Ash washed his plate.
Put it away.
Stood in the kitchen for a moment with nothing to do and too much to think about.
Then he went upstairs.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
He dropped face-first onto the bed.
The sheets were soft. Unreasonably soft. The kind of soft that made it very easy to lie still and stare at nothing and let your brain slowly catch up to the morning.
He lay there for a while.
'Okay,' he thought. 'Let's go through it.'
He was dead. That part he'd processed. It was bad and it had happened and Arceus had fixed it, which was more than most people got.
He was eight years old. Also processed. Uncomfortable, but manageable.
He was in the past. His own past. With all his memories from his previous life. Which meant he knew things — every gym, every rival, every crisis that was coming — and he had time to prepare for them properly instead of stumbling into them on pure instinct and luck.
That part was actually fine.
He was engaged.
To an unspecified number of people.
Green had said you'll meet them and then left for Professor Oak's lab with the energy of someone who had set a small fire and walked away.
'How many,' he thought, 'is you'll meet them?'
He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling.
Then he remembered the letter.
He pulled it out of his pocket. Unfolded it.
Read it again from the top, slower this time. Looking for anything he'd missed the first time when the words you are dead had taken up most of the available space in his brain.
He reached the end.
Turned it over.
There was a second page.
He hadn't noticed that before.
He sat up.
A few things you will need to know about the world you have returned to:
First — time.
You may have noticed, in your previous life, that ageing seemed to slow considerably once a person reached ten years old. You likely did not question this. Most people did not.
The reason was Dialga.
Dialga, Sovereign of Time, had been neglecting a portion of his duties. Not deliberately. Simply — carelessly. The result was that the natural flow of human ageing had been quietly, invisibly disrupted for longer than I care to calculate. Everyone who reached ten years old stopped ageing at the correct rate. No one noticed because everyone was affected equally.
When I rebuilt your existence, I saw this. I corrected it.
As additional restitution — because fixing a problem is not the same as making it right — I have also adjusted the rate of development for children in this timeline. Children now grow faster in their early years. Physically. Mentally. The growth is accelerated until the age of ten, after which normal pace resumes.
This is why the world around you feels slightly different. This is why the people you knew as children carry themselves differently than you remember. They are not different people. They simply had the benefit of a timeline that works correctly.
Second — the engagements.
The formalising of your bonds was my doing. The memory of how those arrangements came to be is already yours. Look for it.
— Arceus
P.S. My children send their regards. I told them to.
Ash read the second page twice.
Folded the letter. Both pages. Put it back in his pocket.
'Dialga,' he thought. 'Of course. He wasn't doing his job and nobody noticed for decades.'
He thought about the old world. About being ten for what had felt like forever. About rivals and professors and gym leaders who had all seemed ageless in a way he'd never questioned because there had been nothing to question it against.
'And Arceus fixed it. And then gave everyone faster growth on top of that.'
He looked at his hands.
Eight years old. But bigger than eight should be. Steadier. More capable. The hands of someone closer to twelve if you didn't know the context.
'That explains Green,' he thought.
He sat with that for a moment. Then turned his attention inward — to the memories of this life. The ones that had flooded back when he'd touched the letter the first time. He hadn't gone through all of them yet.
He went through them now.
Looking for the engagements.
He found it quickly. It wasn't hard to find. It was, in fact, the kind of memory that sat right at the front because even as an eight-year-old living it for the first time, some part of him had known it was going to matter.
His father.
Red Ketchum.
Former Kanto Champion. One of the most famous trainers alive. A man of very few words, very strong Pokémon, and — as it turned out — very poor judgment when his rival offered him advice.
Red was famous. Famous meant attention. And what powerful families wanted, specifically, was to connect themselves to the Ketchum name however they could.
The proposals had started when Ash was born. Alliance proposals. Partnership proposals. Formal requests to join their families to his through the next generation — through Ash.
Red had said no to all of them.
He was an honest man. No interest in agreements he had no intention of keeping. And Delia would have had opinions.
But some families didn't accept no well. The Blackthorn family. The Shirona family. Others. Prominent, persistent, the kind of families who sent the same politely-worded letter four times with increasing pressure disguised as courtesy.
Red had been stuck.
And then Blue Oak — his rival since childhood, his closest friend, and a person who had always been slightly better at strategy than at thinking strategy all the way through — had said the following:
"Hey Red. Why not just get your kid engaged to them? They're connected to you, they stop asking, everyone's happy. Problem solved."
Red had considered this for approximately ten seconds.
Then agreed.
Ash lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
'Dad,' he thought, with the fond exasperation of someone who had just watched a man walk into a wall in slow motion and been unable to stop it.
'You meant well.'
'You absolutely did not think it through.'
Young Ash — the version of himself who had been living this life — had been sat down and informed of the engagements very seriously by his mother. Delia had held his hands and explained it carefully and watched his face for signs of distress.
Young Ash had lit up like a Jolteon.
"So I get to make new friends? And they'll come here? When do I meet them?!"
He put his arm over his face.
'I was,' he thought, 'such a simple child.'
But that response wasn't entirely wrong either. He turned it over carefully. Having people nearby. A family that wasn't just him and his mother in a quiet house while his dad sat on a mountain and occasionally sent letters. People who would be part of his life from the beginning instead of met on the road and eventually lost to distance and different journeys.
He thought about Misty. May. Dawn. Serena. Iris. Lillie.
He thought about Green downstairs, flour on her apron, already running the household at eight years old with the focused competence of someone born forty.
'Big family,' he thought. 'Fine. I've handled worse.'
He had, genuinely, handled worse. He'd faced down Mewtwo in his previous life. He could handle complicated family arrangements at eight.
He sat up.
Reached for his jacket.
Green had mentioned Pallet House before she left. His mother's restaurant. Something about helping out.
He had a feeling that was where the you'll meet them started.
One thing at a time.
He went downstairs.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
Somewhere far above, in a space between dimensions where stars hung still and the fabric of reality stretched visible as thread —
Arceus was holding court.
Palkia and Dialga stood before him.
They were not trembling exactly. Gods did not tremble. But they were standing with the careful stillness of beings who had decided every movement should be deliberate and give no indication of how they were feeling inside.
They were not succeeding.
Arceus looked at them.
The Hall of Origin was silent. Not the ordinary silence — the deeper kind. The kind that came before a god spoke and meant every word.
"Tell me," Arceus said. Quiet. Even. "Which of you stole the parfait."
Palkia's mouth opened immediately.
"It was Dialga, Lord Arceus, without question—"
"It was Palkia, Lord Arceus, he broke into my dimension—"
"Which of you," Arceus said, same tone exactly, "stole the parfait."
Silence.
Complete silence.
"...We don't know," Dialga said. Very small voice.
Arceus let that sit for a moment.
"You destroyed a section of reality," he said. "You erased the existence of the Son of Fate. You unmade a life I spent centuries arranging. You did all of this—" a pause, precise and deliberate, "—because you did not know who ate a dessert."
The silence that followed was the most uncomfortable either of them had experienced in eighty million years.
"Lord Arceus," Palkia began carefully. "In our defence—"
"Do not."
Palkia closed his mouth.
Arceus looked at both of them. Taking in their stillness. Their guilt. The fact that neither of them looked away — which was the only thing working in their favour.
"Do you know," he said, "who actually stole it."
They looked at each other.
The thought arrived in both their minds at the same moment. Slow. Humiliating. Obvious in the way that only things you should have thought of much earlier can be.
"...Giratina," they said. Together.
In the Distortion World, Giratina felt the shift.
Not a sound. Not a vision. Just the specific vibration of two gods arriving at a conclusion, filtered through the unmistakable frequency of Arceus being completely, quietly, terrifyingly aware of everything.
Giratina opened one eye.
'Ah,' he thought. 'There it is.'
He opened a portal.
Gone.
Arceus watched Giratina's dimensional signature vanish from his perception.
He would deal with that one in his own time.
He turned back to his children.
"You will not be punished today," he said.
They both blinked.
"You will, however, take responsibility for what you caused. Whatever disruptions arise from Ash Ketchum's displacement — whatever threads need correcting, whatever balances need restoring — that falls to both of you. Until I say otherwise."
Palkia and Dialga looked at each other.
This was not nothing. This was considerably more than nothing. This was an open-ended obligation from the God of All Things with no stated end date.
"Yes, Lord Arceus," they said. Together.
Arceus turned away.
The audience was over.
"And," he said, without looking back, "find Giratina."
The Hall of Origin returned to silence.
Palkia and Dialga stood in it for a moment.
"This," Palkia said, very quietly, "is your fault."
"You fired first," Dialga said.
"You—"
"Enough," said Arceus, from across the Hall.
They were silent for the rest of the day.