At The Food Court (PG-13, Tragedy, spite!fic) [Part 1]
Summary: 15 years later... (A spite!fic/What You Didn't See/What Really Happened of a certain scene in Cori Falls's The Prodigal Parents.)
Word Count: ~11,000 words (Edit: Which... is apparently too much for one LJ post?! If it says so...)
Genre: Angst/Tragedy, possibly verging on Horror at some points.
Author's Note: Mm, there's been a slight... orientation change of one character, which wasn't really necessary for anything, but which I carried out just to spite Cori Falls' homophobia. Just assume he's bisexual.
If one joke early on seems odd, remember that Pokemon currency, as shown in the games, does not have fractional units. In the original fic, Cori Falls had people paying in dollars, but there's no such things as dollars in the Pokemon world - not even in Unova, which has the freaking Golden Gate Bridge By Any Other Name in it. So, yes, a mild flipping off of a minor error...
And heavy bashing of the OOC depictions of James, Jessie, Meowth, and Gary in Cori Falls's fics. Yes, I blatantly made things up at a couple of points. Suffice to say, I don't trust those four as far as I can tackle them. If you wish I had just stuck to the facts of her fics and done a true straight-What-You-Didn't-See - feel free to dislike it. I wouldn't blame you.
[Furthermore, I would like to square this with the Team Rocket AU timeline Cori Falls's site provided, but it's hideously inconsistent. Trying to align the timeline with A White Today, Ash would have been stripped of his Trainer's License at the end of 2001-start of 2002 - yet the timeline has Ash still going on as a Pokemon Trainer into Hoenn, and makes no mention of his losing his Trainer's License. It makes no bloody sense whatsoever, and since The Prodigal Parents makes direct reference to the end of A White Today, I can only assume the end of A White Today and The Prodigal Parents were both written after that timeline was written. However, I can still use some of it, so let me do so - this is occurring during November 2016, and Ash started his journey in 1999, was savagely assaulted on October 8, 2001, and completely lost his mind on December 21, 2001.
Put that way, I'm tempted to introduce Cori!Ash to Ariana - they might be able to commiserate with each other over their... shared... experiences. Who knows, they might actually get along...]
Warnings: (TRIGGERS) Mental illness, public embarrassment, brain injuries, mentions of physical assault and off-screen injuries, hints of sociopathy, intentional sabotage of someone's record. (Misc.) Blatant as-you-don't-know-Bob OC.
Severe OOCness for Cori-Falls!Ash in the final third of the fic - I tried to write him sympathetically, which, in retrospect, drastically changed his behavior from the first (direct-from-Cori-canon) third of the fic. *sigh* Mea culpa, mea culpa.
[Spoiler (click to open)]
(In fact, it forced me to rewrite a small chunk of the exposition - as I wrote Ash as not being completely destroyed,
"Sabrina, with the consent of all involved, including Ash's mother, probed his mind to try to determine his mental state, but reported, after several sessions, that she believed Ash was gone - not just buried, but gone - and that whatever they eventually recovered, even in the very best scenario, would be something that functioned and understood his situation and resembled Ash, but wouldn't be... Ash." Trace folded his arms behind his head. "And you know Sabrina, with all her campaigns to get Psychic-types granted personhood status and her general neurodiversity-advocacy - if she thought Ash was gone beyond recall...
"Nonetheless, she agreed to try to recover - something, and they were going to bring in the most skilled neuroscientists, the most competent psychics, the very best care, pull out all the stops to help him recover to the point that he could lead a normal life..."
had to become
"Sabrina, with the consent of all involved, including Ash's mother, probed his mind to try to determine his mental state, but reported that there wasn't much hope - Nonetheless, she agreed to try to recover... something, and they were going to bring in the most skilled neuroscientists, the most competent psychics, the very best care, pull out all the stops to help him recover to the point that he could lead a normal life...")
===
"I want ten MIGHTY KIDS MEALS with CHEESEBURGERS! Cheeseburgers RULE!"
Rhys nearly dropped his burger at the shout; the next moment, he swung around in his seat and stared in the direction of the counter, where even the hardened clerk was doing a poor job of disguising her disbelief. A middle-aged man - probably homeless, to tell from his poor grooming, dirty clothing, and slightly unnerving air - was grinning at her as if there was nothing unusual at all about his order, while an older woman with prematurely grey hair was huddling in on herself next to him, as if hoping she could hide from the stares of the rest of the McDonald's customers. Upon close inspection, she had to be in her early fifties at the worst, but the lines of strain on her face, untended grey hair, and stooped posture made her look much older.
"What the heck is his problem?" Rhys asked, gawking at the unlikely pair. "Is he getting it for a bunch of kids, or something?" Maybe he was one of those teachers desperately trying to be 'just one of the kids', and went a little too far with method acting... Didn't look the part, but a lot of the hardcore Trainers were... eccentric, to put it politely.
"Doesn't seem like... Oh god. No."
Rhys turned around, blinking, and saw his partner staring at the two with a look of utter horror, his face white and drawn. "What?" When his partner didn't initially respond, Rhys snapped his fingers in front of his face, then leaned across the table and lowered his voice. "Do you think he's going to get violent? I'm decent with people, Trace, I could try talking him down -"
"No - no, it's not that," his partner said, holding up his hands, "it's just that - I - I know him."
"You what?"
In the background, the ill-groomed man confirmed that yeah, he really did want ten Mighty Kids' Meals, and that he didn't understand why the clerk was asking. "Man, it's been over a decade since I last saw him - Do you know anything about the Ash Ketchum case?"
Rhys scratched his head. "No, I don't think - Wait, over a decade? Um... name sounds slightly familiar - Can't remember why, though."
"They would have kept it out of the papers after the initial story broke - he was only twelve at the time, and..." Trace took another look at the man, then shut his eyes and turned away, his face contorting as if the sight had been a physical blow. "Everyone thought it would blow over in a year, at the most, and they didn't want a stain on his record. Get him the best help, send him home to recuperate, and he'd be..." His voice caught in his throat, and he took several seconds to continue. "...back on his feet in no time..."
"Ashy-poo, don't you think ten meals is a little much?" the woman asked the man with the utmost gentleness, but the effort showed in her voice; she sounded like she was the one who was about to crack and start going after people with ketchup containers and plastic lids, not her male companion. Rhys revised any bizarre contingency plans accordingly.
"But mooom, I'm hungryyy!" whined the man, presumably Ash, and Rhys flinched in involuntary horror: he sounded like he was about five years old - and a childish five, at that. Yes, Rhys willed himself to think after a moment, he probably couldn't help his behavior, and one shouldn't be disturbed by the mentally ill, one should be compassionate and accepting -
But good heavens, that voice coming out of a grown man!
When he turned back to Trace, his partner gave him a wan, hopeless smile. "Yeah," he said. "It didn't work out quite the way anyone thought it would."
"But - I mean - what happened?" Rhys asked despite himself. "Was he always like this?"
"Are you kidding me? Not a bit! He was one of the most active, determined Pokemon train-"
"You don't want to spoil your dinner, do you?" the woman asked Ash, her voice pleading. "I'm making you your favorite - chili dogs and pizza pot pies!"
"Pizza pot pies?" Rhys echoed incredulously, not even aware he was doing it.
"If it makes him happy," Trace said, running one hand through his hair and shaking his head, looking down at the remnants of his salad without seeing them. "Delia was the brightest, cheeriest woman - God, to see her reduced to this..." He looked about to lose his lunch.
"But I still want ten cheeseburgers!" the scraggly-haired man whined in the background, drawing out the 'e's in the exact manner that a spoiled little kid might. It sounded like some sort of horrible parody of entitled fans at a convention or irate creeps complaining they couldn't get dates - but this was real.
Then, to Rhys's absolute astonishment, Ash began to jump up and down, his feet landing heavily on the floor each time in the exact manner than a little kid's wouldn't, and started to scream and flail his arms about. "I want ten buuuurgers! I want ten buuuurgers! I want -"
"What is wrong with him?" Rhys whispered frantically across the table, glancing back at the screaming man every other second as his voice ramped up and up in volume. The customers in line behind Ash and Delia had, as one, decided that they weren't so hungry after all and were fleeing the fast-food place posthaste, and the mall security guard was creeping over from the entrance, PokeBall already in hand.
"He's - well, there's no nicer way to say this, considering what you've already seen, but - he's literally crazy," Trace whispered back, eyes wide as he stared at the deranged Ash. "He -"
"I want ten buuuurgers!"
Delia pressed one hand to her temple, looking as though she was on the verge of breaking down in tears, and managed, "Okay, Ashy. Mommy will get ten Mighty Kids Meals for you."
Ash instantly stopped his tantrum and looked at her brightly, as if nothing untoward had happened. Well, if he's crazy, he probably doesn't think anything weird did happen, Rhys thought, fiddling with the Max Repel canister in his pocket. It wasn't quite rated for humans, but in the absence of any mace... "Can I get some McFlurries, too?"
"Now, Ash -" Delia began.
"But I want some McFluuurries!"
Mercifully for the remaining patrons at the McDonald's, Delia immediately gave in. "Oh, all right, all right." She again turned to the clerk (who had been inching back towards the kitchen area) and said, "I'll have ten cheeseburger Mighty Kids Meals with Cokes, one of each flavor McFlurry, and a bacon double cheeseburger with a small Coke." From her voice, Rhys thought that, if McDonald's sold alcoholic beverages, she would have added, "And a bottle of whiskey, the hardest stuff you've got - for here, not to go."
The cashier didn't even dare get closer to the cash register, but whipped out a pocket calculator and frantically jabbed in the numbers; after about thirty seconds, during which Ash began to shift around on his feet and look around blankly, she said, "That'll be 43.94," reached over carefully to the cash register and inputted the amount, and then fled off to the kitchen area the moment that Delia swiped her credit card and signed the receipt. Rhys thought about asking how in the world somebody charged a fractional amount - one of the cashier's fingers must have slipped in her haste to calculate the cost - but decided it was best to leave it be.
Instead, he turned back to his partner and asked quietly, "If he used to be all right, what happened to him?"
"No one was sure," Trace muttered, watching the pair in the same way that he might observe a herd of wild Rhyhorn around mating season, ready to explode at the slightest provocation from a perceived challenger. "A mugging was what set off the psychotic break, but it wasn't enough to drive anyone crazy - there was something else going on with him, something had been wrong for months -" As Dalia guided Ash over to a nearby table, he broke off and shook his head. "Shouldn't talk about it here. It's a long story, and more than a bit ugly to boot."
"Mom, after lunch, can we go to the PokeMart?" Ash asked as he sat down. "Team Rocket killed my Pikachu, and I want a new one."
Rhys's eyebrows nearly shot into his hairline. If Team Rocket had killed one of his Pokemon, maybe that explained -
"Now, Ash, I've told you a thousand times," Dalia said in a weary, pitying voice, "that wasn't a real Pikachu - that was a stuffed toy." Rhys cringed. "Professor Oak had to take your real Pokemon away when your license was revoked because you were always making them attack people, remember?"
"They were going to give it back to him the moment that he received a clean bill of mental health," Trace said under his breath, looking away and half-heartedly jabbing his fork into a shriveled piece of lettuce. "Nobody thought it would be more than a temporary suspension. He obviously wasn't responsible for his actions, in the state he was in at the hearing."
"What state was he in?"
His partner tensed up as if he'd asked him to describe the conditions of the remains at an industrial accident; before Rhys could apologize, though, Ash said in a whining voice, "But I saw them! I wanted to Thundershock that stupid mini-Jessie, mini-James, and mini-Gary, and then the big Jessie ripped its head off! It's just like that time stupid Gary ran over my Bayleef with his car! They're a bunch of evil bastards, Mom!"
The word caught Rhys by surprise, but only because it seemed out-of-place for the five-year-old diction. "Ash, what have I told you about using naughty words like that?" Delia responded, though her heart wasn't in it. "I spoke to Gary and Arwen -" A victim of LOTR-loving parents if there ever was one - "-on the phone the other day - they told me how you barged into their home and then threatened Sam and his friends. How many times do I have to tell you to leave the Oaks and the Woodsons alone?"
"Bet he deserved it," Trace muttered with uncharacteristic bitterness. When Rhys looked back around at him in shock, he flinched and held up his hands. "Sorry - I don't even know who Sam is, he's probably a total innocent. Gary, however - the Professor's grandson - he's a real shit." His expression tightened at some old memory. "I used to know him."
When no further explanation was forthcoming, Rhys looked back at Ash - it was like watching a thirty-car pile-up in action - and noticed that the man was looking around the restaurant in boredom, the reprimand obviously having bounced off of him without effect. Suddenly, Ash's eyes widened, he shot to his feet, and he pointed in a seemingly-random direction with as much panic and vigor as a sane person might use to point out an outcoming stampede of Tauros. "AUGH! It's Team Rocket!"
Since Rhys saw nothing of the like in that direction, he scrambled to his feet, grabbed a PokeBall in one hand and the Max Repel canister in another, and prepared to help subdue Ash as the madman proceeded to charge at and assault... a cardboard cut-out of the Hamburglar. It was so incongrous that he temporarily wondered if he'd gone insane, but Ash smugly marched up to the cut-out and jabbed a finger in its face. "I see that big bag of cheesburgers you're carrying, Team Rocket! I know you're trying to steal food, but you're not gonna get away with it! Snorlax! Hit him with your Hyper Beam!"
Whereupon he threw a Snorlax plushie at the cardboard cut-out and, naturally, knocked it over. Whirling back around to face the restaurant, he reached up to his head... then patted around for a bit with a bemused expression on his face, seeming to be groping for a hat that was no longer there. Giving up after several seconds, he settled for adjusting his dirty blue vest and striking a pose out of any kid's anime. "No need to thank me, everybody! I am Ash Ketchum, from the town of Pallet - the world's greatest Pokemon Master!" There was a thunk behind Rhys, and Rhys glanced around to see Trace, his elbows planted on the table, burying his face in both hands. "Being a hero is what I do best!"
"Trace?" Rhys asked. "Are you all right?" No response came from his partner, and, after several seconds of thought, he wrapped up his half-eaten burger, threw out his trash, and came back over to Trace's side of the table, placing a hand on his shoulder. "Come on, let's get out of here," he said quietly.
His partner didn't move for a full minute; at last, he lowered his hands from his face and looked up at Rhys, then nodded wearily. "Yeah - you're right. There's nothing I can do by staying here."
After he threw out his desiccated salad, they walked out of the McDonald's. As they left, Trace spared one last glance of pity for Dalia and Ash, the latter of whom was now insisting to his mother that several cardboard cut-outs were Pokemon, and then looked away.
------------
"Well, I said I couldn't talk about it there, so I ought to talk about it now," Trace said, lying back on the hotel bed and covering his face with one arm. Rhys, flipping through the official tourist guide to Viridian City, looked up at him in surprise; he hadn't expected Trace to want to talk about it.
"So..."
"Right." Trace sighed. "I wasn't there to see the start of it - but let me start at the beginning.
"Seventeen years ago, Ash started his journey as a Pokemon trainer. He was a fairly typical kid, if a bit loudmouthed and impulsive." Trace let out a sigh through his teeth. "I suppose you could say he was doomed from the start, though, because he made enemies right out of the gate."
"Enemies?"
"Yeah - Ash slept in when Professor Oak was supposed to be handing out Pokemon, so he missed the distribution of the starters and got a Pikachu as a consolation prize." Trace shrugged. "The joke was on the other Trainers - I don't know why the professor had it in his lab, but that Pikachu was powerful. And, naturally, a naive kid running around with a super-powerful Pokemon? He got the attention of Team Rocket right away. Or, I should say, two members of Team Rocket - three, if you count that talking Meowth they had.
"Those guys were batshit insane. When they failed to steal Ash's Pikachu the first time? Okay, I can see trying again. When they failed to steal the Pikachu the fifth time? Maybe they should have considered a change of careers. The dozenth time? Honestly, they needed to learn how to quit. The fiftieth time? They should have been institutionalized."
"The fiftieth - that's hyperbole, right?"
Trace snorted. "What, you think I would call them crazy if I wasn't absolutely sure they literally were? Okay - maybe when I was younger. But not after what became of Ash.
"Now, these two crazies became convinced that Ash had ruined their lives. They went bankrupt chasing after him, he wrecked all their gadgets - in self-defense, by the way, though he would have been justified in making a citizen's arrest at some point and confiscating all their stuff - and, according to records acquired in law-enforcement stings and raids since then, they became laughingstocks at Team Rocket for their complete inability to mug one eleven-year-old - their lives were wrecked, but through their own doing." Trace waved his free hand in the air. "But they couldn't see that - they thought they were entitled to take what they wanted, and so they hated him for daring to prove otherwise.
"In fact, they were still chasing after him two years after they first met - while they'd been launching attempts to kidnap his Pikachu at least weekly."
"Didn't the kid ever report them to law enforcement?" Rhys asked incredulously.
"Oh, law enforcement up and down Kanto - and then the Orange Islands, and then Johto - knew about Jessie and James, but they never managed to capture them. They always managed to land away from civilization, and they were good at fleeing for the hills or doing quick-change disguises if they had to." Trace waved his free hand in the air again. "And now you know why I don't believe in the efficacy of current law-enforcement systems, but anyway...
"Besides, he was a kid. He figured he could always handle them - he had the first, oh, hundred times, hadn't he? It wasn't anything major to him; he had to dispatch them whenever they showed up - I think he began to just view it as a ritual chore, like taking out the trash or scrubbing the stove. They weren't exactly great Trainers, so it wasn't much of a problem."
"But one day, it was," Rhys said. "You wouldn't be going on about this if it wasn't."
"Right." Trace sighed. "I wasn't traveling with him by that time - I had been for a while, back when he was touring the Orange Islands - so I didn't see it firsthand, but the people who were reported that he went out into the woods to get some Berries for their campfire stew... and he took far too long getting back, and when he did, it was obvious something horrible had happened to him in the forest."
"What happened?" Rhys asked in shock.
"That's the strange part," Trace muttered. "Ash didn't know. His last memory was of walking through the woods - and then, abruptly, he found himself in the local lake, staring up at the Team Rocket members. He thought he had lost at least several minutes of memory, if not more, but he had no idea what had happened during those several minutes." He gave a bitter snort.
"But his companions could guess?"
"The tops of his shirt and jacket were soaked with blood, and, to tell from the way the stain ran downwards, it had all come from his face. His jacket was all torn up, too - but they weren't clean cuts - well, except for a few slashes near the top of his jacket, which his companions thought looked like they had been aimed for his face, but gone wild - they were rough tears, implying that they'd come from friction and the fabric being rapidly pushed out of shape... like, say, you might get from somebody vigorously punching and kicking the wearer. A lot."
"Couldn't they tell from -"
"His injuries? That's the thing. The local lake-waters were famed for their healing powers, and so Ash himself was in the finest of health." Trace gave a bitter laugh. "Outwardly, at least. Internally, the memory problems at the very least implied something was still wrong inside his skull, but Ash wouldn't hear any of it. He hadn't even noticed the condition of his clothing until his horrified friends started exclaiming over it, and then he shrugged it off as nothing major.
"He must have been attacked by wild Pokemon, he said, and maybe Team Rocket had come to his rescue and thrown him in the lake. When one of his friends - a Pokemon breeder in training - pointed out that wild Pokemon tended to go for the body, not the face - that going for the face first was a dead giveaway for a human assailant - Ash shrugged it off and complained that he didn't see what the problem was, anyway, since he was fine after taking a dunk in the lake and he couldn't even remember anything."
"They didn't buy that, did they?"
"Of course they didn't. They hauled him into a Pokemon center as soon as they could and tried to press charges, but there wasn't sufficient evidence - the Nurse Joy couldn't find anything wrong with him, and the Officer Jenny recorded the information as they knew it, but said she couldn't start an investigation without more evidence. Ash being perfectly healed, and all-" The hand of the arm slung over Trace's face clenched into a fist. "Bet they planned it that way, the bastards - waited until they could be certain of minimal evidence to let loose on Ash, the way I'd bet they'd been wanting to for ages-" He let out a snarl and pounded his free fist on the bed, cursing under his breath. "Nobody, at the time, thought to check for brain damage."
Suddenly ill, Rhys clamped his mouth shut and watched Trace silently as his partner continued, in a tone of increasing anger, "Everyone - everyone involved in that case, except for the Rocket members, was just a kid. Misty was only fourteen, and Brock was an immature seventeen - they never expected anything like this." In a distant voice, he added, "Ash was only twelve.
"They might have hoped that was the end of it, but the attacks only escalated. Over the next few months, Ash got assaulted at least four more times - and I think I'm forgetting some - by those goons, and this time, people were around to see them: brass knuckles to the face, skin torn open by the claws of a Meowth, repeated group-beatings from some of Team Rocket's friends..."
"Good grief," Rhys whispered, managing to subdue his nausea long enough to speak, and Trace, under his arm, grimly nodded.
"It undoubtedly would have continued for as long as Ash kept adventuring, but the final time - the male one of the two punched him in the face and then told Ash he was now a Pikachu, and Ash - well, he - he snapped." Trace finally took his arm off his face and stared up at the ceiling, his eyes distant. "The asshole had to have known Ash was mentally unstable by then - he would have just been making an ass of himself otherwise. As it was - Ash honestly believed he was a Pikachu."
"What?"
"He'd been showing signs of something wrong with him for months before him - since the very day of the beating that they couldn't prove had happened," Trace said, shutting his eyes. "He grew increasingly impulsive, stupid, and violent - Brock and Misty had been talking between themselves of hauling him in for psychiatric evaluation, or at least to see a doctor, but he flew into a blind fury at the slightest suggestion that there was something wrong with him -"
"Wait - Brock and Misty? The famous Pokemon breeder and the Gym Leader?"
"Yeah - they were his best friends from the start," Trace said, opening his eyes again and glancing over at Rhys. "He didn't have a closer bond to anyone, except maybe his Pikachu. The way he got abusive towards even them, in the end, was the warning sign even they couldn't ignore.
"Nobody wants to think their best friend's crazy, right? You make excuses, you think it's just an attitude problem - Brock told me that he wondered at the time if Ash was just having a horrible start of puberty - but in the end, you're left with a wreck, and all the time in the world to damn yourself for all the signs you missed." He exhaled slowly. "Brock and Misty were nervous wrecks after it became clear Ash wouldn't just snap out of it, and when it turned out it was more serious than anyone had guessed - they both went through a pretty bad period, I'll put it that way. You'd never guess from how they are today, but, well - they recovered. Ash did not.
"Meanwhile, some asshole had pulled strings high in the Pokemon League to get Ash's Trainer's License revoked - it was a ludicrous smear job even fringe fanatics would disown. The 'evidence' they offered was either a bizarre distortion of reality or clearly faked, and the Gym Leaders they called in to testify either were horrified or broke down laughing when they heard the charges - but Ash had to show up for the hearing anyway." Trace took a deep breath, and swallowed hard. "It was a nightmare.
"It was clear in the first five minutes that Ash was in no state to attend - he kept screaming 'Pika, pika!' in response to all questions, didn't answer to his own name, and at one point leapt out of the witness stand and started scurrying about on all fours. The requirement was that the Trainer in question had to be present, though - the mental incapacity clause was added after Ash's hearing - and so Sabrina managed to keep him subdued in a corner, occasionally making plaintive Pikachu noises..." Trace shuddered. "I couldn't be in the hearing room, but Brock and Misty told me afterwards - they had to speak on his behalf and testify as the Pewter and Cerulean City Gym Leaders, since he had conducted his formal battles against them, so they were there for the entire thing.
"Ash was cleared of the formal charges against him, but they had to suspend his Trainer's License on the grounds that he lacked the mental capacity to function independently - and it didn't help that the only 'license' they could find on him was a juvenile forgery - obviously made after he began to decline, because it looked like something made by a dyslexic toddler. Picture taped to a piece of paper, every single word misspelled... He was a 'danger to others and himself', and his Pokemon were given to Professor Oak for storage - and practically the moment the hearing finished, they sent him off to Saffron City Hospital to undergo a battery of tests, because none of what they'd been hearing - and seeing - of his behavior made any sense with the knowledge they already had."
Trace gritted his teeth. "A family history of mental illness came out - his father suffered from severe ADHD and unipolar manic symptoms with psychotic elements, and, amongst other things, took over two weeks to arrive at Viridian City fon a journey starting in Pallet Town - he somehow managed to bypass the city entirely on his travels, and was found starving, exhausted, and half-delirious in the deepest part of Mt. Moon by the Hiker who hauled him out, babbling about how he wanted a Clefairy to show off to everyone back in Pallet before he did anything else. Had a troubled childhood, that kid - even joined Team Rocket in his teenage years, though he didn't seem to quite comprehend what he was supposed to do there - claimed afterwards that he'd heard it was exciting and dangerous, and ditched it when he found out that they actually expected him to do nasty things to people. When he hit his twenties, though - around the time he met Delia - they came out with medications that actually worked on him, and he managed to start functioning as a normal person. Still was a bit goofy, but at managable levels.
"So Ash's parents had a bit of a whirlwind romance, with Delia having a 'love will conquer all' atittude towards his known problems - and the medications worked, besides - and, within the year, they had Ash. Ash's father got a good job working for the League, and then -" Trace sighed. "Well, predictably, he picked a risky job - it had to do with the experiments leading to development of modern, Pokemon-based power plants, I know that much. There was some sort of meltdown, and Ash's father pulled some insane stunt with a jury-rigged fix for the mechanism involved that gave the rest of the research team time to get out, and - as for him? There wasn't enough of him left to completely fill the urn."
Rhys winced.
"Predictably, some jerks with Team Rocket ties - people he had made enemies of during his 'stupid years', as he preferred to shamefully refer to them - started spreading stories about how he'd 'really' died practically the moment the death certificate was filed - just to give you an idea of what sort of people these were, I'll say it involved a drunken bet, a full bladder, and an electrified fence, and leave it at that. I don't think anyone bought it, though - well, not unless they were creeps to begin with.
"So Ash grew up without a dad, but at least the League paid out a small stipend to Ash Sr.'s widow, which was how the Ketchums supported themselves. Fortunately, he showed none of his father's symptoms... but it seems he had a predisposition to them." Trace shook his head. "Never would have come out without - what did they call it? God, it's been so long - neurological insult, however - and boy, did he get some.
"When they ran the MRI scan of his brain, expecting to pick up only abnormal patterns of activation, they found a lot more was abnormal in there than they bargained for - huge amounts of brain damage, for one."
"Brain damage?" Rhys caught himself. "I know you mentioned that earlier, but-"
"Well - the doctors weren't too happy with what they saw, either. Hematomas - those are giant pools of blood outside of the blood vessels - everywhere, inflamed brain tissue aplenty, and lots of places where small areas of the brain had obviously died from either blunt-force trauma or miniature strokes." Trace looked sick to his stomach. "They said it was a miracle that he had been able to speak coherently, give the appearance of clear thought, and walk around in public - he easily could have gone permanently comatose or died from half the damage he had. And, while his skull was normal on the outside, the inside of his skull, when they did detailed scans, was covered in hairline cracks - the waters of the lake hadn't soaked through all the way, obviously...
"Misty and Brock, with full knowledge of everything Ash had been doing for the last several months, were certain they knew where the injuries must have come from - the attack in the woods. However, they couldn't prove it - it had been too long for the doctors to determine an exact timeframe, and Ash had suffered from amnesia regarding those events even when he was functional - they weren't going to get him to testify when all he could speak was some attempt at Pikachu-ese.
"Sabrina, with the consent of all involved, including Ash's mother, probed his mind to try to determine his mental state, but reported that there wasn't much hope - Nonetheless, she agreed to try to recover... something, and they were going to bring in the most skilled neuroscientists, the most competent psychics, the very best care, pull out all the stops to help him recover to the point that he could lead a normal life... I don't know how far they got, or whether he suffered a relapse at any point. I kept in touch through e-mails, mainly, after the first few times I visited him... It felt like attending a casket viewing, only with the corpse moving around and trying, badly, to hold a conversation with you.
"Brock and Misty kept trying to get through to him, but even their e-mails stopped after several years... all I know about the progress that people made was that he stopped thinking he was a Pikachu, though he'd 'gotten confused' and thought he was still on his Pokemon adventure. They wrote hopefully about getting him to the point where he could start travelling with assistance, so that he could really resume his adventure... and month after month, then year after year, they kept hoping...
"I wish I'd kept in better contact, but I had my own problems at the time." Trace shook his head, grimacing. "I should have kept in contact! I should have! Man, I was such an idiot back then -"
"What problems were you having?"
"You know the pills I have to take?" It was a rhetorical question, and so Trace continued immediately, "Well, those problems started up around that time. I had just gotten a job as an assistant at Professor Oak's lab, I should have been over the moon - I felt that way at first - and everything was great - but I... couldn't... do... anything."
"Huh? What do you mean, you couldn't do anything?"
"I could barely move. I lay around all day, it took me all the willpower I had to shuffle from one chair to another, and I nearly collapsed when I had to walk up any stairs. About the only thing I could do was eat - and boy, did I eat. If you dumped me in a salad bar and provided food on conveyor belts, 'all I could eat' would have been the entire restaurant. It was crazy - and I couldn't see it was crazy, because my brain was fogged over, too. 'Tracey Sketchit, Human Snorlax' - sounds about right. I just kept sleeping and sleeping, and eating and eating...
"Well, turns out I had a thyroid tumor to thank. Unfortunately, I didn't know that at the time, didn't have the brains to go into the doctor, and was much too busy making a complete ass of myself as Professor Oak's assistant. If he'd needed the world's biggest paperweight, I would have been great for the job, but..." Trace sighed. "I would have no grudges about how things turned out - I deserved almost every bit of it - if it hadn't been for Professor Oak's grandson Gary.
"The kid was a real shit. There's no other way to put it. He got off on mocking me and sneering at me because he knew full well that I wasn't in much state to retaliate, and -" His face tightened. "Look. My behavior was more than enough to deserve being kicked out on my ass. I'll admit that. But there was a lot of stuff I didn't do - but that kept turning up. Usually around the time - or soon after - that Gary came home to visit his Gramps - funny about that, huh? Broken equipment, screwed-up experiments, angry and mistreated Pokemon... I didn't even get near that equipment or those Pokemon - that was the problem. But of course the professor believed his own grandson over me. Who's he going to believe - his brilliant, charismatic grandson, or his lazy, fat bum of an assistant?
"The thing that got to me - that still gets to me - is that there was no point to it. My inactivity was grounds enough for dismissal. He didn't need to fake evidence - and that thing about my hitting on his sister was just low. She was nice, but I wasn't some sort of sicko who pestered girls after they made it clear they weren't interested - but to hear Gary tell it, about the only thing I hadn't done to her was paw at her with a drunken leer on my face, and the only reason he didn't try was because he knew I didn't drink. And the lab equipment - what the heck was that for? That computer wasn't just broken - when I finally dragged myself over to take a look at it, I saw it had been sabotaged. Wires had been half-cut to make it look like they'd frayed, Mountain Dew had been poured into the floppy drive, the fan had been jammed shut... That was one of his grandfather's computers. And the lab notes? Why did he do that? I...
"All I can think of is that maybe, he just got off on the destruction. Or maybe he hated me that much - after all, my Scyther once gave his friends in Team Rocket a bad haircut. By their loopy standards, that's enough to drag someone's reputation through the sewers, right?"
"What?" Rhys asked. "He was friends with Team Rocket?"
"Yeah, and the very same ones who made Ash's life hell. He bragged about it to my face, can you believe that? And, of course, I was so out of it that I actually bought his claim that his grandfather knew of the friendship, and approved - Damnit, I was an idiot!" He smacked himself in the face. "He must have had it all planned out, too - he hit me in the face first, leaned in and bragged about his friends - I should have known he was keeping his voice low for more reasons than dramatic effect - and then started threatening me... I had enough and tried to grab him by the collar, but he seized my hand and squeezed it as hard as he could, and - all right, I cursed him out. And that's when Professor Oak came into the room, saw me cursing at and seemingly attempting to hit his grandson, and - well, he made up his mind then and there, and I didn't have the brains left to try to tell my side of the story. I kind of mentioned the Team Rocket thing, but the way I was saying it, it must have sounded like I was just trying to throw Tauros-dung at the wall to see if it would stick." Trace lifted his hand from his face for a moment, then dropped it back onto his face again.
"So I got fired and kicked out, I didn't have any family nearby, and I was generally up a creek without a paddle - not that the paddle would have done me much good, in my state, since I wouldn't have had the energy to really row with it, and probably would have tried to gnaw on it. It at least got me in to see a doctor, since I knew that, having lost that job, I couldn't manage another - I barely had the energy to get to the doctor as it was. And, well, that's when I found out I had a major problem.
"My parents, once I managed to get in touch with them, paid for the operation, paid for the follow-up checkups, and paid for the medications - but that left me massively in debt to them, and I wanted to pay them off as quickly as possible. It wasn't exactly good for the family bank account, and they really weren't happy about having to spend so much money on a son who'd, by his own confession, turned into a worthless lump - and who had to kept pleading for them to believe him when word got back to them about his apparent terrible misdeeds. Gary's got one hell of a mouth on him, apparently, and I wouldn't be surprised if his friends took painstaking care to make sure the word got around quickly to my family of what I'd supposedly done.
"However, I had a heck of a time getting a job, because anyone who was interested in hiring me called up Professor Oak, and - well, I think you can guess what happened then. My saving grace was getting a position on an Pokemon-research expedition far out at sea, where they were apparently more interested in getting people crazy enough to stay out in the middle of the ocean - or under the ocean, occasionally - without a break for about a year straight than checking qualifications - but that's another story. It paid well, anyway, and, on the thyroid pills, I managed to do well enough that I had tales of my good performance at sea to counterbalance the tales of my horrible performance at the Pallet lab - and from there, I could start afresh.
"It wasn't great, even for a few years after that - but I managed. It definitely could have been a lot worse, knowing how the Rockets and their friends treated anyone who had ever crossed them - I could have ended up like Ash."
On that note, Trace yawned and stretched. "Well - that's all there is to it. Sorry to have kept you listening for so long."
"No - no, it's all right. It's all right, really..."
Still, Rhys spent a long time thinking about what he'd heard; Trace, for his part, kept to himself, obviously brooding on old memories, and the two of them barely spoke for the rest of that night.
Neither of them slept well, either.
Word Count: ~11,000 words (Edit: Which... is apparently too much for one LJ post?! If it says so...)
Genre: Angst/Tragedy, possibly verging on Horror at some points.
Author's Note: Mm, there's been a slight... orientation change of one character, which wasn't really necessary for anything, but which I carried out just to spite Cori Falls' homophobia. Just assume he's bisexual.
If one joke early on seems odd, remember that Pokemon currency, as shown in the games, does not have fractional units. In the original fic, Cori Falls had people paying in dollars, but there's no such things as dollars in the Pokemon world - not even in Unova, which has the freaking Golden Gate Bridge By Any Other Name in it. So, yes, a mild flipping off of a minor error...
And heavy bashing of the OOC depictions of James, Jessie, Meowth, and Gary in Cori Falls's fics. Yes, I blatantly made things up at a couple of points. Suffice to say, I don't trust those four as far as I can tackle them. If you wish I had just stuck to the facts of her fics and done a true straight-What-You-Didn't-See - feel free to dislike it. I wouldn't blame you.
[Furthermore, I would like to square this with the Team Rocket AU timeline Cori Falls's site provided, but it's hideously inconsistent. Trying to align the timeline with A White Today, Ash would have been stripped of his Trainer's License at the end of 2001-start of 2002 - yet the timeline has Ash still going on as a Pokemon Trainer into Hoenn, and makes no mention of his losing his Trainer's License. It makes no bloody sense whatsoever, and since The Prodigal Parents makes direct reference to the end of A White Today, I can only assume the end of A White Today and The Prodigal Parents were both written after that timeline was written. However, I can still use some of it, so let me do so - this is occurring during November 2016, and Ash started his journey in 1999, was savagely assaulted on October 8, 2001, and completely lost his mind on December 21, 2001.
Put that way, I'm tempted to introduce Cori!Ash to Ariana - they might be able to commiserate with each other over their... shared... experiences. Who knows, they might actually get along...]
Warnings: (TRIGGERS) Mental illness, public embarrassment, brain injuries, mentions of physical assault and off-screen injuries, hints of sociopathy, intentional sabotage of someone's record. (Misc.) Blatant as-you-don't-know-Bob OC.
Severe OOCness for Cori-Falls!Ash in the final third of the fic - I tried to write him sympathetically, which, in retrospect, drastically changed his behavior from the first (direct-from-Cori-canon) third of the fic. *sigh* Mea culpa, mea culpa.
[Spoiler (click to open)]
(In fact, it forced me to rewrite a small chunk of the exposition - as I wrote Ash as not being completely destroyed,
"Sabrina, with the consent of all involved, including Ash's mother, probed his mind to try to determine his mental state, but reported, after several sessions, that she believed Ash was gone - not just buried, but gone - and that whatever they eventually recovered, even in the very best scenario, would be something that functioned and understood his situation and resembled Ash, but wouldn't be... Ash." Trace folded his arms behind his head. "And you know Sabrina, with all her campaigns to get Psychic-types granted personhood status and her general neurodiversity-advocacy - if she thought Ash was gone beyond recall...
"Nonetheless, she agreed to try to recover - something, and they were going to bring in the most skilled neuroscientists, the most competent psychics, the very best care, pull out all the stops to help him recover to the point that he could lead a normal life..."
had to become
"Sabrina, with the consent of all involved, including Ash's mother, probed his mind to try to determine his mental state, but reported that there wasn't much hope - Nonetheless, she agreed to try to recover... something, and they were going to bring in the most skilled neuroscientists, the most competent psychics, the very best care, pull out all the stops to help him recover to the point that he could lead a normal life...")
===
"I want ten MIGHTY KIDS MEALS with CHEESEBURGERS! Cheeseburgers RULE!"
Rhys nearly dropped his burger at the shout; the next moment, he swung around in his seat and stared in the direction of the counter, where even the hardened clerk was doing a poor job of disguising her disbelief. A middle-aged man - probably homeless, to tell from his poor grooming, dirty clothing, and slightly unnerving air - was grinning at her as if there was nothing unusual at all about his order, while an older woman with prematurely grey hair was huddling in on herself next to him, as if hoping she could hide from the stares of the rest of the McDonald's customers. Upon close inspection, she had to be in her early fifties at the worst, but the lines of strain on her face, untended grey hair, and stooped posture made her look much older.
"What the heck is his problem?" Rhys asked, gawking at the unlikely pair. "Is he getting it for a bunch of kids, or something?" Maybe he was one of those teachers desperately trying to be 'just one of the kids', and went a little too far with method acting... Didn't look the part, but a lot of the hardcore Trainers were... eccentric, to put it politely.
"Doesn't seem like... Oh god. No."
Rhys turned around, blinking, and saw his partner staring at the two with a look of utter horror, his face white and drawn. "What?" When his partner didn't initially respond, Rhys snapped his fingers in front of his face, then leaned across the table and lowered his voice. "Do you think he's going to get violent? I'm decent with people, Trace, I could try talking him down -"
"No - no, it's not that," his partner said, holding up his hands, "it's just that - I - I know him."
"You what?"
In the background, the ill-groomed man confirmed that yeah, he really did want ten Mighty Kids' Meals, and that he didn't understand why the clerk was asking. "Man, it's been over a decade since I last saw him - Do you know anything about the Ash Ketchum case?"
Rhys scratched his head. "No, I don't think - Wait, over a decade? Um... name sounds slightly familiar - Can't remember why, though."
"They would have kept it out of the papers after the initial story broke - he was only twelve at the time, and..." Trace took another look at the man, then shut his eyes and turned away, his face contorting as if the sight had been a physical blow. "Everyone thought it would blow over in a year, at the most, and they didn't want a stain on his record. Get him the best help, send him home to recuperate, and he'd be..." His voice caught in his throat, and he took several seconds to continue. "...back on his feet in no time..."
"Ashy-poo, don't you think ten meals is a little much?" the woman asked the man with the utmost gentleness, but the effort showed in her voice; she sounded like she was the one who was about to crack and start going after people with ketchup containers and plastic lids, not her male companion. Rhys revised any bizarre contingency plans accordingly.
"But mooom, I'm hungryyy!" whined the man, presumably Ash, and Rhys flinched in involuntary horror: he sounded like he was about five years old - and a childish five, at that. Yes, Rhys willed himself to think after a moment, he probably couldn't help his behavior, and one shouldn't be disturbed by the mentally ill, one should be compassionate and accepting -
But good heavens, that voice coming out of a grown man!
When he turned back to Trace, his partner gave him a wan, hopeless smile. "Yeah," he said. "It didn't work out quite the way anyone thought it would."
"But - I mean - what happened?" Rhys asked despite himself. "Was he always like this?"
"Are you kidding me? Not a bit! He was one of the most active, determined Pokemon train-"
"You don't want to spoil your dinner, do you?" the woman asked Ash, her voice pleading. "I'm making you your favorite - chili dogs and pizza pot pies!"
"Pizza pot pies?" Rhys echoed incredulously, not even aware he was doing it.
"If it makes him happy," Trace said, running one hand through his hair and shaking his head, looking down at the remnants of his salad without seeing them. "Delia was the brightest, cheeriest woman - God, to see her reduced to this..." He looked about to lose his lunch.
"But I still want ten cheeseburgers!" the scraggly-haired man whined in the background, drawing out the 'e's in the exact manner that a spoiled little kid might. It sounded like some sort of horrible parody of entitled fans at a convention or irate creeps complaining they couldn't get dates - but this was real.
Then, to Rhys's absolute astonishment, Ash began to jump up and down, his feet landing heavily on the floor each time in the exact manner than a little kid's wouldn't, and started to scream and flail his arms about. "I want ten buuuurgers! I want ten buuuurgers! I want -"
"What is wrong with him?" Rhys whispered frantically across the table, glancing back at the screaming man every other second as his voice ramped up and up in volume. The customers in line behind Ash and Delia had, as one, decided that they weren't so hungry after all and were fleeing the fast-food place posthaste, and the mall security guard was creeping over from the entrance, PokeBall already in hand.
"He's - well, there's no nicer way to say this, considering what you've already seen, but - he's literally crazy," Trace whispered back, eyes wide as he stared at the deranged Ash. "He -"
"I want ten buuuurgers!"
Delia pressed one hand to her temple, looking as though she was on the verge of breaking down in tears, and managed, "Okay, Ashy. Mommy will get ten Mighty Kids Meals for you."
Ash instantly stopped his tantrum and looked at her brightly, as if nothing untoward had happened. Well, if he's crazy, he probably doesn't think anything weird did happen, Rhys thought, fiddling with the Max Repel canister in his pocket. It wasn't quite rated for humans, but in the absence of any mace... "Can I get some McFlurries, too?"
"Now, Ash -" Delia began.
"But I want some McFluuurries!"
Mercifully for the remaining patrons at the McDonald's, Delia immediately gave in. "Oh, all right, all right." She again turned to the clerk (who had been inching back towards the kitchen area) and said, "I'll have ten cheeseburger Mighty Kids Meals with Cokes, one of each flavor McFlurry, and a bacon double cheeseburger with a small Coke." From her voice, Rhys thought that, if McDonald's sold alcoholic beverages, she would have added, "And a bottle of whiskey, the hardest stuff you've got - for here, not to go."
The cashier didn't even dare get closer to the cash register, but whipped out a pocket calculator and frantically jabbed in the numbers; after about thirty seconds, during which Ash began to shift around on his feet and look around blankly, she said, "That'll be 43.94," reached over carefully to the cash register and inputted the amount, and then fled off to the kitchen area the moment that Delia swiped her credit card and signed the receipt. Rhys thought about asking how in the world somebody charged a fractional amount - one of the cashier's fingers must have slipped in her haste to calculate the cost - but decided it was best to leave it be.
Instead, he turned back to his partner and asked quietly, "If he used to be all right, what happened to him?"
"No one was sure," Trace muttered, watching the pair in the same way that he might observe a herd of wild Rhyhorn around mating season, ready to explode at the slightest provocation from a perceived challenger. "A mugging was what set off the psychotic break, but it wasn't enough to drive anyone crazy - there was something else going on with him, something had been wrong for months -" As Dalia guided Ash over to a nearby table, he broke off and shook his head. "Shouldn't talk about it here. It's a long story, and more than a bit ugly to boot."
"Mom, after lunch, can we go to the PokeMart?" Ash asked as he sat down. "Team Rocket killed my Pikachu, and I want a new one."
Rhys's eyebrows nearly shot into his hairline. If Team Rocket had killed one of his Pokemon, maybe that explained -
"Now, Ash, I've told you a thousand times," Dalia said in a weary, pitying voice, "that wasn't a real Pikachu - that was a stuffed toy." Rhys cringed. "Professor Oak had to take your real Pokemon away when your license was revoked because you were always making them attack people, remember?"
"They were going to give it back to him the moment that he received a clean bill of mental health," Trace said under his breath, looking away and half-heartedly jabbing his fork into a shriveled piece of lettuce. "Nobody thought it would be more than a temporary suspension. He obviously wasn't responsible for his actions, in the state he was in at the hearing."
"What state was he in?"
His partner tensed up as if he'd asked him to describe the conditions of the remains at an industrial accident; before Rhys could apologize, though, Ash said in a whining voice, "But I saw them! I wanted to Thundershock that stupid mini-Jessie, mini-James, and mini-Gary, and then the big Jessie ripped its head off! It's just like that time stupid Gary ran over my Bayleef with his car! They're a bunch of evil bastards, Mom!"
The word caught Rhys by surprise, but only because it seemed out-of-place for the five-year-old diction. "Ash, what have I told you about using naughty words like that?" Delia responded, though her heart wasn't in it. "I spoke to Gary and Arwen -" A victim of LOTR-loving parents if there ever was one - "-on the phone the other day - they told me how you barged into their home and then threatened Sam and his friends. How many times do I have to tell you to leave the Oaks and the Woodsons alone?"
"Bet he deserved it," Trace muttered with uncharacteristic bitterness. When Rhys looked back around at him in shock, he flinched and held up his hands. "Sorry - I don't even know who Sam is, he's probably a total innocent. Gary, however - the Professor's grandson - he's a real shit." His expression tightened at some old memory. "I used to know him."
When no further explanation was forthcoming, Rhys looked back at Ash - it was like watching a thirty-car pile-up in action - and noticed that the man was looking around the restaurant in boredom, the reprimand obviously having bounced off of him without effect. Suddenly, Ash's eyes widened, he shot to his feet, and he pointed in a seemingly-random direction with as much panic and vigor as a sane person might use to point out an outcoming stampede of Tauros. "AUGH! It's Team Rocket!"
Since Rhys saw nothing of the like in that direction, he scrambled to his feet, grabbed a PokeBall in one hand and the Max Repel canister in another, and prepared to help subdue Ash as the madman proceeded to charge at and assault... a cardboard cut-out of the Hamburglar. It was so incongrous that he temporarily wondered if he'd gone insane, but Ash smugly marched up to the cut-out and jabbed a finger in its face. "I see that big bag of cheesburgers you're carrying, Team Rocket! I know you're trying to steal food, but you're not gonna get away with it! Snorlax! Hit him with your Hyper Beam!"
Whereupon he threw a Snorlax plushie at the cardboard cut-out and, naturally, knocked it over. Whirling back around to face the restaurant, he reached up to his head... then patted around for a bit with a bemused expression on his face, seeming to be groping for a hat that was no longer there. Giving up after several seconds, he settled for adjusting his dirty blue vest and striking a pose out of any kid's anime. "No need to thank me, everybody! I am Ash Ketchum, from the town of Pallet - the world's greatest Pokemon Master!" There was a thunk behind Rhys, and Rhys glanced around to see Trace, his elbows planted on the table, burying his face in both hands. "Being a hero is what I do best!"
"Trace?" Rhys asked. "Are you all right?" No response came from his partner, and, after several seconds of thought, he wrapped up his half-eaten burger, threw out his trash, and came back over to Trace's side of the table, placing a hand on his shoulder. "Come on, let's get out of here," he said quietly.
His partner didn't move for a full minute; at last, he lowered his hands from his face and looked up at Rhys, then nodded wearily. "Yeah - you're right. There's nothing I can do by staying here."
After he threw out his desiccated salad, they walked out of the McDonald's. As they left, Trace spared one last glance of pity for Dalia and Ash, the latter of whom was now insisting to his mother that several cardboard cut-outs were Pokemon, and then looked away.
------------
"Well, I said I couldn't talk about it there, so I ought to talk about it now," Trace said, lying back on the hotel bed and covering his face with one arm. Rhys, flipping through the official tourist guide to Viridian City, looked up at him in surprise; he hadn't expected Trace to want to talk about it.
"So..."
"Right." Trace sighed. "I wasn't there to see the start of it - but let me start at the beginning.
"Seventeen years ago, Ash started his journey as a Pokemon trainer. He was a fairly typical kid, if a bit loudmouthed and impulsive." Trace let out a sigh through his teeth. "I suppose you could say he was doomed from the start, though, because he made enemies right out of the gate."
"Enemies?"
"Yeah - Ash slept in when Professor Oak was supposed to be handing out Pokemon, so he missed the distribution of the starters and got a Pikachu as a consolation prize." Trace shrugged. "The joke was on the other Trainers - I don't know why the professor had it in his lab, but that Pikachu was powerful. And, naturally, a naive kid running around with a super-powerful Pokemon? He got the attention of Team Rocket right away. Or, I should say, two members of Team Rocket - three, if you count that talking Meowth they had.
"Those guys were batshit insane. When they failed to steal Ash's Pikachu the first time? Okay, I can see trying again. When they failed to steal the Pikachu the fifth time? Maybe they should have considered a change of careers. The dozenth time? Honestly, they needed to learn how to quit. The fiftieth time? They should have been institutionalized."
"The fiftieth - that's hyperbole, right?"
Trace snorted. "What, you think I would call them crazy if I wasn't absolutely sure they literally were? Okay - maybe when I was younger. But not after what became of Ash.
"Now, these two crazies became convinced that Ash had ruined their lives. They went bankrupt chasing after him, he wrecked all their gadgets - in self-defense, by the way, though he would have been justified in making a citizen's arrest at some point and confiscating all their stuff - and, according to records acquired in law-enforcement stings and raids since then, they became laughingstocks at Team Rocket for their complete inability to mug one eleven-year-old - their lives were wrecked, but through their own doing." Trace waved his free hand in the air. "But they couldn't see that - they thought they were entitled to take what they wanted, and so they hated him for daring to prove otherwise.
"In fact, they were still chasing after him two years after they first met - while they'd been launching attempts to kidnap his Pikachu at least weekly."
"Didn't the kid ever report them to law enforcement?" Rhys asked incredulously.
"Oh, law enforcement up and down Kanto - and then the Orange Islands, and then Johto - knew about Jessie and James, but they never managed to capture them. They always managed to land away from civilization, and they were good at fleeing for the hills or doing quick-change disguises if they had to." Trace waved his free hand in the air again. "And now you know why I don't believe in the efficacy of current law-enforcement systems, but anyway...
"Besides, he was a kid. He figured he could always handle them - he had the first, oh, hundred times, hadn't he? It wasn't anything major to him; he had to dispatch them whenever they showed up - I think he began to just view it as a ritual chore, like taking out the trash or scrubbing the stove. They weren't exactly great Trainers, so it wasn't much of a problem."
"But one day, it was," Rhys said. "You wouldn't be going on about this if it wasn't."
"Right." Trace sighed. "I wasn't traveling with him by that time - I had been for a while, back when he was touring the Orange Islands - so I didn't see it firsthand, but the people who were reported that he went out into the woods to get some Berries for their campfire stew... and he took far too long getting back, and when he did, it was obvious something horrible had happened to him in the forest."
"What happened?" Rhys asked in shock.
"That's the strange part," Trace muttered. "Ash didn't know. His last memory was of walking through the woods - and then, abruptly, he found himself in the local lake, staring up at the Team Rocket members. He thought he had lost at least several minutes of memory, if not more, but he had no idea what had happened during those several minutes." He gave a bitter snort.
"But his companions could guess?"
"The tops of his shirt and jacket were soaked with blood, and, to tell from the way the stain ran downwards, it had all come from his face. His jacket was all torn up, too - but they weren't clean cuts - well, except for a few slashes near the top of his jacket, which his companions thought looked like they had been aimed for his face, but gone wild - they were rough tears, implying that they'd come from friction and the fabric being rapidly pushed out of shape... like, say, you might get from somebody vigorously punching and kicking the wearer. A lot."
"Couldn't they tell from -"
"His injuries? That's the thing. The local lake-waters were famed for their healing powers, and so Ash himself was in the finest of health." Trace gave a bitter laugh. "Outwardly, at least. Internally, the memory problems at the very least implied something was still wrong inside his skull, but Ash wouldn't hear any of it. He hadn't even noticed the condition of his clothing until his horrified friends started exclaiming over it, and then he shrugged it off as nothing major.
"He must have been attacked by wild Pokemon, he said, and maybe Team Rocket had come to his rescue and thrown him in the lake. When one of his friends - a Pokemon breeder in training - pointed out that wild Pokemon tended to go for the body, not the face - that going for the face first was a dead giveaway for a human assailant - Ash shrugged it off and complained that he didn't see what the problem was, anyway, since he was fine after taking a dunk in the lake and he couldn't even remember anything."
"They didn't buy that, did they?"
"Of course they didn't. They hauled him into a Pokemon center as soon as they could and tried to press charges, but there wasn't sufficient evidence - the Nurse Joy couldn't find anything wrong with him, and the Officer Jenny recorded the information as they knew it, but said she couldn't start an investigation without more evidence. Ash being perfectly healed, and all-" The hand of the arm slung over Trace's face clenched into a fist. "Bet they planned it that way, the bastards - waited until they could be certain of minimal evidence to let loose on Ash, the way I'd bet they'd been wanting to for ages-" He let out a snarl and pounded his free fist on the bed, cursing under his breath. "Nobody, at the time, thought to check for brain damage."
Suddenly ill, Rhys clamped his mouth shut and watched Trace silently as his partner continued, in a tone of increasing anger, "Everyone - everyone involved in that case, except for the Rocket members, was just a kid. Misty was only fourteen, and Brock was an immature seventeen - they never expected anything like this." In a distant voice, he added, "Ash was only twelve.
"They might have hoped that was the end of it, but the attacks only escalated. Over the next few months, Ash got assaulted at least four more times - and I think I'm forgetting some - by those goons, and this time, people were around to see them: brass knuckles to the face, skin torn open by the claws of a Meowth, repeated group-beatings from some of Team Rocket's friends..."
"Good grief," Rhys whispered, managing to subdue his nausea long enough to speak, and Trace, under his arm, grimly nodded.
"It undoubtedly would have continued for as long as Ash kept adventuring, but the final time - the male one of the two punched him in the face and then told Ash he was now a Pikachu, and Ash - well, he - he snapped." Trace finally took his arm off his face and stared up at the ceiling, his eyes distant. "The asshole had to have known Ash was mentally unstable by then - he would have just been making an ass of himself otherwise. As it was - Ash honestly believed he was a Pikachu."
"What?"
"He'd been showing signs of something wrong with him for months before him - since the very day of the beating that they couldn't prove had happened," Trace said, shutting his eyes. "He grew increasingly impulsive, stupid, and violent - Brock and Misty had been talking between themselves of hauling him in for psychiatric evaluation, or at least to see a doctor, but he flew into a blind fury at the slightest suggestion that there was something wrong with him -"
"Wait - Brock and Misty? The famous Pokemon breeder and the Gym Leader?"
"Yeah - they were his best friends from the start," Trace said, opening his eyes again and glancing over at Rhys. "He didn't have a closer bond to anyone, except maybe his Pikachu. The way he got abusive towards even them, in the end, was the warning sign even they couldn't ignore.
"Nobody wants to think their best friend's crazy, right? You make excuses, you think it's just an attitude problem - Brock told me that he wondered at the time if Ash was just having a horrible start of puberty - but in the end, you're left with a wreck, and all the time in the world to damn yourself for all the signs you missed." He exhaled slowly. "Brock and Misty were nervous wrecks after it became clear Ash wouldn't just snap out of it, and when it turned out it was more serious than anyone had guessed - they both went through a pretty bad period, I'll put it that way. You'd never guess from how they are today, but, well - they recovered. Ash did not.
"Meanwhile, some asshole had pulled strings high in the Pokemon League to get Ash's Trainer's License revoked - it was a ludicrous smear job even fringe fanatics would disown. The 'evidence' they offered was either a bizarre distortion of reality or clearly faked, and the Gym Leaders they called in to testify either were horrified or broke down laughing when they heard the charges - but Ash had to show up for the hearing anyway." Trace took a deep breath, and swallowed hard. "It was a nightmare.
"It was clear in the first five minutes that Ash was in no state to attend - he kept screaming 'Pika, pika!' in response to all questions, didn't answer to his own name, and at one point leapt out of the witness stand and started scurrying about on all fours. The requirement was that the Trainer in question had to be present, though - the mental incapacity clause was added after Ash's hearing - and so Sabrina managed to keep him subdued in a corner, occasionally making plaintive Pikachu noises..." Trace shuddered. "I couldn't be in the hearing room, but Brock and Misty told me afterwards - they had to speak on his behalf and testify as the Pewter and Cerulean City Gym Leaders, since he had conducted his formal battles against them, so they were there for the entire thing.
"Ash was cleared of the formal charges against him, but they had to suspend his Trainer's License on the grounds that he lacked the mental capacity to function independently - and it didn't help that the only 'license' they could find on him was a juvenile forgery - obviously made after he began to decline, because it looked like something made by a dyslexic toddler. Picture taped to a piece of paper, every single word misspelled... He was a 'danger to others and himself', and his Pokemon were given to Professor Oak for storage - and practically the moment the hearing finished, they sent him off to Saffron City Hospital to undergo a battery of tests, because none of what they'd been hearing - and seeing - of his behavior made any sense with the knowledge they already had."
Trace gritted his teeth. "A family history of mental illness came out - his father suffered from severe ADHD and unipolar manic symptoms with psychotic elements, and, amongst other things, took over two weeks to arrive at Viridian City fon a journey starting in Pallet Town - he somehow managed to bypass the city entirely on his travels, and was found starving, exhausted, and half-delirious in the deepest part of Mt. Moon by the Hiker who hauled him out, babbling about how he wanted a Clefairy to show off to everyone back in Pallet before he did anything else. Had a troubled childhood, that kid - even joined Team Rocket in his teenage years, though he didn't seem to quite comprehend what he was supposed to do there - claimed afterwards that he'd heard it was exciting and dangerous, and ditched it when he found out that they actually expected him to do nasty things to people. When he hit his twenties, though - around the time he met Delia - they came out with medications that actually worked on him, and he managed to start functioning as a normal person. Still was a bit goofy, but at managable levels.
"So Ash's parents had a bit of a whirlwind romance, with Delia having a 'love will conquer all' atittude towards his known problems - and the medications worked, besides - and, within the year, they had Ash. Ash's father got a good job working for the League, and then -" Trace sighed. "Well, predictably, he picked a risky job - it had to do with the experiments leading to development of modern, Pokemon-based power plants, I know that much. There was some sort of meltdown, and Ash's father pulled some insane stunt with a jury-rigged fix for the mechanism involved that gave the rest of the research team time to get out, and - as for him? There wasn't enough of him left to completely fill the urn."
Rhys winced.
"Predictably, some jerks with Team Rocket ties - people he had made enemies of during his 'stupid years', as he preferred to shamefully refer to them - started spreading stories about how he'd 'really' died practically the moment the death certificate was filed - just to give you an idea of what sort of people these were, I'll say it involved a drunken bet, a full bladder, and an electrified fence, and leave it at that. I don't think anyone bought it, though - well, not unless they were creeps to begin with.
"So Ash grew up without a dad, but at least the League paid out a small stipend to Ash Sr.'s widow, which was how the Ketchums supported themselves. Fortunately, he showed none of his father's symptoms... but it seems he had a predisposition to them." Trace shook his head. "Never would have come out without - what did they call it? God, it's been so long - neurological insult, however - and boy, did he get some.
"When they ran the MRI scan of his brain, expecting to pick up only abnormal patterns of activation, they found a lot more was abnormal in there than they bargained for - huge amounts of brain damage, for one."
"Brain damage?" Rhys caught himself. "I know you mentioned that earlier, but-"
"Well - the doctors weren't too happy with what they saw, either. Hematomas - those are giant pools of blood outside of the blood vessels - everywhere, inflamed brain tissue aplenty, and lots of places where small areas of the brain had obviously died from either blunt-force trauma or miniature strokes." Trace looked sick to his stomach. "They said it was a miracle that he had been able to speak coherently, give the appearance of clear thought, and walk around in public - he easily could have gone permanently comatose or died from half the damage he had. And, while his skull was normal on the outside, the inside of his skull, when they did detailed scans, was covered in hairline cracks - the waters of the lake hadn't soaked through all the way, obviously...
"Misty and Brock, with full knowledge of everything Ash had been doing for the last several months, were certain they knew where the injuries must have come from - the attack in the woods. However, they couldn't prove it - it had been too long for the doctors to determine an exact timeframe, and Ash had suffered from amnesia regarding those events even when he was functional - they weren't going to get him to testify when all he could speak was some attempt at Pikachu-ese.
"Sabrina, with the consent of all involved, including Ash's mother, probed his mind to try to determine his mental state, but reported that there wasn't much hope - Nonetheless, she agreed to try to recover... something, and they were going to bring in the most skilled neuroscientists, the most competent psychics, the very best care, pull out all the stops to help him recover to the point that he could lead a normal life... I don't know how far they got, or whether he suffered a relapse at any point. I kept in touch through e-mails, mainly, after the first few times I visited him... It felt like attending a casket viewing, only with the corpse moving around and trying, badly, to hold a conversation with you.
"Brock and Misty kept trying to get through to him, but even their e-mails stopped after several years... all I know about the progress that people made was that he stopped thinking he was a Pikachu, though he'd 'gotten confused' and thought he was still on his Pokemon adventure. They wrote hopefully about getting him to the point where he could start travelling with assistance, so that he could really resume his adventure... and month after month, then year after year, they kept hoping...
"I wish I'd kept in better contact, but I had my own problems at the time." Trace shook his head, grimacing. "I should have kept in contact! I should have! Man, I was such an idiot back then -"
"What problems were you having?"
"You know the pills I have to take?" It was a rhetorical question, and so Trace continued immediately, "Well, those problems started up around that time. I had just gotten a job as an assistant at Professor Oak's lab, I should have been over the moon - I felt that way at first - and everything was great - but I... couldn't... do... anything."
"Huh? What do you mean, you couldn't do anything?"
"I could barely move. I lay around all day, it took me all the willpower I had to shuffle from one chair to another, and I nearly collapsed when I had to walk up any stairs. About the only thing I could do was eat - and boy, did I eat. If you dumped me in a salad bar and provided food on conveyor belts, 'all I could eat' would have been the entire restaurant. It was crazy - and I couldn't see it was crazy, because my brain was fogged over, too. 'Tracey Sketchit, Human Snorlax' - sounds about right. I just kept sleeping and sleeping, and eating and eating...
"Well, turns out I had a thyroid tumor to thank. Unfortunately, I didn't know that at the time, didn't have the brains to go into the doctor, and was much too busy making a complete ass of myself as Professor Oak's assistant. If he'd needed the world's biggest paperweight, I would have been great for the job, but..." Trace sighed. "I would have no grudges about how things turned out - I deserved almost every bit of it - if it hadn't been for Professor Oak's grandson Gary.
"The kid was a real shit. There's no other way to put it. He got off on mocking me and sneering at me because he knew full well that I wasn't in much state to retaliate, and -" His face tightened. "Look. My behavior was more than enough to deserve being kicked out on my ass. I'll admit that. But there was a lot of stuff I didn't do - but that kept turning up. Usually around the time - or soon after - that Gary came home to visit his Gramps - funny about that, huh? Broken equipment, screwed-up experiments, angry and mistreated Pokemon... I didn't even get near that equipment or those Pokemon - that was the problem. But of course the professor believed his own grandson over me. Who's he going to believe - his brilliant, charismatic grandson, or his lazy, fat bum of an assistant?
"The thing that got to me - that still gets to me - is that there was no point to it. My inactivity was grounds enough for dismissal. He didn't need to fake evidence - and that thing about my hitting on his sister was just low. She was nice, but I wasn't some sort of sicko who pestered girls after they made it clear they weren't interested - but to hear Gary tell it, about the only thing I hadn't done to her was paw at her with a drunken leer on my face, and the only reason he didn't try was because he knew I didn't drink. And the lab equipment - what the heck was that for? That computer wasn't just broken - when I finally dragged myself over to take a look at it, I saw it had been sabotaged. Wires had been half-cut to make it look like they'd frayed, Mountain Dew had been poured into the floppy drive, the fan had been jammed shut... That was one of his grandfather's computers. And the lab notes? Why did he do that? I...
"All I can think of is that maybe, he just got off on the destruction. Or maybe he hated me that much - after all, my Scyther once gave his friends in Team Rocket a bad haircut. By their loopy standards, that's enough to drag someone's reputation through the sewers, right?"
"What?" Rhys asked. "He was friends with Team Rocket?"
"Yeah, and the very same ones who made Ash's life hell. He bragged about it to my face, can you believe that? And, of course, I was so out of it that I actually bought his claim that his grandfather knew of the friendship, and approved - Damnit, I was an idiot!" He smacked himself in the face. "He must have had it all planned out, too - he hit me in the face first, leaned in and bragged about his friends - I should have known he was keeping his voice low for more reasons than dramatic effect - and then started threatening me... I had enough and tried to grab him by the collar, but he seized my hand and squeezed it as hard as he could, and - all right, I cursed him out. And that's when Professor Oak came into the room, saw me cursing at and seemingly attempting to hit his grandson, and - well, he made up his mind then and there, and I didn't have the brains left to try to tell my side of the story. I kind of mentioned the Team Rocket thing, but the way I was saying it, it must have sounded like I was just trying to throw Tauros-dung at the wall to see if it would stick." Trace lifted his hand from his face for a moment, then dropped it back onto his face again.
"So I got fired and kicked out, I didn't have any family nearby, and I was generally up a creek without a paddle - not that the paddle would have done me much good, in my state, since I wouldn't have had the energy to really row with it, and probably would have tried to gnaw on it. It at least got me in to see a doctor, since I knew that, having lost that job, I couldn't manage another - I barely had the energy to get to the doctor as it was. And, well, that's when I found out I had a major problem.
"My parents, once I managed to get in touch with them, paid for the operation, paid for the follow-up checkups, and paid for the medications - but that left me massively in debt to them, and I wanted to pay them off as quickly as possible. It wasn't exactly good for the family bank account, and they really weren't happy about having to spend so much money on a son who'd, by his own confession, turned into a worthless lump - and who had to kept pleading for them to believe him when word got back to them about his apparent terrible misdeeds. Gary's got one hell of a mouth on him, apparently, and I wouldn't be surprised if his friends took painstaking care to make sure the word got around quickly to my family of what I'd supposedly done.
"However, I had a heck of a time getting a job, because anyone who was interested in hiring me called up Professor Oak, and - well, I think you can guess what happened then. My saving grace was getting a position on an Pokemon-research expedition far out at sea, where they were apparently more interested in getting people crazy enough to stay out in the middle of the ocean - or under the ocean, occasionally - without a break for about a year straight than checking qualifications - but that's another story. It paid well, anyway, and, on the thyroid pills, I managed to do well enough that I had tales of my good performance at sea to counterbalance the tales of my horrible performance at the Pallet lab - and from there, I could start afresh.
"It wasn't great, even for a few years after that - but I managed. It definitely could have been a lot worse, knowing how the Rockets and their friends treated anyone who had ever crossed them - I could have ended up like Ash."
On that note, Trace yawned and stretched. "Well - that's all there is to it. Sorry to have kept you listening for so long."
"No - no, it's all right. It's all right, really..."
Still, Rhys spent a long time thinking about what he'd heard; Trace, for his part, kept to himself, obviously brooding on old memories, and the two of them barely spoke for the rest of that night.
Neither of them slept well, either.