Misty had made it eleven freaking years without Gary Oak finding out about her crush on Ash, all for Tracy and his big mouth to ruin it in four point two seconds.
She wasn’t sure how he didn’t figure it out himself, honestly. Pallet Town grew its boys to be cute but dumb she supposed, and that had been just fine with her, but now with the meowth officially out of the bag, it was time to make sure the secret didn’t spread any further than it had already.
“Wait, you like Ash?!” Gary exclaimed at what could only be described as the top of his freaking lungs. “Like, like-like?! Does he know?”
“No!” she hissed, checking over her shoulder to check that Ash was still down in the basement getting that bottle of wine his mom asked him to fetch for her. “And I’d like to keep it that way, so shut up!”
“You didn’t know?” Tracy asked Gary, wincing as he realized he had spilled the beans. “I’m sorry Misty, I wouldn’t have said anything if—”
“If it wasn’t so obvious?” Brock interrupted dryly. “She doesn’t exactly do a great job at hiding it.”
Gary made a face crossing his arms in a huff. “I’m sorry, I didn’t exactly travel around with the world with them like you guys did, and some of us have more important things to focus our attention on than a friend’s little school-girl crush.”
“Oh my Arceus, can we please stop talking about this?!” Misty cried, the desperation clear in her voice.
“Stop talking about what?”
Misty spun around, coming face to face with a confused Ash Ketchum, looking at all of them like he was hurt they would even think to have a conversation in his absence, and paled. Shit. “Nothing,” she answered immediately, silently praying to the pokegods that the guys wouldn’t do or say anything stupid.
Unfortunately, Gary, despite his lukewarm redemption, was still, at his core, an absolute bastard. “We were talking about the person Misty’s in looove with,” he sang, and Misty could have committed murder right then and there.
Ash, bless him, turned to her in surprise, his brown eyes suddenly wide as saucers. “You’re in love with someone?”
“Yup!” Gary chirped, cutting her off. “She was just telling us how dreamy they are. How she wants them to ask her on a date and be her boyfriend.”
Misty glared at him with all the intensity she had and grit her teeth. “I did not say any of that.”
Ash looked around at all of them, frowning, and finally settled on Misty. “Who is it?”
“Don’t worry, Ash,” Gary jumped in, because apparently he wasn’t quite done ruining Misty’s life just yet, “I didn’t know either until Tracy and Brock told me.”
“What the heck, Misty?!” Ash exclaimed, offended. “Why do they get to know and I don’t?”
Misty gaped at him, then at Gary, and finally Brock and Tracy, who were sitting there doing nothing, by the way, and then back to Ash, her face reddening with every passing moment. Finally, her mind went blank, and her mouth, without her brain’s permission, blurted out, “I didnt tell them anything, they figured it out themselves!”
Ash turned to Brock and Tracy for confirmation, who shrugged and nodded, respectively. He narrowed his eyes, that look of determination that Misty usually loved, but in this case was creating some uneasy squirming in the pit of her stomach, creeping over his face. “Well, if that’s the case,” he declared, smirking at Misty, “I guess I’ll just have to figure it out too.”
“Great,” she said wearily.
She was going to kill Gary.
