head. "Love isn't what makes the world go round, it's what makes the ride worthwhile."
Pikachu had further questioned him just like she had Misty looking for the answers, which would explain the concept that his two favourite humans spoke of so fondly.
Ash thought about it for a second before answering as best he could.
"It's like when I was little and my mom used to keep her light on at night, even though it would give her headaches when she tried to sleep so that I could find her room if I had a bad dream," he explained as he thought dotingly of his child hood. "Or how my dad would eat these disgusting cinnamon cookies he simply despised every Christmas morning before I'd wake so that I'd know Santa Clause had been."
Pikachu looked thoughtfully at her master as she thought about these examples of love and began to make sense of things, but Ash wasn't finished.
"It's like waking up in the middle of the night," Ash continued his tone once again becoming whimsical, "and looking over to see her face. And no matter what, you don't want to go back to sleep even though your eye lids are heavy and you can barely stay conscious because you know that your dreams will never be half as good as your reality as long as it's spent with her."
Ash shook his head as he was suddenly knocked out of his semi-consciousness. "Being in love is like finding something worth dying for and knowing that it's the one thing that makes your life with living," he told Pikachu. "It's having something that means so much to you that it's almost scary, so much that you would sacrifice your own life so that it would always be safe and yet somehow finding it to be the most amazing feeling in the world."
And it was at that point that Pikachu realized it. Ash was in love with Misty and probably had been for some time.
She wondered why she had never seen it before that point, but I suppose she had never really understood love until then. She'd always thought it just to be another of the silly emotions, but as Ash's words sunk in she realized it was so much more than that.
And the more she learnt about love the more she could see it in the world that surrounded.
It turned out there were two sorts of love in the human world. There was the sort of love like that Ash shared for his mother and all his Pokemon. And then there was the sort of love that he held for Misty. The sort that made mountains crumble and birds sing.
If seemed that if Misty was right about love - if love truly was what made the world go round - then Ash's world had just stopped.
Pikachu turned her eyes on Misty trying her best to glare at the other human.
It just wasn't fair. Couldn't she see what she was doing to Ash? Didn't she know what he was going through? Didn't she care that he was in love with her?
Perhaps she didn't know at all.
Maybe that was why she was doing this.
Pikachu shook her head in disgust.
She sighed. No matter what she couldn't quite seem to let herself be angry at Misty. There was just something in the water trainers eyes that made her wonder, that made her glare soften slightly with a sort of admiring pity, as if her heart knew something her mind was still trying to comprehend.
Perhaps that was a form of love, being able to see past the flaws of those close to you, to know that the person staring back at you isn't perfect, and yet to accept them for whom they were despite that.
Maybe that was what love was for Pokemon, being able to love their master and trust them completely even though they weren't the best, or the brightest, or the most handsome but because they were theirs.
Or maybe it was something completely different.
They say love is blind, but friendship closes it's eyes so for now Pikachu would look elsewhere.
~ to be continued ~
Ok, so what did you all think of that chapter? Loved it? Hated it? Just glad that I didn't mention Westlife in there?
Tell me what you think and I'll try to get the next chapter up ASAP, or near enough.