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Jessie knotted her fingers through long crimson locks, trying to silence the exasperated sigh hanging at her throat. Okay, her thoughts swam. There’s still time for my dazzlingly fickle luck to undo this mess.
She ran through the events of the last day or so in her head, desperate to poke a hole in them, for some bright idea to come to her at once, like they so often did. Around her, the Ketchum household was quiet, almost as if it too was judging her for all that had transpired.
“You just gonna stand there bein’ dramatic, or—” Ash started.
“Quiet, twerp,” Jessie silenced him. “I’m ruminating.”
He rolled his eyes as she went back to her incredibly helpful narrative framing, replaying it from start to finish.
As winter rolled across the Kanto region, children paused their pokémon journeys to return home for the holiday season. When Ash waltzed into their cozy little diner fairly unannounced, it wasn’t that big of a deal to the team formerly known as Rocket. They’d seen him a few times since they’d settled down in Pallet, and though they’d never quite broken past the more antagonistic banter they had with the kid, it was always a delight to hear the wild stories he brought with him.
Delia hadn’t been expecting it, though—a nonchalance in her greeting everyone knew was a front. There was a twinge of remorse in her voice when she let Ash know that his arrival coincided with her spending a few days out of town, desperate to get all her Christmas shopping done at once. Bright as ever, he was only thrown off for a moment before re-orienting, more than fine with staying put, for once in his constantly-moving life.
Naturally, with Delia out of town, Meowth and James didn’t hesitate to take on the responsibility of manning the diner. Jessie, on the other hand, practically demanded the burden of house-sitting—her only credentials being a few brief stints looking at a house or two from the outside, and a massive, unrelenting, inappropriate, smoldering crush on her former enemy’s mother.
The plan was foolproof. She’d dazzle the pants off of Delia with her homemaking expertise, and the two of them would fall blissfully in love with a wedding in the summer and a playpen for the psychic-types and a rose garden they tended side-by-side and—
Back in reality, Ash stifled a sneeze into the blanket he was wrapped in, rubbing at his eyes with a muted half-groan.
Right. Jessie rerouted the rebellious comet of a heart rumbling around inside of her. The twerp.
Ash returning home had thrown things a bit off-kilter, but it was nothing particularly worrisome. He was hardly the thorn in Jessie’s side he used to be, bratty attitude notwithstanding. She was expecting him to cause a few more messes she’d reluctantly have to clean up, but for the most part he simply ran from place to place across Pallet’s hills, stopping only to train with his team, coming home only to sleep in until noon and repeat the cycle all over again.
That was, until the snow began to fall.
It was the dead of night—oh, aren’t those just the sweetest first snows? Jessie thought with a glimmer in her eye—and she was so utterly lost in the euphoria of it all that she hadn’t heard the boy’s footsteps behind her. As soon as she’d seen white on the ground, she bolted outside without a care to even shut the front door. Ash and Pikachu found her standing with her arms outward, staring up entranced as she pretended herself an articuno, flying rapturously through the crystals as they fell.
Clad in his pyjamas and suppressing a shiver in the freezing night air, he’d asked the question many folks had asked her over the years— “Aren’t you cold?”
To which Jessie only turned to face the kid with a devilish grin, dropping to a crouch and packing a snowball in her quickly pinkening hands.
“Aren’t you a wimp?”
When the powder made contact with his face, Pikachu made a noise of concern that Jessie was sure preceded a couple thousand volts on her skin. Ash, on the other hand, shook it off and charged forward, a smirk on his face that spelled out oh, it’s on.
Two fires melting the terrain around them, they stayed like that for what must have been hours, laughing and sparring and frolicking as though they were both children, forgetting their responsibilities. Until the chill finally crept under Jessie’s skin, and she allowed herself to relent, and the two of them reluctantly forced their soaked and shuddering selves to be mature and call it a night, and all was well.
Jessie sighed again. What a nice lie to live in that would’ve been.
“Look, I’m sure it’s fine,” Ash said, the normal rasp in his voice sounding less lively by the minute. Towering above him, Jessie made a few ugly noises at the thermometer still beeping in her hands, possibly hoping that maybe hitting the right ungodly pitch would make the numbers change.
“It is hardly fine!” she argued. “37.7? That’s a fever.”
“Barely,” he rolled his eyes, and the gesture wavered mid-way and turned into another round of harsh-sounding sneezes. From the arm of the couch, Pikachu winced a little at the sight.
“Oh, this is a nightmare,” Jessie paced, her normally level head utterly failing her. “If we don’t fix this mess—”
“I keep tellin’ ya there’s no mess,” Ash protested. “It’s a cold. I just need t’ suck it up for a while ‘til it goes away.”
“We don’t have a while, twerp!” she said, hands on her hips. “Your mother’s going to be back in mere days, and if she finds out you came down sick under my watch I’m never going to make it to second base. Or first base. Or up to bat! ”
To her ramblings, Ash only sighed, sinking further into his nest of blankets. “I don’t think mom plays baseball, Jessie.”
“You’re staying right there until you recover,” the woman swerved. “If I have to hold you down and spoon-feed you cough syrup myself .”
“Yeah, I’m… not doin’ that, actually.”
Ash made the motions to get up, certain there wasn’t actually much Jessie could do to inhibit him, intimidating though she was. He’d been hit with a lot worse in the past, but he was starting to feel the effects of the illness in full force, and he really didn’t fancy the idea of being stuck in a room all day with someone who’d tried to rob him upwards of a hundred times. They weren’t enemies any longer, but the boy wasn’t sure yet that he’d call her a friend, no matter how eager his mother was to.
Jessie didn’t have to tie him down though, it seemed. Before he could get to his feet, a weight came down on his chest, pinning the boy back to the couch where he was. He blinked a few times, vision going a little bleary on the fringes, only to see Pikachu standing on his torso with an equally authoritative look in his big brown eyes.
“C’mon, nooo,” Ash whined, weakly.
“Pi-kachu!” his pokémon argued, throwing an arm back.
“Well, well, well,” Jessie grinned, staring down at the unexpected little ally to her cause. “It looks as though the fates have decided for you.”
Utterly betrayed, Ash allowed himself to lose form beneath his partner’s feet, deflating to nothing with a gravelly whimper.
“—and so I said, ‘Since we’re only seeing part of you, we’re only getting a peek-at-chu! Pikachu!’ You see, because—”
“Yeah, I get it.”
The sun had long since set on Pallet, not doing much in its time there to tear through the frigidity that was hanging in the winter air. Snow was still falling, periodically—a few inches every once in a while—and even though he was inside and far from it, the chill beneath Ash’s skin made him feel as though he might as well be outside taking a nap under the ice.
Annoyingly true to her word, Jessie had hardly left his side. She’d spent the last few hours prattling on stories and jokes in an attempt to entertain, and threatened to act out the entirety of at least four movies Ash was certain had never been seen outside of underground arts festivals that Jessie had broken into. His only solace was in brief moments—when she’d pop out of the room to refill his water, or grab ten more miscellaneous bottles from the medicine cabinet, or make a half-hearted attempt at getting him to eat something substantial with general threats of violence.
In someone he liked, it would’ve been too much. On Jessie, it seemed a fate worse than death.
Ash’s head throbbed angrily, desperate for some silence. He threw an arm over his eyes in an attempt to alleviate the pressure, pushing past the rawness in his throat to plead with his captor.
“Jessie, can I have even an hour to myself?”
“Absolutely not ,” she said. “I don’t trust you as far as I can throw you to not run a mile around Pallet the second I let you out of my sights. I’m staying right here and acting as your dutiful nurse whether you prefer it or not.”
He shifted to face her, brown eyes glazed and thick with incredibly uncharacteristic malice. “Never met a nurse who shouts at the volume you do.”
“Boo hoo, we can’t all graduate,” Jessie responded, nonchalantly examining her fingernails.
“What?”
“What?”
The boy felt another heavy pulse shoot through his temple, and he rolled over, wrapping one of the pillows around his head with the hope that it would block out the sensory overload swimming like deafening static in the world around him. The muffled groan he let out was just short of being a scream, one he let himself succumb to after a long day of keeping the pain at bay. Things clearly weren’t going to get better until they got worse—Ash always hated this part.
Jessie’s playful spirit faltered for a moment, and Ash knew he had to be delirious, because she almost sounded worried when she asked.
“H-Hey, what’s your deal? ” she said. “Are you okay?”
Fed up, the boy clutched at his head harder, practically folding in on himself.
“Do I sound okay? Do I look okay?” he bit. “Everything hurts, I can’t get comfortable, an' I’m stuck inside my house with the last person I wanna be sick around!”
The outburst didn’t do much for his aching throat, and he dissolved into a fit of coughing immediately after, completely undone. Pikachu had been anxiously awake at his bedside, and the mouse shot an almost pleading look at Jessie, desperate for anyone’s hand to intervene. Ash was shivering.
The woman reached out, touching the back of her hand to his forehead with a frown that was far more no-nonsense than the energy she’d brought to the table so far. Pikachu looked to Ash—the boy’s eyes shut tight in an attempt to block out the world—then back to Jessie, begging for an answer.
“That’s... not great,” she noted, then turned her tone stern. “Twerp, complain all you want, just stay right here until I’m back.”
Pikachu watched as she stood up swiftly, looking like a stranger in how methodically she seemed to move. Gingerly, the pokémon curled into a tight little circle beside his trainer, hoping to at least offer some semblance of comfort as he worked through the sickness.
Jessie just short of stormed into the kitchen, throwing open Delia’s utterly massive cabinet of herbs and spices. Until now it was looking like a night or two of rest would do Ash good, but with his fever spiking like that she wasn’t content to just wait around and hope for the best. She was grateful, at the very least, to be trapped in the house of a woman whose garden was bigger than a football field. If a plant existed, Delia probably had a plethora of it hiding somewhere . Jessie analyzed the sprawling supply, all neatly boxed and labeled—just as she’d expect. Like clockwork, she grabbed a couple handfuls and brought a pot to boil.
Ash couldn’t have told you how much time had passed when he heard the sound of footsteps again. The silence was divine, while it lasted—the snow smothering all noise outside like a blanket of ivory, only the creaks and shivers of the house and the steady rhythm of Pikachu’s breathing beside him. The strategic part of his brain stayed alive despite the heat cooking it to nothing, insisting that if he managed to fall asleep right now, he could maybe just stay unconscious until he got better.
Pikachu stirred when Jessie returned, peering up at her curiously. The mouse gave his trainer a few gentle prods with his tail, pulling him out of his desperate attempt to ignore her until she went away.
She had a hand on her hip and a steaming mug in the other, and was gesturing the latter toward him in such a way he was shocked the liquid didn’t jump out of the cup from the force of it all.
“Drink this and don’t argue with me.”
Ash opened his mouth to absolutely argue with her—a quip on his tongue about it being poisoned, a lecture about how he’d recover a lot faster if she’d shut up and let him sleep—instead, he caught the begging look on his pokémon’s face and reluctantly swallowed his snark. Wordlessly, he grabbed the mug from Jessie’s hand and shakily took a few sips.
The boy couldn’t taste much of anything in his current state—which was nice, as he wasn’t really one for tea—but there was a distinct flavour in it that pushed past his cold-addled palate, leaving some sort of sensation in his mouth he couldn’t entirely put words to. It wasn’t bad, but it did paint a look on his face that Jessie could tell came with a question.
“What’s in this?”
She crossed her arms proudly and sat back down, sounding a little brighter than she did a moment ago. “Yarrow. With a spritz of peppermint. It does wonders to bring down a more aggressive fever.”
The woman paused, tilting her head.
“Surely Delia’s made it for you before?”
Leaning back, Ash began to comb his memory, but the flavour and sensation remained foreign to him. Now that he was really considering it…
“T’be honest, I don’t have a lot of memories of bein’ sick like this, growin’ up,” he said after a beat. “I think maybe my head’s not too excited t’ hold onto ‘em.”
Jessie’s curiosity was piqued. She could work with this.
“Oh? Why’s that?”
Ash averted her piercing gaze, turning to face the back of the couch while he spoke.
“Guess I don’t like feelin’ weak and bein’ all cooped up like this,” he admitted. “Even though everyone gets sick from time to time… it just makes me feel like everyone’s sittin' around all sorry for me.”
He took another long sip of his tea, turning back to face her.
“I s’pose that’s kinda dumb, though, huh?”
Quite a few memories just short of assaulted Jessie’s own subconscious, then—a couple hundred of her sneaking behind the shelter of a tree to steal secret swigs of medicine, a good handful of her slapping away James’ hand when he dared to check her forehead for warmth, and more than she would’ve liked to count of her, pushed to her limits and too sick to stand, held aloft by her two best friends as they scolded her for not telling them sooner she wasn’t feeling well. Back in the present, she swallowed thickly, her impulse to deny outright cropping up something fierce. With grace befitting of a woman like herself, she ignored it.
“You know, twerp, I don’t think it is,” Jessie said. “You didn’t hear it from me, but there’s a dazzling beauty of a former Rocket agent somewhere out there who may or may not burden herself with the same aggravating brand of pride.”
He shimmied back beneath the covers as she was saying it, placing his empty cup on the table adjacent. As soon as Ash’s head settled on the pillow, he felt himself drifting away from the waking world. For the first time all night, he smiled.
“Guess I can see that,” he said. “Bet your mom had one heck of a time dealin’ with someone like you when you were little.”
Immediately, Jessie’s eyes darted to some distant corner of the room. The uncharacteristic softness in her voice left, its boisterous lilt back in full force.
“Oh, you have no idea! Ahaha!”
She laughed—a little too loudly, for a little too long. The way Ash sometimes heard his mom laugh, when strangers would ask when that man of hers was coming home. He chose not to pry, focused on the warmth in his stomach combating the chills from before, the sweat on his brow that felt more healing than not.
Clearing her throat in an attempt to cleanse her emotional palate, Jessie tried not to become transfixed as she stared out the window, ice on her tongue. A ghostly apparition of a chipped manicure running gently through scarlet baby-hairs, singing a lullaby that soothed her pounding head. In the darkness of the room, with the television long since shut off, the window to the blinding brightness outside was the only light around. It snowed.
Desperate for a distraction, the woman leaned forward once more to feel Ash’s forehead. His breathing was a lot steadier, now, and the heat radiating off him was nearly gone. Beside the boy, Pikachu slept soundly.
“Seems like the tea is doing its thing,” she said, unsure if he was awake. “Now, see what happens when you listen to me?”
His eyes stayed closed, but she could tell from the way he smirked that he wasn’t asleep quite yet.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you almost sounded relieved just now.”
“Keep dreaming, brat,” Jessie took her palm from his face, leaning back in her chair. “My care runs strictly on the basis of not breaking your poor mother’s heart.”
Ash rolled back over, pulling the covers over his shoulder and nuzzling himself back into a comfortable position to pass out until the morning came.
“Whatever you say,” Ash muttered as he was slipping away. He couldn’t have told you what changed, if you asked him—but for the rest of the night, he didn’t hear a word.
Ash was halfway through five or ten slices of leftover pizza when Delia threw the door open a day or two later, wearing a pastel pink fur-lined winter coat that would have made for a practical ensemble if not for the mini-skirt she was sporting underneath. Nonchalantly, the boy threw a crust to Pikachu, who was too busy tearing into the leftover cups of marinara to take much note of the offering.
Mimey was carrying the majority of the luggage, and slinked off quicker than Ash could register to begin the process of hiding gifts in closets and secret attics and basements he wouldn’t think to look in. Delia looked around with a few rapid blinks, registering the condition of everything—besides the mess her son was currently making at the dining room table, everything looked just as she’d left it.
“Wow, I’m impressed!” She said. “You know, I didn’t really know if Jessie was the right person of those three for this job, but she was just so insistent …”
“Don’t blame ya,” Ash agreed, swallowing a bite of food that was far too big. “But hey, welcome back!”
“Oh, thank you, dear,” Delia grinned brightly. “Anything interesting happen while I was out?”
“Nah, not really,” the boy shrugged, going in for another slice. It wasn’t really a lie. Pikachu finally took note of Delia’s presence, running to her feet with a happy chirp of his name.
“It’s good to see you too, Pikachu!” she dropped down to scratch the mouse’s chin, to which he let out an utterly euphoric squeak. She looked around again, for a moment, then back up to Ash, continuing to pet the pokémon as she talked.
“Where is Jessie, anyways?”
Ash swallowed another mouthful of cheese, crossing his arms. “Y’know, I haven’t actually seen her all day. Guess she’s still sleepin'.”
Delia stood back up, a crease in her brow Ash wasn’t used to seeing. “Goodness, this late? She’s such an early riser, norm—”
Her sentence was cut off mid-way by a sharp sound cutting straight through the quiet air—one of Jessie’s uniquely high-pitched sneezes, ringing out from the archway where the woman in question now stood. She was leaning on the wall with a hazy look in her eye, acting as though nothing about that was cause for alarm.
“Delia, darling!” she said, the words heavy with all the wrong consonants. “Welcome home!”
Getting a closer look at her, Delia could see that she was a total mess—hidden in a nest of crimson tangles, pale-faced and pink-nosed and swaying on her feet. Her voice was the worst of all, hoarse and congested and not at all her own.
With her eyes on Jessie, Ash was out of his mom’s line of sight, and he took the opportunity to muffle the wicked laughter in his throat into a nearby napkin.
“That explains that…” he dared to say, and Pikachu shot him an equally sadistic look.
Delia, on the other hand, was on Jessie like clockwork—her motherly instincts engaged with no hope of escape. She rushed over to the younger woman, brushing flyaway hairs from her eyes, cupping Jessie’s face in her hands.
“Oh, dear, you don’t look well at all…” she fussed, and Jessie’s head seemed to swim with every touch of Delia’s maddeningly soft hands. She wasn’t sure where the common cold began and the love-sickness ended, leaning into the brunette’s careful embrace.
Desperate to remain noble, Jessie tried what she knew—
“I’m sure it’s fine,” she said, immediately ruining her point with another forceful sneeze, just barely caught against the back of her hand.
“The weather’s been so harsh,” Delia said. “It’s no wonder, you must’ve caught your death out there…”
“Well, actually—”
She stopped herself. In her knee-jerk reaction to not be seen as so weak in her element, Jessie had nearly allowed herself the satisfaction of going off—about the twerp and his twerp germs infecting her with chronic twerpitis. She realized it all at once—not only had the runt gotten her sick, she couldn’t even complain about it without outing the secret she’d tried so hard to hide in the first place.
She stared over Delia’s shoulder at the boy—looking like some kind of demon with the toothy, devious grin he was shooting Jessie that dared her to spill the real reason. The redhead rubbed at her throbbing sinuses, sighing in defeat.
“—that’s exactly it. Oh, clumsy me…!”
Taking the hit, she allowed herself to become slightly more formless in the older woman’s arms, tuning out Ash’s sly-eyed grins and stifled snickers. All things considered, she was frustrated with herself for not seeing this coming, but then again...
“You poor thing, let’s get you back in bed,” Delia insisted, wrapping an arm around Jessie’s waist in a gesture that demanded action. “Here, once Mimey and I get settled in I’ll be sure to make you something that’ll fix you right up—”
She kept on, tutting and worrying and peppering in some light scolding—her hands constantly caressing Jessie in some way, shape, or form, refusing to break the contact. Delia ushered her back into the guest room bed with little effort, trailing the back of her palm from Jessie’s cheek down to her neck in an attempt to discern if she was running a fever or not. Jessie couldn’t have told you, either—every touch feeling like fire and every worried gaze Delia shot her way making her a million times more lightheaded.
The brunette left with a promise to return as soon as possible, and Jessie sunk into the covers with a contented sigh, thanking her dazzlingly fickle luck for working its magic once more.
Worth it.