Archive of Our Own

There are a lot of things Five didn’t have access to the first time around.

Instant communication is a big one. He rediscovers things like the radio, live tv, new newspapers every day. This is a completely fresh and new timeline, and things are actually changing and people are living, and it feels like Five is in the deep end of a pool he’s never been in before. A pool of culture and humanity.

While he worked for the Commission, he got to experience a couple of cultural things, sort of. He went to movie theaters and used a phone. (Man, the first time he talked on the phone with somebody in 40+ years - that was really something.) He walked through cities where people actually lived and thrived, and watched them live their lives around him. He snuck through the real world, did his job, and left. There wasn’t that much time to really partake in it himself. Or perhaps he just didn’t allow there to be?

On a deep, deep subconscious level, he believed that he genuinely wasn’t allowed to live a normal life. That was something he read about in stories. Something for normal people, something maybe even his family could do. But not him - no, he didn’t count as a real person. There was too much danger to watch for. And yet, now the danger was gone, and he had a life ahead of him.

Christ. An entire life.

It takes about 6 months after things settle down, after he settles down, for him to realize that yes, he is truly 13 years old again, and yes he really does have another 60ish years ahead of him. He’s already so exhausted from the last 60ish years. If he thinks about it too hard, it sends his head reeling.

What is he gonna do now?

Just because things were settled didn’t mean they were peachy. Most days he felt a deep-body anxiety - a kind of twitchiness to be on the lookout, to think through something, to use his time as efficiently as possible to work towards an end goal of... something. The danger being gone didn’t change the way his brain habitually processed the world. He wasn’t often happy. He didn’t have any friends, his family was still kind of a mess, and he generally felt lost. But he supposed that’s what it meant to really live a normal life. And that’s what he fought for. It wasn’t always great, but it was really living. Right?

He… didn’t have any friends.

God no, he wasn’t going to make friends with other children “his age.” He didn’t know the first thing about kids. And making friends who were actually his age was bizarre too - he had no way to connect with them. He didn’t grow up in the culture they grew up in. Boomers liked to do what - have wine and cheese parties? Watch football? Talk about their kids? He couldn’t connect with them on any level. And convincing them he was actually their age - ugh, there's no way they'd listen to him. Why even try?

Instead he spends a few years not doing much at all. Calming himself down. Rediscovering the world. Despite his multiple objections, Vanya eventually gets him to have a couple sessions with her therapist, and he’ll admit it gave him a lot to think about. He was extremely wound up. He had no semblance of a normal life. He had no direction, and habits that were completely useless to him now. How did he want to change that? What did he, Number Five Hargreeves, actually want to do? 

When it reaches that point, Five leaves therapy. It’s a good kick start in understanding his issues, but thinking about it too much feels like staring into an inky black abyss. It doesn’t even feel like the apocalypse, which is a familiar fear. Instead it feels like something completely incomprehensible. It’s unsettling, and deeply terrifying. So he turns his attention to other things that are more present and relevant.

His siblings, when they actually do hang out with each other, make a lot of pop culture references he doesn’t know. (He had plenty of books to read in the apocalypse, but he learns that a massive amount of information on the internet was simply lost to time - and the internet got huge while he was gone.) They must have taken pity on how completely bereft in the sea of culture he was, because they try to help him out a little.

One time Klaus buys him a smartphone, and downloads some games for him. Huh! Wonders of technology. He gets sucked into Cookie Clicker for a couple weeks. It’s pretty embarrassing. He thinks back on those weeks with shame.

Luther sends him a gif (jif?) of a cute dog. He wants to roll his eyes and shrug it off, but he can’t look away. Shit, he didn’t know something this cute could even exist. Then Luther shows him reddit, and the section with more dog gifs, and he loses a solid month to r/aww. Not that he’ll ever admit it. (“What are you smiling at?” asks Diego. Five looks up from his phone full of wholesome dog memes and tells him to fuck off.)

Vanya sets him up with a Spotify account. His past experiences with music are: the, like, two whole records that weren’t broken that he found in the apocalypse, the background music in the bars he visited between Commission jobs, and the couple live bands he came across on the street that were so overwhelming he didn’t really know what to make of them. So he has no idea how to navigate the music of today. Vanya sends him a Top 40 Hits playlist - and he listens to about 2 songs before turning his Spotify off and never touching it again.

Allison uses social media. She makes him a twitter account and tells him he can just send thoughts into the universe. He’s read about twitter, sort of, in some of the more recently-written books, but it was hard to visualize in the apocalypse. Seeing it in action is baffling.

“What do I send?” he asks slowly.

Allison shrugs. “I usually tell my followers what makeup I’m using, or something I thought of that day.”

He tweets the differential equation he’s been thinking about. No one responds to it. He doesn’t understand twitter.

Five doesn’t tend to do much with his day. Luther gets a job as a personal trainer. Diego tries to join the police again. Vanya teaches music, and Allison “influences” on social media (whatever that means) between her movies. Klaus is.. well, Klaus. Doing Klaus things.

Five has no interest in working. He considers it a few times, in passing, as just something to do. While working for the Commission he would sometimes like to daydream about the nice, simple life of a bartender. But then his mouth twists into a frown and he feels that antsiness again, and never pursues the idea further. Then he remembers he’s 13.

Jesus. 

So his first few years back, he hangs around at home, talks with his family, learns about the world, and tries to relax. He isn’t sure how to do much else.

When Five is 16 for the second time (61 for the first time), he slowly starts trying to be social. He goes to some meet-ups. He takes some classes. He likes learning, he always has. It makes him feel active, and like he’s working towards that end goal of - something. And though he lives and breathes math and has passing familiarity with a few languages, there’s a lot in the world he doesn’t know. He learns about taxes. He invests in the stock market. He attends some cooking workshops.

He meets an interesting fellow close to his age (his real age, that is) in his weekly drawing class. He’s a kooky guy with a mustache not unlike Five’s old one, who sits in the back of the room and uses inks while everyone else uses charcoal. They get into a conversation about philosophy during break, and Five doesn’t hate it. They set up getting coffee before class every week. It’s not much, but it’s the closest thing yet he’s had to a friendship, so he takes it as a small victory. They try out reserve coffees, and talk about current events and the intricacies of repairing old DOS machines. 

“Are you thinking about college?” his friend asks, one fall Saturday.

Five hasn’t told him his real age, and he still tends to forget about his physical one. “I… no,” he says dumbly. “I’ve never thought about it.”

“I went to NYU. It’s right in the heart of the city. Great school,” his friend says. “You’d love it there, you’re a smart kid. Have you taken your SATs yet? Do they still do that?”

Five spends drawing class that day lost in thought. College. He’s never been to college before. They do a lot of research at universities, right? 

His brain starts going a mile a minute. Things click into place - he’s found a new problem he can solve. How could he get himself into college without a standard high school education? Maybe he could find someplace with a good math department. Maybe he could take classes about sociology, or business, or film. Maybe he could do research there, find other people to talk with about physics and time travel, maybe he could teach - 

When he gets home he gets Diego to help him look things up about schools. (He still isn’t great at google.) 

It’s a fun idea to entertain. It’d be a completely new thing, something he’s never done before. The last time he explored a new life direction, it involved a lot of murder.

Diego, of course, laughs at him. “What, you gonna go to all the frat parties?” Five threatens to break each of his toes. “You gonna be a pro at beer pong? Date a cheerleader?” Diego’s voice echoes through the halls as he’s pushed out of the room.

Five closes the door with a shudder. God no, parties? Dating? He hasn’t thought about that part of socializing. He doesn’t want to think about it - he still thinks about Delores every single day. (She’s always there, lurking in some part of his brain, waiting for when he needs her - she’s the part of him that’s calm and sturdy and wants to survive - the part of him that values himself, but taking ownership of it means acknowledging he’s a real person, so instead he projects it onto someone else. And when things get a little too much, when he gets too antsy or freaked out, he remembers who he is by thinking about her and breathing. He doesn’t hear her anymore, but he feels her, like a tight clenching in his chest and warmth radiating out into his limbs, and it’s her love that propels him to do something for himself for once and get into college.)

And then, two years later, he’s 18 for the second time (63 for the first time) and he’s working on a PhD, he teaches Physics 101 to undergrads, and dating seems to be something he just can’t escape.

Freshman girls (freshman! That’s what, 18, 19 years old? Christ) come to his office hours and giggle and ask to get coffee. At a job like this he luckily doesn’t have to pull any punches, so he turns them down by saying he’d rather stab his own eye out, and also if they ask again he’ll throw them from his 4th floor office window. And the girls leave with wide eyes and don’t speak to him again.

He manages to avoid parties pretty well. He does try going to one (“gotta have the experience,” Klaus had told him), but he takes one look at the dilapidated frat house, bass pumping out the windows, people overflowing from the front door, and immediately blinks 3 blocks away. There’s another time he’s having a bad day, and some classmates offer free booze at a much smaller party, so he ends up in some tiny apartment soaked in the smell of weed, drunkenly telling a bunch of barely-legal adults about the time he killed someone with a paperclip. He isn’t invited back to another (big surprise).

Dating, though. That conundrum seems to follow him like the plague.

It’s impossible to stay incognito at a large university full of people who remember the Umbrella Academy. The students are too young to remember, but the others - the professors, the grad students, the staff members - they all recognize his unusual name and his still-young face, and light up when they put 2 and 2 together. 

His barista even figures it out. She runs his credit card and gushes, “I used to read your comics when I was a kid. My mom collected them.” She writes her phone number on his cup. Five starts going to a different coffee shop.

His colleagues, the other doctoral candidates, all know who he is - and when they ask what happened to him (they’ve all read Vanya’s book and thought he went missing at age 13) he admits time travel is involved, but he leaves the rest of the details out. They treat him like a washed-up Disney channel star - which is to say, like a kid cynical from a few years of daddy issues (which is accurate, to be fair), instead of from living for 45 years in an apocalyptic hellscape and also having no moral compass due to many murders (which is a pretty major thing to hide from people, but he’s gotten used to being treated like a kid by now).

They’re nice people though, and they buy him beer when their research keeps them at the office together late at night. When it gets past 10, they tend to get a little delirious and start gossiping. “I’ve been trying to get my boyfriend to propose already,” one of them complains. “You’re lucky, I wish I had a boyfriend,” says another. And they each laugh about their current romantic woes until it comes around to Five.

“Are you seeing anyone, Five? Have you dated before?” 

Five considers. “I did. One girl. For a few years.” Fully confronting that Delores isn’t real (was never real) is a deep, dark, horrible untapped pain that he just doesn’t have the strength for. “We didn’t work out. Our lives went different directions.”

The others hum like they know what he’s talking about, and each person seems to fill in the gaps their own way as they start chattering. “Time travel got in the way, huh?” and “It’s hard to date long-distance when you go to college” and “Did the fame get to her?” 

“It’s complicated,” is all Five says.

“You’re so young, you have plenty of time,” they tell him. “Luckily everyone here is your age!” and “You should meet my daughter, she’s about to graduate high school.”

Five holds up his hand. “Nope, stop. Not interested in dating,” he says.

“Really? I bet you could find someone easily,” one of them prods over her beer, leaning on a mountain of physics books. She gestures to him. “You’ve got a lot going for you.”

Something horribly anxious crawls up Five’s spine, like a full-body grimace. No, he really doesn’t have anything going for him. He’s not a real person, don’t they see that? He can’t do normal things like they can. He’s fooling them all. They don’t know the real him.

He feels... hollow.

“Want to focus on school for now? I get it,” another colleague responds knowingly to his silence. “You’ll find someone when you’re ready.” Five feels unsettled and strange, so he ignores the rest of their conversation by turning back to his research.

He wants the topic to stop there. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him, he isn’t ready to talk to people about stuff like this. He tries to find his Delores emotional space to center himself, but there’s a tension in his body he can’t get rid of. Some discomfort he doesn’t understand. (Because she isn’t real, he isn’t real, nothing about him is real, he’s performing and nobody can see it. How can they not see it? How can he not see it? How can no one see how horribly alone he is and always will be?)

He joins a chess club. He’s not too bad at it, and he likes that it’s old-school - after Cookie Clicker he isn’t too keen on electronic games, and looking at something like Call of Duty makes him want to jump off a cliff because he has no idea how it works.

One chess club boy offers to play a few games with him over the weekend. Apparently that was a date, because the boy tries to hold his hand. On pure instinct Five blinks five feet back. Oh god, resolving that one becomes a whole debacle. The boy freaks out, Five doesn’t know what he’s doing and somehow ends up threatening to kill his family, the boy starts crying and hoo boy Five leaves the chess club after that and never goes back. So much for that hobby.

Klaus laughs at him when he hears the story. “C’mon Five, you’ve gotta get over Delores sometime,” he pesters. But Five wasn’t expecting that at all, it comes out of left field, and it pisses him off.

“You don’t know anything,” he spits. How dare he insinuate Five doesn’t need something as essential as Delores. Five doesn’t have the words to explain himself, and frankly he doesn’t think he should have to. “I just have zero interest in dating children.”

Klaus hesitates, and looks him up and down. Five’s 18-year-old skin crawls.

“Don’t you say a word,” Five grinds his teeth. The love he has for his family beats hollowly in his chest, because it isn’t returned the way he wants it to be - they don’t see him for who he really is, no one does. They all think he’s a real person who can live like a normal teenager, but he’s not.

“Maybe you can find a cougar,” Klaus says. Five socks him in the face.

At age 20 (65), Five takes a break from academia. He’s been working closely with some other professors on time travel theory. He enjoyed learning about other topics, he really did - but somehow it always comes back to time travel. And one day they shifted their thinking and edited their equations, and got too close with their numbers, too close to having that epiphany that Five can feel in his bones will really mean something. And he got scared. 

Something is building inside him, something he doesn’t understand. Building and working and preparing for - what? That empty what in the future that doesn’t exist.

Sometimes his thoughts feel like they’re locked up. Like they’re in the shape of a thick metal cage, unmoving and indecipherable, and try as he might to understand this build-up of something, he just can’t make sense of it because his thoughts won’t move. 

He can’t distract himself with physics anymore. Thinking about physics feels like touching hot metal. Thinking about any kind of learning feels that way, because learning means improving himself, and improving himself means preparing himself, and preparing himself for that something he can’t understand is absolutely terrifying. It’s a horrible black hole in his chest - a massive void his brain is too rigid to comprehend.

He sits at home for a while, wallowing, wondering what’s wrong with him. Sometimes panic attacks come out of nowhere. It’s frustrating - he thought he already healed from this a few years ago. This is clearly leftover apocalypse trauma, right? Shouldn’t he be better than this by now? Shouldn’t he be able to exist better than this? What does he have to do to be a person correctly? What is everyone else doing that he isn’t doing?

It’s harder and harder to find that part of his head that’s Delores. It’s like she’s on the other side of a river he can’t cross. It baffles him, how she used to be around all the time to mentally embrace him whenever he needed. But deep in his abyssal core that he doesn’t understand, he doesn’t believe he deserves her. He wants so badly for someone to validate him and reassure him that yes, he’s real and everything’s okay - but he knows that’s wrong. He isn’t real, everything is not okay. So Delores doesn’t come. 

He can’t wrap his head around it, it drives him in circles - he needs her, why won’t she appear? What is wrong with him? Something has to be wrong. He is inherently wrong on all levels.

Vanya tells him recovery is a lifelong process. She’s a successful violinist by now, and she has a long-term girlfriend, and overall she seems to be in good shape. She sits on an armchair while Five splays across the couch, clutching his forehead in despair. “Have you been sleeping alright?” she asks him.

It’s so embarrassing to be in this position. Five is around twice her age, but here she is with her maturity and stability while he is an absolute mess. “No,” he admits. “I’ve been having nightmares. Every night.”

“Have you talked to the Commission lately?” Five shakes his head. “Something remind you of the apocalypse, then?”

When he considers it from this angle, he can’t deny she’s on to something. “Work, I think. We’re close to being able to test our theory.” 

Vanya waits, but Five doesn’t have any more words. They’re locked up in his chest.

“You’re worried you’ll mess it up again?” she offers.

And just like that, his rigid cage of thoughts disappear and become a nice clean pool of water, and suddenly he can see what he’s worried about.

He looks up at her and feels empty with how right she is. “Yeah.”

Vanya smiles. “You won’t mess it up, Five. You’re not alone this time. Don’t you have like 6 people to check your work?”

...Huh.

“That’s true,” Five says, like it’s a revelation.

So maybe his physics research isn’t the issue. Maybe he doesn’t need to be scared of messing up this time. She’s right, so he should go back and finish the work, right? 

But still, he can’t. Somehow it still hurts, like a lattice cutting through his body, turning his particles into nothingness, fading him away into another dimension. He wishes he could stop thinking about it and just do something else for awhile, but he can’t, because he feels like he’s running away from what he’s supposed to be doing (preparing, building, thinking, fixing), but he can’t do what he’s supposed to do because it’s too much. There’s nowhere to hide from the piercing gaze of that abyss that follows him everywhere. He can feel its eyes on him all the time. 

Allison notices he isn’t eating. He tells her he can’t eat anything because none of it will be right and he can’t afford to eat wrong right now, so he just can’t eat at all, and even though that doesn’t make any sense Allison listens to his babbling and buys him ice cream for lunch. 

Huh.

It’s… amazing. 

“You don’t have to eat right, just eat what you want,” Allison says. Five is speechless. The churning anxiety inside him fades away for a couple hours while they hang out and talk about anything. He asks about Claire. She tells him a nothing-story about Claire skinning her knees at a friend’s house a couple days ago. The meaninglessness of it captivates him. He feels like he’s floating.

It doesn’t last.

The anxiety ebbs and flows in waves for weeks, changing day-by-day as he cycles between distracting himself with simple things, to thinking about his colleagues waiting to test their theory, and that turns into thinking about ash falling from the sky and his family scattered across the 60s, and that turns into his father saying “I told you so” as he falls into the infinite nothingness of space, and eventually that exhausts him until he can’t do anything but distract himself again.

He can’t feel Delores at all.

Art is something he has no hope for improving on and doesn’t consider to be really “learning,” so Five goes back to his old drawing class, and astonishingly, his mustachioed friend is still there. His inkwork has gotten complex and beautiful. Five stares at it and has no idea how someone gets good at this, so he gives a simple compliment and admits he hasn’t drawn in years, and his friend grins and invites him to coffee.

“What are you up to these days?” his friend asks. 

Five’s filter for deciding what details to withhold from people isn’t working too well, so instead of starting off by saying he took his advice and got a doctorate, he says, “Not much. Anxiety.”

His friend doesn’t give him any pity, which is a big relief. He nods and asks what about, and Five wants to only tell him the relevant information, but lately the relevant information is harder to decipher. It’s like he’s holding all his thoughts in a deck of cards in his hands, but the decks falls to the floor and the cards are scattered all over, and he can’t tell which ones he needs to pick up to have a clear-cut conversation, so it all just kind of tumbles out like a mess. Went to school, don’t know why I did, people kept recognizing me, miss my ex, don’t know what I’m doing.

“Recognize you? What, are you famous or something?” his friend asks. 

It occurs to Five that despite meeting up with this guy a fair number of times, they have never exchanged names. 

“I was in the Umbrella Academy,” he says blankly before he can stop himself. What’s the point?

His friend scratches his chin. “That sounds vaguely familiar.” 

The conversation takes some time. Five explains poorer than he’s ever explained it before, because his body can’t figure out what to say and what to hide. He doesn’t even hide the apocalypse part. (He does manage to hide the assassin part, because honestly that part doesn’t feel like an unfathomable abyss full of anxiety like the rest of it does - it’s pretty clear to him what that part was and what it wasn’t.) His friend lets him speak, doing his best to keep up. When Five finally admits his real age, it feels like a weight off his chest. 

“It’s no wonder you’re anxious,” his friend says, after a minute of considering.

Five snorts. “No kidding. And I have to finish my research eventually.”

His friend looks at him levelly across the table. “Why?”

Five sputters. “Why? Because - we were so close, and the others depended on me -”

His friend shrugs. “They’ll be alright.”

Five stares. 

“Why do you study it if it scares you?” his friend asks. 

Five doesn’t have an answer.

His friend smiles and looks out the window. “See how sunny it is today? It’s a good day for a walk. I used to take my daughter fishing when the weather was like this. But one time, she got tangled up in her line, and cut herself on her hook. Then she was too scared to even touch a fishing pole. So you know what we did?”

Five stares and waits.

His friend shrugs. “We stopped fishing. Did something else.”

Five bristles. “That’s not the same.”

“Isn’t it?” his friend asks. “Would you be upset at her for doing it wrong? Would you try to make her do it again, even though she didn’t like it? Or would you forgive her for not wanting to fish, and find something else to do?”

It hits too close to home. “I’d forgive her,” Five says numbly. 

His friend nods. “Then why aren’t you deserving of the same forgiveness?”

Five looks out the window. 

His friend leans back in his chair and swirls his coffee absently. “After that, we tried horseback riding. Turns out she’s allergic to horses. So I taught her to play basketball. Now she plays basketball professionally.”

“It’s not the same,” Five repeats, quietly.

“Oh yeah? And what’s different?”

Five’s chest seizes with something. He knows it, he knows the answer immediately, but he doesn’t want to say it. He says it anyway. “You love your daughter.”

His friend waits. “And?”

“And I hate myself.”

“And that there’s the key, isn’t it?” his friend sips his coffee. “So it’s not about your time travel, or your PhD, or even your apocalypse or anything else. You want to know why I use ink in drawing class?”

Five doesn’t answer. His words don’t work anymore.

“It’s because I think it’s fun. I don’t always love what I make, but I enjoy doing it. See, it’s not about loving or hating yourself. It’s about being yourself. You’re not a noun, you’re a verb. You don’t have to have an opinion about who you are. You just have to be.”

Five starts shaking. His hands go numb. “I have to go,” he mumbles, and blinks away. Because that was too much, too much.

He collapses on the ground in the alleyway behind the coffee shop, and can’t stop shaking. He’s next to a fucking dumpster and it smells, he just blinked in public like an idiot, his feet are going numb and he hates it. He can’t stop shaking.

Delores, where’s Delores? Why can’t he remember what she feels like? 

(Because she can’t comfort him, no one can comfort him.)

He tries breathing, but can’t get his chest to slow down. 

It takes him awhile, but he has no choice but to let himself to have a panic attack on the ground by the dumpster in the dirty stupid alleyway. The sky gets dark, time passes. He doesn’t know how long it is until the panic wanes and his breathing slows down. His limbs are still numb but he can move enough to jump home. He lands in the Academy’s deserted living room.

He has no idea if his friend left the coffee shop, or if anyone saw him, or how long he’s been gone, or how he’s feeling, but he does know he’s exhausted and the world feels fuzzy, so he drops himself on the couch and curls up and doesn’t move.

The couch feels soft against his face. 

He wakes up to the strong smell of food, and sees Grace setting down a plate of breakfast on the coffee table. At some point someone covered him with a blanket.

“Good morning,” she smiles. “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”

He gets out a disoriented “thanks” before she swooshes back out of the room. He looks at the breakfast plate and doesn’t move. It looks back at him, a smiling happy face made of eggs and bacon. He doesn’t eat it. He doesn’t do anything.

He wants coffee.

He wants Delores.

Where is she? He closes his eyes and searches for that feeling of calm she always gives him. It doesn’t feel calm at all. It feels instead like a painful reaching out of his hand for someone to take it, but no one is there. His body stops him with a wave of nausea that almost makes him retch.

Why?! Why can’t he find her? Why is she gone? The thought rips through him in a brief flash of despair.

She’s not real, he reminds himself. She never was.

It leaves him feeling so lonely. So lonely, he can barely move. He sits on the couch, wrapped in his blanket, wide-eyed. 

His thoughts just disappear. He can’t process anything at all.

That’s how Klaus finds him half an hour later. “Woah, hey, buddy, what’s goin’ on?”

Five looks up at him. His face scrunches up, but he can’t bring himself to say anything except “coffee.”

Klaus looks between him and the untouched plate of breakfast. “Mom forgot the coffee? Alright, don’t worry. I’ll get some.” Five wants to object, but his heart also aches, so the two feelings cancel each other out and give him a net value of saying nothing. “Be right back,” Klaus sweeps out of the room, his fuzzy robe fluttering behind him. 

Five pulls the blanket over his head. It feels soft on his ears. 

“Hey, hey, no hiding,” Klaus’s voice comes from in front of him a few minutes later, and the smell of coffee feels familiar and calming, so Five pulls the blanket back down. Klaus hands him a mug. It tastes… alright. Better than nothing.

Klaus sits down on the opposite couch. “You doing anything today?”

Five looks at him.

“Can I join you?” Klaus takes a sip from his own mug of coffee and makes a face. “I miss Ben. Just feeling lonely today.”

Huh.

In that moment, Klaus is like a lighthouse in Five’s disastrous mess of a brain. A small anchor that is the only thing that makes sense. The fog clears up a little as the day suddenly becomes less of an unknown something and more of... he isn’t sure. Something easier to visualize. 

They sit in silence for a time.

“It’s been awhile since Ben left,” Five croaks out. He isn’t sure why he thought of this. “You still miss him?”

“Don’t you?” Klaus asks.

Five blinks. “Well, yeah. But I had a while to adjust to it, I guess. It doesn’t hurt anymore.”

“He was around for a long time,” Klaus says, laying his head back on the couch. “And he stuck with me through thick and thin. He was like my conscience, sometimes. He cared more about me than I cared about myself.”

Five stares into nothing. “So what do you do about it now?”

Klaus glances over at him. “I don’t know. Get over it, somehow. How’d it stop hurting for you?”

Five shrugs. “Time.”

“Guess that’s it, then,” Klaus finishes. He sets his coffee mug down and yawns. “Just takes time. It’ll be easier someday.”

Five’s insides clench up.

Time? That’s it? Time?

So what, now that Delores is gone and he hates himself, he just has to give it time?

He doesn’t have time, he can’t just wait around like a normal person, he has to -

He has to - 

Do something - 

He doesn’t have the time for this - 

For what? For what, exactly?

He doesn’t have time for a nothing apocalypse that won’t come? Because he stopped it already?

Doesn’t have time to what, live his life? Be a human, like everyone else?

Five’s chest burns up, his heart feels like it’s on fire, the wretched anxiety burns through his whole body and feels like it’s tearing him apart as he thinks No. He doesn’t have time to be a human. He can’t. That’s something other people get to do, not him.

But that’s ridiculous. That’s not right. 

Five imagines a little girl he’s never met, tangled in a fishing line. He thinks of eating ice cream for lunch, and of defending his dissertation to a room full of friends who clap him on the back afterwards and say they knew his math was right.

Five shakes. No one should have to live like this. No one deserves this. He doesn’t deserve to keep hating himself.

But he can’t stop, because if he didn’t hate himself, who would? Not the Handler, she was long dead. Not any of his victims, they were all dead. Not his dead dad. Not a sky full of ash that doesn’t exist anymore.

No, he had to do it. Because someone had to hate him. What other reason could there be for how not-a-person he was? Why else wouldn’t he be able to do normal things like go to parties and eat normal meals and go on dates?

He can’t be normal. Something has to be wrong with him. 

But what a horrible feeling that was, being so hated and alone. 

So alone.

Five sits up with a jolt. He doesn’t have time to think - he needs Delores.

He must have said it out loud, because he barely hears Klaus say “wait, Five, she’s not-” before he jumps from the room.

Jumping all the way to the department store feels horrible. It’s way too far. He has to do it in multiple legs that land him in the middle of the street, so he’s jumping through regular crowds of people and then leaving them again moments later, ripping himself through spacetime as fast as he can because there is no more time. He feels like nothing - like he is a speck of nothingness against the grand churning chaos of the infinite void, and he’s losing himself to the universe, and no one is left to save him except Delores, he needs her.

He lands in front of the department store and vomits on the ground. He’s dimly aware of a couple of people around on the street who stop and watch him, but he physically can’t care about them at all because the world outside a small bubble around him feels impossibly difficult to process. He stumbles to his feet and trips his way inside. It feels like he’s swimming through water. Everything moves slow and syrupy.

He knows exactly what stand she’ll be at, but he glances around the store on his way there anyway, just to make sure he doesn’t miss her. She’s nowhere else. Of course she’s nowhere else, she has to be at her stand, with her family, where she belongs - 

She isn’t there.

Five stops.

He looks blankly at all the mannequins again and again, triple checking their faces. Is this right? Can this be right? Are none of these really Delores?

Where is she?

He’s afraid to look away from the stand in case she appears suddenly and he misses it, but he manages to yank his gaze away and glimpse at all the other mannequins around. Is she visiting somewhere else?

No. She’s nowhere else.

She’s not there.

Five just… stops.

She has to be there. If she isn’t there, what is he going to do? Who is going to love him? How can he possibly survive?

He stares at the mannequin stand, waiting. She’ll show up, right? 

He waits. Nothing happens.

Five’s chest squeezes. He doesn’t breathe. His emotions are locked up, like a cage. Unmovable. Indecipherable. He wishes he could cry, but he can’t. He wishes he could do anything, but he doesn’t understand how to.

Is she dead? Did they throw her out? How is it possible that she could be gone?

The sounds of the store around him are low and vague. He hears a murmuring as an employee helps a customer close by. Somewhere in the distance, an unmemorable pop song is playing.

He knows what happened. They threw her away, because it’s been 7 years since he returned her and she’s a fucking mannequin.

His heart seizes in this throat. She isn’t real. She never was real. She can’t give Five the comfort he needs. She isn’t coming back.

His body breaks for him, because he can’t do it himself. He stands in the department store and looks at the mannequin stand and cries. It feels like a thick wet blanket wrapped around his throat. For once, he doesn’t think at all. He can’t. He just cries.

Of all things, he hears Vanya’s voice behind him. “Five?” He isn’t surprised, though he feels like he should be. He feels her hand on his shoulder.

“She’s dead,” he reports.

“Yeah,” Vanya responds.

Five turns to look at Vanya. She looks back at him. He blinks. 

“She didn’t have legs,” he says.

Vanya gives a sad half-smile. “Yeah."

She’s a real, physical, solid person next to him. Five’s world is a thick wet mess but he doesn’t even notice it as he looks at her. His brain orients itself on her presence, like the north star. She looks the same as always. Her hair is tied back. Except, wait.

“Is that a new jacket?” Five asks.

She looks down at herself and tugs on her sleeves. “Yeah, do you like it? Got it last week.”

“I do,” Five says. He feels very stupid, but also he doesn’t. The situation he’s in right now is ridiculous and unexplainable, but also he needs it.

“Do you want to get breakfast?” Vanya asks. She tilts her head over to the right, and Five looks over and sees Klaus there. 

Oh.

“Okay,” he nods. 

“Waffles,” Klaus announces.

“Waffles,” Five echoes.

They get waffles. It isn’t anything special, but it tastes like solid, comprehensible food. Its strange diner flavor sits pleasantly on Five’s tongue. It feels very real.

They don’t demand anything from him, and they listen when he talks. “She liked sequins,” he starts. Stops. He has no way of explaining his present half-existent state. And for once, he isn’t hiding anything. He has no reason left to hide this shaken, broken, disastrous not-a-person that he is because he hates himself so much. It feels awful, but it also feels more real than anything has in a long time, because he’s being seen for what he really is.

He looks at Klaus. “I got lonely.”

“I know, man,” Klaus says. “It happens.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t say anything,” Five says. 

“You don’t need to be,” Vanya responds. 

So Five inhales, and exhales away his guilt. Inhales, and exhales away his shame and embarrassment. Inhales, and exhales his fear.

He doesn’t want to hate himself anymore. It sucks. It’s too hard.

“I thought I needed her,” he says, quietly, looking into his coffee. “But she’s not real.”

Vanya makes a face. “That doesn’t mean she wasn’t real to you.”

“No, I mean,” Five shakes his head, “I can’t rely on her anymore. But I’m still here. I have to do it now.”

“Do what?”

But he doesn’t answer that. Not out loud.

They talk about some other nothing-things. Vanya also bought a new scarf last week, she tells them. Klaus talks about a podcast he’s been listening to. Five says the sunny weather yesterday was nice. It’s pleasant because none of it amounts to anything, and they all know it, so there’s no way he can fool them into thinking he’s something he’s not. He just is.

Eventually they make their way back home. They’ve unofficially decided to hang out the rest of the day, so Klaus puts on the podcast episode he was telling them about, and Vanya goes into the kitchen to make tea, and Five says he’s going to go shower but he’ll be right back. “If you don’t come back in 30 minutes, I’ll assume you went to another department store,” Klaus declares. It doesn’t bother Five like it once might have. Instead the solidity of it is comforting.

He turns on the shower. The sound of the water fills the silence and gives his brain room to think. He sits on the shower floor and feels the droplets hit his back.

Delores is gone. No one is left to forgive him except himself.

When the choice is between being hated or not, and the only one with the power to remove the hatred is himself, it’s an easy decision. But it’s difficult to fully process it through his body. He’s so, so not used to it, and fuck does it sound hard. It sits thick in his esophagus, like a candy he isn’t sure how to swallow.

Delores isn’t real, she never was, and she can’t do the work for him. He is real, and he can do the work instead. There is someone there to love him. It’s him.

It’s horrible how overwhelming it sounds. How does he do it? How does he even begin to love himself, completely on his own, with no support? 

No, wait. He corrects himself. He does have support. He edits the thought.

Allison is there if he doesn’t remember how to eat. Vanya is there if he doesn’t remember how to have a conversation. Klaus is there if he doesn’t remember how to let himself be sad. Luther is there to send him dog gifs to cheer him up, Diego is there to help him with stuff he doesn’t understand.

He can let himself be supported.

It’s so unfamiliar, it makes his skin crawl.

He wishes he didn’t have to change thinking about himself like this. He’s so old, and so tired. God, why can’t Delores still be here to do this for him? Why is caring so hard?

He sinks deeper into the metal cage of thoughts that he could never understand, the rigid structure of suspended emotions he could never let himself feel. It’s so sad how hard it is. It hurts that he has to do this work. It hurts that his dad was so awful and never taught him how to do this himself. It hurts that he lived in so much pain for 60 years.

The one person who cared about him is gone, because she was never real.

He sits on the floor of his shower and mourns her. He mourns the version of himself that needed her. The version of himself that he can’t be anymore.

He mourns the apocalypse, and what it did to him. He mourns the world he used to live in, where no one was around and he was too busy to have to experience emotions. He mourns how he got so used to it that he forgot he was a person, and how that ignorance made so many things easier, but made so many things harder now. And how painful it is to leave that person behind who kept him alive for so many years. That old self isn't useful anymore. He doesn’t need it.

He feels the smooth porcelain of the shower on his fingers. He feels his breath on his knees. He feels the water on his skin.

He feels… okay. He’s alive. He’s solid. He’s okay. 

His brain feels more… dimensional than before. Like he’s a more rounded person. He feels a new axis of thought within himself that he’s never felt. Like he’s pulled open a curtain to discover more space to grow on the other side. And isn’t that something? Having so much more space. It changes everything.

He lets the thoughts trickle through him and wash down the drain, with the rest of the dirt and grime.

He emerges from the bathroom just as he hears Klaus say, “I’m gonna check on him.” He can’t hold back a chuckle. His family is right there, and he’s safe and fine. He’s gonna be fine. 

He’s been so stupid. For so long. But he forgives himself, because he has to. And lets himself be.

Five turns 21 for the second time (66 for the first time), and he knows now how long a road he has ahead of him, but he’s ready to try growing up.