It's been a While

Angelo knew a lot of people. There was no way around that. He remembered every person he'd ever met, and he considered a large number of them friends. Clarence and the other Wonders. Agatha and the other Sentinels. Gabe, and... well, mostly just Gabe. All the people he'd met since than on Manta Carlos.

But at the top of everything, resting in a special space in his heart, were the Defiant. His team. His people. And even if that group had been chipped away, he still tried to hold onto them.

But it felt like they were drifting. He was still friends with Travis. He'd inducted Broen in. But Janelle never seemed to have time for them, and Rory...

Well, the less he thought of Rory, the better.

Blade was the one outlier. The last one to arrive on the island. The one who had the most trouble fitting in.

Angelo felt like he hadn't really seen her around in a bit, and he was trying to make a point to fix that, stopping by her dorm and rapping on the door.

"Blade?"

He knew her real name, but it felt wrong to say it out loud.

Angelo was, for the most part, the same person he'd always been. Or at least the same person he'd been since he'd come to the island. He'd changed a lot, both physically and mentally, and at times his life in Halcyon seemed a lifetime away. Like it had all happened a million years ago.

A little buzzer went off in his head when Blade only cracked the door open, even upon seeing that it was him. He'd expected paranoia (she'd always been paranoid), but not even letting him in once she'd seen who it was...?

"I wanted to come visit," Angelo said, not bothering to correct her on his name. "I feel like I haven't seen you in a while."

"Not just school," Angelo admitted, sliding right on in the doorway and finding the dorm... well, more or less as he imagined it. Clean. Largely empty. That was how Blade was. It wasn't as if she collected knicknacks.

"My dad opened a restaurant--not a front, for the record--and I started working there. I wait tables and help make sure things are going well. That's taking up a lot of my time, so I definitely don't have as much free time as I'm used to."

It wasn't like the school he'd done at the tower had been particularly involved.

"School keeping you busy?"

He suspected the answer was no.

Of everyone in the group, there was no question that Blade had things the hardest. She'd never lived a normal life, and she was taking the adjustment like a fish to a desert. The fact that she sounded like a sullen teenager didn't even occur to Angelo at all, mostly because he had a moderate idea of what her life had been like beforehand.

"I have practice," Angelo pointed out. "I went to private school for years, and this isn't that much different. If anything, it's more... accommodating. But I'm not going to keep doing the school thing forever. I've been talking with the counselors to see if I can, ah, speed things up? To graduate, so I can start working."

He doubted Blade had any idea what she wanted to do once she graduated. Even graduating seemed... unlikely.

"There has to be something good, right?"

A normie. Back at home he'd been a 'normie'. He'd had no powers. He'd survived as a hero because of what he'd pilfered from his father's supplies, and the training he'd been given to allow him to defend himself. He knew what it was like to feel like that, but it wasn't like that for him anymore. Not since even before they'd left Halcyon.

Back there, he'd had Giltenn as part of his body. He could never have passed for completely human.

"You're... unanchored," Angelo said, trying to put words to something he was having a hard time articulating. Travis and Janelle had family. Broen... well, Broen had family, but it hardly counted. If anyone, Broen was probably the closest to Blade's situation, but he'd come across without... well, without a lot of things. He'd not been completely emotionally there, and that had been a significant advantage in his particular case to start.

"Maybe a... goal would help? Having something to aim towards. That helped me when I first got here."

"It was probably easier for us," Angelo said, thinking things through even as he spoke, "because there was a group of us. We were all kind of in the same situation, in terms of not being, uhm, prepared. But you got here so late, so everyone else had kind of adjusted. It's probably pretty... isolating."

A part of him wanted to sit down, but it felt wrong. Her room felt wrong. Blade felt out of place in it, like someone had taken Blade's place and replaced her.

"Do you want to go for a walk, maybe? So we can talk and walk as we go."

Angelo was blissfully ignorant to what was going on in Blade's head as they left her room behind, heading out onto the quad. What was one of the nice parts about the school: It had plenty of walking paths, whether they'd been put their intentionally or not, and walking them helped Angelo get a better feel for the school as he did.

"I feel a bit... bad, honestly. That I haven't been seeing you much. Maybe I could introduce you to some of my friends, so you know more people?"

He was thinking, in particular, of Erione. If anyone could help Blade relax, it'd be him.

Angelo didn't really believe she'd been busy. He was pretty sure she'd done almost nothing lately, something that filled him with a strange sense of sadness. He wanted her to be happy. He wanted her to fit in.

"Honestly, I'm not sure how much you know. I'm dating - uh, two people actually, and before you ask, they know about each other. Alma's on the student council with me, and a year younger than me. She's actually an island native. Gabe - you actually know Gabe. Ent, the guy we fought in Halcyon. We kind of bonded over that, and we got along pretty well, so I asked him out."

Better to get the romance out of the way and move onto other things.

"I've got a really weird school schedule which has me taking partial classes at night, because I don't need as much instructional time. I have student council. I'm taking some classes on artificing. But honestly? Most of my time is at work. My dad's opened a restaurant, nice high end Italian cuisine, and I work as a waiter there. I told him I'd do it for free, but he was pretty insistent, and it is kind of nice having cash."

She'd gone silent, which wasn't a good thing. A quick, one-off mention. She hated school. He was confident she didn't have a job.

"You were playing a phone game before - are you still playing the same one?"

Maybe that was something they could talk about. A hobby. Something present and real, rather than the life they'd had and left behind. He knew she played games. She'd done that before. Was she still playing? Had she stopped? He felt desperate, willing to cling onto anything he could get his hands on. It hadn't been awkward before. It hadn't been this kind of excruciating.

Fruit Ninja. She played fruit ninja. At least that was something, and Jude was about to proverbially jump onto that topic only for her to change the subject.

"Not really," he admitted. "I'm going to try and run for student council again next month. It's a good step forward for jobs, and... well, I want to make the time I have count. I've been talking to the school about doing an accelerated track through college. I'm trying to decide if I want to do a bunch of majors and do two or three years, or if I want to only do one or two and just... speed through. Be done in a year or so."

In an ideal world, he'd do one year a term. Entirely possible, if he stacked his courses the right way and was allowed to skip through others.