The door would crack open quick, a narrowed red eye flicking Cillian Quinn up and down. There is only a pause before the door is pulled open, Prince stepping aside to allow the man to step inside. The Gardevoir goes back to what he was doing before, which is helping to pick up the absolute wreck the house is. It's a disaster area.

Two of the bookshelves have been knocked over, shattered plastic and glass littering the floor along with ripped pages. Various dishes are smashed, flowers ripped to shreds, evidence of a pot shattered against a wall, the floor filled with dirt. Prince doesn't allow Gavin too long to linger, hovering it over the mess to lead the man through the house, past the destruction, and to a sliding glass door. It's standing open, Chu-e seated on a small patio overlooking a surprisingly peaceful garden, a group of horse and pony pokemon running in the field in the distance. Various cat and canine pokemon playing with a few toys or stretched out for naps. Serene.

Chu-e himself is taking in the scene without really seeing it, eyes glazed over in a thousand yard stare.

It seems to take a moment for him to notice Gavin at all. When he glances over, that fake quirk of his lips, which the blond should know him well enough to know, eyes empty as he quirks his head to the side.

"I died." His smile widens, all broken glass and manic. "They found crystals inside me."

And other than the clear meltdown he's having, Chu-e is fine. Nothing is hurting. He's not broken and bloody and bruised, his bones aren't broken, not a scratch on him like Gavin was no doubt aware of.

Gavin's simmering fury is shelved immediately upon seeing the state of the house. Of the many things he'd come to learn about Chu-e Choi during their friendship, it was that he kept a clean house. Amber eyes scan over upturned plants and shredded papers, and something settles uncomfortably in the pit of his stomach.

"Chu-e—"

There's raw concern in his voice, hint of a Galarian accent shading his tone. He doesn't care enough in that moment to keep it in check. Choi only makes it worse when he speaks.

"You — what?"
Horror dawns quick over his expression and his stomach lurches.
How could he have—?
He was right here—
but Gavin already knows the answer.
They found crystals inside me.

Confirmation of what they'd already feared. Regret seeps into every part of Gavin. This was his fault. If he'd never let Chu-e lick that stupid fragment—

He exhales. It shakes a bit, and miasma colors his breath. "How did you...?" He swallows, throat dry, and gestures to his friend. He looks fine. Not a mark on him. Should've been a good thing, but it feels like anything but. "Come back?"

"Don't know." The slip of accent, the horror from Cillian Quinn - is lost on Chu-e at the moment. He looks away, at his right hand where the fingers had been shattered mere hours ago, curls and uncurls them to see them move.

"Explosion. Got caught in it. Was gone, then I wake up in Ezra Zeke's arms. Everything was broken, felt like." Recounting it was hard. That whole ordeal, the last bit of the mission after the second explosion, it was hazy and loose. He remembered darkness and the rain and the horrors of watching titans clash. He remembers pain. He doesn't remember much after that.

"Zac came and healed me."

He's quiet, eyes dimmed, face oddly blank now. There is a spare chair is Gavin wants to sit down, look over the scenery with him. Even if Gavin spoke, asked, prodded- it would be a bit before he would speak again. There was a trembling to his whole frame.

"I had to resort to Plan D." Plan A being just going inside, knocking everyone out with some sleeping abilities, grabbing the objective. Clean. Easy. No civilian casualty. No damage beyond the theft. It was why he wanted Lulu Flint. It was why he wanted Ezra.

Plan D was the bomb.

"I sent a video to our secured server." He wondered if Gavin had watched it yet. It ended in the destruction of the phone Creams had been holding while helping plant the bombs. It caught everything inside the building up to that point.

There is little choice in the matter: Gavin sits, for his knees grow weak with shock. The composure that the underboss took such pride in is absent as he comes to terms with it all.

Your fault, taunts his mind; for this fear, Lugia offers no comfort.

Dazed, he can't quite recall who @ezra is. Had he ever known? He doesn't ask. His mind sticks on a name he does recognize: Zac Ramsay. Avatar of the League. Something Rocket was meant to combat, and yet he'd saved the life of Chu-e Choi. He might've found it ironic in another situation. Ignorant of the depth of their friendship, Gavin assumes Ramsay to have been a bystander unaware of Rocket ties.

"The bomb?" Gavin recalls. He winces. "Fuck."

He hasn't seen the video. He's been too busy dealing with the fallout of his own group's efforts to deal with anything else, and he'd rushed for the hospital the moment he'd heard Chu-e was injured. Gavin was a Rocket, some would say a monster, but he was also a friend.

He pulls up his phone now and watches in silence. His expression hardens over time.

"This doesn't look great," but some covers went deep. "What happened after?"

What happened after?

"What didn't happen?"

He blinks and thinks on how to summarize the shitshow that was his side of the mission. To explain the sequence of events while also trying to fill in his own gaps of knowledge.

"After the explosion, we were making our way inside. My Lopunny went mental. Ramsay went mental. Lulu went mental. It was something inside the building. I think this weird pink mist? But I managed to grab Zeke before he could follow after what Creams, Zac, and Lulu did. We kept outside and tried to access the objective from a different angle.

"Everyone was just... fighting each other. I have no idea what the fuck was happening for a while. The roof was blown open, and I tried to get up on the roof to take out Silph; either him or Fairburne was causing it even if I don't know how. Then Fairburne is dragging me inside and was trying to kill me. Then the second explosion happened. I don't remember too much after that." A face is made, nose wrinkled. It felt better after talking about it. It felt better to have Cillian Quinn here. Something about him was calming. It made the more chaotic parts of his mind settle. Maybe it was his smoke. Maybe whatever Lugia had done to him was helping Chu-e, too, since he was apparently turning into a living statue.

"When I came to, one of the Tapu, Darkrai, and Giratina were all fighting. Ramsay was out; he woke up later, but you know. I was a mangled mess and we... I am not able to compete with demigods, neither was Zeke. I tried to pull us out."

It was a lot. It felt like pulling a bad tooth to spill it all out in the air. Later, when his mind was clearer, he would be able to make a more detailed report of things. For now it was a bit scattered. But it was a relief to get it out somehow, even if he would be left lapping at the proverbial empty spot on his gums.

"In Kanto, I led people to their deaths in horrible shitshow battles. Those people died in fucking horrible ways. But I have never seen something like that? And what was it? Four? Five, people? Zeke and me weren't even as much an active part after the first bomb."

Gavin's eyes narrow with concentrated thought. "Pink mist... if Silph was there, it could have connection to his avatar power." Though the information gathered for S.P.E.C.T.R.A was limited in nature, Silph had used his powers enough in public setting that his misty terrain wasn't an unknown phenomena. It had saved Gavin and Emma from Rocket's toxic smog during the Littleroot contest hall, even, but it hadn't caused them to lose their minds. "Not sure, though."

He blinks, caught off guard, when Chu-e mentions Katherine.

"Katherine tried to kill you?" He sticks on this point, bewildered. They'd had their differences, but this seemed extreme. His expression is grave. "You're absolutely sure of that? That's an incredibly serious accusation."

Chu-e Choi knew as much of course, but Gavin couldn't reconcile his shock.

He grimaces as Chu-e laments the power of avatars; he was one of them, now, and the destructive power at his fingertips was not lost on him. Route 113 had been destroyed by hurricane and blight. But he doesn't comment, not yet.

A hand is lifted up, Chu-e tapping his thumb against his fingers as if counting- only over and over in a repeating pattern. His eyes are faraway as he stares into the horizon again.

"When I was on the roof, when I fell in, I didn't fall on my own. Gravity got really heavy around me and kind of... dragged me in. If it hadn't been for the second explosion, I would have been impaled on wooden stakes. We locked eyes. If she wasn't the one who did it, who did?" Sure, there were other Avatars there. Maybe that guy with the green suit, had it been Kazimir Wynter?, was Avatar of making people fall into holes. Maybe Ezra Zeke was secretly Avatar of killing people. Perhaps even Zac Ramsay or Lulu Flint's powers had manifested. But then, why would the two of them try and do it?

It was perfectly reasonable that Chu-e was just being paranoid. That he was jumping to conclusions. That he was painting a target on someone's back without reason.

But the last time he wasn't as paranoid as he should have been he ended up having his insides more on the outside than he would have liked.

"You know, I fucking hated Blackwell. But if one of his Underbosses came to him about someone with even a sniff of dissent in his ranks, they were gutted in front of everyone." He could remember it. Seeing it happen. "I'm glad Rocket isn't like that anymore. But if it's true, if her or anyone else is a fucking narc and I find out about them, they better to pray to whoever they believe in that someone else gets to them before I do."

"You should talk to Zac Ramsay." Gavin knew by now that Chu-e Choi was friends with Bulu's avatar, even if he didn't understand the extend of that bond. "He experienced some of her power first-hand. Could tell you how it felt, maybe."

Gavin, having never experienced Giratina's influence nor the lesser effects that its avatar could manifest, was ignorant as to the answer. Perhaps it was Silph's power, instead.

The thought of Blackwell, of his underbosses, never fails to make Gavin's stomach turn. He'd resented Sinclair for a lot of things, but the man had done the right thing in overthrowing the tyrant who'd lorded over them. He can picture the violence, but it's more than that — he can smell it, if he thinks too hard, the heavy scent of blood.

"Killed a lot of innocents that way, I'm sure." He'd turned on Choi without cause. "But if it's true, and we can prove it, you won't be the only one in line."

As of right now, they can't prove anything, and plenty of questions remain.

Such as, "The first explosion, why did you set it off?" His brow furrows. "I thought that was a last resort. Definitely not something to do with one of our agents in the building, even if Silph was standing next to her."

Zac Ramsay was an avenue that Chu-e hadn't thought to explore. Since he had mostly been checked out of the incident at the church, it was easier for it to slip his mind that the redhead had been effected; that he had seen first hand what those powers could do.

He gives a small shrug and grunt at Cillian Quinn's next statement. Chu-e knew better than anyone when someone was innocent, just sent to his 'department' when upper management was having a bad day or way off base. The looks in their eyes, how they cried, how they screamed- what people didn't tell you was that torture wasn't effective on the innocent. They would plead with you, but after the pain got too much they would agree with anything you said. And agreeing to be a traitor in old rocket? Well, the ones who got their guts spilled out for show were the lucky ones.

"I didn't." It comes out huffed and frustrated. Not so much at Gavin but at the whole situation. After rattling it around in his brain, the whole mess that was his mission could have been avoided if not for that. "The detonator was in my pocket. Wasn't even prepped. Princess had barely finished wiring everything when they went off."

"The plan was to go in, put everyone to sleep, tie them up, take the orb. Even with Silph there, I'm sure we could have fell back on a lot of stuff that didn't resort to putting my team or the civilians at risk. No one was supposed to die, Gavin!" His voice raises in pitch by the end, a fist coming up to slam on the arm of his chair. The other hand raises up to pinch his temples; a headache is starting to form now. He slumps back, as if boneless. 'It was a fucking bong shop. None of those people deserved to die. Then they fucking did anyway because of whatever the fuck happened,"

Chu-e's frustration surprises Gavin, though he does not react beyond a raised brow.

"There's no way it could've triggered by accident?" His voice drops as if to soften the implication. He didn't want to lay blame on his colleague where it wasn't merited, but it was his job to explore every possibility.

He blinks as Chu-e Choi slams his fist down on the chair. Such expressions of ire are drowned in the sea of Gavin's calm, but he isn't unsympathetic to his counterpart's frustration. Loss of life was often a necessary evil in their line of work, the way he viewed it, but here it could have — should have been avoided.

"Plans don't always work out," he laments. "But if you didn't set them off, who did?"

"It was a remote switch. Lock was still in place on the plunger, too. It wouldn't even have had time to prep properly to set off if it had been pushed by accident, somehow." Chu-e had checked. Multiple times, after the fact. In the moment he had been less concerned about it, more focused on the mission and used to curve balls no matter how explosive. When he was alone, his first instinct had been to blame himself, wonder how he fucked up. He was the leader of the damned mission, the most senior there and of the highest rank, so of course it fell back on him.

"Maybe it's petty of me, but I suspect Fairburne." He snarls it out, still raw. "Silph was almost dead from that blast and they were standing next to each other. But she comes out scott free? How could she have managed that?" Vaguely, Chu-e knows that she was looked upon by a god as well. Yet, somehow having powers to be impervious to blasts seemed a bit too far fetched.

In Kanto Rocket, a fuck-up this bad might've meant the deaths of all those present. You could never be too safe. This knowledge sits, heavy, in the back of Gavin's mind.

He meets Chu-e Choi's gaze, studies it, then dips his head.

"I believe you."

Katherine's arrogance created a bitterness between Kanto survivors toward one who could speak so freely without reprimand, but he does not think it runs deep enough for Chu-e to kill her. Not when there were innocent lives at stake.

"She's an Avatar, whose powers we don't understand," Gavin points out, in the interest of fairness, but his frown and the furrow of his brow speaks clearly to his consideration. "Motive. Do you think she was trying to target Silph?"

"Possibly. If it was, she didn't have to go inside to do it." Lifting his hands to his head, Chu-e pinches his brow. A migraine is starting to form in the back of his skull. Whatever calming effect Cillian Quinn has on him by presence alone was being disrupted by the occasional throbs of pain, promising to form into something much worse. Like the previous anger and life was sucked out of him, Chu-e sinks back into his chair.

"I'm really tired, Gavin."

His voice is quiet but so honest when he says it. All the pain, the hurt, the horrible, terrible shit he's lived through since he was a kid, it all sinks into those four words. Chu-e is exhausted, mentally and emotionally and physically. If Gavin was to find a miracle cure for him tomorrow he doesn't know if he could come back from how he feels now.