A bit of fun for Onewingedmuse's contest on deviantart!

Tick, tock went the old brass clock, serenading Brock to sleep.
Drip, drop, the tears did slop, all over the old man's sheets.

Brock was eighty three that night, his birthday. He was an old man in an old house, a wooden shack in the Viridian Forest that creaked when the wind blew as hard as it did tonight. He wasn't far from his hometown, Pewter, and though children and grandchildren and siblings and nieces and nephews had long since overrun the place he was glad he could walk into the city and stock up on supplies each week. His bones may have protested the walk every once in a while, but he forced himself onward. Old age was no reason for him to lose his good shape.

He hated nothing more than the sound of his footsteps on that road, reminding him too well of the ones he heard at night. Is wasn't the wind or the ticking of the old grandfather clock or the creaking house or any other sound that might have come, but the footsteps that reminded him just how alone he was. And here they came now, light and quick and barefoot. A twist of the handle, the door bursting open, and those little feet coming next to his bed.

"Brock," she whispered, shaking him by the shoulder, and it was a she. It was a young voice, the sound almost like a memory instead of fresh vibrations through the air. They were young hands, thin but calloused and strong that grabbed his frail body so roughly. "Brock. Bro-ock! You have to wake uh-up! I know you don't want to, you never want to do anything when you're this old, but you have to wake up. I'll never forgive you if you don't."

"Go away," he muttered, pulling the covers over his head, doing a good job of shaking off her hand in the process. He gave a final, longwinded (well, longwinded now that he so rarely spoke) speech of: "Misty, get back in your grave and I'll join you later, alright? Go sleep for good tonight. I'm sick of putting up with this." before closing his eyes as tight as he could manage and hoping that she would leave him alone tonight, vanish to wherever wandering souls went when they weren't bothering the living.

She couldn't let that go, not without a good fight. The young redhead punched his shoulder once, twice, but gained no reaction. So, a slight smile hiding in the corner of her lips, began stomping and storming around the room, making noise loud enough to drown out the wind. She kicked at the chair he sat in and at the desk he wrote on – though his joints made such actions painful – and threw his pencils to the floor. This was the loudest of all, as the sound of wood leaving the plastic cup and crashing to the boards hit when the wind paused. Still, through all of it, Brock stayed firm and never let his head appear above the covers.

Next, she tried something bigger: the old, ticking grandfather clock. She kicked out the glass that kept the pendulum safe and reached inside, fiddling with the swinging metal rod until it was useless for telling time. Nothing still. Not when she slammed her elbow into the clock face or ripped off the hands. He didn't even look when she wiggled and pushed the thing down, successfully shaking the house. However, she still hadn't managed to shake Brock's resolve.

It wasn't until she set her eyes on the cabinet, filled with so many cups of dried leaves and ground pepper it might as well have been a spice rack. One by one she reached up, dropping the fragile cups to the floor and guessing out loud the spice that mixed with the broken ceramic. Those broken pieces flew far across the floor, to the point where Brock was terrified to leave his bed for fear of treading on one.

"Misty!" he snapped, clutching the sheets as he sat. "Misty! Stop it! I don't work anymore! I can't pay to buy new ones!"

She dropped one last cup, turned, and beamed. "I think that was black pepper. It's hard to tell in the dark. Not that it matters, Brock. You know they don't stay broken. They always get fixed by the time I leave. I vanish and everything goes back to the way it was and you wonder if you're crazy until I come back again tomorrow night. I always come back. I will always come back. Your lonely soul called to my lonely soul, and your guilt called to my actions and…well, here I am! Here with you while Ash goes on to…to someplace."

She raced across the room, feet crunching against the spilled shards, to jump up and bounce on his bed for a good while. He couldn't see much in the dark, but the red blood streaking her feet and left leg was too great a contrast to go unnoticed. She was too pale, even when she was alive. Being dead only washed out her colors. She looked perpetually sick, about to faint, and seemed to do so when she finished jumping, panting and giggling, collapsed on his sheets.

"I love being fourteen," she said, as if this explained her behavior. "This is my favorite age. I was happy and Ash and I has just started dating. You remember that? Maybe not. You didn't get involved too often. You're old, too, and old people forget. It's alright, Brock. I forgive you for forgetting, though I never will. You can't forget things like this when you're dead, 'specially when you're young and dead. There's not too much to remember."

She shook her head and sat up, putting her straightened arms behind her back and propping herself up on them. "It was my happiest year, anyway. I was bubbly and giddy. Of course, I made him leave the next year. He had to go to that League. He had to. But I guess we weren't meant to be. Things weren't supposed to get fixed, because we grew apart. We stopped talking and writing and I was alone except for my sisters." She stopping, cocking her head at him. "Pewter isn't that far of a walk, is it, Brock? You don't live that far away."

There was a long moment of silence, during which Brock's breath grew ragged and he began to rock. She didn't continue, and had no reason to, he guessed. She had plenty of time, all the time in the world, and he could have just seconds, depending on the tricks fate played. But there was nothing much to say to that, not that he hadn't said so many nights before. So he settled for whispering, "Why do you keep doing this to me?" he whispered. "Why don't you pass on?"

She nodded as if he had made an on topic point, then continued: "I loved him, I think. I love you too, but it wasn't the same. You were never Ash, but you would have helped. You were part of my other family. My other family was more important than my real family sometime, though I feel bad for saying that. You, Ash, Tracey, Mrs. Ketchum, Professor Oak…heck, even Gary was part of it. You were the one I was closest too, aside from Ash. You were like my big brother."

She scooted up next to him, cuddling her face into his chest, slinging her arms around his neck. "You're so warm and soft and I'm paying you back by getting my feet of over your blankets, bleeding all over them. I'm sorry, since you're such a nice old man. When I come back tomorrow I'll try not to bleed so much, but you have to wake up right away. It's partly your fault, you know. If you had just woken up I wouldn't have had to run around and get all cut up."

"Don't your feet hurt?" he asked, tenderly wrapping an arm around her.

She smiled wider, peering up at him through the darkness. "Yeah, but I don't mind. Physical pain doesn't hurt as much as mental and emotional. Hurts more on the inside. Besides, nothing like fake blood and pain to pretend you're alive. Pretend. I've got to pretend because I'm not alive, Brock. You know how I died, don't you? Don't you remember?"

"Yes."

She breathed in deep then let it go, head lolling back a little bit. "I can't tell you why I keep doing it, but that's why I'm here, Brock. To die again. I have to die right in front of you night after night. It must be terrible. You can't even tear your eyes away. I think it's unfair. We shouldn't have to do this. We should get to leave. I'm sick of this, but I have to do it. I can't not do it. It's not a matter of will. I mean, I don't think it is. I'm pretty sure it's like trying to make your heart stop. You just can't. You can try, but it's stupid and pointless and ridiculous."

She laid with him a moment longer, hearing the beat of his heart while he felt the beat of hers. She was interested, as his heart was much weaker than she had remembered. It was hardly beating now, each thud seeming to take too much effort, like it would give up and give out at any moment. She wondered what if felt like, to have a heart that weak. Hers had never sunk so low. Hers, as he was feeling right now, was a nice, steady, slow beat. Was that how calm it was when she died? It was strange enough to think of her having a beat than to imagine how it worked. Did it beat harder when she ran around, or stay steady when she couldn't?

She pulled away from him then, talking as she went about her business, gathering up a chair and a rope: "I was in my early twenties, I think. That's a lie. I was twenty three years, two months, three weeks and a day and I know it. I could do the hours, if you wanted, but I'm sure you don't. It was March when the high started wearing off. I can't give you the exact date on that, emotions are too slow. I can't pin it. While I was on it…man, was I on it. We turned out shows like nobody's business, and good shows too. I figured out ways to save money, energy, battles loads of trainers and won against most. I was soaring. I had the perfect life, Brock. Without Ash, without you, without any of my old family but the occasional visit from Tracey for Daisy, I was fine. I was great."

She sighed and stood up on the chair, tying the rope to some invisible tether on the ceiling. It hung perfectly, dangling with the low loop of the noose right at her head. "Then I crashed, and crashed hard. You understand depression. Nothing I can say about it. Everything sucks. All I wanted to do was be alone and die. Afterwards, the doctors said I was bipolar, something that worsens during and after puberty, gets noticeable around then. Pretty hard to spot unless you have practice for it."

Solemn hands reached forward, practiced and easy as they slid the noose around her neck. She hadn't changed appearance. She was still fourteen. It wasn't a young woman, but a girl standing on that chair, eyes haunted and distant but not upset, not troubled by the world or what taking that step forward would mean. She was dead, he told himself, and since she was dead killing herself against would make no difference. You can't kill a ghost. Maybe it was more that she still seemed to be a memory, that the step had already happened was what disturbed him. Maybe it was just because it was Misty, a girl close enough to be his sister.

She wouldn't look at him, he noticed. Maybe she was sick of hurting him. The words she said every night weren't delivered the way they often were, with malice or guilt, but a deadpan, an honest musing tone. It was light, comedic in the flat tone, as humorous as she could make them. "I wonder, though. If you had been around, would you have noticed? If I hadn't let Ash go, or gone with him, would he have notice? Or was I just always, always supposed to be swinging? I wonder, though."

And she stepped forward, as she had done so many nights before, to a short drop and a quick snap. Her head lolled to one side, her eyes still open and looking just as lively as a moment before. The wind seemed to be screaming for her, seemed to be the cause of her rocking gently in the air. A little taller, another year and her feet would touch the ground. The suicide would be impossible in his room.

He closed his eyes and counted to ten, and by the time his eyes opened, she had vanished. The room was back to its usual state, nothing broken or bloody or moved from its place. A memory, is what her voice sounded like, and every night he wondered if that was all she ever was. The ghost was a dream, bits of memory strung together, giving an old man delusions of things he wished he could have prevented.

But he could still feel the heartbeat – the one that should have gone still years ago – thrumming against his own.

Tick, tock went the old brass clock, serenading Brock to sleep.
Drip, drop, the tears did slop, all over the old man's sheets.