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It’s been a while since I thought about de-aging fics but just imagine
jack zimmerman turning into a teenager
how? idk ice magic cup wishes you name it
maybe he wished he could’ve met bitty sooner or thought to himself bitterly one night that bitty deserves someone better, someone without all this history and baggage
(not because they aren’t good now! not because jack really thinks he’d be better off if he hadn’t gone through what he has or has any illusions that his teenage self had problems too! but when you have anxiety late at night sometimes you catch yourself going over what-ifs and maybe jack wonders if some younger version of himself would’ve been kinder to bitty from the start)
and then he wakes up, the sixteen-year-old jack he’s summoned up out of the past
and he vaguely knows this isn’t right and he’s supposed to be an adult in the nhl but he doesn’t really remember it clearly. more like this incredible happy future is a dream. and teenage!jack is gonna have to go out there and prove himself to his brand new juniors team
but meanwhile bitty woke up and there’s a dorky boy with floppy hair and the Zimmerman baby blues, and bitty about has a heart attack
and jack has no idea what to do or what’s going on except
“I think…. my older self…. wanted me to meet you? or for you to meet me? I don’t really understand it.”
and it’s a good thing it’s an off day so it doesn’t matter that jack is swimming in his adult clothes and tripping over his own feet and bitty keeps having to hide laughter behind his hands because he knows his jack, and a jack who doesn’t know him is one who’d think bitty is laughing AT him instead of being charmed and in love…
basically floppy-haired dork teenager jack zimmerman being flustered and crushing hard on this adorable Grown Up Boyfriend his future self has, and furiously wishing he could go back to being Cool Adult Jack who apparently knows how to deal with bitty smiling at him without spontaneously combusting
idk just imagine a teenage!jack getting to meet bitty and being totally smitten but also 100% hopeless about it
like, bitty thought the jack zimmerman he met in first year was bad. but this. this jack zimmerman can’t even TALK to bitty. he communicates entirely in eyebrows and blushes.
bitty getting chirping material forever out of the shyly mumbled french jack eventually spills out. but being too oddly protective of this old super vulnerable version of jack to ever use it against his bf even if he knows grown-up jack wouldn’t mind it.
jack waking up back to normal but a little flustered and shy, left over from his reversion to teenager-hood.
jack confessing that he still feels like that, a bit, sometimes, around bitty
that there’s still this bit of his younger self that’s watching jack’s life now out of his memories and just
awestruck
that jack has ended up where he is
like. teen!jack and his anxiety, if you’d told him back then that he’d make it to the nhl and (probably) even become team captain someday would’ve been mostly just…. relieved? like he used to be so worried he’d mess it up but he always kind of knew he was heading there
but show teenage jack his life with BITTY and jack will just. not know how to deal with this at ALL, nothing has prepared him for finding this kind of love his parents had, that he’s never bothered WORKING in the way he did with hockey.
there’s a part of grown-up jack that’s just kind of watching his life in utter gleeful disbelief, he has no idea how he got so lucky, but now that he’s got it by god he’s willing to work harder than anything to keep it.
teenage!jack would be so proud of his future self.