Chapter Text
She was Louie’s age, her hair just as wild as her brother’s, but where he’d been hiding, Marianne was sitting out in the open, on a boulder. She kicked her legs back and forth and she sang, and smiled broadly when Ash stepped into her cavern. It only faltered when Louie followed him out.
“Y-you… what are you doing here?” she asked.
“Marianne!” he ran forward. “I’ve been looking for you for so long! I fell down into a lake, and I couldn’t get out! But Ash helped me! Are you okay? You’re not hurt, are you?”
She stared at him for a long time. “You… you came to find me? Really?”
“Of course!”
“But… but I thought…” She twisted her hands into her skirt. “I thought everyone forgot about me. I thought…”
“Of course no one forgot you,” Ash said as he moved forward, giving Noivern room to fly in as well. “I bet there’s a bunch of people out there really worried about both of you. Miss Maggie’s probably really upset right now.”
“Miss Maggie doesn’t care about me!” Marianne snapped. “No one does! No one but Louie!”
“That’s not true, Marianne!” Louie shot back, stomping his foot. “Is this because Miss Maggie yelled at you? She was just mad you didn’t do your homework!”
“That’s no reason to get angry! It’s just school!”
“School’s important!”
“Is not!”
“Is too!”
“Is not!”
“Guys!” Ash interjected loudly, holding up his hands. “How about we argue after we find Shelley and get out of here, okay?”
“Who’s Shelley?” Marianne asked irritably. “I bet you came looking for her, didn’t you? Not me.”
“He might’ve, but he didn’t know we were down here,” Louie said, sounding just as annoyed. “I came looking for you, and he helped me get unstuck. Don’t be mean, Ash is nice.”
“Says you.”
“Yeah, I do!”
“Guys!” Ash said again, before they could start. Pikachu jumped down to stand between them, arms out.
“Pi-ika-chu!”
Both kids folded their arms and looked away with matching huffs, and Ash let out a weak laugh. He knew he could be worse when someone really got on his nerves, but geez.
He walked forward and extended a hand to Marianne. “I might’ve come down here for someone else, but I’m still really glad I found you. Wanna get out of here?”
She peeked down at his hand, then up at his face. He could see the hint of tears in the darkness. “Get out? You mean… you’d take me home?”
“Sure,” he said quietly. “Let’s all go home together.”
She looked away for a moment, then closed her eyes and nodded. “I want to go home.”
The apple orchard was nice, in a spooky kind of way. The trees had grown close to each other, stretching out of the neat rows the other orchards had and almost blocking out the sun overhead. Ash lingered at the fence, caught between heading in and not taking Brock in with him.
In a lot of ways, he was exactly like the boy Brock knew. He was kind and friendly, honest, and perfectly comfortable talking about anything except the stuff that worried people. But he was different too. Calmer, maybe. Less focussed, certainly, but he didn’t have the hyperactive brightness that Brock associated with Ash. Giving up on a dream would do that to anyone, but it was still a sad thing to miss.
Pikachu was different too – it didn’t show off as much, and it had mostly been ignoring the conversation. Now, it was perched on the fence between them, allowing Brock to examine it for the first time since they’d appeared, so many hours ago.
It was thinner than before, he noticed, with nothing but muscle under its fur. He almost got on Ash’s case about it, but it was clear Pikachu was healthy, and its cheeks were still round and plump. Its fur still had that healthy sheen, and it cooed when Brock scratched under its jaw. “Still partners, huh?”
“Always,” Ash said, settling his weight back on one hip. “We take good care of each other, don’t we buddy?”
“Pika pikachu!”
“Do you travel with anyone else these days?” he asked, petting Pikachu’s tail. “Anyone human?”
“Mm… not at the moment,” he said. “I was last with Trevor – I don’t think you know him yet. He was tracking down Diancie so I went with him to say hi. The last person I travelled with properly was probably… hmm… Misty and I sailed around the Decolor Islands in her boat for about a year.”
He raised an eyebrow, smirking. “You and Misty, huh?”
Ash met his smirk with a falsely innocent smile, blinking wide eyes. “What about it, Brock?”
It was so heavy with hidden meaning that Brock had to grin and lean forward. So Ash had finally developed hormones – or at least rediscovered that people had relationships. “So… that date Shaymin interrupted was with…?”
“One thing has nothing to do with the other,” he replied.
“Uh huh. So who made the first move? I have a bet with Tracey I’d love to settle.”
“Well, I don’t mess with history if I can help it, so I’m not telling you anything,” he said, folding his arms. “You can wait. Besides, if I was gonna tell you anything about future relationships, I would’ve thought you’d be more interested in your own, Kidanova.”
“My – you mean I have some?” he asked, and hunched over Pikachu to lean into Ash’s personal space. “I have a girlfriend? I got married? Who was it? Please tell me it was a Joy! Or, wait, no! It was a Jenny, right? Which one? It was the one from Vermillion, right? I always knew she had a thing for me.”
Ash had the gall to look shocked that he’d asked. “You’re really asking me to spoil the surprise?”
“This is serious, Ash,” he snapped, pounding his palm on the fence. “What’s she like? How old is she? Give me a name, a location, a hairstyle, anything! I have to know!”
“You really don’t.”
“Are you kidding me with this? You come from the future to waste time and not tell me who I’m dating?”
“Did I ever say you were dating someone?” he asked, and then looked at Pikachu with wide eyes. “Did I say that?”
“Pikachu,” it replied, just as innocently, and they both smiled at him in mock-interest.
“Okay, what about exes?” he demanded. “I refuse to believe I got to the age you’re at now without a few girlfriends. How many? At least one of them was a Jenny, right?”
When he’d first met Ash, back in Kanto, he hadn’t been quite the all-loving hero he was these days – in fact, he’d considered quietly mocking people a personal hobby. Apparently being a nice guy was just a phase, because this older Ash gave him a grin that was all kinds of evil.
“Well, I dunno about Jennys, but there was Professor Ivy.”
It shot straight through Brock’s heart, and he crashed to the ground. Ash and Pikachu snickered triumphantly.
Between Noivern and just plain following the upward slopes, it wasn’t long before they started to see signs of an exit. The water was draining away, the algae not as bright. Louie and Marianne had gone quiet, each of them holding one of Ash’s hands.
Their hands worried Ash a little, because they were so cold. They didn’t seem sick or anything, but their fingers were like ice. It was kind of like the water, in that respect – the cave itself was filled with warm air, but the water was freezing.
This time, it was Pikachu to perk up at something Ash couldn’t hear, and Noivern seemed to agree with it.
“What is it? Something else down here?” Ash asked, peering down the way Pikachu was looking. “Is it Shelley?”
“Pi… pikachu pika!” Pikachu replied, and Noivern took off, heading down into a small cavern below their current walkway. Ash winced, but didn’t argue, just helped the kids down and followed after.
Less than five minutes later, he realised why, as he’d barely ducked around a corner when he found himself face-to-chest with a very powerful, very angry looking dragonite.
“Uh… hi?” he said, and it huffed steam in his face.
“Tini!”
Ash was nearly knocked into Dragonite as both Louie and Marianne rushed past him and latched onto its legs.
“Tini! We found you!”
“You came for us!”
“We were so scared!”
“It’s been so long!”
Dragonite grumbled back in welcome, while Ash stared at the whole scene. “This is Tini?”
“Yeah!” Louie said as he pulled back with a broad grin. “I knew it would come for us!”
But Ash wasn’t given time to be relieved – Pikachu’s ears were quivering against the side of his head, and it soon patted his cheek for quiet attention. He glanced at it, then followed its pointing paw to a small alcove behind Tini’s back.
“Stay here a second, Noivern,” Ash said quietly, and stepped around the reunited friends to peer inside.
Asleep on a small rock shelf was a small girl, even younger than Louie and Marianne, with long blonde pigtails. She looked a lot like the crying woman had. “Shelley?”
Tini growled, and Ash twisted back around to meet its glare. “Tini? Were you… taking care of Shelley?”
Its growl got a little deeper, and Ash frowned, hand instinctively moving toward his belt. Something about this felt… wrong.
“That’s so nice of you!” Louie said, recapturing everyone’s attention. “Like how Ash took care of me!”
“Tini?” Marianne asked, her voice soft and shaking. “Do you know the way out? Can we… can we go home now?”
Tini’s wings, which had been raised in warning, began to lower, and Ash moved his hand away from his pokeballs, down to Shelley instead.
“I don’t want to be here anymore,” Marianne whispered. “I want to go home.”
Louie nodded, and the twins pressed into Tini’s legs. “Let’s go home, Tini.”
“I heard it from a friend,” Ash said, leaning back against the fence as he stared into the orchard. “There’s a legend, from a hundred years ago, about two little kids who went missing in this area.”
“Two kids?” asked Brock. “I think I heard something today… about a dragonite that lives underground and steals children.”
“Uh huh. The official story is that there were two orphans that lived here, and they stole their caretaker’s dragonite and went on a pokemon journey,” he said. “But the truth is, the kids got lost in the caves here and the dragonite went looking for them. None of them came out.”
“Oh man,” he said, looking around at the caves. “The kids…”
“Yeah. And the dragonite’s still down there, still looking,” he said. “My friend said it won’t come out until the kids do.”
“But if it’s been a hundred years…” Brock said quietly, and Ash shrugged.
“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” He shifted his weight a little more heavily on the fence, kicking his legs out in front of him. “Worse, Tini—that’s the Dragonite’s nickname—knows the kids will hide from any grown-ups that try to find them. So it’s put up a barrier to stop them going in. But kids can pass the barrier. So they go in, get lost… and no one can go in to find them.”
Brock looked at the ground under their feet. “So… down there somewhere right now…?”
“Tini’s down there, looking,” he said. “Only even if I knew where the entrance was, I couldn’t get in because I’m too old. You might just make it, if you could find it.”
He raised his eyes back to Ash’s slight smile. “That’s what Ash is doing now, isn’t it? He went back in time to find the kids.”
“Forward, more like,” he said, lifting a hand to point at his own nose. “We swapped places.”
“How come?” he asked. “Why not just send him down there now?”
He closed his eyes and shrugged, turning back to the orchard. “I guess there was an opportunity for him to go down there in my time. Now, he’d be travelling with Clemont and Bonnie, right? No way Clemont would let Bonnie anywhere near a potentially cursed cave, so little me would have no reason to even be out here, let alone go underground.”
Brock hummed in his throat, then said, “I don’t know how he’d react to finding bodies.”
“Like I said, I don’t really remember this whole thing,” he said blandly. “But I would remember something like that.”
“So what’s he doing?”
“I dunno. It was years ago, and I barely remember last week,” he pointed out, then sighed. “I remember helping out some kids and meeting a dragonite that really needed a break. How and why is a little fuzzy.”
He chuckled, but even to his own ears it sounded bitter. Ash glanced at him again, so he tried to explain, “You haven’t changed a bit. You change people’s lives—save their lives—and it’s nothing. You –”
“It’s not nothing,” he interrupted, annoyance leaking through. “Someone’s life is never ‘nothing’. It’s just…”
He trailed off, and Pikachu piped up as if Brock could understand it. “Pi pika Pikapi pika,” it said. “Pika… pikachu pika pika.”
He made a noise like it had clarified something. “I might not remember faces, or names, but I’ve been doing this since before I can remember. Like Serena – have you met her yet?”
Brock nodded silently. He’d been kind of meaning to bring her up all afternoon.
“When we were little, she fell and scraped her leg, and I found her. Wrapped it up, and convinced her to get up and get going. I said something like ‘never give up until it’s over’. I didn’t even think anything of it back then, but to her it was a really big deal, and she never forgot it,” he said, turning his gaze back to the orchard. “I didn’t remember her name, what I did, or even her face. But I remembered the girl in the sunhat, who hadn’t wanted to be at camp. And I remembered her smile as she waved goodbye.”
He was quiet for a few seconds before speaking again. “People are important. Pokemon are important. To me, the ‘big’ things aren’t when I save the world or change someone’s perspective. They’re just things I do. But making a new friend? Earning someone’s trust? That matters. I remember that.”
Brock raised his eyebrows, watching Ash’s profile for a few seconds. It reminded him of what he’d been talking about with the original Ash, before all this started. How lonely it was, never thinking your friends would stick around longer than a gym challenge. It had to be so much worse for this older Ash, who didn’t even stay in a region that long.
“Are we still friends?”
Ash and Pikachu both turned to look at him again, surprised. “Huh?”
“In your time,” he said. “Do we talk on the phone sometimes? Do you ever visit, or do I come see you? When it’s not for business?”
Ash looked away again, and Pikachu’s ears drooped a little, even as it kept smiling. In the end, though, Ash just chuckled lightly, like it didn’t matter. “Of course we’re still friends, Brock!”
It wasn’t really the answer he’d been looking for. But it probably told him what he needed to know.
Ash hitched Shelley onto his back, while Tini carried the twins on its broad shoulders, and they followed Noivern upward and onward. It took time, but eventually the algae was replaced with dim light, and then the red wash of an oncoming sunset.
It was barely a gap in the rocks, only just big enough for Tini, so Ash returned Noivern, sent Pikachu ahead, and then headed out after it, carefully manoeuvring Shelley to make sure she wouldn’t hit her head. He set her down in the long grass, then came back, arms out and ready.
“Okay, Marianne, you first,” he said. “I’ll help you.”
She smiled—the first real smile she’d given him—and put her hands in his. He pulled her up and out, made sure she was safe, then turned back for Louie.
“Ready?”
“Ready!” he agreed, grabbing hold of his arm in a monkey grip.
Ash dragged him out too, grinned at the finally safe twins, then turned back for Tini. “Now it’s your turn!”
For a moment, Tini just looked at him, and for some reason, Ash found himself pausing too. In this moment, staring into Tini’s eyes, he suddenly realised just how… tired the dragonite looked. How pale and exhausted it seemed, its scales dull, wing membranes so frail. Without really thinking about it, Ash stepped forward again, extending his hand toward it.
“It’s okay now, Tini. We’re all safe,” he said softly. “You can come out of the cave.”
“Pika,” Pikachu added quietly, moving up beside his ankle. “Pika… chu?”
Tini growled quietly, but did extend its paw out, and Ash didn’t watch it shake, keeping his gaze on the tear-filled eyes. When the blunt, worn claws hit his palm, he carefully closed his fingers around them, and then gently pulled, guiding it forward. It stumbled, and its wings caught on the rocks, but in mere moments, Tini stood on the grass beside him, blinking in the dim light.
“Thank you for coming to find us!” Marianne said brightly.
“Thank you for bringing us home!” Louie agreed.
Ash turned back, and then flinched. Louie and Marianne were sparkling, and slowly fading from view like…
Something at his back, behind Tini, was fading too. Kind of like – kind of like a falling wall. He could only gape as the two children clasped hands and waved, slowly disappearing. Behind them, Shelley was starting to mumble and shift where she lay, waking up.
“Y-you’re welcome,” Ash said finally. “Take care of each other.”
“Pikachu,” Pikachu added, sounding just as stunned as Ash felt.
The kids both grinned and giggled… and then they were gone.
“Thanks for hanging out today, Brock,” Ash said, slinging an arm over his shoulder and dragging him into his side. “This was fun!”
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Fun.”
“Oh, cheer up,” he said, and shoved him away again, shoving his hands in his pockets and spinning on one heel to grin at him. “Future you is an amazing pokemon doctor! You even saved all of Oak Ranch from a plague once! I wouldn’t want you to come globetrotting with me when you’ve got so much more important stuff to do.”
“Pika pika!” Pikachu agreed, clenching its paws in determined fists. “Pika!”
Brock tried to smile, but it was hard, even when Ash laughed. “You and Misty talk on the phone all the time. And Dawn drops everything to visit you whenever someone gives her half a chance. And even if they didn’t, you’re not exactly lonely!”
“You are,” he shot back, but Ash’s smile only paused for a moment before hitching back up again.
“Nah! I’ve got Pikachu!” he said, and the pokemon chirped its agreement before bounding up his side to his shoulder. “And people travel with me all the time. Remember Misty and the boat?”
That was true. But it just all felt so… temporary. “Don’t you ever want to stop?” he asked. “You have to have been travelling for what… ten years? Fifteen? Don’t you ever get tired?”
“Yeah, and then we go back to Pallet for a few days. Believe me, living with my mother for a week is more than enough for me to get over that feeling,” he said, and then reached out to clap him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about me, Brock. Or little me. We like our life. Saying goodbye to people is always hard—saying goodbye to Clemont, Serena and Bonnie was… really hard, from what I remember—but we all have our own journeys to take. What matters is that we’re still friends when they’re over.”
Brock frowned, but he couldn’t come up with an answer before a shining green light appeared in the orchard, and Pikachu tugged at Ash’s hair. “Pikapi?”
“Hm? Oh, time to go,” he said, and squeezed Brock’s shoulder once before beginning to walk backward. “I don’t say it enough in this time, so… thanks for everything Brock. You’re the closest thing I have to a big brother, and a great friend. I’ll see you in a few years, okay?”
“Yeah, okay,” he said, lifting a hand. “Stay as safe as you can.”
“Egh, it’ll be easier from now on. I’m about to go catch a dragonite, remember?” he asked, and then winked before turning and jogging into the woods. “Bye!”
“Pikachu!” Pikachu added, twisting around to wave.
Brock watched them disappear out of sight, and tried not to feel like he was being left behind.
“That’s a dragonite!” Delys exclaimed, over Shelley and Cheryl’s relieved sobbing.
“Uh, yeah, Tini took care of Shelley, down in the caves,” Ash said blankly, because he had no other explanation and his horrible feeling that Tini hadn’t really planned to get Shelley back to the surface wasn’t something they needed to know just now.
“Thank you so much for finding her,” Cheryl suddenly burst out, staring up over Shelley’s shoulder. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if anything happened to her!”
“No problem,” he said. “I’m just glad everything worked out.”
“Thanks to you and your dragonite,” she said, and then gasped, eyes widening.
“My – oh, no, Tini isn’t –” He paused, a flash of green light catching his eye. He looked up, and then flinched, realising he could see Celebi flitting through the trees behind the emergency workers’ truck. It paused just long enough to catch his eyes and wink, then flitted out of sight. He got the hint. “I’m… really sorry, but I think I have to go.”
“What? But we didn’t thank you!” Cheryl got up, hefting Shelley to keep hold of her as she stood. “At least tell us where you’re from, so we can –!”
But Ash was already running, only pausing long enough to wave. “Take care of Shelley and Tini! Good luck! Bye!”
“Pikachu!” Pikachu added, barely breaking stride as it jumped onto Ash’s hip and then up onto his shoulder. “Pika!”
“W-wait!”
Too late – Ash ran into the treeline, almost right smack into Celebi, and was then unceremoniously shoved through a bright green light.
A moment later, Ash stepped out the other side, Pikachu objecting from its place on his shoulder as he stumbled over the last step. He had time to blink and turn, watching the light vanish, before Delys and her friends appeared in the trees behind him.
Judging by their gaping, he was a lot more recognisable to them now.
“Kapikachu!” Pikachu greeted, enjoying their stares more than it should have.
“Are you looking for a kid?” he asked, and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “One just went sprinting through here like an absol was on his tail. Did something happen?”
Delys in particular looked like the ground had opened up in front of her. Again. “A-Ash K-K-K-”
“Ketchum,” he supplied. “Here to pick up a dragonite. I don’t suppose you’ve seen one around here, have you?”
Without waiting for an answer, he walked past them and into the clearing, smiling kindly at the still-crying Shelley and Cheryl before turning his full attention on Tini. It frowned, obviously recognising something the humans couldn’t see, but he just smiled and extended a hand.
“Pika pikachu,” Pikachu said, shifting from Ash’s shoulder to his head. “Pi Pikapi pika-chu.”
Tini didn’t comment, or lose its quiet frown. But it did reach out and take the offered hand. And then it took a shaky step forward, moving up alongside its new trainer.
“Come on,” said Ash. “Let’s go see the world.”
Ash was oddly quiet as they headed back to town, his eyes on the trees around them. But it was good in a way, since it left Brock free to watch him, thinking back over everything he’d learned about the future and what the older Ash hadn’t said.
If he asked, he suspected Ash would tell him about the dragonite. Maybe talk about going to look for a kid. He wouldn’t mention how he’d gotten the dead children out of the caves, or offer any more explanation than the older one had. Probably wouldn’t explain what was bothering him, either. Pikachu might have, but Brock couldn’t understand his own pokemon that well, let alone Ash’s.
Ash didn’t talk about Legendaries, or risking his life, or doing the right thing when it was hard. He tried so hard not to depend on anyone emotionally anymore. Brock wondered if he’d tell anyone how much it hurt to have to give up on his hopeless dream. He wondered if Ash even admitted to himself how much he hated saying goodbye to people.
“Hey.”
Ash raised his eyebrows, obvious surprised by the break in the silence. “Yeah, Brock?”
He hesitated, then stopped walking, and after another step, so did Ash, turning to face him with an increasingly worried look. “What? What’s the matter?”
He held up a finger, and then winced at Pikachu. “Could you get down for a second?”
“Pi? Pika?” it asked, but when Brock just continued staring at it, it shrugged and did so, leaving Ash’s shoulder free for Brock to place his hand there.
It was his turn to say what he never said enough.
“You’re a good guy, Ash,” he said seriously. “I’m glad we’re friends.”
Ash stared at him, eyes widening. “W- why would you say that so suddenly? Did something happen? Are you dying? Is this why you really came to visit?”
He grunted, nearly falling over. “No, I’m not –”
“Am I dying? Is that why Professor Sycamore’s here too?” he asked. “I thought he was here for Squishy, but – why am I dying? What happened? Oh, man, is this what Olympia meant? There’s been no green fire! I was promised fire! There was no fire!”
“No one’s dying!” he snapped, and then frowned. “What? What fire? What are you talking about?”
“You don’t know about that? So I’m not dying in a blaze of green fire?” he asked, and Brock groaned.
“Stop being you for like five seconds, I’m trying to have a moment here,” he said, and Ash blinked but subsided. Brock frowned at him suspiciously, then tried again. “Five second attention span aside, you’re a good guy. Travelling with you was one of the best times of my life, and I’m never gonna forget it.”
“Uh… It was a lot of fun travelling with you, too,” he said, and after another few moments of worried staring, he smiled warmly. “I’d be lyin’ if I said I didn’t miss you a lot.”
“Right back at you,” he said, and then paused. This was harder than it should’ve been. He was overthinking it. He’d just do it. He yanked Ash forward, ignored the way the kid stiffened up like cardboard, and gave him a quick, as-manly-as-he-could-make-it hug before shoving him away again. “I’m proud of you. Call home more.”
“Uh,” Ash said, but Brock was too busy trying not to burst into humiliated flames and so turned away, marching onward. He knew Ash too well to think he wasn’t exchanging blank stares with Pikachu.
But he didn’t mind. It was as close as he could get to admitting he loved the guy like a brother too, and Ash was the soppy one in their group of friends. He knew Ash would know what he meant, and he could leave it at that.
Ash would carry on saving the world, one mini-crisis at a time, leaving them all behind. But he at least knew Brock cared, and always would.
He felt okay going back home now.