Ash was finally World Champion.
Ten years. Ten long years of travelling, losing, training, bleeding, and somehow always coming back for more.
And now it was done.
The trophy was real. The title was real. The quiet feeling in his chest — the one that said 'you actually did it' — was real too.
He walked the road out of Vermillion City with Pikachu on his shoulder and nothing ahead but open sky.
No crisis. No evil team with a terrible name. No legendary Pokémon that needed urgent appeasement.
Just the road. Just the morning. Just the ferry to Paldea waiting at the end of it.
"Hey, Pikachu." He tilted his head sideways. "You pumped?"
"Pika pi." 'Obviously. For the fourth time today, obviously.'
Ash grinned and kept walking.
He was not going to jinx this.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
Above the clouds, something was wrong.
Palkia, God of Space, stood and stared at an empty glass.
His parfait glass.
The parfait was gone.
Not just any parfait either. A Celestic Sakura Parfait. A dessert so rare it was made only once per century. Only two servings in existence. He had spent forty years tracking it down through legitimate cosmic channels because he believed in doing things properly.
The glass was empty.
The spoon was licked clean.
It was sitting at a slight angle that could only be described as smug.
'When,' Palkia thought slowly, 'did Dialga learn to pick dimensional locks?'
In the Hall of Origin, Dialga was having the exact same thought.
Same empty glass. Same clean spoon. Same creeping, furious realisation.
'When did Palkia learn to pick dimensional locks?'
They found each other in eleven seconds flat.
"You ate my parfait," Palkia said.
"I did not eat your parfait," Dialga said.
"The spoon is still in your claw."
Dialga looked down.
There was indeed a spoon in his claw.
He set it down carefully. The way someone sets something down when they've decided that acknowledging it is a trap.
"That proves nothing."
"You have strawberry on your face."
"I have always had this on my face," Dialga said with great dignity. "This is simply how my face looks."
Palkia stared at him.
"Dialga. I have known your face since before the physical universe existed. That is strawberry."
"It is a natural colouration."
"You are blue."
Dialga opened his mouth.
Then closed it.
Made a sound that, translated out of divine frequency, was approximately: 'well.'
"You despicable damn fiend," Palkia said. Calm. Measured. Like he'd been saving that exact phrase.
Dialga's eyes narrowed. "Don't you dare call me a fiend. You are the fiend. You snuck into my dimension and took mine first."
"I didn't touch yours!"
"Then where is it?!"
Silence.
Neither of them had a good answer for that.
"That," Palkia said, pivoting, "is not the point. The point is that you are a thief. A temporal tyrant. A dessert-stealing menace, and I will shrink you to the size of an atom."
"You wouldn't dare."
"I am currently daring."
"You're bluffing."
"I am a Spatial God. I don't bluff. I restructure."
Dialga laughed. It was not a nice laugh.
And then they were both talking at once.
The argument lasted four hours.
Four hours of two gods who had been silently furious at each other since the beginning of the universe finally running out of patience at the same moment.
By hour one they had covered: the parfait, a dimensional trespassing incident from the thirty-seventh millennium, and who exactly was responsible for an unmade Tuesday in the Cretaceous period.
"That Tuesday was fixed within the hour—" Dialga started.
"The hour was also wrong, Dialga—"
"That was a separate issue—"
"It was the same issue—"
By hour two it was personal.
"Your orb placement has always been passive-aggressive and everyone knows it!" Palkia snapped.
"My orb placement?!" Dialga looked genuinely offended. "Your roar frequency has been condescending since the Jurassic period!"
"My roar frequency is perfectly calibrated!"
"It implies that I'm slow!"
"You are slow! You let someone steal your parfait!"
"SO DID YOU!"
Another silence.
They both stopped.
The same thought arrived in both their minds at the exact same moment.
Palkia said it first.
"...Giratina."
Dialga went very still.
"...Giratina," he agreed. Quietly.
A pause.
"I'll deal with him later," Palkia said.
"After I deal with you," Dialga said.
And that was the end of the thinking portion of the evening.
The attacks were not proportionate. They were not meant to be.
Palkia fired a Hyper Beam. Dialga answered with Dragon Breath.
Space and Time collided at full force in the upper atmosphere.
The explosion unmade everything within range.
Including a small but very structurally significant piece of reality.
The piece of reality that had Ash Ketchum in it.
And Pikachu.
The road was empty.
Palkia looked down at it.
Dialga looked down at it.
"...That was your fault," Palkia said.
"You fired first."
"You ate my parfait."
"I DIDN'T EAT YOUR PARFAIT."
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
In the Distortion World, Giratina was very comfortable.
He had arranged his resting spot carefully. Familiar geometry. The quiet hum of a dimension that asked nothing of him.
He burped.
Softly. Contentedly.
There were still traces of strawberry on his teeth. Celestic Sakura strawberry. The kind that somehow tasted like summer, mild guilt, and zero regrets all at once.
He licked them away.
The lock-picking had taken forty minutes. Worth every second.
From far above came the familiar sound of two gods destroying something they'd regret.
Giratina listened for a moment.
'Ah,' he thought. 'That'll be the parfait.'
He rolled over and went to sleep.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
In the Hall of Origin, something ancient woke up.
Arceus did not stir. Did not open his eyes slowly.
He simply became aware. All at once. Fully. The way only a god can.
Something was wrong.
He looked at the threads of fate stretched across the world below. Billions of them. Each one a life moving along its intended path.
One thread was gone.
Not frayed. Not tangled.
Gone.
He traced the empty space back to its source. Through the upper atmosphere. Through the scorched wreckage of a collision between Space and Time. Down to a stretch of empty road outside Vermillion City.
A young man had been walking there less than a minute ago.
Ash Ketchum.
The Son of Fate.
The one life he had spent centuries carefully arranging. The one thread woven through the fabric of everything — through prophecy, through history, through the careful balance of a world that needed him exactly where he was supposed to be.
Gone.
The Hall of Origin was silent.
Arceus turned.
Palkia and Dialga stood at the far end of the hall. Still. Not speaking. They had the look of two beings who understood exactly what they had done and were waiting — very carefully, very quietly — to find out what came next.
Arceus looked at them.
He said nothing.
He didn't need to.
The weight of his gaze alone changed the air in the Hall. Made it heavier. The kind of heavy that reminded even gods that there were things above them. Powers older than Space. Older than Time.
Powers that were looking at them right now.
"Lord Arceus—" Palkia began.
"Do not."
Two words.
Palkia closed his mouth.
The silence that followed was not empty. It had shape. It had weight. It pressed down on the Hall like a judgment already delivered.
Arceus looked back at the broken thread.
At the frayed edges where a fate had been interrupted.
At the work of centuries — undone in seconds. Over a stolen dessert.
He was not angry.
Anger was for beings who still had something to prove.
What he felt was colder than anger. Quieter. The absolute, settled displeasure of a god looking at a mess created by those who should have known better. Who did know better. Who had chosen, in a moment of petty fury, not to care.
And now he had to fix it.
'Both of them,' he thought. 'Since the first moment of creation. Always.'
He turned back to the broken thread and began to work.
Behind him, Palkia and Dialga did not move.
Did not speak.
Did not breathe.
The Hall of Origin stayed silent — the kind of silence that doesn't lift until the god in the room decides it should.
It did not lift for a long time.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
Ash groaned.
His eyes opened. He saw ceiling.
'Ceiling. Okay. Not dead.'
He tried to push himself up. His hands sank into something soft. He overcorrected. His arms went sideways.
He fell off the bed and hit the floor.
"...Ow."
He lay there for a moment.
Wood floor. Lavender polish smell. The specific grain of a floor he'd spent half his childhood lying on.
His room. He was in his room.
He pushed himself upright and looked around.
His Charizard poster. His desk covered in old stickers. His window looking out over the path to Professor Oak's lab.
His room. Definitely his room.
Except—
He turned his head.
That was not his dressing table.
He didn't own a dressing table. He'd never owned one. What he had was a cracked mirror from the Sceptile incident and a desk that was mostly stickers.
The dressing table sitting between his window and wardrobe was ornate, expensive, and covered in hair ribbons sorted by colour with the confidence of someone who had strong feelings about organisation. Next to the ribbons sat several small porcelain Pokémon figurines. And a framed photograph.
He crossed the room and looked at it.
Himself. And a girl. Both young. The girl was making a face at the camera that said 'I am winning whatever this is.'
He looked at his reflection in the mirror.
Same face. Same eyes. Same stubborn mouth.
But younger. Softer. No scar on the left thumb. No calluses on his palms.
He raised his hands and stared at them.
Small. The hands of an eight-year-old.
'I am shorter,' his brain reported, committing to facts rather than feelings. 'My hands are smaller. There is a dressing table in my room that belongs to someone else. I fell off my bed.'
He stared at his reflection a moment longer.
'Something has gone very wrong,' he thought, 'and I strongly suspect it happened to me.'
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
The door opened.
"Oh." A girl leaned against the frame, hat pushed back, expression of someone who arrived specifically to cause problems and found the opportunity already gone. "You're awake. I had a whole prank ready."
She looked genuinely disappointed.
Ash stared at her.
Green. Leaf Green. His neighbour his entire childhood. Sharp eyes, sharper tongue, fully aware of both. She'd left Pallet Town to go on her own journey and never come back — or she was supposed to. Apparently something had changed.
She seemed to be eight. Same as him. Already carrying herself like someone ten years older.
She was wearing an apron.
A practical, slightly flour-dusted kitchen apron. She wore it with the same energy she wore everything — like she'd decided to do it and the apron had better keep up.
"Green," Ash said. "What are you doing here?"
Green blinked. Looked at him. Then looked slowly around the room — at his poster, her ribbons, his bookshelf, her dressing table, the shared wardrobe. Then back at him.
"...Are you feeling alright?" she said.
"I'm fine."
"You're on the floor."
"I'm sitting on the floor. There's a difference."
"The difference being?"
"Intent."
She crossed the room. Pressed the back of her hand to his forehead. Quick, no-nonsense, completely unsentimental.
"No fever." She pulled her hand back. Narrowed her eyes. "You've got your confused face on."
"I don't have a confused face."
"You've had that exact face since we were little."
'I am little,' some part of his brain noted helpfully. He ignored it.
"Green," he said carefully. "Why are you in my room?"
Her eyes narrowed further.
"Because I live here." She said it slowly. The tone of someone explaining something to a person they were starting to worry about. "Ash. We've had this conversation."
"No we haven't."
"We had it last Tuesday."
"I don't remember Tuesday."
"You agreed to let me repaint the shelves."
He looked at the shelves.
They were a different colour. A calm, decisive sage green that had clearly been chosen by someone with opinions about these things.
"...When did that happen?"
"Tuesday," Green said. "Which I just said." She crouched down so they were eye level. This felt more alarming than it should have. "What do you actually remember?"
"Walking to the ferry."
"What ferry?"
"The Paldea ferry. I was World Champion. I was starting a new journey. There was a road and then a flash of light and then I was on your floor."
"Our floor."
"The floor," he said firmly, "of the room in which you are currently standing."
Green looked at him. Long. Patient. Doing maths she hadn't expected to be doing.
"Ash," she said.
"Green."
"Do you not know where you are?"
"I'm in my room."
"Our room."
He paused. "Why do you keep saying it like that?"
She didn't answer. Just looked around the room again. Slowly. Deliberately.
His poster. Her ribbons. His shelf. Her dressing table. The shared wardrobe. The photo on the mirror.
Then back at him.
The silence said: well?
Ash looked at the dressing table. At the ribbons sorted by colour. At the photograph — him and Green, younger, Green winning.
He looked back at her.
Green had her arms crossed. The expression of someone with nowhere to be and all day to wait.
"Green," he said.
"Ash."
"Are we—" The word sat at the front of his brain and refused to come out properly. He tried again, quieter. "...Are we engaged?"
Green opened her mouth.
Closed it.
The corner of her mouth moved. The early edge of a smile she was deciding whether to hide. She looked at him on the floor — small hands flat on his knees, genuinely confused face at full deployment — and something in her expression shifted. Something warmer. Gone immediately.
"Yes," she said. Like it was the simplest word in the world.
Ash.exe stopped working.
Outside, a Pidgey was complaining in the oak tree. The smell of omurice drifted up from the kitchen — eggs, rice, something made by someone who knew exactly how you liked it.
"Oh," Ash said.
"Breakfast is ready." Green was already turning for the door. She'd done her part. She saw no reason to stand around while he processed. "Come down before it gets cold."
She paused at the door.
"Before you ask," she added, without looking back, "you're eight. The room is bigger because we renovated. And yes, I moved in. We had a whole conversation about it."
"I don't remember that conversation."
"You agreed to everything immediately." She glanced back. One eyebrow up. "I found it suspicious at the time. Now, less so."
The door clicked shut.
Ash sat on the floor of his shared room in his shared house in what appeared to be his shared life.
'Engaged,' his brain said.
'Eight,' it added.
'Engaged. At eight,' it clarified, apparently thinking this was helpful.
'To Green,' it finished. Then had the grace to stop.
He pressed both hands flat on the floor. Breathed in. Breathed out.
Downstairs, something sizzled in a pan.
He had been World Champion. He had faced Mewtwo, Darkrai, Kyurem, Zygarde, and a Dragonite with a personal grudge he'd never fully understood. He had never once lost his nerve.
He looked at the Bulbasaur figurine on the dressing table. It stared back. Serene. Porcelain. Indifferent.
"Okay," he said to himself. "Okay."
He stood up.
Found his shoes.
Went downstairs.