catboy kevin. thoughts?

hello neil i am your mentor kevin come here lets train together i am your normal coach kevin come here practice with mBITES YOU BITES YOU BITES YOU BITES YOU BITES YOU PUFFED TAIL A MILLION CAT SCRATCHES ON YOUR ARMS WHY DID YOU FUMBLE THAT PASS i love catkevin!!!!! hes my favorite!!!!!!! ive done some art for it a few months ago :3

never not thinking about how kevin day is david wymack's son

imagine you're kevin, practically born with a raquet in your hand, you grow up with your mother for a while and maybe you ask about your father and she tells you not to worry about it, or maybe you just never ask because she doesn't mention it and you don't know how important it is, yet. then she dies, you're moved to evermore, it's so different from what you've seen previously but you have no choice so you just bow your head and do your best to survive, clinging onto your mother's sport, clinging onto the idea that you'll become a star.

you're there for so long you eventually forget you've ever been outside of it, but you see how desperate riko is for his father's attention so you start wondering, however briefly, about the concept of a father.

then you're in high school, you find the letter and suddenly it's not just a vague concept you have to wonder about, suddenly it's something real and tangible. you've heard of david wymack, it would've been impossible not to since he was a friend of your mother's and considering the kind of team he's taken up to creating, maybe you've even met him extremely briefly at some point. you know enough about the industry to think his team isn't just a publicity stunt, and somehow you know that if he finds out he'll do everything in his power to get you out.

you're not stupid enough to tell riko this, but you do tell jean and he laughs at you. of course he does. but you've been there for too long, you've seen too much, and you're old enough to understand what the master would do if he deemed david wymack to be a threat. you can't leave riko's side therefore you can't tell him any time soon, possibly ever, so you resolve to reading the letter over and over instead. (riko reads it almost as often as you)

then you're 19 and the erc thinks riko is holding you back. you're 19 and you're watching riko stomp on everything you've built up through the years. you're 19 and the letter is the only reason you have the strength to leave.

you tell wymack and the team as much as you dare because they deserve to know the risks of having you here, and wymack takes it in stride, he puts himself and his team at risk and even takes out loans to keep you here, like you knew he would. he signs you and he deserves to know about the letter, the more time passes the worse it'll be when you do tell him, but you can't yet because it's too soon and you don't trust yourself to tell riko no when the time comes.

then neil is asking for your help

now imagine you're wymack. your childhood was shit and you didn't have the support you needed at the time, but you believe you can be better than the hands that shaped you. kayleigh taught you everything you know about exy, and you loved her so it stung when she died and you couldn't be there for her only son. but, no matter what you might think of tetsuji moriyama, you don't think kayleigh would send her son to an unsafe place. you just go on with your days, maybe tune in on the news to see that kevin's doing well. you have no reason to think otherwise.

when you have the opportunity to start an exy team from scratch, you dedicate it to the kids that need another chance, the kids the world has given up on. you'll never give up on them.

then, what feels like a lifetime later, kevin day is standing in front of your hotel room and asking you for help. he's saying his 'beloved brother' broke his hand, he's saying the moriyamas are part of the yakuza, he's saying they'll kill him if they find him. throughout the year you get to know him better, you see that he's grown up to be a caged and abused wreck, you see he was raised to care about nothing but exy, you see him having a panic attack at the mere mention of having to face his former team, you see him drinking himself to oblivion to cope. you can't undo the past so you do your best to support him now, but damn if you don't wish you could've been there for him.

then he's telling you he's your son

as shifty as they were when they were younger, at the actual age that andreil are at do you think they've got the potential to be friendly strangers? like not overly friendly but the kind of people who understand what being human is

think about it, the experience of living a sheltered life and neil is standing behind someone in the grocery line, watching them unable to scour up money for ramen and water so he pays for it to help things along

andrew watching a little kid peer into his mega expensive car of the year and the kid gets scared of him and moves aside but andrew opens the door moves back, tells the kid he can have a look its fine

do you think they would interfere by force if they ever saw something bad happening in front of them? neil on his runs stopping to help someone cross the road, feeding stray cats in alleyways, yk the people who know what struggle is and don't want it for anyone else?

idk if they're the type to shrug off injustice so easily, i feel like whatever they learnt as children is buried deep inside the caution and fear of strangers and all but maybe what wymack taught them would rise to the surface too cuz if wymack hadn't chosen to help them they wouldn't be alive either

i think they should all kiss each other and be happy

it is completely one hundred percent baffling to me that any of the foxes would come away from witnessing neil and andrew's reunion in baltimore with the opinion that their relationship was just hate fucking . like my brother in christ are you blind

Thinking about kevin being the platonic third person in the relationship of not just andreil but also jerejean like andrew ships kevin off to usc when he wants just one fckn weekend off the court and kevin has the time of his life there with jerejean and they go on little ice cream dates and they teach jeremy french. Kevin and jean learn to love each other for real and not just in desperation to survive and they all laugh and go over precision drills that jeremy passes along to his team and then when andreil pick kevin up on sunday night and he's all like that was fun now exy and neil is practically vibrating with excitement but andrew just rolls his eyes and indulges them both anyways but the main point of all this the only thing im saying is they all love kevin so much bc its what he deserves

We learn more from Jean's pov than Neil's about what Riko did to him at Evermore. Neil prioritizes everyone else's pain over his own to the point of walking into the ravens den for Andrew, and feeling guilty for leaving Jean there

aftg is wild because kevin says "give your game to me." and "close your eyes and tell me what you see" and neil just says "you." and andrew has to watch the whole thing. and then andrew is the one he falls for.

Neil sounds like the bad boy mafia gang leader dark werewolf vampire billionaire that Y/N (Andrew) somehow manages to tame (enables his dark side)

My other fav queen wip

#6.

by the way the day riko broke kevin’s hand was not the first time he ever hurt kevin and at this point if you believe this you’re just plain stupid. not after jean calls kevin riko’s punching bag and says a year in kevin’s shoes made him the target of a thousand subtler cruelties, not after the ec confirms kevin’s first time as a 15 y/o was not consensual either, not after we are constantly told from two different povs that riko was kevin’s worst abuser and ‘what neil’s father was to neil (to kevin)’. i do not use this word lightly but if this is seriously what you got from tsc perhaps you are just dumb 👍

I HAVE A THOUGHT.

okay so maybe kevin caught onto jean having feelings for SOMEONE but didn't know it was him.

and Jean, trying to keep kevins attention (as one does when they have a crush on an older person they sort of idolise) tells him it's a freshman trojan right

and Kevin, both out of curiosity and Teenage Boy Bullying (affectionate) makes jean watch a match with him, and keeps pointing towards freshmen on the trojan line up, and he gets to jeremy (Jean doesn't even know his name at this point)

and Jean agrees. yeah. that's who he has a crush on. not because Jeremy is particularly attractive to him (at the time at least) but because he's the exact opposite if kevin, and kevin wouldn't ever suspect it MIGHT be him if jeans got a thing for blonds who don't know how to wipe the smile off their face

cut to 3.5 years later and jeans FURIOUS with himself because not only is he not a raven, but he accidentally predicted his own crush on this stupid blond with a cardboard dog who is just as bad at talking about his issues as jean

and Kevin already knows.

jean should collect homoerotic codependent partners professionally

But what if Riko did kill Matt?

Imagine the angst?? Dan hating Neil, Allison (again) hating Neil, SETH hating Neil, Neil hating Neil.

Would Neil stay if he knew that Matt, the person he could genuinely rely on, was killed because of him?

Srry but Neil is always so unserious and is always so sassy