The problem with May and Dawn going together was that neither of them wanted to go at all, and the problem with that was they both knew the other didn't want to go, which meant the negotiation had been running silently between them for the better part of five minutes with no resolution in sight and diminishing prospects of one.
Misty watched this with the satisfaction of someone who had already had their turn and was now entirely comfortable being audience.
"One of you," she said.
"We're deciding," May said.
"You've been deciding for five minutes."
"It's a nuanced decision."
"It really, genuinely isn't," Misty said.
Anabel, who had been watching the silent exchange between May and Dawn with the quiet attention she brought to most things — the specific attention of someone observing a dynamic they haven't encountered before and finding it instructive — said, calmly: "You could go together."
May and Dawn both looked at her.
"You said you met him at the same time," Anabel said. "It's the same story from two directions. It would be more complete that way."
A pause.
May looked at Dawn. Dawn looked at May.
The silent conversation between them shifted — from negotiation into the specific mutual recognition of two people who have been offered a door and are assessing whether walking through it constitutes a loss. It did not, they concluded simultaneously. It constituted strategy.
"Fine," May said.
"Fine," Dawn said, at exactly the same moment.
They looked at each other.
"I'll start," May said.
"Obviously," Dawn said, with the tone of someone who had expected nothing else and had made peace with it years ago.
It had started, as several significant things in both their lives had started, with their fathers making arrangements and bringing them along.
Professor Birch — May's father, broad and cheerful, perpetually slightly dishevelled in the specific way of people who spent most of their time in the field and had long since stopped fighting it — had been corresponding with Professor Oak for months about a collaborative research visit. Pokémon habitat studies. Cross-regional data. And something Oak had apparently been calling, with what Birch considered excessive gravitas, the Hoenn Paradox — a set of soil samples from Hoenn with unusually high mineral concentrations that had been producing anomalous results in the habitat data and which Oak had decided required his personal attention.
Professor Rowan had been invited too, from Sinnoh. Quieter than Birch, more deliberate, the kind of man who selected his words the way he'd select equipment for a long expedition — carefully, with clear purpose, nothing extra. He had brought Dawn.
Johanna, Dawn's mother, had come separately and arrived first. This was characteristic.
They had all come together at Pallet Town on a Tuesday in early summer, the ranch at its fullest and the light clean and the air warm with grass and distance, and both girls had watched the approach from the car windows with the specific focused attention of children arriving somewhere they've been told is important.
Professor Oak had met them at the gate.
With a Butterfree on his shoulder.
The Butterfree looked at both girls. Waved one small appendage in greeting.
"Freee," it said.
Both girls forgot every other thought they'd had.
"Oh," May breathed. "It's so cute."
"Oho," Oak said, with the particular satisfaction of a man who knew exactly what a Butterfree on his shoulder did to visiting children and had put it there deliberately. He smiled at them both. "So you like this little one. Think you might enjoy living in Kanto?"
The effect was immediate and total. Both girls went red in the specific way of children who have understood the implication of a sentence before they've had time to defend against it.
Their parents, standing behind them, laughed. Oak looked serenely pleased with himself. The Butterfree waved again.
"All right, Samuel," Birch said, stepping forward with the practiced ease of a man who had been managing Oak's particular brand of cheerful ambush for twenty years. "Give them five minutes before you start."
"I'm not starting anything," Oak said. "I'm welcoming them."
"There's barely a distinction," Rowan said, from behind Birch, which was the most words he'd offered since they arrived and which made Birch laugh harder than anything else had.
Johanna put a hand on Dawn's shoulder. "Your fiancé is out on the ranch with Gary at the moment," she said, to both girls, with the measured warmth of someone delivering information she knew would land with weight. "He'll be back to greet you shortly."
May and Dawn exchanged a glance — compressed, quick, carrying approximately three months of correspondence in it — and then looked away again, which fooled nobody.
"While the adults discuss the Paradox," Birch said, already turning toward the lab with the energy of a man who had been thinking about soil samples for three weeks, "why don't you explore the ranch? Completely safe. All the Pokémon here are used to people."
"Stay within the fences," Johanna added.
"Don't try to catch anything," Rowan said. "They live here."
"We promise," both girls said, already moving.
The ranch was considerably larger than either of them had imagined.
The word ranch had suggested something with visible edges. This did not have visible edges. This was a rolling green landscape that seemed to extend until it quietly became something else, populated with Pokémon going about their business with the easy indifference of creatures who had never had cause to be cautious around humans and saw no reason to start now.
A family of Nidoran rolling together in the long grass. An elderly Pidgeot overhead, moving without urgency. Three Tauros grazing in a loose group at a distance, tails swishing in the afternoon heat.
A small pink Jigglypuff hopped past without acknowledging them at all.
"This is infinitely better than listening to them talk about dirt," May announced, with the conviction of someone who had sat through several of her father's research conversations and had a well-developed sense of the alternative. She skipped ahead, scanning the horizon. "He mentioned a Snorlax somewhere. I want to find it."
"Last one to that tree is a Magikarp," Dawn countered, pointing to a large oak at the crest of a low hill.
They ran.
They were still running — breathless, laughing, May going backwards to taunt Dawn about her lead, which was already the error — when May's foot found the hidden mud patch.
It was not a small patch. It was not the manageable kind that caught your shoes and could be wiped. It was the deep, dark, foul-smelling variety that had been sitting under a concealing layer of long grass, gathering itself, apparently for exactly this occasion. May went in sole-first, with her full momentum behind her, and then sat down in it completely.
The sound it made was comprehensive and unflattering.
Dawn stopped.
Looked at May.
Looked at the mud.
Looked at May again — the expression on her face, the mud from waist to feet, the long grass that had given no warning whatsoever.
She laughed. Fully and without management, because it was too complete to manage.
"You look exactly like a Swampert that just finished a mud bath," she said, when she had enough breath for words.
May, who had been one second from crying from the shock, cracked despite herself. "That is not funny. Help me up. I'm genuinely stuck."
Dawn reached out. May grabbed her hand. May's foot slipped in the mud and her weight shifted and her mud-coated leg swung outward and the sleeve of Dawn's jacket — her good jacket, the blue one Johanna had bought specifically for this trip — went directly across it.
They both looked at the sleeve.
A long moment of silence.
"Now we look like Swamperts," Dawn said, in a very flat voice.
"We need water," May said immediately, already attempting to stand with the focused urgency of someone who has identified both the problem and the solution and intends to pursue the solution at full speed. "Right now. Before he gets back. Before our mothers see us. Before anyone—"
"Your mother is going to—"
"My mother will not know if we find water quickly enough. Look — there's a path. That way."
It was a Pokémon path, worn smooth by years of hooves and paws all heading to the same place. They pushed through the wet ferns lining it — getting wetter, which at this point had stopped being the relevant concern — and came out at the edge of a lake.
Not a pond. A proper lake — genuinely, unexpectedly large, the kind that had its own particular stillness, the surface completely flat and reflecting the Kanto sky back at itself with the clean precision of something undisturbed for a long time.
Both girls stopped.
"That's not just a pond," Dawn said.
"I know," May said. She was already moving toward the shore. "It's perfect. Quick, before anyone comes looking."
The mud had soaked through entirely. The pragmatic assessment of the situation took approximately four seconds and produced an obvious conclusion, and they stripped to their underclothes without discussion in the way people made practical decisions when the practical decision was clear, and got in.
The water was cold. Significantly cold. And completely clear, and after the mud it felt like the best thing that had happened to either of them in recent memory.
"Oh," May said, scrubbing her arms with visible relief. "That's so much better."
"It's freezing," Dawn said, dunking her head under, surfacing, pushing her wet hair back. "It's wonderful."
They cleaned up. And then — because they were already in, and the panic had settled, and the lake was genuinely beautiful, and they were seven years old despite everything that had been arranged about their futures — May splashed Dawn.
Dawn splashed back, twice as hard.
"We should pretend we're on a deserted island," May declared, spinning in the shallows and creating a wide, satisfying spray. "You be the brave explorer, I'll be the shipwrecked princess."
"I'm the princess," Dawn said immediately, dodging the spray.
"You can't be the princess, you weren't the one who fell—"
"That's exactly why I'm the princess. Princesses don't fall in mud."
"Princesses absolutely fall in mud, it's practically a requirement of the genre—"
"That's explorers—"
"Then you're the explorer—"
"I'm not being the explorer in my underwear in someone's ranch lake—"
"We're both in our underwear in someone's ranch lake, Dawn, that ship has completely sailed—"
The bushes at the edge of the lake moved.
Both girls froze. Mid-splash, mid-argument, water still dripping from their hands.
The bushes parted.
A boy came through them.
Roughly their age. Messy black hair. Baseball cap pushed back on his head. The look of someone who had been doing outdoor work all morning and had come to this specific place with a specific and entirely innocent purpose that had nothing whatsoever to do with finding two girls in their underclothes splashing in his lake.
He stepped out onto the bank.
Looked up.
Stopped completely.
His expression moved through several things in very quick succession — confusion, blankness, deeper confusion, the specific blankness of a brain that has received information it is not currently equipped to process. He looked at them. He looked at the lake. He looked at them again.
His mouth opened slightly.
"Eh," he said.
That was all he managed.
The girls' frozen silence lasted one second.
Then everything happened at once.
"Kyaaaa! Pervert!" Dawn screamed, at a volume that almost certainly reached the lab.
"Get out of here!" May shrieked, lunging for the nearest piece of clothing — a towel, muddy, functionally useless as a shield — and deploying it anyway with the commitment of someone who has no better options.
The boy's blank confusion became pure undiluted panic. He spun around so fast he nearly lost his footing. His cap came off his head and he jammed it over his face instead, eyes squeezed shut, shoulders up.
"Wait — I didn't — I wasn't — this is my spot, I just came to think, I come here every day, I didn't know anyone was — I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm leaving—"
He was already gone. Back through the bushes, faster leaving than arriving, the sound of his retreat fading rapidly into the ranch.
The lake went still.
The Kanto sky continued to reflect in it, undisturbed.
May and Dawn stood in the shallows in their wet underclothes holding a muddy towel between them and stared at the space where he'd been.
"Did he see anything," May said.
"He had his eyes shut," Dawn said.
"Before that."
A pause.
"...His eyes were shut very quickly," Dawn said, which was not quite the answer to the question but was the best answer available.
They got out.
They did not speak of it.
They got dressed over their damp underclothes, walked back through the ferns, emerged onto the ranch path and oriented themselves toward the lab, and agreed without a single word exchanged that the lake and the boy and the towel and all of it would be quietly buried and never surface again.
They told their mothers they'd fallen in a stream, which was close enough to the truth that it required no elaboration, and went inside to change.
When they came back down, their parents were still deep in the Hoenn Paradox, Birch gesturing at a sample jar with the enthusiasm of someone who had been waiting three weeks to gesture at it and was finally getting his chance.
Johanna looked at both girls with the expression of a mother who has identified a gap in the account she's been given and has decided, for now, to let it sit.
"He'll be back within the hour," she said.
"That's fine," Dawn said, in a voice of complete neutrality.
"Completely fine," May agreed.
They sat down on the bench outside the lab and waited in the specific silence of two people who are not thinking about the same thing.
He came back forty minutes later.
Gary was with him, talking about something, gesturing with the loose ease of someone used to having an audience. Ash was half-listening with the expression of someone whose attention is elsewhere, already scanning the yard in the way he apparently scanned most spaces — quick, systematic, not obvious unless you were watching for it.
He saw them.
He stopped walking for just a moment — one step's pause, barely noticeable, quickly recovered — and then continued forward at the same pace.
Gary was still talking.
Ash looked at May. Then at Dawn. Then, briefly, at the very faint mud shadow still visible on the hem of May's sleeve where the lake water hadn't quite finished the job.
He said nothing about it.
He sat down across from them on the low wall, with the ease of someone settling into familiar territory, and looked at them both with the direct, undecorated assessment of someone who had decided the most useful thing to do right now was take stock.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi," May said, in a voice that was entirely normal and contained absolutely nothing.
"Hi," Dawn said, equally normal, equally containing nothing.
Gary, arriving a step behind, looked between all three of them with the expression of someone who could feel the shape of something he had no information about.
Ash held both their gazes for a moment.
Then he nodded once, with the manner of someone who has made a private decision and is not going to be announcing it, and said: "You want to see the Snorlax? It's in the east field. I'll show you."
"Yes," May said immediately.
"Yes," Dawn said, at the same speed.
They stood up together.
Gary stared at all three of them. "...What is happening," he said, to no one in particular.
Nobody answered him.
"He knew," Dawn said, to the room. Flatly. With the tone of someone who had arrived at this conclusion some time ago and was no longer surprised by it. "He knew immediately. He never said anything. Not that day, not after."
"He just offered to show you the Snorlax," Serena said.
"He just offered to show us the Snorlax," May confirmed, with the expression of someone who has had years to appreciate the specific quality of that decision and still isn't entirely sure how to feel about it. "Like that was just — the next thing. The normal thing."
"It was very him," Misty said.
"It was extremely him," Dawn agreed.
A brief, warm silence settled over the room — the kind that came after a story that had been held for a long time and had turned out, in the telling, to be funnier and more affectionate than either teller had expected.
Anabel had been still throughout. Not the stillness of someone waiting for their turn but the stillness of someone who has been somewhere else entirely — some private distance — and is now quietly returning.
"He never mentioned it," she said. Not a question.
"Never," May said.
"Not once," Dawn said. "Not to us. Presumably not to Gary, because Gary would have used it, repeatedly, for years."
Anabel was quiet for a moment.
"What is it," May said, watching her, with the tone of someone who has decided to ask the question directly because the indirect approach was taking too long.
Anabel looked at her.
"Nothing," she said.
"That's not a nothing expression," May said.
A pause.
Anabel looked at her hands. Something in her expression was doing the thing it had been doing all evening — surfacing briefly and then being set aside, the expression of someone managing the distance between what they're thinking and what they're saying with a great deal of practice.
"He kept your secret," Anabel said, finally. Simply. "That's all."
The room was quiet.
"That's all?" Misty said.
"That's all," Anabel said, and looked up, and her expression was back to its usual quiet surface.
But May watched her for a moment longer than necessary, with the expression of someone who has been given an answer that is technically complete and is nonetheless certain it is not the whole of it.
She filed it away.
Down the hall, in the room that was supposed to be asleep, Pikachu opened one eye at the sound of laughter coming through the wall — Dawn's, high and bright, May's underneath it, and the lower sound of Misty saying something dry that set them both off again.
He looked at Ash.
Ash was on his back, eyes open, hands folded on his chest, looking at the ceiling.
"Pika," Pikachu said. Still not asleep.
"Still resting," Ash said.
"Pi-ka." They're fine.
"I know."
Pikachu looked at him with the patient expression of someone who has made this point before and expects to make it again.
"Pika pi chu," he said. She's fine too.
Ash said nothing for a moment.
"I know," he said.
He didn't say anything else. Neither did Pikachu. The voices came through the wall in waves — laughter, then talking, then laughter again, the rhythm of a room full of people who have been in each other's lives for years and are somewhere in the middle of something they'll remember.
After a while Ash closed his eyes.
This time he kept them closed.