Pairing: Ash/Misty
Genre: Hurt/Comfort/Drama
Rating: T (language, violence, coarse language)
Summary: In which Misty gets into a severe accident, and Ash seeks to turn back time. Can he save her? story-board
Requested by: Mrs. Nose
XOXs
This couldn't have been happening.
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.
"What's your relationship to the patient?"
"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."
Delia paused for a very long moment; "A fiance, I think? And three sisters."
The brown eyes doctor pointed to Ash, and cocked his eyebrows. The doctor tossed a thin finger his direction, and a careless shrug.
"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!" Ash bellowed loudly.
His voice was a sharp his 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 took down more notes.
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 sleep. 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, 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."
Author's Note
This was a request from a very patient Mrs. Nose! :D
I'm actually turning this into a short story, if anyone is interested (you might not be) but I had more to tell about this one (and it'll be relatively short, so...). If you are interested, look for "Until the Day" on my profile in just about a week!
Working on other requests as well, by rotation the next one is for Julie Togepi, but I'm seeing what you guys are leaving! Thanks for the reviews and lovely comments -heart-
NINT