Ash sat at the table.
Green had put omurice in front of him. Fluffy egg. Ketchup on top. Exactly how he liked it.
He stared at it.
The smell was good. The kitchen was warm. Everything about this moment was perfectly normal.
Which was the problem.
Because nothing about this was normal.
He picked up his fork. Held it. Put it back down.
He pressed both palms flat on the table and took a slow breath.
'Okay,' he thought. 'Okay. Think.'
He had been walking to the ferry.
There had been a flash.
And now he was here. Eight years old. In a house that was apparently his. Sitting across from Leaf Green in an apron.
He needed information. He needed to understand what had happened, why it had happened, and what exactly he was supposed to—
Something hit him on the head.
He grabbed it before it hit the table.
A letter. Small. Folded precisely. Sealed with a gold stamp — the outline of an alpaca pressed into the wax.
Ash stared at it.
He looked up at Green.
She was still mid-reach for her glass, her hair moving slightly, her eyes mid-blink.
She wasn't moving.
Nothing was moving.
The curtain by the window had stopped mid-flutter. A drop of water from the tap was hanging perfectly still in the air. The entire world had simply — paused. Quietly. Without announcement.
Like whatever had sent the letter needed him to read it without interruption.
Ash looked back down.
He broke the seal.
Dear Ash Ketchum,
You are confused. This is understandable.
I will explain.
You are dead.
Before you panic — you are not dead anymore. What you are is displaced. My children, Palkia and Dialga, engaged in a dispute. The cause was trivial. The result was not. The section of reality you were occupying was unmade in the crossfire. Your existence was erased.
I have corrected this.
You have been placed in the past — your own past — with your memories intact. Your body reflects the age of this timeline. You are eight years old. Your mind is not. This was intentional.
I will be direct with you, Ash Ketchum: you were important. The thread of your fate runs through too much of this world's history for me to allow it to simply end over a stolen dessert. What happens to you matters. What you do matters. I have given you the chance to do it again — with the advantage of knowing what is coming.
Use it wisely.
As a secondary measure, the bonds you formed with certain individuals in your previous life have been formalised in this one. You are not married. You are engaged. There is a meaningful difference and I would prefer you remember it.
You will have questions. Most of them will answer themselves in time. The rest — figure out yourself. That is, after all, what you do.
— Arceus
Ash didn't move for a long moment.
He read it again. From the top.
Then he set it down on the table very carefully and sat with both hands in his lap.
Dead.
He had died.
Not an accident. Not a close call. Not one of the hundred near-misses he'd walked away from over a decade of travelling.
Erased. Completely. From reality itself.
And then rebuilt by a god who had decided his life was too important to lose.
He sat with that for a long moment.
The weight of it was different from anything he'd felt before. It wasn't fear. It wasn't grief exactly. It was something quieter and heavier — the specific feeling of understanding, for the first time, how close the edge had been. How little it had taken.
A stolen dessert.
His entire existence, ended over a stolen dessert.
He let out a slow breath through his nose.
'Okay,' he thought. 'Okay.'
He folded the letter carefully. Put it in his pocket.
The world moved again.
The curtain fluttered. The water drop fell. Green completed her reach for her glass and took a sip, completely unaware that time had stopped and started again around her.
Ash picked up his fork.
He took a bite of the omurice.
Warm. Good. Familiar in a way he couldn't quite explain — the taste of a house he'd apparently lived in for years he didn't remember living.
He needed to think. And he always thought better when his hands were doing something.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
He was halfway through the plate when it hit him.
Not a thought. Not a slow realisation.
A sudden, lurching drop in his chest — like a step that wasn't there.
Pikachu.
He stood up so fast the chair scraped back hard across the floor.
Green looked up sharply. "Ash—"
He wasn't listening.
He was already moving. Into the hallway. Checking the corners. Behind the shoe rack by the front door.
"Pikachu!"
Nothing.
He took the stairs two at a time and burst back into the bedroom. Checked under the bed. Checked the wardrobe. Behind the dressing table, behind his desk, behind the door.
"Pikachu!"
Silence.
Back downstairs. Faster. The sitting room. The storage cupboard. The back door — he wrenched it open and stepped out into the garden.
"Pikachu, where are you?!"
The garden was empty.
Just grass. Just morning light. A Pidgey that startled at the noise and flapped away indignantly.
No yellow ears. No red cheeks. No familiar warm weight that had sat on his shoulder for ten years like it had always belonged there.
Green appeared in the doorway behind him.
Arms crossed. Concern and confusion both on her face, fighting for space.
"Ash. What are you doing?"
"Pikachu." He turned around. His voice was tight in a way he couldn't fully control. "Where's Pikachu? He was on my shoulder — he's always on my shoulder — where is he, Green, where—"
"Ash." Her voice was firm. Not unkind. But firm enough to cut through. "We don't have a Pikachu."
He stopped.
"What?"
"We don't have a Pikachu," she repeated. Watching him carefully now. The playful edge she usually carried was completely gone. "You've never had one. You always said you didn't want a Pokémon until you'd properly earned the right."
Ash stared at her.
And then — slowly, like cold water spreading through him — it landed.
The letter.
You have been placed in the past. Your own past.
The past.
He was eight years old.
Pikachu wasn't his yet. Pikachu was out there somewhere — in a forest, in a Pokéball in Professor Oak's lab — living a life that hadn't touched his yet. Years away. A whole other chapter of a story that hadn't started.
Ash stood in the garden of his childhood home and felt the full weight of that for the first time.
He pressed his lips together.
Looked down at the grass.
Green said nothing. She just waited — the way she waited when she knew something was wrong and had decided that talking would only make it worse.
After a long moment, Ash let out a slow breath.
"Right," he said quietly. "Right. I forgot."
"Forgot what?" Green asked carefully.
"Nothing." He straightened up. Turned back toward the house. His face was steady again — the steadiness of someone who had learned a long time ago how to keep moving when something hurt. "Sorry. I panicked over nothing."
Green looked at him for a long moment.
She didn't believe him. He could tell she didn't believe him.
But she didn't push.
"Your omurice is getting cold," she said instead, and stepped aside to let him back in.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
He sat back down at the table.
Finished the omurice. Every bite.
Green moved around the kitchen quietly, washing up, not looking at him directly but watching in the way she always watched — through her peripheral vision, patient and precise.
Ash kept one hand in his pocket, fingers resting on the folded letter.
Engaged, it had said. Not married. Engaged.
The bonds you formed with certain individuals in your previous life have been formalised in this one.
Certain individuals.
Plural.
He hadn't missed that word the first time. He'd filed it away to deal with later, because dead and eight years old and Pikachu was already more than enough.
But it sat there now, patient and waiting.
Plural.
How many was plural?
He set his fork down on the empty plate.
Looked up at Green.
She was leaning against the counter, watching him with her arms loosely crossed. The expression he could never quite read — the one that was always three moves ahead.
"Green," he said.
"Mm."
"The letter mentioned—" He stopped. Started again. "Am I engaged to anyone else?"
Green was quiet for a moment.
Not surprised. Not confused. Just — quiet, in the way of someone deciding how much rope to give.
"Yes," she said.
Ash waited.
She looked at him with the calm patience of someone who has decided that the full list is something he can figure out himself.
"How many," he said, very evenly, "is yes?"
Green picked up her hat from the hook by the door.
"You'll meet them," she said simply.
Ash opened his mouth.
"I'm going to Professor Oak's lab," she continued, pulling the hat on. "Don't do anything inadvisable while I'm gone."
"I never do anything inadvisable."
She gave him the look.
"Inadvisable is a strong word," he amended.
The corner of her mouth moved.
She opened the door and paused on the threshold with the morning light behind her.
"Ash," she said.
"Yeah."
A pause. Small. Careful.
"Whatever it is you're not telling me—" She didn't finish the sentence. Just let it sit. "You'll figure it out. You always do."
She left.
The door clicked shut.
Ash sat alone in the quiet kitchen.
The letter in his pocket. The empty plate in front of him. The word plural sitting somewhere behind his eyes and refusing to leave.
He thought about Pikachu.
About ten years of a journey that hadn't happened yet. About every gym, every rival, every crisis he now knew was coming — and all the ways he could face them differently this time. Better. With the weight of experience instead of just instinct.
He thought about the trainer age. Eighteen. A number that had meant nothing to him the first time, because he'd been ten and the rules had been ten. Now it loomed differently — a full decade between him and the road.
A decade.
'Fine,' he thought. 'Then I'll use it.'
He stood up.
Picked up his plate. Carried it to the sink.
Washed it.
Put it away.
Small, ordinary things. The kind of things that reminded a person they were still here. Still in a body. Still moving forward.
He looked out the window over the sink at Pallet Town — small and quiet and exactly as he remembered it from a lifetime ago.
Somewhere out there, Misty was probably already arguing with someone.
May was probably late to something and absolutely unbothered about it.
Dawn was probably practising something until it was perfect.
And Pikachu — his Pikachu — didn't exist for him yet.
That was the one thing that still hurt, clean and simple, underneath everything else.
He pressed his forehead lightly against the cool glass of the window.
'I'll find you again,' he thought. 'I promise.'
He stayed there for a moment.
Then straightened up, squared his shoulders, and went to figure out what being eight years old with a decade to wait actually looked like on a Tuesday morning.