Blue or white phlox? Choose your side.
Ash wasn't really comfortable sitting cross-legged, his tailflame curled against his belly to make sure it didn't touch either the groundcloth or the velum that protected them.
"Well, I never thought you'd follow her for that."
"Zar?"
Edivo hadn't heard him, too busy rummaging through his knickknacks.
"Chari?" he started again, louder.
"Your girlfriend. Why didn't you tell me at Birch's that you were serious about her? I would have understood better why you were so hesitant."
The false pokemon stammered, not sure if he understood, but the annoyed face of his lifelong friend finally allowed him to guess what he was talking about.
*"I... well... it's not... not quite..." he stammered.
"Not quite?" a stunned Pikachu repeated. "What do you mean, not quite?"
Well, part of the list was that she wanted to set him up with a charizard, so his "not quite" was perfectly valid, and more importantly:
"The question won't come up until I get my body back," he decided. "And I have a feeling it's going to stay that way."
"Maybe not for as long as you think," Pikachu replied.
He had just jumped onto Edivo's shoulder and pointed with his tail at one of the dusty drawers.
"Yeah, that's where we should have started. Ash, will you give us a hand?"
"Char?"
"We still have time to set up the equipment before sundown and... I don't want to be too optimistic considering how little data we had, but I'm hopeful that you'll be yourself again by tonight."
Ash's eyes widened. The news he'd hoped for more than anything else, which should have delighted him a thousand times over, only sent a shiver of fear down his spine. Tonight he would get his body back, tonight the pokeball would break, tonight his journey with Serena...
"Ash?"
"I'm fine! I mean, it's... It's great, really."
He tried to convince himself of this as he carried the heavy plates filled with electronic circuits and measuring devices into the old theater. Pikachu smiled at him and said a few words of encouragement, no doubt taking the slight vibration of the scales as a sign of excitement or impatience. A belief Ash had no immediate interest in correcting.
You don't stoop to lying, you just omit.
What if he was more than just a human? What if, in becoming a pokemon, her pokemon, he'd forgotten who Ash was? And if he remembered, if he realized that deep down, everything he'd wanted to do for her was just fake feelings for a fake pokemon.
The panels in the bleachers lit up one by one, accompanied by the roar of electric cables. Ash at center stage, Edivo on the podium, and Pikachu on camera in the orchestra pit. The wall that once enclosed the semicircle had almost completely collapsed, leaving an unobstructed view of the sea and the sun, its golden hues fading to crimson.
Edivo slipped on his gloves and unfolded the silk handkerchief while Ash and Pikachu held their breath, continuing their apnea, as the man lifted the meteorite shard between his two fingers, moving it slowly until the stone reflected the rays of the twilight.
The burn on his face, the discomfort in his throat, the joy that suddenly appeared as he said in a hoarse voice:
"Chaaaa horch. Chaaa Zorrrck."
Where was Serena? He was happy. I didn't know. He was still happy. I didn't know and it didn't matter. Ash was happy. Was she okay? Was she at least okay? Of course, of course, since he trusted her, since he...
"NO!"
Ash panted, his scales still trembling, his wings still heavy on his back, and the sun disappearing below the horizon for good.
"Oh..." Edivo gasped. He pulled up his glasses, his blurred vision focused on the glittering dust that smeared the tips of his gloves. "I'm dead." The breeze scattered what little he had left between his fingers. "I'm so dead," he collapsed.
Ash wasn't sure what made him feel more guilty: the professor's flushed complexion or the desperate look on his pokemon's face.
"Pi... Pika?" the mouse asked.
"Many things. The size or purity of the fragment, the light, or a mixture of both."
The shapeshifter swallowed. He understood their frustration, but the reason they'd brought all this equipment was to analyze what was going on, so he could correct it better.
"Chari," Ash swallowed. "Chariza, Chari?"
"'Mimes, please," the professor replied mechanically.
Ash winced. With Serena understanding him better and better, he was beginning to lose the habit.
"Chariza... Chari?"
"You don't understand," the professor snapped. "Analysis is all well and good, as long as you can test it afterwards."
"Char..."
"But of course! As if all you had to do was bend down to find some," Edivo raged, throwing his gloves to the ground. "I went out of my way just to get this little piece and... Ah, how am I going to explain this to its owner?"
"Sorry," Ash muttered.
Pikachu had approached his former trainer and patted his knee in comfort.
"He's more upset with himself than with you," he reassured him. "Let him calm down."
"I'd like to help."
"That could be arranged," Pikachu chuckled. "How about a treasure hunt?"
Something the former trainer would have accepted without hesitation, if not for...
"Serena," the shapeshifter breathed.
"Huh?"
"I can't leave her."
"But..." Pikachu articulated painfully. "She seems to have regained her self-confidence, so you don't have to..."
"That's not the issue anymore!" yelled Ash. He whirled around, flicking his tail like a metronome. "There's this thing with Archie, only I don't know if there's really anything to it, but I can't go away thinking there's nothing to it either."
"When you say Archie, you mean..."
"The one from Team Aqua, the leader of Team Aqua! And he said he knew her, but Serena didn't, so in the end..." He grabbed his head as if to keep it from exploding. "I still don't know what to think, and... Pikachu?"
Ears perked up, eyes rebelled, it didn't take long for the mouse to scream:
"Why didn't you call me before?!"
Pikachu had grabbed the silk handkerchief and was wrapping up a bottle of ketchup he'd found who knows where.
"Wait! Wait a minute!"
"I'm coming with you," the pokemon ordered.
The shapeshifter froze. He wasn't against the mouse's help, but go and explain it to Serena without revealing everything about his true identity.
"You'll only complicate things!"
"They already are, aren't they?" growled Pikachu. "Besides, I'm sick of you acting like... like..."
An explosion stopped him in his tracks. Something Pikachu had heard most of his life, and which had become even more annoying lately, along with the thick cloud of smoke and the "Oh no, not again!" Throw in thunderous laughter and a balloon shaped like Meowth, and the circle was complete, except for one detail: the contents of the net.
"The brat turned into pokemon!" Meowth realized.
"That's not that bad," said a pragmatic Jessie.
After all, it didn't matter if he'd had hair at some point in his life, or if he'd kept a zigzag of hair on his cheeks, a charizard was still a charizard, even if his scales turned a disgusting green. And they had no interest in being difficult when a certain mouse threatened them with an Electro Ball...
"Pikapi, chupi!"
"Ah no!" snorted Edivo. "I've already broken the meteorite, I'm not going to break my back chasing after them."
If he had any hair left, it would have stood on end from the waves of electricity invading the atmosphere.
"PiKA!"
"Okay, okay, let's go," grumbled the researcher, who had no idea he was about to face a wrath far more terrifying than the pokemon's.
In fact, Serena had searched the city from top to bottom, and she was about to become the second disaster to strike Atellanes. Whose fault was that? It was to the professor's credit that he took care of Charizard's health, except that it shouldn't have taken a whole afternoon! Unless, of course, it was something more serious and he'd had to make an emergency call to the Pokemon Center, which had flown him back by helicopter, sending the reptile straight to his grave with motion sickness... Why didn't she follow them?
"I think you're going too far," the boy said.
Brendan and his stupid infirmary, where she had absolutely no idea where it was! And first of all, what kind of civilized person would forget to tell a trainer where he was taking his pokemon? It seemed as if Edivo had done it on purpose, except that she couldn't see how he could possibly benefit from it, unless he was... The cobblestones shook beneath her feet.
"An earthquake?" the boy swallowed.
Not with the column of smoke she could make out in the distance. Perhaps dear Edivo had finally decided to give her a clue where to go, but something told her that the man of science was not motivated by such noble intentions.
"What the hell are they doing?" hissed Brendan. "Hey! Serena, wait a minute, maybe it wasn't..."
Of course it was them! And she couldn't understand how the trainer could doubt that, it was as if he was doing everything to prevent her from joining her pokemon.
"Ouch!"
The slab hadn't been gentle, and she was forced to hop around for a good ten seconds. Not much, you might say, but when your nerves were on edge, it was already too much. Serena pitied herself for not understanding the boy's plan sooner. The so-called "friend-to-friend" visit was really a date in disguise, which was why he'd been so insistent that Charizard stay away. And no matter how much he assured her that it was just a joke, Serena would really come to believe that Brendan was far more serious about "becoming her boyfriend" than he claimed.
And then people were surprised that she preferred Ash? At least when he asked her out, she could be sure he had no ulterior motives, let alone the idea that it might be a date. Well, Serena was quiet about it, maybe a little too quiet. But at least there were no nasty surprises, unlike with...
"Charizard?!"
The forum was a vast, open space, its boundaries marked by small lights on the ground, giving it the appearance of a landing strip. Except that the balloon wasn't ready to land, especially with the loot it was carrying attached to its basket. And Edivo, at the other end of the square, making grand gestures with his arms, as if talking to the pillars, unless it was a code to direct Charizard's abduction.
What...?
For a moment, she thought she'd spotted a bit of yellow fur at the top of one of the pillars, but she barely had time to blink before it was gone. She shook her head, this was no time to be distracted by a reflection.
"Braixen! Fire Blast!"
But Team Rocket managed to counter the attack, reminding Serena that they weren't as weak as one might think, especially when Pikachu and Ash weren't around.
"Char!"
Her pokemon's alertness allowed her to dodge a Shadow Ball just in time, then the ones that followed, and... it was starting to get critical!
"Serena! Over here!" the professor called from one of the temples adjacent to the forum.
She hesitated for half a second, just long enough to feel the breath of a Psybeam near her ear, before deciding to join him.
"You!" she shouted, despite what little breath she had left. "How do you explain this?" she pointed to the hot air balloon that was moving away.
"They find a better network provider?"
"No, not that. THAT!"
"Oh... I guess they don't have much to do all day."
"And you?"
"What about me?"
"I don't know: luring away a trainer's pokemon and handing it over to bandits is a good thing to do when you're bored, isn't it?"
Edivo's eyes widened as Serena pulled a pokeball from her pocket, looking for the best opportunity to attack.
"You don't think I'm one of them, do you?"
"Then what took you so long?! You just had to check on him and..."
He pulled her back, narrowly avoiding the girl's eye socket.
"It's complicated," he grumbled.
"For me too," she sarcastically added, "but that doesn't mean I'm going to trap him in my nets."
"So you say," the old man muttered.
Serena raised an eyebrow as Edivo dared to stick out his nose.
"Maybe if you promise him a caress or two, or even a cuddle, he'll manage to get out of their trap on his own."
She tilted her head to one side, not understanding what the old man meant until he added:
"Isn't that how you motivated him to evolve?"
"No!" she choked out.
Had they all given each other the word or what? They might have been close, but that didn't mean that he and she were... Loving and loving were two very different things, and she wished they'd stop making fun of her for it!
"Anyway," she shook her head. "Pancham, come and help us!"
The pokemon conjured up bluish rocks from the ground, covering Braixen and creating a stairway straight toward Meowth's giant head.
"Fire Blast!"
With one perfect motion, the vixen destroyed the bottom of the basket, leaving the bandits with a gaping hole in their craft and the shapeshifter free to fly away, now that the top of the net was wide open and no longer pitching like a boat in the middle of a storm.
"Braix..." the fox growled back on the ground.
She held her arm as if she'd been badly injured and turned sideways to make sure her trainer didn't notice.
"Pan?" her friend worried.
"Xain," she breathed, releasing her limb as if nothing had happened.
And anyway, her trainer probably wouldn't notice much, too busy attacking an Ash that had just landed with :
"Are you okay? You're not hurt?" she inspected him from every angle.
Brendan had finally joined them and was struggling to catch his breath, amazed that the young girl, unlike him, still seemed to have the energy to run a marathon.
"Serena?" he gasped. "Can you tell me what's going on... and who these people are?" he pointed at the unfortunates panicking in what was left of their hot air balloon.
"A bunch of bandits who spend their time stealing other people's pokemon," she replied. "I've lost count of how many times they've attacked us to capture..." She stopped dead in her tracks, her mouth frozen, and checked the balloon once more before stammering: "Team Rocket?"
Wait a minute! What were they doing here? What she meant was that the trio was out to get Pikachu, except the last time she checked, he was on an island paradise with his trainer, so these three should be there too!
"You..." she moistened her lips. "You're not in Alola?"
"Alola?" James didn't understand.
"Alola! Chasing Ash and Pikachu!"
"Ash?" Brendan muttered.
The trio exchanged glances, but it was the woman who finally decided to answer:
"The brat didn't tell you he was..."
Jessie looked up, alarmed by the sound of a balloon deflating. The infamous balloon turned out to be Meowth's rapidly shrinking head, which, as you well know :
"Looks like Team Rocket's blasting off agaaaaaain!"
Serena was stunned as the dragon proudly swooped down on her (relief, actually, but she was too angry to notice).
"What were you thinking?"
"Char?"
"Why did you attack them?!"
"Maybe because they started it," the boy remarked.
Serena pressed her palms to her temples, knowing the trainer was right.
"But tell me," Brendan continued, "when you said they had to go after Ash, you were talking about..."
"My friend."
"Ash."
"Ash. Yes."
"Your friend's name is Ash."
"Uh... yes."
"Ketchum?"
A minute of silence. And if you wondered who she was most uncomfortable with, all you had to do was see the fire reptile frozen with the rest of the landscape.
"Do you know him?" she frowned.
"Sort of," he coughed loudly.
"Sort of?"
"Yes. I mean, to get ahead, it's good to look at the tactics used in the League, and I looked at Kalos', so..."
The young girl relaxed a bit.
"It's true that his fighting style attracts attention, it's quite unique," she smiled.
"Inimitable..." the boy agreed, looking at the reptile.
She looked back up at the sky where the bandits had disappeared and sighed:
"I don't understand what they're doing here. Usually when we see them, it's because Pikachu's not far away, and if there's Pikachu, then Ash must be there, except that... He's in Alola, and we're in Hoenn."
"Maybe they got bored, especially for a pikachu."
Ash grunted. Brendan would learn that his Pikachu was more than worth the effort to capture it.
"Not them, believe me."
She bit her lip, her anxiety clear on her features as the wingulls screamed louder and louder, giving the shapeshifter a raging headache. He couldn't just ignore his trainer's fears. Imagine if she started having trouble sleeping again, or worse, if it distracted her during her contests.
"Gull!"
His eyes suddenly widened. But of course! There was definitely a way for him to tell her that everything was fine without compromising himself.
"Char," he smiled.
All we had to do now was wait quietly for Serena to fall asleep before he could act.
Paper: check. Pencil: check. Quiet spot in the bleachers of the small theater: check. Candle (not too hard to find, that one): check! Now all he needed was his best handwriting.
For the latter, rough sketches proved inconclusive. But with a little perseverance, especially when it came to handling the pen with only three fingers, Ash finally achieved a more than decent result. In fact, he could boast that he had never written so legibly, not even when he was human.
All that remained was to write the contents of the letter. Nothing too complicated: just imagine a phone call, then transcribe it and... I'll start with hello, hi or hey? 'Hello' sounded a bit cold and 'Hey' sounded too relaxed. So was 'Hi' the best option? But the word sounded wrong as soon as it was written, so Ash had to cross it out with two parallel bars. Dear Serena. It wasn't any better. Miss you? Worse and worse!
Ash crumpled the paper in annoyance. To hell with polite formulas, he'd start with 'Serena' with a simple comma. Nice, simple, and warmth radiated through his scales as he wrote it. Uh... Maybe it was too much when the paper was burning at the end of his claws.
Well, never mind the introduction, he'd come back to that later (or never), what interested the girl anyway was what he was doing.
I've met a lot of new pokemons, and I can't wait to introduce them to you.
Hey, not bad. It was typical Ash, but he was evasive enough not to give away the fact that he didn't know any of Alola's monsters. After that, he couldn't stop there: he also had to talk about all the trainers he had fought (too many to mention - so he didn't mention any of them), his new friends whose names he didn't mention even once, and all the tasty dishes he had tried (again, we don't want to get jealous - so we won't go into detail).
The former human looked at the letter when it was finished, proud to have reproduced Ash's thoughts to perfection... Which was to be expected. He put the page back on his lap and read it again, noticing that he never once mentioned Serena or even asked her how she was. His adventures, his discoveries that left no room for an answer. Hey, it was well known that everything always went perfectly on the girl's side, not as if she could be attacked by the leader of Team Aqua or shocked by an artificial intelligence that had lost a bolt or two.
This way you can be sure she won't give you any reason to come back and see her... He threw the sheet of paper away with a gesture of disgust. This kind of letter, which would quickly put an end to the correspondence, was exactly what he needed, but he wanted to try to find something more... warm? Without necessarily reaching the temperature of a charizard, he could at least reach that of a small charmander. This time, however, the page remained blank, except for the blackened edges of an incipient burn.
"Char?"
A spotlight had just come on behind him. Ash hurried to hide the letter in his fist, squinting as the caped trainer descended the stairs of the small theater. However, he stopped two rows in front of the dragon and spoke in a loud voice as if the audience surrounded him:
"And in the role of Ash the Charizard, we have, attention, drum roll... Ash!"
He jumped up the last few steps and sat down next to the reptile, hands clasped between his knees.
"In case you hadn't noticed, you're..."
"Char."
"Better and better," Brendan exhaled. "So what went through your flaming brain to tell you that you'd gain something by not telling her? Besides getting to watch her undress..."
"Zar," he reminded him.
"But you can have everything, absolutely everything! You're the one she's looking for, you're the one she wants to see again, and yet you insist on hiding who you really are, as if you never stood a chance in your true form."
"And if it was?" The still virgin letter burned, leaving only a pile of ashes in his fist. "I began to feel new things with her. I mean, it's still a little confusing, and I'm not quite sure what to make of it, but..." He paused, his small smile fading as he watched the scene with a kind of self-denial. "What if it wasn't me, what if all these new things... I became a pokemon, it lit up the moment I became a pokemon, and she became my trainer. My trainer, you hear? It's at times like this that I tell myself that the pokeball is incredible."
"I don't understand much of your gibberish," Brendan sighed boredly.
"What would I do if it suddenly went out? What if Ash didn't care about cooking or dancing or sewing? What if I realized that this was never what I wanted?"
"The truth is, I couldn't bear to hear you make excuses."
"Char..."
Brendan had crossed the stage to climb the low wall, balancing as he gazed into the void.
"It pisses me off. It pisses me off so much! But it's you, whether you like it or not, you're the guy who made her fail her competitions, who spent whole days preparing poison..."
"Cooking."
"It's the same. You see, you keep screwing up, and you can't even see the huge mistake you're making by not telling her. But you look at her, you see Serena, you try to understand things through her, and it's a failure. Of course it's a failure because it's complicated and exhausting and it would be easier if you could just say one sentence and get it all out of the way: 'I'm Ash', yeah, that sounds good, the perfect magic phrase, except... in truth it's dirt, bloody dirt." His body swayed slightly before stabilizing. Slowly he turned to the dragon. "I'm stuck here, unable to move or change. I'm stuck here while you convince yourself that what you are cannot become." Brendan walked back up the theater steps, not to sit next to the dragon again. "Now it's up to you. But if I may give you some advice, don't take too long."
With the projector off and his flame his only companion, Ash clutched another sheet of white paper between his claws. 'How are you?' he wrote the first words. It was like a trance, a moment of letting go where his thoughts flowed through his quill and were inked on the white paper. He had watched every one of her contests as if he had been there, and he would continue to cheer her on all the way to the Grand Festival. Most of all, even though he knew she was strong, she shouldn't hesitate to tell him when things got tough, because that's what he was there for. Really there, he thought as he hesitated to attach the last letters. I miss you, he finished with a sigh.
He blinked, as if waking from a long dream, to discover with surprise the traces someone else had left behind. The pokeball, Ash. Maybe, just maybe. He clutched the letter to his chest, as if the ink would seep through the scales and stain his heart. He curled up on it so tightly that the flame at the end of his tail brushed the edges of the paper and... Everything had to be redone. You've got to be kidding me, Ash complained. He tried to remember what he'd written a second earlier, but to no avail. The sentences had vanished from his mind, irretrievably, the only thing that could have held them was the letter, now reduced to dust.
Exhausted, he produced his third draft, bland and insipid, but at least it had the merit of being more cautious than the one he'd been guided by - he couldn't think of another word for it - a stroke of madness. All he had to do was find a Wingfull's post office and the letter would be delivered in a few days. That was their credo and the reason why this system survived in spite of the telephone: "No matter where you go, Wingfull's Post will find you". It was a bit of an exaggerated slogan, given the number of misses (many people still wondered how these little postmen managed to find their addressees with only the dresser number to go by), but they had the advantage of not asking for the starting address. On the other hand, it was customary to put a stamp of the region you were in...
So Edivo was woken up in the right way - twice. At the same time, when you jump out of bed and say: "Sunshine, I didn't think you'd betray her so quickly", you can expect nothing better than a big bump on the head.
"What about this one?"
"Rizard," the reptile refused.
The old man didn't understand the fake pokemon's request, and he didn't want to know anyway, not at three in the morning. He rubbed his red eyes. Why did the former human have to have a philatelic crisis in the middle of the night? And then he could help him a little instead of babbling on with the electric mouse!
"You still don't want me to come?"
Pikachu and Serena had always gotten along well; in fact, she was the only one of their traveling companions he'd never electrocuted. And Ash understood perfectly that he wanted to take care of her, too, but...
"She'll understand as soon as she sees you."
The mouse lowered his ears, reluctant to confess the other thought that had been on his mind, but whose answer he had begun to dread since seeing his trainer again.
"Will you come back?"
Ash swallowed, a brief second of doubt not lost on the electric pokemon.
"O-Of course!" exclaimed the fake pokemon. "I want... I still want to be a Pokémon Master with you as my partner, and I promise we'll continue our adventure, but... just... wait a little longer."
"I'm warning you, whether you like it or not, I'm going to bed," the professor grumbled.
Between his fingers he held a stamp with some kind of Raichu, who seemed to be surfing with his tail as a board. The tall coconut palms and the beach behind them gave Ash hope that he'd finally found what he needed.
"Chari?"
"I think it's from my trip to Alola. What... It's okay? Ah... Finally! Yeah, here, I'll give it to you, it'll give me a vacation."
With barely a word of thanks to the scientist, Ash left the tent, certain that he'd find a Wingull's hut if he flew over the area a bit. He had no choice anyway: unless he could hide the letter in his mouth, he'd have to mail it this very night.
"Wait for me..." Pikachu croaked as he watched his friend fly away.
It was the last time they would see each other before a long separation, and yet his trainer could think of nothing but his journey with the girl. Pikachu gritted his teeth before spitting into the sky where his friend had disappeared:
"See you again, Ash."
Author notes : Come on, new chapter. I think there are things I would have liked to add or elaborate on, but I have to publish at the end - -'.
I have to admit that I have another idea for a fic at the moment, but I don't want to spread myself too thin, but I wanted to talk about it a bit: the story would take place at the time of JN 105, except that Ash would attend the performance only to discover... that Serena has completely lost confidence in herself and is being mocked by the audience (including Goh, who wouldn't understand why she is picking on her - yes, I don't like Goh, but that's my taste). This would be followed by Ash deciding to stop the WPM to help Serena, which would lead to even more incomprehension from Goh and remorse from Serena. So that's kind of the pitch I have in my head, and the beginning and the end are pretty clear, but I don't have the twists and turns in the middle... Anyway, it was just a concept I wanted to share to blow off steam, but I don't think it'll turn into anything concrete x).