#with JT as the current priority when i've got brain and time to Write Specific Project

[sharkneto]

5 Rob 1234... These exist?!? How MUCH do they exist??? What are the odds that we will eventually see them someday?

(for WIP ask game)

I've shared a few snips of them before (found HERE), and god... hopefully? I've got so many goddamn WIPs and so much less time to write than I used to during covid times, I can't promise anything and especially can't promise anything being soon.

It's a concept I love a lot - I love Five and Rob's relationship, I love Rob constantly tricking Five into cooperating with therapy until he starts doing it willingly on his own. I like the idea of Five trying to keep everything tight to his chest and aggressively keeping it there until Rob can get him to understand that he doesn't have to do that, that he doesn't have to live like that.

But it's a rarely worked on WIP (partly hence why there's multiple files of different Rob and Five conversations rather than One Set WIP), around JT and the apocalypse fic and Number vs Apocalypse Week fic and random odds and ends I play around with.

So, would I like to share it? Absolutely. Will it be any time soon? Absolutely not.

Long snip for your time, though. This is 5 Rob 3

(cw: some discussion of the implications of Five's physical vs actual age in terms of his brain and cognition, mostly from the angle of Rob being excited about brains and Five unimpressed by it)

“What are you thinking about?” Five asks after Rob doesn’t start off their session in the first minute of their meeting starting.

Rob keeps considering Five through the screen. “Your brain.”

Five blinks. “You do that to everyone?”

“More or less. When they’re my patients, definitely. And if there might be something interesting going on. Yours definitely has a lot going on.”

“Thank you?”

“You’re welcome.”

The sit and stare at each other through the screen some more. Five leans back in his seat, eyes narrowed slightly. “If I ask for specifics for what you’re thinking about in regards to my brain, will it be a long winded way of talking about something I don’t want to talk about or is this genuinely a tangent about my brain?”

Rob hums. “If I’m clever enough maybe I can loop it back to your problems but currently I’m just thinking about your brain.”

“This a hobby of yours?”

“A little bit, I guess,” he says with a laugh. “Also my job, but it is why I went psychiatrist route instead of psychologist route. If you go to medical school they let you look at more brain scans.”

“I’m sure that’s super normal,” Five deadpans.

“How would you know, with your fifty-eight-year-old consciousness in a thirteen-year-old brain?”

Five crosses his arms. “It’s almost fourteen,” he defends.

Rob thinks about that for a second. They’ve sort of talked around this before, and maybe with the birthdate coming up they should talk about it some more. He’ll poke. “Aren’t we technically still six months or so away from your physical birthday?”

That gets an exasperated huff from Five. “October 1, 1989 is my actual birthdate and I’m keeping that, it’s a constant that’s never going to change short of me fucking up so badly I’m not born, in which case I’ve got bigger problems – although not ones I’ll care about because I won’t exist.” Rob keeps a straight face. He actually loves it when Five gets on these little time-travel-insane-consequence rambles. Feels like a sci-fi movie and Sarah can’t poke holes in it like she does when they watch time-travel movies. Five also really likes to get on these tangents, so they’re really good for getting him talking on days he doesn’t want to talk – not that seems to be a problem today.

Five pauses but Rob waits. He’s not done. The pause stretches for a couple seconds before Five huffs again. “I’m not moving my birthday because I arbitrarily and accidentally changed my linear position in time. October first isn’t my actual birthday anymore, either, but the amount of effort to figure out the new date is completely not worth the effort. I could do the much easier-to-calculate physical birthday in February—” he cuts himself off with a suddenly blank expression.

Rob frowns. “Five?”

“The day’s not February tenth anymore,” he says, brow lightly furrowed.

“Why not?”

He blinks again, obviously doing math. Rob doesn’t know what it is about Five’s expression that tells him that he’s doing math, but there’s a specific sort of blankness he gets when he’s running numbers. “February tenth was my physical birthday in the apocalypse,” Five says slowly, still a bit distant. Rob subtly slides his notebook over and grabs a pen, even though Five can’t see it with how Rob has his camera angled. “It was February tenth. Now, though, assuming this body is the body I originally jumped from 2002 in…. oh, it’s still just February second. That was dumb.”

“Did you want it to be more different?”

Five shakes his head, a small frown on his lips. “No. I don’t know why I thought that was going to be a significantly different date. April 2, 2019 versus March 24, 2019 are only a week apart. I could have done that math much smarter. Christ, I’m getting stupid in my old age.”

Rob smiles. They’ve looped back to what he’d originally been thinking about. “Or your brain is thirteen. And a half,” he adds when Five gives him a flat look.

“What does my brain’s age have to do with anything?”

“A lot, actually. Maybe. What do you know about brain development?”

Five stares at him for a long moment. “Nothing.”

“Ah, lucky for us I know a lot about it. The cliff notes version of it is that there are set developmental phases for brains from ages zero to around twenty-five. Twenty-five is when science and medicine generally agree that everything is up and functioning, it hangs out there for a few years before it starts going in the other direction. Before that point, it’s building up pieces and pruning connections that allow for better logic and more complex thinking.”

“You’re saying I’m half developed. And you’re declining,” Five says dryly.

Rob shakes his head, ignoring the easy insult. “No. Maybe. See, you’re a really interesting case of the physical versus consciousness. A really fascinating case study that could be a missing key in understanding where what makes us us sits. You, yourself, are fifty-eight, assuming you haven’t been messing with me and your whole family this entire time—”

“What would the point be of doing that?”

“—which I don’t think you are, which is why I accepted you as a patient. I don’t know how you’d even go about trying to parse it out, because it’s such a messy knot. It’s why we’ve been wondering about consciousness and the self for centuries, millennia. But you have such an extreme difference between the two that we might just be able to get a hint.”

It’s quiet as Rob finishes. Five sits considering that, expression slightly pinched. Rob waits.

As Five continues to not say anything, Rob’s gut sinks a little. Maybe he got a little too excited about this, misjudged how interested Five would be about it. He did just pretty blatantly say that this man, who is already stuck looking like a thirteen-year-old, might actually be stuck in a much more real way as a thirteen-year-old.

“Five—”

“You know,” Five interrupts, “you and Sarah make a bit more sense now.”

It isn’t clear if that’s supposed to be a compliment or an insult. Maybe it’s neither. Five usually likes to rub in insults. “How do you mean?”

 “You both like puzzles. You just hide your intensity better than she does.”

Rob might have gotten a little too enthusiastic about how interesting a case Five is. “I’m sorry, Five, I—”

Five waves a hand, tone still low. “Don’t apologize. You know I appreciate candor. Was this the point?”

They haven’t been here in a little bit – Five directing with questions. Rob did miscalculate this. He can let Five keep the control. “Was what my point?”

“To talk about how shit it is to be a fully grown man who looks like a child?”

“No. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about and thought you might find it interesting, too. I had planned on today being a bit lighter on Big Things after last week.”

Five nods slowly. He’s not looking at Rob. “Wow,” he says after another moment. “Bad job of doing that.”

“I’m seeing that now, yeah.”

Five forces them to sit in that. Rob glances at the clock. He has forty minutes to salvage unless Five ends the session early.

“I get the appeal,” Five says after another long minute. “I’m an enigma on a lot of levels. Most of my life doesn’t exist anymore and what it was is so statistically improbable it should be impossible and unbelievable. This isn’t what all this has been about, right?”

He slips that question in as if it’s just an unimportant end to his statement. That’s how Rob knows it’s important. Five likes to bluster, likes to misdirect to avoid feelings and hard topics. The exception is when he needs real, important information. He’s not good at direct lies and it’s obvious the tactic he figured out for learning information he needed while trying to stay under the radar is to be as casual and nonplussed as possible. If Five doesn’t seem to care about the answer, maybe the person giving it won’t care about giving it either.

“No, Five,” Rob says without hesitation. Waiting until Five looks back up at the screen, he continues, “I agreed to be your psychiatrist because I think you need the help to sort through the everything of your life and also think I’m a good fit for helping you do that. You seem to agree, since we’ve been doing this for three months now. My own, side interest of what might be going on in your head isn’t a part of it, outside of my thoughts on non-psychotherapy approaches that might help you should you ever decide you want to try some drugs or physical treatments. Today’s tangent is just that, a tangent that I think is interesting but is non-defining of you or the work we do here.”

Five nods at that with a small frown. “To help you along on that tangent, then, so we don’t have to do it again – it’s wrong.”

“Okay?”

“Your little theory has me half-developed and stupid, of which I am neither.” He waves off Rob as he opens his mouth to apologize and explain. “It’s fine, as you just explained to me your brain function is also declining due to your advancing age. It is interesting, though, that your go-to direction for me doing a simple math calculation in an indirect way was to blame it on a possibly under-developed brain rather than the fact that I’m thirteen years older than you are and am farther along on my brain slipping into mush.”

Rob swallows and waits.

“But how I know you’re wrong about my brain is because, while I don’t remember much from being thirteen, I do remember some decisions I made when I was that age. One very big, very dumb decision. With absolutely no concern for the consequences and no back-up plan. That’s the sort of thinking thirteen-year-old brains do. It was a childish and very poorly calculated mistake. And I’m not that stupid now.”

“Understood,” Rob says. That sits between them, a bit heavy which was not Rob’s goal for the day so he adds, ��You’re dumb because you’re old, not because you’re young.”

A smile ghosts at the edge of Five’s mouth. “Exactly.”

“Glad we cleared this up. I’m sorry I pushed us here, I misjudged. We’re good?”

Five nods. “We’re good.”

#i rotate these two in my head a lot #i'm really soft for their relationship #but it takes a lot of thought to write therapy (ha who would have thought) and i've got so many other projects #with JT as the current priority when i've got brain and time to Write Specific Project #that it really doesn't get much work #so #snips and chatting about it is what we've got #five finds therapy wip #i should have a rob tag #snips #ask game