Ellis is at first flustered, then resistant, but ultimately complies.

Chu-e is cold, and there's a moment of tension as Gavin wonders if it's Chu-e at all. His tongue aches where it presses against the roof of his mouth, and a red bump on his neck provides a visual reminder of their encounter a few days prior.

Merlino.

Gavin's jaw clenches at the sound of his surname, the stiff formality.

"Choi," he acknowledges, wary. "What about?"

There's a guarded element to his posture, a stiffness to his muscles. An ache in his chest as he regards the man he'd looked at once like a brother, now a stranger.

"Rocket."

Briefly, the through crosses Chu-e's mind about this mask. How he got used to not needing it around Cillian Quinn. Would the other even care?

The thought is crammed back into a box and stored away for later. He's gotten too loose with his emotions. This is his own fault.

"A number of subordinates have come to me about you." This tongue is sharp as a needle and just as precise. "I'm getting to the bottom of it. What's happened that so many of our members are starting to fear you?"

His guard only goes up further as Chu-e continues.

Subordinates? Who? His thoughts immediately shift to the likes of Plank, Rowan, and Alexandra. Those who'd expressed their discomfort in one way or another, those he'd wronged in some way.

Yet they'd gone to Chu-e, and not to him. He bristles at the thought of others talking behind his back. That's how it had started with Silas, Gavin is certain. Whispers of fear, and then of treason, until the organization had turned on the tyrant to see him toppled. Paranoia coils tight in his chest.

You're not Blackwell. But how close was too close?

"That would depend on who has approached you, and why they felt they couldn't approach me. They should fear me, as they should you — but I have always been willing to listen. I'm listening, now. What's been said?"

"Anyone with sense would be right to fear either one of us." That, he can assent.

"Yet, you know I wouldn't be here talking about this if it was that kind of fear." And Chu-e knows Cillian Quinn knows. Had already crossed his mind. Blackwell.

"They came to me in confidence. If what they're whispering is true, this organization will go down a path I won't allow. We will not become Kanto." There is no inflection to his tone. It is if it simply is.

"No more beating around this. I heard them. I'll hear you. In your own words, what did you do?"

It feels as if he's being interrogated, scolded.

It would sting less, he thinks, if Choi had approached him as a friend, and not with the cold detachment of a colleague.

"I wouldn't allow it, either." His tone is firm. "Do you know what I went through in Kanto?"

There are hints of it all over his body, the scars that map mistakes. He thinks for a moment of the scar on his shoulder, remembers once more how it had come to be. How he'd blocked out the memory for years not because of his own suffering, but because of the grisly sight he'd been greeted with in its aftermath. A pair of hands atop cubes of bloodied meat. His stomach turns.

"I wouldn't put any of them through half of it. But neither am I going to allow Rocket to collapse from within. Do you know how much information's been leaked in the past few months, Choi?"

Your Rocket is soft.

"What do you think I'm going to do if you give me names, track them down and threaten them?" He clicks his tongue against his teeth, winces at the pain. "How am I meant to know what they're worried about if you don't tell me?"

"I imagine much the same I did."

Cillian Quinn remembers the hands but Chu-e remembers everything that led up to that point. To be made into the person who would do it, and at the time feel no guilt or remorse, only a satisfaction. That particular memory is so similar to hundreds of others he might not be able to recall it if Gavin told him in detail.

"Information was leaked in Kanto. Information was leaked in Hoenn when Silas was still boss. If we all move to Kalos tomorrow, information will be leaked there, too. Nothing that either of us do will ever stop that leak. That's how information works." They had other avenues to control the flow but they could never outright stop it. In a game like this, it wasn't possible.

"But. What did that have to do with peggie vela?"

Maybe this would all go over if Chu-e's tone wasn't so... flat. Everything he says is perfectly even. There is no inflection to his words, just nothing. The mask is cinched tight.

"I didn't have power, then. I was just a grunt."

Yet he remembers, vividly, the primal fear of all those above him. How he'd never truly felt safe even when he'd been the picture of obedience, for there was always the threat of someone unhinged. Someone like Blackwell.

Someone like Choi.

"You stabbed me, once, because you didn't like how I answered a question." He pulls his shirt down over his shoulder to expose an old scar, a line of white against fair skin. "I remembered when you attacked me in the lab. I don't hold it against you. It was a different time. But I remember what it was like, to be afraid. To be that kind of afraid."

He readjusts his shirt. Gavin's tone, too, is flat.

"It's why I regret how I handled things with Vela. I'd been teaching her my way, no violence, none of what was done to me — and my way failed. She covered for Ozaki's theft of a Porygon on a mission and lied in her report. I thought if I gave her to Beckett, he might succeed where I'd failed. Get through to her like he did for me, something. But I didn't like it, and I wouldn't do it again. I told both of them as much."

This time, a small twitch of the eye, of the fingers, before it smooths back down. The mask slips, just a crack.

"Do you think," His tone is still cool but it's softer now, a concentrated effort. "that having 'power' then made it any better?" A small, shaky breath. Just one. His eyes take in the old scar and he still can't remember.

"A leash is still a leash, even if people like me, like THEO BECKETT, like Emma Wolfe had slightly longer ones." His voice lowers, again, almost a whisper, and memories of blood and gore dance behind is eyes. "Silas Blackwell knowing your name was a death sentence, even if he didn't kill you. Don't mistake control for power."

Unlike Chu-e, whose mask only slips, Gavin's falters entirely at the words.

"No," he says, voice soft. "No, I didn't mean to imply—"

He draws a shaky breath, closes his eyes at the mention of Emma and Theo. In the eye of his mind, he can see their scars. When his amber eyes open, they're filled with undisguised pain.

"I saw — a lot of what he did to Beckett, firsthand. I know what he did to you. I'm sorry, Chu-e. I only meant to say that I understand what it's like to have blind fear of those that have power over you, regardless of... what might happen to them."

His shoulders slump with an exhale, all the wariness leaving him.

"I never want to be like that. I never want them to look at me like that."

He doesn't raise his voice to normal conversation level again. It's quieter now, gentler.

"I can sympathize with them. The @aoi in the organization. I tried to run, too." Had he ever went into that with Cillian Quinn? The finer details of things? He thinks he told him, once, long ago when Gavin was just an acquaintance and not a friend. Before they were both Underboss. Before Chu-e had even re-joined Rocket.

"When a rat gets stuck in a trap, it struggles until it frees itself or dies. It hurts, but even if it rips the skin off, worsens the snapped neck, won't survive more than a few steps even if it does get out, that hope for freedom outweighs any harm it could possibly do to itself."

His eyes slide up and he wonders if Lugia is watching. How close the dark legend is.

"We were all just rats in traps. Silas was just the cat outside the door waiting on the ones lucky enough to get free."

His eyes slide down, back to Gavin.

"They think you're becoming the new cat, Gavin. Not a leader that can rely on to keep them safe. Someone who wants to use them till they die or prey on them."

He has been taught to view traitors as the other.

It's the only way Gavin knows how to survive. How to live with the shackles of his guilt. How to turn on those he'd once called friend. He'd felt nothing but rage toward @archon when they'd come face to face again, despite years of training alongside the man, because sympathies are the cracks in a foundation he has been told must be unshakeable.

But when Chu-e relates such others to himself, Gavin's forced to confront it.

"This isn't a life you can just — leave."

The conflict is in his tone, in the furrow of his brow.

"I want to protect them, Chu-e. I don't want them to run, because I'll be forced to chase them down. Fear's what I know. Fear's what's kept me alive these past thirteen years. But it's not what I want from them."

It's difficult to be vulnerable, to be honest when such things had once been a death sentence.

"I want them loyal, and I want them safe."

"I just want them to be safe, too."

He closes his eyes, relishes in the silence for a few moments before he breaks it.

"I was free, Gav. It might have broken my body to do it, but I got out of the trap and away from the cat in the end. But I still came back on my own. Have you ever thought about... why that was?"

"My family was safe. Even if Rocket caught wind of me, I'm dying anyway. Nothing that Walsh, or you, or, now, even Killian could do to me would be as bad as what Silas did to me. I wasn't afraid of Rocket. I'm still not."

"So, why would I come back? End up..." He motions around them, vaguely. "Where we are now?"

Chu-e's question isn't an easy one to answer.

In the absence of certainty, Gavin extends truths of his own.

"I'm afraid, still. I think I always will be." He sighs. "Used to think if I climbed high enough, I wouldn't have to be afraid anymore. But there's always a bigger fish — or worse, too many little ones."

The ones that swam behind his back to gather their fellows, swarming for the attack. He'd had their support, once.

"But in spite of it, I never left when I had the chance. When Silas fell, when there was nothing keeping me in Hoenn anymore. But I stayed because this is all I know. Because this is my home."

Because the comforts of a familiar prison had seemed better than the terrifying void of freedom.

"It seemed like — like you came back because you believed in Rocket."