Chapter Text
It began roughly three years after Five had stranded himself in the apocalypse. At that point he had read almost everything the library had had to offer on theoretical and practical physics, wilderness survival techniques, and any book containing the word “time” in the title.
Five was shaking in the darkness, another harsh winter was coming and the library offered meager shelter at best.
The animals around him were already changing to adapt to a environment of extremes as a result of a shredded ozone layer
Five was in the midst of a fascinating ongoing study on pigeons and their adaptation through generations following a extinction level event; Already he was seeing thicker feathers, more predatory behaviour, and a loss of agility following the collapse of a food chain that left them on the bottom.
In moments of fancy, Five imagined his brain going through a evolution of sorts to determine more predatory behaviour too.
He imagined the thought patterns that died out, like respect for the dead, and those that survived: the art of compartmentalization, thievery, and newfound respect for scavengers and decomposers.
But evolution doesn’t work without any people around.
Five is not a series of generations, happenstance and death of the unfit somehow coordinating into a species that can survive better than its predecessors. He is one man, one boy, alone in the freezing chill that is early november in the apocalypse.
“You need a hobby.”
“What?” Five said, whipping around to face Delores. To an outside observer, she was the picture of calm, but Five had practice reading her face. She was annoyed, and worried.
(((He knew her face didn't actually move back then, but it’s so easy to pretend at age sixteen.
To pretend there’s a spark of life in her eyes, the sarcastic arch of a plucked eyebrow, a frown on her painted face. He an still convince himself it’s tricks of the light.
She consoled him as he realized he was going insane, cried that his wife was a fucking mannequin and that he
Towards end of his forties, she was so real he could feel her greasy blonde hair, he could trace the crows feet and shrapnel scars beside her eye by muscle memory.)))
“Or something. You need something other than the apocalypse. You keep reading books about math and time and that’s fine, it is, but it’s not healthy.”
Five had not slept for a week at that point. Delores was overcompensating her facial expressions for him, worried that his blurry vision wouldn’t be able to read her. Silly Delores.
“I’m not silly, I’m dead serious. You need something other than the apocalypse.”
Shit. He’d said that out loud. Welp, he was not going to win any arguments for the next couple of months. Insulting Dolores was a terrible tactical maneuver.
It started about a month after that.
The religion section of the library was, curiously, the most well preserved. Delores thought that was funny, in a dark sort of way.
It started because Five was lonely, so deeply lonely at sixteen and he could remember his mother’s voice as she told him stories about the origin of his name in her sotto voice, late at night when he couldn't sleep. He remembered the soft rise and fall of Hebrew as he and his siblings learned countless languages to help them on missions.
Klaus had always been the best at languages, switching effortlessly from Xhosa to Russian and back again. Back then it pissed him off, the way Four had a better grasp of linguistics even as he spoke Cantonese through clouds of marijuana smoke. But Five had nothing but time now, and years of solitude had softened his competitiveness.
Five read through the Torah at age sixteen by candles and firelight with a Hebrew to English dictionary in his tent when it was too cold to go outside. A hibernation of sorts.
And when spring came and he could go out for more than a few hours at a time, he took his teachings with him.
In the apocalypse, ritual and pattern becomes important.
Without it, you are liable to fall into days of drinking or self-pity. Five may not have a code of ethics anymore, but in a world where the only rules he has to follow are his own, why not follow those that make him feel more connected to his past, his family, the ancestry that worked for so long for him to be here?
He starts the day with prayer. It becomes a part of the day-to-day ritual of living. Even if he lives in a world of chaos and ashes, he can have something to ground him, a schedule to rely on, no matter how loose.
Five knows about the placebo effect, and the side effects of a life of solitude, but at some undefined point he had started to believe, to hope, to have faith. Judaism became more than a self-soothing mechanism, it became a part of him.
Besides, this way he could pretend his beard was there by choice, not because no one had taught him to shave before he left, and that he didn't touch anyone because he was orthodox, not because there was no one to touch.