#but i couldn’t convey All of That even in five frankenstein sentences

[astronomical-light]

Robby/Jack, “you’re my favorite what if”

“Man, that was back when my crush on you was so bad,” Robby tells Jack, all wistful, focus drifting off into the middle distance as he remembers days long gone by, but he comes back to himself with a shake of his head and a self-deprecating smile, tipping the rest of his beer back and finishing the dregs in one long swallow; he’d said it so matter-of-factly, so plainly, like it was a universally known statement of truth and not a complete fucking bomb he’d just dropped on Jack out of fucking nowhere.

“What?” Jack asks, voice weak and mind reeling from the aftershock, recontextualizing everything he thought he knew in real time—all the pieces of himself and Robby and his understanding of how they fit together, the realization that there was an entire section of the puzzle missing, that the whole picture had never once been fully complete.

“You had to have known,” Robby says, faltering through the words like it’s only now occurring to him that maybe Jack didn’t fucking know, “you were—you were always my favorite what-if, I was so obvious—”

“Brother, I can assure you,” Jack interrupts, “you really fucking weren’t,” he says, mouth twisting as he chews on the inside of his cheek, and he really ought to take some time to process all of this, but what the fucking hell, “I don’t have to be—a what-if, I mean.”

“Oh,” Robby breathes out, eyes wide and jaw slack, blinking like he’s going through his own set of Earth-shattering revelations, and Jack snorts, one wrong thought away from descending into outright hysterical laughter, because oh was just the beginning.