Jacob and Nolan learning to do Black hairstyles so they can help Cat with her hair
Them all sitting on the couch putting in braids while a movie plays in the background or something. And Cat used to have Society stylists to do her hair perfectly for each mission, and Jacob and Nolan are clumsy and leave loose spots or yank too tight or make them uneven. But Cat never wears her hair as proudly as when her family team does it for her, because there's so much love in it.
And when Soldier shows up, never having been allowed to do anything with his hair except buzz it short (because weapons don't deserve to have long/nice hair), he's got a whole group of people who are more that willing to help him do something with a little personality for the first time in his life.
Jacob and Cat are one of my best OC platonic m/f pairings of all time.
Like when Cat first stumbles bleeding into Jacob's dad's church, Jacob's hot off a breakup and of course he sees pretty girl and thinks "ah yes potential rebound relationship"
But also he kinda dislikes her because great, another "project" for his dad to try to save, and another thing that's distracting his dad from paying any attention to him.
He kinda tries to flirt with her at first. But then within just a few weeks they're jabbing at each other like siblings and bickering and eating each other's cereal and she's dragging him home from doing stupid reckless things and he's jumping in to save her on her attempts to take down the Society and suddenly
And Cat tries one time to seduce him because she's used to that being her role back in the Society, that her job is to make people happy and give them what they want, and she knows Jacob was interested in her at some point, right? But Jacob immediately pushes her back like "ew no this is wrong on so many levels go put your sweatshirt back on you looked so much more comfortable in that" and it sparks a realization in both of them of what their relationship is meant to be
And from then on it's pure sibling shenanigans. They fight with each other and play video games and Cat steals all Jacob's clothes until Jacob finally takes her shopping (complaining about it the whole time) and he's her getaway driver and confidant and she's the one who helps him figure out how to talk to his dad.
Jacob, the black sheep of his family and the one who doesn't believe, is the one who ends up leading her to Christ, and then Cat returns the favor by being someone so genuinely invested in the Truth that it draws him back to faith.
I love good characters who still have really bad flaws and mentalities. Thinking about all of Cat's Angels and how they treat Soldier when he joins them.
Cat cares about him so so much. She wants to humanize him, to help him recover from everything they put him through, to deprogram him. She helps him discover his own personality and learn to do things for himself, not just under orders. But she also is a blatant pacifist, because after her own escape from the Society she realized that the way they devalue human life is really messed up. The problem is Soldier was trained to be a killer, to fight on instinct and nit let anything stand in the way. And Cat forgives him for what he had to do in the past, but she can't live with herself if anyone else dies. And that means that even when everything in Soldier wants to kill Caeyrn or Shaw, the people responsible for his lifetime of torture, Cat has to put her foot down, and after all the talk of "You're not a tool, you make your own choices," she still has to give him the order to stop. And it kills her, but she will still give the order every time.
Jacob likes Soldier, but Soldier also makes him feel inadequate. Because Soldier somehow has managed to lock on to the fact that Jacob is the only one here without any training, and that makes it his job to train Jacob. To toughen him up. And Jacob hates that. And when he feels inadequate, he fights back. He yells, he swears, he insults, and he fights. And it's a toss-up whether Soldier will fight back, or just take it like every other discipline he's been given.
Nolan... oh Nolan. He tries so hard to change, to be better than the version of himself that would've hurt the people who care about him just for his own gain. And most of the time he is. But sometimes... how easily he falls into Carewhumper territory. Yes, everything that Caeyrn did to Soldier was awful; but since they can't change the past, and now the most powerful person on Earth just showed up on their doorstep, why shouldn't they utilize him? Why shouldn't they use Soldier to take down the Society once and for all? What's the big deal with giving him an order every now and then? Having someone who will do anything at your immediate command does feel pretty nice. But there's also the other side of him, the side that twice chose saving his own skin over protecting his team, the side that warns, "if Soldier is really capable of all these powerful things, who's to say he's safe to be around? Can a weapon ever truly be trusted?" And that side of him prepares contingencies, creates devices he can use to disable Soldier, just in case.
