Curate, connect, and discover
Am I the only one that thinks Riko might have turned out to be a bit of a better person of Nathaniel was put in the nest? Like Ik he never had the option to be a good person *grooming* but I feel like he would have seen and heard enough about neils/nathans relationship, which would be his closest connection to the main branch Kengo/Ichirou, and just seen it for what it was and not try so hard to seen above everyone to earn their validation.....just a thought.
one thing that will always fuck me up is the thought of neil and jean being ravens together. of the brief time neil experiences in the nest, where the two universes intersect, neil the raven and neil the runaway, and understands what his life would've been if his mother hadn't ran away with him but also understands what jean had been living through all this time. jean being angry at neil for getting caught but also mitigating that anger by daring to hope, to wonder what if he stays? what if jean finally has his permanent partner? and it's a foolish hope of course because neil doesn't stay, but he makes sure that renee gets jean's number and when jean needs her the most she shows up, one single girl against the mafia, and takes him out of the nest. and neil makes a deal for him so jean can keep on living, he makes sure, in his blunt way because neil is not a soft person, that jean fully understands that riko is dead, that neil saw him being killed with his own eyes. and he shows up at jean's new house and acts like a little shit with the fbi when he notices jean feels off and needs some time to recover. he kills his abuser. he tells jean he is worth saving. they are not friends, but they are still connected in a way. neil isn't jean's partner in suffering, but he's there to try to make that suffering more bearable.
in an universe where neil ended up being a raven, i wonder if after escaping the nest he and jean could ever remain close, or they would be doomed to the same fate as kevjean, to love and care so much about each other but to have a history so complex and horrifying that they can't ever actually be friends anymore
Nora saying that Riko burned the number seven onto Andrew in a universe where Andrew becomes a Raven haunts me. What does it mean? Was it as a punishment for Riko catching Andrew smoking cigarettes? Was it just because of Andrew generally not cooperating? Where did he burn the number onto him? Because there is no way it could’ve been on the cheek where the perfect court tattoos are because that would a thousand percent cause an investigation into the Ravens. He must’ve burned it onto Andrew somewhere that was hidden by their gear. Maybe his back? Or possibly onto his wrists on top of his past self-harm scars? And don’t even get me started on the parallels between this and Neil being burned by a dashboard lighter by Lola and his dad’s men in the book.
Let’s talk about the fact that Nora said that in Neil and Jean are forever partners and would end up together and any other life, but then also said that Jean died in every draft other than the one we got. Is this insinuating that if Neil and Jean ever did get together, it wouldn’t last and that Jean would die, leaving Neil alone?