November 16th

He stirred half-awake to a dull pain in his chest and a sting across his arms and torso.

The air hung in a dead chill. It condensated and pooled into droplets at his knees, soaking the fabric of his jumpsuit. The stench of mold and iron crept into Lance's nose, the rankness forcing him fully awake.

He jerked up, the sting in his upper body a sharp digging into his flesh. His body forced itself to relax, though each breath welcomed a stabbing sensation into roughly twenty different points across his chest and his arms. Whatever was binding him, it hurt like hell.

An attempt to speak, to call for help, turned into a gurgle of spit and blood. He let it dribble down his chin before he looked down, vision still blurred.

The strands of barbed wire wound across his wrists stained red where the barbs had found a home in his skin.

He strained his torso; with a grimace, he found the same binds there, all across his chest. Any kind of struggle past breathing invited the barbs back into his body - they couldn't be more than a quarter of an inch long, but that was a quarter of an inch longer than what Lance was comfortable with.

"B...breathe…." he told himself. His dried, cracked tongue kept him from saying anything beyond that.

Lance took inventory. His shins, also tied just above his boots, creaked with stiffness. His knees, brittle from his dead weight, pulsed with soreness against the stone floor. He couldn't adjust his weight without the wire drawing more blood, which dotted his suit in droplets.

He made out the bars of a cell door a few feet ahead, its browned rust matching the patches of dark mold across the floor. Echoing drips from the ceiling collected in puddles, leaking through the cracks where the grout had given in.

"You're okay," Lance thought. "Not really in an ideal situation, but this could probably be worse. At least you're not on fire."

He turned his wrists gingerly within their binds, but the barbs held firmly inside him. A finger grazed at the wooden post keeping him upright, its grains splintered throughout.

"This must be the prison facility Wilton mentioned the other day. Which means ...Rocket territory."

To his right, two darkened figures sat hunched over, just like him. Neither moved. Only one breathed.

"Yellow's still safe in Violet Town."

A door thundered open out of sight. A thick pair of footsteps boomed to the left of the barred door, stopping just away from where Lance could see. Then, silence.

He held his breath, waiting for the door to swing open.

That's when the electricity rattled the bones under his skin.

His muscles exploded, teeth on fire under a spasm of a scream, before his body found rest. Catching his breath, Lance saw through stinging eyes the cell door slowly slide open.

"Did you like that?" Tyson's voice emerged the same time as his form did, his shadow towering over Lance. The opened door brought in little light, but Lance, looking up weakly, found the Rocket's eyes lit with a malevolent bliss.

"The barbed wire was one thing, but when I had the idea to wire it to a couple of car batteries for some kind of back-alley interrogation device? Hoooooo, boy. A real pat of the back for myself on that one, there." Tyson smirked, holding up a small remote, his gloved thumb resting on a switch.

The Rocket flipped the switch again, and Lance's vision blinked out as his body jolted. He felt his muscles broiling for longer this time - almost twenty seconds passed before the current died, leaving the champion gasping for air.

"What do-" he gulped, wetting his tongue, "what do you want?"

Tyson shrugged. "Well, I think you're the last member of the League that we hadn't already captured. Or killed."

"Tell me where Clair is! Tell me she's here!" He struggled against his bonds again, numb to the fresh blood dripping down his chest, before another shock of electricity rocked his body.

Next to him, he saw one of the bodies twitch in surprise. At least, he thought he did.

The voltage died again. Lance, coughing and spitting out bile onto the cement, looked behind him. The barbed wire strung across the floor and up the wall, before stopping halfway at a circuit breaker, panels flayed and bent.

He wasn't sure what hurt worse: the electricity, or the absence of it, when he felt the barbs truly at home inside of him.

Tyson tisked under his breath. "The reason I don't wanna tell you whether or not she's here is because you owe us some rather pertinent information. Right?"

"What the hell are-" he coughed again, "you talking about?"

"We only found you because of the phone call you made from the library. Now, we already know one was to Clair's old landline, but the one before that…"

Tyson clicked on the remote twice in rapid succession, triggering quick, fleeting volts to Lance's body.

The Rocket chuckled darkly. "That is really fun. Wouldn't you agree?"

"Piss off."

Tyson shrugged. "Alright, well, can't say I didn't try."

He spun the button on his remote, giving Lance an icy glare and beige-toothed grin.

"Wait, I-"

The electricity turned into fire. He could feel the wet, grating licks from the electric current pulsing through his heart and back, throat roaring in pain.

It fizzled out just before Tyson walked up to the bound champion, grabbing a fistful of his maroon hair and forcing their eyes to meet. He grimaced under the stench of Lance's pained gasps.

"I'll tell you exactly how this is going to work," he growled. "I have to leave for a few minutes, and return with one or two more tools for this little job. My hope is that we won't have to use them, since I know you'll tell me exactly who was on the other end of the call."

His grip released on Lance's head, which fell limply. "It had to be someone important, right?"

Lance mustered faltering strength to look up at Tyson, mouth too dry and rattled to form words.

The Rocket smirked, walking away towards the cell door. "You'll probably need a few minutes to pull yourself together. But, if all else fails...maybe we bring your blue-haired cousin to help us with things."

A fire lit in Lance's eyes, naked with fear. "What have you done to Clair?" he shouted, shoulders bucking fruitlessly against his bonds.

Tyson only cast a half-hearted sideways glance at the champion before shutting the cell door behind him, walking away without any other acknowledgement.

"Come back here and answer me!"

His thrashing feralized. The wires held firm, rooting further into him.

"Tyson! I want to see my cousin!"

"Save your strength," a voice said.

Lance froze. The barbed wire encircling him turned into ice.

"As much as they know how to shed blood, they really know how to worm inside your mind," the voice said. "Quit strugglin' so much, you'll bleed to death."

The champion squinted, hearing the voice echo from the figure on his right. He could barely make out a fellow head of spiked hair, the blond darkened with dirt…

"Surge?"

A chuckle. "This is a hell of a way to prove me wrong about Team Rocket, isn't it?"

"Y-you're alive?" Lance croaked. "I thought the explosion at Viridian would've-"

"Killed me? Yeah, I thought so too." Surge paused, staring down at the dried blood pooled at his knees. "Figures I'd survive a war, but not that siege, right? Knocked me out for a while, but those Rocket wolves picked me up pretty quickly."

"So what the hell brought you to Johto? That border was tight when I broke through. I nearly got killed in the process."

The lieutenant swallowed, the muscled gulp reverberating through the cell. "Anyone with the League who's still alive is being rounded up here. Half of Kanto's, I think most of Johto's."

"Surge, is...is Clair…"

"Alive, as of about three days ago. I saw some grunts walking her down this hallway here," he nodded towards the open space outside of their cell door. "No idea where they took her, though. She could be just down the hall, or in another part of the building."

Lance shuddered, arms instinctively quaking to break from his bonds. "But you...you saw her alive, right?"

Surge's silhouette nodded. "Y-yeah, she was alive. Conscious, anyways. Put up one hell of a fight against whoever was carryin' her."

He took a deep breath, then another. "Right. Tell me everything you know about this place. How long you've been here, where they might be keeping any Pokemon, places of interest in the compound - just, anything that could be useful."

"Useful for what, Lance? Breakin' out?"

The champion looked at his friend in anguish. "I can't die here, Surge."

Surge sighed, looking out the cell door. "I don't know, Lance, it's...it's just this hallway's gotten real quiet over the past day. Hell, they haven't even paid attention to me the last day or so. I think they think I'm as good as dead."

He paused. "But, I didn't get the same electroshock therapy crap that you got. Lucky you."

They both looked at the corpse opposite them wordlessly before another jolt of stabbing electricity coursed through Lance, its voltage stronger still. He quaked in exhaustion once it finally subsided, wrists and ankles convulsing.

It wasn't until they went still that Lance felt the dull weight of the knife tucked away in his boot.

He gulped, flexing his knuckles with hesitation. It'd be one thing to work through the barbed wire and flex his ankle to get that knife out. To hold that knife to electrified wire, turning his body into a conductor should Tyson flip that dial again, would be suicide.

"Surge," he panted. "Tell me everything you saw when they brought you here."

"I think Tyson's office is at the end of the hall here," he said. "Anytime he leaves, his footsteps stop instantly just after another door clicks shut. Every time. If someone else is coming or going, it's always from the other end of the hall."

Lance winced through a nod, contorting his foot to wriggle out of his boot as best as he could. The ball of his foot couldn't budge past the boot's stiff leather - the wire encircling his shins only made it an even tighter squeeze. He cursed under his breath, releasing the tension in his limbs. He bent one wrist opposite of the other, drawing a barb back into his skin, anything to loosen the wire even a little bit…

"That's a start. What else?"

Surge shook his head. "I don't have much else, Lance. I tried to escape from the prison in Fuchsia City, and at that point they'd already taken Johto. The last thing I remember before going under was my captors debating on whether they were gonna take me to Cianwood, or here."

"They're based in Cianwood, too?"

"It's not just one base, Lance. I don't even think Mahogany is their main point of operation in Johto. That might be...Olivine? Goldenrod? Hell, I don't know."

More voltage. The current found its way to the barb in Lance's wrist, searing his arm in pain and boiling his muscles. When it finally went away, Lance had to squint his eyes shut, grounding himself to keep conscious.

What else?" the champion demanded. His seared hand could barely reach into his boot, the tip of his pointer finger barely grazing the knife…

"I...I think, uh…" Surge groaned in pain, "There's a furnace room one floor down. I think this is the ground floor, but their utility room, boiler room, whatever you wanna call it, is in the basement."

His pointer and middle fingers found a grip on the knife, delicately pulling it from his boot. "That's good. That's real good Surge."

Lance tightened his fist around the blade's ivory handle. He cursed the handle's dampness, likely from sweat. An excellent conductor of electricity, should the knife find itself against the metal wire when a current struck.

He grazed a finger over the blade's serrated teeth. Not terribly deep, but could easily cut through the wire, with some patience.

"Alright, here's the deal," Lance panted, beginning the work of sawing at the bindings on his legs. "I think I can saw myself out of here, as long as I don't get fried in the process. Tyson must have stowed my bag and pokemon in his office, so if I can get past him and grab them…"

"Can you reach the wire connected to that circuit breaker? Cut the electricity, first?"

Lance shook his head. "If Tyson tries to shock me and he sees I cut that before my bonds, then it's all blown. I need to start where I can hide what I'm doing."

The first strand of wire at his legs snapped loose under the blade, followed by a second. Lance only cut halfway through the final wire around his shins before a door creaked open, its metal hinges slamming shut.

"Tyson," Surge hissed. "Shit!"

Lance's stomach sunk. He blanked, but snapped himself back into the moment. He sawed furiously at the last binding at his legs, exhaling quietly with relief once it broke. Tyson's shadow came into view just as Lance tucked the knife under his boot, the leather shielding the blade from a fresh jolt of electricity to his body.

"That really doesn't get old, does it?" Tyson swung the cell door open, remote clicking in one hand, a sealed tube of liquid in the other.

Lance panted, taking stock of his state. Other than his bones feeling rattled from inside him, he felt okay, all injuries aside.

Tyson knelt beside Lance, dangling one of the vials in front of the champion like candy. "This is a new drug Petrel's testing out over in R&D. Did you know if you capture a Gengar's Dream Eater with certain radioactive frequencies, you can recreate its properties into a cocktail of sorts?"

A darkness fell over Lance's eyes, and he glared at Tyson wordlessly.

The Rocket forcefully clenched his fist over Lance's nose, cutting off circulation. Knowing full well what was coming, Lance clamped his mouth shut. He resisted for almost a minute, eyes stoking fire at Tyson, before he had to gasp for air.

"Swallow," Tyson growled, forcing the opened vial into Lance's throat. A gloved hand forced his mouth shut while another massaged his Adam's Apple, forcing a swallow. He stepped back as Lance gagged and retched at his knees.

"Wh-what did you-"

"Relax, Champ," Tyson said, procuring a chair from just outside the cell door. "We've done enough testing to figure out that it won't kill someone your size. But the mental effects over the dose's six-hour course have been known to be quite...debilitating." He sat, gazing at Lance with curious observation, a foot away from Surge's silent, unassuming state.

"Si- hours?" His ears only picked up a slur of what he said.

Tyson laughed - a full, hearty, evil belly of a laugh. "We're pushing for a longer dose time, but this is the best we've got. And, see, what I'm interested in is what kind of truths I can pull from you while you're trying to-"

Lance stopped hearing words altogether. He looked up at Tyson, who'd been replaced by a walking, talking Feraligatr. He blinked, and Tyson stood there again, his skin a festering green boil.

"T-this isn't…" Lance stammered, not that he could hear himself. Tyson kept shifting from the vaguely humanoid to the mythically grotesque; things Lance couldn't imagine if he tried. He tried to breathe, ground himself where he was at, before a ten-foot chameleon doused him with venom.

That's when Lance renewed his thrashing, and he could see the blood leaving his body again, droplets floating into the air, falling up, with no concern for gravity.

"This isn't real," Lance thought. At least he could get that far. "This isn't...isn't…"

The snake turned back into Tyson, his arms around the lifeless body of a child with drenched blonde hair…

"Yellow!" Lance screamed. It came out surprisingly clear, far more than his mania could show.

The figures changed again. To what, Lance couldn't tell. But the vibrant colors - the purples, the greens, the whites - they all assaulted his eyes, sparking a visceral, searing pain just from sight.

"Thisisntrealthisisntrealthisisntrealthisisntrealthisisnt-"

A rumbling bubbled underneath him, and the floor caved through with a giant crack. Lance, thrashing with no success, couldn't shake the floaty, flying sensation that would've felt dreamlike if not for the nightmares around him.

One more shock of electricity that felt decidedly too real, and he fell into an unconscious blackness.

He woke to a fist at his chest, tugging loosely at his limp torso as he wearily picked up his head. His jumpsuit stuck to his body completely, soaked through with blood and sweat.

"God damn you," a voice snarled. Tyson. His glove connected to Lance's face with a fresh slap. At least that felt normal.

The champion squinted. Everything looked as it had before the drug kicked in.

"Couldn't even handle five minutes before your body flatlined, huh?" Tyson stood, giving his knee a light kick. "Some champion you were."

Lance said nothing. He could still feel the small bulge from the knife, wedged miraculouslyout of sight under his boot.

"I'm getting your cousin," Tyson said. "She'll provide you with the right motivation to talk, I'm sure."

The blood in Lance's face ran empty, but he still sat silent. Only after Tyson's footsteps down the hall disappeared did he reach for his knife again.

Across from him, Surge shuffled awkwardly in his bindings. "Lance…"

Still nothing. He sawed madly at the wire across his wrists, and only now did he feel the wooziness in his muscles kick back in. He could move the knife back and forth, but he could feel the post-trip fogginess setting in.

"Lance, you can't-"

"I can," he panted. "I gotta."

Almost on cue, the wrist bindings snapped loose. He moved onto the barbed wire across his chest without pausing, much to the protests of his aching forearms.

"We're getting...the hell out of here," Lance said. "I'm taking my cousin with us. And we're gonna take this place down with us."

The door down the hall opened again. Lance quickened the pace, cutting into equal parts wood and wire. He could still feel two strands left as a figure - smaller than Tyson's - was shoved into view of the cell door.

"L-Lance?" the figure hunched over the door, peering inside. She was fully in shadow, save for a glint of diamond blue irises.

"Clair!" he cried, wrists still sawing away.

From behind her, Tyson shoved her again, opening the cell door before forcing Clair inside. She stepped in, staggering towards her cousin, just as the final strand of wire broke.

He stood, legs shaking for a second before he forced them still. He had no room to falter.

If Clair was surprised, she didn't show it, instead continuing to walk towards Lance for an embrace, her tattered clothing and bruised face fully in view. Yet, very much alive.

"Sorry," he muttered, pushing her to the side with one hand, the other clutching his knife with a pained tightness.

Tyson stood, in shock for a second before backing away the next, attempting to get out of the cell.

It didn't work. Lance raised the knife, and despite his body turning into sludge under him, he lunged at the Rocket. His body weight did the work, sheathing metal into flesh.

Tyson knelt, hand clutching at the blade lodged in his shoulder. He yanked it out with a grimace, a fresh pulse of blood oozing from the wound.

Lance reached for his neck, standing to throw Tyson back into the cell. The executive stumbled out of Lance's grip, and his head collided with the pole Lance sat against with a dull thud.

He fell, limp and unmoving apart from a few shaky breaths.

"Quickly," Lance said, reaching for the knife on the floor. "He might only be out for a few minutes."

"What the hell was that?" Clair cried, staring fixedly at Tyson. "Where'd you get that knife?"

"That's a story for later, I think" Surge said as Lance began to cut at his bindings. "Lance, you are insane for trying that when those wires could've fully electrocuted you. But goddamn, do I respect it."

"Couldn't be a G-Man without the guts to back it up, right?" Lance slowed his cutting, letting another wave of nausea pass him by, before finishing up breaking through Surge's wire. Only then did he allow himself to stand, running towards Clair in a full, long embrace.

His cousin shed a tear. "I was so worried, Lance. I thought they would've gotten you in Kanto, for sure."

"That's how I was with you once I saw what happened to Johto," Lance said, breaking the hug to look at her. Her, alive, alive and safe. "We're getting out of here, alright?"

Clair nodded as Surge poked a head outside the cell door. "Hallway's clear," he said. "I think we make a break for Tyson's office, and figure out a plan from there. But we have to be quick; I don't like the idea of burning time here."

Lance sighed, standing on two solid feet, before nodding. "Let's go."

A/N: Hello, I'm alive! Lots of good life things happening right now, but am still hoping to have this finished up relatively soon.

Special thanks to PhoenixLyric and Motherflipping Oak as always for their beta work.

Until next time!