Disclaimer – Of course I own this stuff! But only ‘cause I stole it first! Mwahahah…

Author - Me! I mean, uh, Warlordess

Notes – Part two of my “couples trope” series. Just so everyone knows, none of these one-shots are connected to each other. This was created based off of a list of trope cliches often spotted in romance fan-fiction and I decided to use it to get myself back into writing. I’m not sure if it’s working all that well but at least something has been posted because of it.

Dedication – This one goes out to thepyromancers, one of my many Tumblr wives. She loves Pokeshipping as much as I do, and she listens to me rant and moan on and on about our ship despite the fact that it probably drives her crazy. She really wanted me to use the fake dating trope when I told her about this series… and, since I’d already formed half a story based on it, I decided to give the girl what she wants! Thanks, babe! I love you!

OoO

Title - “Trope Trip”

part two - “fake dating”

part one (“huddling for warmth”) can be found here.

OoOoO

Ash Ketchum liked to think that he could handle just about anything. His reputation, after all, spoke for itself. He was the owner of a plethora of Pokemon (all of which were his trusted teammates and friends), a valued and rather esteemed ranking participant of eight or so Pokemon Leagues around the world (whether they were officially sanctioned or not), he’d blasted off Team Rocket roughly a thousand times, and not to mention there was that whole saving-the-world-on-multiple-occasions thing, all the while maintaining a calm, calculated, and humble composure.

So, yeah, he was a pretty good guy, and more than that, he was reliable. He was always ready to lend a helping hand when it was necessary… Well, until now, that was.

Now, sitting across from an old friend, a tentative relation though it had turned out to be as a whole, and as volatile as her world-renowned temper, he couldn’t help but second guess himself and, nay, even wonder how things had come to this at all.

The two of them were currently in downtown Cerulean City, enjoying the wonderful sunlight and balmy breeze thanks to the outdoor seating at the little cafe Misty had chosen for their so-called date.

He flinched and clenched and unclenched his fists, which were propped stiffly on his knees. Even daring to think the word to himself was enough to send his reflexes into a fit, but he braced himself, repeated in his head the very conversation that had landed him here, and then finished up the round of self-loathing with a mental kick.

“Wha'dya mean, a date? Why would I ever wanna do that kinda thing with you, Myst?” he’d asked the day before after deciding on an impromptu visit to Cerulean to see his old friend before heading back home. A few years prior, he wouldn’t have even understood the language the redheaded gym trainer was using, her words laced with hopeful pleas.

But after so long traveling with Brock, so long with Cilan, and now after learning only very recently about another friend’s romantic intentions with him – Serena – well, suffice to say he knew enough… and he definitely wasn’t interested in having another lesson on this particular subject anytime soon.

Watching Misty’s expression the day before as she huffed and puffed and held her finger-laced hands up at him, begging and praying for his help… Hah, he wished he’d had a camera at the time to preserve the moment for years to come but alas, so he’d done as was expected and asked what she needed. And she’d told him about this guy she’d been interested in and how she wanted to get his attention and could he, as in Ash, maybe play a small role and pretend to date her – just once – to see if that would be enough to garner his concern.

His first response was to shut her down immediately and change the topic out of discomfort. Misty was clearly his friend and no more, no less. She wasn’t his type and, even if she somehow magically became just that, he still had other things on his plate that were far more important than a dinky little date. His secondary response was to sit there and take in the sight of her begging him – hah! - for such a favor. Oh, how the mighty and mature and so-called-grown-up (to cite a very distant yet still bitter insult) had fallen. His third gear kicked up with a less familiar emotion – one that he hadn’t felt in quite a long while – something edgy and violent and olive-colored like jealousy, but he quashed it right away and found the words he needed to set her straight.

“Misty, you’re crazy if you think I’m going to put myself through something like that! Just because you’re letting me spend the night in the guest room doesn’t mean I have to do whatever you say!” And he was so delicate about the entire matter too!

Arms crossed, nose so high in the air that the redhead couldn’t help but wonder if the oxygen was a little thinner up there on his high Rapidash, he deigned to hear a couple more feeble excuses from her before she would inevitably decide to give in and let him win their latest not-argument…

A sigh and then, “You’re right, Ash. I should never have asked you. You wouldn’t be able to pull it off anyway.”

His posture slipped and he nearly face-faulted and smashed his head into the tiled dining room flooring before choking on his response.

“W – what does that mean?”

“It means that the point of this fake date is to try and get the guy I like to notice me and make a move on his own! He won’t bother if he knows it’s an act, right? And, no offense, but someone as childish, one-track-minded, and dense as you probably wouldn’t be able to put up a decent show,”she sighed again with a weary shrug of acceptance. “I shouldn’t have asked though. This is clearly my fault. I’ll just have to find someone else… Maybe Tracey can help me the next time he visits the gym…”

Ash felt an involuntary twitch in one of his eyes but blinked it away and hoped the redhead hadn’t taken notice. The words flew from his lips before he’d had a chance to pace himself through the contract he’d verbally agreed to.

“I can do it just fine, Misty! Pssht, you’ll regret ever calling me any of those things after I blow you away with my smooth moves!”

So, next day, they were at the cafe and he was trying to will up the courage needed to pull off his aforementioned smooth moves. He’d been doing well so far. He didn’t think anybody could glare at Misty – er, stare deeply into her eyes was what he was aiming for – as well as him. And surely nobody would be able to grimace – smile! He was smiling – as animatedly as him. And so what if he’d accidentally kicked her with his foot five minutes into sitting down? He was fine; he was such a professional.

Such a professional, in fact, that he was pretty sure the whole terrible ordeal was two minutes from being over.

“Do you see him?” he whispered as discreetly as possible while sipping from the unsweetened iced tea she’d ordered for him (which, upon receiving, he’d decided to dump about five tablespoons of sugar into).

“Well,” she whispered back with a plastic smile plastered on her face, clearly trying to keep the mood going despite his best efforts to smother it dead, “I called him this morning and told him we needed something from the Gym. Oh, he’s a member of our Sensational Sister charter, Cerulean Branch,” she elaborated at Ash’s quirked brow.

“You mean the fan club your sisters founded in their own honor after they started those water ballets?”

“Yup; that’s the one.”

“The one you aren’t even a member of 'cause you’re just the runt?” he continued, whether it was daftly or succinctly, she couldn’t be sure.

Misty’s facial expression formed into a rigid glare for roughly three-quarters of a second but she stifled it and managed a smile, this time kicking him under the table and causing him to jump. As soon as his hands were on the tabletop, she made her next move and firmly latched onto one of them.

“W – what are you doing?”

“What does it look like, Mr. Pokemon Master? I’m holding your hand!” she retorted with a sip of her own beverage afterwards, “Look, I know you’re no Romeo–”

“–Who?” he interrupted, but never received an answer.

“–but really, we need some sort of lasting physical contact or this is never going to work. We just look like good friends having lunch together. We need some suggestive body language or else he won’t catch on to what’s supposed to be happening between us!”

He? Oh, right, he! Ash’s mind had imploded so severely that, for a moment, he’d forgotten there was a specific purpose for everything he was being put through. That strange edgy pressure was back, nearly causing a troublesome stomachache, but he tried his best to suppress it until it had retreated once more. Who was this heanyway? Didn’t Ash deserve to know the name of the guy Misty was trying so hard to impress?

And she’d pulled out all the stops too, hadn’t she? She’d used a plastic-pearl hair-tie for her signature side ponytail and had, of all ludicrous things, opted to wear a knee-length summer dress and flip-flops instead of her usual attire. To any other person, it would hardly make a difference because she still looked so much like her overall, but to Ash, knowing why she was wearing that and why they were where they were and what they were waiting for… None of it sat well with him at all.

“That’s better,” she told him as Butterfree and Beautifly duked it out inside his abdomen at the slightest change in contact and, looking down, he noticed that he’d subconsciously unclenched his fist and was – for all intents and purposes – casually, romantically holding his best friend’s hand. Or was he simply allowing her to hold hishand?

There was a creeping tingle in that particular extremity but, like a pro, he did his best to ignore it and carry on a conversation. He could totally do this. He knew enough about girls to know how to get by without shooting himself in the foot in this kind of situation. He knew enough about Misty to know what questions were worth asking and answering, what would get the best, most expressive responses out of her, what would cause her to smile and laugh and frown and open up to him.

It was strange. He definitely, really knew all about this… but he hadn’t realized it until now, and he certainly hadn’t expected it to be so simple once he’d been pushed against the wall and found no other options or routes of escape.

Sure, confusion aside, he’d received a couple of kisses, a couple of confessions, from girls in his time. He knew that there was something – something appealing apparently about him… though he didn’t understand why girls had to get so whimpery and clingy about it and why they had to try and force something out of him that he simply wasn’t willing to or interested in giving, especially to girls he didn’t really know all that well.

With Misty, despite her odd request for a date, it wasn’t like that at all. They just acted like, well, like them… only honest, and open, and accepting. They acted mature, like it was simply the next stage of the tentative relation they’d grown to share with one another.

At the brief mention of the word stage, Ash felt a suddenly unbridled sense of regret. Everything else that day, new and different and terribly, awfully unexpected though it was, had managed to be pushed back by his sense of reason. He could constantly excuse this unexplored area of life by claiming that he had more important things on his plate, by thinking of his Pokemon and the Leagues and his dream…

“What are you doing now…?” he asked rather timidly (though hopefully she didn’t notice) as he took stock of her hand, originally softly kneading his palm with her thumb, slowly easing up past the veins in his wrist and towards his forearm.

“I’m taking it a step further,” she told him simply.

“What is it? Do you see hi–”

But Ash’s next question was cut off when the redhead grabbed hold of him at the joint of his elbow and yanked him forward, intentions left undisclosed. In his haste to try and get a good look at the guy Misty was so interested in, the raven-haired trainer had begun wrenching his neck from left to right, trying to locate anyone who might be paying the two of them an unnecessary amount of attention.

He paused, frozen, as he felt a pair of lips haphazardly make contact with his cheek.

As previously mentioned, Ash had had his fair share of romantic experiences before, a couple of confessions, a couple of kisses. None of them had made him feel quite like he did just then; perched barely over the edge of his seat in downtown Cerulean City, Kanto, skin fiery hot from both the unexpected physical contact he’d just received from his possibly-more-than-a-friend-but-maybe-not as well as the flush his own nervous system had decided to induce to help him ease through the shock. Feverish goosebumps riddled his entire frame, and he realized he was going to have to breathe sometime soon or else risk losing consciousness. As if the day hadn’t been embarrassing enough already.

He thought he’d known her, Misty, this girl he’d met years back when he was a greenhorn trainer fresh on his first journey away from home. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he’d underestimated her, oh so daring and thirsty to prove to – to… well, not to him, at least not this time, but to prove to whoever that she was perfectly ready for that silly most-important-thing-in-the-world called “love” that he’d apparently been far too immature and young to notice or care about for so long…

But it was glaringly obvious to him now, right now as he watched his best friend continue to stare pointedly at him, possibly waiting for more of a reaction than him leaning forward, gaping like an out-of-water Magikarp. However his vocal cords clearly needed another moment to cope so she cleared her throat and responded to his unasked question.

“No, Ash, I didn’t see him.”

Oh, right… There was that him again, and Ash inevitably felt his entirely too perfect little world start falling down around him. Yes, he was quite sure after all that he didn’t know Misty as well as he’d originally assumed. But that thought wasn’t enough to kill his curiosity.

“Oh, so why did you, uh… I mean, we – you – uh, you just kissed me so… what was that all about?” he asked blankly, trying to sort the pieces of his newest thousand part puzzle.

“Depends,” the redhead shrugged in response before all too casually sitting back and hunching forward, leaning her face against her palm and using their table to support the rest of the weight. “What are you feeling right now?” she went on to say suggestively, a small smile gracing her features.

Ash felt rather taken aback by this. What did he think? What was he supposed to think? What did his thoughts have to do with anything anymore? Why were they even here? What did Misty want from him? Why did he care what she wanted? Why was she looking at him like that? Why did he feel so inclined to answer her instead of doing what he felt was long overdue at this point; that was, abruptly standing and walking back to the Cerulean Gym alone so that the two of them could have a little breathing room?

“I… I don’t know,” he replied anyway, the words breaching his lips before he could stop them. Strangely, his response did not precede an aggravated comeback.

He still didn’t know who the guy was or what Misty wanted from him or what he was doing anymore or who he was trying to impress… but he did know that the line that had formerly separated his very simple lifestyle from that foreign territory had basically been blown to smithereens. He knew that he didn’t like this guy he’d never met before, he knew that there was an undefined gray space where the definition of his relationship with Misty had formerly been. He knew that, for the first time in his entire life, he hadn’t minded that awkward rumbling, fumbling, tumbling feeling he’d gotten after being kissed on the cheek by some girl. And finally, he knew that Misty was far more – and far more complicated –than just some girl.

So perhaps he indeed knew more than he let on even though such information introduced more questions than answers.

But Ash – clever, dependable Ash – was indeed a professional. So he put on a smile and sat back in his chair and took in the situation for what it was, stifling that voice in his head still demanding answers to the questions it had been shouting over the course of the past five minutes. And then they finished their date and started the fifteen minute walk back to the gym.

“So how did I do?” he asked in a completely neutral tone on the way.

Misty nodded, an odd, somehow appeased expression on her face, “Pretty good, I guess, Mr. Pokemon Master. You’re a more decent actor than I gave you credit for. But we may have to do this again. I’m not sure he,” and she paused and waited for the slight acknowledgment of the still unnamed third party to show in the raven-haired trainer’s gaze as they stared each other down, “quite got the message.”

“Well, I guess if there’s absolutely no other choice,” Ash feigned wary acceptance of his continued burden, delighting in the sort-of-a-compliment that his friend had given him. As if there had been any doubt, right? Of course he could pull off something as simple as this! And he didn’t think it’d be so bad, trying out their little date-thing a second time. Maybe there’d even be another kiss somewhere along the way…

He mulled it all over in his head, techno-lighted fluttering bouncing around his stomach once more. And then they continued the rest of their walk in relative silence.

What Ash had forgotten, however, was that Misty was – like him – a much better actor than she let on, especially coming from a family line of entertainers. After all, she had been able to both manipulate him into cooperating with her date as well as mislead him with the mention of a completely imaginary third party.

Her mollified grin only grew wider as she watched her best friend inattentively stroll back to her home, clearly on cruise control.

Thanks for the first date, Mr. Pokemon Master.

OoOoO

Notes – No, okay, so that turned out a lot longer than I thought. I apologize. I knew, even before I started typing, that this was going to end up longer than my rough character limit/goal. I mean, usually “fake dating” trope fics are novel-length, or rather, at least a few chapters, so I guess I should just be pleased that I was able to do what I could and still contain it to a one-shot… but I guess that’s all I’ve got going for me.