#anyway enjoy the snip it's a thing i've been thinking about for months but never actually wrote down

[sharkneto]

What would be Number’s reaction to learning Reginald is an alien?

You know, I've thought a bit about what he'd think about learning he's not totally human, but I hadn't thought about the Reggie angle.

I think it's a bit of information he legitimately wouldn't know what to do with. Like, as Klaus would point out, it makes perfect sense - how could a man like that be anything but inhuman? But Five has such a specific and complicated relationship with Reggie - he's both huge and tiny in his mind. This figure that's defined so much of his childhood and shaped who he is, that he's set himself in opposition to. It's important to him and his identity that he's classified Reggie as "just a man" and a shitty father. Now you introduce that part of why he's been so uncaring and pragmatic and cold is because he legitimately isn't human? Sure, they joked about it as kids, but this still comes from fucking left field. How the fuck do you react when your father figure and abuser turns out to be a goddamn alien? It's a messy, messy thing he'd have to process -- or not process. I think it's a thing he'd say "doesn't matter" if any of the siblings asked him - he was still shit, wasn't he? He doesn't get a pass just because he's an alien - while he spirals a little bit trying to figure out what that means for what his relationship with him is/was.

Anyway, bonus snip of the angle I've thought about this from in regards to Five finding out he's not exactly fully human himself, featuring some creative liberties with how genetics works.

Amanda looks up from her laptop with a frown as McKenzie plops into the seat next to her with a noisy sigh. The Union bustles around them, the other students oblivious to ‘Kenzie’s apparent bad mood. “You good?” she asks, turning back to her paper that refuses to write itself.

“My experiment didn’t work.”

She looks up again, eyes widening in sympathy. “The big genetics one? The one worth half your grade?”

“That would be the one!” McKenzie says, slouching in her chair and letting her head fall back dramatically.

“Oh my god, what are you going to do—”

“I mean, it mostly worked. I had enough data to do it all and present but one sample was totally fucked and my TA couldn’t figure out what was wrong so my statistical accuracy was—”

Amanda smacks her arm. “I thought you fucking failed!”

McKenzie rolls her eyes. “Who do you think I am? I got extra samples just in case one got fucked so I wouldn’t be fucked. And I’m choosing to believe it was one you got for me from someone at the physics lab. I know I swabbed right, I got good cells.”

The crisis not the crisis Amanda thought it was, she relaxes. “Maybe you fucked your reagents,” she defends, although she’s not a biologist and it is entirely possible her favor for her friend is what messed up the experiment. Cells are tiny and alive and so outside of her interests, she doesn’t know what they need to be happy or whatever. She jammed swabs into the boys’ cheeks at the lab, shoved those into the tubes ‘Kenzie gave her, and then delivered them.

“I did the same thing for each sample, boom, boom, boom, assembly line style. If I fucked that part they’d all be fucked and I would have actually failed.”

She shrugs. “Well, sounds like we’re going out tonight either way, celebrating the end of that project from hell.”

Her friend straightens with a coy grin. “You know me so well. Juan’s has fishbowls tonight.”

“I cannot do fishbowls again, I almost died the last time we went there. If I even think about that shitty margarita I’m going to hurl…”

It’s not until Amanda has returned to her paper (that still tragically hasn’t written itself) and McKenzie has left to find a snack to munch on around distracting her that she realizes there might actually be a further implication to McKenzie’s failed experiment sample.

She sampled the boys at the lab.

Which included a certain person who can do the fucking impossible and teleport.

“Paper so boring it melted your brain?” McKenzie asks as she returns and breaks Amanda from her thoughts. She drops a basket of fries between them.

“How was your sample fucked?” Amanda asks.

She frowns. “Since when do you care about bio? It’s not theoretical, so you don’t care.”

“Maybe I want to defend my honor as a sample-taker.”

McKenzie acquiesces with a shrug. “It didn’t amplify right. All the others had bands in the right spot in the gel, which makes sense because every human on Earth has the gene, but this one’s band was like six hundred base pairs bigger. The primer was scuffed for the PCR or the sample was degraded or some shit so it went weird.” She pauses. “Although then it should have been nothing or smaller, not larger, if it was falling apart…”

“What’s the gene responsible for?”

Her friend raises an eyebrow at her, a fry paused in the air on its way into her mouth. “Who are you, caring about genetics? You usually glaze over when I’m talking about this stuff, like how I nod along and think about Love Island when you and Taylor get into physics crap.”

Amanda shrugs, hoping it’s nonchalant enough. “Your experiments usually work, I’m curious.”

McKenzie sighs. “Whatever, I never get to talk about this shit, and it’s really cool. It codes for proteins involved in cell maintenance and DNA repair. So if it wasn’t user error on the sample, which it had to be because it’s a super conserved mechanism across the animal kingdom for how we’re all still up and multicellular, they’re either in big trouble and going to die soon or they’re a freak of nature and probably should get studied for cancer implications or something. A clump that big, if it’s actually functional, means they’re probably either making really shit copies of the proteins or they’re making a shitton for some insane cell maintenance.”

“What would they need all that maintenance for?”

“The point of it is to not get cancer, right? If you’re keeping all your genes in order to copy right, then you have happy healthy cells that aren’t mutating and dying to save you from how shit they are or mutating and not dying and they’re multiplying like crazy to give you a lovely tumor. I guess having an overactive system like that would be great if your constantly stressing your cells out? But if it was doing it like that like this sample implicates, you’d have to be inhuman. A real freak to have a functional gene like that.”

Like if you were ripping through space on a regular basis. That seems like it would stress the cells out. “Can I see a copy of it?”

“For real? Yeah, here, I’ll send it to you…” McKenzie shoves the fries aside to pull her laptop out. “I should have fucked my experiments earlier if it made you actually interested in genetics…”

The email appears in Amanda’s inbox a couple minutes later, after McKenzie has pointed on her screen why the image is weird and comparing it to the regular samples.

Amanda has one last question: “Did anyone else keep this?”

“Did anyone keep my fuck up? No, Amanda, you’re so weird. And I’m not either, I don’t need a bad sample taking up room on my hard drive. Project is turned in, it’s flagged as an outlier in my results, and I’m sure my TA isn’t going to hang onto it. Why would he?"

Good.

Amanda isn’t really sure what to do with this info that she is pretty sure proves Five isn’t totally human. Or at least has some weird shit going on, which makes sense when he can do what he can do.

She decides it needs to be in his court. McKenzie hadn’t thought anything of the results, and – to be fair – they could really be from an experimental error. But the fact that Five was in the sample group and that, for all her distractions and partying, McKenzie is usually meticulous when it came to her lab work makes Amanda think it’s unlikely just that.

So, she prints out the results, shoves them in a manila folder, and then deletes the email and files.

She catches Five at work the next morning. “Hey! Number!”

He pauses in his math to glance over his shoulder and nod a greeting before turning back to his whiteboard.

“Can we talk for second?” she asks as she dumps her bag in her cubicle, digging the results packet out.

“Shoot.”

“Over here.” She jerks her head to the conference room.

He frowns but follows. “Everything good?” he asks when she closes the door behind them.

“Yeah,” she says. She thrusts the manila envelope forward.

He cautiously takes it but doesn’t open it. “What is this?”

“You remember McKenzie’s big project for her genetics class?”

“Sure, when you shoved q-tips down our throats.”

“Swabbed your cheeks. Yeah, that one. Um. You had weird results, and I thought…” Amanda trails off as Five just stares at her. His expression is unreadable.

“I thought it was anonymous.”

“Yeah, it was. Like, she knows who she got samples from, but the samples themselves weren’t labeled. But…”

“But?”

“She had one sample that was wonky. I don’t totally understand it, and she and the TA assume she messed up the reagents on it, so they don’t think anything of it, but…”

“But?”

“I sampled you and you’re, um. You. With the Jesus birth and everything.”

Five’s expression doesn’t change. He glances down at the envelope in his hands. “You think the weird results are me because of my powers.”

“Yeah.” She shifts slightly.

“And you printed them out and gave them to me in a dramatic envelope because…?”

“I didn’t know what else to do. Felt like if it was something explaining how you’re… different, it should be yours. I deleted the files and I think McKenzie will, too, once her grade is finalized. That should be the only copy.”

He nods and turns the envelope over in his hands. He still hasn’t opened it.

“So, um. Yeah,” Amanda says as the silence stretches.

“This is the one copy?” he confirms.

She nods.

“Cool. Thanks.” He straightens and walks past her, dropping the packet in the garbage as he exits the conference room. He doesn’t look back.

Amanda looks after him as the door hangs open. She follows him a minute later, almost running into Sarah as she’s unlocking her office.

The envelope stays in the garbage, unopened and to be forgotten.

Maybe that’s for the best, Amanda decides.

#number's relationship with reggie is so specific and complicated #anything that shifts it - shifts that dynamic - is huge for five #and learning reggie is an alien is such a fundamental *shift* in how he has to think about his dad #it's an angle that could be used to let him off the hook - which luther would do depending on where he's at in his journey #but five absolutely would refuse to do that #alien or not he still put them all through that shit #but it makes it so much messier and five's usual tactic when things get emotionally messy like that is to pretend to ignore it #while silently obsessing over it by himself #rob would have some work to do there #anyway enjoy the snip it's a thing i've been thinking about for months but never actually wrote down #snips #jt #number #amanda