The Porygon kiss - or, to put it better, Chu-e's Porygon-Z tries to press it's nose to Cillian Quinn's Porygon-Z to do the file transfer. It's a step not really needed, this is all digital, but Porygon-Z were smart. It knew Chu-e liked 'cute' things and it's databanks had told it this was a 'cute' thing to do.

As hard as the Pokemon tries, though, Chu-e is more focused on the other person in the room. Human experimentation was something that crossed a line for a lot of people. To be the smoking gun that okayed the process wasn't going to make him any friends. Gavin was also right, though; Chu-e didn't want to subject anyone to this just for being strong. Even then, he knew that being strong of will didn't mean being strong in body. Chu-e himself was more than capable of enduring torture but a punch too hard to the gut would make him fall like a sack of bricks.

"Thank you. With the Shadow Machine down, Rocket needs... something." An echo of the thoughts that had been eating him since the transfer of power. Rocket didn't have an edge like before. Rocket were the underdogs. They only had a butter knife when they needed a gun. Chu-e wanted more than anything to help give them that gun. But he also had his hand in a lot of pies, so to speak, and not much he could do aside from try to push other people in directions he wanted. It was frustrating.

"In the data is also digitized copies of all the paperwork I found in Cadis' lab." He couldn't remember how much of that whole fiasco that Chu-e had told Gavin; a lot of things had been happening recently. That was something else he had no idea how to read.

"The machine won't be gone forever." Gavin speaks with a confidence that suggests he knows more than he's letting on, but he dismisses that with his next words. "Not if I can help it. We'll figure out how to get it functioning again."

It's clear, then, that he simply believes in their efforts.

"Rocket will have all that it needs and more." He speaks with cold conviction; Rocket's failures in the past served as lessons not to be repeated. "Access to Cadis' research will only expedite our success. I'm glad you thought to salvage it."

That does, however, remind him of Genesect. Of its attack, and of the black crystals that had sprouted along the frail flesh of Chu-e Choi's neck and saved him from certain death. The ODD FRAGMENT feels heavy in his pocket.

"Which reminds me," he says, grim, "have there been any... complications, relating to what happened with Genesect? And how is your Gardevoir?"

"I have my full confidence it will. Just trying to play all the angles until then." Chu-e has no doubt that Cillian Quinn will find a way to repair the machine. Even if it's something that flies above his understanding he will support the other in any way he can. Like, for example, offering the pokemon he has found to be test subjects. The original reason they came here.

At the questioning, though, Chu-e can't help but pause, his hand absently coming up to rub the column of his own throat. There hadn't been a scratch left on him. Just a bit of neck pain that was quickly worked. Not that he could remember too much of what happened directly after- with the seizure and all. Time was often lost on him, whatever he said to Gavin or anyone else present until his brain fully came back online completely gone. One of those terrible things he was so afraid of that had been mentioned earlier. He hated the loss of control over himself when that happened. Hated what he might say or do.

"Prince isn't taking... anything very well. He was close with Cipher." Chu-e folded his hands in his lap, staring down at the floor; ever since the strange crystals he had been... unwell. Even to himself. He had read those reports again and again about the Slateport Blackout. Was it possession? Something more similar to the Avatar process? Something was happening to him. This, on top of the craving for stones, was just....

"I don't think I'm handling it very well, either."

A knife slide from his sleeve, flicked open quick. Nimble fingers flip it around, gripped tight in his palm- before he can think too much of it, he slams it down, into his own thigh. It wells up; another attempt to recreate whatever had happened. He winces, it hurts after all, but for the most part he just grits his teeth and slides the knife back out.

Gavin hums in his throat, a positive acknowledgement of Chu-e Choi's drive. Theirs was the sort of ambition Rocket needed; they had mastered survival in the wake of Silas' fall, now it was time to thrive.

It takes only a moment to connect Cipher to the Delphox that had lost its life to Genesect's assault.

Gavin opens his mouth, but whatever he'd intended to say is cut short by a startled yelp as Chu-e slides a knife from his sleeve and plunges it deep into his own thigh. "Choi, what the fuck?" he demands, watching dark blood seep into fabric. A short, sharp breath before he recovers enough to stride with purpose toward a cabinet, pulling gauze down from a shelf. It was meant for Pokémon post-experimentation, but it would make a more effective tourniquet than anything else lying around.

"No kidding you're not handling it well." There's a stiffness to his tone, a stilted expression of worry. He holds out the gauze, silently giving Chu-e the choice between DIY or assistance. "Do you need to — I don't know, talk about it, or something?"

He's not a therapist, hasn't a clue what he's doing, but trauma is no strange subject to Rocket.

The blood on the knife is wiped on his already-ruined pants and tucked away before anything else. He frowns at the wound, prodding it lightly before he starts to roll up his pants leg. Two more puckered slits sit nearby, previous experiments that also ended in failure. They're pink and scabby, sewn together but clean. "I was hoping that this time it would do it again and I wouldn't just come off as crazy." His tone is almost bland as he takes the bandages from Cillian Quinn, using them as a poor attempt to stifle the blood and clean the wound.

"Can you grab the alcohol?" Reaching into another pocket, Chu-e pulls out what looks to be a glasses case. Inside is a sleeve of sewing needles, a thimble of thread, a lock pick set, and a duo of pills taped to the lid, plus a tube of lip gloss. The needle and thread are retrieved before it's snapped shut and placed on the table.

"I don't.... yes? No? It's...." He groaned and sighed, deflating some and rubbing his hands over his face. "I think I need to call my therapist. I, like, can't tell her about... everything, but...." A noncommittal noise is let out.

Whenever Gavin hands the alcohol over, Chu-e dips the needle in and splashes some on the wound, threading the needle and sets to work on closing it himself. His expression is focused, the mild twitch of an eye when needle meets skin the only indication of his pain. He's not immune. It's still excruciating. This is just one more point of proof for how the old Rocket had molded him into what they wanted.

"What did it feel like when Lugia chose you?" He asks about halfway through. There's a pause, eyes faraway, hands hovering over the wound staring at the blood specks seeping from him without really seeing them.

"This time," Gavin echoes, deadpan, and looks back at Chu-e to see that the other has pulled up his pant leg to reveal two similar wounds, stitched up but fresh. "Fuck. Don't do it a fourth time, 'kay?"

He hopes, sincerely, that it is only the third time, and that Chu-e Choi isn't covered in wounds beneath his clothes.

He grabs the alcohol and hands it over, steady hands a testament to how Rocket has deadened him to violence and horror. Trauma is internalized, instead, a sick flip to his stomach as he frets over the mental state of his colleague and — it almost seems too soon to even think it, the void left by one departed admin still fresh in mind, but it's impossible to deny that he's come to see Chu-e as a friend. It's why he guards the fragment he'd have let any other lick a second time, if only to see what might happen. It's why the thought of Necrozma's influence over the other underboss doesn't fill him with excitement for power, but fear for its cost.

He grimaces at the mention of a therapist. He's never sought help for himself for that sole reason: how to explain the troubles of a Rocket lifestyle without confessing to his crimes in earnest?

"Well, I'm here for whatever shit you can't say to her." The offer is somewhat awkward; it's obvious it's not something he usually does. "Wake me up if you have to, s'long as you don't..." He gestures to the puckered wounds.

When asked about Lugia, he's silent for a long moment.

"It spoke to me, first," he confesses. "Then — how do I even describe...? Powerful, I guess. Like a surge of energy that I knew wasn't mine. Overwhelming, but... right. Like everything was finally as it should be."

Though the explanation lacks the context of a life searching for worth, a purpose beyond himself, Gavin's expression is open, earnest.

"It's like I can feel it with me." Subconsciously, he gestures to his head, as if to indicate the brain within. "Don't know if it's real or psychological, but..." He trails off, shrugs.

When Cillian Quinn starts to speak, it's like Chu-e remembers what he was doing. There is a small jerk, a hitch, then nimble fingers set to finish the task of sewing the wound closed. By the time Gavin is finished he is too, soaking some of the gauze in the alcohol to press to it, sanitize.

".... I'm sorry if I scared you." Chu-e finally says, a few beats after Gavin trails off. It's another sudden jerk and change in subject- erratic as Chu-e was feeling in the moment. Finally he meets Gavin's eyes again and he does seem at least a bit apologetic. "This is... ever since the crystal thing it's like...."

His hands flex in his lap, lip curling up as he thinks of the right words. "I heard once that people can have tapeworms for years and not know it. Something living inside you and just... feeding off you. It doesn't feel like anything. I don't feel any different. But I can't help but think 'What if it's like a tapeworm'? What if this is some... parasite and I'm not... I just can't feel it living in me. It protected me. Kept me alive. But why? To feed off me more? Something else? Why?"

A hand is ran through his hair, pushing it back. There had still been blood on his fingers tips, which smears on his forehead. His eyes are somewhere else again, shining now.

"Is this thing fucking eating me? What does it want? Will it..." He swallows. Voice lowers. The real meat of the issue. "Will it kill me faster? I only... Gavin, I... " The hand on his head lowers, covers his eyes. His voice cracks when he speaks again, voice watery.

"I don't want to die."

He can't assure Chu-e that it's all right, because it isn't; both of them are well aware, and so the amber-eyed underboss merely grimaces in acknowledgement of the apology.

"I'm worried about you."

He thinks back to earlier in the conversation, what Choi had said about drugs. This feels like an intervention, only Gavin hasn't come prepared with words of wisdom or love and he's not prepared to offer a solution. There is only the affliction, and a shared fear of the unknown.

Gavin listens without interruption, his pinched expression a reflection of racing thoughts. He would be scared, he thinks, if he were in Chu-e's position. His whole life, he'd lusted after the promise of power — but this didn't feel like power. It felt malicious, it felt like a threat, and over and over again Gavin pictures Necrozma's violence as it tossed his Pokémon aside like dolls. He remembers the alien appendage that had wrapped around the Light Devourer and yanked it back... where?

What if it's using him to get stronger? What if it comes back?

He doesn't share these thoughts, not wanting to further alarm Chu-e. Instead, instinctual, he wraps his arms around the other in a bracing hug.

"We're not gonna let it come to that. I'm not." Pulling back, he meets the shimmering gaze of Chu-e Choi with his own, filled with a fierce determination. "Xerneas. The — tree, thing, that Walsh was talking about. The mulch from that thing brought a Guzzlord back from a single tentacle. People, too, maybe. There were reports..." He's talking a bit too fast, fervent in his attempts to reassure. On his phone, he pulls up an old news article. "People died, but then they weren't dead, so maybe — I mean, it's worth looking into, right? Walsh wants us to do it anyway, and maybe if it can bring things back, it can — purify, whatever's wrong."

"I'm worried about me, too." Chu-e laughs but it's empty, a bitter joke in a thick voice as finally a few tears leak from his eyes. The hug is unexpected but he leans into it, curls against Cillian Quinn and feels the tides of his own emotions take him. Chu-e's never been a stranger to how he feels but he had always been good at cramming them down. Being an open book in that he only let people see what he wanted. Losing his tight grip on them like this is humiliating.

He isn't loud as he cries, just small sniffles and snorts, but eventually it quiets down. Chu-e meets Gavin's eyes and his are puffy and red and wet, tear tracks down his cheeks. What Gavin says- he wants to hope, he wants to so bad, but the boundaries of death seem so....

"Even if it... if it got rid of whatever's happening, would it be able to fix the rest of me?" The problems with his organs, with the failure, the slow decline of his mental facilities as his body shit down- this was something he's been dealing with a long time. Before the rock. If the thing killed him and he was revived, what would even be the point if it would all end just a few months later?

It's too much to hope.

A staccato breath, two, and he rubs his hands down his face again, slumps forward and digs his elbows into his knees to keep himself up. A visceral sort of exhaustion settles over him, from his body to the very core of Chu-e's person. "I'm so tired, Gav." He finally says, resignation in his tone.

"I've.... come to terms with never turning thirty, I just... we still need to do so much. If I die before Rocket can even put a dent in the League here in Hoenn, it'll all feel like it was for nothing."

In a future conversation Chu-e would have with one chryssa glasgow, he would wonder about the girl's obsession with Arceus. Yet he also understood. When you're dying, you need that one last push to bother getting out of bed. You needed that white whale so you didn't fall into desperation.

If Chu-e died without even leaving a scratch it would feel like a slap in the face.

Gavin's grip is steady, firm, and this close he can feel Chu-e Choi's spine against his palm. He's always acknowledged somewhere in the back of his mind that his counterpart is frail, sickly, but it's this moment that Gavin accepts the gutting reality that Choi is dying. Not in the gradual, inevitable way of the rest of the world, but quick and inescapable.

Only — no, Gavin refused to see it like that.

Nothing is impossible. He'd thought once of the world in hard limits, lines that science had drawn in the sand, but Littleroot had been the start of a gradual shift toward acceptance of the improbable. Then aliens had come to Hoenn, and Necrozma had slaughtered his Pokémon en masse, and Chu-e had survived what should have been a killing blow—

"I don't know," he says, earnest. "But I'll be damned if I don't do everything in my power to find out."

For a man like Gavin, friends were few and far between, kept at a distance thanks to a tumultuous past teaching him to rely on no one outside of himself. But through Emma Wolfe, he's learned that letting others in can be as much a blessing as a curse. And for his friends, he would move mountains were it in his power.

We're still so young.

It seemed cruel in retrospect; his own thirtieth birthday had come and gone without fanfare nor acknowledgement. He'd been raised not to celebrate them, treating the date on his calendar only as a note to update any legal documentation requiring it. But for Chu-e, thirty was the impossible.

"You've been back a few months and already you're making waves, here." He gestures vaguely around them, but the meaning goes beyond the small laboratory to the submarine beyond, to the organization it represented. Here, Rocket. "I wasn't sure about Walsh at first, but — I believe in him, Chu-e, and I believe in you. You and I, we're going to get shit done."

Another sniffle. He rubs his face again, harder, to wipe away any stray tears trying to prickle in his eyes once more. Not again, no more tear for now. Chu-e isn't sure how to respond, isn't sure what to say. He's never been a person who needed or craved validation but the praise does feel nice, does balm a bit of the emotional broken glass rupturing his chest. A deep breath, eyes closed, count back from ten, let it out slow. He feels calmer.

"Today has been really fucked." Is what he says at last. Chu-e's voice is a little rough now, clogged from crying, but a thick laugh leaves him, sudden and wet. "We came here to... man, I wanted to show you Sparklefur. Then it's all sappy and... emotional...." Before Cillian Quinn can pull away, Chu-e tries to wrap his arm around the other and give him own quick hug back.

"Okay I... Flames, I've been going fucking crazy, Gav. I'm going to... yeah. Yeah, this.... I'm calling my therapist. This is fucked. Who the fuck stabs themselves? Three times? I'm a diagnosed sociopath not stupid. What the fuck." Another sigh, the bandages picked back up from where they had been dropped so he could properly wrap the wound.

"Would.... would you do something for me? When I'm gone?" He averts his eyes again, at least calmer. "My brother... His name is Chung-Hee Choi. He lives in Floaroma. Has a kid. A little girl. I don't know her name." He swallows the lump form in his throat. "Would you... make sure he knows what happened to me? That he doesn't have to worry about me anymore?"

Chu-e's laugh is clogged by emotion, and Gavin's is heavy as it leaves his throat. There's nothing funny about their situation, but sometimes laughing was all they could do. He does not resist the other's embrace.

"You're under a lot of stress," he allows, but it's no excuse. "Calling your therapist is a good start. Take breaks from work when you need to; you know I'll pick up the slack. Worked alone for a bit before Sinclair stepped back up."

Sometimes, Rocket work weighed heavily on the soul. He knew that all too well.

Chu-e looks away from him, and Gavin's amber gaze turns curious as it lingers on his counterpart. There is something vulnerable in the way he hesitates on the question, almost as if he's unsure how to ask. Gavin listens, alert. Something twists in his stomach as he comes to terms with what Chu-e Choi is asking. When I'm gone. He hadn't known Choi had a brother. He wonders how many do.

"Of course," he says, soft. He knows that when the time comes, he will deliver this information in person. "Does he know? About Rocket? What they've done to you?"

He shakes his head 'no' and goes back to work with the wound again, needing something to do with his hands. Something to focus on. Chu-e speaks slowly as he explains, trying his best to keep his voice even. It hurts to talk about his family. Much like any old wound he's plucked at, though, the hurt feels more normal than jarring now.

"I only contact him.... maybe once every two of three years. Just a quick text on a burner phone. Let him know I'm alive. Nothing else. I always...." He clears his throat. "I'm one of the few Rockets who still loves my family. So I always avoided them to make sure no one can use them against me. You're the first to...." He closes his mouth, sighs, glanced back up at Cillian Quinn to give him another weak smile. Gavin was the first person in years to know any of their names. When he talked about them, which was rare, it was always in vague statements usually mentioning childhood. While Chu-e had tried to keep up with them, at least vaguely, other than those texts he kept strictly no contact. It... hurt. He wanted to see his brother and sister again, his parents, see if their old Houndour was still alive. Wanted to taste his mother's cooking and sit with his father as he got worked up over a baseball game on TV. Those things were fond and familiar, much like how he kept the traditions of Gods he didn't believe in alive. For his memories.

"When I was a kid," Is what he finally says instead of whatever was bubbling up inside of him. "we celebrated the waters changing. Like, um... you know how in rivers the water on the bottom moves to the top, and the water on the top to the bottom? That. But we celebrated it for Lugia. We would make onigiri with fish in the middle, wrap them in leaves and throw them in the water for Lugia. Maybe Lugia would enjoy that? Since it's more your friend now?"