Work Text:
“This isn’t normal. You know that, right?”
Ash takes a breath and holds it, and tries not to roll his eyes where his mother will see. This is the reason he doesn’t go home. He doesn’t like dealing with it.
He doesn’t know if he wants to say anything or not. He’s not sure it would help. Sometimes, he’s learned, it’s better to just let Mom get it out.
“Ash, look at me.”
It takes a moment, but he tears his eyes away from Pikachu’s yellow fur to look at her. He doesn’t quite meet her eyes, but he gets up to her nose and thinks it’s good enough.
“Ever since you left on your first journey, my heart’s just broken for you! Journeys are supposed to be good.”
“It is good!” he protests, but Mom just shakes her head.
“I know you have your fun. I know you don’t regret going on your journey. It’s how you met Pikachu and all your other friends. But I just wish you’d stayed home sometimes, you know? You’ve always been such a happy kid, and that changed.”
It didn’t, he thinks but doesn’t say. It didn’t. He thinks he’s happier than before he left home.
“I mean, really, honey. If I asked any pokemon professor or doctor or gym leader they would say it’s not normal or healthy for you to come back with as many injuries as you do! I see how sad you get sometimes, you know? Let alone those pills they’ve got you hooked on. You can’t just be on those for the rest of your life.”
Ash thinks of the little white pill he takes every night. He thinks about how Brock sat him down two years into their journey and showed him a handful of pills. “I take these every night,” he’d said, looking at Ash. “What are they?” he’d responded.
“They’re for a few things. But back when I was your age I used to start getting these episodes. Anxious all the time, you know, taking care of all my siblings. But sad, too. And then I started taking these, and they helped. They still do.”
Ash had nodded carefully. “Wow, Brocko. I had no idea. Thanks for telling me. Don’t get me wrong, but why?”
Brock had smiled at Ash, a little sadly, and he’d felt like his friend could see straight through to his soul. “We’ve been traveling together for a while. And I think I noticed it the very first day we started, you know? There was something about you. And I just think it might help.”
Ash had dismissed him at the time, but the idea had wriggled into his brain anyway, and by three months later he’d decided to ask Nurse Joy about it.
It had been a remarkably easy process, all things considered. From Nurse Joy to a human doctor, who he’d had to talk to, ugh, and he’d walked out of the office with a little orange bottle that shook like a maraca.
And they help. They have helped. And he’s been taking them for three years and Mom happened to find them when he came home last night. He wishes she didn’t.
“My friends went on journeys. Even I went on one for a few years before I settled down with you. And it wasn’t like that. When I look back on those years, I think about how fun they were!”
Ash has fun. He has fun. And sure, he loses battles and he deals with Team Rocket and sometimes the world ends, but the things he most remembers are the fun parts. The delight of meeting a new pokemon, or a new person. Winning a gym battle. Training. Pikachu riding around on his shoulder. The feeling of euphoria when he pulls off a new technique with his pokemon successfully, or when they learn a new move. Those are what he thinks about.
“And Ash,” Mom says. “I see that you’re getting ready to be defensive. Can you not? For once, can you just listen and know that this is coming from love? I’ve lived a lot longer than you, and I know you. I know what you were like before you left home. You didn’t need any pills, and you ran around in the grass and played with the other kids. You were happy. And it seems like ever since you’ve left you’ve just gotten worse and worse.”
Ash thinks about how Brock told him he noticed something sad about him as soon as they met. He thinks about all the things Misty and Brock caught him saying, the looks they would share that they thought he didn’t see. How they’d gently correct him. He thinks about the drop in the pit of his stomach that always appears as his journeys come to a close, not because he’s sad to say goodbye but because he doesn’t want to go back to Pallet.
He thinks about the nights he spent alone in his room as a kid with only his mom in the house. The way he’d hug his stuffed gengar so tight he ripped it at the seams.
He thinks about all this, and thinks that maybe Mom just accepted what she saw at face value.
He looks out the window at the garden. The white picket fence Mom always envisioned growing up, the one that she’s built for herself. The perfect house she always wanted growing up. He knows what his grandmother was like. He’s heard the stories she’s sometimes haltingly shared.
But Ash doesn’t think he needs these white pills because he left home. He thinks his life has gotten immeasurably better since he started on that journey five years ago, since he got his best friend, who is currently curled comfortingly in his lap, letting his electricity crawl up Ash’s skin like his own form of a purr.
“Is that how you remember it?” he finally responds, voice quiet.
Mom’s eyebrows furrow. “What do you mean?”
“Do you think all of this started the second I hit the road?”
“When else would it have started?”
He looks at her, just looks at her. He still can’t meet her eyes. He knows he could just leave, but he doesn’t want to ruin their relationship. He just wants her to understand.
“Mom,” Ash says. “You get sad a lot too, don’t you?”
She leans back, looking affronted. “Come on,” he continues, before she can refute it. “I saw it. There’s no use denying it.”
“I suppose I do, but what’s that got to do with anything?”
“You’ve always been sad, and I think I always have, too. Leaving on a journey didn’t start that.”
“But you’ve gotten so much worse since you left!”
“No,” he says. “I’ve gotten older. Not because of the journey, because of my age.”
Mom’s still shaking her head. He doesn’t think it’s easy to accept that she doesn’t have control over this, that she couldn’t have magically fixed him if he’d stayed in Pallet. In fact, he thinks, he’s one hundred percent sure that he would be worse than he is now.
“Can you believe me?” he tries not to plead. “I am an adult, and I have been traveling for five years. Can you trust when I say this journey was the best decision I ever made?”
“But it’s not normal, ” she protests. “It’s not supposed to be like this.”
White picket fence, he thinks. White picket fence and a garden and a happy child.
“There’s no supposed to. There just is.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Mom, it’s been twenty years since you’ve been on a journey. I think you’re so caught up in what you remember of the good parts that you forgot about the loneliness and the pain that sometimes comes.”
She takes a breath. Ash stands up. “Believe me,” he says, definitively. “But now, I’m going for a walk.”
When the door closes behind him, and he breathes in the summer air, he wonders if it was right to pop the bubble.
But then Pikachu hops up onto his shoulder, and he looks around as the flowers sway in the breeze, and thinks about a future where maybe he might not dread coming back to this beautiful town, and this beautiful home.