'Petrel,' a voice cooed into his ear. 'I need a favour. Just a small one.'

'I'm listening,' he replied, already knowing what the favour would involve. Ariana, leaning over the back of the couch, was using the tone she reserved for only the biggest of favours. Her voice was low; privacy was unheard of in the Goldenrod apartment.

'The boy's in his room.'

'How long?'

'We'll only be half an hour.'

'We?'

'We. Half an hour. Be in the room with him if you have to.'

'I can't do more than half an hour on my own.'

'Don't expect you to,' she said, pressing a small kiss of thanks on his temple. 'You, with me,' her voice, suddenly sharp, caused Archer to raise an eyebrow. He followed her out of the apartment and down the hall, into the elevator and out onto the street. She didn't speak until half a block later, three minutes of their half hour already gone.

'What do we do when we can't control him anymore?'

'Silver?'

'Proton.'

'Well, that explains why we needed to leave to have this conversation,' Archer said slowly, thoughtfully. He hadn't planned on being the one to bring up the recent behaviour of his fellow Executive, although he felt uneasy now that Ariana had done just that. 'Main concerns?'

'Our plans. The boy. Our mission. Proton himself.'

'In that order?' he noticed Ariana purse her lips at his question, forced to lay out her priorities.

'The boy, mission, plans, Proton.'

'Not surprising.'

They were still walking. Ariana had made no plans further than getting out of the apartment and Archer, unsurprisingly, was following her lead. Walking was the most logical move since it gave fewer people the opportunity to overhear their conversation.

'He needs busywork, and soon. I want him out of the apartment. Fieldwork. Not Grunt work, he'd see through that before you finished giving him the orders. We've seen him like this before and we know where it goes. He's been skinning Rattata for weeks.'

'Why didn't you tell me?'

'I thought you knew.'

Archer shook his head. The problem with hearing about that from Ariana was not the act itself, but the fact he had not been the first to notice. It meant that Proton was changing his routine, just slightly, just enough to throw Archer off his trail. It meant that somehow, hiding behind their cramped living conditions and eighteen hour workdays, Proton had slipped back into his old habits, unnoticed, unchecked.

'He's useless to us like this.'

'Hardly,' Ariana said. 'He was hired for a reason.'

'Brains. I've been willing to bet for years that he's the smartest of us all.'

'That's his downfall. He's smart, but cruel. Gio hired him for the cruelty, it was effective back in the early days.' She spoke slowly now, her words carefully chosen. 'Very effective. But his brains? They're his downfall, nothing else.'

'How?'

'Boredom comes easily. We work constantly, but he's still bored. Archer, he's working on autopilot.'

'No, he can't be.'

'He's efficient. Convincing. He finishes the most complicated tasks in half the time it would take the rest of us. He needs something big, something that will grab his attention.'

'Like what?'

'I don't know.' Ariana stopped walking then, Archer by her side. Something in a store window had caught her eye but he was lost in a sea of thought, struggling to come up with a task that could capture Proton's imagination.

'What about the boy?'

'What about him?'

'What do you want for him?'

'I..,' she faltered there, unable to respond. 'I need him safe.'

Need. Not want. She needed Silver to be safe more than she needed to believe that Giovanni was coming back for them.

'Proton won't be left alone with him.'

'How long until he tries something? He's got no chance if Proton comes at him with a knife,' she said. Not for the first time, Archer noticed a slight waver in her voice.

'None of us would.'

'The boy's only nine. You know as well as I do Proton could slit his throat before he even realised he was there.'

'What do you want for him?' Archer repeated the question. She hadn't provided him with any answers. Ariana started walking again.

'Who are you asking?'

'You know who I'm asking.'

'Archer,'

'You were what, twenty one?'

'…yeah.'

'Why didn't you leave? If you wanted the best for him you could have left, you could have gone to Hoenn or Unova, given him a proper life. Not this.'

'Don't you tell me what would have been best for him. Why did you join?'

'Power,' he said, hesitating only so his response seemed spontaneous.

'You had power from day one. Absolute control over your faction of Grunts. But while you were busy with them, I'd fallen into the most powerful position I've ever been in. Gio was the boss, and suddenly I had pull over him? Why would I leave that behind?'

'And now you're struggling to protect him from all this. No one outside the organisation knows he exists, no one would recognise him, or kidnap him. No authorities, anywhere, are looking for a child. You're protecting him from the only people he's ever known. What's that going to do to him?'

'I don't know,' she seethed, mood suddenly shifting as Archer overstepped his boundaries. 'All I know is that I want Proton far, far away from my son.'

'We need a project for him,' Archer said, changing the subject and moving them down the street at a slightly faster pace; Ariana's outburst had caused a few passers-by to look up from their shopping. 'A large scale operation with minimum impact. We can't give him anything that will impact on our mission if he fails. It's designed to keep him occupied, but he needs to think he's helping.'

'I've got nothing,' she sighed. 'Until we find something, I want you or Petrel with him at all times.'

'Silver?'

'Yes. I mean it. You'll sleep in his bedroom. Petrel on the couch. I don't want to give Proton the chance to even entertain the notion.'

Archer nodded at her requests. Part of him felt she was overreacting. Proton had always been this way; until he started vivisecting Aipom in the kitchen, they didn't need to worry. But the other part of him – the majority, in fact – wondered what it would take for him to snap, and that was something they did not want to deal with.

'Ariana?'

'Hm?'

'Who are we supposed to be protecting?' Archer knew that she was protecting Silver. She'd listed Proton as the least of her concerns. But if she wanted him gone, out of the way, she would simply leave an anonymous tip with the police. The fact was, as much as she wanted to leave Proton out to rot, they'd all been through too much together to even consider doing that to him. She slipped an arm through his while they walked, refusing to give an answer that they both already knew. 'I don't know if he's coming back. I don't know if he'll hear us even if we succeed. We're at least a year from takeover.'

'He'll hear.'