#i should have a rob tag

[sharkneto]

Today's thoughts brought to you by What If Allison Did The Actor Thing Where They Dip Their Toes Into The Music Industry For A Christmas Album (Joining Together Universe):

Five cuts himself off to squint at the radio. Without saying anything, he reaches out to turn it up, the boppy, generic Christmas tune blaring from the speakers as the vocalist gives an unnecessary amount of vibrato.

Sarah glances away from the snowy road to frown at him – even if he was a holiday person, this absolutely would not be one of the songs he would like. “Five?” she asks as he keeps squinting at the radio, hand still on the volume dial.

“That’s Allison.”

She listens with renewed interest, trying to recognize the voice – she’s never met or talked to Allison, but she has seen a couple episodes of that show she was on, has seen the trailer for her first big movie (it’s hard to avoid, it’s everywhere). The song is… fine, for a pop Christmas song. Rather synthetic, there’s an underlayer of autotune that she thinks probably wasn’t necessary – Allison’s voice around it sounds good, and if there’s one thing she would have iron control over, it’s her voice.

Five sits frozen for the remainder of the song, brow furrowed but expression otherwise unreadable. It gets them to the house, and they sit in the driveway together for the last few notes.

“It was pretty good,” Sarah offers as jingle bells start for the next song.

He hums, noncommittal. Still, he follows her inside.

Rob is in the kitchen and frowns as his greeting is ignored and Five blows past him to the living room. He throws Sarah a questioning look.

“Allison made Christmas music,” she supplies, coming over to him after shrugging off her jacket to give him a quick kiss in greeting.

“Is it good?” he asks.

She shrugs. “For not a tried-and-true, it’s alright.”

Any further discussion on the qualities of Allison’s new career move is interrupted as cheery notes start beating from the living room. Glancing at one another, they move as one to the kitchen doorway.

They find Five perched on arm of the recliner, arms crossed, and his phone plugged into their speaker system. Allison’s voice starts crooning. He doesn’t react, just continues to stare at where his phone sits on the table.

“She’s not bad,” Rob offers.

Sarah shrugs her agreement.

The song ends. The next starts, a slower ballad.

Five doesn’t move.

“Did you know she was venturing into music, Five?” Rob tries.

He gets shushed.

Sarah exchanges a look with her husband. “It’s probably fine,” he says, a little too quickly. They retreat to the kitchen.

For a novelty Christmas album, it’s long. A full twelve songs, covers of classic Christmas songs interspersed with upbeat, cutesy songs about holiday romance. They check on Five a couple times, also expecting each song to be the last as the album just keeps going and going. He doesn’t move through any of it, just keeps on his perch with that mild frown.

Finally, the last song ends and silence returns to the house. They pause, waiting to make sure there’s nothing more coming. Five confirms the end by walking into the kitchen, his phone in his hand and his expression still unreadable.

As always, Rob tries to breech the silence, “Cool she made a whole album?”

Five gives a neutral hum. He taps away on his phone. After another second, he holds it up to his ear. “Hello?” he asks on the other end. “Is this—great, yes. This is her brother… Five. Yeah. No, I need to talk to her… She can’t be doing anything that important. Tell her it’s an emergency. Yes. Five… I can wait. Thank you.”

“You called Allison?” Sarah checks, even though that is obvious. Rob is trying to hold in a surprised, proud grin, the corner of his mouth twitching badly. Five ignores them both, rocking on his heels slightly as he’s on hold.

He perks up. “Allison?” A brief pause. “Yeah. Emergency? Of course not, I just needed you to come to the phone. I listened to your new album.” Another pause. “Yeah, the whole thing. And—yeah, hang on, let me—Allison, it’s terrible. You should have thought through that Rumor more.”

And with that, he hangs up.

Sarah stares at him, still processing, speechless. Rob has brought a hand up to his face to hide the smile he finally can’t contain anymore, his shoulders shaking slightly with his silent laughter.

Five looks up at them, brightening. “Sorry about that, what were we doing tonight?”

[starlight-bread-blog]

Mom: How did you sleep?

Me: There's a fine line between hatred and love. Most hatred stems from it. There is no hate without love involved somewhere in the mix. Katara was the last to forgive Zuko because there was a moment of connection in the Crystal Catacombs. Her hatred of him highlights she did trust and connect with him for a minute there. Because love is brightest in the dark.

Mom: Maybe you should take more melatonin.

[vii-spider]

biblically accurate scary girl

bonus one w axel

[caruliaa]

just bc im a lesbian doesnt mean tht i wont at times become deeply entranced with the beauty of male actor or character. it just means i wld rather be locked in a room with a man with a knife than do anything romantic or sexual with one

[kordbot]

felt the need to draw my favorite docs :3 have a messy doodle

[bring-onthe-rain]

its worse then we thought !!!

[fumifooms]

Thinking about Mithrun angst unfailingly gets me like

[cairafea]

rough sketch of the winged lion to familiarise myself with drawing big cats

[zappedbyzabka]

NEVER FORGET

[rox-of-iu]

Mu Qingfang lost both his rounds and is now officially out of the side-character poll....... .............. ......... .do not @ me, do not hit me up, I'm logging off forever......there is no winning ever

[dittobooty]

I haven't written a fic in at least 8 years but a really good AU does something to a man so have this little ficlet I wrote in like 15 minutes and didn't even bother to read back over for mistakes and don't even have a title. I just didn't feel like drawing a whole comic for this okay? This is inspired by @charliethechandelure's Weird Summer AU. Hopefully it's not too messy, enjoy.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

The news about Pedro was only given to them after everything was said and done in Wano. Franky sobbed for the boy they had only known one summer. A tear sprang to Robin’s eye and she silently wiped it away. That night they would grieve in each other’s company but on the Grand Line there’s no time to properly mourn a loss before you have to keep going. So they decided after that night to accept his passing and move on. That was until Egghead brought them back in the company of two people they never thought they’d be close to again. The truce with Lucci and Kaku was uneasy but necessary. To annoyance of Lucci, Franky was as boisterous and friendly as ever, as though their circumstances had never ripped the pairs apart. It wasn’t until after they had dealt with York and the Seraphim that there was a moment of peace to truly reconnect but, more importantly, to break the news to them. “May I speak with you both for a moment?” Robin asked, calmly approaching the two. Kaku barely remembered anything from the time that they had spent together that summer. He was so young at the time that all he could recall were like snapshots in a hazy dream, the feelings remaining more than any actual events. Lucci on the other hand could remember everything but he never spoke of it, almost as though it was a point of shame in his life. “What do you want?” Lucci replied, never even looking in her direction. “It’s Pedro, he…” “He’s dead isn’t he?” He responded with a voice that felt like ice. “Yes…” This was how it was on the Grand Line. People came and left your life regularly. People died regularly. Kaku struggled to remember the boy that they were speaking about, finally recalling the young leopard mink. He instinctively traced his fingers along the beads of the now too small friendship bracelet that he still kept on his wrist and watched Lucci for any reaction but there was none. “Sorry for your loss” Kaku decided to say. He supposes it was his loss too but it doesn’t feel right to claim it since Pedro was a ghost to him long before his actual death. Robin nodded. “Thank you” she said quietly before leaving them alone. Lucci was always a hard character to read, even for Kaku who had known him for so long, but there were always small signs. Right now the man was looking down with a slightly furrowed brow and a clenched jaw. This was the most grief he’d allow himself. Kaku wonders if the young mink haunted Lucci long before this moment given his devil fruit. There was no way of knowing, but if the loss hurt him, he would be there to help him heal.

[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.”

[hauntingblue]

I have connected two dots... yamato kaido and momo (and kinda shirahoshi with her top) have clouds above their shoulders... and luffy in gear fourth has them also.... I can see the signs

[fountainpenguin]

The fact that there is currently not a single Vicky/Mark ship story on either FFN or AO3 when they are a canon couple for multiple seasons (and Mark had a crush on her for at least 9 seasons) is a CRIME, actually :/

[rosesradio]

does anyone want to make like a petition or something for thomas to donate at least part of the ad revenue on his sorting video to a trans charity? or at least put some kind of disclaimer in the video or in the description stating that he doesn’t support jkr, and maybe link some resources and/or charities to encourage donations? idk, it just sits weirdly with me that, upon checking the video a minute ago, there’s no alterations to how it was originally posted to address the bigotry of that franchise.

(especially considering he bought a bunch of merch for the video, which he makes a joke about, potentially encouraging his viewers to sort & buy merch for their houses as well)

[papa-evershed]

Rob James-Collier | DA1 Red Carpet Premiere (2019)