A/N: Title from 'Song of the Open Road' by Walt Whitman.
They make an odd pair.
People often wonder what they're doing together, adventuring across the world and solving crimes- small and large. The tall man in his colourful, elaborate suit- carrying that long cane- and the small girl scurrying next to him, eyes wide and excited, who most people mistake for his niece. The story of how they met is long and strange and was under the most unlikely of circumstances, and there's no time to explain it because they always have work to do.
"What are we doing today, RGB?" asks Hero, thrown backwards over the couch in the small hotel room that they're renting. She's playing with a ragged old sock puppet, making it jump from hand to hand. RGB, from where he's standing in front of the kitchenette, tosses her a file, and she catches it with practiced ease, flipping it open and dropping the sock onto the ground, where it lies, forgotten, on the linoleum floor.
"'There has been a series of mysterious disappearances in Barcelona'," she reads aloud, frowning at the longer words. "Barcelona- that's where we are right now, right?"
"Don't tell me you've lost track." His voice is low and smooth and sounds like the crackling of television static.
"We keep moving so fast it's hard to!" she protests, and grins. "So where are we looking?"
"They were all last seen near the Casa Milà," RGB answers, retreating into the kitchen. "Madras printed a map for us, so that's where we're off to."
She snatches her jacket off the ground, and flips over backwards to land on her feet. She makes instantly for the door. "Great- let's go!"
A long cane immediately and inexplicably hooks over her shirt, tugging her back. "Not so fast- breakfast first."
"Aw!"
"My dear Hero, breakfast is the most paramount meal of the day."
She allows herself to be lead into the kitchen, although she's still pouting a bit. "'Paramount'?"
"The most important," he clarifies, pulling plates and frying pans and spatulas out of cupboards, and starting up the stove.
"Well, why can't you just say that?"
"Because otherwise you won't be suitably impressed by my frankly sesquipedalian vocabulary."
Her face scrunches up, and she looks almost comically amused. "Sesqui- what?"
He reaches over, ruffles her hair and begins to crack eggs into the frying pan. They sizzle as they hit the already hot metal. "Never mind."
She sits at the countertop, legs dangling off the chair because she's too short for them to actually touch the ground. She swings them back and forth happily. "Are we going to meet anyone there? Or are we solving this one ourselves? Will there be ghosts again?"
"Yes, no, and I highly doubt it," RBG answers, brow furrowed in concentration as he fries the eggs to perfection. "I rather think the ghosts were unique to Mexico."
"Mexico was fun," says Hero musingly. "We should go back sometime."
"Yes, well," said RGB, frowning and tapping at the frying pan. "I think we've been banned from Mexico."
Hero grins even wider but changes the subject. "Who are we meeting?"
"Friends."
"Your friends?"
"You sound surprised that I have any. And you know them already- Melody and Julliene."
Hero bounces in her seat, hands doing a happy little twitching motion. "Oh! They're here?"
"It would seem so."
"Let's go, then!"
"Breakfast," he reminds her, and places a plate of scrambled eggs in front of her, which made next to no sense at all, considering he had been frying them when he started.
She eats the eggs, though (and has seconds, because they're really quite good), and then finally- finally- they leave the hotel room and head off into the busy, colourful streets of Barcelona that are nearly as colourful and busy as the clothes that RGB is wearing. He points out interesting sights as they go along and she asks lots and lots of questions that he answers quite patiently but with a little bounce in his voice that comes from the joy of explaining things- RGB loves doing things like that.
(They don't end up solving the case of the disappearing people that day, or the day after that, but they do find a large infestation of Notions underneath the Casa Milà- which, as everyone knows, tend to grow more and more ridiculous the more you entertain them- but that's a story for another day.)