Different Tunes

Rollo often thought of himself as a metaphorical rock that people could rely on, to stay strong and steady no matter what the environment could throw at him. He’d always been confident of this; he was there to support his younger brother when needed, he’d thrown himself into agent work again and again because he knew Marie wouldn’t fare well trying to save her cousin alone. There wasn’t a thing he couldn’t handle, he’d told himself.

And then he was kidnapped.

He could barely even remember the day it happened, but the days that followed were a lot clearer – or at least, the times of day when he was in control of his own body. Part of him was glad he had no memory of Octavio controlling him with the hypnosignal, and another part of him wished he had been conscious, somehow, in case that would’ve made him able to fight back against it. Regardless, it was over now, and he wanted things to go back to normal. They could! Very easily! There was no horrible sound-that-he-couldn’t-hear controlling him now, the electric hum of the phone charger he now had to unplug at night was not going to turn him evil, and Jake had assured him that having a temporary missing arm, a few scratches and broken glasses was manageable, given how bad things could have been, had one or two things not gone in their favour.

And yet, as much lingering guilt as Rollo might have felt over what happened to his brother, Jake was not the one he was currently having internal turmoil about.

To his team, he’d vanished without a trace. Jake said he’d spoken to Delilah at one point and told her he was ‘missing’, and Rollo couldn’t decide if that was better or worse than her thinking he’d just misplaced his phone and also inconveniently forgotten their practice schedule. Part of that was true, at least. He had no idea where his phone was now, but he was pretty sure it was somewhere in the octarian base as they’d used it to message his brother, and quite honestly, he hoped it had fallen victim to the explosion Octavio caused by crashing his own ship. The fact that he needed a new phone wasn’t the issue – Marie had offered to cover the cost for him, as compensation – but he wasn’t able to contact his team to let them know he was back.

He should talk to them. Jake had contact with Harper; it wasn’t like he would just never see any of them again if he lost their info. Everything would be far too complicated to explain, though, and he’d been putting it off for as long as he could – which was a week, by now.

“Are you going back to practice soon?” Jake asked as he stole the TV remote directly from his brother’s hand.

Rollo wasn’t particularly bothered to fight back; he’d just been mindlessly watching the general news for the past ten minutes, after the stage rotations were announced. Pearl was back on-screen now, so she must have been recovering well. He shrugged and folded his arms. “Why? You sick of having me around again already?”

“No!” Jake huffed, smacking his shoulder lightly with the remote. Ouch. “You just haven’t let the others know you’re back yet.”

“Yeah. Well. They’ll find out eventually.”

“When is eventually?”

“Dunno.” Rollo lifted one hand in a lazy shrug, trying to keep up the impression that he didn’t care.

“But you – they probably still think you’re missing,” Jake said, pointing out an inevitable truth. “I bet they’re worried.”

“Maybe.” They would be. Ugh. It wasn’t like they were work colleagues or anything like that; the rest of Team Geode were his friends. Delilah especially was fiercely protective of her teammates, and he knew if any of the three of them disappeared suddenly he would be concerned.

And that would be worse than how he felt right now.

“… Alright. You’re right,” Rollo sighed, pulling himself off the couch at last to go and search for the notes Marie had given him. He was going to have to memorise that story she’d help him come up with, one which didn’t involve being brainwashed and kidnapped by a long-thought-dead war criminal. “No more hiding. I’ll go see them tomorrow.”