the sunshine court

in chapter 11 of the raven king (thanksgiving), neil says, ‘kevin was staring at andrew like he’d seen a ghost’. i’ve always kind of wondered what that meant, but now with the added perspective of tsc, and all the parallels between andrew & jean … maybe the ‘ghost’ kevin’s seeing here is jean’s. and the implications of that- jean says in tsc that ‘even kevin didn’t know the full story, only the jagged half-lie riko fed him’, so jean doesn’t think kevin knows the truth about the ‘rumors’. but what if he does? what if when kevin heard andrew say ‘don’t ask what’ and ‘you know better’, he finally realized: riko lied. and kevin should have known better than to believe him.

I genuinely think that Baltimore was the catalyst of Neil and Andrew relationship and if it hadn't happened Andrew would have kept gaslighting himself until Neil pushed for an acknowledgment that this was something more, giving Andrew an excuse to deny his feelings. But Baltimore did happen and Andrew was forced to realize that living without Neil would be worse than the alternative so instead of letting it crash and burn he reconciled with this fact and tried one last time to give himself over to another person, trusting they wouldn't stab him in the back this time. He let Neil in. And I think that just may be one of the bravest things we see a character do in the whole series

like every aftg stan, tsc destroyed me and i can't stop thinking about it but there's definitely one thing that makes go feral and it's when riko is about to hurt Neil and Jean grabs the tv as if he can take Neil out of riko's reach and then begs for Andrew to run to save him... like???? The way neil-kevin-jean protect each other??? The way all of them suffered in a different way but somehow understand each other so well???

Too bad Andrew wasn’t there to see Neil make the fbi wait for him to finish his little drinky drink. He would’ve loved that shit