Love in the Time of Tomorrow

Chapter 25: A Flaw

Yes, it was the real Zinnia last chapter. People seemed confused on that...or just didn't mention it. Anyway, this is the final battle. As for music...if you know these lyrics from an anime, you know what song: ROW ROW FIGHT THE POWAH! Chapter 25 time!

Chapter 25

A Flaw

What little air there was in the space of the stadium rippled across them, causing Ash's jacket to split open, waving in the breeze. His hair and Pikachu's fur did the exact same while Deirdre continued to watch them carefully, a rather discerning expression upon her sneering face. Her hand was pulling up, touching to her cheek as a welt seemed to form there from Ash's punch. Beyond her, in the hallway, Ash could see the orbs containing his friends and Greninja, locked out of the battle. However, he just stood there, facing her down. Tucked into her breast pocket seemed to be Ho-oh's feather, though it appeared to be dimming a little already.

"How...?" Deirdre asked. There was a shuffling up above, and Ash could see that Clemont had also come over, fallen to the ground with his backpack off of him. He and Serena were both looking down at them, completely exhausted with their Pokémon. "How did you get free? How are you...alive?"

"Couldn't tell ya," Ash admitted, shuffling his foot a bit on the ground. Deirdre blinked a little, and then she looked down to the feather. As though it was signaling or confirming her thoughts, the ground seemed to shake, and bits and pieces of the stands seemed to disintegrate a little. "I just know that I felt Ho-oh's power rushing through me, healing my wounds with its fire. And that someone reached out to me...someone I never thought I'd see again, and she reminded me. Reminded me of everything I had to fight for, and what everyone else before me had fought for."

"And what is that?" Deirdre asked. Any sense of confidence was gone now. She no longer seemed assured of her plan...and that scared her; he could tell. Ash watched her eyes, searching for where things had clearly gone wrong, and she seemed to spot her comrade up above, collapsed entirely.

"The future," Ash stated definitively. Deirdre seemed to snarl at that obvious implication, turning her gaze back down to Ash. He briefly looked to the feather near her chest, shining in the darkness of that now crumbling dimension. He took a step forward, filled with confidence. "She reminded me of what I told her, what I had promised her. To not give in to despair."

"Not give in to despair? That seems like something a child would say," Deirdre now spoke. In front of her, Marshadow's orange eyes narrowed, glaring at Pikachu rather fiercely. "Hope. Dreams. A future. When you reach a certain point, those things no longer exist."

"Because you let them die," Ash sighed out. If anything, she seemed to be even more angered by this particular assertion of his. He closed his eyes a moment, remembering all the thoughts and things that had swirled inside that space, that supposed perfection of hers. It reminded him of Tapu Fini, and his own time that he was willing to let despair cripple him until he found his hope. He knew all too well how fragile hope was. "I saw...I saw how you were broken."

"Seeing and experiencing are two different things, Ash Ketchum," Deirdre challenged him. The area seemed to shudder again, more of the space breaking apart. The meteonite was also starting to lose its color, as a part of the feather seemed to die, flaking off into dust. "You could never know the pain I endured. The pain I still feel."

"But I can, because I understand you," Ash spoke. He sighed out once more, as if tired of explaining this kind of rhetoric to her, while she looked at him with utter disdain. Some shifting above showed that Clemont was moving, a light on his backpack clicking on while the device in general seemed to malfunction above. "Years ago, I told her I didn't need to understand her to move forward. That was pretty stupid of me, because without that, I could never see what drove us here. But now...I do understand. I understand how you lost your legs, bonded with Marshadow and turned away from hope. It must have been hard, but instead of accepting that pain, you let yourself wallow in it. You gave up on hope."