#just a neverending speedrun of self discovery

[cryptocism]

wanted to say your Too Many Thad's au is super fun and all your clone designs rule! Five's whole deal is really interesting to me (he's the oldest AND youngest? rough) and his (physically) older design kinda jumped out at me. i like how he's more heavily built than his teen counterparts but also isn't like. uncomfortably ripped?? and the scruff peeking out is inspired. do you think Bart himself would look similar when he's older, or is Five different from him in that way?

yeah yeah yeah!! they've all got weird aging situations going on but Five definitely has it the weirdest.

how I've got the timeline rn means that CRAYDL actually created baby Eight and Nine in the cloning chamber before Three uses it to create Five and Six. unbeknownst to Three, CRAYDL's tampering with the machinery leads to complications when creating Five and Six, which leads to Five having to be sprung from stasis early and the exponential age issue. by the time he's chronologically 1 he's physically 3 or 4, by the time he's chronologically 2 he's physically 12, and Three manages to fix his aging before he hits 3, at which point he would've been physically 42ish. (the rate is about 250%) So he ends up in the mid-30s range.

which has gotta be! weird! for everyone involved. Three spends just over 2 years raising a rapidly growing kid, which is, first of all; rife with comedy potential. there's just a whole child in there and Three is constantly having to run around taking care of him, and CRAYDL is no help at all because they've got two 10 year olds they're taking care of hidden in the next room. Five is teething within six weeks, walking within six months, talking in full sentences by the end of the year. Three spends all his time reading parenting guides and recalibrating the VR learning system so that Five can get a semblance of understanding of his whole situation.

Five is in the extremely unique position of becoming physically much older than the person who raised him, which has gotta be? extremely weird. Five remembers vividly only coming up to Three's elbow because it was literally 2 years ago. now he's a full head and shoulders taller than Three and has to deal with a body and mind that are much older than he's really been prepared for.

and i do really want to avoid the 'mind of a child' trope because it's uhhh. bad! his capability for learning was accelerated just as much as his body was, and ya boy does have superspeed so getting a lot of booklearnin done in a very short amount of time is no problem. it's more that he just very literally hasn't been around as long as the other Thads have. As soon as Six got sprung from stasis he pretty much immediately started fucking around with time travel, meaning his chronological age grew an incalculable amount, despite him technically being created after Five.

so the other Thads besides Three really underestimate Five due to his lack of life experience. plus he's sort of quiet and doesn't like arguments or confrontation, and on top of that I cannot overemphasize how shitty of a conversation partner every single one of these little assholes would be. Five also genuinely cares about Three, and is the only one loyal to him without any coercion or manipulation on Three's part. They've all got fucked relationship dynamics but with Five and Three especially it's like a weird "thats my dad but also he's younger than me and i want to protect him like a son" recursive loop.

and on the rare occasions where Three and Five interact with anyone other than the clones, like when Three took them to get Four's body, Five is faced with the extremely odd situation of being perceived as the de-facto authority figure between the two of them. A stranger referring to Three as "your son" was probably the moment where Five was fully faced with the disconnect between his whole situation and the real word.

anyway to answer your question yeah i think Bart would probably look similar to Five when he gets older... possibly taller, but that's just bc I think it'd be funny if Bart starts out as like a 5'1" 13/14 year old and by the time he's 20 he's grown like a foot and a half. although I haven't really hashed out Five's design without the mask so he may get the blonde hair and/or blue eyes of the Thawne lineage who knows!!