Not By Choice

Jude didn't have a choice in coming to therapy. Not really. The choice was sit down with a therapist once or twice a week or move into the dorms, and I'm cutting you off. Not much of a choice at all. He really liked Officer Genovese, and it hurt knowing he'd disappointed him, but it helped a little bit that it didn't seem like he was treating it as a punishment. It was just... something that needed to happen.

Jude hadn't gone to therapy. He'd had a lot of really good reasons for that, but that didn't change the fact that he was feeling a bit nervous as he sat in the waiting room, waiting for his therapist to call him in. What was going to happen? What was even going to...

Jude tried not to think about it.

Mr. Genovese. Even the name felt weird for him. Mr. Genovese was his father, or in a pinch, Officer Genovese. Big-Angelo, in other words. He'd been called Mr. Genovese a fair amount in school, but those days felt very, very long ago.

A lifetime.

He kept quiet as he entered, not quite sure what to do before he decided to finally take a seat. At least he wasn't as nervous as he'd been if he'd had to sit down for therapy right away. He'd had time to process. Time to think things through. Time to get some semi-decent advice from people around him.

"You can just call me Jude," he said, making himself comfortable on the plush couch. "Mr. Genovese is... I don't know, my father, I guess. Or you can call me Angelo if you want, but mostly I just go by Jude." His paperwork was no doubt down as Angelo Genovese, but he'd taken to sticking Jude in as a middle name, even if he hadn't quite sorted out his paperwork just yet.

Maybe before the new school year.

Mister Jude. Still weird, but okay, better. He had no experience with therapy, no baseline to work off. He had no idea what to do, but he liked the idea of explaining himself well enough.

"I guess to start from the beginning, I'm not from here, really. I'm from an alternate timeline, and I'm... adjusting. Maybe not as well as I should. My guardian--who is also named Angelo Genovese, so you can just call him Genovese if you want--think I'm probably not adjusting as well as I should be. I think it's less that and more just... normality. I didn't have a normal life back at home, so sliding into a normal life here feels... weird."

A double adjustment. From world to world, but also from an abnormal life to a normal one.

As normal as Manta Carlos got, anyway.

Jude was definitely not the kind of person who'd sit around and waste everyone's time by not talking. He might not like therapy, and he might not have wanted to be there, but once you got him in the door... well, that was that. There was no point in wasting time by sitting on his hands waiting for the time to be over, and he'd told Officer Genovese he'd do it (albeit under some duress).

He went with the easiest question first.

"Similar, I guess? Physically he's way bigger and older, but mentally I guess we're pretty similar. Shared backgrounds. But kind of like looking at a what if of what my life could have been like. I think he's got his head together a bit more than me, and I guess I'm more... Uh, intellectual? Not saying I'm smarter, but I'm more focused on like, reading and education, where he said he had no real interest in that and was more athletic. Different power sets, I guess."

He was small and a quick thinker, but Officer Genovese... well, he could punch through walls like they were sawdust.

Jude considered that question more or less done, which meant he had to flip for the other one.

"My world was one of... heroes and villains. Like a comic book, basically. It was just a normal part of life for us, that one day a giant monster might rampage through the city and some guy in a cape might appear and save us. So that was normal for most people, only..."

Jude paused for a moment, frowning. There was the rub. Even though it didn't matter--even though he was trying to accept that Basilio would never make it to Manta Carlos--it still felt like a betrayal to say it out loud.

"Only my dad was a mob boss. Like, henchmen and all. Technically he qualifies as a super villain, even if he wasn't into the whole masks-and-cape thing. I kind of grew up with it."

Jude considered each question in turn. He wasn't generally someone to blurt out answers, and he took at least a few moments to process each.

"No, not really. For a while I thought he might push me into taking the same career as him, but... he's pretty, uh, relaxed about this stuff. He isn't going to make me be a cop. He's... pretty nice? Friendly. I guess he's kind of like a big brother."

Definitely not a dad. That would be... really weird. But a big brother with a better-than-average idea of what he was going through, he guessed.

The stuff about his world was better.

"Not really," Jude said. "I mean, it seems pretty... calm here? I guess I could say that I miss the whole hero thing a bit, but it's also giving me a chance to try the whole normal life thing for a while, so... it's good?"

Really, Manta Carlos seemed pretty close to a utopia for him. Where else could he make do with his arm?