A week passed.
Gary avoided Ash with the focused dedication of someone who had made avoiding a person into a full-time discipline. If Ash came around a corner, Gary found somewhere else to be. If Ash walked through the square, Gary developed a sudden urgent interest in the opposite direction. He did it with his chin up and his expression deliberately neutral, which somehow made it funnier than if he'd been openly sulking.
Ash didn't push it.
'He'll come around,' he thought, every time it happened. 'First losses need time to settle.'
He knew this from experience. He had been, at various points in his previous life, the person sitting on the grass processing a defeat he hadn't seen coming. It took as long as it took.
In the meantime, he had training to do.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
The forest near Pallet Town was quiet in the mornings.
Sunlight came through the canopy in moving pieces. The ground was soft with last night's dew. Bird Pokémon called from somewhere further in, and the air smelled like earth and green things and the particular freshness of a place that didn't get many visitors.
Ash knelt in front of Y and made a digging motion with both hands.
"Channel it through your claws," he said. "Quick and deep. Like you're hiding from something that really doesn't like you."
Y watched him with the focused attention it brought to everything. Then tried it.
The first attempt produced a shallow scrape.
The second was better.
The third was actually a hole.
"Good," Ash said. "Again. Deeper."
On a nearby log, X watched.
X had opinions about watching.
"Char," it said, with feeling.
"You're a week old."
"Char."
"The move takes stamina. You need to build up to it."
X crossed its tiny arms. Its tail flame flickered in a way that communicated exactly how it felt about this explanation.
Ash sighed. "Fine. Small attempt. Carefully."
X was off the log before the sentence finished.
Its first dig was — not small. X hit the earth with the enthusiasm of something that had been waiting all week for permission, and within thirty seconds had produced a hole that was, by any reasonable measure, too deep for a one-week-old Charmander.
Ash stared at it.
'Natural talent,' he thought. 'Okay.'
Y looked at X's hole. Then looked at its own hole. Then looked at X.
Something ignited in Y's eyes.
It started digging faster.
X looked at Y.
Started digging faster.
The forest filled with the sound of two Charmanders competing in complete silence, claws moving with rapidly escalating urgency, dirt flying in equal arcs, neither of them looking at anything except down.
Ash watched them.
'I've created something,' he thought, not entirely sure whether this was good. 'I'm not sure what. But I've created it.'
"How deep are you two planning to go?" he said.
Neither of them answered. They were beyond answering.
He was still watching when X's claw hit something that wasn't earth.
Something hard.
A sharp thunk that resonated up through the soil.
Then nothing for a moment.
Then the ground erupted.
The Sandslash came up like something that had been keeping score.
It burst from the earth with a roar that shook the undergrowth and sent every bird Pokémon in the canopy scattering in a panicked cloud. Its claws were out. Its expression was not the expression of a Pokémon that wanted to have a conversation about what had just happened to its home.
X, directly in the blast radius, went airborne.
Landed in a heap three feet away.
Sat up. Looked at the Sandslash.
Looked very small compared to the Sandslash.
"I'm so sorry," Ash said to the Sandslash, stepping forward with X in his arms and his best apologetic expression deployed. "This was completely accidental, and if you give us a moment I'm sure we can—"
The Sandslash's eyes said: no.
Ash looked at Y.
Y looked at the Sandslash.
Y looked at Ash.
They had a very brief, very honest conversation using only their faces.
'Fight it?' Y's face said.
'It's a fully evolved Ground-type and we've been training for a week,' Ash's face said.
'...Run?' Y's face said.
"Nigerundayo," Ash confirmed, and ran.
He ran fast.
He had always been fast — faster than people expected, a legacy of chasing Pokémon through routes and forests across eight regions. Y kept pace beside him without difficulty, nimble through the undergrowth.
X clung to his front and watched the Sandslash over his shoulder with enormous eyes, tail flame a sharp nervous flicker.
Behind them, the ground was moving.
The Sandslash had gone underground. He could hear it — the low rumble just beneath the surface, the tearing of roots, the irregular shudder of earth that meant something fast was tracking them from below.
'Of course it uses Dig,' he thought. 'We were literally just practising Dig.'
The tree line thinned ahead. An opening.
And directly in the opening: a boulder. Enormous. Flat-faced. Blocking the path like something the universe had placed there specifically.
Ash looked at the boulder.
Looked back at the trembling earth behind him.
"You have got to be kidding me," he said.
The ground shook harder.
He put X down, squared up, and looked at Y. Y looked back with the resigned expression of something that was about to try very hard and knew it wasn't enough.
Then the trees to his left exploded.
The Garchomp came through at speed — not charging, just moving, the way something that has never had to worry about speed moves when it actually bothers. It planted itself between Ash and the shuddering earth with the casual authority of a wall deciding to become a wall.
The Sandslash broke the surface.
Saw the Garchomp.
Reconsidered immediately.
"Dragon Breath," said a voice from somewhere above.
Ash looked up.
Perched on the boulder — sitting on it the way other people sit on chairs, completely relaxed, long blonde hair catching the light through the canopy — was Cynthia.
She was watching the Sandslash with the calm, evaluating attention of someone who had classified the situation in about two seconds and found it manageable.
Garchomp's jaws opened.
Purple draconic energy built and released in a shape that was almost solid — a Dragon Breath that moved through the air with the distinct feeling of this is what power looks like when it has nothing to prove.
The Sandslash took the hit, stumbled back, shot Ash one last furious look, and vanished into the undergrowth.
Silence.
X, who had been watching the Dragon Breath with its mouth open and its tail flame burning bright enough to be visible in daylight, made a small sound. Not fear. Not surprise.
Awe.
'I want to do that,' the sound said, clearly and completely.
Cynthia dropped off the boulder with the ease of someone for whom a two-metre drop is a minor inconvenience.
She crossed to Ash and put her hand against his cheek with the directness of someone checking for damage before asking questions.
"Are you alright?"
Ash blinked.
'Cynthia,' his brain said.
'Former Sinnoh Champion. Best trainer of her generation. Garchomp.'
'Also apparently—'
He found the memory half a second later. It arrived with the warm familiarity of something he'd known a long time.
'Also mine,' he thought, and immediately felt that was an odd way to think about it, and also somehow not wrong.
"Yeah," he said. "Yeah — thank you. You saved us."
She let out a breath. Smiled. The relief in it was genuine.
"I'm glad you're alright."
She was very close.
"You're—" he started, and stopped, and was grateful he stopped because finishing that sentence out loud would have been a mistake.
"Hmm?" She tilted her head.
"You're here," he said. "I didn't know you were in Pallet Town."
"I came to visit." She stepped back slightly — not far, but enough that Ash could think again. Her gaze dropped to X and Y, who were both looking up at her with very different expressions. Y with assessment. X with the still-burning look of something that had just decided what it wanted to be when it grew up.
"You have Charmanders," she said.
"Two," Ash said.
"I can count." There was something light in her voice. Then, quieter: "I heard you got Pokémon. I wanted to see."
Ash looked at her.
She was looking at X and Y, and her expression had the particular softness of someone who means something they're not quite saying directly.
"You could have just come to the house," he said.
"You weren't at the house." She glanced at him sideways. "You were in the forest, nearly getting flattened by a Sandslash."
"That was a temporary setback."
"You were running."
"A strategic retreat."
The corner of her mouth moved.
Y had settled beside Ash's leg. X had climbed up to his shoulder and was staring at Garchomp from this new elevation with the expression of someone memorising something.
Garchomp, for its part, looked down at X with the mild attention of a mountain noticing a pebble.
X stared harder.
"Your Charmander," Cynthia said, watching X, "is going to be a problem."
"I know," Ash said, with great affection.
She looked at him then — fully, the way she rarely looked at things, like she was reading something she'd been trying to read for a while.
"It's good to see you," she said.
Simple. Direct. Cynthia had never been someone who decorated the things she meant.
"It's good to see you too," Ash said.
And meant it.