It's so easy to blame Teo for everything that's gone wrong in his life, and frequently Romero does just that, looking back on his twenty-three years with a jaundiced eye toward his brother's influence. In the past eight years he's had ample opportunity to let his memories curdle and his hatred flourish, and little desire to let bygones be bygones.
The Beginning
Romero was born on the fourteenth of January. From an early age the differences between the Laudani brothers were apparent. Teodoro was boisterous and Romero withdrawn. Teo spoke his mind and Rom spoke with tact. Teo was impulse and emotion embodied. Romero was thought. From a strictly Myers-Briggs perspective they were complete opposites. From a more personal point of view, for all their differences, Romero idolized his older brother in those days. His first mistake.
Indeed, even as Teo started staying out late nights, coming home drunk and asking Rom to cover for him, getting in trouble with parents, school, occasionally even law, Romero nonetheless felt that his older brother could do little actual wrong. Teo was wild, yes, but his heart was good, and he just needed to find his true direction.
Romero had found direction early. Several directions, to be sure, but directions that he felt would see him through life comfortably. The first direction, his first true love, was mathematics. Numbers came naturally to the boy, and he saw patterns that some studied years to recognize. He was taking advanced placement classes by the time he was fifteen, and had inquired about getting college credit for afternoon classes at the University of Palermo the following year.
His second love was one familiar to many Italians — even Teo, for all that he wasn't precisely the best example for it. Rom loved the church. A good Catholic boy through and through, he was an altar boy from the age of eight, and might have even considered a career in the church were it an earlier century. It was traditional, he knew, for second sons to go into the priesthood when they came of age — their fathers' holdings would be passed to their older brothers, after all, and in a bygone era the church was a haven for academics. Not so these days, but in numbers Rom saw evidence of God, and he rejoiced in the certainty that there was a just and loving deity watching over him and his wayward, much loved brother. In fact, even given the change in the church's support of the search for knowledge, Romero might have considered a future in the priesthood were it not for his third love.
He met Gianina Immacolata Santoro, Gia, when they were both only six years old. They were nearly inseparable from the moment they met, and while it was, at such youthful age, simple affection and friendship, it blossomed over the years. They kissed hesitantly at twelve, and by fifteen were so deeply in love that parents worried, even expected, that they were entangled in ways that might get them in trouble. They need not have worried — Gia shared Rom's love of the church, and both accepted the commandments laid down without question. They fully expected that some day they would marry and such things could wait until then. At fifteen they were still innocent.
Gia would remain innocent. Rom's innocence would be torn away.
The discovery of the gateway that Romero shared with his brother was considered from all angles before Rom decided that it was a gift from god. He did not know the purpose of this ability — the way it occasionally sliced watchbands and broke loved items was disturbing and annoying, but he appreciated that it kept Teo out of harm's way, and gave thanks for it when Teo would come home and announce his latest defiance of death. Romero rarely utilized the ability himself — he had no need of it, except when lunch was forgotten and Teo would retrieve it for him — but it saved his brother, and that was enough.
The Nadir
That fateful evening Rom and Gia were together — it hardly required saying that they would be together those days. They were settled side by side on the couch in the living room of the Laudani house, the aroma of Amadora Laudani's cooking still lingering in the air and the promise of Gia's own tiramisu still to come, as soon as their homework was finished. Romero had just looked up as Gia said his name, and she leaned in to kiss him. It was a terribly sweet moment, the sort of which young romance stories are constructed. The room was silent as their lips met, and so he heard, on the very edge of his consciousness, Teo's voice: Vedere! Jesus has risen! And then a gunshot.
The pain in Gia's eyes was immediate. The bullet had passed through Teo, come out of Romero, and passed into the belly of his beloved. He could not stop the bleeding, could do nothing to help her, could only hold her as he screamed for help from his mother and father and anybody else who would listen. He would not let go of her cooling body when the paramedics arrived, and they had to sedate him and pry his arms from her as she was carted to the morgue. He was taken to a hospital in turn.
Romero was barely conscious for Gia's funeral, and it is probably just as well. He would have been even more a wreck than he was. As it was, he stood close to her family as she was lowered into the ground, tears streaming down his cheeks and nearly blitzed out of his mind from the sedatives that had been prescribed. When he came down off the drugs he didn't stop sinking. He fell into a bleak, black depression that nothing seemed to penetrate.
It stemmed from his understanding of mathematics, perhaps. His logical mind saw the evidence arrayed before him. Gia was dead because Teo had done something stupid, and therefore his love for his brother was misplaced. Gia was dead, and therefore God was neither just, nor loving. Gia was dead, and all Romero had left was the numbers that had been his first love. The psychologist said his feelings were normal. There was nothing normal about losing the love of his life at such an age, nothing normal about Gia's death.
In the cold hours before dawn one morning the following March, Romero slipped from his bed, wrote a note of apology to his mother, packed clothes, money, a few other necessities, and walked down to the dock where Teo had pushed his rival away the night of Gia's death. He snuck on board a ship sailing for the mainland, secreted himself among barrels and boxes, and in no more than two days he was in Spain.
The Flight
Getting away from Palermo was probably the best thing Romero could have done, and surely there were other teenagers making their way through Europe. He stayed in hostels, worked in vineyards in France and olive orchards in Greece for money. He saw all of Europe, then Asia, Australia. He made friends for a few days or weeks as they travelled together, then forgot them as they went their separate ways. He learned to fight to defend himself, learned to drink to self-medicate for the ache in his heart, discovered sex with some of the random wayward girls he met along the way, and smiled wryly to himself one morning as he realized that he was doing all those things that Teo had. Not that it changed his behavior a bit. He was living to escape.
The portal between himself and Teo broke when he left Palermo. At first he thought it was a matter of distance, but while working on a fishing boat on the Black Sea, when a hook would have taken out one of his eyes, he discovered otherwise — the hook went through him completely, came out the back of one of the others working the nets without anybody being the wiser, and then came sailing back out again. He caught the line, fixed it where it was supposed to be, and got back to work but over the course of the following months and years he pieced together the nature of the portal — the tesseract, as he called it. Space folded at his command, allowing this gateway to form between himself and another person. He learned to summon and banish the portal at will, how to use it to travel from one place to another — an uncomfortable prospect, to be sure, but possible all the same. He rarely left it open as he had once before. There was too much potential for danger.
Once, in China, he thought he saw Teo looking into a restaurant where he was eating greasy dim sum with the lovely daughter of the restaurant's owner. He pretended he didn't see his brother, and was gratified, and a little angered, when Teo vanished a few moments later. The girl was quite sympathetic.
It was just over a year ago that Rom found himself in Los Angeles. So many migrant workers in California made it easy enough to blend in — he spoke Italian and they spoke Spanish, for the most part, but his dusky skin allowed him to blend in easily enough, and he spoke English clearly and fluently, which allowed him opportunities to find work in orange groves and more vineyards. He traveled north as the summer waxed and south as it waned, crossing the United States aimlessly, as he had done in Europe and Asia already.
And when finally he came to New York, well after the destruction of the city, he decided that this was the place for him to put down roots, at least for a little while. Something about the city spoke to him: its devastated skyline was a physical reminder of the shattered soul he carried within him. In this twisted, broken land he has found a home. For now.