Private Finished Seeing Double

Angelo felt like it really said something about the state of things that, taken as a whole, he couldn't help but feel like Broen's world, alien invasion included, was in a pretty good place.

"A big mess," Angelo said. "A really big mess. Basically, we had these things called Gultha that were like.. Eldritch horrors from beyond space and time. They were littered around Earth, but mostly Halcyon, and we—the Defiant, mostly, but then the Sentinels—ended up fighting them. Except we... we kind of lost, really. No point trying to beat around the bush because someone else will tell you. The adults basically evaced all the younger people when it was obvious we weren't going to win, and we ended up here, but we ended up finding a way to evac them, so we got a... a lot of people out of Halcyon to here. Like, a few thousand survivors before the planet died. There's a lot of details, but if you didn't have the Gultha, most of them probably wouldn't mean much."

Angelo delivered his explanation pretty straight faced, even though the explanation itself was grim as hell.

"The whole Defiant is here. Requin is too, and Aga— Captain Triggs. And, uh, our world's version of you."

And their world's version of his dad, but considering he was in jail and would be for a long time, Angelo sure wasn't rushing to share that tidbit.

"You look a little bit older than him. Not a lot, but maybe like a year? Which makes sense, because the Gultha's influence was messing with time. When we evacuated to here we spent a few months before we fixed things, but for them it had only been a few hours."

Alright, now that was throwing him off. Broen—his Broen, anyway—definitely cared. A lot of people thought he didn't, but he did.

But he sure didn't show it quite so obviously as this Broen did, and that was throwing him off a lot.

"You..." God, where did he even start? "Did you have the... did you go to Abernathy Academy? Because if you didn't, that's going to be an awful big thing to explain." Part of Angelo hoped he said no so he wouldn't have had to suffer through that mess, but he wasn't looking forward to explaining it either way.

"You weren't officially part of the defiant until you got here, really, so she doesn't know you all that well. You were, uh, doing the villain thing in our world before things fell apart."

So he'd attended, but not as badly.

"More or less," he agreed. "I was there, but only for a little bit, and the rest of my team showed up to get us all out. We managed to escape—" Mostly because of Angelo's insistence on keeping his dad out of it. "—and went our separate ways. After that you showed up going by Paragon and were a bit of thorn in our side. Didn't really do therapy or anything like that. You've gotten better since you got here, but it's like... well, pretty different from the sounds of it."

Angelo opted to lean against the kitchen counter for lack of a couch.

"Now I have to ask, because I can't not know. What's the me from your world like...?"

Angelo winced, but it wasn't entirely untrue: there had been less oversight for the kids because they hadn't quite known what they were getting into. They hadn't realized how bad the school was, and it was easy enough to believe that Broen had simply slipped away.

"The cyborg thing wasn't intentional, really," Angelo said. "There was an... incident with the Gultha. I had bonded with one of the non-aggressive ones and was using it as a gauntlet, but I got caught in an explosion. Nearly killed me and I lost my arm, so I was using the gultha as a prosthetic. When I got here there were better options, so..." He reached up, twiddling his fingers to show the range of motion. "Full sensation and everything. The metal bits are leftover from the Gultha keeping me from bleeding out."

He tilted his chin back to show the silver running down his neck, and then reached up, tapping them. "Side and stumps a whole mess. I never ended up working with Red Mountain in our timeline, but he did make it out, so who knows?"

Angelo had never actually given all that much thought to working with him, but why not? It made perfect sense, after all. Through the Defiant and his dad he knew both sides of his life.

War. Was what had happened to them war? Maybe. But it didn't feel like it. Not the way Broen had talked about it. Not the way he'd... well, basically sacrificed himself.

"When we first arrived we all got dropped out on the rest of Earth, and I set up the alert so I could hear when the Defiant were brought in. You just triggered it because I never bothered to turn it off. Realistically? No one else is coming from my world, so if anyone else shows up it's someone from another world like yours. Maybe someone coming to find you."

He wanted that. He wanted this Broen to be able to go home in a way they never could, and that thought... that thought hurt. Angelo took a second to catch his breath, reaching up to rub at his face as he pulled himself together.

"It's weird here," he agreed. "But you get used to it. There's a lot of nice people trying to start new lives. I'm... I'm a scout, which basically means I go out and help find people who need rescuing from Earth because they're supernatural. Help them come here and be safe. My dad's here too, owns a little Italian place." He had so many questions, and yet it felt weird asking them. It wasn't like Broen knew the ins and outs of Angelo's relationship with his dad or anything like that.