A/N: So. It's been over a year. Oops. I am aware and I am so sorry. Anyway, the good news is that in my spare moments, I've written a fairly detailed outline for the rest of the story – I know what's going to happen, which is an enormous relief for me because I tend to be crippled by uncertainty. That said, the updates should be coming faster (and by faster I mean by my three to four weeks standard, not these terrible year-long hiatuses). I could have carried a child to term in that time. A child and a half, even. I didn't, for the record.

Additionally, I've made some minor edits to previous chapters where Team Rocket was concerned, to improve constancy of character and to set up future events that weren't in the works when I first wrote the chapters.

Chapter 10

The Illusion of Control

"If you hold on to the handle, she said, it's easier to maintain the illusion of control. But it's more fun if you just let the wind carry you."

Esther couldn't have said she was too surprised when she returned from fetching Gene and found that the Pokémon were missing. She gave the Center a cursory once-over, of course, and peered near-sightedly out of the windows, but didn't expect to find them anywhere nearby. If her husband's expression was any indication of his thoughts, he wasn't particularly shocked either.

There was an abundance of studies to prove it, but neither healer needed evidence to convince them that captured Pokémon tended to grow similar to their trainers as they spent time together. And Lyle's team – of course they were hers, only the best of trainers could go missing for a month and have their Pokémon continue to cooperate with one another – had been with her for years. Lyle herself was a lovely child, if a bit sharp-tongued, but you could just tell that she didn't handle surprises well: she was clever and strategic and had no patience for being caught off guard.

So it was perfectly logical for the girl's Pokémon to have bolted from the Center after hearing such news as Esther had delivered. That was her own fault, the old woman recognized; she had spoken unthinkingly out of shock, not considering of what Lyle's Pokémon would make of it.

But still. It was a bit rude. Both Esther and Gene had taken a risk, helping obviously trainer-less Pokémon as powerful as Lyle's without supervision, and received no thanks? Esther wanted to grumble a comment about the youth of today but refrained; she wasn't that old yet.

"Kids today have no manners." Gene had no such reservations. He had his arms crossed sullenly, like a small child denied a treat, his nightgown buttoned unevenly and his hair askew. Catching the gleam of coins on the counter out of the corner of his eye, he nodded approvingly. "At least they understand the concept of payment. The young ones never do."

"For goodness' sake, dear. If you're going to grumble like an old man, at least have the decency not to look like a child woken up in the middle of the night." Esther quickly evened the sides of her husband's clothing and made a half-hearted attempt to tame his hair. "Besides, it's largely my fault. I'm certain I panicked them before I went to fetch you. They all seemed to really care for that Eevee, and I wasn't exactly tactful when I told them what I saw."

"It just doesn't make sense, Esther," Gene sighed, wrapping an arm around her waist and leading her to the largest armchair in the room. He sat, pulling her down onto his lap. "The kit is ordinary – we were finger-deep into her thoracic cavity last night and saw nothing strange. We pulled a piece of bone from her lung. She had a pneumothorax! We had to remove air from between her ribs!"

Esther stopped him by grabbing his gesticulating hands and holding them firmly within her own. "If this is all leading up to questioning whether I really did see what I told you, then save your breath, you old bat." The look she gave him was scathing and only a man who had been exposed to it for decades could have held back a flinch. She didn't get off of his lap, though, or remove her fingers from where they were entwined with his. "You know as well as I how long I was an army medic. Lives were on the line if I made a judgment error, even more so than for regular medics." The old woman walked her fingers up the buttons on her husband's chest. "I don't. Make. Mistakes. That kit was –"

There was a knock at the front entrance.

Gene chuckled and cupped his wife's cheek softly. "Well, you know what they say. There's no rest for the weary."

Esther pulled away with a smile and stood, pulling Gene up after her. "Back when I was in the Saffron College of Aid and Diagnosis to prep for medical school, we used to joke that the acronym really stood for 'sleep comes after death.'"

Her husband grinned, laugh lines slipping easily onto his face. "I seem to remember you having quite a few sleepless nights with a certain handsome Pokémon Center nurse."

Esther tried to scowl but her lips curved up in spite of herself as she removed his wandering hands. "Oh, do control yourself. You were a kennel-cleaning lackey and you know it."

Whoever was at the door knocked again, this time adding a tentative, "Hello?"

Gene took advantage of Esther's distraction and kissed her. "We have company," she hissed. "We have a job."

"How pedestrian," the old man grumbled, pecking her on the cheek.

"It's unlocked!" Esther called over her shoulder to the front door. She hooked her foot behind Gene's knees and pulled, spinning him around as his legs buckled. After helping him regain his balance, she pushed him lightly toward the stairs. "I'll handle this. Go put on real clothes."

Recognizing a lost cause when he saw one, Gene shuffled to the steps and made his way up them with surprising speed for a man who claimed that the state of his joints would cripple a Primeape.

The front door opened with an unpleasant, drawn-out creak, and a head poked around the threshold tentatively. It was a dark-skinned man with a broad, pleasant face who smiled gently at Esther when she approached. His voice, when he spoke, had a lilting accent. "Hello! Sorry to disturb so early on a weekend, but I'm with the Cerulean City Police Department, and we need to know if you've seen an Eevee kit recently."

Esther was many things, but 'gullible' did not top the list and 'suspicious' was pretty far up. "Is this how the CCPD intends to dress its officers from now on? You look like a Team Rocket reject." The three months she spent in prison after attempting to rescue an abused Clefable from a rather influential family in town might have had some bearing on her attitude.

The man crossed his arms self-consciously in front of his black t-shirt and eyed his white pants and utilitarian black boots. Innocuous, professional clothing, but hardly the royal blue protect-and-serve uniform of which Officer Jenny was so fond. "I'm off-duty at the moment, ma'am," he said stiffly. "This is an urgent situation and I was closest to you."

The old woman crossed her arms and stared down the man at her front door. Everyone know that Beedrill were the most territorial creatures in the world – children who lived near forests had a warning committed to memory before they even learned to speak: "Avoid the hive, stay alive. Throw a stone, you won't come home" – but Esther may well have given the species a run for its money at that moment. "Let's see some identification then, officer."

"Right, of course." The stranger started, slipping his hand into a pants pocket and producing a thin leather wallet. "There you are." He flipped open with a practiced flick of the wrist and let Esther's critical scrutiny hover over it for a few seconds.

Try as she might, the old woman could not find a flaw in either the man's identification card or his tarnished bronze badge. Both were worn with use and the man maintained his quiet, friendly smile. "Fine. What did you want, again? Officer…Bhattacharyya? Seriously?" Her pronunciation was impeccable.

"I'm afraid so." The man – Jay Bhattacharyya, according to his ID, which featured the picture of a much younger man than one in front of her (who had the same wide features but sported significantly more worry lines) – tucked the wallet back into his pocket and cleared his throat uncomfortably. "Eevee kit? Been in here? Recently?"

"Yes."

Bhattacharyya sighed shortly through the nose and his smile finally tightened with suppressed nerves. Good. Esther liked her law enforcement how she liked her telemarketers: eager to leave her alone. She wished she were wearing something more intimidating and worthy of battle than a red button-up, khaki pants, and Velcro shoes, but she had forced retreats with less.

After a further moment of uneasy silence made it clear that the old woman had no intention of volunteering more information, the police officer prompted her to continue, terse but perfectly polite. Who what when where why?

"My husband and I. Eevee kit. Last night and well into this morning. This Pokémon Center. Because the kit was injured." It wasn't obstruction of justice, strictly speaking, if justice simply wasn't asking the right questions.

It seemed like justice might be about to ask the right questions – and by "justice," Esther meant Bhattacharyya, though at her age it would probably be best to tone down the metaphor usage – when he was interrupted by a shout that spiraled down the stairwell. It was Gene, freshly dressed in bright green medical scrubs that had seen better days, coming to the rescue of whoever had incensed his wife this time.

"Is he here about that kit?" the old man asked as he descended. With hair pulled back into a neat bun and practical off-white sneakers on his feet, Gene looked downright reputable. "It was tragic, I'm telling you."

"Tragic?" It was fortunate that the policeman's attention snapped from wife to husband so quickly because otherwise he may have seen confusion wipe over Esther's face.

Gene reached the ground floor and reached out to shake Bhattacharyya's hand. "Oh, yes. No one likes it when a patient dies on the table, but it's worse when it's just a baby. We worked on her all night long but she passed earlier this morning."

The younger man blinked, expression decidedly neutral. "Died?"

"Are you a Ditto?" Esther snapped, recovering and stepping to her husband's side. "Yes, she died. You think we like reliving our failures?" The moron at the end of her sentence was silent but heavily implied.

Bhattacharyya's neutrality dipped momentarily into irritation, a fact that Gene chose to be cheerfully oblivious to as he put one hand on his wife's back and clapped the policeman's shoulder with the other. "Oh, let the man be, love. He'll leave when he gets what he came for, eh?" Both hands came up in front of his chest to steeple dramatically. "The Eevee was such a small thing, and she had been well and truly beaten. Left on our doorstep in the dead of night with some coins, if you believe it!" Another shoulder clap. It was a very Gene thing to do. "I was honestly surprised she lasted as long as she did. Why are you looking for her?"

Bhattacharyya cleared his throat and finally moved. He tapped his wallet through his pocket with two fingers as he took a step back and ducked his head. "That's confidential." His attention was fading fast. Or, not fading, but moving elsewhere. "I could, um, lose my badge if I told you."

"And that would be a terrible pity."

The policeman didn't even have a glance to spare to acknowledge Esther's dry sarcasm. He barely had the time to give a halfhearted salute as he walked out the building.

"What was that all about?" Gene asked, stuffing his hands into his pockets and benignly ignoring the way the doors cracked as they were slammed shut.

"I could ask you the same."

"Oh, right, mine's more important!" Gene tried to point at his wife for emphasis but just managed some abortive jerks from within the scrub pockets. "Something's wrong with our security cameras outside. I can't focus them on anything."

Ever suspicious, Esther frowned at the splintering door. "Acid?"

"Maybe. Or it could just be a malfunction."

"And you think Officer Ditto was involved?"

"I don't know." Gene shrugged, apparently having lost the urge to free his hands. "It's just a bad feeling. Something feels wrong." He surveyed the quiet Pokémon Center helplessly: the ramshackle lobby, the three small rooms off to the side. The window that allowed sunlight to shine on the little mess of a bed in which the kit had been sleeping. The same locale he had been taking in every day for a couple decades now. Unkempt and desperately in need of repair, but probably never going to get any because they weren't exactly the richest people around and spent their money mostly on equipment and medicine. The important things.

No, wait. Something was out of place. The window. "Look." He wrested his hands out of his pockets and pointed.

"I wear bifocals, Gene. I can't see anything." Esther dutifully squinted at the glass anyway and elbowed her husband lightly in the gut. "No, that's a lie. I see black and white blobs."

Gene's voice was strained as he rotated their positions, placing himself between her and the window. "Close enough. You just missed out on the big red R."

What followed was a rapid exchange of hushed words.

"What? No! Team Rocket? Here?"

"Team Rocket yes here, Esther. And…the policeman is with them."

"Well, I feel very dumb right now. How about you?"

"What's the plan?"

"What makes you think I have a plan?"

"You always have a plan!"

Esther did not have a plan and informed Gene of this by punching him solidly in the arm.

He responded by wrapping his arms around her and cradling his face in the curve between her neck and shoulder. "You know I love you, right?"

"Of course. And I love you." She wormed her arms up from where they were pinned between their chests and curled them around her husband's neck. Her nose pressed into his collarbone. He smelled of detergent and citrus.

"Good. That's good."

"Why are we professing our love?"

"Well, not to be an alarmist, because you know how I hate to kick up a fuss, but do you smell smoke?"

It was said that when a Ninetails died, it burned with the heat of a star to make sure that no one would ever touch its tails, even in death. While this, strictly speaking, was true, it would have to have been an exceptionally little star because the worst of the heat tended to extend only to about fifteen yards around the dead Pokémon. But anything caught within that radius would burn as though it were standing on the surface of the sun.

This natural phenomenon had caused quite a few problems over the years – accidental deaths and burns, property damage, and so on – but no one ever managed to come up with a better solution than an extremely well-protected reverse-bomb shelter where trainers were required by law to send their Ninetails to live out their last days when death was imminent. Hardly a perfect system, but there was no way to stop biology from running its course.

If you saw a Ninetails that looked ill or injured, beginning to sizzle with heat, you threw a Potion at it and ran as fast as you could.

Or, if you were Team Rocket, you captured it, leaving it in the stasis of a Pokéball until you needed it, to commit arson without being caught. It would be a tragedy, of course, but not a crime. There was no murder when the weapon was a star.

Now this was a proper human building (a proper laboratory, according to Mother). It wasn't made of trees at all, but of stone and grey sunlight in stretches as far as the eye could see in either direction. Father had told Enya to stay in the sling, nestled against the safety of Mirage's chest, but that had lasted all of five minutes after landing. She stuck close to the Kadabra, of course, because she didn't want to bring the wrath of her family down on herself again quite yet, but even the loss of Grandfather Zephyr couldn't dampen her curiosity for too long.

Well.

Maybe she stayed a little closer to Mirage than she might have before, and if the psychic-type noticed she chose not to mention it.

A faint whirring sound to Enya's left caught her attention – like the wings of Beedrill in the distance – and, casting a glance after Mirage to make sure she wasn't going anywhere, the Eevee crouched down and crawled toward the noise. Thick grass tickled her nose and left little seeds in her fur, and almost concealed a small dark circle of something cold and hard that, when she got close enough, jerked forward to bump against her nose. Within the large circle were several others, each smaller than the last, which spun independently and whined and reflected the Eevee's image back to her. A red dot blinked in the center of the circles; Enya cautiously batted at it with her paw, and the device, human and baffling, then settled back into the grass. It looked a little like the thing the human boy near the woods had held while he battled her.

Well. Father had said that this human was somewhat strange.

"I want to go see Bill," Aunt Zap said, the first to finally speak after it had sunk in that Grandfather Zephyr was not going to be easily found. Uncle Torrent had been returned to his Pokéball and carefully stored in the human bag Mirage carried on her back, and all signs pointed toward useless sitting about until someone broke the silence. "He has a translator and a telephone."

Father started with a mixture of guilt and disbelief. "Bill's a little bit psychotic."

"It's genius psychosis, it doesn't count."

"He tried to shoot you when you got too close to his experiments."

"Hey, fair play. I'm a dangerous meddler."

After a few moments of heated debate from the tree line closest to the human Bill's laboratory and furthest from the city of Cerulean itself, Father, Mother, and Aunt Zap made a simple plan and put it to action before anyone could change their minds. They sneaked into the building from a rear entrance, as much as a Charizard, Dragonair, and Raichu could sneak anywhere, leaving a door with slightly damaged hinges leaning crookedly in its frame in their wake and disappearing from sight quickly into the shadowed hall beyond the door. Their group was so small now, with Grandfather Zephyr taken and Uncle Torrent stuck in his Pokéball until it was safe enough to revive him.

"And we can't find someplace safe and wait for Torrent to wake up because?" Father kept fingering the small red and white ball he wore around his neck. He'd explained to Enya that going into a Pokéball was like inhaling in one place and then exhaling in an entirely new place once released, no matter how much time had passed outside the device – Uncle Torrent wouldn't get any better or worse as long as he was safe within his ball. But he also wouldn't play with her in the river or let her practice her Tackles against his soft tail until he was better, so he may as well not have been tucked into the depths of Mirage's bag in a Pokéball at all. He was missing just as much as Grandfather Zephyr was.

"Because even I'm getting the impression that it's not going to be very safe for long no matter where we go," Aunt Zap responded curtly, "which means you realized that a long time ago." The Raichu had left Enya in the safety of Mother's coiled tail and efficiently maneuvered her way onto Father's left shoulder so that she could tweak his horns whenever she thought it appropriate. Which she did at this point. "We're on someone's radar for some reason, and that's probably not a good thing."

Father attempted to buck the Raichu off and only managed to make her cling harder to his horns. "And you – ow, hey! Watch it – think Bill is the solution to that? What about Oak? What about the plan?"

"Professor Oak is many days of flight away." Aunt Zap relinquished her hold on Father's horns and used his head as a springboard to leap into the lower branches of a tree. She then climbed higher in a series of short jumps so that she could gesture with appropriate drama toward Cerulean City, which twinkled in the not-so-distant distance like sunlight on a moving river. "Bill is so nearby I could drop lightning on his doorstep if I wanted to."

"And what about the CCPD? All it would take is one phone call."

The Raichu shrugged, the casualness of which was undermined by the intense disapproving look she was directing at Father. "On a phone that could just as easily be used to call Professor Oak without several days of interminable flight."

"Yeah, okay, but are you forgetting about the crazy?"

Enya couldn't hear it, but a high-frequency alarm had been set off the moment the back door of the lab had been opened without the proper entry code. (Bill's reputation in town as a paranoid mad scientist was well-earned; he was a genius, to be sure, and no one was eager to malign the man who invented the PC box system of Pokémon storage and transfer, but it couldn't be said that he was particularly stable.) The alarm was short-range, extending only a quarter mile or so from its point of origin; Bill initially tried to extend the signal to the Cerulean City Police Department, but they had politely destroyed their receiver after the fourth time the scientist tripped his own alarm system by accident.

To adjust to the absence of immediate backup from the CCPD, Bill then installed an elaborate system of pipes and sensors that would flood a breached section of hallway with a subtle catalepsy-inducing gas, and took to wearing a gas mask at all times. Despite its irrelevancy, since no one bar a confused pizza delivery boy had ever tried to enter the laboratory uninvited, it was an effective system of defense – of course it was; Bill created it. Even Zap, with her exceptional senses as a Raichu, would have had to strain to detect either the alarm or the gas.

"No, Zap is right." Mother spoke for the first time, glowering at Father and Aunt Zap but passing over Mirage since she was pretending to meditate again and it would have been a wasted effort.

Father started in shock. "Come again?"

The thought appeared to disgust the Dragonair. "Do not make me repeat myself."

"No, no, please repeat yourself." From her perch in the canopy, Aunt Zap looked as though she had been given a gift. "I want to bask."

"You: shut up." The delight failed to fall from the Raichu's face, and Mother growled, turning aggressively toward Father, her curled tail in which Enya sat, observing what was left of her family, swinging gently below her. "You: listen, even if Bill is completely mad, we do not need him to accomplish what we must do. We just need his equipment. It is worth the risk if we can keep him under control."

"You're not implying that we kill him if he won't help?"

There was a flash of scarlet as Mother rolled her eyes. "Of course not."

"How…strangely benevolent…of you." Father placed a tentative hand on Mother's flank, just above Enya's ears.

"Do not wet yourself, twister-brain." The Dragonair shimmied midair and flicked his hand off. "I am just very aware of the fact that we do not need the kind of attention a murder would bring down upon us. Merely knocking him out should suffice."

Father flexed his hand unconsciously, consistently surprised on some level when Mother didn't leap on the chance to hurt him. "Ah. Comforting."

Mirage was on edge. Enya could tell. Something was bothering her; not something distinct enough that she could act on it, because if that were the case she would have already acted, but something subtle that she couldn't quite place her golden finger on. The psychic-type blinked slowly, clenching her eyes shut tightly at the moment of closure and scrunching her face, holding that position until, with a sigh, she relaxed and resumed casually hovering a foot or so above the earth. For someone who was meant to be guarding a kit, the Kadabra was paying remarkably little attention to Enya overall.

"Is something wrong?" Enya asked tentatively after the Kadabra had opened her eyes.

Mirage's answer was short and predictable. "Maybe." She twisted her wrist in a dismissive motion meant to persuade Enya that all was well – and probably, knowing Mirage, it also meant to tell her to slow down, child, have patience, etc. – but the kit could still read the tension in her frame and posture. The Kadabra was trying desperately to sense whatever it was that was making her uneasy before something bad happened. She hadn't been particularly comfortable with the mission from the start.

"Mirage? You haven't said anything. I mean, we kind of expect you to be strong and silent, but you've got to have an opinion in that enormous brain of yours." Father was growing slightly desperate the more outnumbered he felt.

The Kadabra, who had grown more and more willing to speak aloud as Enya grew older – perhaps conditioning, since it was poor form to ignore a kit and hope for it to accept silence as an answer – responded after a moment's thought. "I may not like the idea, but arguing is a waste of time. We have already made up our minds – even you, Kindle – to take a stupid risk in the hopes that something good will come of it." So saying, she turned her back on Father's sputtering.

"I have not – you don't know – am I the only one who remembers how unpredictable he was? He thought E – our trainer was a spy," he snapped, growing louder as he spoke, "even after she saved him from his own experiments! He turned himself into a Pokémon just to see if he could! He tried to shoot you –"

"Shut up!" Aunt Zap hurled herself at Father's head from the tree; she missed her target in her haste but grabbed his muzzle as she fell past it, ending up hanging from it by one paw. "He turned himself into a Pokémon," she echoed, feeling the fire-types hands come up to brace her hind paws and heaving herself up to look him in the eye, "and more importantly, he turned himself back."

Mother froze, and then approached the two of them with curious thoughtfulness. "Well, now, that is an interesting point."

"Yeah, okay." Father unceremoniously dropped his hands and Aunt Zap landed heavily on the forest floor. He looked between Mother, Aunt Zap, and Mirage's back with defeat before glancing wistfully at Enya, who stared back with sad, bemused green eyes. "Okay. Let's go see Bill. Just don't expect him to welcome us."

Within the walls of Bill's laboratory, the gas pipes and their operating systems were dutifully trying to do their jobs, and they would have succeeded if the gas tanks had been in place. But the defense room was currently in a state of disarray and each tank had been laid carefully on its side as far away from the ventilation pipes as possible. An urgent alert flashed on a large monitor in the room, intermittently shading everything red – the scattered sheaves of paper, the upturned desks and chairs, the scorch marks on the walls and machinery. Two smaller, secondary dialog boxes opened on top of the alert with live footage of a small Eevee and a Kadabra stationed outside of the lab; and a Charizard, Raichu, and Dragonair within. The same message blinked urgently on every screen in the entire building, doing its best to warn Bill about intruders.

It's always difficult to warn someone who's not there.

"Not there" being such a subjective descriptor, it should be specified that he was, in fact, still inside of his laboratory. He was simply not in a room with a monitor, and even if that were not the case, he would not have been playing close attention to it. His not insignificant consideration was trained upon his first intruder of the day, who had broken in through the ceiling above the defense room a couple of hours earlier, dismantled the scientist's defense system by dint of laying waste to it, and then proceeded to tie him to a chair in a dark room in his own lab.

For his part, Bill couldn't decide if he wanted to feel triumphant, frightened, or indignant. Triumphant because it's not paranoia if someone really is trying to get to you; frightened because he was tied hand and foot with expert knots to his favorite rolling chair; and indignant because didn't this intruder have any respect for the science he was wantonly ruining?

Feeling, in the end, a sickening blend of those emotions, Bill thought about asking the man (who was gathering himself in the shadowed corner and consulting with a large, brutish Pokémon) who he was and what he was doing, just to complete the scene, but it was an unnecessary question and the scientist didn't really have the patience for that at the moment.

Everyone in Kanto could recognize Lance the Dragon Master in an instant.