#OR if he would be having a violent flashback to the christmas party of 1992 where they were both extremely drunk

[wutheringmights]

Do you have any thoughts on how "everything was fine" au time, spirit, and warriors would react if they somehow met their ctb canon selves?

Everything In the Past Was Happy AU, how I missed you! This is honestly such a good question. I love thinking about characters meeting alternate versions of themselves, especially when their fates are so wildly different.

For clarity's sake, classic CTB brothers are going to be referred to as Warriors, Spirit, and Time. Everything In the Past Was Happy AU will be referred to by the captain, engineer, and child.

I think the captain would be very disappointed to see how far he's capable of falling. While the captain never got as bad as Warriors did, he also never really learned his lesson. He definitely admires Warriors for all the ways he's trying to shape his life into something better, but it's marred by disappointment that he's turned out so pathetic.

Warriors would think the captain was his nightmare brought to life. He would hate the captain on sight and would call him out on so much of his bullshit. But still, everything worked out for him. He got to save the day without fucking up his relationships with Spirit and Time. Warriors would be unspeakably jealous.

The child (who despite the title would be a full blown adult in this scenario) and Time would have the least number of differences between them. Time would have had a rough childhood whether or not everything fell apart during the war. Looking at them straight on, you would think they are exactly the same. They would even think they are the same.

But there's subtle differences that they only realize in each other after a while. Time is very secretive and purposefully keeps himself isolated from others. The child is warmer and tends to lean on others far more. Time has a helplessness streak he can't quite get rid of. The child is more stable. They would be more confused by their slight differences than disturbed

The engineer... oh boy. So in the Everything In the Past Was Happy AU, the engineer and the captain stay on good and close terms throughout the war. But that resulted in the engineer being the captain's outsourced moral compass. The engineer knows the captain is kinda a piece of shit, but he accepts that in part because he knows the captain wouldn't do that shit to him.

So here's a version of himself who lost that bet. The engineer isn't as shocked by that as you would think. The captain betraying him is disturbing, but not unthinkable. Again, it was always a possibility. But what does shake him is how bitter and angry Spirit is, and how Spirit has become the worse version of himself. The engineer is very comfortable believing he has a strict moral code, so to see any version of himself stoop to Warriors's low... that's rough.

Meanwhile, Spirit would be pissed off. In his mind, the engineer is the worst version of him. What do you mean you're his best friend? What do you mean that you let him get away with doing any of that bullshit on anyone?

So they hate each other.