For how long they'd been flying, James didn't know. He didn't have a means of telling the time on his person, and was too preoccupied listening to the other agents in hope of a good piece of news- and indeed in fear of a bad one- to ask anyone else.
The windows lining each side of the aircraft did little to make the situation clearer; there was no visible police presence in the sky, but the thick clouds engulfing them stopped such a fact from offering any comfort. James knew that anything more than twenty five metres away would be impossible to see, and although the pilot must have had a radar, he was clueless as to whether it was picking up more than the Team Rocket planes flying next to them.
"Good timing, all dis," Meowth said, turning his head to the window beside him. He realised that his team mates were confused, and waved a paw. "I mean, right after dat speech."
Jessie let out a ragged laugh, leaning further back in her chair with crossed arms. "Yeah, well, that's just our luck, isn't it?"
She sighed, pushing her hands against the seat so she was more upright again.
"Dis isn't our style, dough," Meowth went on, frowning. "Da boss'd always stand his ground and find some loophole to make da cops look like idiots. He was right in deir faces with it all- even ran a public gym!" His smile faded quickly. "And now we're just runnin' away."
"That was when Giovanni was still running things," Jessie reminded him. "Besides, you should be used to it by now. Running away I mean."
Meowth smirked, almost bitterly. "Ya gotta point dere."
James shifted in his seat, struggling to get comfortable with the two seatbelts forming an 'X' across his chest, biting the skin under his shirt. He considered just undoing them, but didn't want to risk getting thrown around should there be turbulence, or any kind of circumstance that might make the pilot resort to reckless flying.
"Do you think we left in time?" he asked, after a few minutes of no one saying anything.
"I reckon so," Jessie answered with a shrug, "but it's difficult to say for certain. We've got no way of telling whether the police bought Pierce's fake plan, or when they were planning to actually raid the base." She paused in thought. "I guess they could have got there just after we left, but at the same time, they could still be preparing for the attack."
"Ugh- I don't want ta tink about da foist possibility," Meowth grimaced.
"Well, we must nearly be there by now anyway," Jessie said. It was harder to tell with only the odd patch of visible sky, but it was evidently much darker than it was when they'd left the Team Rocket base, after checking as scrutinously as time allowed that they'd taken all the precautions necessary.
"Yeah, seems like it," James agreed.
"I dunno," Meowth replied, a worried expression creeping onto his face again. "Didn't dey say dat we were gonna go all da way back to Unova, since da cops'll be expectin' us to head to the nearest base?" he pointed out.
"Oh yeah," Jessie said, before nodding again. "But it shouldn't take that long, even so. We must be going pretty damn fast."
"Do you really think there's a spy in Team Rocket?" James blurted, getting their attention. "It would explain how the police caught on to our situation so quickly," he explained, more softly this time.
Jessie sighed. "I honestly don't know, James," she told him. "I doubt it, considering how careful they are before trusting agents with information."
"But, that was before everything started going wrong," James countered. He glanced around to check no one was within earshot before continuing. "And if we managed to eavesdrop on them, how hard could it be for someone else to?"
He waited for Jessie to roll her eyes, to tell him he was stupid and argue back. When she just stared ahead, he scanned her expression for any kind of indication that she thought he was wrong, looking for the familiar crease that formed in her brow before she voiced her disagreement to something. When he saw nothing, he wished he'd kept the query to himself, lest she should confirm his fear.
"Not very," Jessie finally said, not turning her head to face him. "You're right- there's no real structure. I guess that now that Giovanni's gone, everyone's too busy just trying to keep things running at all to bother keeping an eye out for people skulking around."
Against the denying sentences he kept chanting over and over in his mind, James found himself agreeing with her; Pierce had taken very minimal measures in making sure that he wasn't followed, leaving himself open for just about anybody with a basic level of expertise in sneaking to tail- and in Team Rocket, that meant everyone.
Hours passed. All three of them remained unusually quiet, concentrating on their surroundings, the smudge of blue and grey through the window. The only interesting thing that really happened in the duration of the time they spent there was when the pilot instructed everyone to get to their seats, and rumour quickly formed that the police had finally caught up; the suspicions were dismissed when it turned out that the blip on the radar had only been an airline plane.
The vehicle dipped down in the sky, and in just fleeting moments, there it was: Unova, like a neatly-drawn map with its carefully divided sections, forests of trees and buildings neighbouring each other in attractive contrast, never quite managing to touch. James mused that, although pretty, he'd never like to permanently reside in such a place; his time there, much like a lot of the region itself, had been notably serious, organised to the point where he'd felt a lack of character. It seemed that that was the price for success, to feel like more than a walking joke.
He expected either Jessie or Meowth (or both of them) to make some comment, but neither did, just rose their eyes to the seatbelt icon as it flashed green with an artificial 'ding'. Perhaps they too were thinking back on their short-lived careers in the place- with positive or negative feelings, James had no clue. His own were too much of a tangled blur to begin to unpick.
After arriving at a makeshift runway that was really little more than a large car park next to the base (cleared of other vehicles in preparation for the oncoming planes), with what the pilot had described as "generous application of the brakes" and Jessie had as "a shitty landing", a flock of grunts rushed out to meet the aircraft. They were so eager in approaching the plane that James was terrified one of them would get pulled into the still rotating blades of the propeller; to his relief, the grunts all managed to avoid such a gruesome end, and instead began helping with the wearing task of unloading the seemingly endless crates the agents on board had worn themselves out packing into the cargo section only a few hours ago.
James raised a hand to his face, squinting in preparation for a sudden change in brightness as he, Jessie and Meowth stepped onto the metal stairs that sloped to the ground. Whilst the lighting did diverge greatly from inside the aircraft, it was not in the way he'd anticipated; rather, it was considerably darker outside, the sky overcast and much greyer than James remembered it being through the window. Dropping his arm, he contemplated that perhaps clouds looked darker underneath than they did overhead.
"Let's get inside," Meowth piped up, nudging James uncomfortably in the small of his back to try to get the human to move. The cat's teeth chattered audibly, almost obnoxiously loudly to the point where James suspected the Pokemon was purposely exaggerating the noise to inflate their sympathy for him.
"We get it, you're cold," Jessie said flatly, as if reading his mind. James noticed the goosebumps that had crawled up his flesh for the first time; it was bitter- maybe not to the point that Meowth was making it out to be, but the temperature was still low enough for the cold to bleed through the fabric of James' uniform and brush across his skin.
"I'm f-freezin'!" Meowth elaborated. He rubbed his shoulders, shivering violently- maybe it wasn't an act after all, James thought, though with Meowth's constant trickery it was impossible to be sure.
"At least you've got fur," he said, starting to climb down the stairs, wary of the frost that clung to each step.
"Ya got clothes!" Meowth retorted ("Thank god," Jessie mumbled with a smirk). "Hurry it up Jim, my paws are gettin' numb."
James did his best to oblige, managing to walk a little more quickly with a hand pressed against each railing. Most of the other agents who'd been on board were either helping to carry the cargo, or just making their way over to the base, which was easily visible from where they were. It loomed above the trees either side of it with impressive height, an imperfect copy of the sky reflected on its largely glass surface. As was the norm with any Team Rocket building, a red 'R' was displayed very conspicuously at the top (though James supposed the area was remote enough to get away with advertising criminal presence).
They crossed the wide spread of concrete, behind the others who'd opted out of any further heavy lifting, and filed into the building. The rise in temperature embraced James abruptly: he took a moment to appreciate the perfectly air-conditioned room.
"Ah, dat's betta," Meowth breathed, immediately finding the nearest radiator and pushing his back against the ribbed metal.
"You'd have thought that he'd be used to the cold, after all that time we spend roughing it," Jessie mumbled to James. He smiled feebly.
"Well, however many times we get blasted into the air, it never seems to get less painful," he said. "And however many times we put on a half-baked disguise and tell the twerp to give us Pikachu for some made-up reason, he never seems to get any more suspicious."
Jessie laughed- a real laugh, not the forced one he'd heard her put on so many times since Giovanni had died. The sound had become so rare that hearing it flooded James with relief, and a strange reassurance, if only for an evanescent moment.
"That's true," Jessie said eventually, and took her chin in her hand, looking pensive. "Maybe it's better that things don't change too much." Her eyes flickered sideways, and met his, a brilliant azure under the artificial lights. "At least that way, everything's predictable."
And in that moment, James had no idea how much he would grow to long for that very thing; for routine, a repetitive sequence of events: for nothing to change.
And certainly not in the way it would come to.
The hallway was crowded, to say the least. Agents ranking from grunts to senior staff crammed into the narrow space, shoes scraping against the rough carpet as they moved forward to try and make their questions heard.
"Did anyone die?"
"Was there a chase? Did the cops really show up?"
"What about all the data in the base? You guys made sure to wipe it all, right?"
"Come on," Jessie told James and Meowth as another agent who'd been on board with them started filling in the details, relishing the attention. "Let's find our room before even more people get here."
The suggestion was fairly out of character for her: usually, Jessie would be more than happy to re-tell the events to her fellow members, twisting the story so it painted the three of them in a better light than they'd ever stood in, and James and Meowth would have joined in with zeal. But, James thought, if she'd reacted in such a way at that point, it would have seemed strange. The events that had passed had lessened her usual appetite for fame, her enthusiasm for respect and reputation. She was just... tired, all of a sudden. They all were.
Ignoring the flight of stairs, the three lazily opted for the elevator, and waited longer than it would have taken to just walk for the lift to descend to the floor they were on. Thankfully, it was vacant, and they rode it up, cruelly reminded of their bedraggled appearance by the mirror that took up an entire wall.
Jessie located the correct room after refreshing her memory of the number on the key they'd been given at the reception, and opened the door by slotting the plastic card into the digital lock embedded into the wall, which beeped with an emerald flash.
"Thank god that's all over," she remarked, sinking onto the lower bunk of one of the beds.
"Yeah," Meowth agreed. "It felt too close for comfort at times."
James noticed a mini fridge tucked in one corner of the room, and couldn't help but feel a little hopeful at the prospect of imminent food. "Looks like they've updated the place a bit since we were last here," he said, pulling the door open and grinning despite it all at the sight of three fully stocked shelves. His eyes were drawn in particular to the branded sodas Team Rocket supplied, and he took one, along with a sandwich.
"Well, dat solves da issue of havin' ta get past dat crowd to da cafeteria," Meowth said, helping himself to a packet of dumplings.
When they'd eaten (and James had slipped the recently removed bottle cap into his pocket), Jessie announced to the others that she was taking a shower, and monopolised the bathroom for the next half-hour whilst Meowth and James alternated between doing nothing in particular and speculating on whether they'd really gotten away with ditching the base or not. A few minutes after Jessie re-emerged, wearing a clean change of uniform with her hair cascading down her back in its undried state, an agent knocked on their door and told them to turn on the news.
"Apparently there's gonna be coverage of what happened back in Kalos this morning," he explained. "Might wanna check it out."
"What channel is it on?" Jessie asked as he began to walk away.
"Two," his voice called back, and James quickly snatched the remote from the table, turning the small flat screen television on and switching channels until he found the right one.
They sat through two minutes of terrible commercials before the vaguely familiar jingle to the news played, and a smartly dressed man and woman appeared on the screen. After a tedious story about some pop star that none of them cared about having an affair, the footage changed to show the base they'd abandoned, surrounded by stationary police cars. All three of them were mildly amused by the introduction to the story, which described Team Rocket as "a highly-dangerous crime syndicate known for its ruthless approach to outsiders."
"They flatter us," Jessie cooed approvingly. Meowth held up a paw, leaning in closer to the screen.
"Shh Jess, I'm tryin' ta listen!"
"... failed police raid early this morning that has raised questions as to whether the law enforcement is taking the right approach into disbanding illegal organisations," the male reporter said, taking slow strides to the right. "Just hours ago, a confirmed twenty police cars, as well as air re-enforcement and nearly a hundred armed officers, moved into the Team Rocket territory with the plan of a surprise attack that would result in the arrest of all agents present. However, by the time police officials arrived at the headquarters, it had already been evacuated." The camera panned sideways to show an Officer Jenny, looking uncomfortable. "Officer Jenny," the reporter went on, looking slightly pleased with himself. "Exactly what went wrong with today's operation?"
"There was no error on the behalf of the squad sent in," Jenny replied, trying (a little unsuccessfully) to keep a poker face. "A piece of misleading information triggered the failure, and we are doing everything within our power to track down the perpetrators."
"I've been told that emergency response time in the police department was extremely slow in the area for several hours, due to all the manpower invested in the mission," the man informed her gravely. "I'm sure the people in Kalos affected by this will be concerned that their safety is being compromised for what seems to be a wild goose chase."
"I can assure you that every emergency call was answered, and that no one came to harm as a result," Jenny said, sounding more and more nervous. "The safety of the public remains our first priority."
"And what can you say to the many people still worried that the likes of Team Rocket could strike at any time? Is there an end in sight to this terrible organisation?"
"Turn it off," Jessie said as Officer Jenny began to spout promises that all Rockets would be brought to justice. James looked at her quizzically. "She's not going to tell us anything else useful, you can tell," Jessie explained. "Shame the cops are smart enough to know that what they reveal to the public, they reveal to us as well."
"At least we know that they didn't show up straight after we moved out," James said as Meowth hit the red button on the remote and the screen buzzed back to black. "That must have bought us some time, right?"
"Depends if Jenny's bluffing," Jessie shrugged, "but I'd bet that she wasn't. The cops would probably want to say anything reassuring they could afford to, just to calm the public down and stop the media from making them look as hopeless."
"Seemed like we're betta informed dan da repoita was," Meowth noted. "Didn't sound like he'd even been told 'bout da phone call."
"Or he was holding back," Jessie said. "Not that I'm complaining, but that channel's biased as hell."
The next week was surprisingly pleasant. Jessie, James and Meowth spent their spare time (which, at that point, was pretty much all of their time) playing cards, helping out with odd jobs in the once familiar building or training their Pokemon. James found himself in better spirits than he had since Giovanni's murder; dare he admit it, in better spirits than he had in a long time before that. In the rare moments he'd only have his thoughts for company, they'd no longer torture him over the death of his boss, or flood his mind with the still fresh memories of helping the criminal mastermind hobble away from Meloetta and all the damage they'd caused, of the rare praise he'd given them. And when he did think of such things, James no longer felt a pang of grief in his stomach. It was as if the problem didn't exist anymore, and- frustrated at his sudden emotional barrier- he tried to convince himself it was just as real, that nothing had changed. But something inside him refused to accept it, even on the occasions he'd hear Meowth sobbing quietly into his pillow at night when the cat Pokemon thought his partners were asleep.
Denial, James told himself. That was one stage of grief, and he was sure that his strangely placid mood was a result of it. Being self-aware did nothing to change the effect it had on him, but, remembering the initial turmoil he'd felt following Giovanni's death, he grew grateful for the lack of feeling. If this was denial, James decided it was preferable by a long shot to the alternatives.
Desperate to keep themselves busy, the three of them wandered outside, and resumed the task they'd started earlier that day: packing boxes of Gym badges into a delivery truck. None of them knew if they were actually being helpful or not, seeing as how there was no current Gym Leader to challenge, but they were more interested in a distraction than creating profit for someone who no longer existed.
"Dat's box twenty," Meowth said, not strong enough to lift the cargo himself so narrating the situation instead.
"You'd have thought this would be more badges than anyone could ever give out," Jessie panted.
"Yeah," James agreed. "Even if we gave the twerps one of these for every time they've beaten us, I think we'd still have some to spare."
Jessie smiled. "Maybe someone messed up on manufacture," she said. "You know, added an extra zero or four to the quantity. Or forgot the decimal place."
Dusk was steadily approaching, the horizon a blur of bright colours and the sun no longer visible. Realising that the work would be horrendously difficult without the usual glare of streetlights to show the way, Jessie suggested that they retreat back to the building for the meantime, and find something else to do there.
"Don't they usually have lights on outside at night time?" James asked, thinking it odd that a base with such advanced technology would have its activity restricted by the cycle of the sun.
"I think they're trying not to make our presence any more obvious than they have to, with all the heat the cops are giving us at the moment," Jessie conjectured. "It might be a desolate area, but if they fly in helicopters overhead and see a bunch of lights coming from an unmapped spot in the middle of nowhere, they're bound to get suspicious and check it out."
"Good point."
"Identification?" a grunt standing outside the door asked, holding out her hand. Since security had increased, it was required of all agents to prove their membership before entering the building, whether they'd been away for several months or five minutes. Jessie and James dug out the acrylic cards from their pockets, and handed them to the woman.
"Who's checking that she's a genuine Rocket?" James thought, but not with any real concern. He knew how keen his superiors were to remedy the situation, and that they wouldn't let such a stupid oversight slip by unnoticed.
The grunt gave their IDs back, nodding. They were about to move past her when James heard the sound of approaching footsteps behind him, and noticed the woman's frown.
Stopping mere inches from the backs of the trio, the man nodded at the grunt, who looked very concerned at his presence, eyeing his navy suit and bowler hat. James watched her discreetly push an almost invisible button on the wall.
"I was told this was the best base to go to," the man said, his tone almost a drawl, but with no defining accent to it. Jessie took a step back to let him forwards, and motioned for the others to do the same. "Given the situation, it's impressive anything's running at all."
"I think you have the wrong building, sir," the grunt replied, her voice firm. A few other Rockets appeared behind her, visibly armed. The man appeared unruffled by her statement. In fact, he smiled, though not in a disagreeable way. If anything, it came across as friendly.
"I don't think I do," he chuckled, and pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of his jacket pocket, holding it out to the Rockets before him, who looked at it as if it were laced with poison. The grunt hesitantly took it, and James saw her eyes skim across the words, widening slightly as they did so. Smile unmoving and just as warm, the man stepped further into the pool of light by the door, revealing light brown hair and a fairly young complexion. James estimated that he was about thirty five.
"Who are you?" one of the other agents asked sharply, motioning for the woman to pass the piece of paper to him.
"My name is Carter," the man answered, his voice calm, and showing no signs of veering from that emotion. "I'm Giovanni's cousin."
