Chapter Text
Red.
The apocalypse is red.
There’s hardly any buildings left intact, at least in the city, and where they still stand erect, Five wishes they’d crumple and collapse onto themselves. They are no more than decrepit shells of what civilization used to offer, and what he had thrown away like a petulant child— a child —in his haste to prove he doesn’t need limits and boundaries.
Well, the joke is on him—for more than 40 years it has been on him. Hiding around every corner and buried under endless rubble, the punch line comes at him again and again, as if this time might be the time he finally cracks (up). For forty-odd years the jest wears him down, and truth be told, it hadn’t started off funny either.
It isn’t about surviving. It has never been about surviving. It’s all good and well until you realize, two days in, that there is nothing and no one to live for. Because… well, why? Everyone needs a purpose after all, and had it been anyone other than Five, they surely would have cut their losses and forfeited their existence. But he has a purpose.
He can do it, goddamn it.
Five can undo whatever had gone terribly wrong and restore the timeline to where he needs it to be. Where he wants it to be .
With a sweaty back, fractured femur, furrowed brow, ragged clothes torn up in need and anger, and a cracked streak of crimson marking side of his face temple to jaw, Five scribbles along the margins of books until the rubbed raw patch of skin on the side of his finger forms a callus.
It takes him years to realize his finger’s quiet transformation, but once he does take notice, the sight of his hardened finger becomes a familiar one. Years later when he dies, that wretched callus would be the last thing he sees (but that’s a story for another day).
He stares at the callus more than a mentally sound human might, but then again, as the only person alive, he was the de facto sanest person strutting around on earth as well. His finger is tired, and cracked, and hardened, and he wishes it could just go back to being soft. Once upon a time, he used to have sensitive, unmarred skin. Now, the callus is right at home and keeps a collection of cuts, blisters, and scars, in its company.
But Five still aches for the childhood he’s had no choice but to prematurely shed.
These days, he puts that ache on the back burner, and cracks on with his singular reason for being, because otherwise…
Shot gun strapped to his back, he stands and fiddles with the equations, empty cartridges and shells littered at his feet.
For a few weeks he grows weary of scanning the same numbers and formulas. During his break he finds a Glock 19, Gen5 he notes tiredly, and his fingers take up fiddling with the slide, racking it over and over, pleased at the clicking sound when it falls into place. Five knows this lull can’t go on for much longer.
So, the sabbatical doesn’t last; he straps the Glock back onto his belt, and resumes with added urgency.
His will is Red.
Not red, but capital ‘R’, Red.
.
.
Yellow.
Yellow flashes across Diego’s field of vision when he puts a villain in its place.
It’s bright and golden, like the sweet scent of summer, like the warm smile on mom’s face when she hands him a plate of pancakes, like a fitful night of training turning on its head when he sneaks out with numbers one, three, four, five, six, and yes, seven, for milkshakes or donuts.
For as much shit that fills the gutters and overflows into the streets, Diego doesn’t let it taint his longing for something better , and he knows he can bring his vision to fruition.
Restlessness had bled right through childhood straight into his adulthood, but not because he’s chronically unhappy, no. Convictions headstrong and unwavering, Diego believes in a better present and future, and refuses to settle. It’s a restlessness that has plagued him as a life’s calling might.
Diego will not be sidelined.
Perhaps his relentless attitude towards taking charge in life is a symptom of an upbringing that’s at best unconventional, and at worse unhealthy—abusive. Whatever the cause, Diego does not dwell, but takes charge to right any ship that dares to veer off-course.
He’s in charge of his own destiny, and sometimes the rest of the world too, if everyone else is too lazy or timid to do what needs to be done.
Swelling anger only ever represents his frustration with those who don’t share his vision—those with blinders on, who don’t see the possibility of the world that ought to be crouching just barely out of reach. Diego knows it could just as easily be well within reach .
Fury also washes away whatever had survived the Academy as far as Vanya is concerned. Diego knows it’s temporary; he has always known. For this reason, he clings to his rage so as to fully experience it before it inevitably dwindles away until it vanishes without trace.
Vanya had diminished what they collectively endured, the good and overwhelming bad, to a nugget of hot city gossip. For a time it became difficult to be anything other than a traumatized boy when in truth, he had worked hard to be so much more than that masked has-been superboy.
He had mopped floors and flunked out of the police academy just to find Diego, and suddenly, none of that had mattered.
It’s continues to be a difficult endeavor for him to make sense of it.
Yet, he carries on, and allows his moral compass guide him. Even when the night falls and he feels adrift, Diego holds fast to his convictions, a beacon, and trusts that his confidence will return as sure as the sun will return each morning at the break of dawn.
Diego wants to bathe his most troubled brother in his light—the light mom had imparted years ago, the one that stuck around against all odds, against all trials and tribulations— and show him there’s another way to exist.
Unsure whether light will ever reach him, Diego still tries each time he casts his car’s headlights into blackened alleys like a spotlight, knowing that one day will be the day. He doesn’t want to miss it.
His virtue is bright Yellow.