Every once in a while I think abt the fact that Jeb has all these memories of like teaching angel to tie her shoes and making her food and just taking care of her but angels most vivid memories of Jeb are of moments she's been traumatized and I wanna cry so hard I throw up. BTW do you think Jeb ever took a turn caring for Baby Angel and put her in a travel crib w baby ari or smth
oh my god i typed like 6 paragraphs in response to this and then i answered a phone call and it all got deleted. round two i guess
i think jeb and angel’s pictures of each other inside their own heads are very disparate. to jeb, angel is sort of like a scientific foster kid. not his kid, but a kid he looked after that his kid cared about.
jeb to his core is a dad type guy. he’s good with kids, he cares about people, he’s nurturing, he likes to connect with others. a majority of the time he’s too busy being evil to actually appear to be those things but underneath all the layers of shit, jeb is a dad. he’s a dadguy. so he cares about angel like that. like your friend’s dad who always remembers to make gluten free pasta when you come over because you told him once regular pasta upsets your stomach
not in his right mind (are you bringing up psychosis AGAIN? yes i am) he sees angel as a tool on the apocalypse chessboard just like max. her mind reading ability is really special. she is on his radar, which is more than you can say for most people when he is so single minded and sick. she’s a tool. not a child.
for angel, i think she mostly just saw jeb as an abusive monster. as this scary concept. as the idea of a hurtful caretaker. without really remembering him that well at all. and then in the middle books like around fang i think it gets flipped on its head.
because of angel’s mind reading and her weird dedication to growing up too fast i think she goes through that experience a lot of people have in their 20s where they look at their parent and go “oh jesus. you’re like a pathetic dumb little kid in an adult’s body who only hurt me so badly because you’re scared and stupid and cruel and small” — a lot of that fear and hate just turns into pity.
i think seeing into stable jeb’s head just makes her pity him. what a sad horrible lost creature, thinking he’s human when he’s even less so than herself. she doesn’t really like to be around him. and she doesn’t think he knows well enough to be in charge. at all. we see that in book six.
jeb cares about angel like the school librarian might care about the kid always sitting alone in the corner. angel thinks jeb is pathetic and someone should just kill him already so he doesn’t get twisted up and start hurting them again
also yes angel and ari being looked after together is very cute
