Who We Are and Who We Might Be

Hal knows that they should go home. When they got back to Halcyon from the fantasy universe they’d been transported to, their phone had been full of texts and missed calls from Maddie and their parents. But aside from a short message letting them all know that they were alive, they didn’t know what else to say. They aren’t ready to talk to any of them, to see the expressions on their faces when they get back.

Eventually though, Hal gets too restless to keep hiding out at the Big Team Base, and finds themself wandering through the streets of Halcyon. Tail perches on their shoulder, nibbling on their ear every so often as if to ask where they’re going, but Hal distracts him with treats.

A particular house catches their eye and they stop in front of it. Hal screws up their face for a moment, trying to place why the address seems familiar, until it hits them – this must be Misty’s house.

An image flashes into their mind, of that other universe’s Misty holding up Tail by the nape of his neck. The sensation of pointed nails dripping with poison scraping down their leg.

Hal shudders and pushes the thoughts aside, walking up to the front door. They hesitate for a moment, but they need someone to talk to that isn’t their parents and definitely isn’t Maddie. So they knock, a few raps in quick succession.

Misty wasn’t really expecting a knock at the door, so she hesitates for a moment before poking her head--and, okay, most of her upper body--out of her window. It and that part of the roof have a good view of the road, after all. She was half-expecting that maybe her dad forgot his keys or maybe someone’s going door-to-door for something; she wasn’t expecting to see a familiar mess of curly dyed-green hair.

“Hey, Hal!” She calls, pulling her head back inside. “I’ll be down in a second, hold tight!”

Even from outside, the sound of someone taking the steps downstairs two at a time is distinctive, ending in a loud thud as Misty apparently jumps the last four all at once. A few seconds later, she pulls open the door, dressed in a too-large Halcyon Downtown Community Radio t-shirt and her usual jeans. “What’s up? Need some help for something for the team, or just dropping by?”

“I need — Could I —“ Hal fumbles a few attempts at starting their request, the exhaustion of the past few days suddenly catching up with them. All of a sudden, their lower lip is trembling and a few tears streak down their face.

“Sorry, I don’t know —“ They wipe the tears off their face, embarrassed, but a few more threaten to spill over. “Could I come inside?” they finally manage to ask, hoping they haven’t drawn the attention of anyone else nearby.

Misty pushes the door further open, exuberance replaced for the moment with concern. “Yeah, absolutely, c’mon in, don’t apologize for anything.” She visibly hesitates, reaching out as if to offer a hug and then thinking better of it. She’s gloved, she always is at home, but even still she’s not sure how huggy a person Hal is even on a good day.

Instead, she leads them through the entryway - her combat boots are where she left them after the dimensional anomaly thing, kicked to the side of the door - and then to the right into the living room.

“Do you wanna sit down? Take the couch, it’s got some blankets on it too - do you want any water or anything?” She is more than a little out of her depth, she’ll admit, but remembers what her dad used to do when she came home from school miserable and upset. Blankets and water probably couldn’t hurt.

Hal follows Misty inside, sniffling slightly. They peel off their sneakers in the entryway before trailing into the living room.

“Water sounds good, yeah.” They flop down onto the couch, Tail hopping off their shoulder and fluttering to the ground. As they reach for a blanket, Tail immediately grabs the other end and begins to tug.

“Hey, stop it!” Hal tries to tell Tail off with a glare, but the miniature raptor continues to pull until Hal tosses a piece of dried meat across the room. Tail scampers off after it.

“Sorry, I’m working to try to train him,” Hal explains, frowning at the stretched corner of the blanket. “This is better than he used to be, he destroyed both of me and Maddie’s comforters the first week after I brought him home.”

Misty ducked into the kitchen, but it only takes a couple of seconds for her to come back with a glass of water, handing it over to Hal and snorting at the stretched-out blanket corner.

“Don’t worry about it - look.” Misty holds up a segment of the blanket a little further down, where four rips, spaced to match with the nails on a small hand,  had been torn into the fabric and then, more recently, sewn back up with bright red thread. “I’ve gotten pretty good at fixing stuff, and the blankets that are out here have been through a lot already.”

She perches on an armchair, leaning toward Hal. “That aside, though - are you okay? Or, uh - that’s probably a stupid question, you were crying - do you wanna talk about what’s wrong?”

Hal stares at the mended tears in the blanket. Back at the Big Team Base, there’s a pair of space print pajama pants with four larger rips through one leg, hanging off of a chair in one of the spare bedrooms. They hadn’t been sure what to do with them — they felt too important to just throw out, but they weren’t sure if they wanted to wear them again either.

They shake their head to clear it, focusing on Misty’s question. “Yeah, I think — well, I hope talking about it will help.” They wrap the blanket around their shoulders, not quite sure where to start. “Did you go somewhere too? Gaia said that most of Big Team had gone missing.”

Misty nods, leaning back a little and wincing at the memory of the other universe. “Yeah. I was - well, there were a bunch of us - we got like, merged with versions of us who lived in a weird dystopia? Not a great place. Not very fun. Glad to be back.”

That’s an understatement. That other universe’s version of her dad turned out not to be dead after all, and the memories weren’t even really *hers*, but every time she’d tried to sleep since she’d woken to a nightmare of a locked door and the terrified certainty that someone was taking her dad away from her. She rubs anxiously at the ring of red tattoos around her wrist and pulls herself back to the present.

“Anyway,” she says, and it sounds a little forced even to her. “Where did you end up getting sent?”

Hal tips their head at Misty’s reaction, curious as to what in that dystopian world caused it, but she didn’t seem inclined to elaborate. Rather than pursue the thought, they take a deep breath and start to explain. “So, me and Ambyx and Echo all ended up in this fantasy world. I don’t think we merged with the versions of ourselves there, but we did learn a little about them. We thought it might be Avalon at first, since it seemed medieval and magical and all, but it turned out to be somewhere else. It was kind of like a video game? Like, there were people handing out quests and then you’d get this list of tasks you had to complete, and once you finished it you magically got a reward. It wasn’t bad really, it was… nice.”

It had been, at least at first. Most of the people they’d met had been kind, and it felt good helping them out. And the people there had looked at Hal and seen a high-level adventurer with a powerful weapon, not just some kid with a random gadget they barely knew how to use.

“We met that world’s Maddie, my twin. She was an adventurer there, and she told us that the best chance of finding something to get us back to our own world was in the lair of that world’s Angy. We snuck in and that’s when things went bad.” Hal finds themself unable to look at Misty as they remember it, a lump rising in their throat.

Misty listens, intrigued by that world - it does sound pretty cool, honestly. “I’ve only been to real Avalon like, twice, but it sounds cooler than real Avalon,” she offers, and then her face falls into a grimace when Hal mentions finding something in Angy’s lair.

“Oh. Oh, dear. I can’t imagine she was too happy about people sneaking into her lair,” she says. Hell, her Angy would be pretty pissed about it, and from Hal’s tone Misty isn’t expecting this to be a nicer Angraxaethe. “Especially - was she like she is here, or did she have her full dragon body over there?”

“She was huge,” Hal spreads their arms for emphasis, letting the question distract them. “Like, bigger than your house.” And far larger than the dragon form that they’d seen Angy manifest when stopping the Pharaoh and freeing the black dragon. They hope that this world’s Angy will be able to take on that form someday. She certainly seems like she wants to.

But back to what had happened. “So we’re sneaking into the lair, and doing a pretty good job of it, until Tail gets distracted by a pile of green cloth. He likes to make nests out of stuff, that’s probably what he was after with your blanket. Tail pounced on the pile, and it turned out that you were sleeping there. That world’s you, I mean.” They sneak a glance back over to Misty, wondering how she’ll take the information of her alternate self sleeping in Angy’s lair. Echo had certainly been delighted by the idea.

Misty’s eyes light up at Hal’s description of Angy as a dragon; she leans forward, drinking in their words. It’s secondhand, and it’s not *Misty’s* Angy, unshackled - but still. Still. Extremely cool to hear about. She doesn’t blink initially at the fact that she’d be sleeping in Angy’s lair--that makes sense, she naps there all the time in this world, and without some stupid dystopian system meaning they can’t talk to each other, Misty’s gotta imagine most other Mistys would think Angy’s lair is a good nap spot.

And then she catches Hal’s glance over at her to check her reaction, and remembers that they said something about Echo being in the group they were in…

“Huh,” she says out loud, going a little pink. “Well. Uh, Echo can’t be insufferable about that because first of all, it proves nothing, I nap in Angy’s lair all the time and did even before - well, also I don’t think you can really draw conclusions from alternate versions of people, right? We ran into dystopia Mayor Crossover and he was a cop, and my dad’s taste is variable but it’s not *dystopia cop* bad. And also Echo can’t be insufferable about that anymore because it’s settled.” She crosses her arms, preening. “Also,” she says, directed at Tail this time, “good eye for nest material, buddy, but also I have prior dibs on anything I’m actually wearing and you’re a lot smaller than me.”

She says it as a joke, and then freezes, remembering the state that Hal was in when they arrived at the door. “Wait. *Shit.* Please tell me I didn’t hurt Tail about that, did I?”

Hal isn’t sure what Misty means by things being settled, but they figure they can ask Misty about it later. Maybe. They’ve never quite been sure what you are or aren’t allowed to ask about that kind of thing.

“No, you didn’t hurt Tail, I — I didn’t give you the chance.” They squeeze their eyes shut, because they aren’t sure if they’ll make it through this part if they catch sight of Misty’s expression while they speak. “Maddie had mentioned something about you being a goddess, and you definitely didn’t look happy about being jumped on, so I just panicked and ran at you. I punched you, and grabbed Tail, so he was fine, but… You got my leg before I could get out of the way.”

A shudder runs through their body as they remember the pain of the poison seeping through their veins, and the cold certainty in the other Misty’s voice as she declared they’d made a mistake they wouldn’t survive.

Misty goes pale as she understands what Hal means. She leans forward, pressing her hands to her legs as if to lock them in place. “Are you alright? Did - it was a few days ago, please tell me someone got it out, that’s - that’s not something that should be left - if it’s still there I can get it out -” She’s not sure why Hal would have come to her door otherwise - there has been exactly one exception to the rule of “people badly poisoned by Misty want to never see her again,” and Misty has just resigned herself to the fact that her dad doesn’t have a survival instinct.

Okay, now that she thinks about it, two exceptions, but Violet also doesn’t really have a survival instinct as far as Misty can tell. Exhibit A: still hanging out with Misty after getting poisoned by her.

Hal peeks and immediately feels awful for the way Misty’s looking at them, as if anything that had happened in the other world had been her fault. “No, I’m fine, see!” They pull up the cuff of their jeans, half to reassure Misty and half to prove it to themself. Four red lines run up the side of their calf, standing out against their pale skin, but the scratches are clearly well on their way to healing. They’ve hurt themselves worse just by falling down and scraping a knee.

“You already took the poison out — the other you. After, well —“ The rest of the incident comes tumbling out of them in a rush. “Echo froze you in place, which made Angy mad so she breathed fire all over him and Ambyx, and then when Maddie tried to help Ambyx they accidentally drained her or something —“ Hall has to pause and swallow the lump in their throat as the image of Maddie crumpling, withered, fills their mind. “Echo managed to heal Maddie and explain to you and Angy that we really just wanted to get home, and they decided to help us, and you took the poison out and opened these portal things, and Maddie went back to her farm and we went back to B-Verse.”

“But now Echo hates me for punching the other you in the first place, and I don’t know what to say to Maddie or my parents so I’ve just been hiding at the Base instead of going home because I don’t know what to do.” Tears are threatening to spill over again, but they swipe a hand across their eyes to hold them at bay. They don’t want Misty feeling any worse for them than she already does.

Misty relaxes a little at the sight of the injury - still bad, definitely, but nothing like the blackened veins that stretch up her dad’s arm even still. She can’t feel any poison left there, either - the other her may have been trigger-happy, but at least she was thorough. She listens to Hal explain the rest of the incident, wincing at both the mention of their sister being hurt by Ambyx’s magic and Echo being angry at Hal.

“That…sounds like a real hell of a mission,” she admits. She’s even more sure, with the knowledge about alternate-her poisoning Hal, that hugs are a no-go, so she awkwardly scoops Tail up in gloved hands and deposits him on Hal’s lap in an attempt at offering comfort. “And…I mean, I don’t know your situation with your family, really, but…” she breaks off, trying to figure out what to say.

“Maybe it would actually help to go talk to them? At least to your sister, if part of what went so wrong was seeing her get hurt. Because you can know that this version of her is okay, but maybe seeing her in person will help you actually realize it’s real, you know?” She shrugs, awkwardly. “And - I dunno what you’d say. If it was me I’d probably just tell the truth, but I know not everyone’s family is cool with everything that happens on Big Team. But still, maybe just saying you had a mission that was a little rough and you just want to hang out and then just hanging out with her would help you realize that she’s still okay.”

Tail attempts to wriggle free at first, upset at being interrupted from his snack, but when Hal draws him close to their chest, he seems to realize that something is wrong. He rests a feathered head on Hal’s shoulder as they try to calm their breathing.

“Maddie’s always been against me doing hero stuff, ever since I started. She kept saying I’ll get hurt, but I never really believed her. I just thought she wanted me to stop so I wouldn’t embarrass her or something. But now…” Hal wondered whether Maddie has felt the way they do when they think about the other world’s Maddie, like a yawning pit has opened up in the bottom of their stomach.

“And I haven’t even really talked about hero things or Big Team at all with my parents. I don’t know why, it’s not like I don’t want them to know. I just wanted them to notice, I guess? To figure it out? They’re just so busy all the time.” They could have made it easier for their parents to catch on, if they hadn’t lied about things like how they found Tail, or why they got banned from the mall, or why they’d shown up with friends from Big Team at a movie set where their mom turned out to be working. But those had felt like small fibs, and they didn’t think they’d be able to explain away disappearing for several days so easily. “Do I just go home and say ‘By the way, I’m trying to be a hero, I almost died, but don’t worry about it’?”

Misty winces. “Uh, yeah, that’s…I’m gonna be honest. I have no idea. My parents…well…” she trails off. “I’m less danger-prone than my father, last time I saw him I had to bail *him* out of a casino because he bet his actual heart on a hand of blackjack, and uh, my dad kinda knew what he was signing up for with raising a demigod whose father is a god of trickery, so…yeah, normal was kind of never on the table.” She shrugs, a little uncomfortably.

“I mean, why - I guess, well, why are you doing the hero thing? You could tell them that, maybe, if you think it’s a reason they’d understand,” She offers, after a moment.

Hal frowns. Tristane had asked them the same question, back when they were both fairly new to Big Team, and they weren’t sure they’d answered it well then. They aren’t sure if they have a better answer now, either, at least not one that they’d tell their parents. But maybe Misty would understand. “I mean, I like to help people,” they start with. Which they know sounds silly, there’s plenty of other ways to help people besides heroing, but they would have stopped a long time ago if it wasn’t true.

They hide their face in Tail’s feathers, embarrassed to continue. “So… Maddie’s better than me at everything. Okay not literally everything, I’m better than her at gymnastics. But like, all of the big important things. Like school, and people. We’re identical twins, people expect us to be the same, which we obviously aren’t, and I don’t mind being different, but it sucks to feel worse all of the time. And I don’t know, I guess I thought that if I could make this hero thing work, I’d feel better? Like I’d have a purpose, or something? But maybe I just suck at this too.”

Misty cocks her head to the side, thinking. She doesn’t have a twin, but she’s also not a stranger to feeling in the shadow of family, or to thinking that if you joined a group you could get a purpose and figure out what to do with your life.

“Well, first of all, I don’t think you suck at the hero thing. It’s like - it’s not like the kind of thing you show up and are instantly good at, or at least, I don’t think I’ve met anyone who was. It’s…a skill, I guess, like a lot of others. You wouldn’t do gymnastics for two months and expect to be great at it, or not to make mistakes. And that can be hard to remember when other people have been doing it longer and are more used to, like…” she shrugs a shoulder.

“The fighting part of it, where you’re tense and a little panicky and have to make a decision real fast, like about if Tail is in trouble and how you’ll get him out of it. That takes work. But also, like, you’ve got the most important part down, which is the helping people thing. That one’s real hard to learn. Keeping your head in a fight, well, that’ll come with practice.” She has a flash of memory of Hati telling her something similar - okay, well, the part about learning to keep your head in a fight. Neither she nor Hati had been great at the helping people part, back then.

“And I dunno if it helps to tell your parents or your sister,  but you did get everyone back home. Sometimes missions go sideways, and sometimes it really, really pisses off people, but if it was anything like what happened with us, you got stuck in an alternate dimension without warning or any way to stop it, and you got yourself and Tail home safe - and it sounds like you did some quests to help out people in that world along the way, which is an added bonus,’ she adds.

“That’s true. Even if it did get scary, everyone came out alright in the end.” Tail has reached the upper limit of his cuddling tolerance, and this time when he starts to wriggle, Hal opens their arms and lets him bound away. They’re feeling a lot calmer now, and they also know that trying to hold onto an antsy Tail is a good way to get scratched.

“I think I’ve been getting better at the fighting stuff, at least compared to where I used to be.” Training with Violet seemed to be paying off. They could just about properly spar with Tristane now, and even though she still always won, it was a much more dignified affair than the first time they’d tried haphazardly flailing their sword around.

Hal pulls their legs up to their chest, resting their chin on their knees as they ponder. “Do you think some people are meant to be heroes? Like, more than other people? I’m pretty sure I’m not. That’s not going to stop me from trying, but — in the fantasy world we went to, everyone else on Big Team was a prince, or a wizard, or a goddess,” Hal gestures to Misty. “But me? According to that world’s Maddie, I just stayed on the family farm and looked after the cow.”

MIsty blinks, startled for a moment at the question, and then shakes her head. “I--wow, people tend to ask me that kind of thing a lot. Sorry, just surprised. No, I don’t really think people are meant to be…well, anything. Or at least, they *shouldn’t* be meant to be anything,” she corrects herself after a moment.

“I think there’s stuff that can make doing the hero thing easier for some people, sure, and I think that if someone, like, comes from a whole family of heroes they can probably think they’re meant to be a hero, and they’ll have known more about what it’s like and prepared for it more and that means they’re better at it - and then sometimes,” she adds a little more bitterly, “you get someone like that who thinks that because they think they’re meant to be a hero, they can’t do anything wrong - and that’s villain material, you know?”

She shrugs. “As for the thing about the other world, I don’t think you can draw like, a ton of conclusions from what you’re like in another world. The Sami in the world we went to was, like, a radical mad scientist who at one point derailed our whole fight because she wanted to use a laser on our enemies? And the Randi in that universe sucked, apparently, she mentioned that she wanted to be on the execution squad when she grew up.” Misty shakes her head. “And also, maybe you - they - were back at that farm teaching yourself magic or something in between chores, or secretly raising dinos in the woods - which would be cool, but also, maybe they just decided not to be an adventurer. Like, they’re a person too, maybe there’s something really satisfying about working on the farm that made them go nah, I’ll stick with doing this for a bit.”

Hal nods slowly as Misty speaks, taking it in. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense. I mean, I must like something about that farm. I can’t imagine I’d stick around in a world full of people handing out quests with magic rewards if I wasn’t happy with it.”

They stand up from the couch and stretch. “I should probably head home and talk to my parents and Maddie. I know that they’re worried about me.” Hal winces slightly, thinking of the wave of texts and missed calls that would flood their phone once they turn it back on.

“Best of luck,” Misty offers, and means it. “And come by any time you want - I mean, sometimes I’m not gonna be here, of course, but feel free to come check if you need anything or wanna talk about stuff.” Another bit of hospitality, learned mostly from watching her dad, surfaces. “Uh, anything I can get you guys before you go? Snacks, anything like that?”

“I think we’re good, I always keep a bunch of treats on hand for Tail,” Hal says, beckoning the raptor back onto their shoulder with one of them. They turn back towards Misty, and on impulse step forward and wrap their arms around her in a tight hug. “Thanks for talking things through with me. I really needed that.”

Misty blinks, startled by the hug. She isn’t  expecting it, particularly not days after some version of her had poisoned Hal. After barely a second, though, she relaxes and carefully - very carefully, even with her gloves on - reaches out to hug them back, equally tightly.

“Hey, no problem,” she manages. “What’re friends for?”