Although Angela would like nothing more than to devote herself completely to unravelling the mystery of Uncle's nanomachines, there is much to do besides that which she can't afford to slack off on. She still needs to work hard to master her Swedish. She still needs to stay at the top of her class, and she still needs to find the time to help Mrs. Lindholm around the house. It keeps her perpetually busy, but Angela isn't about to risk the hard-won affection of her caretakers by emulating those married couples that stop trying their best following the wedding ceremony.
At first she tries to shuffle her activities around a bit to optimise, but that only adds a few hours a week total to her available time. Next she cuts her sleep by an hour, then two, then three, then four and five. The realisation none of it affects her leaves Angela more than a little dumbfounded. All these years and she never realised because, simply put, she's had neither the will nor incentive to stay up past the lights-out. That's a third of her recent years she could've spent doing absolutely anything else, though what that something could've been, she can't really decide.
She debates telling the Lindholms for a while, for the most part due to trouble with finding an explanation for her finding that detail out. It turns out to be a most fortunate delay when two weeks into her new, sleepless life, Angela finds herself realising she doesn't remember what the video she's watching is about, nor even what happened in it just a minute ago. It takes her a good minute of thinking to realise she can just check the title before putting together what Antarctica has to do with penguins.
Angela swallows the lead in her stomach, puts the tablet away, and promptly goes to sleep for the two hours that remain of the night before she needs to get up for school. It helps to a point, but she still catches herself spacing out throughout the day before she for once goes to sleep at the professed hour.
It takes some experimenting, but she soon finds a new balance afforded to her by her lessened need for sleep. While a regular person spends a third of their life asleep, or should do so to remain healthy, anyway. Angela is reasonably sure she only needs a fourth of that, but settles for half just to be sure. It's more than enough, and gives her plenty of time to listen to the latest loud thing in her earbuds that she's taking a liking to, anyway.
With more time in her days, she briefly considers putting in the effort towards making friends again when the adults at home take notice she never brings any home, or even talks about them. The problem is Angela struggles to find a reason to talk with anyone outside the Lindholms and her teachers other than during group projects at school. To be frank, they're boring. More than that, Angela believes the sentiment goes both ways. They're no longer kids who can easily bond over a playground carousel. Telling this truth, however, would show her in a bad light, as if she were somehow antisocial - which is, firstly, untrue, and secondly, not what adults want from children.
"They treat me like a little kid." She professes instead. In reality, it's more that they don't treat her in any way at all, both sides of the issue having decided to simply ignore each other's existence following the initial awkwardness.
Angela isn't sure whether she just starts paying attention to how Mrs. Lindholm keeps her around when she has guests over, or if she really does take to doing it more from that point on. She was not keeping a tally prior. For the most part, Angela doesn't mind. The adults have a tendency to talk about their jobs, and even though she doesn't understand a half of it in their rapid-fire Swedish, it's endlessly more entertaining than playing host to their six, eight and five-year-old children that she hasn't a thing in common with but size.
By comparison, Mr. Lindholm's guests are far, far more out of the ordinary. Meeting Mr. Reinhardt, for example, feels akin to living out a fairytale and that's on top of basically already living one. She has known, distantly, that one of her legal guardians is part of Overwatch, but it somehow never occurred to her what such connections might mean before one day finding the man whose photos and posters she'd seen on so many of the orphanage's walls, sitting on the Lindholms' sofa when she comes back from school. There can be no mistaking the man even without the massive suit of armour he always wears in the photos and recruitment vids and parades and - everywhere really. Her eyes lock onto his blind one and she wonders what overwhelming odds were needed to leave such a mark.
"This the girl?" Somehow, he's even louder than Mr. Lindholm. It's incredible.
"Yes. Angela, introduce yourself."
The exchange leaves her a bit star-struck, but in retrospect it makes perfect sense for the hero crusader to know of her. He saved the world alongside Mr. Lindholm, and is, as she quickly learns, good friend of his outside Overwatch. It follows they'd talk about what's going on in their lives, and taking in a teenager was certain to be a topic of conversation between them at some point. Angela wonders what her caretakers say about her to their friends when she's not there to hear it - good things, she should think. She's always helpful, her grades are stellar, she doesn't argue or get in trouble (the workshop incident unaccounted for) and generally tries to be the perfect child. Every adult should like someone like her.
It suddenly occurs to her she doesn't really know that much about Overwatch in spite of living with one of its founders. The organisation rarely comes up as a topic of conversation between her and the Lindholms; Angela gets the feeling it's not something they particularly want to discuss. As a result, she doesn't have much more insider knowledge than any other person her age, not even about their medical facilities. But that's where Mr. Reinhardt comes in!
If the man minds her sudden bout of excitement, he doesn't show it at all. If anything, Angela's enthusiastic line of inquiry seems to find a mirror in his equally lively answers:
Yes, Overwatch has some of the most advanced medical science facilities in the world. Yes, they organise tourist trips in the HQ, though they don't usually veer too deep into the R&D. No, there's no ban on bringing along a child to see their parents' workplace, though it's more of a case-to-case basis than an actual policy.
It takes her a while to notice the look Mrs. Lindholm is giving her from the side - where she's let her head rest on her palm with a smile Angela can't read - as well as to realise she's left the woman completely out of the conversation by switching to German at some point.
"I'm sorry, it's just- nice to speak with som- uh… to speak like this in my ow- my better language." She tries to smooth over the damage.
It's very polite of both her guardian and her guest, Angela thinks, that they only laugh and assure her it's alright. It's not. She's been living in Sweden for months now and yet still finds herself lost trying to follow the adults' conversations. She should be doing better.
Angela spends the rest of the crusader's visit making sure to leave as good an impression as she can. She puts on her best smile and speaks of how amazing she finds Overwatch. How she wishes to help people like they do when she grows up. It's easy. It's all true.
"A doctor, you say? That's a worthy goal."
Angela feels like she's beaming for the rest of the week.
When the news break about Mrs. Lindholm's pregnancy, it takes her completely by surprise. Strangely, it seems not to the extent to which it catches Mr. and Mrs. Lindholm themselves unawares. It turns out they've been trying for a child for some time before taking her in, evidently with little success, and Angela can't help but wonder where she would be if they'd succeeded a year earlier. Curiously, they seem worried about her reaction. She smiles and laughs and expresses all the delight she can muster at the prospect of having a younger sibling. It won't do to show the anxiety gnawing at her insides at the thought of being replaced with their actual child. Between having their own kid to care for and putting up with a criminal's experiment, it doesn't take a genius to know which they'd rather have, no matter what they say she is to them.
In the end, Angela decides on the only course of action she can feasibly hope to influence, and adds being a perfect big sister to the growing list of the things she needs to be. It's worked out well enough so far, even if the Lindholms still wanted a child of their own. After all, she's still here.
She must be doing something right.