Essere Orgoglioso

The first question was not particularly strange. Maybe for someone else it would have been considered downright bizarre, but for Basilio? Par for the course.

"I don't think it is," Jude said after a moment's consideration. "Officer Genove's been away from, ah, that kind of life for a long time. He left around my age, and he's pretty on the straight and narrow. I'm pretty sure it'd be illegal to record someone in a bedroom without telling them."

He wasn't sure, but he strongly doubted Angelo would do it even if it was technically legal.

As for the second...

Jude wrinkled his nose slightly, unable to stop himself.

"You ran the mob. I'm not... I mean, I'm not that oblivious."

Did Basilio think he'd somehow completely missed the fact that his work was super illegal? That didn't make any sense, but Jude didn't exactly see an alternative.

Jude nodded when his father asked for secrecy. Really, his father probably could have asked Jude to tapdance and he'd have done his very best. He was happy, and he was eager to please even at the most absolutely ridiculous level. So he stayed quiet and listened and tried to process what he was hearing.

Because it was, no two ways about it, not what he expected. He hadn't even known what he expected, but whatever it was, the idea that his father hadn't even wanted to be part of the Family was definitely not it.

His father had always seemed focused on the business. The Family had been his life. The idea that he--so much like Jude--had wanted no part of it was... unreal.

Jude didn't manage a response right away, clearly rolling it over in his head.

"What did you... do, exactly?"

Beyond being the necessary evil.

Once upon a time, Jude had been told (on the internet, of course, because he'd never met someone who classed themselves as a conspiracy theorist in real life) that aliens really did exist, but that almost every person who talked about being probed was a nutjob. That the aliens had picked the people most likely to be the subject of scorn to abduct, specifically so that alien abduction stories would be seen as absolute lunacy.

While it wasn't aliens, the eye was clearly taking a note from that book, and Jude paused for a long moment to just... digest.

A part of him wanted to say of course, I knew my dad wasn't evil!, only that wasn't quite true. Trying to reconcile his image of his father with knowledge of what his father did had been a big part of his younger years, and eventually he had. He'd accepted that his father was a good person to him and a bad person to everyone else, and now the rug had just been pulled out from under him again.

Apparently he'd been wrong about that, too.

"Oh," Jude said, the realization coming. "That one time I visited you beneath the restaurant. You were talking to people, and I thought it was odd because you seemed to put them on the same level as you."

That was them, wasn't it? The Eye. The shadowy figures who made sure the world didn't get cracked in two.

It was a lot to digest. To realize that the whole thing had been... what? Some great secret. That while his father had expressed confusion--annoyance?--at him being a hero, he'd been secretly proud in his own way. Proud that his son had the same drive to do good as he had. That they were walking the same path.

"Secrecy," Jude confirmed, but punctuating it by leaning more heavily into his father was probably not the best way to get his point across. The physical affection felt nice. It felt... like a relief. Like everything would be okay.

"Are you going to start it again here?" Obviously not right then, but Jude had to ask anyway.

Jude could always read between the lines, but this wasn't quite reading between the lines so much as it was noting the train lights approaching you at mach speed through the darkness. Basilio was making only the vaguest effort of pretending like that wasn't exactly what he had in mind, and Jude couldn't help but grin at him.

"You should get some sleep," Jude said. "You look exhausted. I'll get things ready for when you get up. We can talk more when you're less, uh, dead in the water."

Because boy was he looking dead in the water. He looked like he hadn't slept in a week, and Jude had a sneaking suspicion he looked that way because he actually hadn't.

But Jude couldn't resist one more, and he leaned in, pulling his dad in close for a moment longer before finally pulling back.

"I'll see you when you wake up, alright?"