A/N: I have no idea where this is headed :D But I DO know that it takes place, like… 6 years after Psychonauts.
I just love Sasha and Milla so ASTOUNDINGLY much, it's like… AUUGH. They need to make out RIGHT NOW. And I also love Lili and Raz and thus think they should make out. (Hurhur. "I've been thinking about what you said—about us making out?" Oh Raz, you GO:D) So… it's about those four!
And it was so strange—before I found the vaults with Sasha's past in them? I was in his psyche, and cackled "Omg, SEE THE SHOES? I bet he was a cobbler's son. HAHA. I bet he was a poor cobbler's son! Let's write about it!" And… well. Lo and behold. o.o
I creep myself out sometimes.
Brrr.
-.-.-.-.-
Seasonal Greys
-.-.-.-.-
After clicking merrily around a corner of the white-walled TIS center, Milla straightened and clapped her hands as though she'd found a prize at the end of her hunt.
"Sasha, you're hiding!" she exclaimed, tap-tapping yet closer.
"Agent Vodello."
Her Berry Flirtatious lips puckered sadly when Sasha failed to look around or rise from his professional curl in one of the center's standard issue, but silly bowl chairs. The man looked like a great ink-blot in all this white, she thought, just waiting to have a test run on him. What do you see?
Whatever he wants you to see, that's what. Milla sighed, tucking away the mental burst of warmth she had been saving.
"Last names don't win many hearts, darling."
"That would be a problem—if such a thing were my job. Fortunately, it's yours," he said, then added, as a chaser to an already dry drink, "Vodello."
She shook off the mild offense with a small surge of felinity—her hair bustled comfortably as she settled against a desk. After plucking it from its convenient wandering near her ear, she watched him over her coffee cup (three pico-liters of dream-fluff, not one, and a healthy pink glow to show for it) as her tapered white fingers knitted over it.
"Really, Sasha, after all this time anyone would expect us to be on a first-name basis. We're adventuring partners! Such a thing does not leave you with an impersonal bond."
"You tend to concoct pet-names for associates and villains alike within moments of meeting them. Pity on me if I abstain." He said stiffly, moving one arm to stretch it.
Milla drooped like the swarthy tropical flower she was, plying him with wistful green eyes.
"Darling," she said quietly.
"Agent Darling is un-deployed at the moment, and would surely appreciate this misplaced attention—Agent Vodello, if you please."
Now she saw the problem—or rather, now he was uncollected enough to let small starbursts of it dart into her psychic net. Stress, hard and granular (the sand against her mental teeth, grating and crunching) littered the room. Sasha, sensing the presence of her net, repressed the leak with a swat of his hand, but not before an orange zigzag of frustration snapped out.
He did not glare at her (regardless of his glasses, any psychic would have felt the visual connection like a hand on a shoulder) but remained staring forward, ossifying at the computer consol. Agent Nein was infamous for his control; his shields alone were strong enough for several psychics at once. Standing there, Milla Vodello felt the iron liquor of his shields suffocate any and all waves in the empty Tech Intel Sector.
She paused, looking for a change that would and could not occur, and slowly turned on her white heels. The force of his shields left her chill and disoriented—completing the work his conduct had started.
"You musn't overwork yourself, Sasha." She warned him blankly. She tucked her coffee cup down by her leg, frowning at the featureless wall. "Sanity is our highest commodity."
And a delicate one at that.
Sasha only brushed his oiled hair back from his face as the door closed, and the one manifestation of open-mouthed, orgasmic color departed. A tendril of nervous TK energy rooted around in his cigarette dish, long gone cold, and pulled out a dead stub. It hung in the air a moment, defeated.
His mind boiled for more than psyantium-laced nicotine.
The cigarette dropped into the mottled ash with a piff, energy strings cut.
Finally, he straightened and reached out into the screen in front of him, pulling his hands across the glossy surface in a handful of distinct, noiseless patterns. It warmed beneath his ministrations and began to glow a professional blue. Agent Nein drew off one wet-looking black glove, touched one finger to his temple and made the last few strokes with his free hand.
The screen lit.
The light was brief and startled, but it wasted down to a dirty grey. The color became textured, sandy—almost like an old movie—as though someone had TK'd Sasha's cigarette ash and sent it crashing over the screen.
Two gritty figures materialized, a lumpy product of the ash. One was a man, the other, a boy.
Their presence did not surprise Sasha, but spurred him to move closer, needle-thin elbows propped on the console. Still his hand remained pressed to his temple.
The boy already had a particular polygonal jut to his chin, young as he was, although the man had a weak face and a touch more chartreuse in his peeling skin. Both were dressed in ratty, coarsely woven jackets and blended perfectly with the thin, persistent filth of abandoned cities. Sasha Nein watched as they argued and paced furiously in the seedy warehouse.
"Sie können nicht mich zwingen!"
The old man's face filled with anger the color of sewage.
"Sprechen Sie nicht auf diese Art und Weise! Befolgen Sie!"
It was in a different language, of course, but that's how memories went.
Old Germany was another world entirely now, and he rarely spoke his mother language… all to save himself these sooty, suppressed memories. He had yelled in tongue more often than spoken. Alas, he was so well organized (and had such a complete lack of corners in his mindscape) that no cobwebs could be allowed to grow over these portions.
The memories carefully dangled before cadets inside the cantankerous, gamboling vaults? False.
Imposed, concocted, forged—whatever one wished to say. The products of the calculating little men in the Rethink Productions lab, who worked in professional suppression. They had reworked his father into a round, tragic shape with a fan of mustache and silver dollar glasses, and charmingly killed his mother with a mystery disease, molding Sasha himself into a fictionally acceptable victim. One had to learn to overcome fabricated adversity, after all. The truth had dramatic flair, but never the right concoction of 'simple' and 'temporary' to be easily forgotten.
And the age—it was true that some psychics claimed their primordial memories sooner than others, but to produce concrete memories at such a young age, with no error or misconceptions? He would have to claim power and awakening equal to Gerard Croiset.
But they had kept some components for sincerity's sake. He truly was a cobbler's son.
Sasha watched as his father rose up like an old rickety beast and spit in the dirt next to him, creating a viscous dollop of mud. Shooting his son a vicious glare, he limped off to the corner that held his scant cobbling equipment. Illegal squatters in the darkest part of Dresden. Expected to make a living when there was no place to lead a life. Sasha Nein of the memory turned and sprinted out into the wet cigarette-ash streets.
The screen wavered.
Several scenes flashed by. Carded through, as though unimportant, they increased in brightness and detail as he grew older, but often featured only a single face or a sentence. Mostly hateful. It was a scattered little paper trail of his and his family's journey up in the world. Here and there, things stuck out. Assisted by the screen, he remembered the first shoe shop. His father's pride.
He remembered the long hours at the bench, coaxing tacks into perilous pirouettes onto the already scruffy bottoms of shoes—without his hands.
Something in his head did it for him—even though it was a lot of work—and whatever it was stopped a hammer from breaking his head open after it fell from a high shelf.
There lay boxes heaved in every direction, which he would fearfully clean up before his father appeared, but ominous most of all—a cast iron hammer hovered in the air above him, creaking gently left and right as if reined in by invisible strings. A puppet. He stared, and stared, until something inside him grew tired and let it drop with an ear-splitting ping. He did not touch it for days, and held his breath when his father dared to pick it up.
Despite the slightest suspicion or thrill or terror of practicing witchcraft, (close, dirty Germany knew superstition as a way of life, but knew nothing of psychics) he knew it had to be good, so he practiced secretively on tacks. And Sasha practiced, and practiced, and practiced.
He remembered being slapped and dashed against a wall and denied dinner for wasting time on the shoes.
"Unbrauchbarer Junge!"
It wasn't abuse. It was just how memories in Old Germany went. Time was money, and money was food. The need for either was not a very pretty thing for blooming young cadets to see.
Sasha lit another cigarette.
Finally, he remembered the Big Store. Run by people from Berlin, government padded. A would-be strapping thirteen, Sasha himself resembled a chewed-over strap of leather with dry knees poking out of his pants. Watching the beginnings of his new life carefully, he saw nothing but a deal cut with well-dressed snakes. Having his younger sister married off at age eleven (elf) to the storekeeper's young, brusque, closet-rapist son in return for residency was just the beginning.
The Tiffany lamps were just in from America, and kept in the corner. Very pricey.
"Sie verwenden uns!"
"Ja aber, wir kann jetzt überleben."
"Und Nadia ist die Zahlung?"
He had never been close with his sister. It was simply the indignity that hounded him.
And something else.
Sasha Nein held his cigarette and watched his younger image storm and spit in the lushly accessorized shop, doubled in clawing, cleaving spite as he wreaked his last argument upon his father. His memory self howled, gesturing sharply—and Sasha noted that his voice did not sound the same.
He sounded more like his father nowadays.
Finally, the nerve was exposed. In a screaming climax, his father's claim that he would have just as soon sold him to get this far in life halted any natural resolution.
The boy grabbed hold of a table, unable and unwilling to listen. His father shouted more wildly, bearing down on his ninety-pound spawn. This only increased the well of violent input the blinded boy suddenly had access to, and he drew all the hate in with the air, unable to block any emotions. Vengeful yellow energy locked his joints. His square chin snapped down to his chest and his teeth clenched. He would have bitten his tongue clean off had his body not responded accordingly. When Detlef Nein moved to strike him, his knees went weak. When Detlef Nein's hand connected with his jaw, all hell broke loose. Years and years of dirty anger and deprivation broke loose.
Sasha Nein, age thirteen, temporarily shattered his psyche.
The Big Shop combusted. The clean white smash of glass roared up like the surf as every single lamp was viciously heaved from their doily-covered tables. The tables themselves followed, wallowing up against the walls as if blown there by a strong wind. His father was somewhere in the back. The entire shop capsized with the rage of a young psychic, now surrounded in putrid canary light.
But it wasn't enough.
The unbearable heat that had siphoned from his face and neck found home in small seeds of flame, which spread into starbursts and caught onto the tacky American-styled drapery like firewood.
All within moments, the screen broke up into panicked flashes of flame and torn wood and some nauseating feeling very much like regret, and the neon-wired warning meters in the TIS went wild: Sasha stilled them with a hand, wrist twitching, and pushed his mind past those primordial memories. Everyone was warned not to introduce traumatic memories into the system. It stressed the components.
Unfortunately, there was gash in his psyche, like a rip in a tape, which one simply had to push past. Inaccessible, dark.
The screen began to clear up with piles of broken pricey American Tiffany glass and smoldering wood. The little colored panes had fallen from their wiring, leaving clusters of articulate framing that resembled black, insidious honeycomb. His lacerated hands shifted in front of him, slowly scraping and filling and moving. Bag after bag. Krystalnacht.
Sasha pressed onward, now comfortably clear of the rip.
Ford Cruller.
Agent Ford Cruller on a couch, sitting as close to the boy as he dared. He'd laughed and said any Psychonaut within an ocean of him could have felt that little hissy fit and come running. He had happened to be in Africa at the time, so… there you go. Mediterranean only, and no hearing in one ear to prove it. Lucky, aren't we?
Lucky, in their relatives moldering brown living room and a live of servitude ahead of them. Sasha had not known what a Psychonaut was, nor did he care. He had broken the Big Shop doing something hellish and unnamable and now his family would not touch him. A history of life and gritty cohabitation, meager as it was, was deleted entirely by this one act.
Sasha Nein almost smiled as the boy stumbled from his seat and stalked toward the door, only to have his feet leave the dirt floor as he reached for the knob. A shout of surprise, a curse, and he clung to the frame while his family gasped behind him; he felt the crosses being made against their chests and gave a vicious kick of his feet.
Cruller gave a laugh from the couch, which came out as a tumbling, lopsided wheeze.
"Come on down now, boy."
Feeling the intent tug on his lower half (and somehow seeing a visceral arrow, a disconnected line in his mind) he clenched his eyes and did something. The forbidden snap happened inside his head, and a jar swerved off the table and lurched in the general direction of Ford's head. He grunted and twisted like a fish as he pushed it toward the man from his gut, still clinging with all his might and broken fingernails.
Ford only laughed louder, and the jar never crashed. Something feather-light plucked the jar from Sasha's tense, orange control, and the surprise was enough to loosen his grip. Never sagging toward the ground, he was unhooked and came floating over, mouth open, to flop down onto the couch. Ford put an arm around his bony shoulders before he could run again.
"You're a little old for Camp Whispering Rock, Sasha my boy." He wheezed, giving him a friendly rattle, then letting loose a hooting cackle Sasha had never heard the like of before. "But as far as you've managed to get without us, I'm sure we'll find something for you to do."
The fact he could understand the man even as he spoke in a different language was strange enough. He had no reason to trust this stranger who claimed these yet stranger things. But sitting there beside rickety, strange-smelling Ford Cruller, facing the blank spot that was his family, Sasha Nein felt awkward, rebellious, hateful and, above all, safe.
"After all, there's always cabins to clean."
Then the scene changed, and the black train was so very appropriate.
They were sending him away. Ford would have taken him himself, but he had urgent 'Naut business to attend to, and left Sasha to experience his own funeral. His mother and father stared at him from the grey station decks. They stared without love or hate, but maintained a strange, detached fascination with the impersonal threat. Him. When he could no longer abide their blank, aghast faces, he shut the smog-smeared window and sat back in his seat. The train squealed.
He did not see his sister. Perhaps she was killed in the fire.
He was a Psychadet now, whatever that meant.
The details ran in rivulets of blankness down the memory, secretively palming others from his peripheral vision and adding to the landslide of vagueness. There was no emotional stimulation on the long train-ride to the next station and then on the boat to Whispering Rock, and thus no consolidation of the memory. Sasha sat staring at the globular collection of confusing greys, and finally took his hand from his temple. The screen irised out, and the Core seemed to give a grateful whirr.
Sasha crumpled the remainder of his half-smoked cigarette into the ash, stood up, and teleported out of the TIS room.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-
"Milla, my dear, it's not like you to be sad."
Agent Vodello, coaxed to sit down, waved her hand in answer to the rust-colored man beside her. Agent Darling (Agent Oliverne John Darling, to be correct) was a horizontal little PR expert with a generous cotton-candy swirl of beard and not much else—even his eyebrows were bare. It was as though all the hair on his head had migrated to his chin to be whipped up into a mess of butter yellow. He smiled kindly at her, settling down in a chair of his own.
"It's nothing," she said wistfully.
She had not looked for him, despite Agent Nein's stab—he had found her on his own. It was true, Milla had always been one of his favorites.
"You forget who you're talking to."
Oliverne Darling was a true empath, and a highly valued employee because of it. The tiniest slip in emotion was an open door for him, and with receiving came transmission: he could insert opportune seeds of thought into adversaries so easily and secretively, then cultivate them so carefully, anyone would stake their life on the fact that they themselves came up with the idea. He sculpted enthusiasm, made the mind absorb the idea, and quieted any censors. An ideal skill for swaying people to accept the damages that came with their line of work.
He may not have raised a Telekinetic finger in twenty years, he always said, but the many hands of others made for anything but light work in his line of business.
A stubby rust finger tapped at his face.
"Tell me, are your shields on vacation?"
Without raising her chin, Milla let the gel of her light shields close her in again and looked at her pointed feet. They clicked together, white and lacquered and toy-like. Her clothes always made her appeal to children.
"Sorry," she murmured. Her tropical lilt, sorrowfully condensed in such a word, weighted Agent Darling's mound-like brows. He sighed.
"One of these days I'll have to beat Nein with a stick—you know that don't you?"
"Darling!" Milla yipped, sitting straighter in her bowl chair.
"That's my name, Milla," he said wryly. When she slopped back in defeat, he touched her on the shoulder with a yellow-occluded smile. "And I never get tired of hearing it."
She rubbed her forehead, then let her white hand settle across her neck, as if to keep her words and thoughts in check. She sighed.
"I don't know what to do."
"Well, I can only say this, dear. If you don't know what to do, that's fixable. It's when you don't know what to think that we have a problem."
"It's not a problem, it's a..." Milla trailed pointedly, then looked down, as if suddenly struck by something. "Did you know he still won't call me by my first name?"
"Give Sasha some time, Milla," Darling groaned as he popped himself out of his bowl seat. He shifted back and forth, patting his slacks. "You know he always gets shifty around this time of year."
-.-.-.-
"I can't do this."
Raz's voice, now accessing the well of pre-pubescent pitches and dives, rasped out of the mic.
"Razputin, there is nothing to say you cannot do this."
"I can't, I—I'm gonna lose it, Sasha."
"Your phobia is secondary here. You are in my mind," his instructor explained, and took a moment to concentrate the sentence. It echoed, solid and protecting. "The environment is completely under my control—therefore, you must not interfere. You are broadcasting your fears and influencing the water. Stigma and inductive reasoning are holding you back."
Corporeal water is cursed, therefore all water must be cursed.
It was strange water anyways. Built off of Sasha's memories of water, and the man surely hadn't been near a nice beach in ages. It was slightly smoky, and looked scientifically impossible sloshing around in the circus-round tub. Add to that the fact that two bulb-fingered hands are sticking out of the greasy mess and you have yourself a weird picture, Raz thought.
"Continue, Razputin."
"What'll happen if I—" and Raz broke to yell out in surprise as the comical hands rooted hungrily in the air beneath him. "What'll happen if I die in your head?"
"It is my psyche, not my physical skull. And you will not die," Agent Nein replied.
"Rasputin—" The ghastly water moaned conveniently, which caused Raz to all but petrify on the ladder.
"So you mean I'll come back?"
"No, I mean you will NOT die, because you will now complete this exercise with very little prodding," he repeated testily.
"Would you feel anything if I did?" Raz asked breathily, clearly focused on distracting his instructor.
"Now is not the time for idle chatter of death, Razputin," Sasha grit sharply, "Step into the water."
"I guess he'd feel something if he had to come out and kill me." Raz muttered under his (very scant) breath. Wondering exactly how a corporeal manifestation of an astral projection would feel in a violent situation… he took another step down the ladder. He concentrated so hard he could feel his real body tingling right where he had left it—in a chair next to Agent Nein's similarly motionless form.
The water did not move to overtake him.
One cream-colored foot, then another, and the silent water made sense because it WAS Sasha's head. His teacher wouldn't let anything so chaotic happen to him. Sharp motions, violent things, jiggling, and rattling sensations simply did not occur in Agent Nein's grey-scale, geometric mind.
Raz's foot slipped and sloshed into the water. breaking some sort of pact with his life-long enemy.
The arms snapped up and lashed across his head, pulling his neck in two as iron water surged into his mouth and nose with the force of a jet. His arms immediately whipped off the ladder to pull at the painful, intrusive obstruction—he was flipped backwards, legs banging and catching painfully between the rungs of the ladder—his ankle twisted, crack—the water wrenched mercilessly--
He continued to scream for a moment after Sasha cut the simulation.
He lay, shocked and unnervingly dry, on an abrupt metal table. A crisply contained green vortex opened next to him, and dark, angular Sasha stepped out onto the mental plane beside him. The elder Psychonaut stood with his arms at his side, not crossed. Raz's hand immediately went to rub at his face.
"Sorry," he muttered.
Sasha refused to look at him. He turned, conscious gaze glazing the boy over as he turned away. At some other time in the year, he might have apologized as well—exposed both his logic faults and regret to the young boy for putting him in such a situation. Raz only heard the click of glasses, and the squeak of rubber gloves cleaning them.
"Your phobia is overwhelming," Agent Nein said flatly. Raz could feel his eyes someplace far away.
"It has been with me my whole life. Curse, y'know," he said, somewhat sheepishly. His older voice returned, though it was nothing to boast of. He squeaked to the edge of the table, toward his mentor. "What, is there a cure?"
"Perhaps, had we caught you younger," Sasha said heavily. He pushed his glasses back onto his nose, but his chin remained against his chest.
Solemn though he may have been, Razputin had never seen Sasha so ghostly.
"Agent Nein?" Raz tried softly.
Without warning, Sasha disappeared.
"Agent… Nein? Sasha?"
The grey scape of Sasha's white matter shifted and wavered calmly around the block, as though all was still well. Razputin Aquato sat for an empty, startling moment, waited a few more for good measure, then pulled out his long unused smelling-salts and disappeared with a brief sound of disgust.
Winter never did go over well with Sasha Nein.