Hi guys!

This is a little one-shot wherein Lana thinks about things and makes some decisions.

Set immediately after she leaves Ash's room at the beginning of chapter 20.

THIS IS A COMPANION PIECE TO MY OTHER STORY.

You need to have read Together We Are Stronger to fully enjoy this.

.

Lana's dad is waiting for her when she walks out of Ash's room at the end of the day.

"Let's go", she says, and his shoulders drop.

"Great", he replies, and Lana can hear the 'finally' in his voice he leaves unsaid. They take the elevator down and he wraps a big arm around her shoulders while they wait, squeezing gently. Lana bites her lip, looking down. She feels small and frail and utterly exhausted.

Her breath hitches and her dad looks down at her, his smile slowly dropping.

"What's wrong?" he asks, and the worry in his tone makes her throat feel tight. She wants to be alone. "Your friend's feeling better, isn't he?"

It's too soon. Ash had still been pale – too pale – and her arm hurts like a bitch and all she can see behind her closed eyes is the world-shaking explosion that was meant to kill her and her friends and a whole bunch of other people. She should be… she could be dead, and her dad would be crying by her mangled body right now if not for Ash's quick thinking.

Everything's wrong.

"Yeah", she chokes out. "He's doing a little better."

"Good, that's good", he replies mildly, and they ride the rest of the way down in silence.

.

.

"You want anything?" he asks when they pass a convenience store on their way to the hotel. "A snack or ice cream or something?"

Lana shakes her head. She ate soup at the hospital's cafeteria and it's still not settled into her stomach. She feels faintly ill even thinking about food.

"Alright", her dad says. He rolls his luggage along, sets it by the storefront and continues: "I'll just quickly go buy us something to eat in case we wake up hungry. You can wait here if you want."

Lana nods. "Okay."

She sits down on the luggage to wait. The effects of her pain medication are fading, and she focuses on that, on the physical pain in order to distract herself from her spinning thoughts. Her right arm hurts the most. The wrist is sprained and there's a deep gash on the forearm that required stitches, and beside those she has countless smaller scratches all over her palms and elbows and knees. She looks rough, but all she can think about is how minor it really is. How bad it could have been, and how easily.

Ash lost a lot of blood. A lot of blood. Lana looks down at her palms and even though they are scrubbed clean and bandaged with band-aids that have pictures of little fishes on them, she can still feel how it felt to have them covered in his blood. How it streamed down his face as he laid unconscious, dark and viscous and unstoppable. She remembers coming to her senses after the world settled and crawling up to Ash, the pieces of destroyed floor and ceiling and walls digging into her palms. Remembers putting her hands around Ash's head and feeling the warm stickiness there, how her stomach twisted and her body froze with fear.

And after that…

Lana grinds her teeth together, grabs her sprained wrist and squeezes. She isn't going to think about that. She won't she won't she won't…

"Hey, hey, hey, Lana!" someone says, and warm hands wrap around her arms, pulling them apart. "Don't do that!"

Lana lets go and looks up. Her dad is standing there, holding her firmly and looking terrified. Tears well up in her eyes and she leans her head against his chest.

"Never do that", he whispers, and there is pain in his voice like she's never heard before.

Lana nods – just the tiniest twitch against his chest.

"I wanna go home", she sniffles, feebly, and he rubs soothing circles on her back. She's sobbing now, and she doesn't know if she can stop, if it's even physically possible.

"I know, sweetie."

He's silent and still for a long time while Lana cries, just holding her, strong and solid for the both of them. It's a busy street, even as it's getting late, and Lana knows they are getting weird looks. It's fine, though. She's too tired to care.

Eventually she stops crying, and she raises her puffy red eyes to look up at him.

"I'm okay", she murmurs, and he brushes a hand through her hair and smiles.

"Of course", he humors her. Lana chokes out a little laugh and her heart feels a million times lighter already. He holds out his hand and Lana gladly takes it, wrapping her whole arm around his. He grabs the luggage with his other hand, and they walk the rest of the way to the hotel like that.

.

.

Lana is exhausted to the bone, and even the scratchy sheets and lumpy bed of the hotel feel luxurious to her. She presses her face against the pillow and exhales, deep and long. Her dad is reading a book on the other side of the room, and she knows he's going to stay awake until she falls asleep. To make her feel safer – or maybe to make himself feel better. At least to make sure she's not going to freak out again.

She won't, she promises silently. She's over it. What's happened has happened, and she came out of it alive and so did all her friends. That is all that matters.

She must've fallen asleep at some point, because next time she opens her eyes the room is dark and she can hear her dad snoring, deep asleep. She stares at the wall next to her bed and her skin crawls. Something is casting a shadow through the window and in Lana's exhausted mind it resembles something akin to a face. A twisted, mangled face with only white holes for eyes-

Lana gets up so fast she feels a bit dizzy. She stumbles across the room and yanks the curtains closed, the hoops connected to the curtain rail making a screeching sound that feels impossibly loud in the pitch black room. Her heart is pounding and she's trembling all over and she sits down on the floor to catch her breath.

Lysandre is dead, she reminds herself, and she's glad about that. Ash might feel guilty about his death or whatever, and she can kind of understand him, she can, but it doesn't mean she agrees with him. For the ten minutes that she knew Lysandre she despised that man with everything she had, and she knew he felt the same towards her. There's nothing to feel sorry about him being dead, and Lana just wishes Ash could actually see that.

Those two have history, though, and if that means Lana will have to keep reminding Ash that what ended up happening was for the better, then so be it. And to make sure she can do that, that she can make Ash feel better and safer and more whole again, then she needs to be stronger. She needs to be able to imagine Lysandre's dead, disfigured face and his dead eyes and the awful wound in his stomach and still stay strong. And there's no way she's letting Ash down after what he did for her.

Lana opens the curtain, softer now, and stares down the shadow. It stares back at her, and Lana says: "You're gone. You hurt me and you hurt my friends, and I might never forgive you for that. But you will never hurt us again. I won't let you."

She feels a bit silly talking to herself, but she feels better all the same. The shadow looks nothing like Lysandre, she notices, and an exhausted giggle bubbles in her throat. She grins to herself, shuffles back to her bed and crawls under the covers. She's asleep in minutes.

.

.

It's barely getting light outside when her dad wakes her up.

He sits on the edge of her bed and places a gentle hand on her shoulder and says: "There's someone here to see you."

Lana blinks at him groggily. "…Who?"

He just smiles wider. "Come see for yourself."

Lana rubs at her eyes and gets up gingerly, her injuries screaming and doing their best to help her wake up. She trudges after him and peeks out to the hallway.

Her eyes widen and she's grinning before her brain even properly catches up.

"Jenny!" she yelps. "Greninja – many of you!"

Alain's friend Jenny is standing there, a bright smile on her face though Lana can see she's barely slept at all – the incident must mean a lot of work for the police force. Behind her stands three greninja, and Lana instantly recognizes the biggest one as the one who helped her and Ash. She wonders what is going on.

"Hey, Lana", Jenny says. "I'm sorry to barge in on you like this, but this greninja here was insistent that it wanted to see you before it goes back to its home forest. I can see it has great respect for you."

Lana blinks. "Really?" She looks at the greninja, and it nods at her. It has bandages all over its torso and there's a freshly healed scar stretching across its face, but its eyes are sure and steady. Lana feels something warm building in her chest, and she steps closer to the greninja.

"I wanted to thank you", she says then, and it comes straight from her heart. "We might not have made it out without your help. Thank you."

It shakes its head. "Greninja nin greninja."

"I think it's saying the same about you and Ash", Jenny says softly.

Lana smiles. They would be dead without Ash, for sure. And maybe she did a little bit to help, too.

"I'm so glad I met you", she tells it, and the way it looks back at her means the world.

"I'm gonna come back to Kalos someday", she says, and it's a promise. "Maybe we will meet again?"

"Greninja", it says with a nod, and it's a promise too.

Lana grins and blinks the tears away from her eyes.

Maybe the world is not all that bad, after all.

.

.

.

I hope you enjoyed!

(I'm also writing a sequel piece focusing on Ash and Kukui, but that might still take me some time to finish.)