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

Author - Me! I mean, uh, Warlordess

Notes – Part three 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 (view the dedication or ending notes to find a link to it) 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 pacificpikachu, the only one to respond to my post on Tumblr about which tropes I wouldn't mind writing Pokeshipping one-shots for. Thanks for bothering to give me a prompt! I hope this will be as entertaining as you imagined it to be when you replied to my blog!

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Title - "Trope Trip"

part three - "trapped in an enclosed space"

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The kind of awful situation he was in would usually only pertain to emergencies, no other options, last ditch attempts, things like that. However, if he'd been paying the slightest bit more attention, he would have realized right off the bat that he wasn't alone and turned tail in the opposite direction to find another, better (just to throw it in Misty's face) hiding place.

The closet was already pretty small, filled to the brim with jackets, coats, a couple of small boxes, shoes, and the vacuum cleaner his mom hadn't bothered to replace over the course of the past ten years. Hey, don't fix what isn't broken and all that, right?

But now, with the hangers constantly bumping him in the back of the head, the vacuum's handle nudging into his right side, and the unwanted company that was an old friend with a grudge (if that still-too-familiar glare of hers was any indication), Ash Ketchum knew that he had well and truly boxed himself in.

"Ash..."

"Ssshhh! I – is that her? I think that's her," he whispered, inching closer to the closet door, presumably deciding to take a peek and make sure.

"No, Mr. Pokemon Master, it isn't her. Just like it wasn't her the last two times you asked yourself that question," the redhead grumbled irritably with a scowl that he couldn't see through the darkness, so close to him that he felt the heat of her breath on his face with every syllable. "So can you just be quiet and wait for your mom to get home in silence like the rest of us are doing?"

"Misty, c'mon, this is a big deal! My mom doesn't even know I'm home today! This is going to be the best birthday present ever when she finds out! Nothing can compare to the sight of her darling son after eight months with no face-to-face contact!"

"Face-to-face, huh? To be honest, I could do with a bit less of that right now..." she replied almost scathingly from half an inch away from him.

The raven-haired trainer turned a frown and a creased brow in her direction, nearly mashing his nose against her cheek at the same time and doing his best to ignore the discomfort of her right shoulder and hip pressing against his opposing half. He hadn't realized just how close the two of them were before now.

"Why are you even here, Myst? Can't you find your own hiding place?" he asked sharply, resorting to a tone that would have to get through to her in a way that his unseeable-in-the-dark facial expression couldn't at the present time.

"Um, excuse you, but I was here first, remember? It's not my fault that you weren't paying attention and decided to leap in here in a panic earlier. And for the record, that wasn't your mom either. It was Pikachu knocking over a cup in the dining room. So anyway, why don't you get out and find somewhere else to hide if you're so miserable in here with me? Believe me, I definitely wouldn't mind it," and, in her haste, she accidentally stepped on his foot, somehow inadvertently proving her point.

"Yow! Jeezus, Misty, why'd you do that?" he asked, his tone escalating.

"I didn't mean to!" she replied unabashedly, feeling her inner frustration pick up again after she'd been trying to spend the last few minutes holding it at a low simmer. At the same time she attempted to maneuver herself so that she was as far away as possible, but it was futile what with all of the clothes blocking her very limited spacial conditions, unless she decided to forgo all delicacy and knock everything over instead.

"Sshhh! How am I supposed to be on the lookout for my mom when you keep making that kind of racket, huh?" he went on, waving his hand at her as if to forcibly calm her down (and inevitably smacking her in the arm at the same time).

"Oh, please, all you've been doing is alternating moaning and groaning about being here with me and then switching to wondering if any random not-sound just happens to be your mom coming back from Professor Oak's lab with Tracey."

"Pssht, well at least I'm trying! All you've been doing is whining and glaring at me for no reason at all that I can think of!"

"Well, of course not, Mr. Pokemon Master; after all, you never think anyway so why should it matter how I'm feeling or what I'm thinking, right?" she asked in a rave, waving her arms around and causing one to smash rather unfortunately into the door and another to smack him in the side of the face.

"Hey! Watch it!"

"I didn't mean to!"

"That's what you said last time!"

"Will both of you just shut up?!" Brock's voice rung out exasperatedly from somewhere beyond their small corner of the house and they both immediately did, Ash concerned that his mom would (of course) walk in at the wrong time and the surprise would be blown, and Misty because, though she could give two Rattata about how Ash was feeling, she certainly didn't want to be the reason for spoiling Delia Ketchum's birthday when the woman was like a surrogate mother to her.

The closet now bathed in absolute quiet, Ash had no choice but to listen to the combined breathing of himself and his poor choice of hiding-mate as well as pay attention to every slight shift in movement they made. He couldn't help but note their extremely close proximity, the tangle of their legs as she stood half next to and half behind him. Every once in awhile, a random strand of her hair would brush against his neck and he'd do his best to twist just far enough away so that it didn't tickle, but then he was drawn back to her stupid breath fluttering, puffing at his cheek.

All of this wasn't made any easier when Misty, again in an effort to relocate herself and add to the nonexistent amount of space between them, ended up tripping over a few of the shoes below them that had already been shuffled around by their every other move. In her attempt to catch herself and break her fall, she threw one arm out, slamming it against the door, while her body wrenched forward. Thankfully, she remained mostly upright, however at the same time, her equally-as-stupid-as-her-breath lips fell and mashed against the corner of his mouth just as he decided he should turn and do his part to check on her and make sure she was okay.

The two of them stood there for about another forty-five seconds before Misty, now slightly dazed and intoxicated by the contact with formerly unexplored territory, stealthily, slowly backed away and took her terrible, culpable lips with her.

"So, uh..." he began with a fumble of his own vocal cords, his voice cracking awkwardly somewhere in the middle of the second syllable.

"Um," the redhead cleared her throat and, though he still couldn't see it, he could somehow feel the panic starting to well up in her, eyes wide at her recent deviance, "sorry. Accident. Didn't mean to."

"Third time you've said that in the past twenty minutes, Myst... I'm beginning to think you're not being honest with me here."

Ash thought that her dread was mostly caused by the very real and strange incident that had just happened between them. Of course, little did he know that Misty had been wondering about something happening between them for a long time now, had simply never worked up the courage enough on her own to broach the subject, had only sat back wondering and growing more and more disappointed at the distance between his phone-calls and emails while figuring that, had an opportunity been in the works, it would have happened already.

Still, not knowing any of that, he decided he should at least break the ice.

"Y – you okay?" he tried timidly. She nodded, didn't trust her voice, but he didn't see that so he figured this was worse than he thought.

"L – look, it's not a – a big deal, right? I mean, I've been kissed a couple of times before by other girls, you know, and they didn't really matter, even though they were a lot better-looking than you – ow! Jeez, Misty, what's wrong now? I'm just trying to help you feel better about this, okay?" he asked, but at least tried to muffle his voice this time around by gritting his teeth... though that may have been in part due to the pain of her stepping on his foot a second time; and this one hadn't been an accident.

"Well, don't bother! I wouldn't expect you to care now after the past five months without you saying one word to me while you were away from home!" she argued, jabbing him in the shoulder with her index finger a few times for good measure.

"Misty, I was busy training for the Kalos League Championships, okay? I didn't have much time to talk to anyone!"

"That's your problem, Mr. Pokemon Master; that's always been your problem! I mean, you still, even now, don't understand what's important, do you? I get it, Pokemon training is a big deal, becoming Pokemon Master is a big deal for you, it's your dream, but it's not going anywhere! Your relationships with people, though, they depend on communication! All I would have needed from you was five minutes of your time! That's it, and it's definitely not asking for too much!"

"Is that why you've been so mad at me all day? Because you wanted me to call you more often?" he yelped as if the very idea had never even crossed his mind.

"No," she scoffed sarcastically, "that's just silly. Why would I want my best friend to call me once in awhile and let me know what's going on in his life? Why would I want a best friend to talk to at all? I mean, there are so many other people I can have a conversation with, like my part-time sisters who are away for half of the year on regional modeling tours, or my Pokemon who can't exactly talk back to me even if they wanted to, or Tracey, who – if I'm lucky – I get to see once every two months."

Whatever odd little situation had taken place a few minutes ago had been stifled by the arrival of the current matter at hand. However, before Ash could try and dissuade his friend from getting anymore abusive towards him, she finally confessed the one thing she'd been neglecting to say.

"I mean, it's not like I miss you or anything!"

"Y – you..." he tried and failed to repeat the dreaded statement she'd just bluntly made.

Ash Ketchum had met a lot of people over the course of his years on the road, and – had this line come from anyone else – he would have responded in a heartbeat with all the friendly enthusiasm it was possible to muster. His relationship with Misty, however, was (and had always been) very different from his relationship with anyone else. They'd started out very rocky with differing yet still staggering levels of overconfidence and stubbornness. It was because of this, as well as his density and her pride, that they rarely ever got along for more than a few minutes, and it was why it had taken them nearly three years simply to admit that they were friends with each other.

That was not to say that, before such things had been voiced, they weren't friends at all. To the contrary, Ash knew far too much about Misty (and vice verse) for him to even consider that they hadn't been friends since almost the day they'd met, despite such hostile beginnings. But, short of life-or-death or extremely-long-distance situations, he hadn't seriously considered admitting such a thing out loud ever again.

"You, uh... So you miss me, huh?" he asked and was pleased that his smirk was hidden in the dark even now, "Hehe, wow, Misty, didn't think you had it in you to say something like that..." And he proceeded to poke her, both verbally and physically for the next few seconds, unsuccessfully suppressing a bout of very manly giggles.

"I guess you must think of me a lot, huh? Must miss me everyday? Must like me tons to bother telling me, eh? Eh? Eh?" he continued, and the redhead growled in aggravation, doing her best to ignore him as well as hide her flush at the mere mention of the words 'like me tons'.

Surely he hadn't figured that part out, after all, right?

"Ash, I will break your finger, and your jaw if you do not. Shut. Up." she warned him, and, using skills neither knew she possessed, she grabbed his hand in less than a second and held it firmly in her grip, the gravity of her threats apparent when she twisted his wrist just a bit to get his attention.

"Hehe..." he laughed again, however this time it was weighed down considerably with fear, "well, um, w - would it make you feel better if I told you that you were my best friend too?"

It was enough to make her let go of his hand anyway.

"R – really?" she asked. Ash, realizing that she was taking his own confession a lot more seriously than he'd planned, cleared his throat and licked his now very dry lips, trying his best to get the suddenly rabid beating of his heart to calm down a bit.

He wished more than just about anything in the world at the present time that things would stop getting so somber between them. It was a lot easier to get along with Misty when they had no expectations for each other. Just because they were old friends, just because the twinges of something more had been reignited with their accidental half-kiss, didn't mean that he wanted to test the boundaries of everything they'd founded their very relationship off of.

"Um, well, if you... I mean..." His stammer was interrupted, however, by the distant sound of a door opening and shutting, followed by a couple of semi-familiar voices.

"Thanks so much for helping me feed the Pokemon on the preserve today, Mrs. Ketchum," Tracey was saying from the dining room. "You're always such a big help."

"Oh, it's no problem! I always look forward to seeing the Pokemon, especially Ash's. They make me feel closer to him when he's not home," the woman replied with a chuckle followed by a wistful sigh, and the two of them walked towards the living room.

"Oh, oh, this is it!" Ash stated distractedly, reaching around in the dark to find the doorknob. Finally, when he'd grasped it, he went on, "And now, in three, two..."

"Wait, Ash, I still... What about..." But Misty's comments went unheard in his excitement.

"One!"

"I said wait a minute! I think we might be – whoa..."

And the two of them stumbled and crashed through the doorway and into the living room, falling to the floor in front of the bottom landing of the staircase. At the same time, Brock, May, Dawn, Max, and the rest of Ash's friends all popped out of their hiding places and shouted a unanimous mix of surprise! and happy birthday! to the Ketchum matriarch, leaving her delightfully impressed by the turn out.

That was, until she noted her teenage son and a very good girl friend of his (as in, friend-who-happened-to-be-a-girl) tangled and mashed up together on the ground, and her mouth fell open in shock, as well as everyone else's.

"Ash, honey, what were you doing with Misty in my closet?" she asked kindly, as if she was suppressing her maternal urges, both of which were telling her that she should either, A., cry out in celebration that her son had finally figured out his hormones, or, B., take the situation under her control and make sure that nothing permanent had truly happened in there.

Ash and Misty, for their part, were doing their best to try and disengage themselves from one another, both red in the face from the embarrassment at interrupting everything. Brock, in haste, decided to try and make the best out of a bad situation.

"You know," he whispered under his breath to everyone, "I thought for sure that the two of them would end up fighting and ruining the surprise. As it turns out, they've made this party a lot better than we ever could!"

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Notes – Oh, yay, it's finished! I threw this fic together in a couple of hours! It... kind of got away from me because I had, like, three different directions I wanted to take it in. In the end, I somehow went part of the way in all of them... so I think it got kind of messy. But the ending (and the corner-mouth kiss) made it all worth it, right? Right?