Cynthia kept her promise to Gible on the second day.
She didn't announce it. She simply appeared in the garden after breakfast with Garchomp at her side, looked at Gible — who was in the middle of attempting to bite a garden stone with focused scientific interest — and said, "Come on then."
Gible looked up.
Looked at Garchomp.
Its eyes went enormous.
The flush that appeared on its blue cheeks was immediate and complete and entirely without self-consciousness. It stood up very straight. It puffed out its chest. It made a sound that was somewhere between a greeting and a declaration.
"Gib," it said, with enormous dignity.
Garchomp looked down at it from a considerable height. Its expression was the measured one of a Pokémon that has seen many challengers and assessed many opponents and was now running that same process on something roughly the size of its foot.
Then it made a low sound — not dismissive, not patronising. Something more like: acknowledged.
Gible nearly combusted.
Ash, watching from the porch with his morning tea, said nothing. X was on his shoulder running its own assessment of the Garchomp situation. Y sat beside him on the step, tail flame steady.
"You really did keep that promise," he said to Cynthia.
She glanced at him. "I said I would."
"Gible's been thinking about nothing else for two days."
"I know." She turned back to the garden, where Garchomp had lowered itself to a crouch and was showing Gible something — a stance, a weight distribution, the way it held its claws. Gible was copying it with the intense concentration of something that has decided this is the most important lesson of its life. "Gible has good instincts. It needs to see what those instincts can become."
Ash watched Garchomp demonstrate a movement — slow, deliberate, making it readable. Gible watched, then tried. Got it half right. Garchomp made the correction without words, just shifting Gible's posture slightly with one careful claw.
Gible's tail practically vibrated.
"It's going to be insufferable after this," Ash said.
"Probably," Cynthia said. She sat down on the step beside him, not quite touching. "That's fine. Insufferable Pokémon are usually the ones that become something."
Ash looked at X.
X looked back with the expression of a Pokémon that has never been insufferable in its life and resents the implication.
"...Sure," Ash said.
The rest of Cynthia's week was quieter than it had started.
Not empty — the house was never empty, there were always people in it, always something being planned or cooked or debated. But the particular sharp-edged energy of the shopping trip settled back into the ordinary rhythm of days, and Cynthia moved through that rhythm the way she moved through most things: present, unhurried, noticing.
She trained Garchomp in the mornings. Ash trained his team in the forest. Sometimes their training overlapped at the edges — Gible refusing to leave Garchomp's vicinity, Garchomp tolerating this with the patient dignity of a very senior colleague who has decided to mentor someone extremely junior.
In the afternoons Cynthia read, or wrote in the small notebook she carried, or talked with Erika over the phone in the contained, technical shorthand of two people who have been working on the same problem from different angles for a long time. Ash learned not to ask what the calls were about. She would tell him what was relevant when it was relevant.
On the fourth evening she found him in the garden after dinner, sitting against the oak tree with X and Y asleep on either side of him and Gible gnawing a stick in his lap.
She sat beside him.
They watched the dark garden for a while.
"Two more days," she said.
"I know."
"Snowpoint first. The dig site team expects me by the end of the month."
"I know."
She was quiet for a moment. The garden made its sounds — something moving in the hedgerow, Y's tail flame casting a low warm light over the grass.
"The League will take time," she said. "Even with preparation. Building toward a Championship isn't — it doesn't happen quickly."
"I know that too."
She looked at him sideways. Something in her expression was wry and a little fond and carefully not saying everything it was thinking. "You know a lot of things."
"I know the things I know," he said. "The rest I figure out."
A pause.
"Write sometimes," she said.
"You write first."
"I'll be doing fieldwork in ruins with limited signal."
"I'll be training in a forest with no particular obligations. I'll wait."
She almost smiled. "That's very patient of you."
"I have ten years to get good at it."
She looked at the garden. At Garchomp, standing at the far end of it, still and watchful in the dark, its outline huge and familiar. At Gible, asleep in Ash's lap with its stick still loosely in its teeth.
"It's going to grow into something extraordinary," she said. About Gible. About more than Gible.
"Yeah," he said.
They sat in the dark garden and didn't say anything more, and didn't need to.
She left on the sixth morning.
Early — the Abra platform at seven, which meant being out the door by six-forty, which meant the house was still in the half-awake state of people who have gotten up earlier than their bodies wanted to. Delia had made breakfast anyway, because Delia always made breakfast, and it sat on the table going slightly cold while people ate it standing up or sitting on the stairs or in Serena's case leaning against the doorframe still mostly asleep.
Cynthia came downstairs with her bag packed and her hair up and the composed expression of someone who has said a lot of goodbyes and knows the form.
Delia hugged her. "Come back soon."
"I will."
"That means before another six months, Cynthia."
"I'll try."
Delia's expression said she knew what I'll try meant and was choosing to accept it graciously.
The girls said their goodbyes — Serena warmly, May enthusiastically, Dawn with the sincere brightness she brought to everything, Misty with a brief nod that carried more than it showed, Green with nothing but a look that said something precise that Cynthia apparently understood because she inclined her head in response.
Gible had been standing beside Ash's ankle since it woke up. It watched Cynthia come down the stairs, and then looked at the door, and then looked at Ash with the expression of a Pokémon piecing something together.
"She's leaving," Ash told it. "She'll be back."
"Gib," Gible said, quietly. Not its usual confident announcement. Something smaller.
It walked to Cynthia and looked up at her.
She crouched. Looked at it for a moment.
"Keep training," she said. "Garchomp will notice."
Gible processed this. Straightened up. Gave her the thumbs-up — the one it reserved for things it had decided to take seriously.
She stood.
Looked at Ash.
There were people in the hallway and in the kitchen doorway and on the stairs. There was Delia making a small production of wiping her hands on her apron and not watching. There was everything that was not going to be said in a hallway at six-forty in the morning with seven people in attendance.
"Ten years," she said.
"Give or take," he said.
Something crossed her face — not quite a smile, not quite something else, the specific expression of a person who finds a situation both frustrating and exactly right.
She put her hand briefly on his shoulder.
Then picked up her bag, said one last thing to Delia, and walked out the door.
The morning came in cold and bright through the open doorway.
Ash stood in the hallway with his three Pokémon and said nothing.
Gible pressed against his ankle.
"I know," he said.
Three years passed.
Not quickly — years never pass quickly when you're inside them. But with a certain efficiency. A sense of purpose that accumulates without announcement, one day adding to the next, the work done and the rest taken and the mornings arriving with something to train toward.
Ash turned eleven in that time. The accelerated growth of his age and the weight he already carried made him look and carry himself older than that — but eleven is what the calendar said, and eleven is what he was.
His Pokémon grew.
Gible, with a ferocity and commitment that had been clear from the moment it bit Ash on the head its first morning, pushed itself through evolutions at a pace that startled everyone except Ash, who had watched it stare at Garchomp in that garden and understood something about what had been decided in that moment. It evolved to Gabite at two years. It was a Garchomp before Ash turned ten.
X and Y grew into Charizard, and into themselves — X still the aggressor, still carrying those impossible Dragon-type instincts that nobody had ever fully explained, still the one who pushed hardest and cared most about winning. Y still the steady one, the precise one, the one who trained longest after X had already stopped.
They trained every day in the forest behind Pallet Town. Ash ran with Garchomp and used what he was learning about Aura to keep pace in ways that should not have been possible for a human, and sometimes were, and sometimes weren't, and the gap was always interesting.
He heard from Cynthia occasionally. Notes that arrived without warning, concise and specific — a finding from the dig site, a thought about something he'd said months ago, once a pressed flower from somewhere near the Snowpoint ruins with no explanation. He wrote back. She wrote again.
The League happened. He didn't hear about it in real time — news from Sinnoh traveled at the speed it traveled — but one morning he came downstairs and Delia had her phone out and was smiling in a way that said she'd been waiting to tell him something.
"Cynthia won," she said.
He had known she would. He said so.
"Still," Delia said, fond and slightly exasperated, "you could act a little surprised."
He had not acted surprised. But he had stood at the kitchen window for a moment longer than necessary, looking at the garden, thinking about a rooftop in Celadon and lemonade and the way the late afternoon light had looked on her hair.
Then he had eaten his breakfast and gone to train.
That was the shape of three years.
The forest near Pallet Town had a particular quality in the early morning — the light coming through the canopy at angles, the air still cool, the sounds of the first Pokémon waking and announcing the day.
Ash ran through it at a pace that should not have been sustainable and was.
Beside him — keeping up without visible effort, red eyes tracking the path ahead, every movement a controlled expression of power held in reserve — Garchomp ran.
Above, through the gaps in the canopy: two shapes. Fast. Fire-tailed. The long confident wingbeats of Charizards who have been doing this for years and know every branch and turn of this particular stretch of forest.
X and Y.
"Getting faster," Ash called upward.
A roar from above — derisive, delighted. Can't catch us up here.
"We'll see," Ash said.
He looked at Garchomp. Garchomp looked at him. Three years of mornings like this one had made conversation between them largely unnecessary.
"Launch," Ash said.
Garchomp's hands were already there.
He hit them running and went up.