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Everything is a blur of noise and light and pain , and Pikachu curls in closer to Ash’s still frame beneath him with his ears pressed low to his head and heartbeat too loud in his chest.
Usually, after the crisis is over, they can be done. They can wash off the mud and the dirt and the tears. They can have their friends look them over, head to the closest Pokemon Center, and they can rest.
Usually, usually-
But Pikachu can hear no familiar tones. Pikachu does not recognize this place, this sterile smell, the lingering sense of illness and death and pain and healing. Pikachu wakes up in a daze clinging to Ash through a whirl of movement and he has no intention of letting go.
He’s shivering, he realizes, all over. He doesn’t understand why he feels so cold when all he can remember is fire and steel and his partner’s pained cry echoing through his head in some demented loop that will not leave him alone.
He wishes the noise would go away. He wishes his muscles would stop jittering from adrenaline or pain or fear or perhaps all three.
But, most of all, Pikachu wishes Ash would wake up.
They’re moving, moving, and Pikachu should be paying attention but he’s barely clinging to consciousness as it is. He knows he has to stay awake. He knows that he can’t stop, not yet, not when Ash could still be in danger, not when his best friend in the whole wide world still needs him-
But it’s so hard.
Pikachu can hardly keep his eyes open. Everything everywhere stings with every movement. Pikachu’s pretty sure that there had been fire. He remembers the fire, the too-hot too-close flames licking over his fur. He’s pretty sure he’s been burned.
He’s pretty sure that Ash has been burned worse.
So he just stays. He stays curled up on top of Ash’s chest, keeping track of that too fast heartbeat beneath his small yellow dirty paws, tail held low and defensive and ready, and sparks flying off his matted cheeks.
Matted cheeks. Matted cheeks: he is pretty sure they are red from more than just the colouring of his fur, that they are matted from more than just mud.
Pikachu curls up tighter. He feels as if he is moving through a dream. Perhaps this is another Darkrai situation. Perhaps this is all in his head.
It feels real, though. The squeaking of the wheels of the cart beneath him, the drying clumped unpleasant feeling of his fur, the shouting and yelling and panicked voices, the colours whooshing past them in a haze of blue red and greens.
Ash’s breath, rattling in his chest, in and out, in and out-
(There’s something wrong with his partner’s lungs, there’s something not quite right inside of Ash and Pikachu should fix it but he doesn’t know how. He doesn’t know how and this terrifies him more than he could ever say.)
Someone leans over to place something around Ash’s face, and Pikachu snarls because his poor exhausted battered body is still thrumming with its ever constant song to protect, protect, protect and he does not know these hands with their strange rubber gloves and he does not know these smells and he does not know this place and his every instinct has gone haywire and he’s drawn up tenser than a bolt of lightning right before it releases itself into the storm.
Voices, distorted and almost far away, make their way into Pikachu’s ears.
“What’s the pikachu even doing here? This is a hospital- ”
“... wouldn’t let go, sir-”
“Then make it let go.”
Pikachu tenses.
Let go? Ash? Let go of Ash?
No. No. No, no, no no no-
Pikachu stands, digs his claws into the fabric of Ash’s shirt, growls and sparks and glares-
Or, he tries to. His stance is wavering and listing from weary muscles and a trembling kind of agony. His claws quickly retract after Ash- lost somewhere in the midst of his own unconscious battle- lets out a whining sound. His bleary eyes can not focus on anything at all, everything becoming solely blurred colours of slightly formed blobs.
Ash needs him. Ash needs him. There are threats all around and Pikachu can hardly stand, but someone grabs him around his midriff and the panic in his chest expands and grows and suddenly there’s lightning, electricity, flowing through his veins-
“Oh, shit-”
Pikachu uses his every ounce of his control and forces the energy outwards, making sure none of it touches Ash. Ash has enough burns tonight. Ash has enough pains to deal with tonight. Ash has enough pains to deal with for a lifetime.
“SOMEONE GET THAT THING OUT OF HERE-”
Pikachu looks down at his beloved partner’s face, every muscle trembling with exertion and pain. He can hardly recognize it through all the bruises, through all the burns. He leans up and licks it anyways, because this is Ash and they stick together, no matter what.
“Doesn’t it have a pokeball somewhere? Where’s it’s pokeball?”
“I don’t know, sir, it’s not on the kid’s belt-”
Someone tries to grab him again. Pikachu shocks them back harder, whirling around to try and target someone he can’t even see through all the haze in his vision. There are enemies everywhere and Pikachu is scared and angry and he can and he will protect.
“Is the surgery room prepped? This kid’s running against the clock-”
“This pikachu needs medical attention, sir, almost as much as the kid-”
His shot goes wild, expands too wide and too big. It is not concentrated enough- not powerful enough, and the hands are coming back, coming back for more, coming back to take him away-
NoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNo-
“I found it! I found the pokeball! It was in the kid’s bag-”
“THEN USE IT ALREADY-”
Iron Tail, fast and clean and effective. He bats away a fast reaching hand and makes another warning sound in his throat. This is my Ash , he says, my partner , and you can’t have him-
A red light.
Nothing.
This is a familiar nothingness.
This is a terribly familiar nothingness.
Pikachu wants out.
Now. He wants out now. He wants to scrape at the walls of this prison but there is nothing scrape on or scrape with, there is nothing .There is only endlessness, and Pikachu can only feel breathless because all this space still feels so small, like it’s squishing him flat, like it’s getting smaller all the time.
And Ash needs him
Ash needs him.
And he’s trapped, trapped, stuck. There’s no way out and Pikachu had been thinking recently that perhaps the pokeball wouldn’t be as bad as he remembered it, that perhaps all his time spent in freedom would have lessened how cold and confined it felt here, but no longer, no longer, because it isn’t as bad as he remembered it, it is so much worse.
Because, because, because-
Pikachu can’t breathe in here. Pikachu is going to die here. Pikachu got out of here once and swore never again, never again, never ever ever again.
Ash needs him, and he’s trapped, and Ash is going to die out there, because he’s all alone, because Pikachu left him.
NONONONONONONONONONONONONO-
He’s not sure how long he’s been here, caught like a fly in an Ariados web, but every second is an hour and there is no rest in this wretched place, no peace. His heart is filled with daggers and the panic is reverberating around his nonexistent skull because the pokeball takes and it takes and it takes and it leaves behind only nothingness.
Ash could be dead right now and Pikachu wouldn’t even know.
There’s a message on repeat in his head and it goes like this: have to get out, have to get to Ash, have to get out, have to get to Ash, have to gET OUT, HAVE TO GET TO ASH-
Unknown to Pikachu, there is a young man rushing through the crowded hallways, his eyes searching through the bustling of people and bodies and clutter all around. His orange t-shirt is on backwards after being pulled haphazardly onto his head, his short hair ruffled with bedhead, and his movements awkward and lumbering. It is obvious that the man has been running on adrenaline alone and no rest, sluggishness still working itself through his limbs even as his brain has gone high alert from the chaos of an emergency.
The man comes to a crashing stop just before smashing into the front desk.
“Hi. I’m here to see an Ash Ketchum- he was probably emitted two days ago. They said there was an emergency? That he was in critical condition? Can you update me on what’s goi-”
A slightly frazzled tone cuts through the tirade of words.
“I’m sorry, sir, do you mind giving me your name? Patient confidentiality means that I cannot reveal any information unless-”
“Brock. My name’s Brock, and I was informed that you were keeping my friend, Ash Ketchum, here. I’m one of his emergency contacts, and I-”
On it went. On and on and on. Too long, probably. Both sides of the conversation were highly frazzled by the situation, by all the injured people and concerned loved ones jostling around, and when push finally came to shove the manager could only look at Brock a little hopelessly and tell him that Ash wasn’t going to be able to see any visitors for at least another couple of days.
Brock sighed, pinched his nose, closed his eyes, and then opened them.
“What about Pikachu? Ash never travels without him. Where is he? Can I see him?”
The guy at the front desk frowned in confusion before snapping his fingers in recognition.
“Oh,” he says, nonchalant, “the pikachu? We put it in its pokeball.”
For a moment, silence.
And then-
“You WHAT?”
When Pikachu is released from the pokeball, his first instinct is to move. Run, find Ash, never leave Ash’s side ever again. But when he tries to stand his limbs go out from underneath him, so he freezes and stills and forces himself to take a trembling breath.
It takes him a moment to get himself out of the panicky headspace he’s worked himself up to. The nothingness had stretched forever around him and the sudden influx of noise and colours underneath his eyelids is enough to send him whirling into sensory overload.
He doesn’t bother opening his eyes, sensing that Ash is nowhere nearby, and that combined with the fact that he’s still dirty and injured, he’s paranoid enough that he’s set on edge.
And so, when someone reaches out and grabs him, Pikachu reacts on instinct, and blasts out a thunderbolt.
Which is how he is met, upon opening his bleary eyes, with a charred Brock’s grimacing smile.
And listen, Piakachu would much rather Ash’s thousand megawatt grin, or even Ash’s frown or tired-eyed smile, but Brock is familiar in a good way, and can give him the information he needs to hear, and so he murmurs an apologetic ‘ chu’ and licks the man’s nose. There is relief mixed in with the confusion and the bleariness now, even as his limbs ache and the dried muck in his fur pulls uncomfortably in all the wrong ways.
Brock picks him up, and Pikachu would have shocked him again for the pain of it, except that would be rude, and so instead he just holds himself still and stiff and bites down on the whimpers wanting to escape.
“Arceus, Pikachu, what were you guys mixed up with this time?”
He would answer, but he doesn’t rightly remember himself, and the darkness is dragging at his eyelids, and Brock is here, and the man doesn’t seem overly concerned about Ash’s well being and for now that is going to have to be enough.
(Besides, Brock probably wouldn’t understand him even if he did try to explain what he could recall.)
So instead Pikachu lies prone and quiet while Brock ferries him around the hospital- pausing only to speak furtively and with anger underlying his tone with one of the staff members, something about the dangers of leaving a damaged pokemon in a pokeball for extended periods- and then rushes him to the Pokemon Center.
The man tries to hand him over to Nurse Joy.
This does not go well.
Pikachu, still half delirious from pain and completely out of it from his time in the pokeball, senses the change in persons and responds negatively, to say the least.
Three electrocuted Chancey’s and an exasperated Nurse Joy later, Brock finds himself in the back room treating Pikachu himself, the yellow mouse pokemon completely spent, breathing laboriously and trembling all over with exertion, small cackles of electricity still escaping from its matted cheeks.
Brock bites the inside of his cheek, breathes deep, and tries not to feel a sense of terrible deja vu as he sets to work, all the while thanking his change in career choice.
He basically hasn’t slept in three days since he got the news that Ash was in critical care, two young tear-streaked faces he’s never met leaning close to the screen and explaining in trembling voices what the situation was, and the whole time Brock just remembers thinking Arceus, was I ever that young? even as he pulled on the first clothes he could get his hands on and packed a bag.
Ash is lucky Brock was only three days away by car, that the air ambulance had deposited him somewhere central instead of wherever the hell he’d been before.
Delia is going to be there by the end of the week, and Misty the day after that. Brock had been the one to listen to both women rant about plane tickets and how difficult it was to get them, somewhere between hitchhiking and passing out for three hours in a Pokecenter and renting a car to get there the rest of the way.
Brock peers down at the unconscious pokemon underneath his hands. Pikachu is lucky that Brock was only three days away. The man knows how much the mouse hated the pokeball, and given his condition… not good.
Lucky. Brock would feel luckier if there wasn’t a situation to begin with.
But now’s not the time to ponder or regret. There would be time enough for that later. For now, he picks up the brush and starts gently washing the fur around the wounds.
It’s not much, not yet, but it’s a start.
And, at this point, Brock will take what he can get.
“The doctors are pretty sure he’s gonna be okay, Pikachu.”
Pikachu looks up at Brock with fire in his eyes because pretty sure is not good enough. Because Ash is light and life and a breath of fresh air. Because Pikachu doesn’t know how to go on without Ash besides him anymore. They are Ash and Pikachu, Pikachu and Ash, not one or the other. They are partners. That means sticking together through thick and thin, through win or lose, through battles with legendaries and battles with leagues and hundreds and thousands of miles.
Pretty sure is not good enough. Not now and not ever. Ash has to be okay. Anything else is not an option.
Brock sighs, brushes anxious fingers through yellow fur again, carefully avoiding sensitive areas. Really, Pikachu should still be back at the Pokemon Center, receiving treatment and recovering. But the mouse had made it very clear just where he intended to be the moment it was on his feet again, remaining injuries aside.
And, well, Brock was pretty anxious to get back to Ash’s side himself, and so he had agreed on the condition the yellow pokemon take it easy, and then off they went.
And now they’re here, waiting in the quiet too-bright room, sitting on uncomfortable plastic chairs and waiting for someone to tell them they can see their friend, and everything sucks and tensions are high and the sooner this whole ordeal could be over, the better.
The light dings green, and exhausted looking man comes out and calls them over. There are documents to sign and procedures to go over, and the whole process takes forever so Brock doesn’t draw attention to the fact that Pikachu has slipped away when no one was paying attention, just hides his smirk from the doctor and gives the small pokemon time to find his partner.
Half an hour later, Brock leans against the doorway to Ash’s hospital room, arms crossed in front of him and an exhausted sort of look of happiness on his face.
Ash is far too pale, his eyes closed and face slack, the IV still tagged into his arm and the ventilator besides him thrumming softly as the mask over his nose and mouth fogged up with every breath. When Brock looks him over with his eyes, he can see the burn marks, bruises, the now scabbing wounds.
Mostly, however, his eyes are drawn to the splotch of yellow settled on Ash’s chest, rising and falling with every inhale and exhale. Pikachu’s eyes are closed to match his partners, and Brock knows the pokemon pushed himself too hard but can’t find it within himself to be angry about it.
This is a boy who jumps off cliffs without hesitation for strangers, who saves the world and brushes it off, who deserves so much more than hospital beds and near death experiences. This is a boy who holds more love for the world in his pinky finger than most people have in their entire bodies. Who loves his pikachu more than most people could ever understand, and Brock has watched the pair of them grow and learn and rise up higher and higher.
Sometimes the heroes make their way to glory, rising above every challenge and climbing ever higher, so alight with passion they are blinding.
Sometimes the heroes don’t escape unscathed. Sometimes, all that can be done is this, a silent vigil, fervent hopes and dreams whispered into the broken night, and people holding onto every conviction that the next dawn will be a brighter one.
So no, Brock can’t find it within himself to be angry. There is comfort and security in being close to someone you love, something powerful in going through the worst the world can throw at you and living anyways.
Instead, he makes his laborious way across the room and sits down by the boy’s side, reaches out to grab the hand not tangled with the IV, and lets himself rest.