Spoiler:

Camp had always been one of Anthony’s favorite things about summers. He came from a pretty weird family so getting away was always a nice surprise. His parents were fine and all, but becoming an only child had meant endless summers filled with books and boredom. That was at least until he had managed to convince them to let him go to a very secure, very safe summer camp, just for a week or two, just so they could all take a fucking breather. He had gone back every year after that. Camp was nice and familiar and a space that was unlike everything else he had ever known. It was fun, and it seemed almost unreal. It left him pretty nostalgic, after, but he was always so happy to go back it made it all worth it. Plus the regulars, the people he saw every year were really cool, they had become his friends even though they never saw one another during the year.

He fucking loved camp. He loved camp so much that no one ever questioned the fact that he would become a counselor. See, campers were divided into age groups, all from 9 to 16 and then you could be a junior camp counselor until you were 18, at which point you were a real camp counselor.
They were a couple of weeks into the season. The first groups had come and left, leaving more space for the fourteen year old that followed. Anthony liked the older kids the best, even though they were harder to keep in check and a lot more curious than the younger ones. Anthony could still remember waking up in the middle of the night the previous year to check that Lucius was in his cabin and not Narcissa’s. Fucking kids. Lucius was an asshole, always trying to sneak up on them, never happy about not being on the same team as Narcissa and always trying to tell him he was just jealous. Which was absolutely untrue.

Okay maybe a little. Maybe he too had daydreamed about a summer camp romance that never happened, and maybe he had a couple of crushes that were very much unrequited, and maybe one of his crushes was now also a counselor but that was way besides the point.

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They were going out on the river on that day and Anthony was a little nervous. First of all because controlling a canoe/kayak/whatever was harder than it looked but mostly because he and Misha were to share a boat and that meant spending time in close proximity and that was just a tiny bit nerve wracking. “Is this a canoe or a kayak again?” he asked in the general direction of his colleague. They had told him a bunch of times but he always forgot somehow. They had to settle the kids, two per boat. They were all carefully selected of course. They both supervised a different cabin, so they had to select one of their kids to mix with the other’s, for cooperation and all that. Anthony always tried to pair certain kids together, the ones that had the vibe, except for Lucius and Narcissa, because they were both jerks but so was he.

“Ready?” he asked after they had sent every pair out in the wild. His life jacket was secure, Misha was good at rowing. They would be fine. Just fine.