Casca Kichi did not feel fear very often.

Sometimes, she wondered if maybe there was something a little bit off about that part of her. She worked for a dangerous criminal organization, after all; she was near scary people all the time. Wouldn’t it be normal to be afraid?

She stood outside the door, an oversized pack of smokes in hand, psyching herself up – but even now, she wouldn’t say she was afraid, exactly. Isn’t that weird? Hoshi’s a fighter; I noticed the scars on his knuckles that first night in the pub, the faded bruises. He gets angry easy.

If he doesn’t like what I say, he might actually kill me. It wouldn’t even need to be on purpose – he’s a hard man who’s had a shitty day. This could go really bad.

But Casca Kichi was good at her fucking job. She had chosen Hoshi Mutsu for some pretty strong reasons, and her logic had only gotten more right as she uncovered more and more of his personality. So she stood outside his door, listening to the distant hiss of his tiny apartment shower, and repeated the mantra until the hesitancy ebbed away.

Casca Kichi is good at her job. Casca Kichi is good at her job. Casca Kichi is good at her fucking job.

She opened the door.

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Hoshi could never bring himself to take cold showers. Every time a health magazine or doctor’s pamphlet endorsed the practice he would give it a shot, and every time he would make it maybe thirty seconds before he turned the heat up.

Cold showers were fucking miserable. The supposed health benefits could go jump in the bay, if they loved freezing to death so much.

But today, that feeling of ice dripping down his body and soaking through his skin felt soothing. I guess I just needed to balance it out by having an Arcus damned heat stroke first.

He wasn’t sure how long he had been in the shower, and he wasn’t sure how long he would stay in there, either. He definitely wasn’t trying to clean himself; his shampoo and body wash sat untouched, and he had no intention of even combing his hair. He just stood, letting the water pour over him with his eyes closed.

Will she be there when I step out? Or did I scare her off? He didn’t want to find out.

But his body could only follow his mind so far, and eventually the lack of heat went from soothing to annoying, then painful. Hoshi was forced out of his shower, shivering, a clinging cold holding fast to his bones the only sensation making it past the numbness in his limbs.

He dried himself, dressed, and waited a few minutes more, dread pooling in his gut as he eyed the bathroom door. But eventually, conviction overpowered hesitation.

I don’t want to know. But I need to.

He opened the door.

She was there. Casca Kichi sat on his couch, her back straight, staring at the blank, grey-green screen of his inactive television. Her expression was bland and far-away, an unlit cigar held between two fingers.

He moved. He sat on the couch, next to her, and after bathing the day’s heat in cold he felt… closer to normal. Still tired, but he could probably get through whatever this was without freaking out too badly.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” she replied. “So… Ask me again.” He blinked at her. “C’mon, ask me again.”

The corners of his mouth raised, just a touch. The levity was a good sign. “Are you leaving?”

She reached forward, grabbing something he hadn’t noticed from off his coffee table: a novelty lighter, the lid shaped and painted to resemble the head of a magcargo. She flicked it on, and lit her cigar.

“Okay so, there are two ways this can go,” she said through half-clenched teeth. Inhale, exhale, and when the smoke reached Hoshi’s nose it was fragrant, heavy with a whole host of things that were far more intoxicating than mere tobacco.

Ha. Where did she even find a gourmet cigar shop in Vermilion? He nodded, and she continued.

“Option one: I tell you who I am, and you don’t like it. Life goes on for a while… then my long vacation in Vermilion City ends. I go back to Cerulean, and that’s that.”

His jaw tightened. “And option two?”

“I tell you, and you’re into it. We see how far the diglett can dig.”

He swallowed. How bad can it be? His brain attempted to conjure the worst thing it could imagine, but it was stalling out. A Johtonian spy? No, that’s stupid. I genuinely can’t think of anything that I would give a fuck about that isn’t wild fantasy shit. “Okay. I’m ready, hit me.”

A few seconds passed as she puffed, his apartment filling with weirdly pleasant smoke. “…You know that I have money.”

Another nod. “Yeah.” You’re literally burning what must be two hundred pokédollars. Seriously, where did you get that? All the rich guy shit is up north.

“I didn’t exactly come into it… legally.”

“…Okay?” His mouth moved without thought, just as it had earlier in the day. “I steal stuff from work. Or pickpocket people’s phones and shit. I know a guy who does electronic stuff, he pays me for it and sells it on as salvage.”

For a moment Casca’s face scrunched, her eyebrows going down and her nostrils flaring, and in that brief moment Hoshi felt like he would die. I fucked it up. She meant some kinda white-collar crime shit and I fucked up everything.

Then, to his mixed relief and confusion, she giggled. The tip of her cigar bobbed, its bright afterimage turning into dark scribbles in his vision. She plucked the smoke from her lips as her reaction intensified, breaking into full-on laughter for a handful of seconds before her breath petered out.

She looked him in the eye, her face reddened. “Hoshi. Hoshi, I respect you, but that isn’t what I meant. That is some kiddie shit, compared to what I do.”

Irritation. “Hey. C’mon. I stole a Pokéball once.”

Her brows raised. “A Pokéball?” Yeah, yeah, stupid, I know. “Okay, I take it back. That’s actually pretty hard.” She took a long drag, and when she exhaled he doubted an angry dragon would produce so much smoke. “I was going to try easing you into it, but in hindsight that plan was stupid. Simple and direct, here we go.” She looked at him again, and for the first time since meeting the woman Hoshi saw the smallest spark of fear in Casca Kichi’s eyes.

“Have you ever heard of Team Rocket?”

Hoshi blinked. Rocket? The terrorist group? But as he asked himself the question, he recalled something deeper. No, they weren’t always called terrorists. They used to be just petty criminals – and before that…

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“Don’t they know anything about Team Rocket?!”

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

The memory wasn’t clear. It wasn’t faded, either – no, it was simply indistinct. Something that he only half-recalled, because he had never bothered to mark the information as important.

Hoshi had been… young. Young enough to be held by his mother – young enough that his mother was still alive.

Four, maybe? I’m surprised I remember it at all…

When the news of the peace negotiations broke, his father had been livid. Hoshi could remember that part, or at least flashes of it – Shenja tearing a newspaper clean in half, nights where the three of them held each other and his father wept quietly.

This would be after that, he thought. After the Pallet and Silver Leagues joined together.

“It’s those bastard appeasers in the government, I know it is!” The purple haired giant made a wild motion, but stopped himself at the last moment; his fist made soft contact with the table, not even making a sound.

“Honey, not in front of Hoshi. You’ll make him cry,” came a voice, familiar but too washed-out to really describe.

The toddler’s face sours. I was irritated, I think. I wasn’t afraid – I was never afraid of dad.

Shenja’s voice became softer. “Sorry, sorry.” His father’s face stood out perfectly in the faded world, enough that Hoshi knew it had to be a lie – his mind inserting a clearer picture into the eighteen-year-old memory. “But this is important. This is history they’re messing with. Team Rocket were the best damn saboteurs this country could have asked for! They stole the Pokémon Storage System right from under that bastard Bill’s nose! And now the damn pencil-pushers…”

Blurs and smeared sounds were the only thing to follow, his mind failing to dredge up anything more.

But there were other memories, far apart, scattered like the last dying stars resisting dawn’s light.

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Casca watched her lover’s face carefully. She thought that she had managed to navigate through the tricky part, the point where he might decide to kick her out, or worse, but even a trained intuition wasn’t perfect.

Hoshi chewed on her question for long seconds, as she puffed on her Kalosian Kiloude Cloud Fountain. She would have honestly preferred something sharper, but Hoshi didn’t smoke, so she had gotten the smoothest thing she could afford; the thing was more perfume than nicotine, and she was barely buzzed despite being halfway through the frankly oversized cigar.

A bead of sweat threatened to drip into her eye. Did I rush in too fast? Maybe I should have eased him into things after all…

Her numbers were good. Near the top, even – but she had plenty of failures under her belt, too. C’mon, Hoshi. Talk to me. This is freaking me out.

After however many minutes of silence, the man moved. He sat up, his eyes clearing. “Team Rocket, huh?”

She had to stop herself from wincing at his skeptical tone. “Yeah. You’ve heard of it, then?”

“Here and there.” He crossed his arms and leaned back, sinking into the couch. “But everything recent is from the news, and fuck the news. The media says whatever it thinks will get people to turn on their television, when they aren’t being blatantly paid off by Johto.” He turned to her. “So I’d prefer to hear it from you. What’s Team Rocket?”

Team Rocket is money. A roof over my head that actually has some people under it. A shitty collection of greedy assholes that’s somehow not quite as bad as everywhere else.

She smiled as her personal answer flitted through her head. Those were good, true answers, but not what Hoshi wanted or needed to hear. Time to put those three months of boring lessons to use.

“Team Rocket was,” she began, but a thought made her pause. “Do you want the long version?”

“I want what’s important.” His dark purple eyes drilled into her. “I’m sure I’ll ask for the whole story at some point, but now’s not the time. This is about me and you, not anything else.”

While the conversation had been going, her smoke had dwindled. She took one last extra-long inhale, savouring the tingle, before standing. A few steps took her across the room, and as she slid open the apartment window she bid a silent farewell to her month’s singular hit of nicotine. Maybe more than a month; I have a good feeling about this.

She left the window open, sitting back down.

“Okay,” she said, Hoshi’s positive reaction pepping her up. “Team Rocket was a gang back in the sixties, then a black ops group for the government, then a gang again after the unification. You heard about Giovanni back in ‘97?”

He nodded, his expression still serious. “Of course. Not every day a Gym Leader quits and flees the country. I remember my father thinking… Well, it doesn’t matter right now. But I also remember it disbanded – did that actually happen?”

“Oh yeah, it was apparently basically dead for a few years there. But at the turn of the millennium the remaining die-hards hijacked a radio station for a bit, and it got the gang back together.”

She took a breath. “And.. that’s where I come in. My parents…” A twist of emotion stabbed into her gut, and she mentally recoiled. Okay, no, too much. “I lived on the streets a bit, when I was a teenager.” She flashed him a smile, as much to buoy her own spirits as anything. “Rocket took me in. I’m not going to tell you they’re good people, but they take care of their own. If you’re out there stealing Pokéballs already, you’re a much better catch than I thought, and I already thought you were a shoe-in.”

His face didn’t move; his eyes might as well have been carved from amethysts. “That’s your job, isn’t it? Finding guys.”

A moment of tension – then, she raised her hand to her forehead, giving a two-finger salute. “Guilty! You got jynx’d, motherfucker!”

His stoic expression strained, strained, and then broke, cycling through incredulity, to anger, then back again. Then, finally, her words had their intended effect: Hoshi Mutsu let out a snorting laugh, doubling over as tears gathered in the corners of his eyes.

“Yup,” she continued. “I’ve done this with so many guys. Like, maybe a three-figure number.” He gasped, fighting to breathe. “Call me vespiqueen, ‘cause I am a honey. Trap.”

Hoshi continued to snort-laugh. “Fuck you,” he managed to choke out. “You did not just brag about how many guys you’ve fucked.”

Her smile widened. “I totally did, and you totally liked it.”

He shoved her, not hard, and she shoved back. They ended up tangled together, leaning against the couch, their heads on each other’s shoulders.

Hoshi spoke, his normally deep voice whisper-thin. “If I choose option two… won’t you have to leave anyway? If you get paid to bring people in…”

“I get paid for a bunch of things,” she whispered back, hugging her arms around him as tightly as their weirdly positioned bodies would allow. “I actually get most of my pay from smuggling. The recruiter thing is just way safer.”

A moment of silence. “So what happened to all those other guys? That ‘three figure number’?”

Ah, here was another tricky part. Sincerity. People can smell lies, so never, ever lie. She pulled back, and Hoshi reluctantly let her go.

“Most of them were just flings. I’d float the idea to them, and if they joined… great. But they weren’t… serious. A few were, the way we are.” His eyes had hardened again, but not as much. “They didn’t last long either. Turns out that most relationships fail, and that doesn’t change when you add crime into the mix.” A brittle smile. “I’m too much for most guys. They can’t handle me.”

Another moment of silence, and the bead of sweat finally managed to overcome her brow, forcing her to blink first. She pouted at her once and maybe-current lover, urging him to fucking talk, asshole.

Finally, he did. “Was it real? Us?”

“Absolutely. Casca Kichi doesn’t lie – in fact, I’d say not lying is her most marketable skill.” Then, with a waggle of her brows, she drew a hand down her body. “If we ignore all this, obviously. The personality’s a bonus, we all know what gets people through the door.”

He shook his head slowly, but a smile was tugging on his lips. “I thought this was supposed to be a serious conversation?”

She flopped back, the couch’s plush cushions deforming under her weight. “Smoke went out the window a while ago. I don’t think I’m too complicated a woman; you should know me well enough to understand, I don’t have enough serious for a whole conversation. Especially with those brooding silences.”

He stared at her, and she stared back, and then he put a hand to his forehead. “Fuck, I have had too much of a day for this. Did I tell you I passed out at work?”

Her brows rose, and some of the levity disappeared. “What, passed out? You didn’t mention that!”

He grunted, still cradling his head. “Yeah. My brain is soup, right about now. I can’t make a decision when I’m this fucked up… Tomorrow.” He slicked back his wet hair, looking at the ceiling. “Is that fine? If I spend the night thinking about it?”

She kicked him lightly, the impact moving her more than him. “Obviously! Are you sick? Seriously Hoshi, you should have said something sooner! I’ve got, like, so much time before I need to check in!”