A/N: WOOOOOO. :D Two chapters at once! Now it gets interesting! … Sorta.
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Childhood Haven
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"Close your eyes, Razputin!"
They had driven for a solid afternoon. Although the clashing of musical tastes he predicted had not occurred (the radio was fixed on a lilting classical station, as per Sasha's tame taste) but it became obvious that Milla had had no one to talk to in days. She craned over the back of her seat, chirping at him at odd intervals like an infatuated teen, plucking from him exotic details about his life in the circus. She laughed loudly at little things, but far from annoying Sasha, the pallid man smiled at her snowballing levity, and seemed in a stable mood himself.
Last night he had been waiting against the car, door ajar and placidly smoking. Raz had offered a robust greeting, to which the professional agent smiled and firmly took his hand, imparting a word of two of gladness in his throaty Germanic voice. Sufficient enough to reaffirm that he did indeed care for his young protégé: and just as Raz found his love returned and affirmed when he went back to the circus, he knew his teachers had missed him.
Now, stuck in their avocado-green Winnebago (which smelled faintly of cats; Sasha assured him the car was not his, but a loaner. Milla then goaded him into a brief squabble about cats, which had no real beginning or end) Razputin strained to see out the badly-tinted windows, reacting as any boy would to the warning given. Utter disobedience.
"Razputin!" Milla scolded, reaching back and taking a blind whap at him; Sasha actually chuckled at their antics as they swatted back and forth, neither acting their age.
"What? What is it?" He demanded petulantly.
He could blame this complete lack of gravity and professionalism on the fact that he had just taken a pleasant road-trip with his two entirely unconcerned and talkative teachers, and the excitement of the promised mission was clouding his judgment. That, and they had stopped for Slurpees halfway through, and Raz now saw everything in shades of Razzleberry Bloo.
The car stopped, and Razputin viciously protested everything from his instructors' cruelty to the lack of air-conditioning. And the cat smell.
"Close those eyes or we're not going an inch further," Milla warned him, green eyes pining him through the review mirror.
Razputin ejected a nasal, irritated sound, but sat back in his brown velour seat and covered his eyes with his hand.
"And no clairvoyance."
Obviously.
"And no attitude!" Milla quipped, plucking the thought right out of his head.
"Okay, fine!"
Then, when he had complied and they still weren't moving, he gave the wheels a mental push, and felt Milla's pink amusement corkscrew into the air. They were totally laughing at him. Totally.
"Come on, lets go!" He whined into the blackness of his hand.
"Don't speak to your teachers in that manner, Mr. Aquato," Sasha said serenely, as though he and Milla were trading smiles while the car sped up.
"Coworkers," Raz corrected him toothily, and Sasha chuckled again, deep and amused. The road became a little rougher.
"Infinitely senior coworkers," Sasha countered, and when Razputin snorted, the radio coughed and Bach's fifth symphony wiggled all over the place, radio reception crackling and phasing out. Sasha made a satisfied sound and switched it off, and the car was silent.
"You could've kept it on. It probably would'a cleared up," Raz offered after a ten-minute stretch of nothing. He wouldn't ordinarily complain, but being deprived of sight and sound left him very very few means to battle boredom or insanity. Milla shook her head: he heard her hair rustle.
"Not where we're going."
That destination seemed pretty imminent: the car came to a slow stop, veering into what he assumed to be a parking place. Milla made an excited sound, a car door popped open, and instantly Razputin smelled a forest. Pine needles and green air. He groped for the door handle, confused, but Milla got there first and, leading him out with her small gloved hands, set him on the smooth asphalt.
"Welcome back, Razputin!"
He opened his eyes. He was in a circular parking lot, asphalt wheel skewered by a single tree stump. Incredibly ordinary—pedestrian, even, like the entrance to some sort of historical park—but somehow a doorway to memories. Never mind that this was the first time he had actually arrived to Whispering Rock this way: the first time had been through a bunch of espionage and pine trees, and the remainder… well, his family didn't have a car.
"Woah," he exclaimed.
Sasha appeared to his left, stretching casually with small, satisfied sounds.
"Still the same—time goes on, eh?" He commented, while Milla looked around, earrings bobbing this way and that. While he was nauseatingly confused about the entire ordeal, he wondered whether this trip was for his benefit or theirs: his old teachers, six years away from their jobs at Whispering Rock, must have missed it dearly and it showed on their antipodal faces. When Milla had filled her senses, it seemed, she turned on her former student, gleaming with her Mental-Minx smile.
"Are you excited?" She asked him.
Despite the sudden, group rush of nostalgia, Razputin turned around, hands outstretched.
"This is what you brought me back for?" He asked the world, not angrily, but saturated with a puzzlement so intense it drained and choked his voice. "Whispering Rock Summer Camp? My family could be anywhere by now, and this… this isn't an emergency?"
"Razputin," Sasha began evenly (diplomatically): he was encouraged when his student didn't cut him off, but remained frozen with his mouth open. He cleared his throat. "We knew you wouldn't want to come back so soon, but we thought this would be a pleasant occasion."
"I talked to your eldest sister on the morning we came for you. We have your family's schedule for the next two months," Milla offered hopefully, hands clasped almost shyly over her hip. When the young man stayed mired in his formidable silence, she added softly: "You can go back after it's over, or anytime at all. But Sasha and I wanted you here for this."
"What is this?" He asked them, seeming to wake. There was a tremble in him, but in moments his voice relaxed: he gave into the burgeoning forest, to the absurdity of it all—what he'd been ripped away from, and then thrust into-- and soaked in the smell of cooking wood.
"Nothing too important," Sasha answered, shrugging his shoulders, but glanced back at him with an arched brow and smile: all strangely mischievous for the stoic man. He started up the path to the main Lodge, hands in his pockets.
"Just a hero's return."
Milla bustled after him with her purse and hair-scarf in hand, giggling.
"I hope you like children! It's time for you to meet your adoring public!"
Razputin watched them go for a matter of moments, simply staring. When it became obvious that neither of them were going to come back, give up the hoax and explain everything to him (or rewind time and let him go to sleep on his circus cot), he picked up his curiously heavy, pin-needled feet and jogged after his teachers.
"Wait—what?" He sputtered, drawing even with them on the last rise before the lodge. A squirrel shot out of a tree and zoomed under his feet, making him shriek a little—so Milla took the time to laugh at him before answering, and even patted his shoulder. He scowled good-naturedly: everyone knew how the squirrels were. Dogan may have been able to write a novel, but everyone knew.
"You're going to help us a little this year, Agent Aquato."
"But… adoring public?" He squeaked, simply not swallowing all of the information.
"Yes… I'm sure the children will be very interested in seeing one of their most notorious legends brought to life," Sasha mused, shedding his jacket and slinging it over his shoulder as he loped up onto the wooden path. Razputin couldn't help but watch in some amazement as the pale man then turned and offered his hand to Milla, who took it with a bit of a blush, and clacked up beside him.
Then came the fact of what he'd just heard.
"I'm a… a legend?" Razputin parroted dumbly, levitating himself over a gap in the walkway.
"In quite the litereral sense." Sasha chuckled.
Beyond the warm, pleasant buzz generated by his ego, now settling quite comfortably in his ears like a fat cat, he made a mental note to count just how many times Sasha had expressed happiness or amusement that day. It was utterly unreal. Everything was utterly unreal: it was like he'd stepped back in time and space and theory and… and some scientist was crying his eyes out a million miles away, just because.
Milla drew him back again with a hand on his head. She smeared his hair into place again, smiling.
"Go, darling. We have to go meet with the Psychonaut attendings. You'll be announced tomorrow, so you only have tonight until the children start losing their tongues around you."
"Try not to get too attached to solitude, Razputin," Sasha murmured over his shoulder. Milla looked at him, and he looked at Milla, and they smiled and walked into the Lodge together, sunny mental moments practically winking over their heads.
Razputin walked away feeling incredibly unnerved, stunned and the tiniest bit emotionally complete. But maybe that last part was vicarious: who knew?
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Within ten minutes, he'd encountered a fair few adults. They didn't even look at him strangely, being as everyone on Whispering Rock grounds had some sort of psychic excellence inside their skulls. No one suspected a newcomer so long as he had the same spark, and they quickly told him what he needed to know: the kids were on a fieldtrip down at the lake, so the rest of the compound was free for memory grazing. Raz wandered happily as he could, soaking in Whispering Rock: childhood haven and all. It smelled just the same, right down to the suspicious, yellow-smelling funk that always hung around the boys' cabin.
He looked it up and down, noticing how they'd changed the color of the flags inside. He patted his bunk, and laid his head on it for a moment. That first night at Whispering Rock was the most important he had ever slept through. It all lay in knowing that he had succeeded in something he had wanted more than anything on earth: he was there, he was safe, and he had done it all on his own. The power-high should have kept him awake for hours, but it ended up knocking him out like a blow to the system. He slept like the dead that night, wrapped in the open-air feeling of the cabin and the breathing kids around him.
He dredged himself from his half-curl on the bunk, remembering how he had to kick his legs to get all the way up. He smirked absently, and patted the hard mattress one last time. Then he left, only to run into something else—a living, breathing, dangerous memory.
She came out of a cabin, smiling sweetly with her eyes on the ground. Razputin froze, reacting to her like a bulbous-eyed frog to a flashlight, trembling slightly in his cold mental pond water and generating nervous, shocked ripples. Then the fact of her registered, and Razputin needed to run, adrenaline punching him in the gut: but whether it was away from her or toward her, he had no idea.
Seeing her in Whispering Rock was just too much. Out of Psychonauts gear, hair lazily tucked into a bun, it was just too natural. In the end, his feet jerked into motion (decided just to outright bolt, with utter abandon to boot, and find a nice tree to hide behind until she went away) right when she looked up; he stumbled in place, arms wind-milling. He saw her, she saw him. He looked down, so he wouldn't see her smile disappear.
"Hey," she said after a lukewarm second.
"Fancy seeing you here," he tried jauntily, the old Raz Pizazz earning him a twitch of her face.
Birds and squirrels and other small, live things jabbered around them. Otherwise, silence.
"Whispering Rock…" He almost exhaled the name, when she didn't say anything more. "S'good to be back, huh?"
She shrugged and he loved--instinctively—the soft skin of her easy shoulders and the way she moved.
"In ways," she murmured, and, seeing his expression (forcibly blank as he told himself not to love her, really), conceded. "I love the smell of it."
A pause.
"Smells like adventure and frontal lobes."
And she said it with a coy smile.
Raz got indecently excited, like an IV of hot bright liquid straight to his chest.
"And pond scum smells like a good rescue, huh?" He returned sagely, eagerness obvious and shining as he stared at her. She looked up at him out of her lashes, cocking one soft shoulder.
"Thanks for that," she told him, warm and real.
Finally, they were in their element. It was unbelievable. The office walls weren't killing them, Marc wasn't lurking behind her with drink mixes and they were back at the beginning at summer camp. Hot eternal summer camp, boring Whispering Rock where nothing important ever happens, but then he happened. It was sweet, pine-scented renewal, and Lili's smile still made his heart flutter. His not-really-girlfriend. He had to steady himself before he answered her.
"Anytime, Lili."
He hoped he didn't sound too breathless.
Then she looked at him, appraisingly, actually interested. That spark of conscious attention in his direction still floored him (god, she was vibrant and beautiful), but he still raised his eyebrows. She bit her lip for a moment, as if wondering how to phrase something.
"Is Linda still…?" She began slowly.
"She—er, it--sends me letters." He supplied briskly, smiling from ear to ear. Lili's face puckered.
"Letters?"
"Radio messages. The old lady is pretty psychoactive, really," he amended, chuckling. "Letters would have a hard time finding me, anyways."
"You've been away?"
In her question was the admission (but not admission, no, it was just a fact to her) that she had not noticed his absence at work, or had not looked for him. He looked away from her pretty face, and some of Whispering Rock's charm flickered; nostalgia caved like a beloved, rotted Halloween pumpkin. The office hovered outside this little world, threatening.
"Yeah. Back with the fam."
He shrugged. Her eyebrows raised, and her eyes scanned him, as if refitting him in a leotard.
"Back in the candy-corn menagerie," she muttered, then looked surprised at herself, like a stream of cold water had run down her neck.
Raz himself nearly jumped. That phrase—that exact phrase—he'd used over five years ago to describe his family. Huddling with Lili in the darkness of the ship, waiting for Milla and Sasha and Ford, hands resting on wrists… but when the world got quiet and dangerous their fingers twined, and the feeling was the best in the world. The best in his life.
Lili looked down, eyes wide.
"Yeah. Candy-corn menagerie is a good phrase. We look like a box of candy, anyways," he said weakly, drawing her back. She looked up: she was at a loss, obvious in her critical, sepia-rimmed eyes that searched him even as she smiled, starkly. Shadowed by a memory.
"Every family's different," she said, and some of the office's coolness filled the space between them. Raz's face fell a notch, and he grasped for her retreating warmth, their moment of summer camp and huge fish and brains.
"How'd you get here?" He blurted. She stuck her hands in her pockets.
"Jet."
"Lucky. Road-trip for me."
He jabbed a thumb at his chest, but it was useless: her eyes were no longer on him.
"That sucks."
And the conversation ended.
"I have to get back to the Lodge," she told him, looking into the distance. He nodded.
"See you."
He went into the cabin and watched her walk away through the bug-spattered, brown window. He had to.
He just couldn't imagine seeing her again.