The second time Andres woke up, it wasn't to screaming Patrat or angry Sewaddle.
It was to a warm blanket, a gentle breeze, and the faint smell of soup.
A low voice murmured nearby. "Think he's finally up?"
"Let him rest," came another. "He's just a baby. Poor thing."
Andres blinked groggily. He wasn't in the woods anymore. He was lying on a straw mat in a wooden house, patched with handmade quilts and hanging herbs. Outside the window, a Mareep ambled past a split-log fence.
He was alive.
And... apparently still a baby.
---
They found him alone on the edge of the woods that morning. Sticky with sap, scratched up, barely a year old — but alert. Too alert.
A kind widow named Miriam took him in without question, calling him a gift from the harvest gods.
She named him Andre Ilustre Cruz, saying he had eyes "older than the sky."
---
Years passed. He didn't speak much. Didn't cry much either. He watched. He learned. He farmed.
And somewhere between tilling the berry fields and helping stack hay bales with Machop, he forgot how to be angry about what he'd lost.
Life slowed down. Became... simpler.
He was never the strongest kid, or the fastest. But he could calm a skittish Blitzle with a whisper, predict the rain by the air, and fix a broken fence in minutes.
People said he had a "farmer's soul."
Andre just shrugged. Better that than office emails and heartbreak.
---
But sometimes, at night, the memories came back in fragments.
Coffee. Traffic. That café booth. Her name.
It hurt less now. But it still came.
---
On the eve of his tenth birthday, Andres stood in the fields barefoot, watching the wind bend the grass.
A memory flickered — one he hadn't felt in years.
He was back in that café, coffee going cold. A text message blinking on his screen. The rain outside.
He exhaled slowly.
"I guess I really did die, huh?"
He turned to look at the farmhouse behind him, glowing golden from the kitchen lamp. His old Pokéball-shaped pillow sat in the window. A sleeping Tepig snored softly on the porch.
Andres cracked a small smile.
"I just wanted to open a damn farm in the province," he whispered.
The universe had listened. Sort of.
Tomorrow, he'd officially be old enough to get a Pokémon.
And whether he liked it or not…
Everything was about to start.