"For having an artificial God on my team, that sure still went to shit."
Giovanni grumbled more to himself than to anyone else, staring out the window of his jet as Alola grew small and the ocean, illuminated by a sky full of stars, stretched beneath him. His admins had retreated to their own cabins as soon as the plane took off, apparently aware that Gio's blasé attitude at the Aether Paradise had been a façade to hide the agitation of another failure at the hands of a child.
"It's almost as if your failures are because of you as a person, rather than the pokémon with which you battle."
Gio whirled around, eyes locking on a figure shrouded by the darker corner of the room. A pair of violet eyes met his, and a dull purple tail whipped back and forth from the shadows. Mewtwo. It had once again broken out of its Master Ball to berate him.
"I finally manage to put a roof over your head, and this is how you treat me?" Gio shoved the papers before him off his desk and pinched the bridge of his nose. "You're the one with problems, you fuckin' thing."
"Terribly sorry to disappoint, but my very existence is nobody's fault but your own." Mewtwo stepped out of the shadows, but was blocked from approaching Gio any closer by his growling Persian. "Shall I call you 'Father' while I'm at it?"
"Don't."
"Daddy."
"Stop."
Mewtwo cackled, revealing fangs Gio didn't know were there. It sat on the floor, where Persian again snarled at it. He'd put so much damn work into seeking it out at Cerulean Cave, finally uncovering that first clone he'd has his scientists make. He'd beaten the hell out of the Silph Co. President to get the Master Ball, he'd prepared his strongest team in case the bastard had given him a faulty unit; if the Rainbow Rocket thing was gonna work, like hell was he gonna be the only one without a Legendary on his team, and what better than one he'd had custom made all those years ago? But even with that, and even with the mega stone to turn it into the most powerful pokémon to ever walk the Earth—
"Don't pity yourself too much," Mewtwo hummed, reading Gio's thoughts. "The rest of them were defeated by the child as well. Whether that was their own weakness or a result of your poor leadership, of course, is another question entirely."
"You'll fuckin' see." Gio hissed, somewhat ashamedly picking his paperwork up off the floor and re-organizing it on his desk. "It was test for the Ultra Wormholes, not for the fortitude of those other bastards."
"Of course." Mewtwo clicked its tongue, cautiously reaching out to pet Persian, but was promptly swiped at. "And, once you get your nice little army of Ultra Beasts, they'll fail you in the same manner I have, and in the same manner you've failed your creator."
Mewtwo telekinetically caught the flying coffee mug long before it could have struck, and gently placed it on the nearby table. It side-eyed Gio, a smirk splitting its face while Gio turned back to his plans, red-faced with rage.
He'd plotted out his next steps quite a while ago, but ultimately he was now second-guessing his decisions—
"What a shock," Mewtwo declared sarcastically.
—since the InterPol had handled Lusamine's invasion of Ultra Beasts so cleanly. Originally his plan after the Rainbow Rocket fiasco were to do as Lusamine had done: summon Ultra Beasts, get them under his control, and essentially have an easy-access army of legendary pokémon. Any earthly Legendary would hardly allow itself to be caught and commanded, but the Ultra Beasts seemed disturbingly easy to control. However, he realized now that it may not be the most brilliant idea. Nanu told him more than once about the close friend who'd been killed by Guzzlord, and when Mewtwo had quite joyously let Gio have a taste of Lusamine's memory of being possessed…well, it didn't bode well to say the absolute least.
He needed a better team together; he had grunts coming out of his ears, since there was never any shortage of lost twenty-somethings wanting to be part of something bigger. But he'd been served by the same four admins since he took over Team Rocket, and while he was constantly refreshing his lower workforce, ultimately he and his admins were getting a little long in the tooth. It'd been twenty years since the first run-in with that kid—
"He's remained the Champion of Kanto ever since then, to be fair," Mewtwo murmured, at this point having successfully made physical contact with Persian.
—and he'd been running himself ragged trying to make Team Rocket what Mama Boss wanted it to be. But the initial failure of Rainbow Rocket planted another seed in his brain: what happened to the other team leaders in this world?
"Maxie and Archie, I believe, settled their differences and stopped denying the fact that neither of them are knowledgeable ecologists." Mewtwo scratched Persian behind the ears. "Cyrus was believed to be dead for a while but eventually they found him; I think he's in a psychiatric hospital, though you'd have to fact-check that. Ghetsis is in an institute for the criminally insane somewhere in Unova. It's unknown whether Lysandre is alive or dead, since no body was ever recovered from his headquarters…and I believe the InterPol just kind of let Guzma go. Petty theft and vandalism are comparatively minor crimes, I suppose."
"Like hell I'd get Guzma to wear a suit and tie, though." Gio huffed, tapping a pen against his lips.
"Ohh, I see." Mewtwo laughed aloud, visibly startling Persian. "You couldn't get the winners to behave as a cohesive team, so you're going after the losers! Seeking them out at their weakest…quite the noble strategy."
"The version of Cyrus I had to deal with just now believed himself to be God." Gio glared at Mewtwo. "As far as I know, the real Cyrus is an engineer, which I could definitely use."
"Assuming he's made any headway at whatever hospital he's being held at." Mewtwo stood up and stretched its legs, towering over Gio. "And assuming he'd be willing to help a fool like you with something he himself has already failed at."
"Quite the failure fixation you've got there." Gio returned to his notes.
"As if you don't."
Before Gio could go off again, there was a knock at his cabin door. He shot Mewtwo a look before getting up to answer it; Archer stood in the doorway, looking markedly gloomy.
"We're approaching Hoenn, Boss." He half-assedly saluted to Gio. "Did you want to stop for anything, or fly through the evening to arrive in Kanto by sunrise? We're good on fuel, so we don't need to stop if you don't want to."
Gio looked back into his cabin. Mewtwo had retreated again into the shadows, leaving Persian staring intensely at the back corner of the room. He definitely had more room than his admins, but ultimately the jet's cabin was like a closet compared to how he was used to living.
"Let's stop." Gio sighed. "I want to sleep in a real bed."
Hoenn was a marginally chillier than Alola, though still quite warm compared to Kanto. The jet landed just outside of Lavaridge, and everyone donned their respective disguises to enter the city and book the Presidential Suite at a hotel with access to the hot springs. Mewtwo had ever-so-graciously agreed to remain in its ball for the evening; once they were on the jet again, it could come back out and continue to demean Gio and the admins. Gio was quick to drop his belongings at the room and dash off to the springs, but was crushed to find they no longer served more than two alcoholic beverages per customer while in the water.
"Do I look like a man who can't handle a few drinks?" Gio had exasperatedly asked the bartender, slumping back into the water with a beer. He tugged the sleeve of his wetsuit shirt down to make sure his tattoos were covered.
"It's a safety thing." She'd replied flatly. "You don't notice your sweating since you're in the water, and when you're dehydrated the alcohol is more potent, and alcohol also makes you dehydrated…"
"Wasn't like this last year." He took a sip of the beer and nearly gagged; it tasted like someone had chewed up a dandelion and spat it into his mouth.
"We had an incident this past winter." The bartender paused. "I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say more than that. Anyways if that one's too hoppy for you, let me know. I can swap it out for something else and it won't count as one of your drinks."
Gio dejectedly accepted her offer and had a mudslide instead, then being joined by the rest of his admins, as well as the pilot and the handful of grunts he'd brought with him to Alola.
"What's our plan of action, going forward?" Petrel asked. Gio and his admins had claimed a corner of the pool farthest from the bar, where they could discuss their situation in relative privacy.
"Once we're back in Kanto, I think I'm gonna look into hiring or promoting some new admins." When the four exchanged nervous glances, he held up a hand. "Relax, nobody's getting the axe. I just think we need some fresh brains, you feel?"
"Got any particular promotions in mind, Boss?" Ariana took a sip of her own drink, which looked a lot harder than Gio's. "There's a few grunts I've worked with who I wouldn't mind recommending."
"Whoever you guys wanna recommend, I'll look into. The only lead I got is an outside hire." Gio put his mudslide down on the edge of the pool and slowly sank to his neck in the water. "For right this minute I wanna unwind. We'll worry about it when we're back in Kanto. Figure you guys can enjoy yourselves while you're here, 'cause we got a helluva lotta work to do back home."
Proton and Petrel were more than happy to comply, and they promptly got to goofing off for the remainder of the evening. Archer and Ariana, on the other hand, proceeded to bore Gio to death and back with a needlessly in-depth discussion on how this newfangled phone pokémon thing was ridiculous because you can just catch pokémon in real life, why would you bother with virtual ones you can't even do anything with? The objectives were an insult to the established gym system, and boy howdy do they suddenly seem to love gang activity as long as it's led by pretty young faces, right? Gio gradually inched away from them while they ranted at each other until he was alone with his drink in a more solitary corner of the pool.
He stayed in the water as long as the life guards would let him, long after the grunts and admins had left to sleep. The life guards eventually kicked him out of the pool around 2 AM, at which point he himself made a hasty retreat to his room. The springs had been relaxing, but the hot water had done little to ease the bitter taste of failure. If nothing else, being warm would help him fall asleep a little faster, even with the tall puce figure watching him from the corner.
At the crack of dawn, the Rockets checked out of the hotel and boarded the jet to continue back to Kanto. Finally back in Viridian City, they returned to their new headquarters where Gio could continue to work. He thought about what Mewtwo had said on the plane regarding the other team leaders; Ghetsis or Cyrus would probably be the best options. Mewtwo made a valid point of neither Maxie nor Archie really being reliable scientists, and until he could find whether or not Lysandre had been killed by his little death ray, that option was out the window as well. He pulled out his laptop and typed "Cyrus Shawlburg" into Google, which pulled up what he was looking for despite the horrific misspelling of Cyrus's surname.
The only news videos and articles he could find were eight or nine years old, the older ones proclaiming him dead at Spear Pillar, and the slightly newer ones detailing his discovery and trial. Admittedly, Gio hadn't been keeping up with the news when Team Galactic was at its largest; he was just glad that the InterPol were after someone else.
The deeper he dug, the stranger things got; there was a nurse on his team who leaked his medical information to the public, and then went and committed further malpractice by denying him pain medications. At first Gio wasn't sure how bad that really could have been, but among the leaked information was a particularly awful photo of Cyrus's poorly-healed skin grafts, which was more than enough to make Gio forcefully close his laptop. Of course, upon realizing the discomfort it caused him, Mewtwo implored Gio to search further.
"If you want fresh brains, as you said, you have to put the work in for it." It giggled, standing behind Gio while he cringed at the description of Cyrus's injuries. "Fascinating: hand torn clean off, and they had to take his arm in two separate amputations. They tried so hard. Heheh."
Mewtwo fucked off somewhere into the headquarters when that didn't elicit a response. Fortunately, Gio got a break not terribly long thereafter; Ariana had been able to find out what facility he was being held at, and even that he was allowed to have visitors.
"Spectacular work!" Gio grinned, reviewing the email. Cyrus has been at Eterna General's long-term psychiatric ward since his trial about eight years ago. Apparently he'd been intended to get chucked into a higher-security facility, but they went with a nicer joint since he wasn't violent.
"I suppose from here you're going to go straight to Sinnoh and try to win over your little robot man, then?" Mewtwo, who'd come back when it found nobody else to harass, lounged on a small couch in the office. "As the next in line, am I in charge while you're gone?"
"First of all, Ariana's next in line for this shindig unless Silver has a sudden change of heart." Gio printed out what information he'd be taking home to review. "Second of all…there's plenty of work to be done here before I go. Not riskin' failure on this one. I just got back, I ain't about to hop back into a plane for another six hours just for this toothbrush-lookin' motherfucker to say he doesn't want in on this Rocket action."
"What could you possibly say that would convince him? Be honest with yourself." Mewtwo giggled. "'Welcome to my tryhard New York yakuza gang, I have lost to every child I've battled in the past twenty years, please be my sidekick!'"
"Seems like a good enough deal to me, to get out of an institution." Gio completely ignored Mewtwo's remark. "But I want this place to be runnin' right when he gets here. He's gonna need a lab, and probably an apartment…"
"Aww, how considerate." For once, Mewtwo didn't sound sarcastic, moreso just wildly disinterested.
"I'll have Proton get right on the lab, and there's already an open apartment on the fourteenth floor. Archer can make that place look nice…don't you have anything productive to do?" Gio turned to look at Mewtwo, who was limply sprawled across the couch.
"What, oh great master, could I ever do for you?" Mewtwo deadpanned.
"Fix your damn attitude to start." Gio stuffed the papers into a folder, and stood up to leave. "And hey, maybe you could put that God-like power to use and help some of these new grunts train, huh? Ever think of that?"
"If they lose, can I kill them?"
"I'm gonna say no."
Of course, Proton went absolutely ham building the lab; Gio didn't understand a lick of what he said about it, but apparently it was everything an engineer could possibly dream of and more.
"You want him to get back into that inter-dimensional research, Boss? I got you covered!" The lab looked nice but Gio still had no idea what any of it was. "State-of-the-art equipment here, no engineer in his right mind would be able to leave this alone! I did everything I could to match what he'd been doing back in Team Galactic but with all-fresh equipment standards, even managed to snag a couple of original pieces from his lab, from when it got dismantled. It'll feel just like home!"
"Cool!" Gio feigned understanding. "How much did this put us in the hole?"
"Oh, almost nothing." Proton proudly put his hands on his hips. "We stole most of it!"
"Atta boy!" Gio slapped Proton's back, grinning. "How's Archer comin' along with the apartment?"
As if on queue, Archer swung the door open, singing his own praises about how nice of a living space he'd made of the barren apartment. He led Gio to the fourteenth floor to show Bossman around the place; Gio was honestly impressed with now nice it looked. It had the sort of classy, minimalistic look that a guy who really wanted to be a robot would love.
"The sleek minimalism is so in right now." Archer hummed. "If the lab is as good as Proton says it is, I think your guy will be pretty sold on coming over."
"Excellent!" Gio clasped his hands together, having marginally more understanding about interior design than about engineering. "Lookin' good. Pretty spacious, too."
"Glad you're pleased~" Archer grinned charmingly. "Anything else you figure I should add before we finish up? All that's left is to paint the rest of the trim."
"Nah, nah, looks good. I'm gonna be gone less than a week; do what you gotta do to get done by then." Gio looked behind himself into the hall to make sure they hadn't been followed before inquiring, "Mewtwo been leaving you alone?"
"I mean…yeah. I almost never see it, actually." Archer looked confused. "Has it been bothering you?"
"Don't sweat it. I'm not scared of it going off while I'm gone, but…you know. It's not the friendliest thing in the building."
"That's saying something." Archer chuckled. As he and Gio parted ways back to their respective offices, he added, "We'll hold down the fort. Safe travels!"
—
Cyrus was awoken, as usual, at 8AM by a nurse who'd come in to take his vitals. Karen had been one of the few nursing staff who was there when Cyrus was hospitalized who still hadn't left, so seeing her a few times a week was sort of nice.
"Do you want to go to the morning meeting today?" She asked, sliding the blood pressure cuff off his arm.
"Yeah." Cyrus hefted himself upright and swung his legs over the edge of his bed. Karen helped him maintain his balance while he got into his wheelchair, and he followed her out of his room into the same hallway he'd spent the past eight years of his life.
Morning meeting was in the common room, where the other patients he was grouped with would eat and, if they were feeling social, spend most of their day. The meeting mostly consisted of whatever social worker was stationed there for the month asking each patient how they slept and what their goals for the day was. Cyrus slept fine, thanks, and his goal would be (as it had been recently) to spend more time in the common room and less time isolated in his bedroom. Helen slept better than usual, and she'd be having physical therapy today so her goal was to not yell at her physical therapist. Cyrus wished her sincerest of luck. Emerson said he hardly slept and that his goal was to fall asleep at a more reasonable hour tonight. Last in the circle (most of the patients preferred to sleep until 9 or 10) was Tiff, who said she slept alright and was going to spend her time in the courtyard jogging to try to get back in shape.
They quietly ate breakfast as the rest of the patients began to slink in. For most of them, Cyrus knew their names, and maybe why they ended up here, but little else. In general they were discouraged from asking "what're you in for?" as an opening question, but it hadn't stopped anyone Cyrus's first week. Apparently everyone there then had been in the facility for well over a year, and they had a shaky grasp at best on the world outside. Regardless, the other patients were all eventually willing to share why they'd ended up in here.
Helen, in a manic episode, nearly killed her young son. She hasn't seen him since she was institutionalized; now he was fifteen, and she had no idea where he was. Emerson had been there the longest; about two years before Cyrus was born, Emerson believed demons in his head would kill him and torture his family if he didn't complete their hit list. His condition had only let up slightly with anti-psychotics; he still heard and saw them, but even though he was able to reliably discern reality from hallucination, it looked like they weren't planning on letting him go any time soon. Tiff, who had only been there a month, was who Cyrus felt the worst for, primarily because she really didn't belong there. Tiff had killed her abusive husband in self-defense while he was actively attacking her. Sadly, he'd spent the last four years of her life isolating her from her family and gaslighting her into thinking she was the crazy one in the relationship. It was enough to save her from a first-degree murder charge, but after a certain point even she believed what he'd said, and here she was.
The three of them were the closest thing Cyrus had to a friend group in here. Although the environment was calm and, in general, there were few incidents, the constantly-changing group of patients made Cyrus even now hesitant to really befriend people. Even Emerson, though he'd been hospitalized since before Cyrus was born, had been transferred in and out, to different facilities, pretty frequently over the course of his stay.
"I wouldn't mind a change of view myself." Cyrus mumbled drowsily. Recently, there'd been a caffeine ban in the mental health wing of the hospital, out of potential medication interactions.
Emerson mumbled something that Cyrus didn't catch, he himself probably not much more awake. Tiff, who'd gone to her bedroom after breakfast, returned to the common room and sat between them. She slipped something into Cyrus's palm; he checked to make sure there wasn't a nurse in the room, and then looked at the object: a teabag, the tag labeled "Breakfast Tea."
"I asked for a bunch after coffee got pulled from the menu, but before they pulled black tea." She snickered as she snuck one to Emerson as well. "I have like twenty in my room. Where's Helen?"
"She's already off for PT." Emerson quietly got up and grabbed his empty mug. "You're a life-saver."
"I'll save her one for lunch, then." Tiff settled into the couch as Emerson went off to fill his mug with hot water. "Anything good on?"
"You tell me." Cyrus half-heartedly motioned towards the TV, the remote to which was hidden by the nurses, playing the local weather on loop.
"They had it on cartoons last night. Guess they didn't want me glued to the set again." Emerson laughed weakly, returning with a mug of tea. "Hell if I gleaned anything from it, I was just thrilled so see something other than a watered-down version of the news."
"No wonder you barely slept." Tiff stretched her legs. Cyrus scooted his chair closer to the table, where he'd accumulated some computer paper and ballpoint pens to draw with. "Any grand plans for the day?"
Cyrus shrugged. Tiff and Emerson continued to make small talk while Cyrus doodled. Around two hours before lunch, Karen brought Cyrus to his own physical therapy appointment, where unlike Helen he made no attempt to be nice to the therapist.
"Your hatred fuels me." The therapist deadpanned, running the electrodes attached to Cyrus's legs again. He'd gained some motor control back in his legs, enough to stand and sometimes take a few steps, but not really enough to not rely on the wheelchair. He'd stopped feeling like it was worth it when his progress towards walking unsupported plateaued about a year into his stay.
Cyrus weakly kicked at the therapist, knowing he may as well have just breathed at him a little more aggressively. The therapist moved him over to an area with gymnastic mats, where she and a nurse supported Cyrus on either side to try to help him walk. As would happen every now and then, once Cyrus was up, he was able to stand unassisted, but he promptly ate shit when he tried to take a step. The current uncrossable hurdle was that Cyrus would be unable to use a walker due to only having one arm; he'd lost it entirely, even including parts of his clavicle, so there wasn't a very supportive external anchor for a weight-bearing prosthetic. Ultimately this meant that Cyrus's only path to walking would be to go straight from a wheelchair to a cane, and the therapists were largely unwilling to admit that maybe their efforts were being wasted on a man who hated using a wheelchair a whole lot less than continually falling over trying to overexert himself.
Cyrus's knees and nose were bruised when he returned for lunch. By that time Helen was back, and was just as delighted as Cyrus and Emerson had been to receive a little pick-me-up from Tiff. Lunch was otherwise uneventful. At Emerson's insistence, Karen decided to put the cartoons back on; there was something kind of wholesome about someone in his seventies being that excited to watch a show that was targeted more towards elementary students. Regardless, his point of it being something other than the damn weather was enough to leave most of the patients glued to the television for the majority of the afternoon. Cyrus even elected out of going to group therapy just to watch something different.
Visitor hours rolled around, and Cyrus remained by the TV. Grandpa Finn had already visited this week, so he wasn't expecting to see anyone. Tiff was visited by her sister, who'd only that day been able to track her down, and they had a teary-eyed reunion which Cyrus tried to not pay any attention to. When Karen came in and approached him, he figured she was going to tell Emerson his son was there, but instead she lightly tapped on the handle of Cyrus's wheelchair to get his attention.
"Do you know anyone named Vincenzo Romano?" She asked, showing him a photocopy of a driver's license. "He's here to visit you, and said he knew you in college."
Cyrus paused. At this point, he barely remembered anyone from college other than the professor who recommended him to a counselor for the nail biting. The name didn't ring a bell, but the odds are with no name would. What would an old classmate want to talk to him about?
"Uhh, sure." Cyrus ran his hand over the armrest of his chair, and Karen brought him back to his room. Waiting there was a tall man with parted hair in a button-up shirt and pinstripe slacks, who looked up from his phone to grin. He's way too old to have gone to college with me, Cyrus thought, maybe he was a TA? Why is he wearing sunglasses? Karen left the door open as she walked back to the common room, and the man closed it most of the way before turning to Cyrus.
"Hey there, Toothpaste. Good to see you."
"I think you have the wrong man." Cyrus raised an eyebrow at him, now very confident that he didn't know this man. "What did you just call me?"
"No, no, you're definitely the guy I'm looking for." The man grinned again, and pulled down the collar of his shirt. Irezumi tattoos. Most noticeably, a circled R on the right side of his chest. A Rocket.
Cyrus less-than-subtly gripped the armrest of his chair and leaned back in shock; the man laughed, and re did the top button of his shirt.
"Relax, guy. I ain't gonna do nothin' to you." He reached up and, in one motion, took his sunglasses off and smoothed the part out of his hair to reveal a steep widow's peak.
This wasn't just some random Rocket. This was the most-wanted criminal on the planet.
Giovanni.
"Now, hear me out, I know what you're thinking!" Giovanni gently kicked the door the rest of the way closed, apparently taking delight in Cyrus's shock. "I hear you're approximately ready for release, is that right?"
"W-well…I would be if I, uh, had a way to live outside the hospital." Cyrus stammered. "Um, b-but I'd basically need a live-in caregiver and rides to and from so many appointments that—"
"What if I told you I could get you all that?" Giovanni leaned with one shoulder on the wall. "I got a proposition for ya. We got an open lab and an apartment that I can make accessible. I can get you situated with whatever doctors and caregivers you need. You'd get to get out of this hospital, out of Sinnoh; all expenses paid."
"…You want me to work for you…?"
"Ayy, you're still sharp!" Giovanni cackled. "I'm interested in inter-dimensional travel, and from what I've read, you've got some experience with that, to say the absolute least."
Cyrus said nothing, just dramatically motioned at the scars on his face and empty sleeve his right arm would be occupying if it were there.
"I get it, I get it, but I'm not here trying to make whole new worlds or anything. Hell, I don't even really wanna visit other places; I'm looking to bring stuff to me, know what I'm saying?"
"I'm going to be honest, the news station they let us watch is pretty watered down, but I think something like that went very poorly in Alola recently." Cyrus replied. Giovanni seemed taken aback by the statement, but he quickly righted himself.
"Yeah, it did, because nobody had an engineer who's done shit like this before!" He checked over his shoulder to make sure none of the nurses were eavesdropping. "I'm gonna be real with you, Cyrus. You'd be a boon to the team. What can I offer you that would convince you to come to Kanto?"
Cyrus paused. What the hell was Giovanni planning? Though, more relevantly…what did Cyrus want at this point? He was already offering a lab, a place to live, technically everything he'd need to get by…but what else could Cyrus get away with asking for?
"Other than my engineering capabilities, what are you getting out of this?" Cyrus asked. "There's plenty of engineers, especially now that Ultrabeasts are more common knowledge among the scientific community. Why me?"
"First-hand experience, my guy! And, let's be honest, I think we're pretty like-minded."
"Do you expect me to go be an intern to your existing team of researchers?" Cyrus cringed a little bit.
"Oh, no, not at all. You'll basically be an admin; the only person you'd be getting orders from is me." Giovanni flashed a smile. "Whatever you need. Probably been a while since you've had access to internet, right? I can get you a nice PC. Basically anything you'd want, I can get you."
"If I say yes now, and then later on think of something I want or need, is that offer still on the table?"
"Within reason, I think." Gio paused, and checked the door again. "If you, like, need someone killed, that's a now-or-never sort of deal—"
"No, Arceus, what?" Cyrus shook his head. "I'm talking about furnishings or equipment or whatever."
"Oh, yeah, that's fine." Giovanni breathed a sigh of relief. "You have a need, you let me know. If you join Team Rocket, it's yours. Sound good?"
Cyrus paused again. He'd been talking to Giovanni for less than five minutes. Was that really enough time to decide whether or not he'd sign his life away?
"What if, later down the line, I decide I want out? Then what?"
"Then there's a, uh, an informal nondisclosure agreement, if you will." Giovanni shrugged. "We've had people leave without consequence. 'Long as you don't snitch, do you."
"…I'm in."
It took about a week for paperwork to go through for Cyrus's discharge. The nursing staff was pretty suspicious at first; if you haven't visited him once all these years, why was he so quick to move in with you? Cyrus and Gio agreed upon a very simple backstory to explain it; "Vinny" was a business TA at Cyrus's college, and they'd gotten along well enough that when Vinny finally tracked him down, he was able to make accommodations for Cyrus to move to Kanto. Piece of cake.
There was a nice clandestine little Rocket location in Jubilife City where Cyrus and Giovanni would be spending the next couple of days before heading off to Kanto. Cyrus had mumbled something about being more suspicious of Veilstone's game corner than any place in Jubilife, but Gio took it as a compliment on how well-hidden the branch was. Here, Gio was able to introduce him to how the Rocket way of life works; Cyrus seemed off-put by how obedient the grunts were for some reason, making Gio repeatedly assure him that they were here of their own free will and being paid living wages.
"Goddamn, Toothpaste, I'm a businessman, not a slave driver." Gio led Cyrus to the temporary office he'd been working out of while waiting for Cyrus's discharge to go through. "It doesn't benefit the business if my employees need second jobs."
"Okay, I get it, just…" Cyrus looked over his shoulder as a grunt sprinted past carrying a large crate.
"Anyways, we got like another couple of days before things are set back up well enough for your apartment to be ready." Gio took a boxed laptop from a crate in the room and put it on one of the two desks. "That's for you, til we get to Kanto and Petrel can build you a nice one…apparently." He sat down at his own desk and took his phone out. "Speaking of, let me check on that for you."
Cyrus cautiously moved forward and opened the laptop box while Gio took a minute to remember how to do a video call. Archer eventually figured out Gio was trying to contact him and initiated the video call himself.
"Archer! How's the corrections on the apartment coming along?" Gio asked, trying to get the pop socket on his phone to act like a stand, but eventually giving up and just holding the phone like a normal person.
"Uhh, we've got mostly just furniture alterations to do." Archer was looking rather disheveled; he must have been in the middle of working on something. "We've got chair lifts installed in all of the staircases, we already swapped out the pneumatic standing desk for a U-shaped one that'll have plenty of room for his chair…" Archer yawned, which made Cyrus realize it was like 3AM in Kanto. Oops. "Petrel's got the PC pretty much done and put together. Proton's already made most of the stuff in the lab compatible with left-hand-only controllers, but we're nearly done."
"Good work, my guy. How's the fort?"
"Everything's in order. So far nothing has gone spectacularly wrong…" Archer thought for a moment. "I definitely watched Mewtwo try to eat coffee grinds."
"Haha, idiot." Gio chuckled. Persian climbed out of its bed in the corner of the office to hop into Gio's lap. "Anything else?"
"Uhh…not that I can think of." Archer yawned again. "Sorry, Boss, it's just like an unholy hour here…"
"Don't worry about it. Anyhow, we'll be there in three days. Get some rest."
"You too." Archer's face fell into a now-visible pillow, muffling his final statement: "Profit and Glory and all that."
When Gio looked up from his phone, Cyrus was busily setting up his laptop. Persian left Gio's lap to go check out the newcomer. Cyrus slowly offered his hand for Persian to sniff, and it stretched lazily next to him as he returned to his laptop.
"Need the WiFi password?" Gio asked, pulling his own computer out.
"No, I figured it out." Cyrus mumbled. Gio paused.
"…Aaaand how did you do that?"
"I mean, Rocket1234 isn't the strongest password, to be fair." Cyrus glanced up at Gio. "It was a guess. So is Vincenzo Romano your real name, or—"
"Woah woah, where'd you hear that?!" Gio cut him off, totally bewildered.
"They took a photocopy of your ID at the hospital." Cyrus replied, somewhat taken aback.
"What, and they just pin those to a wall in the ward?" Gio flopped back into his seat. "That's personal information!"
"The only person who visited me for the entire time I was there was my grandfather." Cyrus shrugged. "The nurse wanted to see if I actually knew you."
"…Why'd you say you did?" Gio asked. Cyrus stopped typing for a second.
"There's a lot of things I don't remember very well." He resumed the laptop setup. "Brain fog is one of my worst TBI symptoms. For every day I can easily guess someone's WiFi password, there's a day I can't remember what a…a, um…oh." Cyrus stopped typing and put his face in his hand. "Bad example. I actually can't remember the word. But you get what I mean."
"Colander." Gio guessed. Judging by Cyrus's utterly perplexed reaction, he decided that was not the word Cyrus was trying to think of.
"No, it's a brass…thing. It's not important." Cyrus jumped slightly when Persian climbed over the armrest of his chair and into his lap. "And I'm going to take it that you don't want me calling you Vinny, then?"
"Gio's fine, man." Gio stared at his laptop, himself having forgotten what he was going to do on it.
"And, if you don't mind my asking…what's this about Mewtwo?" Cyrus asked innocently enough. Gio let his head drop to his desk, and when he lifted it Cyrus was staring at him, eyes wide with what Gio assumed to be concern.
"Well…do you want the short version or the long version?" Gio groaned.
"Medium."
"Alright." Gio sighed melodramatically; Persian curled up and started dozing off in Cyrus's lap. "My mom founded Team Rocket when I was a kid, and she'd been interested in finding Mew for just, like, ages. Well, when I turned thirty and she handed the business to me, she wanted me to find Mew and do somethin'…well, Rocket-like. She wanted the perfect weapon pokémon, and I thought, hey, that ain't a bad idea. So I manage to track down Mew, and I had the first set of scientists I was in charge of make alterations to its DNA and try to make a viable 'clone' offa it."
"Fascinating." Cyrus said flatly. Gio could not, for the life of him, tell if that was sarcastic.
"Well, uh…it worked, technically. Like we made this pokémon, and I less-than-creatively called it Mewtwo." Gio scratched his chin, the sound exemplified by stubble. "But we couldn't really…control it. At all. So even though the thing was alive and powerful, from the perspective of something we could use, the experiment was a failure. We sealed it off in a cave where it wouldn't go hunting any of us down.
"So, you know, twenty years pass, nothin' good comes out of it. Recently, though I got interested in these Ultraspace Wormholes, and I'd set up a little experiment to see if they were a viable way of better completing my initial goal…and I'd need Mewtwo for it. So I kinda…toughed it out, you know, got ahold of a Master Ball, and got it under control. Sort of. It's, uh, not pleased with its predicament to say the absolute least, but seems like the only thing it's hellbent on destroying is my motivation. So that's that, really." When Cyrus raised an eyebrow at him, Gio clarified: "I don't know what those scientists did to that Mew's DNA, but this thing can talk and it's an asshole."
"Wow. How's that working out for you?"
"Poorly." Gio grumbled. "You got any pokémon?"
"I used to." Cyrus struggled somewhat to untangle the laptop's power cord. "I released them when I was hospitalized. Figured it'd be better for them."
"Hard decision." Gio said quietly, eyeing Persian. He couldn't bear the thought of saying goodbye to that cat, let alone as a willing choice.
"Yeah."
And then it was quiet. Gio was made wildly uncomfortable by the sudden drop in conversation, but when he looked up from his laptop he realized Cyrus had put on headphones. Where did he even get those? They must have come with the laptop. Gio discreetly called Persian back over to him by clicking his tongue, and it somewhat reluctantly left Cyrus's lap to sit on Giovanni's. He felt some sort of pang in his heart when Persian rested its head on his forearm; Cyrus had to miss his pokémon, right?
It was something that was on his mind over the next three days, as Cyrus spent most of his time in front of his laptop, already busily plotting out what he wanted to do in Kanto. Persian had made a habit of sleeping sprawled across Gio's face at night, which had left him still pulling cat hair out of his mouth the morning that the jet was ready to leave to take him and Cyrus back to Viridian City. The announcement from the pilot that there was a bird preventing the plane from taking off was just icing on the jetlag cake. At least until Cyrus nearly fell out of his chair trying to reopen the plane's door in a panic, having caught sight of the specific bird in question. Now he was sat in Gio's cabin, tightly clutching a squabbling mess of black feathers, face buried in the bird's wings. Cyrus hoarsely explained himself while it jabbed at his wheelchair with its beak; this was his Honchkrow, his pet from childhood, who with his other pokémon he'd released upon hospitalization. It had waited for him.
A little misty-eyed himself from the reunion, Gio exhaustedly flopped onto his bed as he felt the plane take off. He'd just woken up, but honestly it's next to impossible to avoid napping on a plane ride if you can; as he started dozing off, he heard one last thing from Cyrus before falling asleep.
"Oh! Saxophone, that's the word I was looking for."