Pallet Town. Nine years ago. When Ash Ketchum was six years old.
The Ketchum house had a particular quality on days when Important People were coming.
Delia moved faster. The good plates came out. The living room got flowers. Everything smelled like something baking. Ash had been told three times this morning to stay clean, stay inside, and be ready to come downstairs when called.
He had managed this for forty-five minutes, which he felt was genuinely impressive.
The problem was the Caterpie.
He'd spotted it on the garden fence three days ago — big one, unusual markings, inching along the top rail with the committed focus of a Pokémon that had somewhere to be. He'd been watching it every morning since. Today it had made it to the corner post. Today was clearly the day it was going somewhere, and he had a theory about where, and his theory was going to be right, and he needed to be there to find out.
He weighed this against stay inside.
It wasn't really inside if he was in the garden.
The garden was attached to the house.
He went out the back door.
The morning was warm and the garden smelled like grass and his mother's roses and the particular green-and-dirt smell of the forest at its edge. The Caterpie was on the corner post exactly where he'd left it, contemplating the rose trellis with the infinite patience of something that had one speed.
Ash crouched down beside the fence.
"Okay," he said, to the Caterpie. "I know where you're going. You're going to the big oak at the back. There's already three Kakunas up there. I counted." He tilted his head. "Did they tell you? Like, is there some kind of Caterpie signal? Because I've been watching you for three days and you didn't come from the direction of the other ones, so how did you know?"
The Caterpie began its ascent of the trellis.
"That's what I thought," Ash said, nodding. "You did know. That's so cool."
From somewhere above him, a deep sound — patient, familiar, faintly amused in the way that only something very old and very large could manage amusement.
Oak's Dragonite dropped from the oak's canopy with the unhurried precision of something that had been sitting up there for a while and had decided to make itself known. It landed on the garden wall with a solidity that made the old stone settle, folded its wings, and looked at Ash with the expression it had perfected over six years of this particular assignment.
"I'm in the garden," Ash said immediately. "The garden is connected to the house. That counts as inside."
Dragonite's expression did not change.
"I can hear Mom if she calls."
Dragonite looked at him.
"I will definitely hear her."
Dragonite settled more firmly on the wall, which was its way of saying I'm staying here then, which was fine. Dragonite was always fine. Ash had grown up with it as a background constant — not a pet, not quite a guardian in any formal sense, just always there when he went into the forest or the garden or anywhere that wasn't inside the house. It resolved problems. The Mankey incident. The river. The time with the territorial Fearow that nobody knew about except Dragonite because Ash had not told anyone about the Fearow. It didn't restrict him. It didn't stop him from doing things. It just made sure the things he did didn't kill him, which Ash thought was a very good system.
"I think it communicates with silk," he said, returning to the Caterpie. "Like a network. The silk carries something — smell maybe, or vibration — and that's how they know where to go." He looked up at Dragonite. "Does that make sense? Do you know? You've been in that tree for years."
Dragonite made a noncommittal sound.
"I'm going to ask Professor Oak. He'll know. He knows everything about Pokémon." Ash watched the Caterpie make steady progress up the trellis. "Or he knows where to find out, which is almost the same thing."
He was working on a follow-up theory about whether the silk network was limited to Caterpie or extended to other Bug-types when the sound came from the forest.
High. Sharp. Small.
A child crying.
Ash's head came up instantly.
"Did you hear that?" He was already on his feet, turning toward the forest edge. "Dragonite — did you hear that? Someone's really upset—"
Dragonite had heard it before he had. Its head was already angled toward the tree line, focused and reading. It made a short sound. Pushed off the wall.
"Yeah, let's go!" Ash said, and ran.
The forest closed around him the way it always did — familiar, immediate, the light changing quality, the sounds changing register. He knew these woods the way he knew the layout of his house. Every significant tree, every usual path, the places where the ground went soft near the creek, the clearing where the Oddish came at dusk. He'd been coming here since he could walk.
He followed Dragonite, who was moving overhead through the canopy faster than he could run, navigating by sound and by the occasional glimpse of orange through the branches. The crying was louder now — and there was something else underneath it, a sound that made the hair on his arms go up.
Buzzing.
A lot of buzzing.
Ash pulled up short behind a wide oak trunk and looked.
The clearing was maybe twenty metres across, sunlight coming down through a gap in the canopy above it. And in the middle of it: a Beedrill swarm. Not two or three. A full swarm — fifteen, maybe more, circling in that specific agitated pattern that meant they'd been disturbed and hadn't decided yet what they were going to do about it.
And underneath them, on the ground, curled over something she was holding against her chest:
A girl.
Honey-blonde hair. Small. Maybe his age. Her shoulders were shaking and she had her face pressed into what looked like a toy — a stuffed Fennekin, its ear bent from how tightly she was holding it — and she was crying in the specific way of someone who had been crying for a while and was running out of breath for it.
"Oh no," Ash whispered. "Oh no no no—"
The Beedrill were getting lower.
He looked up. Dragonite was already positioning — not dropping down yet, reading the swarm, calculating. Ash knew the look. He'd seen it before.
"Dragonite," he hissed. "She's right there—"
Dragonite dropped.
It came down between the girl and the swarm like something falling on purpose, which it was — controlled descent, wings snapping out at the last second to brake, landing with a concussive thump that shook the clearing floor and sent a shockwave of displaced air outward in every direction. The Beedrill recoiled. Dragonite straightened to its full height, raised its head, and roared.
Not the roar it used when it was annoyed with Ash for climbing things. The other one. The one that came from somewhere much older and larger than a single Pokémon, the roar that said I am between you and this thing and you will need to decide if this is worth it.
The Beedrill decided it wasn't.
They scattered in three seconds — a disorganised panicked dispersal that took them up through the canopy gap and away, the buzzing fading fast, and then the clearing was quiet except for the girl's ragged breathing and the sound of the forest settling back into itself.
Dragonite turned. Checked the girl. Turned again to watch the tree line — making sure the swarm was gone, giving it the focused attention of something that knew Beedrill occasionally regrouped.
"Yes," Ash breathed, from behind his tree. Then, louder: "Dragonite! Amazing! Did you see how fast they—" He stopped himself. Right. The girl.
He came out from behind the tree.
She hadn't moved. Still curled over her Fennekin toy, shoulders still shaking, face still hidden. She might not have seen Dragonite come down. She might not know the Beedrill were gone yet.
Ash walked toward her.
He'd been told, in the general instruction that Delia provided about the world, that when someone was upset you should be calm. That being calm helped them be calm. That shouting or being too much would make it worse. He'd found this advice useful on roughly two previous occasions and was deploying it now.
He stopped a few feet away and crouched down to her level.
"Hey," he said.
Her shoulders tensed. She didn't look up.
"It's okay," he said. "They're gone. Dragonite scared them off. They're not coming back."
A pause. Slowly — very slowly, the way someone moves when they're checking whether something is real or whether they're about to be disappointed — she raised her head.
Her eyes were red from crying, her cheeks wet, her bottom lip still trembling. She looked at Dragonite — still standing at the clearing's edge, enormous and watchful — and then at Ash, who was crouched in front of her in a garden-dirty shirt with a leaf stuck to his shoulder.
She stared at him.
He could see her working out several things at once: the Beedrill were gone, there was a Dragonite, there was a boy her age in the middle of a forest, none of these facts connected in any way she'd expected.
"Hi," she said, very small.
"Hi," he said. "I'm Ash. That's Dragonite. It's Professor Oak's but it sort of follows me around." He paused. "Are you okay? Your knee is bleeding."
She looked down. There was a scrape on her knee — she'd fallen at some point, probably when she'd tripped over a root. She hadn't seemed to notice it until he mentioned it, and now she was looking at it with the slightly dazed expression of someone whose brain was catching up to their body.
"It's not that bad," Ash said. "I've had way worse. One time I fell out of the big oak — not the one here, the one in my garden — and I had to get three stitches. Mom was really upset. The stitches weren't even the bad part, the bad part was how long I had to sit still."
She blinked at him.
He was aware he was talking a lot but she was still crying and in his experience keeping a calm steady voice helped and talking was how he did that.
"Do you want a berry?" He reached into his pocket. He usually kept something there — leftover from whatever he'd grabbed from the kitchen before escaping, which today had been an Oran Berry that had been in his pocket since breakfast and was, he now realised, slightly squashed. He held it out anyway. "It's a bit squashed. But Oran Berry still works when it's squashed. The healing thing is in the juice, not the shape."
She looked at the berry. At him. At the berry again.
"I don't know if that's true," she said, very carefully.
"I've tested it," Ash said, with complete confidence.
Something in her face shifted — not quite a smile, not yet, but the trembling in her lip had stopped. She reached out and took the berry from his hand. Didn't eat it. Just held it.
"I'm Serena," she said.
"Serena," he repeated. "Where are you from? You don't sound like you're from here."
"Kalos," she said. "We came on the teleporter. But I—" Her voice wobbled slightly. "I ended up in the wrong place. My uncle was there and then I wasn't and I don't know where he is."
"The Abra Teleportations?" Ash frowned. "That happened to someone else once. The Abra got distracted during the jump." He stood up, brushing dirt off his knees. "My house is right at the edge of the forest. My mom will know what to do — she always knows what to do. And Professor Oak's lab is right there too and he has a phone and he'll be able to find your uncle." He held out his hand. "Come on."
She looked at his hand.
It was a six-year-old's hand, grubby from the garden, completely steady.
She took it.
He didn't make any particular note of this — just closed his fingers around hers and started walking back toward the tree line, talking about the forest the way he talked about everything, which was continuously and with genuine enthusiasm.
"There's a family of Oddish near the creek, I'll show you sometime if you want, they come out at dusk — and there's a Caterpie that I've been watching for three days, I think it's building a communication network with other Caterpie but I need to talk to Professor Oak about it—"
"A communication network?" Serena said, in the voice of someone who had stopped crying and found themselves accidentally interested.
"With their silk. I think it carries information. Like, how they know where to go." He glanced at her sideways. "Do you like Pokémon?"
"Yes," she said, and it was clear she meant it.
"Good," he said, as if this settled something important. "Okay, watch this root here, it's the one I always trip on—"
He tripped on the root.
He didn't fall — caught himself, stumbled two steps, recovered. Turned to check she hadn't tripped too. She hadn't — she'd seen it coming and stepped over it, and was now looking at him with an expression that was, unmistakably, on the edge of laughter.
"I know," he said. "I always do that."
She laughed. Short, surprised — like she hadn't meant to and it came out anyway.
Above them, Dragonite moved through the canopy, keeping pace, ancient and quiet and watchful.
The forest was bright around them and the morning was still warm and somewhere ahead the good plates were set on the table and the Important People were probably already arriving and Delia was probably already looking for him with increasing concern.
Ash didn't think about any of that.
He was explaining his Caterpie silk theory to a girl from Kalos with a squashed Oran Berry in her hand, and she was listening, and the forest was good, and everything felt like it was exactly where it was supposed to be.
That was the day Serena Yvonne fell in love with Ash Ketchum.
She was six years old.
She would not have called it that — she didn't have the word for it yet, not quite. But she knew that his hand was warm, and that he hadn't been scared, and that he'd offered her a squashed berry with complete sincerity, and that he'd tripped over a root he'd just warned her about and turned to check on her first.
She filed all of this very carefully.
Some things, once filed, stay filed.
Back in the clearing, still smelling faintly of Beedrill, a squashed Oran Berry sat on the forest floor where she'd eventually set it down.
An Oddish found it three days later and was very pleased.