Nico hugged him back, though not quite a firmly due to the awkward edges of his shell. Soap bubble memories rose and burst around them -- Nico, still wearing her glasses, posing in front of a floor-length mirror with a thoughtful expression as she examined the T-shirt she'd modified into a hooded tank top. She pulled the hood up over her shoulder-length hair and smiled.

Nico, a little older, dropping the Staff of One to throw her arms around a glowing girl in a torn but still beautiful black and gold dress. The girl flung her arms around Nico in turn, pulling her close.

Nico in her awkward early teens presenting a chubby dark-haired girl with a hand-sewn purple scarf. The girl jumped up and ran to the mirror to wrap the scarf around her neck and turned back to Nico, beaming.

Nico, still awkward, riding the escalator and the mall up and down and up and down as long as she wanted, because she was old enough to go to the mall on her own and that meant no one was there to tell her to stop riding the escalator and get a move on.

Nico, barely school-aged, carefully filling a plastic bucket with beach sand and carrying it back to a group of other children and tipping it over to build another turret on their sand castle.