The memory came back in pieces. Summer camp. Kanto. Professor Oak's event.
Ash had been ten. The camp hadn't been limited to Kanto children. Professors from other regions had brought their kids and entrusted them to Oak for the duration. Dozens of children from across the world, most of them seeing Pokémon up close for the first time.
Among them, a small girl with flaxen hair and a sun hat, looking as fragile as a porcelain doll. Ash hadn't noticed her. At ten years old, his entire being was focused on the Pokémon Oak had brought for the children to interact with. Girls registered somewhere below "interesting rocks" on his attention scale.
That changed when she went missing.
During free time, the children were allowed to play with Oak's Pokémon in an open field. The Pokémon were chosen for gentleness. Nothing dangerous. A safe introduction to what partnership with a Pokémon felt like.
When assembly came, Oak counted heads and came up short. One girl. One Poliwag. Both gone.
Not stolen. Oak knew better. The girl was timid and from a well-off family. She'd receive her own Kalos starter at fifteen. There was no reason to take a Poliwag. The most likely explanation was simple: girl and Pokémon had wandered too far while playing and gotten lost in the surrounding forest.
Oak told the remaining children to stay put and went in alone. Taking a group of ten-year-olds into unfamiliar woods would just multiply the problem.
Ash lasted about ninety seconds before his conscience overruled his obedience.
He knew he was supposed to wait. He knew showing off wasn't what this was about. But a girl was lost in a forest, possibly hurt, and he couldn't sit on a log and hope someone else handled it. His body was stronger than most adults' even at ten. That gave him confidence, and the confidence gave him permission to slip away from the group and into the trees.
He found the Poliwag first, sitting under a tree, confused but unhurt. No sign of the girl.
Then he heard crying. Faint, muffled, the kind of sound someone makes when they're trying to be brave and failing.
He pushed through a wall of brush into a small clearing, and there she was. Flaxen hair. Sun hat. Sitting on the ground, knees pulled up, tears still clinging to her lashes. She looked terrified.
"Hey! Are you okay?" Ash jogged over, Poliwag in his arms.
The girl shrank back. "I'm... I'm fine. Who are you?"
"I'm Ash. Same summer camp. Professor Oak's been looking for you. Let's get you back."
He extended his hand. She stared at it for a long moment, then reached out and placed her small, dirt-smudged palm in his. He pulled her to her feet in one motion.
She cried out.
"What's wrong?"
"My knee..."
Ash looked. One knee was scraped raw, the skin broken and beading with blood. The edge of her other foot had similar abrasions. A fall, probably, plus whatever the underbrush had done to her during the wandering.
"It's nothing serious. Surface scrapes. We'll put ointment on them when we get back and they'll heal in no time." He set Poliwag on the ground. "Can you walk on your own, buddy?"
Poliwag nodded and hopped along beside them. Ash turned around and knelt, back facing the girl.
"Get on. I'll carry you."
She climbed on. Her weight settled across his back, and her arms found his shoulders.
"Am I heavy?"
"You're lighter than paper. That's a problem. You need to eat more. I've been eating like a Snorlax since I was little, and look how strong I am. If you have strength, you don't have to be afraid of anything."
He hooked his arms under her legs and started walking. His back was broad for a ten-year-old. His shoulders were solid. His hands were warm where they held her steady, and the fear that had been eating her alive since she'd gotten lost dissolved so fast it felt like it had never been there.
Her name was Serena. She hadn't wanted to come to this camp. Her mother had insisted. "You're ten and you have no independence. It's time to see the world and interact with Pokémon." So she'd been signed up and shipped across two regions to the most distant corner of Kanto, far from everything familiar.
And something had gone wrong, just as she'd feared. She'd wandered too far, fallen, hurt herself, and been alone in a forest with no way to call for help. Before Ash appeared, every rustle in the bushes had sounded like a wild Pokémon coming to finish her off.
From where Serena had been sitting in that clearing, all she'd seen were bushes shaking. It could have been anything. The moment Ash stepped through, her panic went quiet, as if someone had turned down the volume on the worst day of her life.
Everything he did after that made the silence permanent. The steady voice. The offered hand. The piggyback ride she was too embarrassed to refuse and too grateful to end. By the time he carried her back to camp, the worst day of her life had become the most important one.
She became his shadow for the rest of the summer. Wherever Ash went, Serena followed. That was why he remembered her at all. If he'd just found her and dropped her off, five years would have erased the memory. But a girl who'd attached herself to him for an entire camp? That stuck.
"Your name is... Serena, right?"
"Yes!!" The word burst out of her with the force of someone who'd been holding her breath for five years. He remembered. He remembered her name. She felt like a girl who'd lined up for hours to meet her favourite trainer and been recognised at the front of the queue.
Misty watched the reunion from two steps behind. The surprise on both their faces, the joy radiating from this girl she'd never met, the way Serena's eyes hadn't left Ash's face since the disguise dropped. Something cold and electric settled in Misty's chest.
This girl is not a threat, she told herself. They haven't seen each other in years. It's just an old acquaintance.
The words didn't land. Serena's face was too pretty, her figure too well-proportioned, her fashion sense too sharp, and the way she looked at Ash carried a warmth that went beyond "old friend from camp."
"I can't believe we ran into each other here. The last time was what, five years ago?"
"Five years! After that summer camp, I wanted to find you again, but I didn't have your contact information. Then I saw you on TV..." Serena nodded, the words tumbling out, the excitement too big to contain in measured sentences.
Five years ago. Summer camp.
The puzzle pieces clicked in Misty's head. Childhood friend. Not just any childhood friend. A rescued-from-the-forest, carried-on-his-back, followed-him-around-for-weeks childhood friend. The kind that romance novels wrote entire arcs around. The kind that, according to every story Misty had ever read, never lost.
The cold feeling in her chest sharpened.
But then she steadied herself. The good news was simple and unassailable: she was Ash's girlfriend. Right now, officially, confirmed. She'd made her move first, confessed first, kissed first. Whatever title this girl held from the past, Misty held the present.
Even a childhood friend from the heavens had to get in line.
"Woo-oh..."
The neglected Lapras called out from the sand. Ash turned and knelt beside it, resting a hand on its head.
"Feeling better? The pain should be gone." He stroked along the ridge of its neck. "Be more careful out there. If you see a storm coming, go around it. Don't charge through." His tone shifted. "And those injuries weren't just from the weather, were they? Something else happened."
"Woo-oh."
One sentence. That was all Lapras needed. Ash understood.
Poachers. The Lapras clan had been attacked. The artillery fire and the storm had combined to separate this young Lapras from her family, leaving her battered and stranded on the beach of Trovita Island. Too injured to return to the water. Too weak to defend herself from the delinquents who'd found her lying there.
And now, healed but alone, she faced the same ocean that had nearly killed her.
"What do you want to do? Go back to sea and look for your family?"
Lapras hesitated. The desire was plain in her eyes, but so was the fear. She was a child in her clan's terms, despite being Low-High level. Her size and the condition of her skin said "juvenile" to anyone who knew the species. Sending a young Lapras alone into waters where poachers were operating and storms raged was a sentence, not a solution.
"How about this." Ash thought for a moment. "We're already travelling through the Orange Islands looking for a Pokémon. Come with us. If we run into your clan along the way, you can rejoin them. If not, at least you won't be out there alone."
Helping Lugia Jr. find its father and helping Lapras find her family weren't conflicting goals. Same ocean. Same islands. One more passenger didn't change the mission.
"Woo-oh!!" Lapras agreed so fast it was almost suspicious. No hesitation, no wariness, just immediate, wholehearted acceptance.
Serena stared. Everything she'd read about Lapras said they were gentle but cautious around humans. High wariness, slow to trust. This one had jumped at Ash's offer like it had been waiting for him to ask.
Does he have some kind of magic?
In a sense, yes. Tokiwa Power radiated from Ash at all times, a low-level field of life energy that put Pokémon at ease on an instinctual level.
Add the fact that he'd healed her injuries with his own hands, stood between her and her tormentors, and spoken to her like an equal rather than a specimen, and the Lapras's instant trust wasn't surprising at all.
It was just Ash being Ash.