Sharp eyes scan the crowd for a familiar head of scarlet hair, but it's a blonde who finally catches Gavin's attention. He'd recognize his little sister anywhere and the return to her roots — literally and figuratively — is not enough to throw him.

"Hiding from someone, or just bored of the red?"

He appears from behind her, circling slow to look her in the eye. He will not express the worry he's felt for the past few months. The war had been rough. The events preceding it had perhaps, for Lulu, been worse. He does not ask how she's coping. It's not how they were raised.

Instead, he lights a cigarette and flicks the ashes into the wind.

"You coming back?"

His gaze is on the fireworks, allowing her the freedom to process her answer without the weight of his judgement.

[break]

Lulu Flint

There was still the matter of their relation, but they'd managed to keep it under wraps so far. The blonde suits her better, he thinks, but doesn't vocalize the opinion. Her life, her choices.

Just as it had been her own, foolish choice that led her to the Dragons. He'd read the intel files on the incident and had known that she was forced to go to ground for a while after the war but their personal contact had been kept minimal for her safety. It had been enough to know she was alive.

He endures most of the conversation with the stoic silence he was known for, taking a deep drag of his cigarette and exhaling smoke. A brow is raised at her untouched food. He'd picked up his own food on the way, and savours a slice of Tonkatsu as he mulls things over.

"You going back to working intel, you think?"

[break]

Lulu Flint

"You? Polite? Please."

Gavin's smirking as he chews. They'd been raised polite, but around one another it was like wearing a skin that didn't quite fit. Tight. Uncomfortable. Polite had been their parents, not them.

"Still going for Beast, then?" His teeth strip the Grumpig meat. The word Beast comes with a flash of his teeth. "You'll want to hurry. Dachev and Clayton took mantle in your absence. Just one spot left."

The absence of Emma's name is, hopefully, explanation enough. She was still alive and still serving out her role. He mentions nothing of their relationship, leaving its health implied.

"Thought you wanted away from violence." It's a statement, open-ended to allow her to respond or keep silence as she wills.

[break]

Lulu Flint

He wonders if, perhaps, he has offended her. There's something in her eyes that suggests as much. He doesn't ask, because he doesn't know how.

"These are times of peace." In the aftermath of the alien war, and Necrozma afterward, it felt as if he could handle anything. As if Rocket could. Lulu Flint didn't even know about Necrozma, he realises. "If anyone falls off, it'll be because they slipped up."

Like she had slipped up, with the Dragons.

He recognized it as her weakness, but he did not resent her for it as he should. She was his little sister. They did not coddle one another, and their sympathies were expressed in strange ways, but he was glad she'd slipped her noose.

"Yes, I'd heard." He wonders at the psychological effects; was she plagued with nightmares, like his dreams of the devouring dark? He wakes in the night and Lucario is no longer there to soothe his aura. Gavin hears a gentle sniff, but doesn't call attention to it. His gaze is on the moon. "How goes the recovery?"

His tone is more casual than the question feels.

Feeling her eyes on him, Gavin turns his head to regard her with his eyes of sharp amber.

"Good," he says, of her shoulder, and his expression softens with relief. Near-imperceptible, but not by the girl who'd grown up with Cillian Quinn. "It gives you any more trouble, they'll look into it at HQ. Just avoid Olson."

Any softness vanishes at mention of Wendy Peterson.

Lulu Flint's question is a difficult one to answer, and Gavin takes a drag of his cigarette to give himself time to mull it over. How much did he burden her with truth? Necrozma was no easy thing to describe, and yet she was perhaps the only person outside of Emma Wolfe that he'd want to tell. Rocket had his reports out of necessity.

"With work? Not much." He thinks on it again, elaborates, "We secured a few of the generals from the war, they work for us now, but it's been back to business as usual otherwise. Something happened to me, though."

He looks away, colorful bursts of fireworks reflected in his gaze.

"You hear about the Blackout of Slateport?" That's what they'd been calling it on the news.

"I was there."

Gavin's faraway gaze remains fixed upon the fireworks without seeing them. His mind's eye is somewhere else, a dark void with no exit.

"Not 'there' in the way the people they interviewed were there," he elaborates, after a long pause. "There, there. Inside of it. It was..." He struggles to think of a proper descriptor. Fear is a weakness. But Gavin was human, and Necrozma was the closest he's ever come to losing himself. "It was fucking terrifying, Lu."

He exhales, gathering his thoughts. "They're calling it Necrozma. The thing that was in there with us. Could barely see the thing it was so dark, but it just slaughtered everything we threw at it. Even Lucario..."

Perhaps Lulu Flint would remember the fiesty Riolu that had been her brother's first Pokemon, the only one he'd had before their parents kicked him to the curb. Perhaps she remembered it from the war, fully evolved and stalwart, its life dew scattering across the blood-soaked ground. Gavin had watched it die.

Ordinarily, Gavin might've lectured his sister on apologizing for things she had no control over. Now, he sits in a solemn silence as his chest tightens around memories of his beloved starter.

"Not sure," he admits; there's a tightness to the words that betrays his discomfort with the fact. "It was — you know when it's so dark, you can't see your own hand in front of your face? It was a lot like that. There was a Moltres... might've been Stormy Silph's, but I never saw her or anyone else. Just heard them, and their Pokemon."

Heard them screaming, some of them dying, desperation in strained voices as they cried out for the lost. It was the stuff that haunted his nightmares. He might've labeled them weak if he hadn't been there to experience the horror firsthand.

"I know Valerio Dachev and oscar clayton were there, but I didn't know 'til after."