HC that Kevin has a dedicated time slot to go to the swimming pool not only because it’s a great sport to strengthen his body muscles and to reduce the pain in his wrist but also because it’s the only time where his mind stays quiet and he gets to keep his thoughts quiet. He could do laps upon laps for over an hour and it will leave him both exhausted and stress free for a blissful moment before he has to get back to real life.
Matt noticing Kevin has been eerily quiet for a few days so he asks Kevin if he can come to the swimming pool with him because he knows Kevin will push himself too hard again and could accidentally get injured. Kevin is surprised by the question but he says yes. Cue Matt going with him and realizing swimming DOES feel great so he goes back with Kevin again the following week. While Neil has Kevin’s evenings, Matt suddenly finds himself having two hours at the pool with him on Thursdays and he loves it. They get to talk about random things in the car and the locker room, Matt gets outraged Kevin hasn’t seen a certain movie, Kevin is unimpressed by Matt’s breaststroke. Matt holds Kevin up to it so they hold mini swimming competitions. Funnily enough, that’s how they really start bonding and enjoying each other’s company.
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OK so Baul and Lilias friendship lives in my mind rent free, so I think that a few days after silver gets sick for the first time and mama and papa zigvolt manage to teach lilia the proper way to care for a sick infant after he comes over to their house tembling with poorly restrained panic, Baul goes over with v little persuasion from his daughter to check up on them.
What he sees is a happy and healthy Silver just quietly smiling up at him from Lilias arms while Lilia is passed out in his rocking chair fevered and red from catching baby's first cold.
Baul immediately assigns himself caretaker duties, doesn't even bother trying to move Silver from Lilias arms and instead just picks them both up to deposit them both in Lilias bed for a proper nap before checking the fridge for tomato soup ingredients.
When he first heard from his daughter that Lilia— Lilia Vanrouge, the once General of the Right, feared commander of the fae armies and scourge of humankind— had adopted a human child and had been caring for it for several months now, Baul had roared with laughter so hard that he split a scale wide open on his cheek.
It was certainly a poor excuse for a joke, the very kind of rumor that the castle fae still bitter over Lilia's persistent existence four hundred years later might spread. The very idea that Lilia, Lilia Vanrouge, would debase himself to care for a human child not of his blood, to stoop so low as to toil over its screeching and wailing demands when he had bathed in the screams of its own kind with a mad vengeance after the tragedy of Lady Meleanor . . . not even four hundred years of honeyed peace was enough to sweeten that wound.
Time, it seemed, had forgotten what was so cruelly emblazoned in the very depths of Baul's mind, in Lilia's own memories, and the nightmares of all those surviving fae who stalked the forests during those blood-soaked nights. Those born in kinder years had never known the horror of human avarice, and even his own daughter had taken up residence with one of their kind despite her father's immense displeasure, simpering, soft-hearted fool that her husband was.
At least, to Baul's proud credit, their lineage rippled strong and true through his grandchildren— and with his daughter due any day under the weight of a third, he's only too certain for another healthy, bouncing, scaled Zigvolt.
So when she had simply stared back at him with crossed arms and an arched brow while he had laughed and laughed and laughed, a sinking kind of horror began to creep into his heart— surely . . . she wasn't serious?
Months— hardly the blink of an eye for faekind, but everything to humans. Months, Lilia had kept a child for several months, and not once had tried to rid himself of it? Not once tried to deposit it upon the stoop of a human village and wipe his hands clean of the responsibility of child-rearing? He had been taking advice from Baul's daughter and her wisp of a husband on how to pacify and coddle it? He had barged into their home, fretful beyond measure with a colicky babe clutched in his arms, and all but demanded them to cure the child?
("Or what?" Baul found himself asking, utterly bewildered and needing to find some kernel of normalcy in the fact that surely Lilia had menaced his daughter's husband some into obeying his whims.
"Or nothing, Father," she said, the taunting ghost of a knowing smile playing about her lips. "In all the years that I've known him, I've never seen him quite so distraught. He stayed by the crib all night, frozen— we had to tell him it was alright to breathe and to hold Silver's hand if he wanted, it was as if he was afraid to hurt him.")
Silver? Lilia, afraid? Holding the hand of some human child?
It simply couldn't be true.
It couldn't be, this had to be some elaborate, poorly executed prank.
He clung to that belief even as his daughter shoved a bundle of medicine, food, and knitted blankets into his arms with the stern instruction to deliver them to Lilia's home (Home! He had never heard the forest cottage to be described in such terms! The place was a hovel, a storage shed for Lilia to dump his treasures before venturing off to the next location, how could it be considered a home?).
He clung to it even as he emerged from the woods to the path that led up to the cottage's door, casting unnerved glances to the strange and new abundance of woodland creatures skulking about the thatched roof and scampering along the thick tree trunk supporting the cottage like a lean-to, soft little animals that would have darted away in fright from Lilia's presence before Baul's own.
He clung to it until he could no more, when he threw open the cottage door with an odd tightness in his chest to see his oldest friend collapsed on a worn and lumpy armchair with a honest-to-goodness human baby snuggled safely within his arms and sucking happily on a stray piece of ruby-stained hair. Beyond them, a soothing glow flickered in the fireplace where a kettle of milk quietly steamed, and the scattered presence of cloth toys littered the living room floor along with (Baul shuddered) well-thumbed pamphlets, their covers illustrated with the cheerful faces of frolicking human children.
What had this child done to Lilia Vanrouge?
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i can't sleep and all i'm thinking about is how percy and clarisse are best friends but best friends in the most sibling "i hate you more than anything but if anyone so much as looks at you wrong i will kill them in a heartbeat" way
like their quest together where they saw each other's biggest fear, percy overhearing clarisse's conversation with ares, clarisse pleading with percy to understand that silena was a hero????
you cannot tell me that sally jackson didn't take one look at clarisse and not completely want to engulf this broken, hardened teenage girl in the warmest hug possible.
just percy and clarisse being best friends and no one knows the specifics, no one except for annabeth and chris knows exactly what went down.
and god forbid these two have a normal friendship, they will bicker and snap and say the harshest things, but they can also have entire conversations with their eyes and know exactly when the other is being triggered into a bad memory and needs to spar or talk.
like yes they're each other's rival but they're also each other's support system. they're best friends, they're siblings, they're enemies to friends to "i hope you get eaten by a hellhound but if that happened i'd go down to the underworld to get you back because i platonically can't live without you".
these two are trauma bonded to the max and i'm begging people to start talking about their friendship more
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