Hey! Itsa me, Volt anon. My Ao3 account is all set up, but I didn’t post anything yet. I’m feelin pretty good today, though, and I wanted to throw just one more HGAU headcanon your way before I finish up the fic I’m gonna post tomorrow. I hope to see you there!
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Volt is more of a cat person and tries to avoid Sacha when he first arrives at the Gehabich household. He’s pretty stressed out by all of the stuff that’s happened to him and Lync, and copes mainly by doing chores around the house. On the one hand, Alice is relieved that she does not have to clean up after everyone by herself, but on the other hand he sometimes runs out of stuff to do and starts detailing. He pushes couches around to sweep under them (Sacha gets nervous when the furniture is rearranged), mops the kitchen floor twice and applies granite polish to all the counters (lunch gets a bit delayed so it can dry), and accidentally mixes up the medicine and spice cabinets in an attempt to organize all of the bottles and containers by size and shape (they still have no idea where he hid all of that paprika, they had to buy more on an emergency grocery trip while he and Dr. Michael re-sorted the cabinets).
One day, sensing that Volt might try and stick some dry-clean only linens in the washing machine if he doesn’t clean up something, Alice gives him a shovel and some thick jackets and tells him to shovel snow off the driveway. He does. He also shovels the lawn, and the backyard, and the road, the neighbors driveway and lawn, he basically shovels snow the whole day without eating and falls asleep in a snowbank. That night, he wakes up in the local clinic with pneumonia.
The entire Gehabich household comes to his room so they can yell at him. Sacha is the only calm one, which leaves Alice and Dr. Michael to do most of the sensible scolding, ‘What were you thinking’ ‘You could killed yourself’ ‘Don’t do anything like that ever again’ and at first Lync is yelling the same things at him too. Then he loses his composure and hugs his big brother while crying and the scolding turns into ‘please don’t do that again’. Hydron hangs back to pseudo-calmly explain to the nurse that Volt knows nothing about snow and didn’t realize how close he was to giving himself frostbite. The nurse comments on how much he is shivering and his ultra-dilated pupils, and Hydron all but kicks him out.
They are sent home with a prescription for medicine that they can’t use on a Vestal, and an infinitely more helpful lecture on the medical hazards of being exposed to sub-zero temperatures for too long. Volt is couchbound for a week after that, and it’s hard for him to breathe for nearly a month after, and it is very hard for Alice to keep the house from falling apart without his help. Sacha stays by his side every night he’s bedridden. If it weren’t for her, he might have come out of the whole ordeal much worse for wear, which he gives her credit for.
It’s either during or soon after this time that Volt gets really comfortable around Sacha. Volt tries to be a little (a lot) more careful about dealing with earth stuff. Alice tells him to take it easy more often, Lync spends more time with him, just talking and hanging out. Hydron tries to help Volt through what Hydron believes is the same depression that he went through, remembering how Alice helped him. He’s a little off the mark sometimes, but his intentions are good. They’re both a little sick right now, but they’re here to heal, and heal they will.
(Hope you don’t mind that I broke up the word wall into paragraphs!)
I’m really excited to see your AO3!! Please send me a link asap!!
And oh my god I love this headcanon so much?! It’s also kind of impressive that Volt shoveled the neighbor’s drive too since the Gehabichs seem to live far away from other people (the Russian countryside, I suppose).
Hydron would be aware that what’s going on with Volt is nowhere near as extreme as the depression he had when he first arrived on earth (considering that he was blatantly suicidal for a month or two), but he would probably think it was similar to some of his darker times (which isn’t too off the mark).