Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Title: Creeping Towards Extinction

Author’s Notes: I am obsessed with this series and more so with this tiny gremlin man. I’ve read the comics (which at the time of writing this the latest source referenced was Hotel Oblivion) and as you may/may not know, both mediums end in a similar cliffhanger. Therefore, this story is partially speculative of Season 3, but is not the core focus. (AKA this is convoluted way of saying !spoilers for one of the Sparrow Academy students’ powers, literally just based on a panel in the comics that gave no further context.)

No beta so please excuse the mistakes 

He times his jump disastrously and finds himself falling through the crisp, spring air of April 2^nd, 2019.

Five drops like a rock, arms floundering uselessly, a shout of surprise trapped in his throat. His shoulder slams onto the metal of the garbage container’s lid with a painful bang. Momentum proves itself equally as unkind as gravity, and he rolls off the container and onto the cold concrete ground like a tossed doll.

He lays on the floor pathetically, sucking in air through shivering teeth. His cheek is pressed against a puddle of rainwater, the stench burning his nose and eyes. His fingers twitch as he tries to move himself off his crumbled position, but finds himself incapable of even that simple movement.

Fuck, he thinks dizzyingly. Cold sweat has already latched onto his forehead. His ribs rattle with every wheeze.

Then, with more affirmation, he thinks, Fuck.

He’s completely depleted. No, further than that. His reserves were already empty when he made that last jump. Pure adrenaline and manic desperation were the only things utilized to rip open that iridescent hole. Any other circumstance and he would never even have considered such a foolhardy move. The risk is just way too high, even in the most irrational of situations.

Now, as he experiences that very risk reverberate his bones and steal his breath away, he understands the surrealness of his situation with grave clarity.

—And somewhere in the back of his head, his father’s cold, clipped words rumble like a rolling thunderstorm, adamant on reminding him just how futile his efforts are. No, he tells himself, no. Not now. Screw that bastard.

With more excruciating effort, he lifts his head off the ground. His vision dances, the brick walls swaying over the waving floor. A few blinks over his glazed eyes and his surroundings have announced themselves; Five finds himself smack in the middle of the alleyway behind the Academy mansion.

Though unsurprised, he can’t help the frustration that bubbles in the back of his throat. So much for getting away, he thinks bitingly. He’s hardly made any distance. He can still hear the noises of battle and chaos happening within the mansion’s walls. If anything, he’s made himself an easier target than before.

At the mouth of the alleyway, the world goes on. From the corner of his vision, he spots people going about their merry way and cars driving down the street in leisure, completely unaware of the disaster that Five and his siblings had stumbled into. Completely unaware that just yesterday, their world was flattened and burned to a crisp, everything and everyone reduced to a pile of putrid ash—

Five swallows thickly. He should move. He needs to get out of here, else those asshole replacement brats find him.

He rolls over, bending his knee underneath him. When he stands, the world lurches forward. Five staggers to the side, hand flailing as he tries to grab something for purchase. His abused shoulder collides against the wall, burning with white hot agony.

“Fucking—,” the word tumbles out his mouth like a mouthful of dirt. He leans against the wall, trying to keep himself up. If the world would stop spinning for one fucking second, that would be most appreciated.

Inside the mansion, objects shatter, something explodes, and somebody cries out ferociously. Five elects to ignore it all. He has his own problems to deal with right now. One of which is trying to catch his goddamn breath; he wheezes like a horse on the brink of exhaustion. His exhales scrape out of his body like sandpaper against cement, tearing apart this pathetic body from the inside out.

This is all wrong, he thinks with bitterness, and not with worry. He can’t worry about this now. He needs to focus.   

Five takes a tentative step forward, his legs wobbling precariously. The second step is less successful, and a wave of cold dizziness assaults him. He staggers forward before collapsing to his knees. His stomach heaves, and before he can prepare himself, Five twists his head and hurls the only proper meal he’s had in weeks onto the alleyway floor.

His vision blurs once more, and even the noises around him seemingly distort as Five presses the side of his head against the wall. Yet, the pandemonium happening within the Umbrella Aca—no, within the Sparrow Academy— those noises do not lessen.

His body is at complete revolt against him. An unnatural coldness laminates his clammy skin. His heart is hammering so ferociously beneath his ribs that Five can feel its ricochet against his chest. It’s absolute mutiny. He’s never experienced something this baffling before.

At least his mind is still with him. Presently, it remains focused at the original task at hand. The original order shouted at him from his siblings from across the room before all hell broke loose— possibly the only order he will ever follow from those selfish and simpleminded idiots.

Get out of here!

He wipes his mouth with the back of his sleeve. He needs to move. Needs to get as far away from the mansion as possible. Staying and fighting alongside the others has been aggressively crossed out as a reasonable option. He’s nothing more than a liability now. His powers are snuffed out, his body in agonizing turmoil. If he wants to give the others a chance at prevailing, he needs to ensure he’s not caught in the crossfire.

A bitter laugh escapes his lips. What a fucking turn of the tables, he thinks sardonically, or possibly maddeningly. Me, the one who needs to be protected. The one who needs to stay out of the way.

He shakes his head. He doesn’t dwell on the thought too much. He doesn’t need to. Five can endure this—he’s a survivor. The very foundation of his being is held by the pillars of raw, animistic instincts of survival. He’s survived an Apocalypse, for fuck’s sake. He can survive through this botched timeline, with or without his siblings. Staying alive is the only order he knows he can execute flawlessly.

Screw what the old man said.  

He coughs roughly, licks his lips, tasting blood.

He tries walking once more.

Five takes a step over one of the fallen Commission lackey's crumbled bodies. It doesn’t play out as he expected, however; when his heel meets the snowy patch of grass, his entire leg buckles and he crumbles to the ground.

“Whoa—Five!”

Diego is at his side immediately, grabbing his elbow in a vice grip to keep him falling flat on his face. For a moment, Five had forgotten he was there. He comes to a stumbling halt, involuntarily grabbing Diego’s forearm for additional support as his knee thumps onto the ground.

Five frowns and thinks, something’s wrong.

A harrowing sensation racks against his ribs and makes his heart stutter, and Five’s breath gets trapped in his lungs. He clenches his fists as the wave assaults his bones. It doesn’t hurt necessarily, but it does feel like he’s being hollowed out with a rusted spoon, which is a league away from painful.

He grits his teeth. Something is definitely wrong.

His chest feels strange. No— Is it his heart? He’s not too sure; he cannot accurately pinpoint where this sensation is originating from. All he’s certain of is that it feels strange. It had felt strange since he and Diego had tiptoed around the fallen Commission assassins to meet Herb and Dot. It had felt strange since he watched as Vanya coaxed the child to calm himself long enough for her to absorb her powers back, had felt strange since he tossed the gun aside and watched with wary eyes as the last of the Swedish boy band did the same, had felt strange since he snatched the gun from the Handler’s hands and pointed it at her—

“Seconds, not decades—"

“Five?”

Five blinks. His grip on his brother’s arm had tightened considerably, unbeknownst to him. Diego is looking at him oddly. Five scowls and pulls away from Diego’s hold harshly, nearly hugging the briefcase closer to his chest.

Diego huffs in annoyance, but doesn’t comment further. He straightens, looking over Five’s head. He hovers his hand over his brow to shield his eyes from the setting sun’s rays. “Those two really have their work cut out for them,” he says of Herb and Dot. He gives the body on the ground a half-hearted kick. “Lotta trash they gotta clean up. Glad I wasn’t headhunted for the body disposal department.”

Five ignores him.

He needs . . . a moment.

He sets the briefcase on the ground and sits on top of it carefully. His body feels much older than even his mind does, creaking and groaning with every bend of appendage. He pushes his disarrayed strands of hair away from his face, then stares at his hands.

Seconds, not decades, his father had told him, and goddammit did that self-righteous bastard choose a good time to be giving fatherly advice. It had worked, and Five is still reeling from the fact. He did it. He’d finally manipulated time to his exact will, and it worked— everything worked out.

But there’s a wrongness tagging along with his mental celebration. He wants to feel victorious, but that strange feeling in his chest is halting him. Going back those few seconds took more out of me than I expected. Fatigue has coiled itself around his body, stuffing his head with warm wooziness.

Seconds, not decades, and Five snorts softly. But that is easier to advise theoretically than to do in practice, old man. Jumping forward and backwards in time is a straightforward concept to grasp. It’s like scooping up sand. With decades, it’s cupping your hands into the sand and pulling forth a sizable amount. One heave and you’re done. Seconds is an entirely different task. It’s picking up each individual grain of sand with a pinch of your fingers. It’s utterly exhausting.

Five watches his fingers dig into his palm, hand forming a fist. The desperation of the moment, laying in that barn with his blood and life oozing out of him, his siblings once again still and lifeless around him, was enough incentive to render the task possible. But now, knowing how much energy and single-minded focus it took to perform, he’s unsure he’ll be giving it another go anytime soon. With how spent he feels now, he’s not entirely confident he can even perform a simple spatial jump.

Five shakes his head. No matter. He has survived, and that’s all that matters. The universe had tried to deal him an unwinnable hand, but this timeline had forgotten that’s he’s played this game. Five is a survivor, and he will always push the very foundation of limitations to ensure that he survives.

His body is perhaps paying the price for it now, but it’s immaterial. Once he’s back in 2019 and adequately rested, he’ll be back to his usual vigor and will pursue the subject further.

2019—the number rolls in his mind. A manic chuckle threatens to bubble of his throat. This would be, what? The third time he drops himself into that year? And each time he’s visited, the same horrendous host would greet him at the door with open, fiery arms. The apocalypse is quickly turning into a shadow that he cannot detach himself from. It’s always there, following him around no matter how many times he’s survived it.

Five digs his fingers into the snow. They are as pale as the ash of an apocalyptic world, and cold and mercilessly as the winter of a dead world. If he stares long enough, he can see the heads of the cockroaches peeking through the white, eager to scurry over to his fingers and nibble on something warm, something alive—

Something shifts, the snow moves. Five looks up. Diego is in front of him now. He’s sat himself on the ground as well, patiently watching as Five mulls over his thoughts in suffocating silence. Five blinks owlishly, momentarily surprised at his presence and then at himself for forgetting his presence.

When their eyes meet, Diego’s face softens. “You good?”

The question is quiet, and there are traces of concern in the words. It makes Five’s blood boil.

“Don’t ask stupid questions,” Five snaps immediately.

He stands up briskly and pulls the briefcase with him, marching towards the bullet ridden house in this godforsaken part of Texas. He hears Diego mutter something close to “pissy little shit”, but his brother trails behind him regardless.

Five’s eyes are narrowed. He’ll deal with the peculiarities of his body later. Right now, he needs to get his idiotic family back to their proper timeline once and for all. That is his only priority. Everything else is superfluous.

A window shatters sharply above Five, startling him.

Diego is thrown across the alley from the destroyed window, his back slamming onto the wall before he falls flat on his face onto the ground. His brother groans miserably, rolling onto his back. Shards of glass trickle off his body in ominous chimes.

“C-Crazy witch,” he hears Diego cough to no one in particular. He stumbles on to his feet, shaking his head to toss away the last of the glass from his wild hair. He’s poised to make a mad dash out of the alley, but has the common sense to give his surroundings a quick cursory glance first.

Then his eyes find Five’s.

“Wha—Five!?”

Five has made incredibly small progress in his attempt to distance himself from the mansion. He’d managed a few additional steps before a cold wave of nausea racked through his body, clattering his bones like bamboo wind-chimes. He slumped against the wall, succumbing to a harsh coughing fit, before he felt himself go lax, his body shivering from the onslaught of unnatural assaults. He told himself he’d continue his escape later. Later had long since passed.

Diego skids to a kneel beside him. “Five!” He grabs his shoulders and props him upright. Five’s head lolls, brushing against Diego’s knuckles. “What the hell, man? You’re supposed to be long gone from here! Are you hurt? Did you get hit?”

His brother is talking too quickly to understand. Five tries to meet his eyes, but his lids keep obstructing his vision. “Di-Dieg—,” the word fumbles in his mouth, his tongue too heavy to do its job properly, his breathes coming out too quickly to make room for his voice.

“Shit- hey, look at me.” A hand grabs his chin, and Five is looking at Diego. His brother’s eyes are wide, panic etched onto every line. There’s blood on his forehead, and a budding bruise above his jaw. Five looks down to inspect the rest of Diego’s state, and his vision darkens.

The hand around his chin tightens. “Hey, no, no- Come on, bro, keep your eyes open. Five, hey. Look at me— Where are you hurt?”

Five can only shake his head. He tries once more at speaking, but suddenly his chest clenches in foreboding familiarity. Five grits his teeth, eyes squeezing shut as the upsurge of agony shudders through his body once more, squeezing his heart and lungs with cold, skeletal hands.

A coughing fit overtakes him, each harsh outburst more painful than the last, shaking the very groundwork of his body. When it passes, Five is left absolutely breathless and lightheaded.

For a moment, he thinks he’d slipped back into unconsciousness. With the window on the mansion blown apart, the noises of chaos happening within the Academy’s walls are more pronounced. Five reaches for that noise, using it to ground himself. His eyes flutter open.

Diego is looking at him with open worry now. “Shit, Five,” his brother says helplessly. “Your nose is bleeding.”

Five doesn’t feel it. His skin is numbingly cold. “D-Diego,” he manages to gasp out, but at this point he’s forgotten what he wanted to originally convey. His lungs are scorching. Breathing is a laborious task, and each exhale that pushes past his throat is more painful than the one before it.

Realization dawns over Diego’s face. “It was the jumps, wasn’t it?” The hand on his shoulder is squeezing much too tightly. The muscles in Diego’s jaw jumps as he comes to his epiphany. “You over did them.”

It’s not as simple as that, but Five is way past the point of expanding upon it. He simply nods, and watches as Diego’s frustration mingles with his concern. “Damn—”

A blur of motion flies out of the window Diego was ejected from.

His brother scrambles to his feet quickly, placing himself in front of Five. The sound of feet touching the ground in a graceful landing meets Five’s ears, as does the odd sound of the flapping of wings and the screeching of crows. 

Diego’s feet scrape the ground as he widens his stance. He says tightly, “You assholes just don’t know when to quit, huh?”

“Funny,” A woman’s voice says with little humor. “I was going to say the same thing to you, dropout.”

Shit, Five thinks. He doesn’t need to look to know one of the Sparrow Academy students had followed Diego out. They’re persistent little brats. Then, with a harsher scowl, he thinks, Naturally, since a half-assed job won’t do much to please daddy.

Diego’s body completely shields the girl from Five’s sight, but the opposite was probably his brother’s true intention. He’s stiff with apprehension, despite the casual comments he throws her way. And he has a right to be apprehensive; Five doesn’t know what this woman’s powers are, but he’s certain that both he and Diego are currently no match for her.

He can see how Diego’s fingers twitch towards his back instinctively, knowing there’s nothing there. He’s out of knives and I’m out of juice. Diego’s slow backing is enough evidence to tell Five that his brother has come to a similar conclusion— we’re fucked.

Five peels himself off the wall. Diego and the woman are trading weak insults back and forth like schoolchildren. Good. It keeps their focus away from him as he scrappily climbs back to his feet.

His eyes take stock of their surroundings. This space is too tight and narrow, and of our two exits, one of them is blocked. If she were to attack the two of us here, we’d be fertilizer for the garden within seconds. We wouldn’t even have time to blink.

He spares a glance behind him. But we still have one exit. Five runs the options through his fog muddled head— I can probably try and blink a few feet away with Diego, although the probability of that killing me is laughingly high. I’m too weak to try and outrun her- maybe I can distract her and let Diego make a run for it . . . no, the idiot’s hero complex is too convoluted to even consider that. He’ll probably try to distract her and have me run, but I doubt I can crawl out of here let alone run.

The woman barks a haughty laugh, not impressed with whatever Diego had to say. She takes a step forward. Diego takes a step back. Five’s finger twitches. Fighting is out, and just one of us escaping is out. We need to get out of here together, and we need to get her off our asses if we want to survive.

At the mouth of the alleyway, a car speeds by in breakneck speed. Another car honks loudly in protest, and a pedestrian shouts unprompted, “Slow the hell down, asshole!”

Five blinks, an idea emerging. “Diego,” he hisses.

Diego doesn’t turn around, but holds out an arm to keep him back. Five sneers at the gesture. He grabs his brother’s forearm, nails digging into skin to keep himself balanced, and to relay his urgency. “Dieg—”

The woman pokes her head to the side. Her grin is sharp when she spots Five. “Hey, kiddo! You still here?”

He ignores her easily. Diego’s posture stiffens at her acknowledgement of his existence, but Five is too tired to roll his eyes at his brother’s sudden protective instincts. “Listen,” Five pants, his voice straining. Diego finally raises his chin enough to meet his eyes. “Th-The . . . street. They can’t—”

Five doubles over, his hand grasping desperately at his chest, over his erratic heart. He can’t fucking breathe. His words are merely puffs of air that are swept away by the wind. He can’t deal with this right now. He needs to speak, needs to spell it out to his hopelessly reckless idiot of a brother, who is clearly about to jump into a fight that he can’t possibly win—

The pain finally lessens after an eternity, and Five picks his head up, sweat rolling down his temples. Disoriented, he can’t help the blink of surprise at seeing his brother still beside him. He truly expected Diego to ignore him and charge at the woman in a glorious display of stupidity.

He feels a warmth of gratefulness flutter in his chest. Perhaps it’s the sight of his sorry state, or the frantic clinging of his brother’s arm that is making Diego listen to him for once in his life. The desperation of the situation has clearly been understood by Diego.

Five tries to speak again, ignoring the impatient tapping of the woman’s foot from in front of them. “Th—the . . .”

“The street,” Diego repeats slowly, low enough for the both of them to hear.

Five nods tiredly. He can’t elaborate further, else he’ll suffocate himself. He stares at Diego with wide, imploring eyes, intent on making his brother understand through expression alone. Because his reasoning is simple— If the Sparrow Academy was raised by Reginald Hargreeves, then it’s safe to assume that he raised them in a similar manner as the Umbrella Academy—to be heroes of the people. Heroes who would not harm the public, even if they were chasing down a dangerous culprit in the middle of the day. A hero would try to minimize collateral damage as much as possible, minimize starting a panic within the innocent bystanders, minimize the use of their destructive powers—

Diego blinks, his eyes widening. It clicks for him. Five could melt from the relief alone.

The woman raises her arms, a wave of transparent energy revving up as she prepares to the use of her powers. A herd of crows fly in circles above them, squawking in deprivation. “Well, this just got boring. Time to wrap it up— hey!”

Diego forgoes all pretenses of engaging her further. His eyes harden in resolution. In an incredible display of speed and upper body strength, he turns around, grabs Five’s arm, and hauls him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and sprints towards the street without looking back.

“Dieg—dieg—Diego!” Five sputters indigently, his chin bounces against his brother’s back with every frenzied step he takes.

“You got a better method, bro!?” Diego shouts over him, skidding on the sidewalk as he makes a sharp turn down the street. He adjusts his hold on his brother with a shrug, his shoulder digging into Five’s stomach. “Is she tailing us?”

Five groans as he pushes his body off of Diego’s back enough to look up from the ground. Every person they pass seems to have an incredibly irate expression on their face, others stumbling aside roughly with a scowl and an incensed shout. Clearly, Diego doesn’t give a shit about politely making his way down the sidewalk.

Five squints his eyes, trying to see straight in this incredibly odd vantage point. A few paces back, he spots a newly familiar face making her way down the crowded sidewalk.

“On our ass,” Five huffs, falling back against Diego’s back. His brother curses, picking up speed, but Five is less concerned. Just as he surmised, the woman has withheld using her powers, and is trying her best to meekly chase after them without creating a panic.

As Diego sprints down the sidewalk, roughly pushing passed the unsuspecting citizens with little regard to their balance, the woman is carefully zigzagging through them, her powers put on pause as she helps those fallen over or irate with the situation.

Five snorts. What an amateur.

Diego makes another turn. The ground’s color changes from grey to black. A car’s horn blares deafly into his ear. The ground turns back to grey. Five closes his eyes, the disorientation so overwhelming that he’s confident his brain is about to bleed out of his ears.

A few nauseating minutes pass and finally, Diego stops running.

Five is maneuvered off his shoulder and onto the ground, propped up against something cold and unfeeling. His stomach does somersaults inside him, and he kneels over to heave and cough out absolutely nothing, his organs pushing against one another as if they’re the ones wanting to be thrown up. He can hear Diego murmur apologetically, “I know, I know.”

Five opens his eyes to find the world twisted and bloated, only to right itself after a few excruciating blinks. Oh. He’s in a driveway of some sorts. Diego had taken them down the scenic route, his goal clearly being to remove themselves from the commercial area and into some random, innocent neighborhood where no one would expect to search.

Beside him, Diego is breathing harshly as he bends over a car door, picking the lock with something small and sharp. Ah, so they’re stealing a car. Makes sense.

Five looks around. The woman chasing them is nowhere in sight. The general population is also scarce, which is to be expected in the afternoon of a workday in a residential neighborhood. Above him, the sun shines down like a spotlight. The sky is clear and bright.

Not too far from the sun, the moon is visible in the sky, full and pale and mockingly clear. It looks almost like a skull, grinning down at the world like it knew a devastating secret. Five shudders.

The door clicks and Diego grunts in success. He opens the front door a little too roughly. He pulls Five to his feet and settles him in the seat, maneuvering his legs into the car and pulling the seat-belt over his chest. He shuts the door carefully and rounds the car to sit himself at the driver’s seat.

Five’s head rolls to the side, watching as his brother pulls apart the casing underneath the steering wheel to expose a mess of colorful wires. Diego hunches over, frantically but with steady familiarity tugging at the wires in search of the ones that would get the car to start.

His hands shake as he manipulates the wires. His curses are soft as nothing happens, and his aggravation only simmers as he tries to untangle the array of colors. “Fuck,” he hisses when he connects the yellow and green wire, only to be met with silence. “Fuck!” He says louder, when connecting the yellow and red wire proves equally unsuccessful. “Fucking fuck, stupid piece of shit!” He roars, yanking the entire entanglement of wires down as he slams his foot over and over again on the gas pedal.

A suffocating silence wraps around them when he finally calms down. Diego puts his hand over his eyes, his breathes haggard and his body vibrating with misplaced fury. He grabs the steering wheel, dipping his forehead to let it touch the wheel.

“He just tossed us aside like we were nothing.” Diego’s voice is precariously quiet.

Five swallows thickly. He knows precisely what Diego is referring to, but Five does not want to delve into that right now. Besides, it wasn't their father who said those words. He thinks he should tell Diego that, as some method of consolidation. That man in the mansion was not the man who raised them. He's just this timeline's version of him, so his words shouldn't mean anything to them. The old man doesn't know anything about them. He has no right to presume their place in the world. They're not defects, or failed experiments, or whatever other nonsense dad had spewed. They're just trying to get home, to save the world. Doesn't dad see that? Five is only trying to fucking survive—

Five bites his tongue. It’s irrelevant, he insists to himself, calming himself. Irrelevant. 

Diego bares his teeth. His voice raises. “Like we were fucking nothing! After everything we did, after everything we had to go through—!” He punches the steering wheel. “He couldn’t even look at us! Tried to make those im—imp—impostors take us out like we were trash! He doesn’t even care about us anymore!”

He never cared about us from the beginning, Five wants to tell his brother. His memories of his childhood might be fuzzy, but he at least could distinctively remember the lack of paternal bones in Reginald Hargreeves’ body. He was never a father to us to begin with. We were just tools. Just like these new kids are.

“I’ll . . .fix’t” Five tries to speak, snake in some reassurance to get his brother to simmer down and stay on track, but his words are so incredibly slurred he’s not sure he sounds coherent.

Diego looks crushed. He reaches over gingerly, hand on Five’s shoulder, thumb digging into his collarbone. He’s been doing that a lot, recently. Touching him. “Five . . .” He trails off, eyes searching his face helplessly. “You look like fucking hell, man.” His brother sounds so distraught, so scared. “Are you alright? What do . . . what do I do?”

Five shakes his head tiredly. There’s nothing he can do, and there’s nothing Five wants him to do. He raises a tremoring hand to push away Diego’s. Survival, that’s all they need to do. That’s all Five needs to do. Survive. Survive, Survive, Survive, Survive, Survive—

Diego’s expression hardens, and within the silence he answers his own question. “We’ll find the others,” He mutters, confidence edging in-between his words. He nods to himself. “We’ll—we’ll figure this out, together. As a family, alright? We just need to,” –Survive, Five thinks hauntingly—“Stick together. Everything’s gonna be alright. It’ll be fine. You’ll be fine.”

Diego connects the red wire to the blue wire, and the car starts with a shudder and a sigh.

Chapter Text

Chapter Two: They Serve Me Life in A Rusted Gauntlet, Poison Brimming

The couch is a bullet-riddled mess.

Foam spills out from every vicious hole that punctures the fabric. Snow has fluttered through the gaping tear on the side of the house, making the cushions chilled and moist. Five sits on it with his legs crossed, the briefcase sitting over his knees as he tinkers with its internal hardware. He’s sat on worse things before.

Klaus is sitting on the floor in a similar position, only he has a plate balanced precariously on his knee. He is eating a ham sandwich, of which Five has no idea how he procured. His brother takes slow, methodical bites, chewing ever so carefully as if it were the most delicious thing in the world.

His other siblings are also in this bland living room, chatting amongst themselves in various volumes, depending on how passionate they are on their particular point. Five pays them the absolute bare minimum of attention; his focus pinpointed onto the briefcase in his possession.

Five pulls one wire and inserts it into a different port. The briefcase gives a soft beep, and Klaus’ eyebrows shoot up, peeking over like a curious puppy. He opens his mouth, ready to ask for the hundredth time, “Did ya break your toy there, sport?” but Five cuts him off with a sharp glare. Klaus grins, making a zipping motion across his mouth.

A gust of wind blows chilled air onto Five’s skin. He wonders if the steaming sensation is just in his head.

At the tedious task laid out in front of him, Five clicks his tongue. Before they’re issued to the temporal assassins, all Commission briefcases have the destination and time preprogramed into them. This briefcase, along with all the other ones littered across the farm, have been programmed to Dallas, Texas on November 22^nd, 1963. All roundtrip flights, and Five, naturally, is in no rush to pay Headquarters a visit, so he fiddles with the controls to enable him access to customize the next trip. It’s annoyingly monotonous, but he’s managed to already change the location, leaving the date his last obstacle.

Klaus sets his plate on the leg of the overturned table. He pats his belly, sighing and smiling wistfully. Diego, Luther, and Allison continue their conversation from the corner of the room, the words, “home”, “Ray”, and “body” being thrown around with no decipherable context.

Five connects another wire to another port, twists the squared knob, presses a few buttons, and the briefcase chimes in success.

Another gust of warm air turns cold on his skin.

He shuts the casing and flips the briefcase over, fingers hovering over the rotating padlock that’s currently set on the numbers 22111963. His thumb touches the dials, flicking the first two digits over to 0 and 2. He swallows dryly and changes the next two numbers to be 0 and 4, and finally, with cold sweat latching onto the back of his neck, the next four rotations showcase the number 2019.

His fingers are shaking by the end of it, the air leaving his mouth too warm and dry and fast. He remembers April 2^nd 2019 with vivid clarity. It was the morning after his reckless jump, and his eyes had snapped open, childishly hoping and praying that it had all been an over-imaginative nightmare. That he wasn’t in this inferno of death and destruction and desolation. That he was still in the Academy with his brothers and sisters, surrounded by life and color and love. Only to realize, with bone-crushing despair, that he was not entirely wrong. He was in the Academy, the building collapsed and burned to the ground like it was never built to last in the first place. He was with his siblings, unbeknownst to him at the time, their mangled bodies spread out on the other side of the city, like a crown of thorns.

Sometimes, if he looks at his siblings long enough, their lifeless faces start to overlay their current ones, meshing together to make it seem like he was interacting with animated corpses.

Another breeze, a lick of decay on his ashen skin.

The winters were the cruelest. A breath shudders out of his mouth, a white cloud of air that is the only proof that he is alive. He would watch it evaporate into the air, wondering if his existence would soon meet the same fate.

02042019, the padlock says now, tauntingly and with an ominous snicker. Five is staring at the numbers with wide, unblinking eyes. A whistle of wind slithers by, blowing ash and deterioration onto Five’s clothes, coating his hands with lifelessness.

The winters were the cruelest. The clouds were always overcast, never dispelling, heavy with a weight that pressed him down to the earth, a butterfly trapped under a net. The snow’s gentle trickle from the sky nothing but a façade to hide its rabid bite. The howl of the wind his only company, a mournful hymn.

Five exhales. Ah, there goes his breath, escaping the warmth of his lungs to die out in this unfeeling world.

The winters are the cruelest, Five thinks, blinking away the ash from his lashes. The cold burns his skin harsher than any fire. Colors are snuffed out, and the clouds loom over him like titans. It is a thief, the winter, but it always took care to leave him the scent of burnt and rotten flesh. That scent never leaves him, even when all his other senses abandon him. He inhales cold and the remains of humanity—

Klaus burps loudly.

Five blinks, and the ash disappears.

His head shoots up and he glares at Klaus, who in turn grins and asks, “Did ya fix it, champ?”

Five tries to swallow through a dry throat. “Bite me.”

He kicks Klaus out of the way and stands in the space he was ejected from. He shakes his head, blinking roughly to restart his mind and tether himself back to this shithole house and timeline.

Hand gripping tightly to the handle of the briefcase, he tells Klaus, “Go get Vanya. We’re leaving in five minutes.”

Klaus frowns.

The conversation in the corner of the room is halted abruptly. Allison is staring at him exasperatingly, and Diego shakes his head, snorting sardonically. Luther clears his throat and says hesitantly, “Five. Uh. Were you . . . not listening to that whole conversation we just had?”

Five purses his lips to keep himself from lashing out. It doesn’t work out as well as he hoped. “No, Luther, I was not listening. And moving forward, you should always assume I’m never listening to your insignificantly trivial conversations. Now,” he gives Klaus another kick. “Go get Vanya so we can get the hell out of here.”

Klaus cringes, looking over to his other siblings helplessly.

Luther clears his throat again, his awkward energy practically suffocating the man. “Well, the thing is- we had agreed,” he gestures to the others, as if their support would give his statement any credibility, “that maybe it would be best if we . . . wait.”

“Wait.” The word is spat out like something foul.

“Five, we’re tired.” Allison says loudly. She’s pinching the bridge of her nose. “We were fighting for our lives less than an hour ago. We need a break. Some time to . . . to catch our breaths and rest a bit—"

“You need a break? You’re tired? I’m sorry, does this look like some kind of resort to you?”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Are you sure? Because for a moment there, I thought your selfish little brain wanted to stay in this timeline a bit longer so you can fuck it all up and throw the world into more chaos!”

“Hey!” Diego takes a step forward. “Cool it, bro. It’s not like we’re asking to stay here for a few more days—"

“It doesn’t matter what you’re asking because we don’t have the luxury for any amount of time!”

“We get that,” Diego snaps back at him. “But a few hours of us just chilling in this house is not going to end the world.”

“The world already ended, you idiot!” His patience is running hazardously thin. “Don’t you get it? Every second we spend here is a colossal shift to the current timeline! How, how, do you idiots still not comprehend this? I physically cannot dumb it down any further for you.”

“But we saved the timeline,” Luther tells him, and Five’s eyes flash. “We stopped the Apocalypse, right? So, it’s not like we can start another one if we—"

Five grabs Klaus’ plate and hurls it across the room.

It explodes into a million little porcelain pieces on impact. His siblings startle, staring at him with wide eyes.

“Explain to me how the Apocalypse works,” Five seethes to Luther, “and you will permanently lose the ability to explain anything.”

Luther sets his jaw, swallowing. The air in the room is sucked dry, a bloated silence taking its place.

“Five, come on,” Allison finds her voice first. “You’re blowing this way out of proportion. All we’re asking for is a couple of hours to cool off, get our bearings. Until it gets dark, the latest.”

“Now that,” Five shakes his head, a manic laugh creeping out of his mouth. “Now that is rich. You guys want me to abide to a deadline?” The laugh splinters out. “I seem to recall this very same situation playing out in reverse. Remind me, how the hell did that work out?”

“That is not fair,” Allison says tightly. “We tried to come. I tried to. It’s not like I didn’t meet up with you because—”

“Because you were too busy gallivanting around in your new, perfect little life as some housewife?” Five taunts, unable to help himself now as his blood boils with misplaced frustration. “Or because you were too busy finding new ways to insert yourself into a timeline you didn’t belong to?”

“Five!” Diego barks in between Klaus’ sharp intake of breath and Allison’s affronted stammering. “Knock it off!”

“I’m trying to get you idiots home! While there’s still a home to get back to! I have been trying to get you home for days, and you all threw away every viable opportunity I handed to you! I am not giving you guys a chance to toss this one away for some egotistical reason, so we are leaving right now—"

Luther struts forward and yanks the briefcase out of Five’s hand in one swift motion.

It’s such an unexpected and quick move that Five is momentarily stunned. When he finally manages to get his bearings after a dumbfounded blink, Five’s face contorts into one of absolute fury and he lunges at his brother like a wild animal. “Luther, you goddamn—”

Luther easily holds him back with an open palm, his monstrous strength completely undeterred by his brother’s swipes. Five tries to steal back the briefcase, but Luther just moves the arm holding it behind his back and out of Five’s reach. Immensely frustrated, Five swings his leg back for a devastating kick, but his brother quickly pivots his lower half to the side, the kick landing on Luther’s thigh rather than Five’s original destination.

“Damn it, Number One!” Five seethes, stepping back as he recognizes he’s been laughingly outmaneuvered by his simpleton of a brother. He’s simmering, out of breath from the brief quarrel and multitude of fuming emotions. “Give it back! I don’t have time to entertain your newly-found display of juvenile self-righteousness—"

“Five, I need you to calm down. Ah,” he holds up a placating hand when Five’s eyes bulge at the very notion that he—, “Just . . . stop, for a second, alright? No one is trying to pick a fight with you, I promise. We’re too tired for that. Just hear us out.”

He can hardly hear anything at this point, his blood pumping loudly and angrily through his ears. He glares at his siblings but is not met with the same heat. Tired and exasperated eyes meet his. God, they all look pathetic. Allison’s complexion is hauntingly pale, the remnants of nearly suffocating to death slow to leave her features. There are cuts and welts marring Diego’s face and neck, exhausted bruises weighing down Klaus’ eyes, slumped shoulders drooping the rest of Luther’s features.  

Pathetic, Five thinks with a sneer. They’re all pathetic.

Do they think they’ve accomplished their mission? Do they think they’re finished, that they have survived? They are fools, a bumbling assortment of naivety. So what if they’re tired? Five is tired, he’s been tired for nearly half a century, but that doesn’t matter. It didn’t matter back then, and it certainly doesn’t matter now.

Because he still needs to survive. They still need to survive.

They did not save the world, he wants to growl at them. Not until Five sees it with his own two eyes. He needs to make sure, make sure that 2019 is not an apocalyptic wasteland, and he can’t do that until he leaves here. Don’t they see that? He needs to make sure. He needs to see that that fucking dead world is completely erased from the universe, wiped clean from his mind.

He needs to see it, he needs to make sure, he needs to see it, he needs to see it, he needs to fucking confirm it right now–

Five blinks. The haze over his mind suddenly dissipates. He doesn’t even remember when it came.

He purses his lips, clenching his jaw to stop his teeth from clattering. Shit, he thinks, overwhelmed.

Luther brings down his arm, the briefcase hanging next to his side. He continues in that unwavering, calm voice, “This is exactly why we need some time before we jump forward. The adrenaline is wearing off, and we can barely stay on our feet. We can’t bounce back from multiple near-death experiences in five minutes. We’re human, Five. We all need to rest.”

“You can do that in 2019,” Five says tightly. His voice is unnaturally scratchy. “In the mansion, in your own crappy beds and in our own shitty timeline where it’s safe.”

Allison speaks up, arms crossing over her chest. “When we say “we”, Five, like it or not, you’re included in that grouping. Deny it all you want, but we know you’re the one in need of rest the most.”

“Thanks, Allison,” Five drawls. “But if I really wanted a bunch of immature brats worrying about my well-being, I’d shoot myself in the kneecaps and crawl to a nursery school.”

Diego scowls harshly. “Stop deflecting, you little prick. We’re doing this for you. We know you’re exhausted; don’t think we haven’t noticed. You’ve been insanely working to stop two apocalypses in a matter of weeks with hardly any rest. Take a goddamn nap and eat something so you don’t fall flat on your face when we land in 2019.”

“Oh, spare me the doting brother routine, would you?”

“Doting?” Diego snorts. “Don’t flatter yourself, old man. We just don’t want to be hauling your lanky ass around when you inevitably collapse from the sheer weight of your bullshit.” He cocks an eyebrow. “Or did you think I’d forget about your little stumble after grabbing the briefcase?”

Five's features are expertly schooled, but internally he thinks, shit. He had hoped Diego would've just thought he had tripped over one of the sprawled bodies. So now he chooses to become observant. How convenient. He pushes his lie through his teeth. “Don’t try to exaggerate one meaningless stumble into some ridiculous justification for your selfishness. I am fine, and you self-centered idi—”

“Why haven’t you blinked?” Luther asks bluntly.

Five covers his falter with a scoff. “That hardly has any relevance in this—”

“You could have just,” Luther makes whirring noise, trying to imitate the sound of Five’s powers. “You know, blinked and took the briefcase from me earlier, piece of cake. But you haven’t. Still haven’t.”

The lie is on the tip of his tongue, but Diego eagerly cuts in, “It’s because you can’t, right? Not just because you’re too tired from jumping. Nah, we all know how fast you bounce back after you binge-jump. Your last blink was, what? Back in the barn? You should be in tip top shape by now, but you’re not. So, what is it?”

“Irrelevant,” Five says too quickly.

“Ah,” Diego smirks. “You’re not denying it. How about this, if you can pull your head out of your ass and admit you’re exhausted, then we’ll pop open that briefcase right now and get out of here.”

“I don’t have to explain myself to you,” Five grits out.

Klaus groans, holding his face. “Guys. I’m getting so dizzy from all the circles we’re running around in.” He drags down his hands, pulling along his face. “Can we, I don’t know, stop bullying the old man for a hot second?" He reaches over, tugging the sleeve of Five's pants. "Hey, Five. Hey.”

“What?” He snaps.

Klaus is fiddling with the dog tags around his neck, a thoughtful pout etched onto his face “You’re right, we’re selfish brats for wanting to stay and lick our wounds, yadda, yadda, yadda.” He looks up, trying to meet Five’s eyes. “But we should at least give Vanya some time to say goodbye to Sissy. We owe her that much, don’t you think?”

Five’s mouth curls, prepared to throw a hideous remark about how Vanya, out of all them, cannot be granted such a priceless luxury. But whatever retort Five had gets trapped in his throat.

There’s a cloud over Klaus’ eyes. At first glance, Five easily mistakes it for the drug infused haze that his brother usually sports. His ire grows, but then just as quickly settles. No, that haunted expression is not the result of any drug.

It’s grief.

Oh.

All his siblings have a similar expression, Five realizes. Allison’s eyes are glossy and faraway, and he realizes her ashen complexion is not just the result of strangulation. She is in mourning, he realizes. Mourning the man that loved her as equally as she loved him. Luther’s expression is glazed over, ghostly, stricken with the realization that the father he had imagined Hargreeves to be was always dead and gone. Diego’s eyes are sunken but forcibly dry, resolved to not think of the girl who he had grown so closely with, only for her to whisk herself away with one last crushing look back.

If Vanya were to walk into the room right now, he’s certain her expression would be one of pure heartbreak.

Five’s nails are digging into his palms. It is absolutely frustrating, how young and soft they are.

Why couldn’t they just focus on a singular goal, instead of hurting themselves with these fickle attachments? Survival should have been the only thing on their mind. They should have told themselves that getting home was the priority, and everything else was just superfluous. That’s what Five would have done. That’s what Five did. He was able to sever himself from Dolores the minute The Handler came knocking on the apocalypse’s proverbial door instantaneously. He never gave himself a moment to mourn, because that would have distracted him from his goal.

Because that’s what must be done in order to ensure one’s survival. Can’t they see that? In order to survive, one must become a survivor.

His siblings are not that.

Five wants to be angry, but instead he feels his age twice fold. Of course they are not that. Because that’s what Five has been fighting for, isn’t it? Survive long enough to put a stop to the end of the world, so his family can survive as well. If they were as cutthroat and cruel as him, then Five would have failed.

Fuck, he thinks harshly. Of course his family is acting like this. He’s a fool to think that they could ever be similar to him.

There’s no one like me.

Five exhales deeply through his nose.

“Give me the briefcase, Luther.” His voice quiet, controlled. “Before your ape hands crush it.”

His brother doesn’t hesitate. The briefcase feels incredibly heavy in Five’s hand. It weighs him down, tethering him to this world, like an anchor holds down an abandoned, battered ship in an evaporated ocean.

“The minute it gets dark,” he mutters, not meeting any of their eyes. “We leave.”

They all exhale as one. Klaus reaches for his arm, a sloppy smile on his face as he says, “Thanks, bud—” but Five harshly pulls away and stalks into the next room, surrounding himself with the hauntingly familiar companionship of solitude.

He is shaken out of unconsciousness only to find himself drowning.

“Five!” Someone’s muffled voice says, and the jostling of his shoulder becomes more frantic.

Five’s eyes open, and he chokes. He’s not submerged underwater; he's in the car, breathing air, but he’s still drowning.

The space he’s in is too small, and only adds to his suffocating agony. His hands blindly unclip the seat-belt across his chest and he pushes the car door open, staggering out of the vehicle, not yet of sound mind to register how reckless that might have been had the car been moving.

He folds onto his knees, palms slapping the pavement, coughing out the ocean that clogs his throat and threatens to pull him back down into the abyss. Dark red splatters onto the ground heavily. He coughs deeply and wetly and feels years of his life being expelled out of him.

Blearily, he hears a car door open and feet scraping on tarmac. A hand is on his back, rubbing rough circles between his shoulder blades as a string of curses and reassurances mingle the quiet, night air.

Air replaces the blood, and Five is finally able to breathe correctly. He stares at the gore he spat out with morbid curiosity. His breaths seem to come out from the very bottom of his lungs, rattling out of his mouth in noisy wheezes.

He’s so unbelievably tired. He dips his head, and it touches the ground. It is bitingly cold and jagged, but it tethers him to this world.

He breathes out. No white clouds stream out of his mouth. The air is hot and unforgiving, but his teeth clatter from the coldness inside him.

Hands gingerly guide him to his feet, settling him back into the car. He lets himself be maneuvered because he is absolutely certain his body wouldn’t comply if he gave the orders. The door is pulled closed, but Five feebly stops it with his toe. He doesn’t want to be closed in. He doesn’t want to suffocate again. The door remains open.

Diego is outside the mouth of the car door, kneeling to look up at Five with wide, frightened eyes. His brother looks incredibly stressed, his face a lined mess of worry. He has a hand on Five’s knee, fingers digging into skin with urgency.

“Jesus, Five,” he breathes, searching his brother’s face. “Jesus. What happened to you? What’s going on? Please, I’m—you’re scaring me, bro.”

Five closes his eyes, shaking his head wearily. It’s fine. Everything is fine. It’ll pass. Diego has no reason to be concerned. Five has experienced worse pains than this. Granted, this agony is completely unprecedented and possibly worse than Five was expecting it to be—but it’s fine. There are worse things that can happen.

Diego’s face pinches when rattled breathing is the only reply. He begins patting down Five bodily, ignoring his brother’s shabby groans of protest. Hands tug at his jacket, at his shirt, at his sleeve, pressing on his stomach, chest, arms, and legs with trained accuracy, searching for a physical injury on Five’s pathetically small body. Five wants to tell him it’s no use; Diego won’t find anything. The only life-threatening injuries have been reversed, his jump back in time erasing the onslaught of bullets that tore apart his middle.

Although, sometimes, Five can still feel the phantom pain of a ripped stomach, of mangled internal organs and—

“What pain?” Diego asks urgently. Five frowns, eyes fluttering back open. Did he say that aloud? Shit, I’m becoming incoherent. “Five, come on, look at me. Where does it hurt?”

“Sh-Shut . . .” Five pants out, weakly pushing away Diego’s jittery hands. “Up.” Damn, that wasn’t as eloquent as he would have liked. Talking is a laborious task that squeezes out whatever energy he has remaining. He slumps deeper into his seat, smoothing out his jacket that Diego disheveled with shaky hands.

“I’m trying to help you, you piece of shit,” Diego tells him, but there’s little animosity in his voice. It is thick with worry, tight with emotion. “You just threw up blood all over the parking lot. You have to tell me what’s doing this to you so I can help.”

Five frowns. Parking lot? He looks through the windshield, spotting the bumpers of other parked cars. A diner with neon lights illuminates the area. The red and blue sign says Griddy’s but its appearance looks drastically different from last of what Five remembers of it. 

Above them, the moon competes with the brightness of the diner with its own reflected light, shining down on parked cars’ exteriors. Five can’t help the shiver that racks his body at the sight.

Diego notices. “Five?”

But Five simply ignore him, mumbling, “Where’re. . .” The rest of his question is a slurred mess, so he makes a weak wave with his hand hoping that would fill in the gaps.

His brother clicks his tongue and stands up, his squatting position clearly too painful to maintain.

“We’re at Griddy’s. Though it looks like they’ve remodeled since we’ve been gone, what with the new lights and everything.” Five wishes he had the energy to tell Diego how stupid of an assessment that is. “Figured might be safe to lay low here. Driving around the city would get us spotted eventually, and driving out of the city would separate us from the others. We all know where Griddy’s is, so it’s safe to guess one of them might stop by looking for the other here.”

Five concedes that that, at least, isn’t a stupid assessment. If they all separated before they can communicate a rendezvous point, then it isn’t far-fetched to assume they should independently regroup in a place they’re all familiar with. He’s briefly impressed by Diego’s show of common sense.

Five swallows, tasting blood. He asks, “H-How lo—”

“Nope,” Diego cuts him off, craning his head back into the car to glower at his brother. “No more questions from you. You’re not off the hook, bro. I’m literally stepping in a puddle of blood you threw up. You’ve gotta tell me what’s going on, right now, or I’m taking you to a hospital.”

Five’s brow furrows in protest, but Diego interrupts him again, “Don’t. Don't give me that shit. You can’t see what I’m seeing right now, Five. You . . . ” His mouth opens and closes, trying to form his next words. They crack from the weight of his emotions, “You look like you’re fucking dying, alright? It's fucking scary- And-And I can’t even find anything wr—wro—wrong with you- fuck.”

Diego’s shoulders shake from a sudden rush of distress, coupled with a frustration for his failing elocution. He turns around, hand running through his shaggy hair feverishly as he mutters more expletives under his breath. Five struggles to get a word out, desperately wanting to tell Diego off; to snap at his brother that it’s his body (semantics be damned) and he can do whatever the hell he wants to it. No one should be concerning themselves with it but him. He’s survived years of worse abuse and turmoil; he doesn’t need someone decades his junior getting overexcited with the state that he’s put it in. That’s his business and his alone.

But as he watches his brother try to compose himself, uninterrupted by what would have been a snide comment from Five’s part, he’s momentarily perplexed. Diego truly seems distraught about Five’s state, and he realizes with slow confusion that it’s not because of what Five did to make it so mangled. No . . . Five frowns.

Oh.

Diego is genuinely, simply, concerned for him.

Guilt flickers and Five deflates even further into the seat.

Of course.

Sometimes, it’s increasingly difficult to remember that it’s no longer Five against the world anymore. That he means something to other people now. For Diego to see Five in such a pathetic and helpless state is undoubtedly adding more to the hopeless desperation that is weighing over him.

Sometimes, Five thinks with a pang and painful swallow, it’s so horrendously easy to forget that he is part of a family again.

Five shifts in his seat, wincing at the tight pain that’s reverberating from his very core. He searches for words that might reassure his brother. It takes him a painstakingly long time to find something to say, and he hasn’t even found it before something odd catches his eye.

Slinking in between the cars is a shadow.

A person, seemingly. When Five squints his eyes, his vision sharpens, and he notices that it isn’t a person, but a walking corpse. Five’s skin grows cold.

That’s not right. How could the corpse be walking? He buried them all already. They shouldn’t be able to climb out of the rubble, despite how shallow of a grave Five had dug.

He watches with short breathes as the corpse continues to sidestep the abandoned and destroyed cars, climbing over the debris and moving through the undying flames—

Five reaches over and flicks the high beam headlights on.

The parking lot is flooded with blinding, white light.

The person it’s aiming up throws up their hands immediately to shield their face, and Five’s heart stops banging so loudly against his ears when he realizes that, no, that isn’t a corpse. Of course it’s not a corpse. This blood loss is starting to be a problem, he thinks deliriously.

Diego immediately throws himself over Five’s lap, reaching over and flicking the lights off. “What the shit!” Diego hisses at him, clambering out. “Are you trying to get us spotted? We could . . . be . . .”

He trails off, gazing towards where Five is also looking. “Stay here,” he says tightly to Five before rounding the car and rushing towards the stunned person staring at them.

Five watches blankly. Diego approaches the person, stopping short a step away, tentative. He’s talking, but Five can’t hear what’s he’s saying. Diego grabs the person’s shoulders, then their face, body language ripe with alarmed concern. Diego is saying something again, and the other person nods tiredly, and then Diego pulls them into a rough hug. The other person is lax in Diego’s embrace, but eventually their hands snake up his back and Klaus returns the hug.

They pull away. Diego says something, then gestures to the car. Klaus’ head snaps in Five’s direction, and then they’re taking quick, faltering steps his way.

“Five,” Klaus breathes, stumbling over to the open car door. There is a crumbling smile on his face that is threatening to collapse. “Oh, you slippery old bastard. You are truly a sight for sore eyes.”

Five meets his brother’s gaze with his own half-lidded one. Klaus truly has the characteristics of a corpse, and if Diego wasn’t around Five would have fully believed the hallucination. But no, this is Klaus, alive but terribly exhausted and weary. His eyes are a teary, depressed mess, his face gaunt and stripped of color and warmth.

Five wants to say something about that. He wants to say something about a lot of things, but fatigue weighs down on him like the pressure of the ocean’s abyss. His insides feel like they have the same fragility of a house of cards, and any type of exertion would send it all crashing down.

To Klaus, he doesn’t say anything. He can only swallow dryly, tasting blood and ash.

Klaus’ smile wavers. “Sheesh,” he blanches, eyes flickering throughout Five’s face and body. “You’re not looking so hot, buddy.” His hand reaches for Five’s face, cupping his cheeks with open palms. God, his hands are so fucking warm. He thinks he wants to push them away. A thumb strokes under his chin, wiping the blood trickling down his mouth. Five loathes how complacent he has been reduced to; how vulnerable he might seem in front of his helpless brothers.

“Five?” Klaus’ voice is quiet and thick with bubbling fear, and fuck it all, he does not need this kind of attention directed towards him. He needs his brothers to focus, to stay on task and to . . . to . . .

Fuck, Five cannot think of what they should be doing right now. The urgency is there, but he cannot get his mind to clear up enough to pull forth an action.

“I told you,” Diego comes next to him. “He’s in bad shape. Come on, get in the car. We shouldn’t be crowding outside. Looks too suspicious.”

Klaus spares Five a pained expression before he disappears and the door behind Five opens and shuts, the entire vehicle jostling. Diego returns to his seat behind the wheel with a hefty sigh. The air is cool and stale inside the car. The warm ghost of Klaus’ hands remains on his face.

His brothers begin conversing in low murmurs, and Five closes his eyes, listening faintly. He hears Klaus recount his day to Diego, explaining how he managed to escape the mansion during all the chaos. He sheepishly describes how he wandered around the city without an idea of where to go, making stops at familiar places like the bowling alley and the prosthetic lab, hoping to run into one of his siblings but to little avail.

Diego is all agreeable grunts and thoughtful hums. Klaus asks where the car had come from, and Diego explains how he’d found Five in the alleyway and the high adrenaline events that led up to the grand theft. They’ve been driving around for hours, Diego tells Klaus, similarly making stops at familiar places only to be interrupted by the appearance of an out of place crow.

There’s a lapse of silence, suddenly. Klaus comments, “He’s, uh, uncharacteristically quiet, isn’t he?”

Diego grunts. “I told you, he’s in bad shape.”

“Five?”

Oh, they’re talking about him now. Five opens his eyes and turns his head. Klaus has squeezed his way in between the two front seats. He and Diego are looking at him expectantly. Five doesn’t know what they’re expecting him to say, so he merely blinks.

Klaus hisses like he just pricked his finger on a needle. “I know you’re not one for the dramatic flair, Diego, but this deserves a more colorful description than just in bad shape. Did he hit his head or something? He looks . . . super loopy and out of it.” He waves his hand in front of Five’s face. “Hello? Five-y, are you with us, pal?”

Five slaps the hand away weakly, scowling at his brother. Diego says, frustrated. “I don’t know man, I’m not a doctor. He pushed himself too far with his jumps or something, I’m not sure. I’m not a space-jumping expert. But he said he was fine- or would be fine with some time and rest.”

Five frowns. Did he say that? He doesn’t recall that conversation. He’s not sure why he would say something like that to Diego, either. With how long it’s already been with him in this condition, it doesn’t feel like he’s getting better in the slightest. If anything, he’s getting worse—

“Then fucking say that!” Diego snaps loudly, startling Five. “For God’s sake, Five, I’m trying to help you over here! You think I’m having the time of my life sitting here and watching you like this? You look fucking catatonic!”

“Whoa, alright, let’s—let’s calm down a little, yeah?” Klaus pushes Diego back to his seat with fluttering hands, looking incredibly out of his element. Klaus’ hand finds Five’s wrist. He gives it a squeeze. “Five, what’s going with you? On a scale of ninety-nine to a hundred, how worried should we be?”

They shouldn’t be worried at all; Five will figure this out eventually, he just needs time. But asking his brothers to curb their concern is an impossible request at this point. They look at him with twin expressions of anxiety, eyes glowing in the darkness of the car.

Five works his jaw. “Calm d-down,” he murmurs, eyes finding Diego’s specifically. With his normal bite, it would have come out more patronizing. But even with the subdued tone, it still manages to make his brother’s face flash in annoyance. Five lifts his hand slightly, finding the breath to continue. “My powers . . . are empty. Too many jumps . . . just ti-tired. Don’t go . . . popping a blood vessel over it.”

“Bullshit,” Diego accuses him tersely, and Klaus looks like he begrudgingly agrees. “I’ve seen you when you’ve overdone your jumps before, bro.” His mouth is a thin line. He gestures to Five’s entire being. “Never came out looking like this.”

The word this is spat out like poison. Five spares the rear-view mirror a glance, catching his own reflection. He’s mesmerized by the lifeless stranger that stares back at him. Glassy and bloodshot eyes, clouded with a fog of disorientation, sat over a skin that’s too pale even in this darkness, shadowed by dark crevices under his eyes and within his cheeks. He blinks, and the corpse blinks back.

He wonders if this is what Dolores saw, every time he glanced at her during those harrowing decades. She never said anything out loud, but her concern was always palpable, her silent worry heartbreaking to suffer through, because they both knew there was nothing she could do.

“I ad-admit,” he says after a long moment, taking in his ghastly being. “That I’ve . . . pushed myself fu-further than I should. An exp-experimental jump . . . that proved to ha-have unexpected consequences to my body.”

Diego and Klaus share a confused look. Of course the two dimwits are confused, Five was being deliberately vague, after all. He doesn’t want to share this newfound time travel technique just yet, and especially doesn’t want to dive into the how’s and when’s and why’s that it will undoubtedly bring out.

Naturally, Diego asks, “Do you want to expand on that?”

And Five smiles. “Nope.”

“Christ, Five, you can’t just—"

But Five continues despite his frustration. He points to himself. His finger shakes. “—I don’t need to ex-explain mys'lf to you. I do-don’t need to expl'n . . . anything to anyone. Ev-E'rything I do . . . is no one’s bu-business but mine . . .”

He has more to say, but he’s run out of breath, suddenly incredibly winded, his tongue numb. Klaus bodily cuts between the two of them, his head covering Diego’s. “Yes, yes, you are so right, grandpa. Freedom of speech and all that jazz, we hear you. But, but, but,” he clicks tongue. “You never answered my original question, hmm?”

Five’s brow furrows. He doesn’t remember Klaus asking a question. As if reading his mind, Klaus smiles patiently. “How worried should we be?”

The snide retort is automatic. “The le-least amount." 

Then, he looks away from his brothers, knowing they’re brandishing glowers of disapproval. God, he’s so damn tired. “Look,” he tries again. “Just . . . you don’t n-need to worry. It'll . . . co-correct its'lf.” He swallows, and this time there is no bite in his words. “I just need . . . so'time . . . t-to rec'ver.”

There’s a beat of silence. Five hopes his uncertainty didn’t leak into his words.

From the corner of his eye, he can see his brothers holding a silent conversation with raised eyebrows, exaggerated shrugs, and bobbing heads. Their silent language seems too complicated for either of them to understand, and they begin whispering to each other. Their chattering becomes louder, but Five’s mind has already floated into numbing territory. His brothers’ voices filter in and out of his ears, words that Five knows he understands but can’t comprehend clearly making short appearances.

They seem to have come to an agreement of some sort, and it's followed by a flurry of movements. A hand dives into the cupholder. Coins clatter and giggle. A harsh scoff, a persuasive plea, a begrudging grunt. Five's eyes begins to droop. A car door opens, a thunderclap as it shuts. The voices have quieted. The car is less one source of warmth.

Five shivers. He tries to blink himself back to awareness before the black spots in the corner of his vision completely swallow him up. He hears Klaus talking to him, asking him the same questions Diego had asked him but with a softer tone, patiently waiting for a response. Five sighs deeply, too fatigued to repeat his answers. Any more responses from him will only inflate his brothers' pitiful concerned expressions, and he would very much like to not be looked at like some fragile thing.

A car pulls out of a parking spot in front of them, the vehicles rear lights flooding his vision with a brutal red flash. He turns away. Diego has left, it seems. He wonders when that happened. Beside him, Klaus has given up trying to speak to him and is now rifling through every pocket, cup holder, and crevice within the car, searching for anything of value. The world and its inhabitants look as if they have little to no trouble continuing on without him. The thought is oddly comforting. 

Five watches his scavenger brother with a curious frown. Klaus finds a credit card, then giggles madly at the fact that the car belongs to a woman named Susan. He finds a box of tissues under the seat, which he immediately uses to wipe the blood from Five's face, unaware of the nausea the familiar motion invokes within him. There's a few receipts and letters underneath the overhead folding mirror, a child's toy in the arm rest pocket, and—

“Oh damn," Klaus titters, the glove compartment he'd opened exhibiting a small heap of crumbled bills and, more interestingly, a gun. "Susan is hardcore,” he says, holding up the revolver. 

He shows off his find to Five, a haughty grin on his face. The gun is incredibly petite, one of those models aesthetically built to fit into pocketbooks. Five doesn't say anything, and simply holds his hand out expectantly, eyebrow raised. Klaus looks scandalized, offended by the idea that he was not responsible enough to be trusted to hold a firearm. He holds the gun closer to him, like a child unwilling to share their toy with others, but then eventually huffs out a defeated, “Fine,” and gives the gun to Five. “But I get to keep the cash.”

The metal of the gun is crisp and cold to touch. Five expertly pops out the cylinder and is surprised to find a few bullets in the gun. Good, he thinks. They have a weapon, at least. Now they won't have to default into a defensive approach when they encounter a threat. Five was always more competent in offensive tactics, anyway. 

He turns the gun around, and is suddenly awash in a memory that fills him with unnerving nostalgia. He recalls, decades ago, when he found his first gun in a cabinet inside a destroyed apartment room within the first summer in the apocalypse. He doesn't recall what he did with that gun. He had found a handful of other weapons after that throughout his time there, but the emotions of his first find were vividly clear in his mind. He remembers feeling safe, knowing he now had a weapon to protect himself with. Then, that emotion quickly morphed into pessimism with the knowledge that there's nothing out here he needs to fight against, that everything that would prove to be a threat was already dead.

Then, much later, the emotion darkened into something absolutely crushing when he pulled the trigger, and the gun only clicked, and clicked, and clicked, snickering at a joke only it was in on. Dolores had been watching the whole time, but if she was disappointed or betrayed or even heartbroken by what she saw, she never mentioned it.

Klaus has stopped his scavenging and is watching him curiously. The silence within the car is deafening. Klaus' eyes keep jumping from the gun in Five's hands and back to his face. Five clicks his tongue, understanding with a grimace as he pockets the revolver inside his coat. 

It is absolutely depressing to remember how young and soft his siblings are. They had all grown up in a world where they were taught to protect and live, a picturesque existence where happily-ever-afters are awarded once the bad guy is defeated. He forgets, so, so, so easily, that only he was the only one subjected to the harsh reality of this world, that only he had to drink that poison.

Five lived through a world that taught him to survive and kill. They seem to struggle in grasping that. Five is sure that his adolescent appearance is the contributing factor in that confusion. His body is the spitting image of the last they've seen of him all those years ago, after all, and they've never seen that thirteen year old boy brandishing fire arms or covered in blood. 

But Five is a killer. He cannot pretend for them that he is that child. That boy had died the minute he was spat into the inferno. The lessons of his heroic youth have long been overshadowed with his self-taught lessons of survival. In the apocalypse, there was nothing to save. In the Commission, nothing was saved, only maintained. Five doesn't know how to save things anymore. He doesn't think he ever really did. 

The cold bite of the gun's metal presses against his chest. 

Klaus shifts in his seat, his pale complexion glowing softly in the dark. Five wonders, not for the first time, what his brother sees when he looks at him. Wonders if, amongst all the ghosts of his victims during his employment at the Commission, if Klaus can see his own corpse tailing behind Five. If that corpse is a bloody, mangled mess of limbs and protruding bones, or a charred pile of melted skin and burnt organs, or if it’s a bloodless mannequin with bullet holes across its face and head. Five has killed Klaus three different times now, after all. 

“What?”

Or does he see all three different corpses of himself, perhaps, standing together in a single line, glaring holes into Five's back. Are ghosts bound to the timelines they were killed in? He'll need to ask Klaus that sometime. Maybe there’s the whole lot of them there, too. Five always did feel like he was being followed, but more often than not it was just his paranoia. But perhaps it’s not. Maybe it truly is the bodies of his siblings from all the doomed timelines that Five had walked through, following him around and wondering if they’ll gain more ghostly doppelgangers of themselves. He is Atlas, condemned to carry the brothers and sisters he’d killed on his shoulders for all eternity.

“Five, what—”

Yes, that would make the most sense. It's easier to compare himself to creatures of folklore, since he has long thrown away his humanity. He is Atlas; bound to carry those he couldn’t save. Maybe the entire world is on his shoulders, too. He was the one that couldn’t save it, after all. He couldn’t save it in his own timeline, he couldn't save it in his siblings' timeline, and he couldn’t save it in the next. And maybe he won’t save it again, and again, and again. Maybe he isn’t Atlas, maybe he’s more akin to Thanatos; appearing before each new timeline only to carry it off into death.

Maybe dad was right—

“Don’t say that,” Klaus whispers harshly.

Five's brow furrows. Klaus' hands are on his shoulders, his eyes boring imploringly to his own, their foreheads practically touching. There's a pleading desperation in his expression, maybe even heartbreak. Five frowns, confused. Had he said something?

Klaus' mouth twitches, but the smile doesn't have its usual light. "It's nothing. Welcome back," he says shakily, the forceful reassurance unmistakable. He gives Five’s shoulders a squeeze, then he leans back into his seat, looking absolutely jaded. He shakes his head, laughs at something that Five must have missed, and says, “What a shit show we walked into, huh?”

Five doesn't know what he means. Through the rear-view mirror, he watches as Klaus grins to the ceiling. “You know," he says after a beat. "I knew dad never liked us back when we were in the Umbrella Academy, but who would have thought there was a world out there where he could not like us even more."

Something clenches inside Five's stomach. A coil of some sorts, wrapping around his heart and squeezing. Sympathy, he wonders, or maybe pity. Klaus is saying, "Wonder if he was nicer to those Sparrow bitches than he was to us.” He pauses to consider that, and giggles, “Nah, if he named them something as lame as Sparrow then definitely not."

The humor is lost to Five. He tries to meet Klaus' gaze through the mirror, but his brother is pressing his palms into his eyes. He wants to tell his brother to forget about Hargreeves for now, but that advice would be laughable coming from Five. He's aware now, that no matter how hard he tries to expel his father from his mind, the old man will always be there, his condescending words battering against his head like the oncoming strum of war drums.  

“But jokes on him,” Klaus says suddenly, louder. “Or jokes on dead him. He always said I wasted my potential, that I was never utilizing my power to its full extent, but he was wrong, 'cause look at me now, pops!” Klaus shouts to the car's ceiling, arms spread wide in a momentous gesture. “Fucked around in the sixties and one butterfly affect later, boom! Inadvertently brought Ben back to life!” His smile is absolutely harrowing. “And they said I couldn’t do it! Ha!”

Five feels the stone of imminent failure sink into his stomach. It seems this timeline has already decided that Five will ultimately fail in saving his siblings, whether it be from danger or from anguish. He swallows down the lump in his throat. "I'll fix it," he breathes, the affirmation tight with inert resolve. He has to fix it. He has to. He has to fix what he broke.

"Okay," Klaus says softly, his smile small but brimming with sympathy. 

When Diego comes back, he tosses a bag onto Five’s lap. Inside it is a water bottle and one plain doughnut. “That's all four dollars worth of quarters gets you. We’re all sharing that,” he grunts to his brothers, settling into the driver’s seat and pretending not to notice Klaus' sudden bloodshot, glassy eyes. “And I better not hear any goddamn complaints about it.”

Chapter Text

Chapter Three: And Like A Fool, I'll Drink it Whole, The Merciful Rye

A Texan drawl asks him, “Are you not hungry, sweetheart?” and Five is pulled out of his thoughts.

He blinks, finding himself sat in the kitchen area of the ravaged house. For a moment, he had forgotten, but just as quickly, he’s thrust back. Ah. Right. Shit, maybe he is tired.

The napkin underneath his palm is a mess of numbers and rips. He couldn’t find one goddamn sheet of paper in this house and was forced to make do with the next best thing, but napkins are hardly built to withstand Five’s furious scribbling. The data set is too dispersed, the probability line between impossibility and certainty frustratingly long. The formula had crossed over onto the table many times, the white square not providing enough space for him to calculate the probabilities of the apocalypse meeting him in 2019.

He scrubs his face with both hands, glancing out the window. Darkness envelops the formerly quaint little farm, and with it, the heightened sound of crickets chirping fills the still air. His thoughts have completely consumed his attention, and presently, it seems they have whisked him away from the hours between daylight and sunset.

Someone sniffs. Five looks up. Sissy is standing not quite near him, but close enough that her nervous energy smothers him. Her hands are on the table, hovering over a cutting board, cutting knife, and a loaf of bread. Her eyes dart down and Five follows them.

There’s a plate in front of him. A ham sandwich sits innocently on the cracked porcelain. It’s been cut in half, two harmlessly placed triangles almost touching to form the square it once was. Five sneers.

“No,” he tells her, somewhat startling her at the prolonged response. His hand falls underneath the table to confirm the briefcase’s presence. He tries incredibly hard not balk at how enthralled he was in his work that he didn’t even notice the woman’s presence. Maybe those idiots were right. Maybe he did need a moment to rest. Damn it.

He looks around. “Where’s Vanya?”

The woman looks like she’s been thrown through the wringer and back. Her hair is comically disheveled, some gold curls surviving the hurricane of power from the barn, while the rest lay flat, too tired to maintain any texture or volume. She looks like she’s been crying, too, if those glassy eyes and flushed skin have anything to say about it. Everyone in this house seems to have the same look, like it was some twisted trend they’re all jumping in on.

Sissy brushes the crumbs from her hands onto her lap. “She’s out back. Talking to, um, her sister.” The word sister is thrown cautiously, as if she’s not entirely sure it’s correct but also not brave enough to question it. “Or, your sister, too, I should say. You’re Vanya’s younger brother, I reckon?”

Five grits his teeth. “Sure, why not.” The woman blinks dumbly at him, and Five pinches the bridge of his nose. “And the others?”

She frowns. “The others?”

Five rolls his eyes. It’s not her fault, he tries to rationalize with himself. The woman is traumatized from recent events, most likely; she can’t help being so insufferably slow. “Yes, the others. You know, the other people in this house who don’t live in this house.”

Her hand fiddles with her necklace, and she looks away. “Your brothers, yes. They’re out back, doing some,” she clears her throat. “Ya-Yardwork for me. Cleaning. They’ll be done soon, don’t worry.”

“Cleaning?” Five repeats, feeling the teeth of anger biting into his voice. “They bitched and moaned to stay here longer to do yardwork? Is this some joke only morons understand?”

There’s a pinch in his chest, a cold pain, but just as easily it disappears. He doesn’t dwell on it, as the sudden spike of anger overshadows it.

Sissy’s expression is one of a mother who had just been talked back to by her child, while also one of a child being scolded by their father, all wrapped into one. Five had never seen anything like it. She swallows, hands wringing her fingers. “N-No, it’s—they’re helping. Vanya asked them for help. The short fella, with the glasses, he was going to, but he was busy, so they vol-volunteered—"

She’s rambling, and Five is growing increasingly annoyed. He doesn’t miss how she fiddles with the ring on her finger. He is struck with the memory from earlier today, when they arrived at the barn and Sissy pointed a gun to their faces, and the back and forth questions and answers between her and Vanya.

The pieces fit together easily after that, and Five says, “Oh. Getting rid of your husband’s body. Jesus, lady, why didn’t you just say that.”

She gapes at him like a fish, but Five is muttering to himself, “That’s good. Tying up loose ends before we depart. Glad those idiots are able to think at least a second ahead for once.”

The woman looks like she’s going to be sick. Then, like a mercy for the both of them, the front door creaks open, and Vanya’s voice is saying, “Hey, Sissy? Diego says they’re do—”

Both Five’s and Sissy’s heads turn at the sound, Sissy’s relief immeasurably more visible than his.

Vanya spots her brother and jumps. “O-Oh, Five!” Her eyes dart to Sissy and her step quickens, hastily entering the kitchen. His sister sports a nervous smile, her hand reaching for Sissy’s, fingers intertwining in tender familiarity. “Hey. Hey, um, what’re,” Vanya clears her throat. “What’re you guys talking about?”

“Nothing of importance,” Five answers flatly, before Sissy can start her stuttering all over again. “Are you ready to go now?”

“Yeah. Sissy, can you . . .” Similar to one stepping away from a wild dog no longer secured by its leash, Vanya pulls the dumbstruck woman away gently, murmuring a sleuth of persuasive words to get her out of the room. Five is appreciative that Vanya knows him well enough to decipher when he would want to interact with strangers. When Sissy is gone, however, Five scowls at his sister.

“I’m not going to bite her head off, you know,” he says, hoping he doesn’t sound as sullen about it as he feels.

Vanya’s smile is apologetic. “I know.” She pulls a chair and sits next to him. “But not everyone is as accustomed to your charm as we are. Sissy is a little more,” she searches for the word with a whimsical sigh. “Delicate. I just got her to stop crying, after all.”

Five concedes that fair assessment. “Regardless,” he sniffs, folding his arms. “It’s time to leave the delicacies of this timeline. Did you have fun playing your little Southern Living fantasy?”

The remark is meant to be scathing, but Vanya’s mouth purses to hide her euphoric grin. “I—I did, actually. It was, um, different. But a good different, you know?” She rubs her arm. “It was nice, to be part of a relatively normal family. To be—to be cared about by someone else. It was refreshing and . . . just really nice. I’m going to miss it. Miss her.”

Tears prickle her eyes, but Vanya doesn’t let them fall. Five bites the inside of his mouth, looking away from his sister quickly. He’s not—he isn’t—reassurances and words of encouragement are not his strong suit. He really isn’t equipped to deal with this—

“Sorry,” Vanya says quickly, blinking the rush of emotions away. “Sorry. I know I shouldn’t—I don’t want you to think that I’m changing my mind about leaving, or, or that I’m not appreciative of you guys, of my family—"

“It’s fine,” Five murmurs. He picks out the pesky remnants of dried blood from underneath his nails. “You shouldn’t feel guilty about being happy, even if it was a fleeting happiness. I’m not going to hold that against you.” I’m not that heartless, he doesn’t say.

She smiles sadly at him. Her smiles are always so goddamn sad. “Hey. Do you want some coffee?” She asks, already standing and moving to the counter. “Sissy only has instant, though. The stove is probably . . . not in any shape to heat anything, so it’ll just be hot water from the tap. It’s still—it’s still something. Still caffeine, at least.”

A small laugh. Five doesn’t join in. He tells her, “Sure,” but narrows his eyes. Is this her method of distracting me for more time? There’s a scoff at the back of his throat, waiting to be let out. They’re all the same breed of selfishness. She really thinks she can buy more time if I’m stuck here drinking coffee?

The tap water is turned on, and a mug is filled. A spoon tinkers against the porcelain as it stirs the coffee grounds into the liquid. The sound is hypnotic, but Five doesn’t let himself fall for it.

He should have never succumbed to his siblings’ earlier pestering. First, it’s a few more hours they ask for, then it’ll be a request for an additional hour, then a few more minutes are tacked on, followed by a few more hours. Suddenly, it’ll become an endless stream of delays that sets him back further and further away from his goal.

Vanya sets the mug in front of him, the aroma of the coffee strong but the steam weak. He knows what she’s going to say next—something along the lines of, Five, while you drink that, I’m going to go and talk to Sissy for a few more minutes. Or maybe I’ll go and take a drive with Sissy. Just a few more minutes, no big deal, you can sit and drink that in the meantime, while I—

But she doesn’t.

Vanya sits back down in her seat. A small smile on her face. A sad smile.

Five deflates. He feels like a complete asshole.

“What’s wrong?” She asks him, catching some shift in his expression.

“Nothing,” he mutters into the cup. The foulness he feels inside him robs him from enjoying the drink. He tries not to dwell on how quickly his paranoia and suspicion had just emerged over something so innocent, and tries even harder not to think about what that means for him. Maybe I am heartless.

In two large gulps he finishes the drink, forcing it down his throat like it was consecutive shots of vodka. His chest flickers with coldness, but the warm coffee does nothing to alleviate that. “Thanks,” he grunts.

He pushes the mug away, goes to stand. They’ve wasted enough ti—

“Wait, Five.” Vanya starts, looking conflicted. “You . . .” She trails off, searching for something to say, something that would make him stay. Five sighs, feeling drained. It’s not pity that makes him sit back down. He thinks it might be guilt. Or the sudden need to prove to himself that he isn’t heartless. That he has some humanity left in him.

Vanya is clearly relieved. She swallows. “You—” Her gaze drops, eyes darting. She gestures to the sandwich. “You should eat that.” That’s not what she wanted to originally convey, Five knows, but she rolls with it. “Sissy really wanted to express her gratitude to you guys, but most of the appliances have been, um, pulverized, or gunned down, so she couldn’t cook a proper meal for us like she wanted. This was the second-best option. It’s—it’s still good.”

It hits him, then, as Vanya talks for the sake of filling the silence, that the only thing Vanya is trying to get out of him . . . is his company. She just wants to speak with him, to sit with him, to be around him. What he doesn’t know is whether she’s doing that because she’s lonely, or because she thinks he’s lonely.

We owe her that much, Klaus had said before, but maybe they owe more that. Maybe it’s not just time for goodbyes that they should afford Vanya, maybe it’s just time.

He tries to ignore the bubbling franticness buzzing inside him, trying to pull him forward, forward, forward—

Five looks at the sandwich. Two ridiculous triangles made for easy consumption, since evidently children cannot eat full squares. His mouth twists. If the crust had been peeled off he’s sure he would have flung the plate across the room in rabid disgust. No. No, he wouldn’t. He would never waste food.

“Oh,” Vanya says, shoulders sagging, misinterpreting his scowl. “R-Right, sorry. I forgot- you, you were never big on ham, right? You always did like turkey sandwiches. I—think there’s some, some leftover chick—”

“It’s fine,” he mutters quickly. He takes a bite of the sandwich, hardly tasting it. The sandwich could be submerged in saltwater and he’d still eat. Whatever food preferences he had as a child have been completely erased from his pallet. He’s been reduced to a being that would consume anything, so long as it provides sustenance. Like a cockroach. He snorts at that last thought.

Vanya seems meekly pleased. She pushes the cutting board and knife over, resting her elbows on the table. “Once we get back to 2019,” she says, almost to herself. “I think I’ll cook a meal. For the family, I mean. Sissy taught me a few recipes that I think everyone would like. We can have dinner in the dining room, like old times. Or maybe in the basement. We always did like it down there, anyway.”

Like old times. The statement makes his stomach twist, and he thinks maybe he actually doesn’t like ham. He doesn’t remember not liking a specific food. Five chews slowly, yet he cannot ascertain a taste. Another ridiculous habit that he hasn’t been able to shake off yet; slow, deliberate chewing to ensure he doesn’t eat too quickly and make himself sick. A double-edged sword, as the more time he takes to eat his food, the more time it gives the surviving insects to sniff him out and attempt to steal his bounty.

”I think Luther might be opposed,” Vanya is saying. “Not-Not to the family dinner. No, I think he’d appreciate that the most. But maybe to having it in the basement— it is pretty cramped down there, especially for him. Plus, I think having it in the dining room would be nostalgic. Maybe even symbolic.”

Nostalgia is mythical feeling for him. He rarely felt a breath of the sensation, anymore. Sometimes, as he chewed whatever vile thing he could get his hands on, his mind would remind him of a past that seemed more of a fantasy; of a life where food was given to him whether he was hungry or not. It was always just there, he vaguely remembered. His mind couldn’t recreate the images of the types of food, but his throat would always constrict at just the whisper of that past life.

Another bite, methodical chewing. The bread is ridiculously fluffy, melting instantly in his mouth. Vanya’s mouth quirks. “The good snacks were always kept in the basement, too. Heh. Remember how you, Ben, and I would sneak downstairs and raid the kitchen right after everyone else went to bed, when we were kids? Especially on Saturdays, when the groceries came in.”

Five doesn’t have the heart to tell her that the first thirteen years of his life are the hardest memories for him to recollect, overshadowed by decades of destruction, death, and the feral need to survive, survive, survive. His childhood before the apocalypse felt like a fever dream, a haze of color and noise in no particular order.

Sometimes, he would have to pull out Vanya’s book and feverishly read it from cover to cover to remind himself that it was all real. That he was a person before he was a mindset—survive, survive, survive.

He takes a harsh bite of his sandwich, tasting ash. A few crumbs spill on the table. Great, he thinks dully. Now the roaches are gonna swarm in.

Vanya’s eyes are shining with nostalgia. “You once took Luther’s protein bars and put them in the freezer overnight, waking up just a few minutes earlier than him to put them back in the cupboard. You got so mad when Luther would just bite down on it like a block of concrete, unphased, since he apparently had super strong teeth, too. Do you remember?”

No.

“Yeah.”

She looks at him fondly. “It would be really nice to have everyone back in the house. Even if it’s just for a day.” She traces the cutting board with a finger, suddenly shy and full of childish optimism. “I think I’ll bring it up with everyone, see if they would like that, too. Not-not right now, though. Maybe I’ll ask after we get back to 2019 and there isn’t an apocalypse looming over our shoulders.”

He swallows, the taste of roasted insects polluting his mouth. His blood is pumping loudly in his ears, and he’s not so sure why, and he takes another vicious bite of his food, glaring at the table.

“What about you?” Vanya asks him. Her voice sounds far away.

He doesn’t look up. “What about me.”

“Do you have any plans on what you’ll do after?”

After— Five rolls the word over in his mind but can’t seem to comprehend it. After what? There was survival, and only survival. After you failed to survive, you become extinct. That’s the natural order of things. Exist and survive, all the while crawling your way towards extinction.

He’s finished his half of the sandwich, feeling sick. He goes to grab the other half. The table is infested with roaches.

Fuck, he thinks miserably.

They crawl around the surface in droves, and Five watches them with a spiteful glower.

They are beings of pure survival, these cockroaches. No other creature in the world is more prepared for an apocalypse, and Five had viciously envied them for decades. He would glare at them, whenever he had collapsed from starvation on the side of a road, and mournfully wish he was able to adapt as proficiently as they did to this hell.

He watches, now, as they start to slink towards his food, keen on eating it with absolute disregard to him. One brave cockroach approaches his plate, its antenna touching the other half of his sandwich.

A feral rage grips him, and Five grabs the knife from across the table and stabs the insect right down in its middle with a loud THUD.

The others scatter away. Not from fear, though. No, they are only momentarily startled. They return just as quickly to surround his food again, complete ignorance to their comrade that was knifed down for their efforts. Pure survival. All they comprehend is survival, and so to survive this apocalypse, Five had to adopt that same mentality. He will survive. He will only survive. And, afterwards, he—

His grip tightens around the hilt of the knife. The stabbed cockroach’s legs still kick, trying to push itself towards the sandwich. He never considered after. The question alone made him nauseous with anxiety, a black coil of panic that wrapped around his stomach and squeezed.

Survival was everything to Five. It was the solitary goal that drove him to existence. He would so easily sever any kind of bond, sacrifice any principal, throw away his very humanity just to remain alive. Because if he didn’t survive, he would become extinct. He would be food for the cockroaches and nothing more.

The stabbed cockroach kicks more frantically, the food right there but the knife holding it back. It doesn’t stop, even with such a grievous wound. It kicks and kicks. The other insects don’t help it. They can’t, because they’re programmed the same way. Survival, survival, survival. Eat the food, regain the lost energy, and continue onwards. Rinse and repeat. And then—

And then—

What happens after I’m done surviving?

“F-Five?”

Vanya is staring, startled, eyes wide with confusion and worry.

Five blinks.

The table clears, and the air becomes easier to breath in. Fuck—he thinks nauseatingly. Again?

He pulls the knife’s point out of the table’s surface harshly. The insects have receded for now, as have the flames and the stale stench of decay.

He stands up abruptly. He’s done here—

Vanya starts. “Five, I—”

He pauses. She also pauses. The broken wallclock’s erratic ticking is the only noise brave enough to penetrate the sudden silence.

Vanya’s hand is slightly outstretched. She seems to have something to say, but can’t get it out. Another beat passes. Her jaw twitches, trying to get the words to form.

“You what?” He asks her, impatient, voice a pathetic rasp. He’s suffocating in this room, all the while thinking, something’s wrong, something’s wrong. Why do I keep losing my grip with reality? It can’t just be because I’m tired. Was it the jump? Did it scramble my mind—

Vanya’s mouth closes with a click, and she looks away. Sad eyes, sad frown. Five swallows painfully, a part of his mind wanting to leave, leave, leave while the other one begs him to stay and try to comfort his sister.

He twitches. Bites his lip. Foot bouncing. Finally, he settles back down into his seat, hands intertwining over one another, squeezing to stop the tremors. “Vanya,” he says, voice forcibly controlled. He feels like he’s vibrating from a raw, uncategorized emotion. “What is it.”

She meets his gaze. There’s turmoil in those eyes. He wonders if that’s just from her emotions, or the aftermath of the FBI’s interrogation. His stomach pinches, and he realizes she probably hasn’t fully recovered from that ordeal. With the thought now in his head, he’s profoundly aware of how pale she is, how raw the skin of her temples is, how diluted her pupils are, how shaky her fingers are. I should ask her how she’s doing, he thinks. He doesn’t.

“Five,” she says again. “I’m—I just wanted to say- I’m sorry.” She bites her lip. “No, it should be thank you, first. Right, I want to say thank you, for this. For giving me the time to say goodbye. I know we wouldn’t still be sticking around if you didn’t, um, okay it, I guess.”

“You can thank Klaus and the other herd of idiots for that,” Five mutters, forced nonchalance. “Their collective annoyingness can actually accomplish things for them. Who knew.”

She snorts softly. “Still,” she gives a half shrug. “Thank you, Five.”

He grunts, his jaw clenched so hard that his head begins to pound. He knows she has more to say, and the pitifulness of her state is the only reason he’ll sit and listen, but the overwhelming urge to leave is making the blood in his ears pump so damn loudly.

Vanya’s next inhale is shaky, and Five tenses. “But, I also,” she breathes out, and he can hear the hitch latching onto her voice. “W-Want— well, should would be the more appropriate word, here. I should apologize to you, Five. I . . . with my memories back, I—I realize that I’m the reason you—"

“No,” he says firmly. “I don’t want to hear it.”

“Please,” She reaches for his hand. He pulls away. “Five—”

“Don’t.”

His sister looks absolutely crushed. He can tell, by that expression alone, that this is something she’s been building up for, something she has prepared herself to say. But he’s not prepared to hear it, and he would rather tear it down before he hears it.

He wishes he had the strength to blink out of this room.

He momentarily considers risking it.

“Five, please,” Her voice gains strength, and she speaks faster, demanding to be heard, anxiety be damned, resistance be damned. “I owe you this, alright? Not just because of how I treated you, before, when you first found a way home. I—I am sorry about that, but that’s—it’s more than that. I know now, that the bl-blame is on me, or the—the apocalypse, and you getting stuck, I’m sor—"

He slams his palm on the table. She jumps.

“Vanya,” he says, voice dangerously steady, dangerously low. “Stop talking.”

Sad eyes, sad frown, a sad soul. She recedes into herself. “Okay,” she whispers. He did that. Heartless.

He fiercely ignores the painful pang of guilt slamming against his heart. I don’t want to hear it, he thinks. Not from her.

He pushes himself off the table roughly, and takes the knife with him. A habit. “Let’s go,” he tells his sister tightly. “We’ve wasted too much time here.”

He takes the rest of the sandwich with him. Another habit.

Let the cockroaches starve this time.

The fit hits him so suddenly this time, so fucking hard and painfully—

Diego pulls the car over without wasting a second. Klaus yelps from the backseat, unprepared for the sharp swerve.

Five has a hand on his chest, clutching at his skin through his jacket, frantically trying to push back his erratic heart. His entire body shudders as a cold wave racks through his insides, gripping every warm organ with icy cold fingers, squeezing until frost collects on every artery.

He slaps a hand over his lips, the red oozing between his fingers. He coughs through the obstruction, drowning himself. Even the blood that bursts through his mouth is nauseatingly cold. His other hand is frantically trying to unclip his seatbelt, his limb cold and numb as he seizes from the unnatural pain.

He’s suffocating, he’s suffocating, he’s drowning—

Klaus is a wild mess of alarm in the back. Diego, however, has clearly improved his observation skills, and is already bringing the car to a stop, muttering quick, “Hold on, hold on, I know, I know,” over Five’s choking. The car stops over the curb with a violent bump, and Diego reaches over and helps Five with the seatbelt.

“Wait,” Diego is saying, but Five cannot. The minute he is freed he pushes the car door open and falls onto the cement, hacking out blood, spit, and that stupid fucking doughnut. He clutches at his stomach as he heaves, the damn organ feeling like its being wrung out like a washcloth.

There’s a hand on his back, rubbing over his spine. There’s another on his shoulder, whether for comfort or to keep him from falling flat into the newly formed pool of blood, he’s unsure. There are voices that sound like his brothers’ speaking to him, or about him, or for him. He doesn’t know. He can’t get his eyes to stop seeing white, can’t get his ears to stop ringing, his mouth from tasting decay, his skin from sizzling from the unnatural light—

Fuck— another jolt overtakes him. Five gasps, cold air filling his lungs, as his heart physically lurches. His jaw aches as he grits his teeth through this upsurge of pain— fuck, fuck, the pain so overwhelming, locking his limbs and solidifying his blood.

The world is folding in on him, the sky flattening him, crushing him—

The hand on his back becomes belligerent. The voices of his brothers become louder, shriller. “— . . . i . . . v . . . e . . .” he vaguely hears as the cold sweat wraps around his body like the flurry of melting snow. “. . . is . . . n’t . . . br . . . ea . . .” he thinks he hears as his ribs close in around his lungs, squeezing it mercilessly—

“—Five!” He hears clearly now, the hand smacking his back so hard it nearly knocks him down. Klaus’ face is inches away from his. “Come on, please, just breathe—"

Five exhales through his teeth, then inhales so harshly he chokes all over again.

Klaus’ hands are on his shoulders, keeping him steady as he coughs and chokes and coughs and wheezes. “That’s it, that’s it, there you go, keep going, that’s it.”

At last, the agony has passed, but it has left Five a shivering, exhausted shell of himself. He cannot taste or smell anything other than blood, the sensations hauntingly familiar to him. He hears his heart trying to regain its rhythmic beating, hears his lungs expand enough to take in more air, hears the outside world continue on with little regard to his turmoil.

Five closes his eyes, feeling the back of his head thump against the car’s exterior. He wants nothing more than to collapse on the ground and let himself be stolen by unconsciousness’ embrace. To be swallowed whole and have all sensations robbed from him. It’s so unlike him but he cannot find it within himself to care.

He thinks he’s dying, but he’s gone through the motions of dying before. This is a new one.

There’s a tentative silence. He can practically hear his brothers’ holding their breathes, preparing themselves for another nerve-wracking onslaught of commotion from Five’s end. But Five has been successfully bled dry by his revolting body, and all he can seem to get it to do at the moment is just exist.

“Oh my god, oh my god,” Klaus says shrilly, his voice vibrating into Five’s head. “Diego, holy shit. What—what, what—what in the what—"

“Klaus, shut the hell up! You’re drawing too much attention!”

“But he—Jesus, Mary, and Diego! What was that? Is he having a heart attack? Can a thirteen-year-old have a heart attack? And the blood, holy fricken’—"

“Stop freaking out! It’ll be fine, it’s fine—”

“Fine? Fine? Oh my god, do you even know what that word means? He’s not fine, Diego! He’s—he’s—"

“—Listen,” Diego’s voice is a solid contrast to Klaus’ stuttering one. “This is- yes, this is bad. I know—I know, Klaus, just listen! It’s getting better, alright? I know it’s bad, but it’s not as bad as it was in the beginning, so he’s getting better.”

He is? Five wonders absently as his brothers’ belligerent yapping continues. He opens his eyes, watching his vision blot like a drop of ink falling into the ocean.

“He is?” Klaus asks shrilly, unbelievingly. Five thinks that’s his hand behind his neck, thumb stroking the icy skin. Warm, warm, warm.

Feet scrape against cement. Diego is pacing in place. “Yeah. Yes, he is. He is because he hasn’t—” Diego pauses, collecting his thoughts. Cars whiz by. A stream of wind whistles in the air. A crow croaks. “Look, it’s just a— a theory. But the last time he puked blood was hours ago, right? Before we found you, even. But before that, it was happening more often, like every other hour or so.”

Klaus sputters. “Dude! Puking blood just once is never a good sign for anything!”

“I’m saying—that the time between each one of these fits is widening. Alright? It’s not as- as consistent as it was before. So, so that’s a good sign. It is. He’s getting better.”

Five licks his lips, tasting the copper bite of blood. Diego is surprisingly . . . somewhat correct. The gap of time between each fit’s abrupt occurrence is widening, that’s true. But Five is of the theory that it may have to do with him foolishly partaking in his brother’s stupid arguing earlier.

They had been stationed at Griddy’s parking lot overnight, forced to sleep in the car as they had nowhere else to go. Five had bobbed in and out of consciousness, his exhausted body fighting with his restless mind. When morning had come, he felt substantially better, and was throwing destination suggestions to Diego on where to go as his brother drove them around the city.

They passed by Vanya’s apartment, Leonard Peabody’s shop, and any other place they mutually share the knowledge of with their siblings. Klaus had said something unbelievably infuriating at one point, Five cannot recall exactly what it is now. But it caused a lengthy, petty argument to break out between all three of them, and Five was talking too fast, too loudly, knowing his body could not keep up.

Ah, so that’s it.

His body is so spent that even the trivial energy needed to talk is something he physically cannot afford. Fuck.

“—we just,” Diego is saying now, hand combing through his hair, creating a more wild, unhinged appearance. “Need to be patient. This isn’t something a hospital can fix, Klaus, it’s his powers. Get it? We’re way out of our elements here. Five said he just needs time for it to correct itself, s-so that’s all we can do.”

”Yeah, but how much time?”

Silence answers him. Five hopes the question wasn’t for him; he doesn’t think he has the energy to form a believable lie.

“Hey, Five? Can you look at me, please?” Klaus’ voice is like silk, softly slithering into his head. Warm hands cup his face. “God, you’re freezing. Hey, hey, slow breaths, okay?”

Klaus wipes the blood from his face with his sleeve, pushes his hair away from his face with delicate palms. It’s humiliating, being handled like some fragile doll. It’s unnerving. He has lived an entire lifetime without gentle, warm hands, without kind words and worried looks. He had lived in an overheated world, where everything and everyone was cold and lifeless to touch, where only empty dead eyes looked back at him.

Now, everything has been turned upside down, and he is the cold and lifeless thing surrounded by warmth. He doesn’t know how to make sense of that, doesn’t know how to adapt to it. It’s maddeningly confusing. It makes him nauseous all over again.

“Hey,” Klaus murmurs, so quietly that it’s nearly drowned by the cool breeze of air. “You still with us, old man? Hm?” The hand cups the back of his neck again, the warmth so blissful it makes his head swim. “There he is. Let’s get you back in the car, yeah?”

But Diego is shaking his head. “We need to ditch the car. It’s definitely been reported stolen at this point, and driving around in it in broad daylight will get us pulled over in no time. Gotta make the rest of the way on foot.” He at least has the decency to sound apologetic.

Five blinks blearily, glancing around. The sun’s boisterous glare reflects off the storefront’s window. Behind Klaus and Diego, he can see a few feet passing by in varying paces; heels and dress shoes and sneakers clattering in separate rhythms, momentarily slowing at the sight of the three of them on the ground before Diego throws them a sheepish lie that persuades them to move along.

The area looks familiar to Five, but he can’t quite put his finger on it. Klaus makes a displeased noise but doesn’t contradict Diego. “Can you stand?” Klaus is asking him with a wince, like it pains him to even suggest it. “The walk shouldn’t be too bad; the Icarus Theater is what, like a block away? Two? Easy-peasy.”

Ah. Right. Their next stop was the concert hall. To Klaus’ question, he nods wearily, muttering, “Give me a second.” He needs to get his bearings. Needs the world to stop spinning and his vision to stop flashing for a moment. Then, he’ll be right as rain. Just—just needs a moment.

His brothers are patient, surprisingly. When Five picks himself off the floor, they each grab him by the arm, steadying him like he was some sort of newly born fawn taking its first steps. Irritatingly enough, it’s completely justified, as Five’s wobbling legs prove unable to support his weight alone.

Miraculously, neither Diego nor Klaus comment on the assistance. They flank him on either side, awkwardly making their way down the street as inconspicuously as possible. Klaus eventually does make a comment when they pass by a pharmacy, giving Five a tiny nudge and asking, “Want me to steal you one of those walking canes, grandpa? We can stick tennis balls on them. I hear they’re all the rave at the retirement homes.”

When they reach the entrance of the Icarus Theater, Five is absolutely winded, a fresh sheen of sweat overlaying his face. Klaus trots over to the teller, concocting a way to get them entrance into the theatre despite not having tickets.

Diego and Five stand to the side, his brother’s hand steadying him against the wall. It’s so strange, Five thinks with something close to awe, how his brothers are ensuring that Five remains by their side. Had they been efficient, they would just leave him. Not to die, no, he’s well aware his siblings would never do something that callous. No, the more efficient option here would be to hide Five away somewhere, out of sight, so they would be able to continue their manhunt without the additional baggage holding them back.

In the world of survival, you need to shed this kind of hindrance if you want to succeed. His brothers don’t do that. They don’t see his invalid state as a liability. Rather, they see it as something they need to take responsibility for. A priority they need to resolve immediately.

The cockroaches would never do that.

“What?” Diego asks. 

Five frowns. “What?”

His brother’s eyes narrow, but he doesn’t follow up further. The muscles in his jaw tighten and he looks towards the street. 

“You are getting better,” Diego asks him uncertainly after a moment, his forehead creasing as he looks down at the pathetic state Five is in. “. . . right?”

He doesn’t have an answer that he’s confident in, so a wordless response will suffice; he nods. Diego frowns deeply. His brother is a hard one to brush aside, the man not accepting an answer unless it completely satisfies his queries. It reminds Five of his father.

“Don’t worry,” he eventually slurs to Diego. He tries to work his mouth to make the next words more comprehensible. “I won’t . . . drop dead anytime soon.”

Diego swallows, the noise incredibly loud. “Better not.”

Klaus comes back, waving three tickets in his hand. “I’ve returned bearing gifts,” he sings, handing each one to his brothers. “Wouldn’t let us in without a ticket, those greedy capitalists. But, lucky for us, there’s a nice and early concert starting right about now. Grabbed us some great seats, too.”

“We’re not here to attend a concert, Klaus.” Diego glares at the ticket suspiciously. “How did you pay for these, anyway?”

Klaus wags his finger. “Ah, ah, ah. A gentleman never discusses finances in public. People might talk.”

They wade through the entrance with ease, the déjà vu not lost on any of them. An employee by the concert door examines their tickets, then unclicks the velvet rope and gestures them inside. The auditorium is dark and still, but the podium is bright with song and the precise assembly of movement from the musicians.

“Stay here,” Diego whispers when Five and Klaus settle in their seats. The music blares on, unaware of their interruption. “I’ll take a look around, see if the others are here somewhere.”

Klaus shushes Diego, shooing him away as his eyes sparkle at the concert ahead of him. Five slouches deep into his seat, eyes trailing after Diego, watching him move down the walk path in an awkward crouch, head turning in either direction hoping to spot on his siblings amongst the concert-goers.

The orchestra is playing a song from The Nutcracker. Five recognizes Tchaikovsky’s work; in the first few months of the apocalypse, he had stumbled upon a car that still had a workable cassette player. With rabid, desperate hands, he shoved one of the many tapes he found in the destroyed library into the slot hoping to hear anything other than the cracks of fire and the silence of death.

The music is hauntingly melancholy. It swims through the half empty auditorium with the sleuth of an eel, curling around the seats with serene grace. The wane of the violins’ humming over the trickle of the harp is like droplets of rain over the howl of wind. The tone drops and the trumpets enter, the song becoming more climatic and urgent, the clap of the cymbal like an overhead thunderstorm.

Five would very much like to see Vanya up on a stage such as this, one day.

Then, the fire alarm screeches.

Five startles as if struck. Klaus sits up sharply, looking around frantically. “Fire?” He either exclaims or asks, even his tone is uncertain.

The orchestra is halted, the musicians looking at one another in confusion. Murmurings break out throughout the theater. The overhead lights turn on, and the heads of dozens of rows of seats look back at him. Five’s stomach twists in unease.

Then, the sprinklers spring to life. A downpour of water rains down on them.

The concert goers don’t need additional motivation; as one, they all arise and begin rushing out towards the exit. One of the employees is patiently shouting directions to those who would listen, kindly asking all to remain calm, to please form a singular line, that everything is under control.

It’s meticulous chaos, and the people here have enough dignity to not instantly create a stampede of panic. Klaus has his knees to his chest, allowing people occupying the row an easier exit. He’s soaked to the bone, the sprinklers mercilessly pulsing down water to put out whatever fire is ravaging the building. Five imagines he’s just as soaked as his brother, but he’s too tense to notice. He shivers, but he doesn’t think it’s from the cold.

Klaus’ hand is latched onto his throughout it all. Warm, warm on cold, cold.

Diego returns, looking incredibly akin to a wet, put out dog. “Just our luck,” he grunts, pulling Five out of his seat and gesturing for Klaus to follow. He throws Five’s arm over his shoulder, ignoring his indigent protests. He keeps grumbling, “I swear, this universe really has it out for us. Can’t go a single minute without something going wrong.”

The three of them follow behind the crowd, feet splashing over the shallow stream of water that swims down the path. The bright, red EXIT sign is sharply visible over the torrent of unnatural rain, and the masses flock to it like moths to a singular light.

“I don’t know, broski,” Klaus is saying, uselessly wiping the water from his face. “This is actually pretty good for us. Now everyone in here will all be outside, so if our lovely siblings were actually hiding out here, we can pick them out from the crowd outside.”

Diego considers that. “Huh. Good point.”

“I have a lot of those, you know.”

The crowd thins, and they’re close to the exit now. Five freezes, halting himself and Diego in their spots. “S-Shit.” He pants.

Klaus bumps right into the both of them. Diego tenses. “What? What’s wrong?”

Five doesn’t answer, so Diego follows his gaze. He curses when he sees her, too. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”

The Sparrow Academy woman from earlier stands at the center of the exit.

She doesn’t budge as people begin shuffling around her. They don’t even pay her much attention, even with the crows perched on her shoulder.

She glares down at the three of them, her smirk sharp and her eyes malicious. That expression alone confirms to Five that she was the one that pulled the fire alarm. Getting rid of the collateral so she has free reign to go wild, he thinks, begrudgingly impressed. She’s learned.  

Diego pushes Five to Klaus, placing himself in front of the two of them, chest out and shoulders broad. Five would have something incredibly scathing to say about that behavior, but he truly is not in any position to talk down the only brother who can adeptly defend themselves. Five slaps away Klaus’ hand. He refuses the support, not right now.

The sprinklers finally shut down, and the sharp bell of the alarm is snuffed out along with it. The auditorium has been safely and swiftly evacuated as if an actual fire had taken place. The only souls remaining are the Sparrow and Umbrella Academy students.

Water drips from multiple areas, irregular drip, drip-drip-drip, drip-drip, drip noises filling the tense silence.

The incline of the room makes the woman seem like she’s looking down on them. She is definitely thriving on that perception, her smile insultingly arrogant. She says, “You—”

But Klaus steals the first word by loudly complaining, “Oh, are you serious? You know, we were really enjoying that show. We paid good money to see it, too. Well-deserved money, because, man, those guys were good. With the trombone and the, the little harp thing. So professional, you can tell they worked really hard for this day. And you just,” he gestures to the woman, disgusted. “And you just, you just ruined it for them. Interrupted their dreams. So rude. So, so, rude.”

Five is grinning, watching as her cocky smirk melts clean off her face. “Oh, lovely,” she drawls. “You’ve added another idiot to your little idiot collection. Which one are you, now? Can’t be the ape one, clearly. The Séance then, hm?”

Klaus falters at the odd name, looking at his brothers, but Diego shrugs and Five frowns. Klaus scratches his neck, “Uh, I guess? We’re just throwing cute little nicknames at each other, then? OK, I’ll bite— I dub thee, uh, The Hitchcocktress. Yeah. Because of that trippy Bird movie. Oh wait, does Alfred Hitchcock exist here, or—”

“Oh god, shut up,” The woman groans. She takes a step forward. Klaus pulls Five’s sleeve and takes a step back. Diego stands his ground. “It’s not a nickname, dumbass. What are you, seven years old? It’s what Dad called you. He had a name for all of you rejects. You’re the Séance, since apparently you can commune with the dead, although Dad loved to go on about how much of a disappointment you were in their first meeting.”

Klaus pouts, but Five tenses. He knows what she’s doing. He doesn’t like it.

The woman keeps talking, pointing casually at Diego, “And you. Let’s see, insolent brat and predictably reckless? Yup, you must be the Kraken.”

“Kraken?” Diego asks, and Five really hopes his brother doesn’t ask aloud what the word meant.

She shrugs. The crow on her shoulder makes a short, shrieking noise, as if cackling. “Apparently, your fighting is laughably all over the place.” She waves her arms around to demonstrate, snickering. “He said fighting you was like fighting an octopus that just learned it had more than two limbs.”

Diego bristles. “He’s the one that taught—”

“And you,” her eyes land on Five, and he looks back at her unimpressed. “The Boy, he called you. Kept calling you a kid but I didn’t think you’d actually be one. Yeah, he did not like you. Said we needed to make you disappear at any cost, or else the entire world would be dealt a great loss. Actually, he said that about all of you. Makes sense— you freaks are like stains to this timeline.”

Five knows what she’s doing. He isn’t a fool. It’s one of Dad’s favorites, his goddamn mind games. She’s trying to throw them off with this pathetic wordplay. Five isn’t an idiot, and this girl isn’t as clever as she likes to think she is. They’ve all had to endure Dad’s stupid little manipulation tactics from the man himself— hearing it from another source doesn’t really have the same bite.

“Wow,” Klaus breathes, stopping the silence short of stretching out any further. He seems genuinely amazed. “Un—be—lievable. Even in this timeline, Dad couldn’t be bothered to give us real names. Heh, what a real tool that guy is, huh?”

Diego also chimes in, his voice steady. “Listen, lady. Not to burst your high-and-mighty bubble, but we’ve heard this all before from the old man himself. I’d put money that you and the rest of your little Sparrows had to listen to his trash talking, too. But unlike you guys, we learned there’s nothing we can ever do that would impress him. So, take our advice and stop trying. He’s not gonna be impressed if you kill us. He’s never gonna be impressed with anything you do.”

The roles have switched, Five observes with something akin to pride. His brothers have handled the attempted manipulation with much more polish than he would expect from them. Even the Sparrow woman seems awestruck that her opponents haven’t had some sort of mental crisis at the pathetic attempt to tear down their poise.

She shakes it off easily, though, and Five can see from her eyes that she’s switching tactics. “Of course Dad was never impressed with you losers. You’re so predictable. Let me guess what your plan is here— going around and rounding up the rest of your little gang, huh? Strength in numbers, that whole cliché attack plan?”

“Hey, you’re the ones that attacked us,” Diego barks. “We didn’t ask for this stupid Daddy-sanctioned cat and mouse game, alright?”

The woman laughs, genuinely amused. “Oh, cut the crap. You think we’re doing this just for him? We’re trying to save the world from you freaks! This entire timeline is on the brink of collapsing because of your goddamn joy ride through space and time!”

Five stiffens. He pushes Diego out of the way and snaps at her, “You wouldn’t even have a timeline if it wasn’t for us!”

She bares her teeth, taking a step forward. “And if it wasn’t for you, your timeline wouldn’t have been reduced to a freakin’ apocalyptic wasteland.”

Five sees red, but Diego pushes him back before he can snarl back a retort. His brother speaks loudly, his voice filling the large auditorium. “For fuck’s sake! Don’t you see he’s literally fed you guys a bunch of lies about us so he could pit us against one another? This is exactly what Dad did with us when we were kids, and we’re both falling for it all over again.”

Klaus pulls Five back again, their retreat discreet as Diego attempts to maintain the woman’s attention on himself. Shit, Five thinks, surprised at himself for momentarily losing his head. It’s so incredibly obvious to him that the woman is just baiting them so that she can swiftly catch them when their guard is at its most unsuspecting. He would never let such a greenhorn tactic succeed on him, and yet here he is, heart pounding wildly and emotions bubbling to the surface. He needs to stay on task—he needs to ensure his family’s survival, and he cannot do that if he’s losing his edge.

“Stop calling him that.” The woman’s face has darkened considerably. The birds on her shoulder fluff their feathers, seemingly revving up for launch. Five doesn’t take his eyes off them. “He’s our father, not yours.”

Klaus speaks up, despite Diego’s frantic waving for them to shut up and get away. “Oh, girl. You can have him. You can have our timeline’s version of him, too, if you want.”

Her hands are clenched, and Five is acutely aware of the dozens of crows perched on the balcony seats above them, staring down and waiting for permission to go wild. His fingers twitch. She’s going to do something.

He and Klaus take another step back as she says, “You don’t know anything about our dad! It’s because of him that we didn’t turn out like you rejects, a shittier version of the Sparrow Academy. God, even looking at you idiots is like looking at a mirror of what could have been.”

“Hang on there, lady,” Diego can’t help but interject, offense in his voice. “What makes you think we’re the bad bunch?”

Klaus nods. “Yeah, for all we know, you guys are probably the evil version of the Umbrella Academy.”

“Oh, I know we’re not.” That coy grin of hers returns, as if she was waiting for one of them to ask that question. “Because at least we’ve never been so shit at being decent humans that we got one of our siblings killed. Can you say the same for yourselves?”

The air stills.

Klaus gapes, his mouth paralyzed, for once rendered speechless. Diego physically recoils at the words, a similar horror-stricken expression on his face. The back and forth rhythm between them and the woman has effectively been interrupted, and his brothers are shellshocked.

An opening has been made, just as she was gouging for. She takes a step forward, utilizing her disturbance to its full intent. Even if it only lasts a flicker of a second, it’s enough time for her to go in for the kill while their defenses are down—

But wordplay is for amateurs.

Because while she was waiting for her words to have its intended effect on his brothers, he was waiting for those words to leave her mouth. The second after she had spoken, Five’s eyes have already narrowed into slits, and he has already decided with finality, that’s it.

He shoves Diego out of the way, swiftly pulling the revolver from his pocket, and fires.

BANG!

The bullet flies straight into her forehead—

—Or, it would have.

Right when he fires, one of her stupid birds devotedly throws itself in the bullet’s direction taking the hit with a shrill squawk. It thumps to the ground in a heap of blood and black feathers.

The sound of the gun going off startles everyone— Diego and Klaus both flinching violently while the birds above them fly around in a panic. Even the Sparrow Academy woman is startled into wide-eyed shock.

It’s all the time he needs to cock the gun once more and fire another bullet—

Are you fucking kidding me, he thinks furiously as another bird shields the woman from the lethal hit, the bullet hitting it in the belly in a mess of blood and guts.

The woman is no longer shocked—she is red with rage.

“You little shit!” She screams, and with a grand wave of her arms, the birds above them stop flying in circles and redirect their attention down on the three of them. Like missiles being dropped from the sky, a torrent of birds rains down on them. “Eat shit and die!”

“Crap,” Five mutters, and he’s yanked to the side harshly by Diego and running down the aisle and towards the abandoned podium.

“What the hell, Five!” Diego is shouting, shielding his face as a crow latches on to his elbow and starts pecking at his face. “You had a – gah! – a gun with you this whole time!?”

“Tech—get off me! – technically,” Klaus adds from beside him, fighting off a bird while also trying to shield Five with his body. The birds are intent on absolutely lacerating them, using their claws and beaks in attempt to shred their skin to bits. “Technically,” Klaus says again. “It’s Susan’s gun.”

 “Who the hell—you know what, I don’t care. Give me that,” Diego takes the gun from Five’s grip and points it at his feathery assailant’s head. He fires, and the bird’s beak is blasted off its face, blood spraying dramatically in the air. Another bird easily swoops in and takes its place, and when Diego pulls the trigger, the gun simply clicks.

“Shit!” He tosses the empty gun away and punches the bird in the head. Another crow digs its talons into his forearm, while another starts scratching at his neck fiercely. “If anyone else has any hidden weapons they’d like to conveniently share with the class, now would be a great time!”

Klaus makes a small, “Oh!” noise at Diego’s question. Pushing one of the many birds away from his personal space, Klaus searches his pockets and pulls out a kitchen knife.

Diego nearly trips. “Where the hell did you get that from!?”

Klaus, with an appreciative smile on his face, shrugs. “You dropped it back in the mansion, remember? Didn’t mom teach you to pick up your toys after you’re done playing with them, Diego dear?”

“It’s mine?”

“Well, actually, now that I think about it, it’s Five’s.”

“It’s Sissy’s,” Five pants.

“I don’t care! Give me!” Diego snatches the knife from Klaus like a petulant child. He stops running and turns around, holding the tip of the knife with two fingers. He shoves a bird out of the way before he throws the knife forward. It soars through the air with purpose, slicing through the birds as it makes its way up the auditorium.

With a wet thunk, the knife stabs through the Sparrow woman’s shoulder.

“MOTHERFU—” She howls, sinking to her knees. Her voice carries in the large room.

Diego seems pleased with his hit, but Five can’t help but growl under his breath. It’s infuriating how soft and naïve his brothers can be, how averse they are to killing. If he had just struck her in the throat or chest, this whole ordeal would have been over with.

But, no. Instead, injuring her only did more harm than good for them. The birds seem more intent on gouging their eyes out as retribution. They swarm together, forming a flock of black, and press down on Diego, Klaus, and Five. The three of them are bombarded with sharp claws and beaks, with slapping wings and harsh shrieks. They’re trapped in place, the birds surrounding them from all sides, pushing them against one another with an unnatural ferociousness that is incredibly out of character for crows.

For the first time in an incredibly long time, Five finds himself woefully useless. He shoves the birds away from his face, trying to keep them from gauging his eyes out, feverishly racking his brain to find a solve. Maybe, he think with a hiss as a talon slices at his cheek. Maybe—if I had my powers. I could blink us out. No, the exertion would kill me—but, then it would save them. I could save them.

He grabs his brothers’ arms through the chaos, fingers curling around the limbs securely. Just one jump. That’s it, then he can save them. Five grits his teeth and pulls forth his powers—

A flash of cold pain strikes him, threatening to tear him in half, but Five does not stop, not until the familiar blue tear is formed in the space in front of him. He reaches into his reserves once more, reaching deeper and deeper, exhausting all the energy his body could afford to summon his powers.

He feels sick, he feels horrid, but just a little more, just a little more, he needs to do something.

His hands begin to glow a weak, faint hue of blue—

An arm is yanked free from his grasp.

“Five, stop it!” Diego shouts desperately. Five gasps, nearly tripping at the harsh breakage of concentration. Diego pulls his grip from Klaus’ arm, as well. Five balks, something snapping loose within him, his body shuddering as the strenuous activity has been neatly canceled.

Completely ignoring the birds that claw at his back, Diego grabs Five’s ridiculously thin wrists, squeezing them enough to grind the bones. “Don’t fucking do it, man,” Diego tells him. When Five doesn’t say anything, his brother shakes him urgently, rattling his entire body. “Please, don’t,” he says, and Five realizes he’s not talking about simply using his powers. “Don’t try that again, okay? Okay?”

Five nods shakily. “Okay.”

Then, there’s a shout from the other end of the auditorium. “Get down!”

He doesn’t have time to register the new voice. The command is clearly meant for them. Diego moves the fastest, grabbing Five and Klaus by the cuff of their shirts and hauling all of them to the ground.

There’s a glow of white directly above them. Five hears the sound of a bow sharply slicing against the strings of a violin. The note explodes into a wave of energy, and it bursts down the hall in a translucent upsurge.    

The herd of crows are pushed away like wind pushing away a cloud of smoke. Their feathered bodies smack against the heads of the chairs and the walls of the theater with resounding thwacks. The Sparrow girl is knocked off her feet as well, her body being thrown straight through the exit door.

Five, Klaus, and Diego pick their heads up at once. Standing on the podium, amongst the discarded instruments, is—

“Vanya!” Klaus cheers, scrambling off the ground and sprinting up the stage to envelope his sister in a suffocating hug.

The sight of Vanya seems to settle something within Five’s chest. His breath leaves him with ease, his head clear and his vision filled with color. It is relief, he realizes after Diego pulls him off the ground. That’s the feeling—pure, unfiltered relief. He nearly sags with the weight of it.

“We-We gotta go,” Vanya is telling them when Diego and Five reach the podium. Her face is still pale, the light of her powers slowly bleeding off her skin. She drops the violin, taking Klaus’ outstretched hand instead. “There’s a back exit, come on.”

They don’t turn back to see if the Sparrow Academy woman has regained her bearings. With the ease of memory, Vanya leads her brothers through the back rooms of the stage, quickly sprinting past the dressing rooms and production closets. They shove open the emergency exit door and are greeted with the blaring sun of an undisturbed afternoon day.

“Shit,” Diego pants, wiping the slither of blood from his eye, hands on his knees as he tries to catch his breath. He has a painful array of scratches throughout his face, although thankfully most seem to be shallow. Klaus is in a similar state, the cuts and punctures littering his exposed skin, a few black feathers hidden in his hair. Five is confident his appearance is just as disheveled.

“Are-Are you guys, alright?” Vanya asks, eyes jumping from one worn-out brother to the next. She looks incredibly uncertain on what to do, her hand hovering over each of them, head turning from the closed door to the street.

Klaus nods vigorously, leaning against the wall tiredly. “Peachy, peachy, peachy. We’re just peachy, sweet sister. I may or may not have a newfound bird phobia, but other than that, we’re just peachy. And how are you, hm? Good, I hope?”

Vanya stutters, absolutely lost. Behind them is a sleepy street that pays them little regard. Closer to the intersection, the flashing lights of firetrucks and first responders litters the horizon. Diego straightens, wiping his mouth. “Stay here,” he says gruffly to no one in particular, looking toward the crowded corner. “I’ll go bring the car around, get us the hell out of here. Vanya, if you see a bird, blast the shit out of it, alright?”

Vanya looks at him like he had just spoken a second language. Diego takes off immediately, further straining Vanya’s passivity. She turns to Klaus and Five, perhaps looking for them to provide some explanation, but Klaus simply shrugs and Five winces as his heart cannot seem to settle on a rhythm.  

Vanya notices. “F-Five? Are you alright?”

He slides down against the wall, plopping to the ground. His lungs are on fire, burning relentlessly with every draw of breath. He can feel his body beginning to fall apart as the adrenalin finally seeps from his skin. He hears Vanya’s voice calling his name, like an echo from the very bottom of the ocean. No, he’s in the bottom of the ocean, the pressure of the darkness squeezing the life out of him.

He must have blacked out for a moment; he opens his eyes and vaguely sees Klaus and Vanya suddenly kneeling in front of him. His vision is horrendously blurry and unreliable, but the worried bodies of his siblings are unmistakable. He can hear them talking, now, too, and whether they’re talking to him or about him, he is unsure. All he can decipher is the emotions in the incomprehensible stream of words.  

“—po . . .we . . . rs? B-But he hasn’t even—”

“—bl . . . ood, but is gett . . .ing . . . be . . . tter—"

“—Klaus! He’s not— doesn’t look— h . . . u . . . r . . . t—"

“—Oth . . . ers . . . and will be . . . f . . . ine . . .”

“—worried.”

Cockroaches never worried about each other.

Five recalls once turning over a plank of scorched wood to find a nest of roaches. There was perhaps two dozen of them hiding under there, the insects huddling together like a close-knit family. He stared at them with morbid curiosity, then brought his foot down and crushed one with the heel of his boot. He expected the cluster of cockroaches to immediately climb his leg, band together and maul him to death as retribution for killing one of their own.

They didn’t. They scattered immediately, each bug fleeing in attempt to save itself. Their brother nothing but a stain of crushed guts underneath Five’s foot.

“—Did he . . . s . . . a . . . y— so. . . me  . . . th—?”

“—not . . . s . . . u . . .re . . . isn’t . . . coherent—Five?”

His vision clears and he sees his siblings now, sees their worry clearly now. Unlike the cockroaches, they remain at his side, despite how battered he is. They haven’t scattered away, like the family of roaches in the apocalypse. Perhaps that’s why the bugs were so adept at surviving that wasteland. Five had forced himself to adapt to their mindset in order to survive, because he needed to survive no matter what.

He doesn’t want to be a cockroach anymore, he realizes now.

“Five?” Vanya whispers.

He blinks, turning his head. Vanya looks so horrified, so disorientated and scared. Sad eyes, sad frown. He shivers at the sight, and the shiver evolves into a shudder, and suddenly he’s folding into himself, his insides rattling with agony as he coughs and wheezes and paints the floor a morbidly enthusiastic red.

“Shit!” Klaus hisses, moving a petrified Vanya out of the way as he swoops in to keep Five upright, rubbing his back in rhythmic circles. His brother murmurs a string of words that Five cannot understand at all, but they are a solid tether that he latches onto as a jolt of electricity strikes through him, over and over and over again.

And just as the fit ends, the cold surges in. Five shivers, this time indisputably from the frigid chill that coats his skin. He feels flattened, hollowed out. Nothing but a crushed bug underneath an apathetic foot in a cold, cold apocalyptic world—

Vanya lunges forward without hesitation and hugs him, squeezes him, wraps him in a warmth he has never felt before. “I’m so sorry, Five,” Vanya is weeping, her watery voice drowning his mind. “This is all my fault, it’s all my fault.”

He closes his eyes, letting his head be buried in the crook of her shoulder. He feels her body hitch with sobs, hears Klaus’ voice frantically try to console her. But Vanya continues her quiet cries, her string of apologies. He doesn’t want to hear this. Not from her. He wants to tell her that it’s not her fault at all—

“It is,” she insists with a choke. “It is. I-I ended the world, it w-was me, I destroyed everything and made you get stuck there, and now, again,—and—and—it’s all wrong again—I—I—I—"

“Oh, Vanya,” Klaus’ voice murmurs, and the warmth becomes warmer, Five feeling another set of arms wrapping around him, the warmth so overwhelming he thinks he’s floating. “Vanya, come on, now, don’t say that, hey, hey. It’s alright. What’s all this nonsense about your fault? Vanya, you’re an angel. How can anything be your fault?”

A loud sniff, and Vanya is shaking her head. “It is, it is, if I didn’t—I destroyed the world, Klaus, and made—and made all this happen—made Five so—so—and now, Dad is—and the timeline—”

Klaus is shushing her gently, his hand on her head, patting her hair down in slow, rhythmic strokes. “Vanya, my sweet, sweet sister, have you been drinking crazy juice? Come on, you’re the smart one of the family. You know there’s only one person whose fault this is.”

Vanya shakes her head again, her tear tracked cheek touching his own bloody one. Klaus tuts, “You silly lady. Come on, it’s that old bastard’s fault! Right? It’s because of that nutjob of a father that everything is so shit. Think about it—if he wasn’t such a dick, we’d all be frolicking through a field right now, or, or I don’t know, eating caviar and lobster in a ridiculously high-priced restaurant in that super tall building in Dubai.”

A chuckle bubbles out of Vanya, and Five nearly sinks into the ground from the sound. Klaus and Vanya sit back, the warmth lessening, but unlike the cockroaches, they don’t scatter away. Klaus is wiping the tears from Vanya’s face, murmuring, “Right? Hey, come on, you’re alright. No one blames you, Vanya, no— no one ever even thought to, so get that nasty idea out of your precious head. Everything’ll be alright, okay?”

She bites her lip, her eyes flickering to the side. “B-But, Five . . .”

Klaus winces, then sighs in defeat. “Ah, yeah, our old little brother is currently, hm, out of commission? No, bad choice of words- he’s going through a rough patch, but he’ll be alright, too! Just some, some minor problems with his powers, but definitely not your fault!”

Diego suddenly returns, running back with a heavy scowl. “There’s a whole squad of cops swarming the streets, swarming the car. Don’t know how the hell they tracked down that car. Goddamnit.”

“Ah,” Klaus cringes. He scratches his head shamefully. “Yeah, that, uh, might have something to do with Susan financing our concert tickets.” He stands up, fishing a credit card out of his pocket and then indiscreetly tosses it aside. “Uh, my bad?”

Diego pinches the bridge of his nose so tightly he nearly tears his face off. He looks down, and spots Vanya’s tear tracked face and Five’s bloody chin. He swears loudly, kneeling down, looking at Vanya first, “You alright?”

She wipes her eyes quickly, a shuddering sigh before she nods. But that’s a lie, Five knows. She’s not alright. She’s an emotional wreck, and no matter what lies Klaus feeds her, Five knows this is all because of him. Maybe that’s why the cockroaches always fled, never looking back at their mutilated companion, never condemning themselves to the guilt and pain and worry.

Diego taps Five’s face lightly with a finger. “Hey. Five. You with us?”

He swallows, tasting blood. Tasting ash. Tasting rot. Tasting failure. He doesn’t know where he is, but his siblings are here, and he knows from the warmth of earlier that they’re real, that they aren’t corpses.

“Stay with us, man, alright?”

He wants to. He really does.

Klaus suddenly shouts—“TAXI!”

Diego’s eyes widen and he twists around. “Klaus, what—"

A yellow cab pulls over in front of Klaus, and he turns to his siblings with a self-satisfied grin. “Ta-da! What? Don’t give me that look. We need to get out of here, right? And old Five-y is definitely not walking anytime, soon. So, improvising!”

“Oh,” Diego blinks. “That works, I guess.” With Vanya’s help, Five is settled into the back seat of the car. Vanya is next to him, their shoulders touching, her warmth filtering into his frigid body. Diego hesitates before getting in himself. He narrows his eyes and asks Klaus, “Any idea how we’re gonna pay for this?”

Klaus pulls out a wad of crumbled bills from his pocket. “Say ‘thank you, Susan.’”

Vanya grins. “Thank you, Susan.”

Chapter Text

Chapter Four: O Reluctant Foe, You Think You Can Save Me?

It’s time to leave.

The sun has completely disappeared behind the horizon, the cloudless vista of a Dallas night closing this chapter of their lives. Just as they had agreed, it was dark out, and they were all ready to go.

His siblings are outside, standing beside the porch or lazing on it, waiting underneath the moonlight or impatiently pacing back and forth with restlessness, Five isn’t sure. He’s also unsure of what they were all up to with the time allotted to them per his generosity. Whether it was saying their goodbyes to their respective companions of this timeline, tying up all loose ends, or brooding and sulking over the lives they have to leave behind, it was all a quiet affair that Five had kept himself scarce from.

But now, everything is set. It’s time to leave. They are all ready and eager to open the briefcase and, finally, finally, get the hell out of here.

Five is—

Five is not.

Presently, he is inside the house, hand clutching the briefcase’s handle tightly, a horrible knot of something tangling itself within his stomach and kidneys and intestines, wrapping and suffocating his insides to the point where he might be ill.

He’s—

He just needs a moment.

He stands in the center of the destroyed living room, the front door straight ahead of him, the bathroom to his left, its door blown straight off its hinges showcasing a dinky sink and shattered mirror. Five, in the crossroads of the two entrances, feels like he’s standing in the middle of the universe.

But he’s—

He’s fine, he just—

He’s fine.

The front door is slightly ajar, and through that gap he can see the endless darkness of the Dallas night. There are shifts within the darkness, heads bobbing and bodies shifting. He can hear his siblings conversing with one another in low murmurs, hear their emotions fill the pregnant silence with anticipation and consolidation.

Five exhales. A white cloud of air shudders out of his mouth. The snow had already melted outside, but he is covered in a sweat so cold he wonders if the ice is just now melting onto his skin. He doesn’t realize he’s shaking until he hears the briefcase rattle.

But that’s—

That’s normal.

That’s just the exhaustion, and nothing more. The residuals of the minuscule time travel expenditure. Nothing more.

He’s fine, otherwise. 

He spares his left a hesitant glance, catching sight of his shattered reflection. The mirror is a spiderweb of fissures, some pieces completely removed while others hanging onto the frame by sheer willpower. Five blinks, and his fragmented reflection blinks back at him. He hardly recognizes himself through the millions of cracks, but the broken image of himself feels like an old friend.

Standing in the middle of the universe, two gravitational pulls tugging at him so strongly he thinks he’ll be ripped apart at any moment.

Okay, he decides, a forced finality in the thought. Time to leave this shithole. Grip on the briefcase tightening, body straightening, Five nods to himself and—

He doesn’t move.

He glares at his destination. The front door is ajar, but it’s not only darkness on the other side. His glare wobbles, losing its heat, and he feels his expression contorting. A sensation he hasn’t felt in an incredibly long time carves a hole in his stomach, and he refuses to acknowledge it as fear.

Coward, he sneers at himself.

The front door is ajar, and the night sky is heavy with clouds and toxins, giving the horizon an orange tint. He licks his lips, tasting a desert of dread over the cracked skin—

Get a grip! He snaps at himself with clenched teeth. He cannot be that person anymore, that scared, naïve fool that lets doubt and fear overwhelm his mind, rendering him indecisive. He cannot, because if he is, then he cannot move forward, then his family cannot move forward—he has to survive, and the only way to do that is to move.

He—

He doesn’t move.

Fucking coward, but the insult holds little venom.

The front door groans, and Five watches passively as Allison’s head peeks inside.

She doesn’t need to glance around; she finds his eyes quickly and something shifts in her expression. She’s bracing herself. Trepidation.

“Hey,” she says quietly. She takes a few steps forward, her shoes clicking against the hardwood floor, the noise jarringly loud. She gestures behind her. “We’re all ready to go.”

Five nods, then turns back to the mirror. “Good,” his broken reflection says. He steels his expression coolly, watching as the mirror does the same. A small chip of glass falls, and Five has to swallow down the manic chuckle that threatens to trickle out.

“Good,” he says instead. Repeated word. He doesn’t know why he felt the need to do that. He turns back to his sister. “I’ll be outside in a moment.”

A moment passes. Then another one.

Allison doesn’t move, nor does her tight expression loosen. They stare at each other for an impossibly long time. In the space between them, there is a magnetic reaction, two identical poles incapable of getting closer, a thick and heavy separation that keeps the two apart or keeps the other from moving forward.

Another moment of immobility passes.

“Five,” she says. Her arms cross over her chest, but not in impatience.

“Allison,” he returns stoically.

The silence stretches even further, bordering on uncomfortable. Allison is undeterred, and levels him with an equally passive gaze.

Five wonders if Allison maintained some of her childhood personality, or if adulthood and parenthood had morphed her to someone completely unknown within Five’s memories. It was hard to decipher, and more so to mull over, in the first two weeks of their reacquaintance, but he finds himself now suddenly curious.

They had always been somewhat similar, he and Allison. They were both narcissistic little brats in their own ways. Five was a ball of overconfidence, brimming with a conceitedness that was well beyond his years. Allison was a vain creature of her own creation, taking in monstrous amounts of pride in her ability to generate validation and admiration, all capabilities afforded to her without the assistance of her powers.

Five’s confidence was held together with his unmatched skill, while hers was fortified by her unwavering character and sociability. When two such forces of inflated self-worth collided with one another, it inevitably created a vibrating pressure of irrational competitiveness with it.

He remembers the looks they would always spare one another when their narcissism was fed. When the training would turn competitive, and Five would be crowned the winner amongst his siblings, he would always be sure to shoot a childless look of arrogance over to Allison. A challenge. Allison always took it. It would be during dinner the next day, when the table was being cleared and talking was permitted, that Allison would casually reveal that she had already memorized next week’s text of Homer, and promptly recite it with the eloquence of a scholar. Mother would always gush over her with sweet words, but it was their father’s curt grunt of approval that she was angling for, and when she got it, her chin would turn upward, her eyes would find Five’s, and the smugness would reveal itself. Another challenge.

That was the line of separation, in the end. Allison loved the praise and validation her personality rewarded her, no matter the source. She loved the words of acclaim, the amazed gleam in others’ eyes, the gasps of wonder and coos of admiration, and she knew how to get it.

Five loved the winning, and nothing more. Rewards, praise, all that nonsense was worthless. It was just the thrill of the win. The knowledge that he was the best.

Stupid, naïve, petty little children. They would never let the other have the last word, never let the other one feel more superior than the other, even if they were pitting different sources of vanity against one another.

Looking at her now, he sees some of that petty competitiveness line her face, her jaw clenched tightly to adamantly push it away.

Sometimes, when his mind begins to wander after looking at his brothers and sisters for too long, he would wonder how his siblings would have fared if they were the ones left to their own devices in the apocalypse.

For some reason, he doesn’t think Allison would have done well with the loneliness.

He hears a muffled argument between Klaus and Diego breakout outside, followed by Luther’s exasperated voice interjecting every now and then. Allison had left the door behind her wide open, and flames light up the frame.

He can see the destroyed city behind her, the collapsed buildings and charred vehicles and the crumbled shapes that were once human beings. His ears are buzzing with static, a small mercy, as it is undoubtedly drowning the sounds of a dying world.

Allison would have unquestionably died in that wasteland.

Stop it, he thinks, biting down on his lip. He curls his toes within his shoes, looking for some kind of purchase.

He’s incredibly cognizant of how horribly ill he feels, a pollution of exhaustion suffocating him. He’s starting to conclude, almost bitterly and with an immense amount of denial, that it’s the likely cause of his crumbling psyche. 

The silence has stretched long enough, and Allison concedes. She shakes her head, turns to leave, saying, “Well. Whenever you’re ready, I guess—”

“Allison.”

His mouth moves at its own accord, and he’s not sure why he felt the need to call after her. Perhaps it was because she was now facing the front door, making her way towards the aftermath of a scorched world, and he knows that if she leaves, he would need to leave as well, and he’s not sure if he wants to move forward just yet, if he’s ready to see—

Allison whirls around so quickly her hair wraps around her neck.

“You know,” she says pointedly, loudly, a fake tone of conversation but a biting edge of bottled-up fury, “I didn’t just give up and settle in this timeline, Five.”

Five closes his mouth with a click, presses his lips into a thin line.

Allison takes two strides forward, breaking through the invisible magnetic push. She’s glaring down at him with clenched fists at her side. “Alright? I didn’t just land here and decide to assimilate and give up on going home—all I could think about was going home! I tried everything to get back, but what the hell could I have done, Five? Not everyone has the luxurious privilege of being able to time-travel!”

Her mouth opens to continue, but there’s a miniscule pause of hesitation, as if she were debating disclosing the next statement. A miniscule pause. “All I could do was wait. Wait for you. I thought, well, if you got us into this mess, you could get us out. But months and years passed, and you didn’t show up. None of you showed up, so I had to push that hope to the side and focus on surviving.”

The flames behind her cackle and Five swallows down the nausea.

“And, yes, maybe my idea of surviving was inserting myself into the timeline and falling in love with Ray and becoming a housewife,” she spits the word back at him like a bullet. “But I don’t regret it, because it helped me stay sane and stay alive. So don’t you dare assume that just because I looked for a way to be happy that I had given up on going home, that I gave up on Claire. Don’t you dare.”

There are stones in Five’s chest, pressing down and crushing him, as he watches Allison whirl right back around and leave, uninterested in looking at him any further. Five’s eyes find the mirror, and a blank face, void of expression, stares back at him.

A small chip of the mirror falls, the piece reflecting a fraction of his mind. He wonders how long before the entire thing collapses to the ground.

“Allison,” Five says quietly, the words escaping his mouth like a murmur. “I know.”

His sister pauses at the door. She doesn’t turn around, but surprise is written all over her rigid shoulders.

He wonders if she thinks Five still has some of his personality from his own youth. He doesn’t think so. He knows that child died a long time ago, replaced by a tired man with a personality morphed by bone-crushing solitude.

Decades of nonexistent human contact in a destroyed world, followed by his employment in an agency that supplied him contact with those sentenced to die immediately after introduction, has afforded Five the belief that his words cannot stick.

But with his siblings, he’s beginning to realize his words are now being absorbed, processed, and retained by actual people. It’s a strange thing to be reacquainted with, the consequences that follow his statements.

Even more strange is the tightening feeling around Five’s heart when he sees the effects of his words in Allison’s hurt face. Like some twisted sense of masochism, he latches onto that uncomfortable feeling, his only proof that he has some semblance of humanity left.

He tells his sister’s back, “I know you didn’t give up. I never believed that you did. What I said earlier was not . . . it was unnecessary, and cruel. For that, I apologize.”

He doesn’t tell her that he wholeheartedly believes she didn’t give up, because he knows what giving up really entails. He’s sure if he tried expanding upon it, he’d choke on his own voice.

Allison turns around, and Five is relieved to see that the tightness in her face has lessened.

She looks taken aback, though Five is not offended, as he’s already seen how arguments play out with this family. He won’t fault Allison for being surprised that one her siblings can actually absolve something civilly.

“I—I appreciate that, Five,” Allison says genuinely, after a beat. Her shoulders sag, and the anger seeps out. “I really do. And, I guess, it’s not fair that I took it all out on you. We were all—we were all in a mood. You were stressed, and we were tired, and upset, and hurting. It was only natural that tempers would be tested, that we would say things we didn’t mean.”

He hums noncommittedly. Sure, Five thinks. Let’s go with that.

She clears her throat. “When you were stuck in the future,” she broaches the topic like she was blindly navigating through a minefield. “Did you ever . . . give up?”

“Clearly not, since I’m here,” he throws the response out easily, because the question’s slow ebbing out had begun to frustrate him. But then Allison’s face falls again, the hurt and guilt coloring her expression, so he sighs and surrenders an answer. “Though, not without lack of trying. I did consider it a handful of times, but eventually I gave up on giving up when I discovered a purpose for myself.”

“To save the world?” Allison asks carefully, but Five’s mind floats back to those earlier years, when he was just a child terribly confused and terribly traumatized, when he was a young adult, tired and worn out, and when he was a middle-aged man, jaded and absolutely maddened. He remembers all the attempts at giving up. The thought would always enter his mind unprompted, no matter how hopeful or desperate he felt. But it was always preluded by a sudden silence from Dolores; suddenly, she would not speak, and it would last for days, weeks, months, before it would drive Five to a horrible madness and he would start entertaining giving up.

They did not happen often, but when they did, they would gnaw away at his will with sinister methodology. He remembers each moment that preceded the thought; when he was burying his siblings, when he reached one full year of solitude, when the gun in his pocket became too heavy, when he found that burnt car in the middle of the road—

Ah. He licks his lips. Best not go there.

“Five?”

“Hm?” He asks, then remembers her question. “Yes. To save the world. Spectacularly shit job I’m doing there, though.”

Allison looks at him oddly.

“Right . . . I guess this isn’t the best time to be having this kind of talk, huh.” A sheepish chuckle. She squirms from the silence. Five feels like it’s absorbing him. “We can save the talking for when we’re home. We’ll have plenty of time for that. Should we go, Five?”

Five swallows thickly, adjusting his grip on the briefcase.

His eyes are narrowed, staring with resolve at the front door, but when he takes a step forward, that resolve comes crashing down on him so harshly he nearly balks. He can’t seem to take a step forward without the sensation of falling into an endless abyss catching him abruptly.

The half-opened front door is like a tear in the universe, showcasing a hellish landscape on the other side. Like a bloody, toothless grin. And he has to walk through it, else he’ll never know if he’d rid himself of that nightmare. He has to. He has to—

His eyes jump to the side, and the mirror splits him into a million pieces. The task is so simple, just leave this fucking place already. So easy, but he feels like his mind is on the brink of collapsing as it is. If he were to open the briefcase and see that it was still there— that nothing had changed— that he had failed—

Coward.

Allison sighs deeply.

Her voice is heavy with sadness when she says, “I really wish you rested, Five.”

Yeah. He’s starting to wish that, too.

He rips his gaze away from the mirror. Allison’s eyes have gone soft with worry. He doesn’t want that. Doesn’t want that for himself, and certainly doesn’t want that for her.

“I ate Sissy’s stupid ham sandwich,” he offers as appeasement, then scowls. “That was on Diego’s ridiculous criteria, if I recall. A snack and a nap. I satisfied one, so that should suffice.”

Allison frowns. “You hate ham.”

“So they tell me,” he murmurs, mind wandering at just how incredible it is that his siblings could remember such a small detail about him, even though they’ve only spent roughly thirteen years of their lives with him. Those first few years hardly even count, too, considering early childhood memories are nothing but a haze in the mind of a child. Yet, they still remember him with great clarity, while he cannot even grasp one correct thing about them. What little he knows of their current personalities is scraped together from pieces of Vanya’s autobiography, nearly illegible tabloid magazine pages, and the whirlwind of the last two weeks spent with them—

“Five,” Allison says loudly, and he blinks, finding her gaze, not realizing his eyes drifted. “Five, I’m serious. We’re not saying these things just to tease you. Have you even slept or ate properly in the last few days? Or even weeks? You really look downright awful, like you’re about to collapse any minute.”

“Noted.”

“Five—”

“What do you want me to say, Allison?” Five sighs, rubbing his temples to keep his mind present, to hold it down and keep it from leaving. “I’ve acknowledged your concerns. I’m well aware of the state I’m in, considering I’m the one that put myself in it. What more do you want?”

“I don’t want anything. I just—I just want to help. We all do. Is that so hard to believe?”

Five makes a face. “I hardly see how this has anything to do with you all. Besides, there’s nothing any of you can do that can remotely help.”

“There’s nothing you’re doing for yourself that’s helping!” Allison snaps, then quickly collects herself. “No. No, I’m not going to make this into an argument with you, so stop baiting me. Jesus, Five. We’re just worried about you.”

“Unnecessary,” Five says quickly. “And highly detrimental to our current plight.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

How the hell could he explain that to her, or explain that to anyone? The only creatures that could possibly understand him are cockroaches, and even to himself that’s an absurd train of thought. How could he possibly explain to Allison that in order to keep your mind focused on the goal, to keep it focused on survival, you must throw away all other thoughts. You cannot worry about such trivial things, like another person’s health, because then you’re pulling focus away from survival—

“It means,” Five says through a clenched jaw. “We don’t have time for worrying. It will just slow us down.”

Allison’s eyebrows rise. “Slow us down from what? The crazy Commission lady is dead, the Swedish guy left, we’ve found our way home already, it’s over.”

It’s never over, Five nearly says, the statement like a living thing, desperately trying to claw its way out of his mouth for air. Five grits his teeth hard, keeping it caged, and instead says, “That kind of naïve conclusion is just as detrimental as your needless worrying.”

“Oh, and you’re standing here, wasting time and doing nothing, isn’t?”

Five’s exhale is shaky. “I’m not doing nothing,” He swallows. “I was thinking.”

Allison snorts, absolutely nonplussed. “Right. Well, if you’re done thinking, and you don’t want to waste any more time—" She moves aside, and gestures to the door. “—then let’s go already.”

Five’s face contorts into something scornful. Another smug challenge from Number Three. Does she really think this kind of childish baiting would work on him? Ridiculous. He doesn’t need to prove anything to her, nor to anyone. He knows they need to leave, he’s well aware of that. He’ll walk out of that door right now, if it would erase that stupid arrogant look from his sister’s face. He will. He will—

Five takes a step forward, and suddenly the briefcase weighs thrice its weight, and it anchors him in position. His foot comes down to its original spot, rooting him back in the center of the universe, a universe whose gravity is thicker than the deepest depths of the ocean.

Like a moth to a flame, Five’s eyes are instantly captivated by the light seeping out from the other side of the front door. He distinctly remembers it opening to a cloudless Dallas evening, but that has long morphed into the familiar setting of a flamed warped world. Lifeless, soundless—even in such a small frame, the apocalypse still paints a dauntingly and horrifying picture.

Five nearly snarls aloud. I know you’re not real, you piece of shit—

Yet, it corrects with a cackle, not real yet.

Fucking hell, he’s truly coming undone now. There’s no point denying it. He can feel it, a physical sensation of being torn to threads, each limb being pulled in a separate direction. His mind is falling apart, just like the mirror.

The hallucinations have been getting worse. He’s not blind to his own deterioration; the apocalypse has haunted him since the day he took the Handler’s hand, a shadow of a previous life that suffocates him if he isn’t looking. The psychological evaluation administered by the Commission confirmed it, giving the visions and ghosts a clinical name, but Five quickly learned that with enough distractions, he can manage through it. It was a sporadic problem during his employment, only becoming a hindrance when he returned to 2019, but even then it was controllable, as most of his mind was monopolized by the goal of finding the source of the apocalyptical trigger.

But now, fuck, now it’s being conflated, and steadily getting worse. He knows with certainty it’s because he’s been pushing himself too much, demanding too much from his mind and body. Traveling back those few seconds has sapped him of all energy, and the exhaustion that follows it is muddying his mind, twisting his realities and shrouding him with confusion and emotions long unfelt. The worst part is he knows it’s not real—he knows he’s not there anymore.

But it feels so fucking real.

The longer he keeps this up, the worse it’ll get. He’s incredibly aware of that hypothesis now, but he can’t just stop and rest. He can’t, not yet. He needs to—he needs to make sure, first. He needs to—needs—

Five feels his heart beating all too quickly against his ribs, and twists his head to the side.

His reflection’s doubtful expression makes his heart lurch, and like quicksand, the hardwood floor beneath his feet swallows him further, rooting him deeper in that position. He looks at himself, and a tired, worn out child looks back at him. A scared child, afraid to take next step forward, afraid to see what’s waiting for him on the other side of the door, afraid that the nightmares that have been lurking from the corner of his vision will spring to life once he takes that next step forward.

He thinks, with horrible, cold dread, that if he were to open the briefcase and be greeted by the apocalypse on April 2^nd, 2019—he might truly, undoubtedly lose his mind.

“Five,” Allison’s voice echoes in his mind.

He turns back to her, finds her standing closer to him now. Her brow is furrowed, her eyes soft with pity— was that what was in her tone, too? Pity and sympathy? It makes his head swim with anger, his face hot with irrational rage. That stupid, pitiful look. As if—as if she pities him, or worse, as if she empathizes with him. As if she could possibly understand.

He hates that look, and wants it eviscerated. His fists ball, and he snaps at her, unnecessary and cruel words to push her away, push away that stupid expression— “What would you do if Claire isn’t there, in 2019? It’s a possibility, after all, considering all your little escapades in the past.”

Allison recoils as if struck, eyes wide. Five is not remorseful, and watches her absorb the words, waits for her to choke some retort at him before storming off. Waits for that pitiful expression on her face to morph into anger, or offense, or hurt, or anything but understanding—

But Allison simply looks at him like he’s the saddest thing in the world.

“The thought has crossed my mind a million times already, Five,” she says with a small shrug, and with an even smaller smile.

He did not expect such a nonchalant answer. He finds himself befuddled as he listens to her continue, “Since the moment I realized I was in the sixties and not 2019, I knew there was . . . implications. I thought, well, if I’m here before I’m born, then that means Claire isn’t born at all. I tried to wrap my head around whether she’s been erased completely from existence, or she’s out there living in 2019. Thinking about it gave me a headache, but I couldn’t stop. If I’m stuck here forever, I thought, then maybe I can meet Claire if I live long enough to be 90. Then, obviously, I realized that’s impossible, since Claire wouldn’t exist if I never meet Patrick. Then it just kept spiraling and spiraling, and I would make myself sick thinking about it. I’m serious, I would literally give myself a panic attack. I couldn’t figure out a straight answer to calm myself so I started reading those tacky novels about time travel, just to see if it could give me some idea of what could happen. Ray thought I was a sci-fi geek.”

The roar of the apocalypse is so loud behind the front door, behind Allison, that he’s surprised she can’t hear the wind’s screech as it pushes the scent of decay all throughout the world, that she can’t hear the cackling of the undying flames as they mockingly applaud a successful decimation, as—

She chuckles, shaking her head. “Then you guys showed up, and Luther told me about how you found a way home with the briefcase, and those thoughts sprang back to life in full force and I . . . I was scared, Five. Not just about leaving Ray, but—I was scared that we messed up too badly, and what that could mean for Claire. What if something had changed, and Claire didn’t exist anymore? If us coming to the sixties caused a full-blown nuclear war, who’s to say it wouldn’t affect our present lives in 2019? God, I was so scared that I hesitated leaving.”

His eyes jump to the left. Allison is so close to him that her reflection is added onto the deconstructed mirror. There are more pieces missing on his reflection, a kaleidoscope of dreadful emotions.

She pauses and takes a shaky breath. Her eyes are hard when she finds his, “I almost convinced myself that it was better staying here and never knowing, than going to 2019 and taking the chance of confirming all my fears were true. So I don’t,” she swallows, the jaws in her muscles tightening, and pushes through, “So I don’t know what I’d do, if we go back and Claire isn’t there. But I do know that it’s the same as what you’d do if we went back and the apocalypse was there.”

Five’s head snaps back to his sister.

Allison is digging into her pocket. “That’s what you were thinking about, wasn’t it?” She pulls out a crumbled napkin with a blur of scribbled ink and tears on its surface. She says, “Vanya said you left it on the kitchen table. I’m not going to pretend I understand whatever advanced statistics this is, but I do know a probability formula when I see one. We all had the same math teacher, after all.”

Her smile is pursed. She looks at the napkin for a moment, asks, “What was the result?”

“Inconclusive.”

Allison snorts softly. “Of course.” She curls her fingers, crushing the napkin, the residue of the ink most likely smudging against her palm. She’s looking at the briefcase, while Five’s gaze is agonizingly seduced by the front door and its ghosts.

“What will you do,” Allison’s steady voice is saying now, “if we opened the briefcase, and the world was just as we left it? If nothing has changed.”

Five shakes his head, but not at Allison. There’s a harsh pain in his throat, answers that should remain unsaid clawing to the surface. He shakes his head harsher now. He doesn’t know what he’d do—hell, he doesn’t think he can do it again. He—he doesn’t think he can handle it. He doesn’t think he’s strong enough—

“I’d fix it,” Five whispers harshly, glaring down at the front door and all its taunting visages. “I would do everything and anything to fix it.”

Because that’s all he knows how to do. When the faux humanity is stripped from him, all that’s left is a skeleton of a mindset. He’s no longer a person, but a personification of the mantra survive, survive, survive. Humanity has long been stripped from his bones. His heart is just an organ that beats and keep him alive, not that thing that feels and loves and endures. And for it to continue to beat, Five must continue to survive. For his siblings to continue to live, he must continue to survive—

Allison’s hand touches his shoulder and he nearly jumps right out of his skin.

“Five, you’re shaking,” she tells him needlessly, her hand now hovering over his vibrating shoulder.

He’s not shaking, he’s collapsing within himself. “I’m just tired,” he mumbles.

She bites her lip. Crouching slightly, she tries to find his eyes. “Hey,” she whispers, and when his slow gaze finds her openly worried one, she winces. “Jesus, Five. Maybe you should try to get some sleep . . . we can leave in the morning, the others won’t—”

“No. No, we,” he presses his palm against his eye. “No, we can’t. We have to leave. This—” he gestures to himself nonchalantly. “This is just temporary. A side effect that will go away with time. I’ll be fine with rest, but not here. It’s not safe here anymore.”

“A side-effect from what?” Allison asks carefully, and of course she would. He thinks he hears a chip of the mirror falling, and when he glances over, his reflection is disgustingly pale. Beside his reflection is Allison’s, the cracks shattering her face and body.

The cracks, however, do nothing to hide the bullet holes that riddle her forehead, chest, and abdomen. Her reflection is covered in blood, just like it was when—

“—Five?”

He blinks. “What?”

“I asked, a side-effect from what?”

Oh. Right. He sighs, searching for an answer that would suffice as deflection. “A short burst of time travel,” he concedes, too tired to be snide. “Back in the barn, I jumped back a few seconds. The side-effects, however, are clearly not as fleeting.”

“The barn?” Her brow furrows as she tries to recollect the memory. “I did see you jump from one side of the barn to the other, but I thought it was because you saw the Commission woman sneaking up on us . . .”

She trails off, fitting the pieces together with the small amount of information provided. “You already knew she was coming, didn’t you?” Her voice is hoarse. “What happened in those few seconds that you had to jump back?”

Five doesn’t want to have this conversation. “Obviously something that shouldn’t have happened,” he snaps at her, his voice picking up speed. “It doesn’t matter. You’re all alive, aren’t you? No need to mull over something you’ve never experienced. It all worked out just great. Just as my current state is not worth contemplating. I pushed past my limits, and now I’m experiencing the byproduct of that endeavor. That’s all there is to it. Just drop it.”

Allison is rubbing her temples. “Fine, sure. Just . . .— can you at least tell me how long these side-effects would last? I feel like it’s more than just being tired. Can you even jump? Now that I think about it, I don’t think I’ve seen you blink the entire time we were here.”

“Mm, pretty sure trying to jump would prove lethal.” At Allison’s horrified expression, he can’t help but roll his eyes. “It’ll be fine, Allison. I told you, I just need to rest—which I cannot do here, because I’m quite certain if I sleep now, I’ll fall into some self-healing coma and won’t wake up for days. Thus, we don’t have time right now.” He takes a deep breath through his nose, controlling his tone. “It will be fine.”

Allison doesn’t say anything for a while, taking in his words. She glances behind her, at the door, then looks back at Five. She smiles, and Five’s heart does that painful lurch again.

“Okay,” she says, as if the statement was a truth. As if she believes it without any semblance of doubt. “If you say so.”

Allison, without much hesitancy, believes him. Not just about his assurances that he’s fine, no, it goes further than that. Her fears, doubts, anxieties have been settled because it was Five that had assured her that he will handle it. Her emotions were a wild mare, bucking and kicking wildly, and it wasn’t until Five’s words got through to it that it finally settled.

Ah. His words are being absorbed, but not just in a painful manner. His siblings actually seek out his words for comfort. His heart stutters, and the pain is horribly gentle. 

In the end, his siblings are looking to him for protection. They are his responsibility, after all. He’s chosen to burden himself with that weight the moment he stopped giving up.

He can still taste the lie at the back of his teeth.

No, he didn’t stop giving up because his goal was to save the world. His goal was to save his family. That was always the goal—past, present, and future. That was his column holding up the mindset of survive, survive, survive.

Five takes a deep breath, staring past his sister.

He takes a step forward.

Then another.

Then another—

– and through the front door he is greeted by the Dallas night sky and the various complaints from the remainder of his siblings. They form a circle, and Five does not think as he opens the briefcase and allows time to swallow him.

If the mirror fell and shattered into a million irreversible shards, Five isn’t there to hear it.

“—Hey, Five. You with us?”

The warmth inside the car is like a festering wound, spreading with each move, the cool breeze seeping through the window doing nothing to alleviate the heat it pulses. Five inhales warmth, and the puff of air he lets out manages to be even hotter.

Five is sat between two sturdy pairs of shoulders of different heights. Like pillars, they keep him upright, preventing his body from folding within itself and slumping deeper into the middle seat. Five remains lax, his body shifting with each bump the car hits, his head rolling from one shoulder to the other with each slow turn.

Vanya’s voice floats over his head. “Let him sleep, Diego. He’s clearly exhausted.”

Five is not asleep. He doesn’t contradict his sister, however. Since being shoved into this car with the coherency of a drowned pigeon, Five had primarily focused on settling his racing heart, swallowing down the nausea that pooled his stomach, and keeping his consciousness away from the seductive black void of nothingness. All accomplished in silence and stillness.

In between it all, the world continued on without him. His siblings had conversed in low voices, setting course to their next destination after arguing whether they should go to the bar Vanya and Allison frequented, or back to Griddy’s. Even after Five’s internal turmoil had settled, he remained in his passive position, not taking part in the vote that resulted in the destination being the bar. A silent observer as things are set in motion with him in a fixed placement.

It’s a new feeling; not constantly moving. He’s still trying to figure out how he feels about it.

From his right, Diego makes an unimpressed noise. “I would if he would. Doubt he’s even asleep, anyway. Little prick is stubborn about that for some reason.”

The fretting, he can do without.

But, he’s well aware now that it’s a futile effort to convince his siblings to curb their worrying. He knows a fruitless battle when he sees one, and so he opts instead to choose neutrality, neither arguing nor agreeing with his siblings. Let them do as they like, he’s decided. They seem to be managing well without his interference, surprisingly.

“Diego, buddy, what did I tell you about picking on your little brother?” Klaus’ voice trickles in from the front seat, his neck craned to shoot Diego a quick glare. He laughs sheepishly, turning to the driver. “Kids, am I right? Say, how many little ankle biters do you have, Moe? You look like the rugged, paternal type. Bet your little angels are just the cutest, well-mannered little things.”

The taxi driver’s eyes move from the rearview mirror to his passenger, attention effectively stolen. “Oh, me? I have a daughter and two . . .”

Diego grumbles something unpleasant under his breath. Vanya chuckles softly, her mirth vibrating against Five’s shoulder. Klaus listens attentively as the driver excitedly divulges tidbits about his wife and kids. Five sighs softly.

The traffic light changes to green, and the car moves forward with a hum.

Five watches the scenery move. They are driving down a relatively congested street in a familiar businesses district. He tries to catch a look at a street sign, but his limited view in the back makes the task difficult.

He would much rather be the one driving, or at least in the passenger seat, so that he can have a full view of his setting. Sitting in the back feels incredibly patronizing. And harrowing. It reminds him too much of when he blinked inside that charred car in the apocalypse all those years ago . . .

Ah—

No . . .

Best not go there.

That’s how it usually starts, his distortion with reality. It’s been getting consistently worse, he realizes now, but as long as he focuses elsewhere, he should be fine. He just needs to not think about it. That’s all.

Stay here, he tells his mind. Just a bit longer. He just needs more time—more time being here.

“. . . really, I’m alright,” Vanya is saying, voice small. “The stuff they gave me wore off after some sleep. I have a small headache, and get a little dizzy every now and then, but other that, I’m honestly alright.”

Diego nods. “Good. That’s good. Just make sure you say something if you’re not feeling a hundred percent, okay? If that crazy Sparrow Academy lady shows up again, I’d rather you not save our asses if it ends up hurting you.”

“Aww,” Klaus coos from ahead. “He has a heart!”

“Eyes on the road!” Diego snaps at him.

“I’m not even driving!”

“And you’re not part of this conversation, either, so piss off!”

“You see how they treat me, Moe?” Klaus laments. “I blame our dad. He didn’t instill brotherly love into their brains. Make sure you nail that into your babies’ heads nice and early, okay? Promise me?”

“Thanks, Diego,” Vanya eventually says. Five watches her fingers clutch her knees. There’s a slight tremor in her hand. “Seriously. I—I appreciate it, but I promise I’m alright.”

Diego shrugs. “Nah, we should be thanking you. Really saved our asses back there. Would have been really embarrassing if we got mauled to death by birds. Jesus.” He shakes his head with a snort. “So, good shit. The hero look suits you.”

Vanya squirms, abashed. “No, I—I’m sure you guys would have been fine, would have gotten out of there on your own.”

“Yeah, right. Hate to admit it, but we were seriously cornered. Not that that chick was better than us or anything, but we were outgunned. I was out of knives, Five can’t jump, and Klaus—”

“—has a strict no animal abuse policy,” Klaus interjects. The driver is frowning, and Klaus quickly explains, “Like I told you, that seagull attack was no joke. They really did a number on us. Never stroll on the boardwalk with a full pizza pie, friend. Words of wisdom.”

The car comes to a stop at the next traffic light.

The aged and dirty windshield smudges the color red throughout Five’s vision, coloring his sight a macabre view. A chill runs down his spine.

Five curls his fingers, letting his nails dig into his palm. He feels the dull pressure, and that helps ground him. He focuses his attention to the low conversation between Vanya and Diego. Yes, he’ll latch onto their trivial conversation. That should be enough.

He can hear a frown in Vanya’s voice. “He can’t jump?”

Damn. Of all the conversations they could be having, why did it have to revolve around him. Five grits his teeth. He doesn’t want to be constantly reminded of his deteriorating state. He knows he’s unwell, but he’ll fix it.

“That’s what he said,” Diego shrugs. “Haven’t seen him jump since the mansion, either, and even that jump seemed to mess him up.”

The red light is like a bloody sun, glaring holes into Five’s skin. When he blinks, he can still see its remnants behind his eyelids. He nearly forgets to open his eyes, his only reminder is his chin suddenly falling onto his chest. He picks his head back up, blinking harshly. No. Stay here.

“Do you think he hit his head? Or . . . or maybe he got hurt in the mansion, when those people attacked us?”

Focus. Focus on this, he tells himself, and not on the sudden, harsh stench of sulfur that seems to have manifested from nowhere, or the tint of red that overlays everything and everyone inside this car. If he can just power through this heavy exhaustion weighing over his bones and mind, then he can rest easy. But that’s an accomplishment for later, once his goal is accomplished.

Diego shakes his head, strands of his ragged hair tickling the top of Five’s head, like ash slowly settling over him. “No, it was before all that. He’s been out of juice before we even left the sixties, but the little shit is being vague about it.”

“Oh. He did seem pretty, um, odd, the last time I spoke to him in Sissy’s house. I figured it was just him being, you know, himself.”

Sissy’s house feels like both a lifetime ago and hardly a second ago. Five silently agrees with Vanya; he was acting odd. That was perhaps when his grip on reality began to wane. He still distinctly remembers the perturbed look on Vanya’s face when he killed the cockroach—

No, he thinks, blinking harshly. That wasn’t real. You know that, he hisses at himself, and he does. It’s just his memory bleeding into his reality, he rationales. Simply his sleep deprived mind manifesting images of his time in the apocalypse.

No, he will not succumb to these ridiculous memories. He hasn’t thought about his time in the apocalypse with this much vivid detail in so long, and he refuses to let it latch on to him again.

“Odd,” Diego snorts at the word, and Five tries to follow the conversation with more rigor. “Yeah, that’s one word for it. More like a cranky old man-child. Made such a big deal about how we don’t have time to take a break at Sissy’s, all the while knowing he was this banged up. I even tried to convince him to sleep in the car last night, but he just ignored me.”

Sleep is a privileged man’s luxury. He cannot sleep, not yet. Don’t they understand? There’s too much happening for him to just surrender his awareness, it’s not safe. He can’t forsake his survival on that indulgence. Not yet.

Klaus snorts, “Oh, you’re one to talk, pal. You weren’t sleeping either, and I know this ‘cause I kept hearing your foot tapping all night long, you little anxiety bunny.”

“I was keeping watch.”

“You guys slept in a car?’ Vanya asks sadly, as if it were some horrible thing they had to endure.

Music plays from the radio, low and muffled. A song with too many electronic instruments and a vocalist singing much too quickly. Five reaches for it like an anchor searching for the seabed, keeping his overflowing mind tethered.

“Eh. Wasn’t that bad, I’ve slept in one before. We made the best of it. Oh, don’t give me that look. We didn’t really have that many options available. Why, where’d you sleep?”

“Um . . . the costume closet in the theatre . . .”

Klaus chortles immaturely.

The traffic light turns green, and Five takes in a quick breath. The air is becoming unbearably thick.

He looks around, and the red is gone, but the coldness that sweeps his body still remains. He ignores it. He ignores the buzzing in his ears and the dryness of his throat and the wooziness in his head and grounds himself in the present, tethering himself in reality.

“I’d appreciate it,” Five mutters, voice thick from disuse, “if you all wouldn’t have discussions about me as if I weren’t here.”

He can practically hear Diego roll his eyes. “Oh, look. He speaks.”

“I’m sorry, Five, were we being too loud?” Vanya says, much too considerate for his taste.

“You were being too annoying,” Five corrects, though not unkindly. He picks up his head to glare specifically at Diego. “And I told you, I’m just out of juice. Stop the insufferable worrying already.”

“Hey, full sentences!” Klaus claps enthusiastically. “He is getting better. Hallelujah.”

Five flicks him the middle finger, and Diego says, glaring right back at Five, “He would get even more better if he just slept and stopped pushing himself.”

Five scowls. “What use is falling asleep when we’re half a block away from our destination?”

“I’m talking about before, smart ass.”

Five knows what he’s talking about. His eyes drift to the windshield. He can keep this going, the back and forth with Diego. His brother is the easiest of them all to rile up, and once he can get under his skin, the conversation can quickly pivot away from the original topic. Five is tempted to let the next snide remark slip, if it would mean they can discuss something other than his wellbeing.

But he doesn’t. He’s much too tired for all that; he doesn’t have the strength for an argument. Talking costs him energy he cannot afford. If he were to try to face off against an irate sibling, he knows the argument would just afford him another mouthful of blood.

So instead, Five just sighs and says, “Stop being dramatic. As I said, it will correct itself with time. I will rest, later. Worry about something else in the meantime if you’re so inclined.”

“What the hell is so bad about resting now?”

Five doesn’t answer.  

Diego makes an aggravated noise. He shifts in his seat, gesturing wildly to himself, then to Five, before throwing his hands up in defeat. The rigorous bodily conversation is directed towards Vanya, undoubtedly, but Five easily interprets it as: I can’t do it—you deal with him.

The car rolls to a stop again. The traffic light screams red. The sky is a bloody landscape. Five sinks deeper into the seat.

The last time he was in a car with a similar occupancy, it was in three years into the apocalypse. Dolores hadn’t spoken to him in months. It was the longest she’d gone without speaking to him, and Five was slowly getting crushed from the prolonged silence.

In his mindless trekking across the state, he came across a seared car in the middle of the road, sat in front of a traffic light that hadn’t changed colors in years.

Inside the car was a family of corpses; one behind the wheel, one beside it, and two smaller ones in the back. The flames of the earth’s destruction had frozen them in that moment, like the victims of Pompeii’s destruction. The driver still had his hands on the wheel.  

Oh.

That’s where his mind is taking him, then. He watches the interior of the car begin to rust, the back Klaus’ seat begin to decay.

He shouldn’t . . .

“Five,” Vanya musters the courage to face his wrath, unbeknownst to her that he has none left to hurl. “I-I know you don’t like being asked too many questions, but can you at least tell me what’s going on? You were, you were coughing up blood before. It was really scary. We just want to help.”

He looks at her, and his sister’s large eyes shine down on him. The sadness seems forever carved into her face, like the expressions of the corpses, their faces solidified into a permanent expression of their last moments. Was it fearful, or blissful ignorance? Mid conversation or mid scream?

Stop it.

“Five?”

“What?”

Vanya is frowning. “I asked if something’s—"

“Nothing’s going on,” he tells her quickly. He wonders if its thirst that’s making his voice so raspy. He wondered where that family was going. “I’m just tired, so stop making me repeat myself.”

Diego clicks his tongue. “People don’t hack up blood all day just from being tired, man.”

“Not that kind of tired,” Five murmurs.

The warmth in the car increases, but at the same time, Five knows it doesn’t.

“What?” Diego asks sharply, at the same time Vanya takes a quick, horrified breath and asks, “Wait, he’s been coughing blood all day? Diego that’s—" Her hand latches onto his. It’s warm, but Five’s skin is frigid cold. He wonders if the family of corpses— “Oh, Five . . . That’s- shouldn’t we do something? Take him to the hospital?”

— if the family of corpses gripped each other with fear, or with love, in their last moments. If they were able to quickly say their goodbyes, or if they were cut off in the middle of a trivial chat, with their last thoughts and emotions mercifully insignificant—

Klaus clears his throat loudly. He nods indiscreetly towards the taxi driver, then makes a flapping gesture with his hand, imploring them to lower their voices or change the subject to something less incriminating.

There’s ash piling over Klaus’ head.

No, there isn’t.

Five remembers standing in front of that car for hours, a pain in his chest so profound he couldn’t breathe. He remembers the bitter emotion of envy so vividly—

No, he doesn’t.

Stop remembering.

“You think we didn’t already try?” He thinks he hears Diego ask lowly. He thinks he hears the music change to something more orchestral. He thinks he tastes bile and filth between his teeth. “Vanya, listen. The issue is his powers. I really doubt a hospital knows how to fix that. None of us know how to fix it, except him. We literally have no choice but to take his word for it.”

Five squeezes his eyes shut, but when he opens them, he’s not in the same car.

That’s right.

He blinked inside the car, and sat in the middle seat, beside the two corpses. He sat in that car for hours, or maybe days. He fantasized about being a part of that family, the third child in the car, on their way to a weekend getaway. He envisioned himself having the luxury of dying alongside a family—

Stop, stop, stop—

The corpses were rigid, stale, but grotesquely warm—

“What if it doesn’t stop?”

But it should stop because he knows it’s not real.

No, that’s— Vanya, that’s Vanya’s voice, distraught and hurt and real, because he’s here, and they’re talking about him. He blinks, and the interior of the taxicab returns.

Shit, what are they talking about? About his—about his powers, or about his blood? Did they ask him a question? Should he say something? Maybe speaking will help him clear away these pesky visions. But, damn it all, he’s so goddamn tired.

“It will. He’ll get better. He is getting better. I promise, it’s going to be alright.”

Right, his siblings are worried about him. Because of the state he’s been reduced to after the burst of time travel, and subsequent jumps. He’s shredded himself to bits, and maybe they have a right to be worried, after all.

Five stares at his ash-covered hands with morbid curiosity.

Maybe he shredded his mind to bits, too.

“I just got you guys all back,” Vanya moans miserably, voice thick with emotion. “I can’t—I don’t want to lose you. Not again. I just got you all back.”

Five is losing his mind, but Diego is right, he will get better. Extreme exhaustion does a funny thing to the mind, that’s all. Makes a person see things that aren’t there, hear things that haven’t been said, feel things that don’t have sway in the physical world. But once he’s adequately rested, his mind will be restored. And he will rest. Later.

Diego’s voice is fiercely adamant. “You’re not losing anyone, Van, alright? No one’s dying.”

It’s not necessarily dying, he should tell them. His body was on the brink of complete power deficiency after time traveling, and the blink he performed outside the Academy tore through those reserves, bleeding it dry and pulling the remaining needed energy from wherever else it could find it.

He can’t blink until all those reserves are restored. He shouldn’t be walking or talking either, since that steals away the energy needed for his organs to work properly. Energy that he still hasn’t recouped, energy needed to keep his heart beating and his lungs expanding and kidneys working, so sometimes they flicker like a dying lightbulb. He can’t properly breathe until his lungs find the energy to expand, and his heart sometimes gives out without the energy to beat, his blood would momentarily clot, his kidneys would flicker with failure, but just as quickly they would restart.

Maybe, technically, he is dying, but only in short bursts—

“You’re dying?” Vanya whimpers miserably, voice hitching, while Diego hisses a lucrative string of curses, “Five, don’t say shit like that! Vanya, don’t listen—” and Klaus says with surprise, “Whoa, whoa, what’s going on back there?”

Five frowns deeply at the sudden commotion. Did something happen? He picks up his head to see if he can gouge whatever has his siblings riled up through—

Oh.

He’s in the car.

He can see the ashen sky through the destroyed ceiling of the rusted car. The sun is hidden behind the toxin-filled clouds, giving the sky an eerie red glow. The smell of sulfur is excruciatingly sharp.

Yes, that’s right. He had stood outside that rusted car for hours before blinking himself inside, settling in the middle seat between the two corpses in the back. Deciding that the silence of the world was too much, deciding that maybe he’d like to feel what it’s like to die with a family.

He thinks he hears something, maybe a voice that says, “Nothing’s going on, Five’s just delirious, Vanya don’t—” but that’s not right, because there’s only silence. Dolores had stopped talking to him months ago, and so his only companion was the noises he made.

The radio is playing the tape he found in the destroyed library. The scratchy tunes of the Nutcracker hum inside the vehicle.

Then he hears, “Five? Five, are you alright? You’re shaking—"

And he turns to see where the voice is coming from. On his right is a corpse, and on his left is another one. Only the dead surround him, and the dead don’t talk. The radio continues, playing the melancholic music. The world continues to burn from the windshield.

“—don’t worry about it, Moe!” The corpse ahead of him says. It turns its head, and flakes of its decomposing skin peel off and flutter to the ground. “Oh, look, the light’s green, let’s keep going before we get honked at. Diego—"

No, this can’t be right.

This isn’t right.

He—

The corpses didn’t talk.

This is not real.

He got out of the car. He knows he did. He knows he did. He had decided he didn’t want to give up, that he didn’t want to stay here anymore. He got out. He did.

So why is he back here?

“I know! Shit, Five, look at me.”

“Diego, what’s wrong with him?”

He doesn’t want to be here again. He doesn’t. He doesn’t. The corpses heads are turned to him, looking down on him. One of its hands is latched onto his arm.

“No,” he moans, shaking his head, trying make this setting disappear. The radio continues to play Tchaikovsky’s symphonies—

No. No, the radio was playing some stupid pop music. He’s not there. He’s not.

“I don’t know, he just—” the corpse on his right is saying—

No, no, no. His siblings are the ones beside him, the ones talking to him.

Five swallows hot air, looking around for his reality, but all he sees is that godforsaken seared car in the middle of the road, sat in front of a traffic light that hadn’t changed colors in years. The car he had chosen to give up in—

“No,” Five gasps out. “I don’t—I don’t want—I got out— I didn’t-”

The family of corpses are talking to him, but Five can’t make sense of the words. He squeezes his eyes shut, gasping through the nausea that threatens to strangle him.

One of the corpses says, “What’s wrong?” with its toothless mouth and hollowed out eyes and Five thinks that’s probably what he looks like, too.

He manages to grit out, “Diego,” through his clenched jaw because he knows, he knows that his brother was in the car with him before, that none of this is real even though it feels so painstakingly real, so he says, “Diego, I need- I have to get out. I can’t- I don’t want to—I have to leave, please—”

And the corpses begin jabbering again, in horrific voices that sound too similar to overlapping flames, and he hears, “Klaus, tell him to pull over—” and then, “What, but we’re in the middle of the street!” and then, “Something’s wrong, he’s doesn’t look—”

And he’s still in this fucking car, even though he had chosen not to stay here anymore. He brings his hands together, trying to form fists, trying to pull forth the familiar blue energy because he changed his mind, he doesn’t want to stay here, he doesn’t want to stay here, he doesn’t want to stay here—

But one of the corpses’ blackened hands pulls his hands apart, and Five thinks he’s going to be sick when someone shouts, “Five, don’t—” but he needs to. He can’t stomach staying in this car longer. It’s crushing him.

And then loudly, the corpse to his right says, “Pull the fucking car over!” and the corpse ahead of him says, “Alright! Shit, Moe, you heard him! Stop the car!”

Momentum pulls him to the side, then pulls him forwards, then there’s a screech. The music continues to play the miserable symphony, even though Five knows it should be playing some trivial pop song.  

The car door opens, and he sees rubble and doom, but Five still flinches from the daylight. He fights his way out of the corroded car like an elk bucking out of a crocodile infested river.  

He stumbles out of the door blindly, staggering away from the haunted vehicle as far and fast as his weak knees would take him, before he slams himself into a wall, leaning against it with shuddering shoulders. Squeezing his eyes shut, he begs the roaring in his ears to shut up.

Stop it, stop it.

Someone is calling his name. He doesn’t dare open his eyes, woefully terrified to come face to face with the horrible visage of the apocalypse and its permanent corpses.

“—Diego, what’s wrong with him?”

“—another fit?”

“I don’t know! He’s just started—”

“Five? Five, please, what’s—"

He can still feel the heat, squeezing at his throat and making it impossible to breathe. He can still smell the foulness, its stench burning into his mind and making it impossible to think. He thinks he’s going to be sick. He slaps his hands over his mouth, heaving.

“I think he’s hypervent—”

“—was fine just a minute ag—”

“Just give him some space, he needs to—”

“—not calming down, Klaus—"

He knows it’s his siblings that surround him, but the chances of him opening his eyes and seeing their lifeless bodies is too high of a risk. If he has to see that again, real or not, Five is certain he’ll scream.

“Five, come on, open your eyes. It’s okay.”

Five shakes his head. It’s not. It’s not. It will be, but right now it’s not.

“Five,” the voice says again, and he recognizes it as Klaus’. “Please,” the word cracks on its way out of his brother’s mouth. He tugs at Five’s wrists, attempting to pull his hands away from his mouth. “You have to breathe, buddy, please. You’re going to pass out if you don’t.”

Five realizes he’s breathing too sharply through his nose, the quick breathes leaving him lightheaded. He lets Klaus pull his hands away, and nearly gags at the first inhale through his burning throat.

“That’s it, that’s it,” Klaus is murmuring. Five feels himself get pulled, feels a warmth envelope him, feels arms around his back, feels a head rest against his own. He’s shaking so badly his teeth clatter. Klaus’ voice fills his body. “Slow breathes. In and out. Take your time. Just focus on your breathing. Don’t think about anything else.”

Five doesn’t know what else to think about. “I’m fine,” Five chokes out too quickly. “I’m f-fine. I’m fine.”

He hears Vanya’s voice flutter into his chaotic senses. “Five, can you open your eyes?”

He shakes his head, rubbing his chin against Klaus’ shoulder. “Not yet. Not yet, not yet—”

“Okay,” she says gently, patiently. Her hand rests top of his head. Five latches onto that soft pressure, a man-made gravity pushing him down to reality. “It’s okay. Whenever you’re ready. We’ll be here. Just concentrate on your breathing, alright? Try to match Klaus’.”

“Just in,” Klaus says, and Five feels his body inflate as his brother takes that breath. “And out.” A deflation, sinking back to the earth.

He can’t see it, but he knows the world is collapsing around him. It’s not real. The debris that crushes his body, the hand that’s wrapped around his throat, the poison contaminating his lungs, none of it is real. He knows. He’s trying so goddamn hard to make the thought a fact.

“Come back, buddy,” Klaus whispers, and Five shudders because he’s trying.

An eternity passes. Then another. The roars become whispers. His heart begins to slow down. Klaus and Vanya are speaking to him in quiet voices. He hears cars driving over tarmac. Hears quiet chatters of living people. This is real. He inhales spring air with an aching jaw. Smells the greasy food from a nearby food truck. Real.  

He opens his eyes.

He sees Vanya, and an alive and thriving world behind her. The blazing sun. A clear, blue sky. Real.

His knees give out. Klaus doesn’t let go, and sinks to the ground with him. The ground is cold and hard against his knees, but it’s clear of ash and heat.

He hears Vanya ask, “That wasn’t one of his fits, was it?”

And then Klaus answer her with an equally sad tone, “No. It wasn’t.”

“I’m fine,” Five murmurs into Klaus’ shoulder. He pulls away, and Klaus lets him. His back rests against the wall. “I’m fine,” he lies again, trying to get his hands to stop shaking. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not,” Diego says testily.

Yeah. Five feels lightheaded with delirium that he nearly smiles. “No shit,” he says, or maybe he doesn’t.

Vanya and Klaus share a concerned glance. Diego scowls harshly, stomping back and forth, his stress nearly electrifying. Real expressions, real emotions. Not frozen by death. Five will take their horrified and worried looks over the corpses. At least they’re real.

“Of course we’re real,” Klaus tell him.

“I know that,” Five snaps, incredibly defensive. The memory is oozing out of him, like sweating through a fever, leaving him breathless and shaken. He just needs a moment. He knows he’s not there, anymore, but the sensation is still there. He just needs to force the reality back. He’s not there, he’s not there.

“Stop talking,” Diego tells him harshly. “Just fucking stop, man. Don’t talk, alright?”

Vanya frowns. “It’s not his fault, Diego—”

“I know! Fuck!” He shouts, paying no mind to the startled onlookers that pass by. Diego’s hands dig into his hair, then he lets out a frustrated grunt, gesturing rigidly to Five. “I’m- no. I’m done. This is—this has gone on long enough. I’m done, alright? Klaus, hail a fucking cab. We’re going to the hospital.”

Five’s brow furrows. Absolutely not. He refuses to go to a hospital, a suggestion as outlandish as it is unnecessary. He’s not even coughing up blood or seizing like he was before. He’s not injured, he’s just- he’s— he will be fine. He just needs to rest, and then he’ll be well again.

“Fine! Then we’ll break into a hotel, and-and tie you to a fucking bed and force you to sleep—"

No.

He can’t. Not yet. He can’t rest yet—

“Why the hell not!?” Diego explodes. “For fuck’s sake, Five, are you trying to kill yourself!?”

“Diego, calm down!” Klaus says sharply. “Yelling like a maniac isn’t going to accomplish anything.”

Diego’s eyes flash. “Don’t fucking tell me to calm down. I’ve been calm this whole time, waiting for him to get better, like he fucking said he would, and the hell did I get for it?”

“I get it. I get it, I do, but getting pissed isn’t going to get you anything either.”

“And running around the city, watching him fucking waste away, is? Nah. I don’t care what he says, we’re done here. I don’t care if we have to rob a liquor store to get money for a mattress, or if we have to drug him, one way or another he’s getting some rest.”

No. He can’t. He can’t. Not yet—

“Five.” Vanya’s voice pulls him away from his bickering brothers. He finds her face. “Five, if you know you’ll get better if you just . . . stop, and- and rest, then why won’t you?”

Because he can’t. He can’t stop. Not yet. He needs to make sure, first. He needs to be absolutely sure—

“Until what?” Vanya whispers.

She wouldn’t understand. None of them would. How could they? They never had to endure the raw, animalistic pressure of survival for the sake of accomplishing a single-minded goal. Five is still trying to survive, he still hasn’t given up, because he needs to make sure he’s accomplished his goal.

He can’t rest. Not yet. Not until his family is safe. Not until he sees it with his own two eyes. He needs to make sure they’re all alright, first. Then, then he’ll stop. Then he can rest.

A deafening silence settles in.

Klaus and Diego have stopped shouting, and Vanya has taken in a sharp breath. Five frowns.

“Shit, Five,” Klaus swallows.

He looks from one sibling to the other, confused. “What?”

Klaus’ mouth opens, then closes, speechless. He shares a befuddled look with Vanya and Diego. The former looks on the brink of tears, her face flushing with heavy emotions. Diego looks like all of his anger had escaped from him in one large exhale.

Five wonders what happened.

“Nothing,” Diego says quickly. He sighs, looking incredibly tired all of a sudden. “Nothing happened, man. Just . . . fuck.”

They all seem abruptly subdued. Perhaps they tired themselves out from all their worrying. Five doesn’t dwell on it. He can feel the claws of sleep trying to pull him down. He shakes his head.

“We need to go,” he tells his shell-shocked siblings, ignoring the slur in his voice that sticks his words together.

Klaus looks at him doubtfully. “Can you even stand?”

“I have legs, don’t I?” Five snaps immediately. He doesn’t reject the help, however, when he begins to sway immediately once upright. Klaus latches onto his arm, while his other hand finds the wall to steady himself.

The world spins dangerously, but Five has walked through a more unstable world before.

Klaus makes an uncertain noise. “Um. Right. I guess, uh, we’re going, then? Where, exactly, did we land on going? A bed?”

“No.”

Klaus cringes, looking to Diego for help, who simply throws his hands up in defeat. “Fuck if I know. We’re blocks away from the bar. Doubt he can make it on foot, looking like that. Plus, our ride is gone, and so is the rest of our cash, unless you guys are down to hotwire another car.”

“You know, I’m starting to think the ever responsible Allison and Luther aren’t waiting for us at a bar in the middle of the afternoon. Maybe checking out Griddy’s would have been the better bet. Also, I’m starving.”

“You’re the one that voted to check out the bar.”

“It’s also a restaurant,” Vanya murmurs. She rubs her eyes and stands up slowly. Glancing around, she says, “Oh. We’re on Stone Street and 3^rd. The library should be just around the corner. We can go there? Even if the others aren’t there, we can hole up inside for the time being. Is that okay with you, Five?”

He nods mutely. Being indoors is ideal in terms of safety. Any more time spent outside in broad daylight will only expose them to danger, and Five is no position to provide a helping hand.

Vanya isn’t met with any disagreements from Klaus and Diego, and together they shuffle around the corner, people throwing odd looks their direction throughout.

The walk is short, but Five pauses multiple times to catch his breath and adjust is footing, the exertion proving more strenuous than he expected. When they reach the last step of the looming library, the air entering his lungs is frigidly cold and painful, but there’s a fresh lense of clarity overlaying his mind.

“Let’s find an empty table,” Vanya is saying as they enter the bright, fluorescently lit library. She side steps a few people, letting them pass, before continuing, “Somewhere to sit down. I’m sure we can ask someone for some water, or— oof.”

Something collides against Vanya, stealing her breath away. Diego and Klaus startle, and Five tenses violently, hands balling into fists as he prepares for the absolute worst—

But just as quickly, they relax, as they realize that what collided against Vanya wasn’t a thing, but a person. Five’s heart lurches, and if it weren’t for Klaus’ support he might have crumbled to the ground from the sheer weight of relief.

Allison is hugging Vanya so tightly as if she were afraid the other woman was about to slip through her fingers. Vanya is lax in the embrace, her own arms coming around to return the gesture. Five can’t hear what they’re saying to each other, but he can venture a guess.

Then Allison rushes over to the three of them, wrapping them together in her arms, their heads all coming together, and her tears are mingling in with her laughs as she says, “You idiots, god I can’t believe you’re okay, I was so worried, my god, where have you been, what took you so long—” before it dissolves into weepy gibberish.

Diego and Klaus are quick to return the sentiment, and then his sister’s glassy eyes find his, and something in her expression crumbles.

“Five,” she breathes, pulling him close without any hesitation. Five let’s her. “I’m so glad,” she shudders, the emotions wracking her entire body. “I’m so glad you’re alright.”

Five inhales softly, embracing this warmth. He sinks into it.

“I’m glad you’re alright, too, Allison,” he mumbles, meaning every single word.

Chapter Text

Chapter Five: I Will Not Beg

The briefcase spits them into the mansion with a mouthful of blue.

Five's eyes immediately catalogue his surroundings. 

There is a roof over their heads. No signs of a red sky pregnant with smog and toxin. No scent of decay and charred flesh. No sound of crackling fire and the unique silence of absolute extinction. Absolutely no apocalypse in sight, simply the walls of their home.

Five had hoped, had truly and freely assumed, that the sight of the Academy, standing strong and firm like it was never meant to collapse in the first place, would finally settle the raging anxiousness within him. It doesn’t.

He picks up the newspaper. His hand shakes.

He reads the date aloud. His siblings sigh and cheer and almost collapse from relief. Logically, he should have had one of those reactions. At the very least, his nerves should have quelled, or his tremors should have stopped at the printed confirmation of the date. Confirmation of victory.

Confirmation that he’s accomplished his goal.

Yet, the cloud of foreboding only grows thicker and darker over him, casting him a disfigured shadow. His body is so tense that he half expects himself to step onto a mine and have everything explode in his face, like the universe’s last prank on him.

He just— he feels like he missed something.

He momentarily considers this all a side effect of his burst of time travel earlier. Yes, that’s it. Maybe his body is too busy staving off the lingering exhaustion trailing that endeavor, he rationalizes. Maybe it doesn’t have the energy to experience even a slither of relief. Maybe it isn’t, in fact, the slippery hands of dread coiling around his neck and making it hard to breathe. Maybe he’s just tired. Optimism was always a hard thing for him to grasp, after all.

Then, they all enter the next room—

And the confirmation of absolute failure blows away all semblance of optimism and hope, like a candle in the face of a hurricane—

There is a painting of Ben over the mantel piece.

OK, Five starts to think in rapid speed, OK, that probably just means—

But before Five can even rationalize that into something that isn’t a sign of disaster, their father is alive. Their dead father is now alive and ripe with old age. Dizziness smacks Five in the face, and he tries to make sense of that, OK, so maybe we changed—

Then there’s a gaggle of strangers staring down at them from the top floor, and then Ben is standing there with an uncharacteristic sneer. Five puts two and two together, then he puts ten and ten together, and his probability formula grows a second arm, and his recollection of his meeting with his father in the sixties is painted in a new light, and—

The realization collapses over him like a house of cards, its weight bone crushing

Shit.

His siblings have the same sentiment.

“These,” his father begins to say, and Five’s skin crawls at how familiar that voice is. Unlike in the sixties, when his father was a young man and still vibrant with clarity, this voice is hardened with age and an impatience that only comes from experiencing a full life. Just as Five last remembers.

His father continues to speak over his head, addressing Ben. “These are your predecessors, Number Six. The Umbrella Academy, as they call themselves. The first draft of the Sparrow Academy. A blundered one at that.”

Five feels his siblings’ reactions—Klaus’ sharp intake of breath, Vanya’s trembling chin, Diego’s bewildered blink, Luther’s confused frown, Allison’s gaping mouth. So animated. So slow. They haven’t grasped it yet. Haven’t grasped the extent of it all. So goddamn young and naïve.

“These are them?” Number Six sneers, unimpressed. His arms cross over the uniform that is cruelly familiar. “They look like they crawled out of a dumpster. Jesus, they smell like one, too.”

“Ben,” Klaus gasps, taking a step forward. The expression on his face is an oil and water mix of confusion and horror. “Y—You’re . . . but . . .?”

He takes another step forward, hand extended. Number Six tenses, his sneer twisting Ben’s face into something cruel. Diego grabs his brother before he can take another clumsy step, his instincts perhaps warning him of some danger. Yet even Diego looks just as shellshocked at the sight. They all do. Vanya looks positively ill.

Luther’s voice cracks. “Ben? How are you here . . . ?”

Klaus’ head snaps to the side, blinking furiously, as if realizing just now that Ben was plainly visible to everyone. This seems to only conflate his confusion, and he looks to Diego for an answer, but even he is still trying to make sense of it all.

“The hell are you talking about?” is the reply, just as Five assumed it would be, and so he ignores the rest. Number Six will continue to reply with retorts that are grossly uncharacteristic of Ben, and his siblings will try to make him understand that he is someone he is not, and they’ll be at it for hours, if left to their own devices, this painful back and forth that will eventually break their hearts.

But Five does not have time for this sentimental plot, at the moment. He already understands that the young man wearing their brother’s skin is not their brother. Five’s whole being aches at the sight, it truly and painfully does, but he simply does not have the luxury of playing the optimistic, wide-eyed ignorant.

His eyes turn back to his primary target. His vision darkens in the corners, spotlighting the figure in the center. Five stares, wide eyes and a scowl so vicious it tears at his face, at his father.

A million and one things run through his mind. The most prominent is the insult on the tip of his tongue, hanging by a thread and ready to be flung out. You son of a bitch, he wants to shout. You self-righteous asshole. His heart is beating tremendously fast at the anticipation of Five’s lash out. You cold hearted bastard! He wants to scream, maybe point an accusing finger, maybe even lunge forward with the intent of sucker punching him. What a spectacle that would be.

But the bubbling emotions render him motionless, body locked in place as it tries to choose its reaction. Five has never felt a rage this constraining before. Not even a second of immobility passes during it all, yet Five feels like he’s been standing there, glaring at his father with pure vehemence, for an eternity.  

“Good.” Reginald’s voice is a whip, cracking in the air and breaking the bloated silence between them. The compliment is laughably empty. “So you understand, then? I do hate the time allotted for expositions, after all.”

Chin tilted down, eyes sharp and clear, he stares at Five like a hawk eying its prey.

Five blinks the red away from his vision, erasing the expression his father has interpreted so easily. Reginald’s words are as cold and smooth as marble, exposing nothing and everything.

The commotion around them continues without concern for their lack of participation. The voices of his siblings and Number Six fade away in Five’s mind, a garble of noise from deep under water. Reginald is unperturbed by it as well, and Five thinks that’s odd for only a brief moment, before the recollection of what kind of calculating man his father is comes crashing down on him.   

Ah. Five replays everything over in his mind again. Of course. He understands now. So that’s how it will play out.

Five shoves his hands into his pockets. He commands his body to ignore the rapid anxiety polluting his nerves. He schools his expression, erasing its previous betrayal, forcing an air of nonchalance. The people on the banister begin to descend down the stairs, and even with his back turned to them Five knows he would not recognize another face. Number Six is saying, “—stop calling me that!” And someone makes a pained noise as a reply.

As if time has stopped, Five’s mind draws conclusions in rapid speed.

Succinct and composed. He must be succinct and composed. The lesson repeats itself in Five’s mind, recalled from an archive of memory he did not know he still had. He hears his father’s voice echo, in a battle of words, defeat is granted to the party that allows emotions to take reign, children. You must be succinct and composed at all times. Do not show your enemy any semblance of an emotional reaction. May as well flop onto your back and show the soft of your bellies.

His siblings are unaware that they have already lost this preliminary battle. Five’s fists curl in his pockets. Their emotions at the sight of a dead sibling has rendered them vulnerable, and although that was not Reginald’s true intentions here, he is clearly pleased with the outcome, perhaps thinking, five enemies down, one to go.

Five can see what will happen next. These new children of Reginald’s will encircle his distracted siblings, subtlety trapping them and blocking all exits. They are at an advantage, after all. Undoubtedly, Reginald has retained the knowledge of their powers from all those years ago, and certainly communicated as much to his children.

I knew you’d be back, Reginald had said, and Five can only interpret that in the worst possible way. A dangerous waste it would be to construe that as nothing more than a threat. I’d knew you’d come back. I’ve been waiting for your return. I’ve prepared extensively for this moment.

In Five’s mind, he pulls forth a lesson of his own creation. Expect the worst, and you’ll always be prepared. Expect the worst, and it will hurt just a little less when it happens. So, Five settles his mind into the worst case scenario: he and his siblings have landed into enemy territory with their bellies exposed.

Reginald Hargreeves is their enemy.

So be it.

Reginald thinks he’s already won, based on that minuscule glint in his eyes. Not yet. Five is still standing, his emotions easily shoved into the back of his mind. Almost. He almost slipped, almost lost it all to the selfishness of his emotions. Not yet.

He sets his jaw, visualizing the battlefields around him. The battlefield behind him will be the most problematic. The disadvantages are staggering. He doubts he can do much against the other children with mere strength alone, his body as strained as it is, and there’s still the mystery of these children’s skills and possible abilities. The odds are not in their favor, clearly.

But Five hasn’t given up. They think they’ve already won. Fine. Let them think they’ve got him with his back against the wall. That will be their disadvantage. His siblings, once snapped out of their sentimental crisis, will be able to prove resourceful. They’ve overcome worse odds than these. Five just needs to give them some leverage. He’ll think of something. He’ll fix it.

But to do that, he needs to win the battlefield in front of him. 

Five’s heart calms. He exhales his emotions away. Clarity prevails at last.

And so, time continues.

Five looks at his father. The man is as impeccably put together as ever; his dark suit hanging over his body with neither crinkle nor crease. His ridiculous mustache completely symmetrical on both ends, laid over a thin lined mouth that refuses to ever curl upward. And of course, the monocle is there as well, perched over his cheek, without even a shadow of lint on the glass.

Nothing more than an old man with a conflated sense of prominence in the world. Five has dealt with the man before, and he’s dealt with much crueler enemies, too. He is not intimated, so he’ll play along and show Hargreeves just as much.

“Of course,” he says, the words as flat as Reginald’s empty compliment. “Doesn’t take a monkey to put two and two together. Though I can’t say I’m not surprised.”

“And why would you be?” Reginald harrumphs. “Any man with a semblance of common sense would have been able to see the opportunity presented at the time. I would have been an outright fool to not seize it.”

Five’s mouth twitches at that rationale. Opportunity. The word sounds grotesquely defiled coming out of his mouth. He pushes away the images of his siblings’ expressions from that tacky restaurant a few days prior. Diego’s flooded eyes, Luther’s desperate exclamation, Allison’s dejected silence, his own heavy sense of defeat. Yet that whole time, the bastard saw none of that, only opportunity—

Five sets his jaw. “We weren’t there to give you an opportunity, and you know that wasn’t our intention for meeting with you.”

His father’s head cocks to the side. “Why should I care what your intention was?” Patronizing would be the kinder word to describe his tone. “Does a fisherman care what the lobster was doing before it was ensnared in his net? No. He sees the lobster for what it is, and for what rewards its subsequent sale will reap. The opportunity for wealth, for continued work, a warm meal for his family, and what have you. The lobster’s intentions mean nothing, and caring for them doesn’t even benefit a sunk cost, thus tell me, why should I have cared about your intentions?”

Heat blossoms in Five’s stomach. “Because we were your children. And we were coming to you for help. Help to save the goddamn world. Would have thought that would have triggered some excitement in you, at least.” He shakes his head. “But you didn’t see us as that, no. You took one look at us and saw a blueprint for your own damn benefit.”

“I saw a catastrophe.” Reginald takes a step forward, and Five fights off the instinct to step back with bloody knuckles. “A failed experiment that has mutated into some grotesque monster with a consciousness of its own. I saw a man’s legacy tarnished by the failures of his own children due to their self-assigned importance in the world. I saw a future that rewarded the world nothing, that if left to its own devices would become a devastating hinder to all of mankind.”

He waves his hand about curtly, gesturing to Five and his siblings as if they were some broken silverware littering a floor. “I saw more than enough.”

The world tilts in Five’s peripheral vision. His father stands close enough that he towers over him, those beady eyes glaring down and waiting for him to squirm. Five feels like a child under that gaze, and Reginald like an immortal titan. Regardless, Five faces him with fiery eyes of his own, ignoring how his body is trembling at the idea of lashing out with equally vile words, the fury so raw that his nerves are smitten with excitement at releasing it all.

The commotion behind him increases in volume. His siblings continue their pleading with Number Six, talking to him as if he was the brother they remember from their childhoods, recoiling at the strange personality the stranger lashes out with. The other Sparrow children’s voices can be heard too, joining their brother in talking down the unwelcomed strangers in their house, like two school cliques bullying one another with juvenile insults. Five and his father are absorbed in a different world. Neither concerns themselves with the external affairs of the children.

Five tosses his father a humorless smile. “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend, eh? Well, we saw more than enough ourselves. We saw a man so indifferent to the realities around him that he couldn’t see past his own two hands. A selfish, apathetic human that holds no regard for how his self-serving actions effect those around him.”

Reginald’s mouth twitches ever so slightly. “It seems vanity trickles down from parent to child, like a drop of rainwater sliding down from a tree branch and onto the soil that bares the next life.”

“Spare me the poetic metaphors, would you? The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, is that what you’re plagiarizing? Fine. We’re vain because you taught us to be vain. How else were we going to come out if we were told our whole lives that we were special? That we were meant to save the world? Doesn’t take a child psychologist to figure that one out.”

“Fascinating. So the goals remained the same throughout...”

“Guys, he’s not Ben!” Allison’s voice breaks through when the argument behind him becomes too distorted. And immediately after, Number Six’s voice snaps, “No shit, lady, that’s what I’ve been saying—” and an unfamiliar voice coos, “Aw, Six! Did the dropouts give you a cute little name?” and he hears Luther splutter, “D-Dropouts?” and Vanya ask, “What do you mean, Allison?” at the same time Klaus says, “That is Ben! It’s—he’s—it’s him—” and, then Allison stresses, “No, it’s not, look— it is and it isn’t! I’ve read about this, it’s an, an alternate reality—"

“Do not associate me with my predecessor,” Reginald tells Five brusquely. “His choices, and more relevantly, his mistakes, do not translate as my own, especially considering that I’ve ensured that this world would not experience them.”

Five’s fists curl in his pockets, nails digging into his palms. “From where I’m standing, it looks like history is repeating itself. You can dress it up in different names all you like, Sparrow, Umbrella, whatever, but it’s still the same song and dance as your predecessor. You’ve ensured nothing. The world still has to suffer from your despicable child army, and they in turn still have to suffer you.”

“Then you do not understand!” Reginald bellows, and Five almost jumps.

The ruckus in the back quiets as if the man had shouted at all of them. Five breathes sharply through his nose, a strange fear running cold hands over his chest.

“Disappointing. I took you for a smarter man, but clearly you choose to be blind to the obvious. No, the mistakes I refer to are the ones I’ve learned from simply observing you all that humiliating evening years ago. Amazing what a few minutes encounter can illuminate, if you know where to look and listen.”

The insult from his father stirs something within Five that he has not felt in decades. He hasn’t been chastised in fucking ages, and yet, those words alone threaten to break apart his efforts to hold back both his furling emotions and numbing exhaustion.

Succinct and composed. Succinct and composed. He speaks over the lump lodged in his throat. “I’m sure it was real fucking enlightening.” The silence of the house is deafening. Their conversation is now being consumed by all the other occupants; their attention latched on so acutely that their previous quarrel has been pushed aside. They listen with attentiveness and in silence, subsequently making Five and Reginald’s exchange jarringly loud.

Fine. Five will give them something to listen into, then. “Well, right back at you, pal. We came away with our own illuminating insights, too, and we didn’t even need to try. Just how you were a sick, twisted bastard in our timeline, you’re clearly just as perverse in this one. Did your unabashed disdain for children age along with you? I doubt you’re capable of even understanding the basic concepts of compassion, just like our own dear old dad couldn’t, so whatever failure you think we are, your little Sparrows are that twice fold.”

Someone behind him shouts, “The hell did you say!?”

And Diego’s voice cuts in, “Back off!”

A shadow of a smirk casts over Reginald’s lips. He leans back slightly, and Five swallows, feeling less encaged but all the more tense. “Compassion I understand, I assure you. But such superfluous feelings needed to be cast away in order to raise the generation that will ensure the world’s survival. A necessary evil for the larger picture.”

“The world’s survival?” Five nearly chokes on his laugh. “Are you serious, or just pulling my fucking leg? Last I recall– and let me assure you, that memory is pristine— you were unflinchingly adamant in your refusal to partake in such heroic endeavors.”

“My refusal was to partake in cleaning up your mess,” his father snaps. “The memory might be fresh in your mind, but it is just as pristine in mine no matter how many years have passed by. It was that memory that fueled the birth of the Sparrow Academy, and the birth of their one and only mission.”

“Don’t dress it up it like some unheard-of concept,” Five seethes. “Just like your long-winded metaphors, your Sparrow Academy is nothing more than a plagiarized version of us, the Umbrella Academy. Everything they are, and everything you are, was created for the sole intention of mimicking us. You wanted to be a better version of us? You cannot. Because we’re the pedestal, and you’ll always be scraping and crawling to reach our level.”

One of the kids behind him makes a deeply offended noise, and he hears Ben’s voice snarl, “You don’t know shit about us!”

And Five lips curl upward, ensuring that Reginald can see his smile. “I know everything about you. You were all adopted by this bastard in ’89 because you all have some sort of ability, for lack of a better word. You all have numbers for names, all of which are arbitrary, but he most likely hasn’t disclosed that yet. He told you all that you’re special, meant for bigger and better things, and has trained you all to fight crime and other missions for the betterment of society and later the world. Shall I keep going? I imagine I hit the nail on most of it.”

He doesn’t turn around to see the effect of his words, the infuriated silence vivid enough. He keeps his eyes on his father, the man’s face like a goddamn statue, absolutely untouched by Five’s words.

Then Reginald says with the barest of smiles, “Not quite.” And something about his tone makes Five’s skin crawl. “Unlike your father, I did not conflate their sense of purpose with such flowery words. Not special.” He lifts his gaze, monocle reflecting his children. “But necessary.”

“To save the world.” Five finishes, the disgust unmistakable. He waves a hand behind him, gesturing to the brats glaring holes at his back. “Well, hate to break it to you all, but the fact that you’re all here, breathing and shitting, means that we’ve saved the word. Thereby, we’ve already accomplished the grand mission that you were all born out of. Your existence is now obsolete.”

There’s a muffled uproar behind him, and Five smiles. Those brats’ succinct and composed attitude has deteriorated unbeknownst to them, making them just slightly susceptible to an attack should it be implemented correctly. It’s not nearly an upper hand, but at least now the Umbrella Academy is no longer backed into a corner. It’s still more than they came in with.

But it’s not enough. Reginald is unmoved. He doesn’t even fucking twitch from his words. Five feels infuriatingly at wits end. How could he catch him with his guard down? Is the man really that unemotional? It’s inhumane.

Then, Reginald’s expression turns chillingly curious, and Five freezes.

“Is that what you think?” His father says quietly, almost like he was in awe. He leans forward, looking at Five like he was some pitiful creature. “You misguided fool. Do you really think you’ve saved the world?”

Five balks. What the hell does that—

“Five,” Luther says, and Five finally breaks away from his father’s pressing gaze. Luther looks like he’s unsure whether to stare at his father in disbelief or continue his gawking at Ben. His brother’s mouth opens, and Five thinks, no, no, don’t fucking interfere, you bumbling idiot— “I don’t understand. How’s Dad alive if—”

“I am not your father, boy!” Reginald snaps, and Luther flinches violently. “I am a father to none of you. Are the rest of you so slow in the uptake that this fact hasn’t sunk in yet?”

Five watches his siblings’ expressions contort and his stomach drops. He’s in a peculiar panic, now, seeing his father’s attention turning to his siblings. Five opens his mouth, ready to steal that attention away quickly, ready to shield his idiot siblings from Reginald’s callous words, but then—

“Oh, screw you!” Diego calls out, his grip on Klaus’ arm crumbling the fabric of his sleeve with how tight it is. “We don’t even wa-want you as a father, you piece of shit!”

“Luther, he’s—this is a different timeline,” Allison explains, voice controlled, wary eyes on Reginald like he was a bear stalking through the woods, searching them out through the barest of sounds and scents. “He’s a different version of our dad.” Her eyes dart to him. “Right, Five?”

He twists his head over to her, but Luther is quicker to respond, or maybe Five is just too fucking slow, “But what does that mean? Are we not—is this not our home?”

Five grits his teeth—stop it, stop it you idiots! This is not their battle. Why can’t they let Five handle this? If they join in, then Reginald will lash out at them, and Five still remembers what their faces looked like the last time that happened in the sixties. He still remembers what that had done to them when they were children.

They’re too fragile, too soft. Five’s handling it; he can take the razor-sharp cuts and bruises their father’s words inflict. He’ll take it all so they don’t have to. He brought them here. This is his mistake, and thus his responsibility. No one else should suffer from it.  

But whether it’s the dizziness from his panic, or the weighted exhaustion that fills his blood with led, Five is too slow. He feels like a flimsy fence now, the only thing separating his siblings from this stalking bear of a father, and a poor job they’re doing in going unnoticed, what with all the fucking noise they’re making to exploit their presence. There’s only so much Five can do if the bear decides to barrel over him to get to them.

“It means we’ve been replaced.” Vanya says, her eyes on these new children. There’s a horrific fascination trailing behind her words. “Because we were in the past, we changed how things would turn out, and he—” her eyes flick to Reginald, and she pales, quickly looking down, and the strength in her words falter. “H-He didn’t adopt us. He adopted them instead . . .”

One of the Sparrow children, the tallest of the group, rolls his eyes. “There you go, that wasn’t so hard to figure out, was it?”

Allison’s fists tighten, eyes narrowing. She takes a protective step over to Vanya, who shrinks within herself. The Sparrow boy meets her glare with a smug smile, shoulders squared, waiting for one of them to take the first swing.

“But Ben is here,” Klaus chokes, his voice wet with bubbling emotions. He points. “If—if, no, no then how is Ben here? How is he alive? What the fuck is this!?”

All eyes move to Number Six. The young man’s mouth curls in disgust at the attention given to him.

“That is basic statistics, boy.” Reginald says, voice carrying within the pregnant silence.

Something sharp and dense is wedged in Five’s throat, and the words take too long to move around it.

Reginald takes off his monocle and casually cleans it with a handkerchief. “I suppose an exposition cannot be avoided, after all. Very well. The Sparrow Academy you see before you are the children I have adopted. You lot, on the other hand, are the children I chose to avoid adopting, which was a relatively simple venture considering I knew your names and faces, thereby avoided countries that your names shared origins with, and avoided the mothers with similar facial bone structures. Seeing as you were once seven, as you previously divulged with me, I was acutely aware that the probability of me adopting the unknown seventh child was not impossible.”

Number Six scowls. “Fucking great.” Another of the children says, “Well, that explains the weird looks they’ve been giving you.” The green cube flashes in color, and Six shoves it slightly. “Shut up, you ass.”

“However.”

Reginald puts his monocle back on, and it flashes like lightning when he looks up. “I was not concerned. After meeting you all, it was clear that if the seventh child was surrounded by a different assortment of siblings and environment, the combination of those factors would greatly influence his chances of a prolonged survival. Evidently, my hypothesis was correct.”

The weight in the room changes into something heavy and numbing. Five feels himself vibrating with apprehension. His brothers and sisters are all latching on to Reginald’s every word, unable to stifle their morbid curiosity. All the while Five’s mind is screeching with panic, no, no, no, don’t listen to him, stop listening to him, you idiots—

“Tell me,” Reginald drawls, and Five heart is beating dangerously fast as he thinks, shut up, shut up, you monster don’t say anymore—! “When did your . . . what is it you call him, Ben? When did Ben perish in your doomed timeline?”

Hearing their father say Ben’s name feels gruesomely sacrilegious, like the man was walking on his bones, crushing each with the heel of his foot with the indifference of man stepping through a pile of leaves. Five can only watch helplessly, knowing any reaction he expresses would be both counterintuitive and playing right into Reginald’s hands. Stay succinct and comp—

Reginald continues casually, “I only ask out of curiosity, you see. I’m very keen to learn how many years of life having different brothers and sisters would have awarded him. It would narrow down a conclusion to another one of my theories, of whether you all had some direct correlation to his death, or—“

He pauses, gaze traveling across every single one of them. 

“—that you were all simply too predisposed with your own vanity to bother saving a dying sibling.”

Faces crumbling, eyes widening, breaths stolen, a physical blow wouldn’t even initiate that type of pained reaction. And of course the bastard isn’t asking out of curiosity. He asks so he can watch with sick satisfaction as Five’s brothers and sisters all drink his poisonous words with gut-wrenching agony.

And that’s what does it for Five, in the end— it’s seeing how his brothers and sisters, all of whom he’d sworn to protect and bring home, suffering from a pain they shouldn’t be experiencing, a pain only made possible because they followed Five in the hopes of going home. And he did not bring them home.

So, Five snaps.

He twists, takes a step forward, cocks his arm back, and lunges at Reginald Hargreeves, succinct and composed be damned—

He doesn’t get very far.

He hears Klaus shout, “Ben, no!” and suddenly, something horrid and alien snakes itself around his neck, squeezes, then slams him down onto the floor with a reverberating BANG.

Five’s ears ring when his head bounces against the wooden floor, his breathe stuttering out when his body is slammed down on the flat surface. Throughout that flash of wrangling, he still manages to hear Vanya’s cry of “Stop it, stop—!” and Diego’s bellow of, “Let him go—”

The serpent around his neck tightens, and Five chokes. He brings his arms from under him and tries to claw the grip away, but it doesn’t falter. Five has never been this close in proximity to the Horror that Ben housed, not even had the monster accidentally brush against him. Ben was always careful to contain the beast, only unleashing when absolutely necessary, but even that was a rare occurrence. From what Five remembers, the Horror was untamable, a wild beast that lashed out without regard to friend or foe.

So it’s an extraordinary surprise that Five’s head is still attached to his body.

With struggle, Five twists his head as much as possible to get a view behind him. Number Six is standing there, a bored expression on his face, with one hand lifting the corner of his shirt. One of the Horror’s tentacles pours out of that gap, extended towards Five and pressing him down by the neck and nothing more. Obedient, trained, as if waiting for additional orders.

God, Five could just fucking crumble into dust from the devastating pride he has for this brother that could have been.

There’s a blur of movement behind Number Six. His siblings all react at once at the abrupt attack. Diego and Luther leap forward, shoving past the Sparrows that block their path. Klaus’ and Allison’s sharp exclamations mingle in between the sounds of feet pounding, but even those are interrupted by another pair of Sparrow children, the green cube flashing and one of the girls summoning a flock of birds. Vanya’s skin pales unnaturally, her chest glowing with light—

“Try anything and I pop his head off like a wine cork,” Number Six warns. The alien appendage constricts, and Five chokes.           

And just like that, everything comes to an abrupt halt. His siblings all freeze. Number Six smirks. The Umbrella Academy doesn’t move, but the collective rage in their eyes is enough to melt ice. Like subdued sheep, his brothers and sisters are herded to the side, the Sparrow kids pushing them into a corner with snapping teeth and vicious barks.

A strained silence follows. Five wonders if everyone else can hear his strangled breathing or if it’s just humiliatingly loud to him.

Footsteps click on the floor, the noise jarringly loud with his head involuntarily pressed to the ground. A pair of pointed, well-polished shoes stop in front of him. Five’s eyes trail up.

“Sloppy,” Reginald tells him, and Five snarls.

“Please,” Vanya’s voice chokes out before Five can contemplate ripping Reginald’s feet out with his teeth. “Please, don’t— W-We’re just trying to go home. We don’t want to fight, I swear. We’re n-not here to cause any trouble.”

“There’s no point appealing to a psychopath, Van,” Diego says tightly, eyes watching cagily when the corner of the green cube gets too close to him. “You know how this bastard is, how he thinks. He won’t listen to anyone, especially when they tell him to his face that he’s dead wrong.”

“Hm. How sad,” Reginald says, “that you cannot even comprehend your follies, and the consequences thereafter.”

“Our follies,” Five strains through the strangulation, “Ensured that this world would still be in one piece today! Everything we did was to avert the end of the world, and we did. Clearly, our success was not completely satisfactory, else you would have stayed a lump pile of ashes in a forgotten vase—ack.”

Neither the Horror nor Number Six appreciated that last bit, but Reginald raises his chin subtlety and Five’s airway clears just slightly.

“If the delusion that you’ve saved the world is one you’ve chosen to entertain,” Reginald leans down slightly, “Then you are representative of the body you possess; childish.”

“You son of a—"

“But it’s been stopped!” Luther says. “The end of the world—it’s, it’s stopped! It was supposed to happen on April 1st, and-and it didn’t! We’re not delusional—"

“Perhaps in your timeline the world is safe, now that you’re currently absent from it. However, you are here now, which correlates to the threat being here, and that alone threatens to collapse our timeline. To erase that danger, we must erase you.”

“We’re not threats,” Vanya urges brokenly. “We’re not, we’re not, I’m not, we—”

Allison says, “We’ve already learned what caused the apocalypse in our timeline, and we fixed it.” There’s a miniscule pause, and Five imagines she’s giving Vanya some reassuring touch. “Just like how we stopped the world from ending back in the sixties. So, whatever threat you’re talking about is gone.”

“You’re all so fixated on that disposition, that you’ve saved the world, that it hasn’t even occurred to you to reflect on why the world is continuously in danger in the first place.”

Vanya’s voice rattles, “N-no, I—I—I don’t, I’ve got it under control, now, I won’t—I won’t do it again—”

Reginald shakes his head. “Think bigger, girl, the universe is not so guileless that just one person can make it convulse. No, it’s all of you. It’s your frivolous joyrides through time, trespassing in realities that aren’t capable of accommodating you. Do you see? Think of yourselves as a virus, if you will. Every timeline you penetrate produces an infection so arduous that it forces the world to riddle itself with a fever so hot it tries to burn the disease out of it.”

Five struggles from his pinned position, trying to push himself up. He’s heard enough of the old man’s bullshit, and he refuses to have his siblings be subjected to it any longer. He balls his fists, feeling his core go cold as he tries to summon his powers—

Reginald’s voice bellows down from over him. “Was it not you that told me that when you first time traveled, you botched it?” Five pauses, glancing up. “You jumped forward in time, and the world burned, and when you jumped back, the same result, correct? Hmph. I wonder if my predecessor ever disclosed this with you, but I’ve always reviled time travel, primarily for the god complex it bestows onto its wielder. I imagine you’ve learned to jump through time by your own accord, rather than from your father’s teaching?”

“Don’t you dare lecture me on time travel,” Five hisses. He slides his hands underneath his chest, trying and failing to push himself up. He feels something flat but sharp underneath his jacket. “I’ll be damned if I ever let some greenhorn explain to me how time travel works.”

“Sometimes, there is more knowledge behind the theoretics of a subject than just the implementation. I understand very well that you traveled through time for your own benefit, without regard to its impact to the world. I understand that you’ve all,” he shoots his stoic expression to the others, “taken part in twisting time, moving along as if the world revolved around you, interacting with a timeline that should have been left undisturbed. Domino and after domino, you all knocked down the pillars holding the fabrics of reality in place, like a toddler running through a museum with arms extended. Your destructive tendencies have now bore alternate timelines. Who’s to say what other anomalies you’ll bring about to the world?”  

Five speaks through his teeth. “You don’t know anything.”

“I knew enough,” Reginald returns. “Our world is bloated, threatening to pop, but the least we can do to alleviate that inflation is to rid you all from it. That’s why I created the Sparrow Academy. I knew you would all return one day, and I knew the world would need a team that can defend it when that time came. And that time has come. Children!”

Everybody in the room startles, the call universally familiar. Reginald speaks like he’s standing in the center of a podium, addressing an attentive crowd. “Your training is complete, and your final mission begins now. You were created to stop the end of the world. The end of the world has come.”

The air shifts, the tension simmering into something dangerous. Five squirms harder underneath the Horror’s unflinching grip.

“No!” Vanya cries. “No, no, we’re not threats!”

Reginald is unmoved. “Of course you would think that. Every antagonist assumes they’re the protagonist of their own story.” He inclines his head, and his monocle flashes again. “That’s what makes a tragedy so poignant. Number Six?”

Five feels the muscles in the Horror’s tentacle constrict. The pressure around his neck increases with monstrous strength, trapping the air in his lungs. A strangled gasp scrapes out of his mouth, and he hears his siblings cry out in terror, and Five wonders whether it’s his imminent death, or the fact that Ben is causing it, that has his siblings this distressed.

As with all his experiences with dying, this one is painfully slow. Through his darkening vision, Five can see just the slimmest expression of satisfaction on Reginald’s face, his victorious outlook coming to light now that he’s succeeded in his ultimate goal. His brothers’ and sisters’ helpless pleas and cries are probably music to the man’s ears, and the sight of Five’s slow death like a fresh glass of red wine.

His vision blurs.

Voices and sounds become muffled, like they were being suffocated as well.

His vision darkens.

The outline of his father’s expression seems to be the last thing to fade.

His vision shutters.

The world goes mute.

Maybe that will be the last thing Five sees before he dies . . .

His last thought floats in his mind.

. . . Not his life flashing before his eyes. Just a content smile on Reginald Hargreeves’ face . . . 

—Over his fucking dead body.

“Th—this story— isn’t—over,” Five strains with his last breathes. He grins despite the smothering lightheadedness, hoping his father could see. “W—We’re— only at— the catharsis plot.”

With his hands underneath his chest, Five grips the handle of the kitchen knife pocketed within the inside of his jacket. He wedges it out from underneath him and, in one blind but fluid motion, brings the point of the knife down and deep into the flesh that coils around his neck—

The Horror screams in wild pain.

Chaos erupts like the blood from the entry wound.

Number Six curses loudly, and Reginald takes a step back. “Num—!"

The tentacle uncurls from around Five’s neck and starts to recede. Five doesn’t let go of the knife, so when the monster pulls its arm back, the knife tears though the flesh even further, slicing the appendage open like a roll of dough, blood spraying in the air.

The Horror’s wails become wildly feral now, its screech of pain so sharp that even Reginald flinches from the sound.

Coughing and gasping through his abused throat, Five quickly scrambles to his feet, knife gripped in bloody knuckles, poised to strike, adrenalin a wild beast taking a hold of him.

Behind him, pandemonium has exploded from underneath Number Six’s shirt. The Horror’s tentacles have all burst from Six’s stomach, the limbs waving around and smashing into walls and objects indiscriminately while the monster shrieks in pain. The cleaved tentacle convulses in agony, bucking like a wild horse and tossing blood onto the ceiling.

“Fuck!” Six grunts loudly, straining from the monstrous strength of his tenant. A tentacle smashes over the heads of the herded Umbrella and Sparrow students, and they all dive onto the floor to avoid it. Glass shatters, wood splinters off the walls, and furniture breaks apart in that instant sweep.

“What the hell, Six!” One of the Sparrow kids shouts.

“I can’t control it—ngh, shit!”

“Children, focus!”

“Five, look out!”

One of the tentacles shoots out in Five’s direction—

Shit! His eyes widen, watching the limb barrel towards him. Instincts take over, as they always do when there’s nothing but madness around him and his blood pumping frantically in his veins and his setting is painted an exciting red, and without thinking he blinks—

—something inside him splits in half.

When Five stumbles out of the blue tear in the universe, he cannot see anything, vision obstructed by a burst of merciless assortment of colors. His breath goes cold and solidifies in his lungs, and a flash of white-hot pain strikes him in the chest. The agony is so sharp and heavy, his hands fly to his chest instinctively, looking for the ice pick that surely has stabbed through his heart.

His elbow bumps into something, and then his whole body is colliding against another. His vision clears, and he sees that he’s blinked himself in the middle of the two Academy students’ standoff, his sudden appearance shoving over one of the larger kids who had no problem keeping up with Luther.  

“Five!” He hears Allison cry out, or maybe Vanya. Hell, maybe that was Diego.

Five is so fucking disoriented he doesn’t know what the hell is going on around him, but immediately all hell seems to break loose with his sudden appearance.

Luther takes that moment of distraction to shove away his distracted opponent, then turns around and punches the green cube that seems to have been accosting Klaus. Five stumbles to the side, only realizing he’s bumped into Diego when his brother is quickly pulling the knife out of his hand, “Fuck, man, give it to me!”

Then Five is out of a weapon, and Diego has gone somewhere else, and Vanya’s in his place. She pulls him away sharply when some sort of acid comes flying towards him, melting the spot he was just standing in. More of that vile liquid is projectile vomited in their direction, and Five thinks his arm is going to get torn out of his socket with the way Vanya is pulling him.

Then Vanya is glowing with a blinding white light, and she pushes Five behind her before unleashing a torrent of power forward, the noise as sharp as the beast’s howls. Five nearly trips on his feet as he stumbles back. He watches as one of the Sparrow kids say, “Shit, she’s got range! Take her out—hit me!” and then another Sparrow comes to him and punches him in the stomach. Vanya chokes a gasp, knees buckling as she holds her stomach and folds with abrupt pain, her skin dimming.  

Five doesn’t even have time to make sense of that before Klaus barrels out of nowhere and knocks him down just as one of The Horror’s wild tentacles comes crashing over their heads. A lamp shatters, porcelain raining down on his head.

“Five!” Klaus is shouting in his face, and Five feels like he’s just resurfaced from the bottomless pit of the ocean, gasping for air, limbs uncooperative, and mind just fucking blaring on with a deafening pain that blocks all thoughts from coming through. “Hey! Don’t just stand there—!”

A knife lands on the wall behind Five, and he hears Diego shout from a million miles away, “Klaus, Klaus! Grab that for me! Fuck, man, hurry!” and Five is being pulled back to his feet and pushed to the side, and when his eyes flicker open, Klaus is gone, Allison’s face takes his place.

“Five, god, are you—” she’s saying, but the rest of it is a warble of nonsense. He doesn’t even see Allison, just a blur of a silhouette talking to him. Everything seems to be bleeding together in a horrible mess of colors. None of it makes any sense. Is his brain melting?

The Horror’s wails don’t stop for breath. A chandelier is dropped from the ceiling, and the dining table is flung across the room. Five watches, eyes slowly blinking to refocus the chaos once it starts to mesh into shapeless colors. His siblings are engrained in that shitshow, fighting for their lives.

Allison must have shook him; his head is suddenly being rocked back and forth. “Five, Five! Snap out of it!”

He can’t. Something has been torn into pieces within him, its cold shards digging into Five’s insides. Everything feels wrong. He messed up. He messed up everything. He broke this reality, and now he’s gone and broken himself.

Allison sounds incredibly distraught. “Shit, Luther, he’s not—!”

“I know!” Luther’s voice says from fucking somewhere. He grunts, then groans, then grunts again. Winded, he manages, “Go—help—Vanya—we need—to get out!” Then another grunt and Luther breathes easier. “Go, Allison!”

Five blinks slowly and Allison’s face comes into focus. A voice he’s never heard of says, “You assholes aren’t going anywhere!” and he watches his sister’s face darken into something vicious. An enemy? Shit, he should do something, he should—

Allison straightens and glares in the direction of the mocking voice. “I heard a rumor you—!” But then, a flock of black crows careens towards Allison, their loud shrieks and flapping wings drowning out her voice. Allison staggers as the birds push her back in unnatural frenzy.

A hand grabs Five’s arm, and he’s pulled aside again, like a doll getting tossed around by envious children. He feels ill, like his lungs are about to spill out of his mouth. The Horror’s blood-soaked tentacle comes smashing down in the spot he and Allison had just been, splitting the flooring like it was made of glass. Everything’s wrong.

“Five!” Luther’s voice booms in his head, and hell, why is everyone yelling in his face when all this other shit is going on— “Can you jump?”

“What?” Five slurs like a drunkard, swaying on his feet when he realizes there isn’t a hand holding him in place. He didn’t even realize he needed that support. Five looks down on his legs, watching them stagger in place.

Luther’s eyes jump to the side, and suddenly he’s arching bodily over Five. Another one of the Horror’s limbs blindly whips itself dangerously close to them. A painting gets torn, a ceiling light cracks, and a window bursts.

“Number Six!” Dad’s voice is yelling, but what the hell is Dad doing here. “Remember your training!” and Ben says, “I’m trying! It’s not listening!” and since when did Ben talk back to their father—

“Five, listen to me,” Luther’s face is back in his line of vision. He has a cut over his eye, and his lip is a bloody mess. The world seems to be falling apart behind him. “We can’t win. We can’t fight them. We need to escape, alright? Can you jump out of here? I can’t—” Luther blanches, hesitating to continue.

Then Five looks behind his brother and realizes, shit, fuck, and it’s his turn to blanch. His siblings are all fighting for their lives. These Sparrow Academy students are out for blood, putting up the best fight of their lives all in an effort to impress the father that stands and watches. And his siblings . . . they’re just trying to survive. They can’t match the Sparrow’s bloodlust. They’re just trying to go home.

And a fat load of good Five did to help. He’d gone and fucked it all up, damning his siblings to this scenario. He let Reginald bait him, he let his emotions take hold, he lost his head, slipped into an easy trap, made himself a burden.

He fucked up, he fucked up. He can’t even fix it. He’s shredded himself to pieces. He can feel his body starting to deteriorate. His legs can only hold him up for so long before they buckle and collapse from the weight. His head is a filled to the brim with honey, clogging up his thoughts and slowing his reactions. Fuck. Fuck! He’s useless to them now. He’s a fucking liability!

Luther’s concerned eyes say it all. They look at him with open worry, and Five may as well have signed his brother’s death warrant. To harbor worry for someone else during a battle is an immediate crutch. It leaves Luther vulnerable, leaves them all vulnerable. They’ll be too distracted with their worry to concentrate on surviving.

Just by being here, Five is setting them all up for failure. And failure in this case means death.

Luther puts on a brave face and says. “We all need to escape, but you first. I can’t watch your back and hold them back, Five. You need to get out of here, fast.”

And it makes sense. Of course, that’s the logical strategy. Because if Five stays, he won’t be able to defend himself properly, his siblings don’t have the bandwidth to protect him. None of them would be able to focus on fighting or escaping if Five was in danger. It’s the obvious answer. Luther is correct.

But Five—

Five shakes his head. “I can fight,” He says, effort in his voice to sound coherent. He finds his brother’s eyes, and his voice becomes desperate. “Number One, I can fight. You guys won’t—you can’t—you need me, and I can help. I’m not leaving.”

The destruction of the house becomes dangerously loud now. All sorts of wild powers are being displayed around, tearing down walls, melting the floors, bending and twisting furniture. The Horror’s mindless howls are like a falling nuclear bomb, whistling sharply and ominously as it makes its never-ending descent.

Five’s feet are tombstones, burying his logic six feet under the floorboards. He can’t just leave them here. He’s the one that brought them here. He’s the one that screwed up. All they wanted to do was go home, and they trusted him to accomplish that simple task. He had assured them, promised them he would get them home. And he fucking failed.

No, no, he has to make sure he fixes things. He has to make sure they all come out alive. He could never forgive himself—no, he couldn’t fucking live with himself if one of them got hurt on his account. If one of them were to die here, fuck, he doesn’t, he’ll never—he – he—

“We’ll be fine.” Luther says loudly when the crows’ shrieks become unbearably shrill. “Five. It’s OK. You don’t need to worry. We can hold our ground, alright? Trust us.”

Five feels his face crumble. “I can’t leave you guys.”

”You won’t. You’ll be saving us.”

A shadow eclipses them from above, and before Five can look up Luther pushes him back roughly. The Horror’s limb slams between the two brothers, then jerks to the side and sweeps Luther in its motion.

“Go!” Luther is shouting, despite being brushed aside like dust by the crazed monster. “We’ll be fine! We’ll find each other when this is over, I promise! Get out of here, Five! GO!”

Five bites his lip, his blood pumping ferociously in his head.

He takes in the scene before him, watching his siblings all scratch, claw, and fight their way towards survival. Survive, survive, survive. This was never something they should have to experience. Reginald was wrong. They didn’t destroy the world. Five single-handedly destroyed their world.

His face twists.

Then just as quickly, he settles it with professional accuracy.

Fine, then.

He destroyed everything. He’ll accept that responsibly, and in turn he’ll fix everything. That’s something he can do. That’s something he will do. That's what his siblings depend on him for. 

He stops thinking. A different kind of adrenalin takes over—

Five closes his eyes and blinks out of the Academy.

(apologies for the delay, next chapter is the last..hopefully next week!!)

Chapter Text

Me, putting a gun to my own head: you will finish this story before 2021 bitch!!!!!! Stop crying and type!!!!!!

Chapter Six: So I’ll Dare You To Try

“I thought you died,” Allison tells him, her voice broken with open honesty.

They’ve huddled themselves over to an empty table in the equally empty library. Squeezed in, elbows and breaths touching, the excitement of finding one another had long dissolved. Reality had set in, eclipsing them with shared misery.

The florescent lights from the library’s high ceiling blare down on them, dragging long shadows down all their faces, like tear tracks in the shape of bruises. Five wishes those lights would turn off to properly reflect the downcast mood. And because the brightness is giving him a bitch of a headache.

“I didn’t know where you went. I didn’t know where any of you guys went.” Allison holds her head. “Everything just happened so fast, so suddenly. I just blinked, and we were fighting for our lives.”

She pauses, controlling her voice. She looks more abysmal than he’d last seen her. It’s not unkind to say she looks absolutely frazzled, even. It was evident the moment she started to speak, her poise chipping away to make way for bubbling distress, before she forced it back up. It would crumble all over again when she caught one of their gazes. Five wonders if the others can see how hard she’s trying not to break down.

Allison continues, that distress slipping through again. “When I couldn’t find any of you yesterday, I . . . hell, I thought the worst—that one of those assholes chased after you, or that dad chased after you. Jesus, just hearing myself say that is insane!”

Five swallows. He keeps his hands under the table, hiding the tremor that had settled into his limbs. Vanya and Diego sit on either side of his elbows, attention on their sister. Five appreciates the stolen attentiveness. His siblings would likely have something infuriating to say about the state he’s slipped into. The moment he sat down, his head swam down a murky ocean of numbness. Five can’t see himself, but he’s well aware that the dense exhaustion that melts him in his seat is just as apparent externally.

But seeing Allison, alive and well, makes it all that much more bearable.

Vanya touches Allison’s hand. “It’s alright. I know what you mean, how you feel, but we’re here. We’re okay. You don’t have to worry anymore.”

“Thanks.” A small smile for the sake of smiling pulls at her lips. Allison exhales shakily. “You’re right, I know. It’s silly hearing myself saying it out loud. Do I sound crazy? I guess I was so paranoid that my mind just imagined these crazy scenarios.”

“Oh. Sorry, no,” Vanya cringes. “I mean, that’s exactly what happened, but you don’t have to worry because we’re okay now.”

“What?”

“Um, well. I was fine, at first. When I left the mansion, I went straight to the theater. I didn’t try going to my apartment. I mean, I didn’t have the keys on me, obviously, but if this is an, um, alternate reality,” she says it like it was some foreign word she was mispronouncing horribly, “then I doubt I even live there, so I just went straight to the theatre. Sorry, I’m rambling— I just mean that I wasn’t chased down by anyone, or in any apparent danger. At least, not until they came to the theatre . . .”

Her eyes trail to the side. Diego scowls. He crosses his arms, grumbling. “Yeah, yeah. We had one hell of an overzealous bitch tailing our ass for the last couple days. Guess we drew the short straw there.”

“Jesus.” Allison groans, holding her face again. She pulls her hands away, her bangs a crisscross mess of hair. “Is that why you guys look like that? And are those scratches? Which one was it? Was it the—”

“—Hitchcocktress, yes, yes.”

He hears more than sees Klaus return. A chair is pulled roughly, at the same time Allison is saying, “Ew, what?” and then Klaus dumps a colorful array of individually wrapped candies onto the table.

His brother sits down next to Allison. He slouches, putting an arm behind her chair. “Our lovely pursuer, the Lady Hitchcocktress. You remember her, I’m sure. Tall, slim, has an affinity for birds of the murderous nature? The name, obviously, of my own creation.”

“Obviously,” Allison agrees flatly.

He sighs at length. “I wonder what her real name is. Her number name, I mean. I felt a tiny little spark when we had that riveting back and forth, back in the theatre. You missed that part, Vanya. My tit and her tat were just dancing.” He frowns when no one touches the candy.

“Uh. Okay.” Vanya says.

Klaus leans over and pushes half of his candy bounty towards Vanya, and the other half towards Five. He imagines Klaus snagged it from the jar at the front desk. There’s a lollipop within the mix, and Five glares up immediately at Klaus.

Klaus continues, “Anyway, she’s probably a Number Four, hence our connection. Ah, but thinking about it, she was only there because she was chasing Diego first. She’s been hot on his tail since he left the mansion. Hmmm, maybe it wasn’t a spark between us, but straight up murderous intent? Guess that makes her your lady, Diego. Don’t think Lila would like that. Two sisters pining over one brother… how spicy. I think I’ve watched— cover your ears, Five— an adult film with that same premise. Great plot, terrible acting, but had a very happy ending—”

“Oh my god, shut up.” Diego throws a piece of candy at him. Five throws the damn lollipop in his face. Klaus ducks for cover, nearly falling off his chair. Vanya shakes her head.

Amazingly, Allison manages to pull forth the main insight amid that unintelligible monologue. Her eyes dart to Diego. “You’ve been chased since you left?”

“Told you, overzealous bitch. But I got a hit on her. She shouldn’t be chasing us anymore. Probably went back to lick her wounds. But her birds might still be around. Might be keeping watch… patrolling the city… they’re probably her eyes. Be on guard.”

“On guard for what?”

“Just, just keep your eyes peeled for any suspicious birds.”

“Suspicious birds.” Allison deadpans.

“Crows, mainly.”

“We’re all a little psychologically damaged from our last encounter with her.” Klaus supplies, incredibly unhelpfully. “Her powers sound so stupid, whatever they are, but lord, do they pack a punch.”

He points to one of the scratches that runs down from his ear and to his collarbone. It’s shallow, not bleeding, and certainly won’t leave a scar, but Allison nonetheless winces in sympathy.

“Right,” Allison continues, massaging her temple. “Okay. Well, better her than Ben, I guess.”

Klaus’ lopsided smile splinters.

Around the table, all faces fall. Instantly, Allison pales at the implication of her words. As if they were reliving their introduction with Number Six all over again, his siblings adopt that horrid expression on their faces. Hurt mixed with shock and overlayed with a never-ending grief.

And just like before, seeing those expressions makes Five’s stomach just drop.

It hurts. It hurts to see them like this. He is reminded, painfully but grotesquely clearly, that he was the one that subjected his siblings to this pain. This misery. He was meant to bring them home. The stone in his stomach becomes jagged. He promised them. He promised himself.

An uncomfortable silence settles over them, and no one can meet anyone’s eyes anymore. The mood becomes unbearably thick. A beat passes, and Five can no longer stand it.

He clears his throat, plowing forward for all their sakes. “Allison. Have you been chased by anyone?”

He doesn’t think so. She looks relatively unscathed, appearance wise. But there’s a frantic energy about her that makes him nervous. She’s clearly distressed about something, but he needs to ensure it’s not from any immediate danger.

Allison shakes her head, happy to deflect from the sour topic she accidentally touched. “I didn’t notice anyone or anything weird. I was in such a panic that I didn’t even look back. Just went straight to a place I can hole up in without an issue. Haven’t been bothered at all.”

“Hm. Good.” Five scrubs a hand over his face, watching the back of his eyelids dance with indecipherable colors and shapes.

Klaus makes a comment that Five can’t hear, his ears muffled by static. He settles his mind back into numbness, ignoring the conversation at hand. Staring at the candy, he watches as the colors of the vibrant sweets mesh together, a blob of iridescent. He sighs deeply through his nose.

Just barely above a whisper so only he can hear, Vanya suggests carefully, “You should eat one.” She unwraps some artificial blue thing and pops it into her mouth with a small smile. Around them, Diego and Klaus argue petulantly on whether the birds were crows or ravens. “The sugar will help.”

Five glances at his sister, the Déjà vu not lost to him. The bags under Vanya’s eyes are more defined under the facsimile light of the library. Her complexion is paler, as well, making her look almost sickly. His stomach twists at the sight of his sister. She’s doing an admirable job holding herself together, but she’s clearly in desperate need of rest. They all are. He was meant to bring them home, so they wouldn’t feel this horrid. He couldn’t even get that right.

“Five?” Vanya whispers. “You alright?”

Ah. He blinks tiredly. He’s been staring past her for too long, must have been unnerving. Shaking his head, he stares back at the candy. He should eat something, shouldn’t he. Probably would help. The hollowness in his stomach is likely hunger, and not phantom pains of a bullet riddled middle. Or maybe both.

“—you’ve been crashing in the library?” He hears the tail end of Diego’s appalled question, somehow managing to steer the conversation away from birds. His brother looks around, eyebrows raised. “What, did you make a bed with the books or something? How did no one kick you out?”

Klaus snorts. “What a nerd, sleeping in a library. That’s something I’d expect this old fart to do, not you, Ms. Hollywood.”

Diego hums thoughtfully, “You know what, he actually has done it, and no one seemed to bother him. Huh. Guess the library is a good place to crash if you want people to leave you alone. Five was plastered and a minor and no one seemed to give a shit.”

“I would have loved to see that.”

Five reaches for the candy. The plastic wrap crackles loudly between his fingers, like the cracking of concrete. He holds the butterscotch orb loosely, its bland brown color all too familiar. When he throws it in his mouth, he cringes at the nausea it rallies up, but powers through it. Better to have the taste of this buttery crap in his mouth than continue on with the coppery tinge of blood. Vanya looks relieved, too, so there’s that.

“Idiots. Of course I didn’t sleep here. I just come here every now and then, hoping one of you morons, or Vanya, would be here, too. I thought, well, if we were to meet up without actually having a meet up place, might as well be somewhere we’re all familiar with.”

“That’s what I did,” Vanya murmurs. “When I went to the Icarus Theater.”

Diego nods. “We did the same thing when we went to Griddy’s. That’s where we picked up this dumbass.”

“Wow, great minds really do think alike!” Klaus quietly claps. “Or maybe Diego’s just a bloodhound, sniffing all of us out with his superior sense of smell. He’s the one that found us all, starting with old Five here. Was your reunion as dramatic as ours? Any tears shed?”

Five hums, not really paying attention to whatever nonsense Klaus is spewing for the sake of filling the silence.

Instead, he concentrates on the candy in his mouth, rolling it over his teeth. The taste is dissolving, changing into something bitterly familiar. He adamantly tries not to focus on the nausea building in his stomach.

The conversation continues without him, the chatter sounding far away. 

His skin grows hot, suddenly, and that’s probably not a good sign. Is he about to be sick? He hopes not; the last thing he needs is Allison on his ass about his wellbeing. It’s probably just the air circulation in this library, he reasons. He hasn’t done anything excruciating to warrant another fit. He’s fine. Just the candy.

The candy tastes fucking disgusting.

I shouldn’t have eaten the damn candy, he thinks suddenly, bitterly.

He really needs to stop appeasing Vanya like this. If he becomes too complacent with her mothering, then she’ll get too comfortable and keep at it. Best to put a stop to that now, and remind her that he is not, in fact, some malnourished, emaciated child.

There was a time, now that he mulls on that last thought, where he was a malnourished, emaciated child. And even then, he managed just fine. Despite the circumstances. He took care of himself, sustained himself. Seeing as he is alive now, he obviously did a pretty good job there. So. Yes. He doesn’t need to be smothered with worry.

He stares at the remaining candy on the table, wondering when they turned to cockroaches.

Even as a child, he knew that he would need to do whatever it took to survive, dignity be damned.

The cockroaches’ antennas twitch, and they begin to move across the table, their paper thin legs making the softest sounds against the plastic surface.

He tries to remember what led to his first taste of those cockroaches. God, that was years ago. It wasn’t a conscious choice, that much he remembers; he didn’t just wake up one morning wondering what a cockroach would taste like.

The memory is murky, but he recalls that moment beginning with him being on the brink of starvation for the first time in his life. First of many.

Yes, now he remembers.

He was in the library, or the remains of a building that was once the library. His legs couldn’t sustain his weight anymore. He collapsed on the ground, feeling like dust, waiting for the wind to blow him away. He didn’t even feel hunger anymore. It was now just a rusty knife twisting in his abdomen. The feeling like an old friend.

His eyes were closing, eternal sleep beckoning him forward.

Then a cockroach scampered towards him.

Five didn’t think.

His first brush with survival took over, right then and there. He grabbed the bug and shoved it in his mouth. Its legs were still kicking when he bit it in half.

The cockroaches on the table move idly, as if baiting him.

He has the urge to pick one up, knowing how scarce food is. Although, he’s not on the brink of starvation. Or at least, he doesn’t think he is. The pain isn’t there, but he does feel empty in a different sense. Strange.

When he looks around, the library is empty, collapsed, and partially riddled with flames. Ah, did he come here for shelter—

Fuck. No.

He blinks rapidly, but the images don’t erase. Images. These are just images.

That realization doesn’t stop the cockroaches from moving, making their way towards his hand. The library is but a skeleton of its former grandeur—

No.

Quickly, Five slides his arm over the table, pushing the bugs onto the floor, their bodies clattering to the ground like candy.

He bites down hard on the butterscotch in his mouth, breaking it in half with a loud crack and swallowing before his mind could make it into something it’s not.

He takes a shaky breath, not ready to look up and see if the library is still desolated. The silence is unbearably familiar. Shit, wasn’t it filled with some sort of sound before? What was he doing . . . where was he . . . ?

Diego nudges his shoulder.

Five’s head shoots up.

His siblings are all staring at him, equally disturbed expressions painted on their faces. Diego. Klaus. Vanya. Allison.

The florescent lights fill the room with faux daylight. His breaths are cold in his lungs, but hot when they leave his mouth.

Right. That’s right.

Shit.

He scrubs his face quickly. “I’m fine,” he says hoarsely. He clears his throat. “I’m fine.”

Stunned silence, then—

“Are you?” Allison blurts.

Five doesn’t answer. The others don’t say anything either. Allison notices; her eyes jump from one sullen sibling to the other. “Is he? I wasn’t going to say anything at first but . . . what the hell happened to you? Jesus, Five, you look like hell.”

“We’re aware,” Diego says tightly.

Five glares at him. Diego glares back.

Allison inhales sharply, like the realization just hit her. “Was it the jump?”

Five’s head snaps to Allison, Diego’s reaction equally as sharp. “How do you know that?” His brother asks briskly.

Allison’s eyes narrow, growing defensive and suspicious at the same time, trying to piece everything together while she asks, “Why shouldn’t I know that?”

But Diego was never one for dramatic revelations and instantly complains, “Because we had to wrench this little shit’s mouth open just for him to tell us the vaguest detail for why he’s so fucked up.”

“Not literally,” Klaus quickly comments when Vanya frowns deeply.

Allison’s brow doesn’t slacken. She blinks, a bit taken aback by the mental image of that reply and says, “Oh… Well, I was talking about when we were back in Sissy’s house. Five mentioned that he time traveled. Did, did you not—? Isn’t that what you’re talking about, too?”

“Time travel!?”

Ah. Shit. Right. He vaguely recalls sharing with Allison a few tidbits about his state back in Dallas. That would explain the disbelieving looks she’s been shooting his way, as well as the small emotional breakdown she had when she first saw him. Five sighs wearily. If ever he needed reasoning to not disclose such information with his siblings, this would make a prime example.

Allison is shocked. “I—I thought you guys knew! Weren’t you with him this whole time? I thought he at least told you guys!”

“The fuck he did!”

“Why do you think I said I thought he was dead?”

Diego splutters. “Why would you think he was dead!?”

“Because he told me at Sissy’s that if he tried to jump he might die, and then he goes and blinks twice in the mansion—"

“Jesus fucking Christ!”

Five’s eyes roll skyward, staring at the florescent white lights that beam down on him, easily tuning out the shrill chatter. Once he’s fully healed and can maintain a conversation without choking out blood, he’s going to give Diego a vicious dressing down about his sudden overprotective nature.

But, better they’re arguing and getting lively. Much more preferable than the reaction they had when Ben was mentioned. Better they don’t dwell on the insinuations of the newly revived dead brother now, when they’re already so emotionally compromised.  

Five can still feel the ghost of the tentacle wrapped around his neck. Can still remember the detachment on Ben’s face as he was seconds away from strangling Five to death. He can only imagine what watching all that take place must have done to his siblings. Definitely not the greatest thing to witness.

But that’s over now, and Five’s fine. He survived that encounter, as they all can clearly confirm for themselves. No need for this lingering worry. For Klaus’ touching and Vanya’s subtle force-feeding and Diego’s terrible bedside manner, and now Allison’s large, imploring eyes.   

Unless. Hm.

He wonders if their overprotectiveness must have originated in that moment, when Five was near death. Did they think they would lose Five, and now are fearful that it might happen again? Did nearly losing a brother make them realize how much they desperately didn’t want him to disappear? How much they needed him?

That’s . . .

Warmth flutters in his chest.

Five shakes his head.

Sentimental rubbish. He doesn’t know why he’s thinking about this now. They already had to deal with him presumably dying when he was a child. Shouldn’t make that much of an impact if it were to happen again. They’ve dealt with his loss and moved on. The second time won’t necessitate any mourning.

“—say anything, Five!” Diego snaps at him, amidst all the other collective arguments that are flying across the small table. Are they still fucking at it?

Klaus is saying, “Wait, wait, wouldn’t we know if he time traveled? I think I’d remember—” and Vanya’s voice swirls in as well, saying, “But he’s time traveled before and never—” and Allison is trying to get Diego to calm down, “—going to get us kicked out—"

But Diego’s the loudest, and he’s saying, “Does no one in this family know how to communicate!? God, Five, you can’t just do—"

BANG!

Five slams both hands on the table.

His siblings startle in their seats, shrill voices dying in their throats. They stare at him, wide eyed and tense, and Five glowers at each and every one of them.

“If you’re all finished,” he hisses between his teeth, curling his fists.

There’s a harsh reprimand at the tip of his tongue, a scathing remark that would tear them down and maybe even hurt them. It’s tempting to lash out. He’s so fucking infuriated, absolutely sick of their bumbling overreactions, that he wants to make the lesson so painfully clear that they’ll never repeat this ridiculous demonstration.

But within the silence of his own creation, he remembers their cries when Ben was squeezing the life out of him. Remembers them all standing up to their father when the man was picking Five apart with his words. Remembers how they all tried to protect him while he was trying to get his mind to work after that first jump.

Ah.

They’re not reacting like this because they know it humiliates him, or because they get a kick out of his vulnerability, or because of some strange superiority complex in the wake of his weakness.

They’re just fucking worried. Because they’re his family. He’s their brother.

Christ. He keeps fucking forgetting that he’s not alone, that people give a damn about him. That he’s a brother to these idiots, not a tool.

It’s so simple and yet he absolutely loathes how difficult this is to grasp for him. 

He uncurls his fists, sighs.

Then, softer, “…you’re giving me a headache.”

That was certainly not what they expected him to say. It’s certainly not what Five originally intended to say, either, but it’s not untrue. He rubs the side of his head where the throbbing is nearly physical. He can’t think clearly when the voices around him are drowning out his internal voice.

Admonished, his siblings dip their heads, each one murmuring a soft, “sorry.” He nods when they share the same reprimanded looks. That’s enough. They don’t deserve any pain, whether emotional or otherwise. Five is not Reginald.

He turns to his sister. “Allison. If you haven’t been loitering in the library, where have you been staying?”

She’s confused only for a moment before realizing he’s resurfacing an earlier conversation. She relaxes. “Oh. We’ve been staying at this hotel a few blocks away.”

Five frowns. “We?”

“Luther and I. Did I not mention that? Shit, sorry. Yeah, we left the mansion together right after—”

Diego is already standing up, his chair screeching as it’s shoved back. “Why didn’t you say that!?” Klaus and Vanya quickly scramble out of their seats, and Five pushes himself out of his, dizzy with abrupt relief.

“Sorry!” Allison squeaks, massively confused but clambering off her seat as well. “I thought I told you! He was the one that helped me get out. He’s in the hotel now. We’ve been rotating shifts; Every few hours one of us would camp out here, hoping one of you would come in. W-Wait up, jeez!”

They hurry out of the library in an ungraceful rush. Diego is saying, “And he’s fine? Luther didn’t get his ass beat by that other big guy, did he?” Five doesn’t miss how his gaze goes skyward the minute they step out and into the daylight, searching the sky for any signs of suspicious birds.

Allison, however, is looking towards the street. “He’s fine, just a nervous wreck. He’s been sulking ever since we left, but I can’t really blame him for that— TAXI!”

A yellow car comes to a screeching halt beside the sidewalk. The driver rolls down the window and gives them all an once-over. He shakes his head. “Nuh-uh. Car only takes four people at a time, hun. You’re gonna need a van if—”

“I heard a rumor that you let us all get in the car.”

“ . . . well, are you just gonna stand there or what?”

Klaus whistles. “Well, that was easier than when we had to do it.”

Five immediately takes the front seat, yanking away from Diego’s grip. His siblings all loudly complain, mainly because he’s now doomed the four of them to squeeze themselves in the back row that only fits three. Five doesn’t care; he’s already pulling the seatbelt over his chest, settling in the seat with a tired sigh.

The car jostles a bit once all his siblings are situated. The driver doesn’t seem to care about how squashed his customers are. He does give Five an odd look, though, and Five smiles politely.

“Drive,” he tells him, and the man shrugs and pulls the car out of the curb and onto the street.

In comparison to their previous voyage, this drive is both shorter and lacking of any incident. Five slouches in his seat, appreciating the stream of cold air that splashes onto his face from the open window. His brothers and sisters are grumbling behind him, one of them asking the other to move their elbow away from their balls. Five is glad he’s not back there.

Allison eventually rumors the driver to take them to their destination without accepting payment, making a face when Klaus makes another comment about how ideal this experience is. The driver is all too eager to abide, and says traffic is good, they should be there in less than ten minutes.

Ten minutes is more than enough, so Five closes his eyes briefly, but then immediately afterward someone is jostling his shoulder. He opens his eyes and sees Diego in front of him.

“Come on, bro. We’re here.”

Disoriented, Five can only blink at his brother. He looks around. The car has stopped, and all his siblings are standing behind Diego, patiently waiting and pretending not to look in their direction. He looks at the driver, the man tapping a finger on the steering wheel, staring dead ahead.

Diego reaches over, unclips his seatbelt. “Come on,” he grunts, pulling Five by the elbow.

Five stumbles out of the car. He looks at the destination they’ve arrived at. Morning Brew Hotel. Huh. The name is familiar, and the absurd green font over the blue signage even more so. A chain hotel. He’s pretty certain he’s stayed in one of their other locations while on assignment. He doesn’t recall ever there being one in this neighborhood, although it would make sense; the Sparrow Academy, seeing as they haven’t disbanded in comparison to the Umbrella Academy, have probably made this area a tourist attraction with their continuous presence.

“Everything alright?” Allison asks carefully, but Five waves her words away and trudges towards the door. Behind him, Diego sighs exasperatedly.

Something is revving inside Five, the feeling starting the moment Allison had said Luther’s name. It sounded too good to be true, that the last brother he’s searching for is safe and sound. He won’t accuse Allison of lying; she has absolutely no reason to. But Five refuses to get his hopes any higher without confirming it himself. Optimism always had devastating consequences.

The young girl at the front desk doesn’t look up from her magazine when they push the door open. They follow Allison to the elevator, squirming beside one another as they’re lifted to the second floor. His heart is pounding incredibly loud in the awkward silence.

A ding, and the doors slide open. The hallway is grotesque in design; the rug is a lime green contraption with squiggly lines that somehow passed off as a pattern. The walls are a deep blue color, with cheap light fixtures protruding beside each room’s pale white door.

“We got the biggest room,” Allison is telling them, strutting down the hall and fiddling in her pockets in search of the keys. “Which is not saying much, considering how run down this place is. But, I made sure it was big enough to fit all of us. I figured we’d all need a place to hunker down for . . . a few days? There’s enough room for all of us.”

“The presidential suite?” Klaus asks hopefully, wagging his eyebrows.

Allison merely scowls at him. She stops in front of a door and says…

Well, he doesn’t really know what she’s saying.

Her mouth is moving, but no sound escapes it. He considers that peculiar, just for a moment, before he feels the familiar sensation of frost clinging to his lungs.

He stills.

Shit, no, not now—

He must have made a sound. Diego and Klaus both turn sharply in his direction. “Five?” One of them asks from a million miles away. The hallway begins to melt, the blue walls dripping into the green carpets. The black silhouettes representing his siblings begins to stretch out and curve.

Fuck. No.

The frost begins to spread over to his heart and stomach, clutching at the organs with merciless cold hands. His breath gets caught inside him, strangling him. He definitely makes a sound there.

Feet pound on the horrid rug, and suddenly his brothers and sisters crowd him, looking down at him with those unbearably worried eyes. Looking down? Oh. He seems to have collapsed against the wall, knees buckled over that blinding green rug. There’s a splash of red on the green, too. There’s a lot of red on his hand when he pulls it away from his mouth.

“Jesus, Five!”

The cold that rages a storm inside him is relentless, and he shudders and gasps as another torrent wreaks havoc onto his body. Even the blood that pulses through his teeth is chilled.

“Give him some space!”

The pain is white hot, blinding, and horribly familiar. Sight and hearing have long abandoned him. His senses are overloaded with internal and external pressures. He feels dozens of hands on him, pressing warmth onto his shoulders, his back, his head. Even through all this turmoil, he knows the owner of each one of those hands from touch alone.

Then there’s a larger hand on his back and under his legs, and Five feels the world descend below him. He feels the sensation of movement but knows he’s not the one doing it. He tries to say something, but blood has long replaced his voice.

Then all movement stops, and Five is sitting up on something soft, with a large hand on his back to keep him upright. Five peels his eyes open, wondering when he’d even shut them. Indistinguishable colors and shapes overlay his sight, but behind all that nonsense he’s able to make out the face of his brother.

“Lu—th . . . er.” His brother’s name is a wet gurgle before he chokes on it, turning his head as he hacks out the glass that is certainly tearing through his lungs.

“Yeah, bud, it’s me. Here—”

A wastebasket is placed under his chin. Five grabs it, then hunches over it when another wave of turbulence rattles his chest. He’s coughing and gagging like he’d drowned in an ocean of blood and was resuscitated by Death itself. The pain strums his ribs like they were nothing but cords on a flimsy guitar. Luther’s massive hand rubs circles on his back. He feels like that’s the only thing keeping him tethered.

An eternity of agony passes, and then another, and the inside of the wastebasket is now a macabre sight of blood and bile. The hand on his back is gone, and his brother sits back.

Five wheezes, well aware of how ragged he sounds and making no attempt to mask it. Cold sweat tickles his forehead, his skin feeling grossly clammy. He’s shivering from some unnatural chill that is unrelated to the cooling mechanism of the room. He’s getting pretty sick of how accustomed he is to this shit.

A cold, wet towel dabs his forehead. Five’s eyes trail to the side. Vanya gives him a small, strained smile before handing him the towel and the dignity. He wipes the blood from his mouth and chin roughly, and Vanya doesn’t comment.

“Are you…” Luther is sitting across from him on the other bed. His arms are outstretched, just slightly, as if preparing to catch Five should he pitch forward. His brother’s bloody lip has scabbed over, and there a few bruises scattered throughout his face, but otherwise, he looks relatively unharmed. “Are you alright?”

Five nods tiredly. “Peachy.”

He tosses the bloody towel into the wastebasket, ignoring Vanya’s huff of disapproval. He pushes away the strands of hair that have plastered themselves on his forehead. He imagines he’s quite a sight for Luther to behold.

Luther’s a sight himself. He doesn’t recall who said it earlier, but nonetheless they were correct when they commented that Luther was a nervous wreck. The man, for all his massive height and size, manages to sit on the bed and make it look too big for him. His knees are pressed against one another, shoulders slumped, chin wobbling, like a child waiting to be reprimanded.

Five notes how interesting it is, the contrast of which Allison and Luther deal with their anxiety. Allison is a ball of franticness, razor thin patience and seemingly about to be set off from one more minor inconvenience. Luther, however, folds into himself, quiet and nervous, secretly hoping that things will resolve on their own without any more inconveniences.

A part of Five wants to relieve Luther of some of that anxiety. Clearly, watching Five hack out his lungs has made Luther’s list of grievances increase. Yet, he has no idea how to go about doing that.

He wanted to do that with Allison, as well, and all his other siblings when their expressions turned concerned, as Luther’s does now. He assumed that assuring his siblings that he was fine would suffice, but hearing him say that only seemed to piss them off.

God, he doesn’t understand his family at all.

Vanya speaks up well after Five realizes he has no idea what to say. “How are you doing?”

“Me?” Luther looks like he’s never been asked that question before in his life. His shoulders slump even further. “I’m—I’m fine. Good. Um, as good as I can be, I guess. Maybe not good, exactly. But I’m not puking out blood, if that’s the standard.”

A small laugh from Vanya. She takes the wastebasket from Five’s loose hands. “Yeah, fair. It’s been a bit crazy on our end. I’m glad you’re alright, though.”

“You are?”

“Of course.”

”Oh.”

”I was worried.”

“Oh.” Luther says again. He picks up his head, that small drop of bliss uncurling him. “I’m,” he clears his throat. “I’m glad you’re alright, too. That you’re all alright. It’s a—a huge relief, to see that it all worked out.”

Vanya smiles, and Luther smiles as well.

Five blinks. Huh. Is it really that straightforward? Words of reassurance and general…heart to hearts are not his strong suits, he thinks. He can’t remember if he was ever a consoling brother when he was a child. He doesn’t think so. Maybe his siblings’ behavior is just objectively strange, and it’s not him.

Regardless, he doesn’t dwell on it. Luther and Vanya’s voices are like streams of wind over his head. Five turns around, taking in the room he finds himself in instead of trying to unlock the mystery of his family’s interactions.  

Allison was not exaggerating earlier; the room was large enough only to accommodate their disheveled faction. There are two beds sat parallel in the center of the room, with a nightstand separating the two. Across on the opposite wall is a chest of drawers with a thick television box on top. Then in the corner, a flimsy desk, a flimsier chair, and lastly a large armchair that likely was advertised as the third bed. Truly underwhelming, but better than the room Five was stuffed into when he patroned this hotel god knows how long ago.

Five’s eyes search for the rest of his siblings, realizing alarmingly late that he hasn’t registered their presences. Diego is lunging from one side of the room to the other, quickly drawing the curtains closed and inspecting the small bathroom and even smaller closet.

Allison stands by the foot of his bed, arms crossed tightly over her chest as she looks at him with a seemingly permanent frown.

Klaus is sitting on his other side, and Five was nearly unaware of his presence until his brother’s lanky elbow bumped against his middle when he pulled open the drawer to inspect its contents.

Right. Of course. Where else would they be? Five scrubs his face. He feels like he’s been doing that a lot, recently. As if he were trying to scrub away the exhaustion. It doesn’t work. It never does. He’s so fucking tired. When he pulls his hands away, his vision is a blurry mess, and he seems to only feel worse.

He sighs, resigned to this discomfort. So be it. It’s worth it, in the end, seeing his family alive and well. The discomfort is dwarfed by that fact alone.

The low conversation beside him is interrupted by Klaus’ excited gasp. “Room service?” He waves the laminated menu in the space between Luther and Vanya. “There’s room service in this place? Holy crap, and they have waffles? Oh, wait, that’s only in the mornings. Ah, but they have chicken fingers!”

Luther blinks. “Huh. Didn’t even know they put things in that drawer, other than a Bible.”

“We should order something,” Klaus says suddenly.

“Klaus,” Vanya reprimands.

“What? We’re all starving, aren’t we? Plus, I’m pretty sure some food will do this little bugger some good.” Five knows that’s a reference to him but refuses to acknowledge it. Klaus twists around, pouting imploringly. “Can we order something to the room? Please, Allison? Please?”

“Fine, whatever,” Allison says tightly. The muscle in her jaw jumps. “Are we not going to talk about what just happened? Five just coughed up blood, in case you all missed it.”

“Yeah, he does that now.” Diego says, moving past Allison to crouch in between the two beds, inspecting underneath them.

She throws her hands up. “This isn’t funny, Diego.”

“Do you see me laughing?”

“Here,” Vanya murmurs, reaching behind Five to arrange the pillows over one another. “You should lay down.” She gestures to Luther to hand her a few pillows from his bed. The headboard beside him is covered in pillows. Christ.

“Hello? Yes, how are you, sunshine? I’d like to place a few orders for room service? Room number? Umm…” Klaus snaps his fingers at Luther and waves his hand franticly. Allison’s exasperated voice says, “No, but I don’t see you taking it seriously, either.”

“Move over, Klaus,” Vanya says, the same time Luther says, “2B” while he shifts over to give Klaus some room to sit on. Diego is muttering, “Ah, that’s ‘cause you missed it, sis. I put on a whole show of taking it seriously. Ask Klaus. Took it seriously, and then some.”

“2B,” Klaus says, wriggling in between Luther’s massive body and the pillow-less headboard of the opposite bed. “Yup, this is all going on the room’s tab. Yup. Yup, yup, yup.” And Allison is annoyed now, but trying desperately to reign it in, “Can you just- just give me an actual answer here? Shouldn’t we do something?”

“Five.” Five looks at Vanya, and then at the makeshift bed she’s made for him. He gives her a withering look. She doesn’t whittle. “You’re tired, Five. You really need to rest.” And Diego says, “There, that’s your answer. Thanks, Van.”

Five scowls, feeling incredibly dizzy. “I’m not a hospice patient.”

“Could have fooled me.” Vanya mutters. Great, now she’s getting cheeky like the rest of them.

“Is he injured?” Luther asks loudly over Klaus’ chattering. “Or was it from the jumps?”

Diego’s head shoots up from where it was scanning under the bed. “Are you kidding? Even Luther knows about that!?”

Luther frowns, offended. Allison comes to his defense quickly. “I told him about it.”

Klaus is saying, “…yes, six orders. Extra knives, too, please.”

“Was it supposed to be a secret?” Luther asks, lost.

Diego is on his stomach, head underneath Five’s bed. His voice echoes from below him. “No, it was just never meant to be communicated, apparently. Would have been helpful,” he says loudly, pointedly, “if we at least had an idea of what was wrong with him, but no. Five deemed us too unworthy of such information. Instead, he sat there and watched us guess like idiots.”

“That’s not fair,” Vanya says. “He just didn’t want us to worry.”

“And why the hell can’t we?” Diego asks.

Vanya’s mouth clicks closed. She doesn’t have an answer.

Then Luther’s shoulders slouch, and he says, “Oh, hell. So it was because of the jumps? Shit, Five, I didn’t know. I—I wouldn’t have asked you to jump if I knew you would turn out like… this. I’m really sorry.”

Five frowns, perplexed, wondering when Luther had ever told him to do anything, and when Five ever gave him the luxury of obeying. Then, just as quickly, he recalls that disastrous introduction at the mansion and Five feels himself visibly age.

“No,” Five murmurs. His voice threatens to slur, so he speaks slowly, “You…” He licks his lips, searching for whatever it was that Vanya managed to procure earlier. How did she do it? It seemed relatively straightforward. “Don’t apologize. You…”

It occurs to Five, at that very moment while he trails off and practically has Luther leaning on the edge of the mattress in anticipation of something, that up until he reunited with his adult siblings, he’d never wanted to reverse someone’s disposition. He never cared about a person enough to be affected by their misery.

He knows why. He recalls it being vocally itemized during his psychological examination debrief once the Commission enlisted him, listed out among a myriad of other conditions; they told him he was apathetic. The doctor didn’t think it would be detrimental to his work, and The Handler certainly agreed, and so Five never really put much thought behind it. He’s not ignorant of his apathy.

He didn’t much care for other people’s feelings, it was really that simple. Decades of solitude helped nail in that emotional detachment. There was nobody around besides Dolores, but she was thick-skinned enough to never protest his apathy. Without a soul around to remind him of empathy, his apathy only festered, and festered, and festered.

Then there was the Commission, and there, Five relearned that his words and tone had emotional consequences to those that heard it. People got offended, or upset, or excited, or scared, and so on and so forth. But Five never really cared. Tears, curses, gasps, they didn’t stir anything within him.

There was a part of him that had hoped, that once returned to civilization, he would stop being this cockroach of a person and start regaining some fucking humanity.

But it never came.

The Commission handed him a gun and told him if people got offended, or upset, or excited, or scared, or so on and so forth, he could just shoot them and move on. Jump to the next mission, next timeline. Put it all behind him. The little boy crying over his dead mother or the man waking up to find a bullet between his lover’s eyes are nothing to him. He’s already moved past that. He never felt compelled to apologize, or reprise his words into something gentler, or stay in the room while one of his victims died a slow and agonizing death.

Festering, festering, festering—

But… with his siblings…

It’s different.

He looks at his brother’s face now, and Luther’s devasted expression makes him look so goddamn young, and it hurts to see it. A physical pain in his chest that aches harder than any bullet wound.

Five is intimately familiar with the guilt that’s crushing Luther. He recalls, as children, that Luther had always given out orders to the rest of them with ease and confidence. This was prominently due to the fact that he was just regurgitating whatever their father had told him beforehand. Mission briefings always consisted of Reginald providing the correct strategy for success in some sort of riddle, and Number One was the only one who’d manage to crack it every single time. Number One was their leader, and they followed him as such, commands and all, trusting him for a successful outcome.

But this time around, there weren’t any briefs or riddles. It was all instincts for Luther. The order for them to scatter probably erupted from him without much mental deliberation. Luther gave an order, and bore the responsibility of watching his siblings trust his instincts and obey. The man was probably besides himself with worry once the adrenalin wore off and he gave himself time to mull over his decision. To doubt himself. To berate himself.

And now Five shows up, coughing blood and God knows what else, because he followed through on Luther’s orders and jumped out of a building when he shouldn’t be jumping at all. And suddenly, Five finds himself wanting nothing more than to take those painful emotions away from Luther.

Christ. He could really use a stiff drink.

There’s an incredibly awkward silence looming over him. His entire family is waiting for him to continue. Luther’s receding into himself again.

Five swallows thickly. “You…” he concentrates on the floor, visualizing his words, “…did good, Luther. You made… the right choice, chose the right tactic. I’m…” he trails off, wincing, not really sure how to articulate that he had already fucked himself over with the first jump, so it’s impossible for anyone but Five to carry the blame for coming out like this.

He decides not to articulate that, and concludes his… whatever this is, with a deep sigh. “…you did good.”

He hazards a look at his brother, a part of him already preparing for Luther to scoff at the presumably false words. Five will not fault him for that. Who is Five, but a man stripped of all humanity pretending to belong in a world that has outgrown him? A cockroach playing the role of a human being is ridiculously laughable, after all.

But instead, there’s softness in Luther’s eyes, like Five’s words managed to smooth out some of the creases of stress. Luther’s shoulders have sagged, relief cutting the strings of tension holding them up. Abashed, Luther says, “Thanks, Five.”

Oh, Five thinks. That’s… nice. Warmth flickers in his chest. That’s nice.

Movement underneath his feet continues after a beat, Diego recalling why he was down there in the first place. He turns over and starts feeling under Luther’s bed. Strained, he grits out, “Yeah, okay, that’s all cool and all but maybe next time, give us a hint on the rendezvous point so we aren’t running around like chi— hey, what’s this?”

Five’s eyes were flickering when he hears Diego’s hand bump into something heavy and sturdy. He bats away sleep’s greedy arms and sits up, intrigued, but at the same time abruptly fully aware of what his brother had found. Diego pulls his arm back from under the bed, the Commission’s briefcase in his grasp.

Five tenses. Diego’s eyes are wide, and Vanya takes a quick breath. Even Klaus’ prattling trails off at the familiar object.

Diego looks at Luther, eyebrows raised. Luther scratches his neck. “Yeah… we grabbed it on our way out. Figured it might be useful, or at the very least, better with us than with Da—with the Sparrow Academy. I… we didn’t touch it, or anything. I mean, we touched it when we grabbed it, but we didn’t mess around with it. Or open it.”

Five nudges his brother with the tip of his foot. “Diego,” he grunts, and his brother complies, handing him the briefcase. Five’s mouth had gone dry at the sight of it. He loathes to admit, but the presence of this briefcase completely slipped his mind. Many things have slipped his mind, recently, but this is the most shameful thing to forget.

He inspects the briefcase quickly, turning it over to ensure it isn’t outwardly damaged. Good. Everything seems to be in order. He lays it on his lap, settling his hands over it. It feels unbelievably heavy, an anchor pushing him further down into quicksand. Good, good.

“Is it,” Allison clears her throat. “Does it work? Can we use to fix everything? To go back?”

Five hums, then shrugs. “Looks fine to me. Dunno if it…” he suppresses a cough, swallows roughly. He shakes his head, searching for his train of thought. He runs his hand over the padlock that reads 02042019.

02042019. The end of the world. The second day of the apocalypse. Yesterday. And the day before that… the beginning of the end. An end that stretched on forever and ever. Endings are continuous. Beginnings can end, but the end is always final and constant.

That’s dimensions away now. Far away. But sometimes he blinks, and it’s right next to him. Memories are curiously strange. The apocalypse doesn’t even exist in this world anymore, not a soul besides those in this room are even aware of it, and yet it lives in Five. Only Five. His siblings know of it, but they never had to live it. 02042019 is just a day to them, a series of numbers. Five saved them from having it as a haunting memory that lives forever inside them. He’s th—

Saved.

Five’s throat tightens.

“Five?” Vanya says, shrugging a shoulder against his.

Five blinks, looks at her. “Hm?”

She looks at Allison. Five follows her gaze. Allison’s brow is knitted, waiting but slightly perplexed. Oh. Right. He shakes his head. What had they been talking about? He looks down at the briefcase in his lap. Right.

“I don’t know,” he says again, forcing articulation into his voice, “if it’s got any juice left for another trip.”

“And if it doesn’t?” There’s an edge to Allison’s voice now. The others notice it as well. They probably think its impatience, but Five doesn’t. He knows what desperation sounds like. “Is there still a way to fix everything, Five? What’s the other option?”

Five opens his mouth. Diego is quicker. “Hey. Don’t put the pressure on just him.”

“Do you have time travel abilities, Diego?” She snaps back, surprisingly harsh. “No? Exactly, so I think I will ask the time traveling man about time travel.”

Diego glares. “I’m saying let’s not depend on just Five to fix everything for us. That’s what got him looking like that in the first place.”

“Then who else is going to fix it? You?”

“All of us. We can figure it out together.”

Allison looks ready to object, but she catches a glimpse of the others. Vanya’s expression sympathizes with Diego. Luther’s mouth is partially open, hand raised, as if silently trying to placate Allison. Even Klaus, who’s half listening and half babbling on the telephone, cringes at the burst of confrontation.

Frustration builds further, but Allison purses her lips and looks away silently, pushing a strand of hair out of her face. The loose ponytail she’d probably pulled her hair into hours ago is losing its tautness. She looks uncharacteristically disheveled.

Five doesn’t know what his expression is. He watches his siblings like he was observing them through a two-way mirror. He’s awestruck, dizzy from keeping up with the interactions. He doesn’t understand. This is his family but sometimes he feels at a loss with them.

There’s a strange, tense silence following after, and for some odd reason Five feels as if he may have caused it.

Then Klaus hangs up the phone with a click.

“Alright! Food’s on its way! Woohoo!” Nervous giddiness dances with his words, trying to shift the suffocating atmosphere. “Thanks for that, Allie. I haven’t eaten since last night. Wish I had run into you instead of Diego, he only let me have a third of a doughnut. Isn’t that wild—”

Allison whirls around, eyes flashing— “Do you think I had it easy!?” She explodes.

Klaus starts, and all heads snap in Allison’s direction, but she’s not finished. “Do you think I was just lazing around, living the high life because of my powers? You think this hasn’t been hard for me?”

Klaus gapes. “Wha—no, I didn’t. I… I didn’t—”

“I lost my husband,” she seethes, taking a step forward. Her eyes are shining, and when she blinks, the tears expose themselves. “Do you understand? He’s gone, probably dead. And now—I lost my house, my father, I lost everything. People were trying to kill me! You all disappeared, gone! And Luther and I were alone! You think we were ordering cocktails and lounging by the pool? I didn’t know where any of you were! I thought you guys died, I thought Five died, I thought—I th-thought I’d lost you all, again, and th-then– and then—and-and—”

She covers her face with her hands, her shoulders heaving. Sobs choke out, and she’s gasping in between them as she tries to reign in her tears. Luther gets up quickly and steers her to the bed, throwing an arm over her shoulders as the rest of her cries bubble out.

The others are shellshocked. Five is rigid with horrible anticipation. No, he thinks, knowing exactly what’s going on now, and god, why is that he only understands this of his siblings. Their weaknesses and vulnerabilities. He thinks he should know more but he doesn’t understand what he should know.

Diego stands up, face contorting. He’s caught between sympathizing with his sister and being offended on Klaus’ behalf. His voice does a funny, strangled thing when he tries to land in the middle. “What the hell, Allison. No one said or even thought any of that! You can’t just yell at Kl—”

“Diego.” Luther says quietly. “Claire’s gone.”

The air is stolen from the room, and just like that, they all go rigid. Easily, the heartbreak spreads over them, like a drop of ink in a glass of water. Slowly but vividly coloring their expressions with black horror.

Diego sits back down, very slowly. “…What?”

Luther purses his lips, looks away. Allison’s sobs become strangled.

Vanya whispers, “What do you mean…gone?”

Five already knows the answer. He doesn’t feel the heartbreak his siblings feel. Not immediately. No, for him, the guilt becomes a serpent and constricts around his soul, squeezing mercilessly before swallowing it whole. He waits, full of resigned dread.

“I called Patrick’s.” Allison pulls her hands away, her eyes burning red, her face absolutely devastated. She sniffs, wipes her cheeks. “The call didn’t even go through. The phone number didn’t exist.” Her chin wobbles. “Then I—I called his parent’s house, and—" she sniffs loudly, looking anywhere to avoid their eyes. “They didn’t know who I was. Said their son didn’t…” Her voice breaks, her anguish mercilessly shattering it to pieces. “…didn’t have any children.”

Her face crumbles again, but this time she doesn’t cover it. They watch, morbid curiosity, as grief wreaks havoc onto their sister. Diego says, “Fuck,” and the others seem to feel the same way.

Klaus gets up without prompt. He sits next to Allison, and pulls her into a hug. “I’m sorry, Allison.” He tells her softly, into her hair. He squeezes. “I’m sorry.” And Five wonders why he would say that, when he didn’t do anything to cause Claire’s erasure. He wonders if this is another one of those things he doesn’t understand.

Allison buries her head into his shoulder, pressing herself into him. Five can see her head shaking, mumbling brokenly, “Sorry for yelling, sorry. I’m sorry.” Klaus hugs her tighter, murmuring something Five cannot hear.

“We’ll fix it, Allison.” Vanya says firmly, her voice thick with emotion. “We will.” And Five wonders why Vanya would say that when the responsibility of fixing it doesn’t fall on any of them.

“How?” Allison moans.

He doesn’t understand, but he thought he would by now.

He thought he knew what he was coming back to when he time traveled, but that understanding has escaped him. He’s terrified of asking himself if it’s human interaction he’s having trouble grasping, after all those decades of being starved from it, or if he simply doesn’t understand his family anymore. That they aren’t the family he always dreamed of returning to, but children who have grown into strangers.

There’s a knock on the door.

Everybody tenses.

“Room service.”

Five blinks, dazed. As one, a huge exhale of relief is blown into the room. The tension bleeds away, and his brothers and sisters slump.

Luther clears his throat. “Just—” He says loudly, then clears his throat again, “Just leave it by the door!” He adds, after a beat, “Please! Um, thanks!”

They hear an annoyed sigh, then, “…okay.” Something heavy is set on the floor with a soft clatter, silverware bumping against silverware. Muffled footsteps recede. A few seconds pass before Luther decides to get up and head towards the door.

There’s something about the ridiculous plate full of fried chicken strips that seems to have sobered them up.

Allison laughs, a wet bubble of incredulousness. “Does anyone else feel like they’re losing their mind?” She’s shaking her head when Luther picks up the tray, looking at it like it was the oddest thing in the world. “Because I do.”

“I envy you, sis,” Klaus mumbles, leaning his head on her shoulder. “My mind’s been long gone, now. Haven’t found that little bitch in years.”

“They threw me in an insane asylum,” Diego mutters, perking up at the sight of the food in Luther’s hands. “Clinically, I lost my mind last month. Wonder if that’s still in my medical records.”

“The government fried my brain,” Vanya pushes her hair back, pauses. “I think they fried some of my hair, too. Damn.”

“It’s just chicken,” Luther frowns, carrying the tray over. There are six plates filled with breaded chicken strips on a wide tray, the steam rising in the air. The smell overtakes the small hotel room. “Just… just chicken. Where’re the vegetables? Or- or the rice, potatoes? Not even a salad? Klaus?”

“What? It’s protein!” He takes the plate offered to him and inhales. “Luther, buddy, how can you complain? It’s chicken fingers. God, they’re heavenly. Heaven on this hell earth, timeline, whatever. Pure heaven.”

“Get a room,” Allison says, taking her plate. She frowns at the offered utensils. “I don’t eat chicken fingers with a fork and knife.”

“I don’t either.” Luther mumbles. He holds up six butter knifes to Klaus. “Why’d you get these? You eat chicken fingers with knives?”

“Oh, those’re for Diego. Not gonna lie, I was kind of expecting steak knives, or something more… weaponized.”

Diego grins. “Nah, these’ll do. Thanks, man.” He runs a finger over the sharp edge. “Yeah, these’ll definitely do for now.”

Klaus grins, "Happy to help. Did the room pass your security pat down, by the way?"

Diego misses the joke. "Yeah, we're all clear. Room's clean."

"We've been here for two days," Luther tells him. "We could have just told you that."

Allison inspects the chicken with flared nostrils. “These got here quick. It was probably frozen, and they just popped it in the microwave. So, probably not that heavenly.”

Klaus shrugs, taking a large bite. “Chicken is chicken.”

“I don’t care if it’s molded cheese,” Diego grumbles, taking a plate of his own, pocketing his half a dozen of knives. He shoves a piece into his mouth. “I haven’t eaten anything legit since Sissy’s sandwich. And that was technically, what, seventy years ago? I’m fucking starving.”

“Oh, yeah.” Vanya murmurs. She leans forward to grab two plates of food. When she sits back down on the bed, the mattress shifts slightly, jostling Five. Almost like she was talking to herself, she says vaguely, “Me, too.”

She sets a plate in Five’s lax hands, moving the briefcase from his lap. He blinks, staring at the food. “I’m not…” he starts to say. He doesn’t continue, blinking tiredly. He’s really tired. He forgot why he was so tired. He lifts his heavy and looks at his sister again—

Oh…

This must be…

This is probably another one of those…images, again. Hallucinations. Mind playing tricks on him.    

Vanya is sitting beside him, but it’s not… her.

Little, thirteen-year-old Number Seven is sitting next to him on the bed, sad eyes and a sad smile. Her hair is long and thick, bangs like walls sitting atop her eyebrows. Her face is soft, slack, and filled with permanent trepidation. She sits, listening attentively, just happy to be in the room and included with the others.

The others…? Oh….

He blinks like he’s in some kind of dream. There they are. There they all are.

There’s lanky and giddy little Number Four, sitting on the floor with his legs crossed and his arms behind him. He’s talking with that goofy smile on his face, probably recounting some stupid joke a ghost from the stone age had told him, presumably.

Next to him is Number Two, eyes wide and shining, and had he always been that short as a child? Yes, Five thinks, that’s how he remembers him. His face is without crease nor crevice, his childhood adventures not yet leaving permanent scars on his innocent face.

And there’s Three, too, hair pulled back without a strand out of place. She’s sitting on the desk chair, legs crossed, arms waving while she talks and grabs the attention of the entire room. Her chin is raised, mouth curved upward, oh she always loved the attention. Always loved when her brothers couldn’t help but focus on her. Confident little Number Three.

Oh, and Number One’s here, too. That’s rare. He doesn’t usually join in on these little get togethers after they’ve all been put to bed. But here he is, leaning against the wall, arms crossed, but a delighted twinkle in his eyes, hidden happiness at the fact that he can set aside the leader burden and be around his brothers and sisters as equals.

His brothers and sisters.

They’re all here.

This is how he remembers them all.

…This is what he’s been trying to get back to, isn’t it? The family he so clearly remembers, the ones that have lived inside his mind all those decades in the apocalypse.

This is what he understands.

He leans back in his seat, his back meeting a comfortable arrangement of pillows. Right, he’s sitting... on a bed. He looks around and remembers, of course... he’s in his bedroom this time. His bedroom, just as he remembers.

It’s customarily a random rotation, the bedroom of choice for these gatherings. They’d occur after one of their more exhausting missions or trainings. Once goodnights have been handed around, they’d slink into their respective bedrooms. Usually a pair of them would be chatting in a room, and another would pass by and join in, then the others would trickle in one by one and they’d sit together for hours before someone would fall asleep in their seat.  

This time it’s Five’s bedroom. It was probably Three that came by his room first, probably trying to gouge how tired or unscathed he is so she can measure herself against it. She’s always poorly subtle about it, mentioning casually how she saw him trip after blinking across the room, or how no, she didn’t stutter when she rumored that guy, she meant to do it like that.

Number Four probably heard them through the walls and popped in, asking them what they were talking about, why they were talking in secret, oh, oh, Five and Three are fighting again so they definitely like each other. Then they’d both shout, embarrassed, and One would just happen to pass by, and what are you guys talking about? Oh, yeah, the mission was pretty crazy this time, but it went well this time, don’t you think? But no one would give him an honest answer because they were suspicious he’d turn around and tell Dad.

Then Two’s annoyed voice would enter the room before he does, and jeez One, no one wants to talk about the mission. What are you going to ask next, if we did our homework? And One would turn red and vehemently defend himself, that he was only asking because they were talking about it from the start, and Two would scoff, wave, and say, hey, did you guys see that one guy’s beard? It was up to his knees. And yeah, Three saw it, she was so distracted by it that she almost fumbled her rumor.

Seven was always the last to come by, though there were times where she wouldn’t show up at all. She always tired easily and fell asleep the earliest. Three would always grouch and wonder how she could be tired all the time when she didn’t do anything. But this time it seems she’s quietly made her way in, sitting on Five’s bed and making herself invisible.

She does seem tired, but clearly the happiness of being included outweighs her sleepiness. Five’s pretty tired, too. He doesn’t want to be the one to fall asleep in his seat, though. Two and Four would probably draw on his face again. They always use those stupid, smelly markers when they do it, and those are a pain to wash out.

He’ll... stay awake. He likes it when they choose to congregate in his bedroom. He always makes sure to leave out his special math homework on his desk for them to happen to glance at, so they could see just how much smarter he is than them. Dad said his special math homework was complicated and something grown-ups can’t even complete. Five’s completed it a few days ago, and even though he wants to rub it in all his siblings’ faces, he’s subtle about it. Unlike Three.

The bedroom is cramped with the entirety of his family in it, but then he realizes that Six isn’t here. He feels bad for not noticing, but his absence is not uncommon. More often than not, if the mission is a particularly challenging one, Six would become quiet afterwards and seek out solitude in his own bedroom. Challenging missions would require releasing the Horror, after all, and that always upsets him. It’s okay, he’ll be in a better mood in the morning and they can catch him up then.

This mission was a challenging one, wasn’t it? Yes… Five remembers, settling back in his seat. Maybe that’s why he’s tired. Did he overdo it again with his jumps? He hopes not. Three would be teasing him endlessly, and Four would laugh when his embarrassment colored him a vibrant red, and God, Four’s laughs were annoying.

Yes… it must have been a hard mission. Five feels goddamn awful. They all look pretty rundown, actually. They look sad, too. Sad and tired. Was the mission not successful? Did he mess up? None of his brothers and sisters look as awful as he feels. Oh no. He did mess up, didn’t he? He did.

Five sinks deeper into the pillows, making himself small. Is that why he’s lying on the bed and the others are sitting? He must have messed up so badly that he injured himself. Shit. That’s the worst outcome. He’s going to have to spend all day tomorrow with Pogo getting patched up while his siblings all advance. He doesn’t want to be stuck in a room by himself, he wants to be with them.

Five huffs, resigned. Oh, well. It won’t be that bad. Seven always visits him when he’s alone, anyway. She likes to be around him when the others aren’t. Five doesn’t tease her as much as they do. Sometimes he does, but only because she’s so quiet and so slow that it gets on his nerves, but not always. Not always. She’s quiet, and more importantly, she listens. Where his brothers and sister tell him to shut up when he starts talking about something they don’t care about, she gives him a small smile and listens. He likes that.

Seven is quiet now. The others are talking, filling his bedroom with tired conversation. Seven is listening. Even though her eyes are pretty dull and unfocused, it’s evident that she’s immensely content as a spectator.

But she also looks… sad. Five frowns, wondering why. Then, his frown deepens when her dull eyes start to glisten. Oh.

She’s crying. Why is she crying?

Was Two teasing her again? Five wasn’t paying attention to the conversation. He doesn’t like it when they pick on one another in his room. It usually escalates to pushes and shoves and suddenly all of Five’s things are broken.

The talking in the room quiets. They noticed Seven’s tears. Five watches like he’s in the audience of another’s dream.

“Vanya?” Four asks, and oh. Right. Mom gave them names. Five forgot they liked to be called by these new names now. “What’s wrong? Is it the chicken? Is it salmonella?”

Seven brings a hand up to her face, touching her wet cheek. “Oh,” she says. “I didn’t…” More tears start to spill, as if outside of her command. “Sorry, um.”

Two tenses, sitting up. Five cringes. Two was always the biggest jerk to Seven. He’ll probably tell her to stop crying like a baby and get out, that if she’s too weak to handle some teasing then no wonder Dad thinks she isn’t cut out to join in on their missions. “Hey, hey. Are you alright? Vanya? What happened?”

Seven was never one to fight back when others lashed out to her. She’ll probably leave now, mutter something close to an apology and shuffle out of the room to avoid a confrontation. “No, I’m good. I’m good. I’m, um, shit, sorry… it’s stupid and the drugs haven’t worn off and they’re just making me super emotional. Sorry, just- just ignore me.”

More tears track down her face, caught by the plate in her hand. Her mouth begins to tremble, her breathes coming in quick. An unpleasant thought must have passed her; her face crumbles and she covers her mouth after a weak groan, “Ah, sh-shit.”

“Vanya, come on,” Three coaxes. Five wonders if she’ll defend Seven from Two or join him in the mocking. Five can never anticipate which side she’ll fall into. It’s as if there are days where she pities Seven and days where she’s frustrated by her weak deposition. “It can’t be stupid if you’re this upset about it. What’s wrong? Is it… did we do something? You can tell us—”

“No!” Seven blurts, alarmed. She sniffs, shaking her head. “No, no, it’s not that. It’s… god. I wanted to,” she pauses to collect a large breath, then slumps in humiliation. “I—I wanted to cook us a dinner. A family dinner. It was more of a thought than an actual plan. Sissy taught me this neat recipe for jerk chicken, and I… wanted to cook it for us, when we got back. To our timeline. To celebrate. But now…”

She gives a halfhearted wave to the chicken in her plate. “Now we get this.” She groans, burying her head in her hands. “See, I told you it was stupid.”

“It’s not stupid,” One says quickly. They’re all picking on Seven now, and One will probably tell them to knock it off, then tell Seven it’ll be best if she leaves and goes to bed. That was always the easiest way to regain order. “It’s not. I love jerk chicken.”

Seven snorts, and Two scowls. “That’s not the dilemma here, dude.” Ah, of course, Two always has to go the opposite direction of One. He can’t help himself but contradict Number One.

“I—I know that,” One splutters. He collects himself. He’s the leader, after all. He can’t have his team mocking him. He needs to put his foot down, figuratively, and showcase some force, some fear, just like Dad. “I just meant… the idea. It’s a great idea. Not stupid at all. I know we all would have really liked that, Vanya. The food and the idea. It… yeah, a family dinner would have been really something. It’s been a while.”

“Well,” Seven takes in a shuddering sigh. “The idea is gone. Dead. Our house is overrun by Sparrows, so I doubt dad will let us use the dining room like I originally wanted. Plus, we don’t even have money to buy the ingredients, let alone a working kitchen to cook everything.”

Four speaks up, voice subdued. Five anticipates he’ll say something outrageous that will detract from the attention towards Seven. He always abruptly does that once the teasing becomes unbearably cruel. He’d make a fool of himself, or show them all something interesting in his pocket, or announce that there’s a ghost in the room. Anything to wash away the tension.

Four says, “We don’t have anything to celebrate, anyway.”

And a dull shadow casts over them, just like Five had anticipated. Tension replaced with misery, anything to shift the mood. Five knew Four would do that. Five knew they would all act as they did, like he was reading the script while watching the play. Because he understands this family.

His memories from his childhood are muddy waters, only the very best memories and the very worst sticking through his recollection, decades after everything in the middle have been washed away. He can remember with glistening clarity the nights his family have snuck out to Griddy’s and the celebrations the city threw them when they completed a mission. He can also remember the trainings where he’d end up spitting blood and wracked with a pain that felt otherworldly, and the debriefs where their father would barrage them with cruel and merciless words that would leave Five crying frustrated tears into his pillow.

But it’s the memories in between those that he’s had to push aside to make room for decades of adulthood. It’s those uneventful memories that were alive within him those first few decades in the apocalypse. It was memories of his siblings gathering together after hours to talk about nonsense that he missed the most, that he would latch onto and tell himself this is what he’s surviving for. This is the dream.

He must have forgotten all that, somewhere along the way. Those uneventful memories soon faded away, slimming down into something more singular: family. His dream narrowed down into a mission: go home. He’s forgotten. He’s lost the understanding.

But here it is, in front of him, and Five feels like he’s floating with exhilaration. His family, his dream, his goal. It’s changed, yes, but it never truly disappeared. His family has grown and his home has outgrown him, but it’s still something he yearns for. He wants to understand again.

“Not yet,” One says suddenly. Heads lift, looking to him. Stronger, Number One says, “No, not yet. But will be celebrating, eventually. Because we’re not—we’re not just going to roll over and accept… this.”

Three slumps. “But what can we do?”

“I don’t know,” One says loudly, but he doesn’t sound distraught about it. He shrugs, nonchalantly. “I don’t. Would be lying if I said I do. Truth is, we’re in unprecedented territory here. But, we do have an advantage. We’re together.”

Two rolls his eyes, “Come on, man, no one wants to hear this cheesy—”

“No, no, just- just hear me out. Before, with the first apocalypse in 2019, and then in Dallas, everything went to shit because we all tried to do things separately. Think about it—Diego got locked up because he tried to go after Hazel and Cha Cha alone, Allison got…um,” he makes a motion across his throat, very gingerly. Three raises her brows, unimpressed, but listening, “and then in Dallas, Klaus was left alone and started a cult, Vanya, well, you know… and then Five kept running off alone, and, um, you remember, the blood. Uh, and Ben! Ben’s… well, he…”

“You’re losing steam, dude,” Two snaps his fingers. “Wrap this up, let’s go.”

“The point is,” One stresses, pinching the bridge of his nose. “We keep messing up when we try to do things alone. This isn’t new information. But now, we all know what the problem is, and we’re all together. We really do kick ass when we’re together, and you all know that. We're better as a team.”

Nobody interjects with a quip or comment.

Number One’s voice hardens now, and that leveled tone that can captivate a drowning man comes alive. “We’re a little rusty, I know. It’s been a while since we were a team. A family. I don’t expect us to work as a collaborative team on the get go. We’ll need some work, and we’ll need everyone to put in the effort."

“Luther’s right,” Two mutters. Then, louder, like he was agreeing with the words as they tumbled out of his mouth. “We can’t make anything right if we’re not together. One team, one dream. That’s the focus.”

Seven sniffs, wiping her eyes. The flustered emotions from earlier have dissipated. Her eyes are hopeful. “So, what do we do first?”

“We talk to each other,” Two says.

Four brightens. “Oh, like a group therapy session? Fun. Can I be the therapist?”

Two throws a half-eaten chicken at him. “No, dude. Just straight up talking. Like, tell each other something’s not right. No more hiding shit, going off and trying to solve problems on your own, taking risks for our benefits. That kind of crap.”

Three snorts. “This feels like it’s directed at one person, rather than all of us.”

“If we weren’t constantly fucking up, that one person wouldn’t be doing all of that,” Two says, a bit harshly.

Three’s mouth closes with a click. Five realizes they’re looking at him now.

“Five,” Two says, suddenly sitting beside him. “You with us?”

Five blinks, says vaguely, “Yeah.” He looks down at his hands, and sees a plate of chicken instead. He frowns, mumbles, “…m’not hungry.”

Seven takes the plate away from his lap, and Five sees blood underneath his fingernails. Seven is saying quietly, “We should let him rest, Diego. He looks really awful.”

“He needs to hear this first. Listen, Five. Things are gonna be changing.” Two tells him sternly, “We’re a team now, alright? So we’re gonna be working together. Helping each other, you understand? You’re the one that keeps telling us that we need stay together, right? Well, we will. But you’ve got to meet us halfway, man.”

In Five’s mind, coherency fights with fantasy. He sees his siblings and their strikingly young features, but their voices are hardened with age and despondency. He blinks slowly and the images in front of him shutter.

One looks sad, and Luther’s voice says. “I don’t think he understands.”

Five stills, wondering how he knew. He shakes his head. “I don’t. But m’trying to.”

“We know, Five,” Seven tells him gently, and oh. She’s still the room. The others haven’t chased her away. They were supposed to because that’s what Five understands. That’s the family he understands. But that family doesn’t exist anymore and he doesn’t understand.  

He looks at Two, then Four, then Three. He looks at Seven and desperation tightens around his throat. “I’m trying. It’s… hard. I forgot,” his words are slurring and he knows he doesn’t making a lick of sense but he needs them to know this. “But I’ll—I’ll try. I will.”

Seven grimaces. “No, Five—it’s not… we just don’t want you to push yourself too hard.”

Five frowns, not comprehending. Are they talking about the mission? He doesn’t remember what happened there. He shakes his head. He messed up. He was the one that ruined everything for them. Failure. He remembers the failure. He messed everything up and now they’ll be the ones that have to fix it for him. No, no, he needs to fix it. He messed up so needs to fix it—

“Five. You don’t need to make things right on your own. We’ll fix it together.” One tells him. “Like we said. As a team. As a family.”

Damn it. Frustration bubbles. He doesn’t understand.

“That’s okay,” Two tells him. “Hell, we don’t get it either. Before you dropped from the sky, we weren’t a proper family for years. Hardly knew shit about each other. But we’ll figure it out now, okay? Things are changing but we’ll keep up.”

Things have already changed. They used to be so small. So happy, naïve, and wonderfully childish. He hasn’t seen them in so long he thought he’d never see them again.

“We’re not—we’re right here, Five. We’re not going anywhere.”

But the faces Five is looking at right now have long been eviscerated. He knows that behind these wide eyes and chubby cheeks that there are faces of adults who have known true suffering. Those children have died, just like how the child that they remember Five to be has died—

Two grabs his shoulders and gives him a rough shake. “Stop it, Five. No one’s dead!”

Five jolts at the motion, barely hearing his siblings cry out in objection. His vision dances like some flimsy kaleidoscope, and the feeling of the ground disappearing from underneath him steals his breath away.

He hears someone say, “—Christ, stop manhandling him, Diego.” And someone else say, “…he loses his shit if we let him hallucinate—” and someone else say, “…just let him sleep.”

Oh. He knows those voices, doesn’t he. Five rubs his face with the heel of his palm.

“Five?” His brother asks after a beat. “You with us now, for real?”

“Diego,” Five mumbles. His brother’s face is a blur of features in front of him. Five lets out a weary sigh, feeling himself deflate. The pillows underneath him swallow him up. The images of before have melted away, showcasing reality’s dull setting.

“I’m tired,” Five hears himself mutter to no one in particular. The announcement makes the exhaustion more prevalent, and his eyes flutter. Like a tide washing over the sand banks, sleep tries to pull him down. Everything slows down. He waves a hand, gesturing to the bed. “Gonna go and…”

“Yeah.” Diego sits back. “You should do that.”

Five nods. He looks around, his setting horribly hazy. “Ev'yone here?”

“Yeah. We’re all here. We’re all fine, too.” Diego pauses, then adds. “It’s just you that’s messed up.”

Five nods, mumbling. “S'fine.”

The bed shifts when Diego tenses. “It’s not, Five.”

Five hums. “It is. Because you’re all… fine, so it’s…fine.”

“No, man. Not anymore.” Diego licks his lips and says sternly, “Listen, Five. You’re not on your own. You don’t have to do things alone. You understand? I know that’s how you lived your life, in the…” he trails off, clearing his throat. “But you’ve got us around now. So, stop trying to fix things by yourself.”

“No, I’m…have…” Five murmurs, then he sighs, because his siblings don’t understand. They don’t understand that he needs to fix everything on his own. If his siblings try to get involved, they’ll get hurt. He wants them alive. They cannot help him, because then they’ll get hurt.

“We can do both,” Vanya tells him fiercely. She grabs his hands and squeezes, warmth blossoming within each finger. “We can help and can stay alive.”

Five doesn’t know if he can risk that. For his own sake, he’s not sure he can live with himself if he lets his family die again. If he has to watch his family die again.  

Klaus’ voice says, “We know we’ve been doing a pretty shit job of staying alive before… but, we live to learn another day. That’s a saying, right? If not, then it’s the new Umbrella Academy motto. We’ll do a better job staying alive, Fivey. We promise.”

That’d be nice…

Diego’s voice says, “But you gotta do the same, man. Stop trying to get yourself killed for us.”

Ah… no… he wants them to stay alive…

He’s already determined to do whatever it takes…

He'd like that... his family... alive and well.

That's the goal.

Reason for survival.

Then Luther’s voice says, “We… we want you to stay alive, too, Five. You know that, right?”

Oh… they don’t understand…

They’re still young… naïve…

A hand pushes his hair back, and Allison’s voice is telling him, “And selfish, too, right? Yeah, we are. No shame there. We’re selfish cause we want you to stick around, just like how you want us to stick around.”

Yeah… he knows he’s selfish…

The cockroaches were selfish… only wanting their own goals to be realized… Five just wants his own goals to be realized…

But he’s so tired…

… and he just…

He just wants to understand.

“Things will be different,” Diego says, his voice an echo in the abyss of unconsciousness. “But we’re going to figure it out together.”

And Five thinks…

He can…

Yeah.

Maybe it’s easier to understand, together.

He’ll try.