Sasha had already been pressing his thumbs together, his fingers intertwined, hand acting as the pedestal for his head while his elbows provided the crux of support and anchored themselves to his desk, when the young agent – his protégé, for lack of a better and yet somehow more explanatory word – decided to launch the question into his brain.

The question.

Why did he have to ask the question when he was in the middle of researching the past incidents of the target of his recent case assignment?

"Hey uh – Agent Nein..."

"What is it Razputin," was his automatic and monotone response. Sasha didn't really register the words that had been spoken, just that the syllables strung together came complete with a questioning intonation.

"Well you see – Agent Martens just had a baby, right?"

"Yes."

"So she'll be out for a while?"

"Yes."

"What about before, did she – get any special treatment or anything?"

"Active field agents must be in the proper state of health in order to perform their duties sufficiently; it is considered in poor taste for the agency to endanger a pregnant woman, so Martens has been mostly teaching for the past eight months." Although the information was stored somewhere in the secondary part of his brain, Sasha had no problem rattling it off. Flashes of the words ran in his passive mind while his active part went about working on his own task.

Somewhere in the background of the office space, Raz was nodding his head, absorbing the knowledge. He opened his mouth while processing how to best ask the next question, but what resulted was not the most fluent string of words:

"Agent Nein, where do – um – you know – babies – how do people make them?"

Sasha's thumbs pressed tighter into each other, his fingers squeezing so hard as to melt into one another. His vision completely shut out what was on the computer screen in front of him, instead feeling to need to force the rest of his body to turn in the swivel chair to face the boy.

"...Aren't you eleven?" was his counter-question. Raz immediately scoffed and averted his gaze, his cheeks flushed with indignant embarrassment.

"T-that – what does that have to do with it?"

"As far as I am aware, most children are informed of this topic by your age, either through their parents or school." Not that he could talk, but having heard enough stories during his summers at Whispering Rock, Sasha was able to conclude that the majority of schools taught their students about why they were feeling sweaty and awkward by the time they were nine or ten years old. Essentially, the case stood that by middle school, when hormones were really ramping up, at least a child would somewhat understand what was going on with them.

Apparently that memo had missed Raz, and subsequently, the Aquato family.

"I didn't go to school," the young psychic deadpanned, raising an eyebrow at his mentor. "And as far as Mom and Dad..." He rolled his eyes and sighed, throwing his hands up. "Dad was always all 'don't ask me about that, ask your mother' and Mom would go 'I'm not going to tell you if your father doesn't want you to know', so I stopped asking."

Sasha felt the sweat seep from his hairline. "Don't you have...older siblings?"

"Pft, yeah – they wouldn't tell me either."

"I – I see." Using the mask of his glasses to his advantage, Sasha ran over his mental rolodex. Was there anybody else he could pawn the boy and his question off on? Milla? Or maybe even Zanotto? Martens herself would be perfect, but she was gone and – wait, her husband, he was in the research department! and – he would've been gone right now too. Dammit. Why couldn't Raz have asked one of his pals in the mail room, surely one of them would be willing to share.

Bottom line, why did it have to be him, the deceptively-functioning adult not equipped to answer these sorts of things?

"You ah...you really want to know?"

Raz nodded vigorously. "No one will tell me, Sasha! They either start laughing or brush it off or – well, Agent Vodello told me to ask you."

Sasha filed away a note to talk to Milla about this later. Through clenched teeth and a fuming mentalscape, the older agent pushed his glasses into his nosebridge and attempted to speak on the subject of the miracle of life in as eloquent a way as possible.

…

Except that he couldn't.

He continued to fiddle with his glasses while running over the millions of possible ways he could open up the story. What did Raz even know? He surely knew that boys and girls were different, but did he know why? Like...biologically speaking? Did he know what exactly happened with puberty and how it changed children into adults? And – even before that did he – did he know about the separate set of genetics that each potential parent carried and how that combination of DNA would produce a unique offspring? Did he have to break out the punnet squares?

Finally, Sasha lowered his hand to his mouth, forming it into a fist while he cleared his throat. He then brought the hand to his head, extending his index finger to tap the side of his temple.

"It all starts right here."

The boy cocked his head. "...In my mind...?"

"No. The pituitary gland."

Raz blinked.

"Focus, Razputin – for while the pituitary gland is small, it has...plans."

"And that is how, as you so eloquently put it, people make babies." Sasha was telepathically shoving a rather silent Raz out the door of his office, eyes flicking back and forth to the clock hanging on the wall. He had lost approximately forty-three minutes of his research time to explaining the fundamentals of life to the boy. "Now go bother someone else."

The door shut behind him, Raz was left to stare at the frayed carpet of the hallway, his eyes absently tracing over the well-worn patterns treaded in it. But his eyes weren't sending any information to his brain, which remained blank.

Raz made it a few paces before thumping into the wall, sliding down until he was kneeling, his head knocking into his shoulder. He managed to eek out a quiet murmur: "Good-bye, childhood," he said to no one, except for maybe the spirit of himself that had entered the office one hour before.