The house had too many people in it.
This was not unusual. The house had always had a lot of people in it, and the warmth of that had always been the ordinary kind — familiar, settled, known. But tonight had a different quality underneath the warmth. A charge. The specific energy of a day that had contained several significant things and hadn't finished being processed by anyone present, and probably wouldn't be finished being processed for some time, and everyone in the house could feel the shape of that even if they couldn't name it.
Ash was asleep.
The rest of the house was not.
It started with May, because things of this nature generally started with May.
She came upstairs after the dishes were done, stood on the landing, and listened. Ash's room: quiet. The rest of the upstairs: the particular restless non-quiet of several people independently pretending to be settled when they weren't.
She knocked on Serena's door.
"Ten minutes," she said, when it opened. "Everyone."
Serena looked at her.
"May—"
"There is a girl downstairs," May said, "who is apparently engaged to Ash, arrived with his father, has no family name anyone recognises, gave no explanation for either of those things, and has been in this house for four hours. And we are all going to go to sleep and wake up tomorrow and she will still be here and we will still know nothing." She paused. "Ten minutes."
Serena opened the door wider.
Ten minutes later her room had five people in it.
Serena on the bed with tea. May in the armchair she had relocated from the corner because May always relocated furniture when she was organising something. Misty on the floor with her back against the wardrobe — her position for long conversations. Dawn beside her, knees up, chin resting on them, already wearing the expression of someone who had elected to find this interesting rather than exhausting. And Green in the corner, because Green was always in the corner, with the air of someone who had neither agreed to come nor decided to leave.
"Her name is Anabel," May said, opening proceedings.
"We know that," Misty said.
"That is," May said, "the complete list of things we know."
A silence in which everyone acknowledged this was accurate.
"No family name," Dawn said.
"None given."
"No explanation of how the engagement happened."
"None."
"She arrived with Red," Green said, from the corner, not looking up. "Which means Red brought her. Which means Red made this arrangement. At some point. Without telling anyone."
"Red didn't tell anyone he was coming either," Serena said. "That seems to be how Red does things."
"It is," Green agreed. "Which doesn't make it less worth understanding."
Misty turned her glass of water in her hands. "What I want to know is where she's from. Every single one of us has a reason we're here that someone could trace. Families. Agreements. Introductions. She just—" she gestured vaguely. "Appeared."
"With very good posture," Dawn added.
"With very good posture," Misty confirmed. "And those eyes."
"What about her eyes?" Serena asked.
"They look at things sideways," Misty said. "Like she's seeing something next to what's actually there."
A brief silence.
"That could just be how her eyes are," Dawn said.
"It is not how her eyes are," Misty said.
"We should ask her," May said.
"We are absolutely going to ask her," Misty said. "Tomorrow. When there's—"
A knock at the door.
Everyone stopped.
May looked at Misty. Misty looked at Dawn. Dawn looked at Serena. Serena looked at Green. Green had already turned to look at the door a full second before the knock landed, which nobody pointed out.
"...Come in," Serena said.
The door opened.
Anabel stood in the doorway in borrowed pyjamas — Serena's, from the pattern, slightly too long at the hem — and looked at the five of them arranged across the room with the expression of someone who has arrived somewhere and found it exactly as expected.
She had clearly known they were here.
She did not explain how.
The silence that followed had a very particular quality. It was the silence of five people trying to look like they hadn't just been talking about the person now standing in their doorway.
They did not fully succeed.
"...Hi," Dawn said.
"Hi," Anabel said. She looked at the space on the bed beside Serena, and then at Serena, with a brief polite inquiry in her expression.
Serena moved her mug.
Anabel sat down.
Another silence, shorter this time, because May was already recovering.
"We were just—" May started.
"Talking about me," Anabel said. Not accusatory. Just accurate, in the mild way she seemed to be accurate about most things.
"...Yes," May said.
"That's fine," Anabel said. "I would have too."
She looked around the room with those quiet eyes — the ones Misty had correctly identified as looking at things slightly sideways — and landed on May with the calm patience of someone who has sat down for a specific reason and is in no hurry.
"You have questions," May said.
"I do," Anabel said.
The room leaned forward very slightly. Even Green's page stopped turning.
"Actually," Anabel said, in the same unhurried tone, "I was hoping you'd answer mine first."
A beat.
"...Yours," Misty said.
"Yes." Anabel looked around the room again, with what appeared to be genuine curiosity — not performed, not strategic, just the particular attentiveness of someone who has walked into a situation with real gaps in their understanding and would like to fill them. "How did you each meet him?"
The room stared at her.
"We," May said carefully, "had questions for you. About your family. About how you and Ash—"
"I know," Anabel said. "I'll answer those." A small pause. "But I've been here four hours and I don't know any of you. I'd like to." She looked at her hands briefly, then back up. "How did you meet him?"
Silence.
It was, the room collectively recognised, an extremely simple question. It was also, delivered like that — plainly, with no leverage attached, no transaction implied — somehow very difficult to dismiss. There was no calculation in her expression that they could find. No angle they could identify. She appeared to simply want to know.
Which was, in its own way, more disarming than anything calculated would have been.
Misty looked at May. May looked at Misty.
"She still hasn't answered anything about herself," Misty said.
"No," Anabel agreed pleasantly. "Not yet."
Green, from the corner, turned a page. "Answer her question," she said, to the room. "It's more efficient."
"Green," Misty said.
"We want to understand her," Green said. "She wants to understand us. One of those things can start right now." She glanced up briefly. "I'll go first."
The room looked at Green.
Green, who never went first. Green, who never volunteered anything personal unless specifically cornered. Green, who was currently setting her book down with the precise movements of someone who has made a decision and is not going to be talked out of it.
She looked at Anabel.
Anabel looked back, with the same quiet, complete attention she'd been applying to everything.
"My grandfather," Green said, "was a researcher. A contemporary of Professor Oak."
She did not tell it the way she would have told it to someone she was performing composure for. She told it the way she told things when she had decided something was worth telling — flat, precise, no more words than the thing required.
Her grandfather had been brilliant. The kind of brilliant that consumed everything around it. He and Professor Oak had been colleagues once, rivals once, friends in the complicated way of people who respected each other too much to be comfortable in the same room.
Her mother had died in his laboratory when Green was three. An accident, they said. Equipment failure. Green had grown up with the story the way you grew up with furniture — it was just there, it had always been there, she had stopped seeing it as something that required examining.
After that her grandfather had gone somewhere inside himself that she couldn't reach. He still fed her. He still ensured she was clothed and educated in the cold efficient way of someone managing a responsibility. But the house had been very quiet and very large and she had spent a great deal of time in it alone.
Then one morning when she was six she had come downstairs and he was simply gone.
A note on the table. Vital research. Cannot be followed. Do not look.
And a name: Red Ketchum would arrange things through Professor Oak.
"I was angry," Green said, in the same flat tone. "And I was relieved. Which made me more angry." She paused. "Professor Oak was very kind. He brought me here, gave me a place. Treated me like I was his own, which I had no framework for and found difficult to accept."
"And the engagement?" Anabel asked.
The room glanced at her. The question had come at exactly the right moment — not interrupting, not rushing, just placed precisely into the pause where the story was waiting for it. Misty clocked this. May clocked it. Neither said anything.
"Red sent word through Professor Oak that he intended to have me formally adopted," Green said. "Into the Ketchum family." A brief pause. "I refused."
"Why?" Anabel asked.
"Because I didn't want to be placed somewhere out of obligation," Green said. "I wanted a position that was mine. That I had chosen. That couldn't be revoked because someone changed their mind about their responsibilities." She looked at her hands for a moment. "Ash was Red's son. An engagement was a legal and social tie that didn't depend on anyone's sentiment." She looked back up. "So I asked for that instead."
The room was quiet.
Anabel looked at Green with the expression she'd been wearing for the whole story — that complete, lateral attention. After a moment she said:
"How old were you."
"Six," Green said.
Something moved in Anabel's expression. Not pity — Green would have closed immediately at pity — but something more like recognition. The specific look of someone hearing a thing that lands somewhere true in their own experience.
She nodded once.
Green held her gaze for a moment, and then picked up her book again. Which, from Green, meant: that's enough of that, and also, you passed something just now, and also, I'm not going to say either of those things out loud.
The room breathed out quietly.
"Right," May said, into the silence, because someone had to. She looked around. "Who's next."
The specific silence of four people finding their respective hands very interesting answered her.
"Someone," May said, "has to be next."
"Not me," Dawn said immediately.
"Not me," Serena said, at the same speed.
They looked at each other. Then at Misty.
Misty looked at the ceiling with the expression of someone who has lost a game of musical chairs and is now deciding how to be graceful about it.
"Fine," she said. "Fine. But I want it on record that I was two years old and nothing that happened was my fault."
"Noted," Anabel said.
Misty looked at her. Anabel was simply attentive. No amusement she could object to. No evaluation she could deflect.
Misty crossed her arms, leaned back against the wardrobe, and began.
It had been the Waterflower Extravaganza.
Cerulean City's great annual event — the one the whole city came out for, the one that had been running since before Misty was born, built around the Waterflower family's celebrated Water Pokémon performances. Her mother as the star. Always the star. A water ballet with Dewgong and Vaporeon that had made grown adults cry in the front row for twenty consecutive years without apparent effort.
Misty had wanted to be in it.
She was two. She could already swim better than most children twice her age — it had always been more natural to her than walking, she'd been half in the water since before she could form complete sentences. She had watched her mother rehearse and her sisters rehearse and she had wanted, with the absolute consuming certainty available only to two-year-olds, to be part of it.
Her sisters had said no.
Specifically they had said: too young, too small, too uncoordinated, would probably splash at the wrong moment, was basically a Poliwag in terms of stage presence and grace, should wait until she was older, should consider whether she even had the temperament for performance, should perhaps go and play somewhere.
Misty had absorbed all of this with the patience available to her — which was none — and then informed her sisters, at considerable volume, from the top of the stairs:
"I hate you! I hope you never ever get boyfriends! Any of you! Ever in your whole lives!"
She said it with the full conviction of someone who believes spoken curses work. Then she turned and ran.
She made it to the Cerulean River. Her place — the stretch of bank outside the city where the wild Water Pokémon lived in the deep channel and nobody called her a Poliwag. She sat down in the grass and cried comprehensively into her knees.
She also made several declarations to a passing Poliwag about her future. These declarations involved becoming the greatest Water Pokémon trainer in Kanto, having a very impressive boyfriend who was probably a Champion, and returning to the Extravaganza one day to be so astonishing that her sisters felt it in their bones.
The Poliwag appeared to take all of this seriously, which she appreciated.
She was mid-declaration — the boyfriend part, specifically — when the light changed.
The afternoon sun went somewhere else. The air above the river went still in the way air went still when something large was displacing it. The Poliwag vanished. The ambient sounds of the riverbank — water, rustling, distant Pidgey — switched off together, as if someone had turned down the volume on the whole afternoon.
Misty looked up.
And up.
And up.
"I fainted," she said, to the room. "Immediately. It hadn't done anything. I looked at it and I went down."
"What was it?" Dawn asked, leaning forward.
"A Red Gyarados," Misty said.
The room took a moment with this.
"Shiny," Green said.
"I was two," Misty said. "I did not have the vocabulary for shiny. I had very large and very red and extremely close and my brain decided the correct response to all three of those things together was to stop working."
"That is a completely reasonable response," Serena said.
"Thank you." Misty paused. "Apparently it had just surfaced to see what all the crying was about. It was curious. It hadn't done anything threatening at all. But I didn't know that because I was unconscious."
"How do you know what it was doing if you were unconscious?" Dawn asked.
"Because," Misty said, "of what happened next."
What happened next was Ash.
Two-year-old Ash Ketchum, apparently exploring the riverbank unsupervised — which, Misty had gathered over the years, was simply how Ash had spent most of his early childhood, and nobody had a fully satisfactory explanation for why he'd been allowed to — who had watched a Red Gyarados surface from the Cerulean River and had responded not with screaming or running or fainting but with:
"Ahhhh! It's really red! So cool! It's huge!"
The Gyarados had looked at him.
He had looked at the Gyarados.
And then, in the way that Ash communicated with Pokémon — which was not translation exactly, more the direct movement of meaning from one place to another, bypassing language entirely — they had understood each other. The Gyarados indicated the unconscious girl on the bank. Ash puffed out his small chest and said he would handle it.
He had then looked at Misty lying in the grass and said, audibly, to himself:
"She's kinda heavy. Where should I bring this girl to?"
He had brought her to the Extravaganza.
Not to the police station. Not to the Pokémon Centre. Not to any of the several sensible destinations a reasonable person might select upon finding an unconscious two-year-old by a river. By means that remained unclear even now he had gotten her backstage at the Cerulean Waterflower Extravaganza in time for the final act.
"My mother's last performance as the star," Misty said. Something in her voice had changed — the flat defensive energy was still there but underneath it something quieter had surfaced. "She retired the following season. Health reasons. None of us knew that one was going to be the last." She was quiet for a moment. "If I'd still been at the river I'd have missed it."
The room was still.
"The engagement was my father's doing," Misty said, moving on in the way she moved past things she'd said that were true and didn't want examined. "He heard the story, decided Ash was some kind of hero, and apparently the appropriate response to that was a betrothal. Very much my father's approach." She shrugged. "Anticlimactic. The Gyarados was the interesting part."
She looked at Anabel, because she had been aware throughout the whole story of Anabel listening — that complete unhurried attention that didn't perform anything, didn't evaluate visibly, just received — and she wanted to see what it looked like now that the story was finished.
Anabel was quiet for a moment.
Then she said: "You went back. The next year."
It wasn't a question.
Misty looked at her. "Yes."
"And performed."
"Yes."
Anabel nodded. Not the nod of someone ticking a box. The nod of someone who had followed a thread to where it led and found it ended where they expected. Her expression said, plainly enough to read without difficulty: I thought so.
Misty held her gaze for a second longer than she'd planned to.
"Right," she said, looking away. "That's mine. Someone else's turn."
She looked at the room. The room looked back with the energy of people who have been audience to something and are now being asked to be participants, which was a different thing entirely and required a moment of adjustment.
May looked at Dawn.
Dawn looked at May.
Between them passed the specific silent communication of two people who have been friends long enough to have entire arguments without speaking, and the argument they were currently having was about which of them was going to go next and both of them were losing.
Anabel watched this with what appeared to be genuine interest.
"Either of you is fine," she said helpfully.
"Thank you," May said, through a smile that didn't fully reach her eyes. "That's very helpful."
"I thought so," Anabel said.
Dawn made a sound that was half laugh half groan and buried her face in her knees.
Down the hall, in the room that was supposed to be asleep, Pikachu opened one eye.
Listened to the muffled sounds coming through the wall.
Looked at Ash.
Ash, flat on his back staring at the ceiling with his hands folded on his chest, said nothing.
"Pika," Pikachu said. You're not asleep.
"I'm resting," Ash said.
"Pi." Your eyes are open.
"I rest with my eyes open."
Pikachu looked at him with the expression of someone who has heard this exact argument before, from a Garchomp, recently, and did not find it convincing then either.
Through the wall: Dawn's voice, then May's, overlapping, then laughter, then someone — Misty probably — telling both of them to just pick one.
Ash looked at the ceiling.
"Pika pi," Pikachu said, settling back down. She's going to be fine.
"I know," Ash said.
"Pi." Go to sleep.
"I know," Ash said again, which was not the same as agreeing.
Pikachu closed his eye.
The ceiling continued to offer Ash nothing useful.
Down the hall the voices continued, and Ash listened to the shape of them — not the words, just the rhythm, the way a conversation sounded when it was going somewhere real — and after a while something in his shoulders that had been held since the moment he walked through the back door that evening and looked into the sitting room finally, quietly, let go.
He closed his eyes.
End of Part I.