Chapter 5: Pleasure and Panic
The glade felt like a crime scene. The air was too still, the dappled light too cheerful, the whisper of the ferns too knowing. Ash stood frozen, Misty’s fingers still pressed against the lips it had almost kissed. The phantom heat was gone, but the memory was a brand.
A different, more immediate heat was building in Misty.
It started as a dull, persistent pressure, a foreign insistence in the cradle of Ash’s hips. She shifted her stance, trying to ignore it, but the denim of his jeans was rough and unyielding. The sensation sharpened, defined itself—a firm, unfamiliar thickening, trapped and straining against the zipper. Her face, Ash’s face, flushed with a wave of mortification so complete it felt like vertigo.
This wasn’t the confused, sleepy reaction of the morning. This was a direct, humiliating artifact of the Kirlia’s manipulation, a blunt physiological echo of that shattered almost-kiss. Her own body had betrayed her in a new, horrifying way. She jammed Ash’s hands deep into the jacket pockets, hunched her shoulders forward, anything to hide the undeniable evidence of a arousal that wasn’t hers, but absolutely was.
Her eyes, desperate for a distraction, landed on Ash.
He was staring at the spot where the Kirlia had vanished, looking lost. He brought a hand up—her hand, with its slender fingers—and wiped it across his mouth again, a frantic, nervous gesture. The sunlight caught the faint tremble in those fingers. It fell on the smooth line of her own neck, the vulnerable curve where pulse fluttered. It highlighted the gentle swell of her chest beneath the soft fabric of her top, the dip of her waist, the way her shorts hugged—
Misty tore her gaze away, breathing hard. A cold disgust washed over her, aimed inward.
Stop it.
But the guy-brain, or whatever this was, didn’t stop. It analyzed. It appreciated. It cataloged the very things she’d taken for granted or actively disliked about her own reflection. The length of her leg. The shape of her… her butt in those shorts. A detached, clinical part of her mind whispered: Oh. So that’s what they see. That’s the point of all of it.
The realization was nauseating. It was also, secretly, powerfully illuminating. She finally understood the sidelong glances, the stupid comments from jerks like those kids from the Squirtle Squad years ago. It was all right there, in the package she’d walked around in for nineteen years. A package she was now viewing from the outside, with a lens painfully polished by testosterone and residual psychic suggestion.
And part of that lens, to her utter horror, found the package… compelling.
“We should… we should keep moving,” Ash said, his voice small in Misty’s throat. He finally turned from the empty branch. His eyes—her bright blue eyes—were wide, haunted. He saw her staring. Saw the rigid, uncomfortable way she was standing.
A flicker of understanding, then acute embarrassment, crossed his borrowed features. He’d been in this body for days. He knew its signals. His gaze darted down, then snapped back up to her face, his cheeks flushing.
Misty looked away, her jaw tight. “Yeah. No kidding.”
They walked. Not side-by-side, but staggered, Misty a few paces ahead, plowing through the undergrowth with a violence that suited Ash’s body. She needed the burn in the muscles, the distraction of physical exertion.
“It was just the psychic thing,” Ash said to her back, the words tumbling out. “It didn’t mean anything. It was like… like a Status condition. Like being Paralyzed or something.”
“Attract isn’t a Status condition, Ash,” Misty muttered, not slowing down. “It’s a move. It works because there’s something to work with.” She regretted the words the moment they left Ash’s mouth.
The footsteps behind her stopped. She forced herself to keep walking for another ten seconds before stopping too, not turning around.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” His voice was closer than she expected. He’d caught up.
She sighed, a rough exhale. She turned. He was right there, looking up at her with her own face, which was infuriating. “It means maybe the stupid Kirlia wasn’t making stuff up out of nothing. Maybe it was just… turning the volume up on a radio that was already playing static.”
Ash blinked. “Static?”
“Forget it.” She shoved a hand through Ash’s messy black hair. “It’s just… this is so messed up. I’m looking at my own body and I’m… and you’re in it, and it’s…”
“Weird,” Ash finished, softly.
“Yeah. Weird.” She met his eyes. “And you’re feeling… things. In my body. Right now.”
Ash’s gaze skittered away, confirming everything. He wrapped his arms around himself. “It’s confusing. Everything is… softer. Closer to the surface. I feel jumpy all the time. And after what it just did…” He shook his head. “I don’t know how to turn it off.”
The raw admission disarmed her. This wasn’t the stubborn, battle-obsessed Ash. This was someone adrift in a foreign sea, confessing to drowning. Her own anger, her disgust, wavered.
“Well, join the club,” she said, the fight leaving her voice. She nodded downward, a grim, sarcastic gesture. “I’ve got a whole new set of plumbing that has a mind of its own. And right now, its mind is in the gutter. Looking at me.”
A strained, desperate sound escaped Ash. It was almost a laugh. “This is so stupid.”
“The stupidest.”
They stood in the filtered light, two souls profoundly out of place. The unspoken thing hung between them: the Kirlia’s solution. The "joining." It was no longer a abstract, horrifying concept. It was a path paved with the very real, very confusing sensations they were both drowning in. The path was lined with the sight of her own lips, the feel of his calloused hands, the ache of unfamiliar desires.
Misty’s stomach, Ash’s stomach, growled loudly, shattering the tension.
Ash looked down at it, surprised. “Oh. Right. We skipped lunch.”
The mundane need was a lifeline. A problem they could solve.
“There should be berries near the stream,” Misty said, jerking her head toward the sound of running water they’d been paralleling. “Oran or maybe Persim.”
They moved toward the water, the dynamic shifting again. The immediate, screeching horror dialed down to a low, constant hum. They were just two lost, hungry people in a forest.
As they knelt by the stream, washing dust and panic from their hands, Misty watched the water ripple over Ash’s fingers—her fingers. She watched the careful, almost delicate way he selected the plumpest Oran berries from a bush.
She understood the softness he talked about. She saw it in his actions. And a part of her, the part that was still her, found it strangely… not awful. It was a side of herself she never got to see, reflected in the most bizarre mirror imaginable.
He handed her a few berries, their fingers brushing. A simple, practical contact.
Both of them flinched, but only a little. The static was still there. But for now, they chose, silently, to ignore it. They ate in a silence that was almost peaceful, two strangers in a shared, impossible secret, gathering strength for whatever came next. The forest around them held its breath, waiting for them to decide which thread to pull.