Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The apocalypse is a dead place, full of dead people, and dead things, and a very alive Number Five.
It’s rather stressful.

He’s digging through the academy – or what’s left of its bones – looking for anything of note other than a newspaper or deceased, terribly aged siblings. Luther went through what looks like a malfunctioned transformation and it’s difficult to resist finding a syringe and taking some sort of sample. He’s dead either way, and Five would have done it while he was still alive, too. Respect is overrated, even at the end of the world. He pats his shoulder on the way past through the rubble.

Seriously, how did newspapers survive Armageddon? The paper’s so thin a second’s touch to wet concrete ruins the whole thing, but ohh noo, fire is just fine. The air tastes like barbeque.

“Hello, mom,” he murmurs to her cracked shoulders. “This may be a slight invasion of privacy, but you” – the metal casing snaps – “are precious, precious electronics.” Five stares blankly at the exposed wires. Maybe he should have studied something past his own powers before jumping around in time.
No, never mind, that’d mean Reginald was right. The point of this was to prove he wasn’t right, and that Five can manage his powers just fine, and that being thirteen with knees scuffed from pillars of ash and splinters means nothing in the face of success.

Grace’s one intact eye stares blankly into the air, a soft smile still tilted upwards at him.
He harvests her not-organs, and then sits down to cry.

In the rest of the wreck he finds a bag with minimal holes, some clothes to shove in it, cutlery, a packet of pancake mix miraculously undamaged, a lighter, a book by Vanya (weirdly enough), and a toolbox behind what used to be a laundry wall. Big winnings to be shoved in along with the solitary eye. The sky is clearing of one layer of dust, leaving about fifty more between Five and the sun. It’s just a wide, glowing sky reflecting what’s left of the flames still burning below. He gives it the finger.
From the highest point he can reach without teleporting, he gives the flattened neighbourhood a classic once-over, hand over his eyes to defy the glare. Generally, there are rocks, pieces of building, and the occasional bent tree giving off dry smoke. His own personal playground. There’s evidence of the old (really old, now, if they were dilapidated before) shopping malls. That’s the next hit, then. Five reaches his hands out in an abortive motion, and nearly tips sideways entirely off his pillar perch when the usual muscle-pulse-shiver doesn’t take over while he sends himself across the distance. He doesn’t teleport at all, in fact.

Wow, the apocalypse is shit.
He walks.

***

Five decides that time wasted in terms of travel should not be wasted for any other process, and starts spiralling. It takes nowhere near as long as he would have hoped. So what, the world ends? Of course it does! That’s just a logical conclusion. Sure, maybe he didn’t expect it to happen in under 20 years into the future, but you get what you get, and you don’t get upset. The how is what’s worrying.

Possible theory number one: devastation via alien attack. The thought process for this is that there was obviously some sort of explosion or atmospheric impact, and no matter the unlikelihood of extra-terrestrial forces, Five would like to believe the world is smart enough to avoid an asteroid of this size.
Possible theory number two: his siblings are stupid. There’s no thought process, it’s just true. They would do something like this.

Possible theories three to five have more to do with mathematical probability of humans exhausting various fuel sources and/or committing war crimes in various orders, which are generally less interesting and likely in the grand scheme of things. The world revolves around power, and what’s more powerful than a bunch of physio-magical children with daddy issues? And mommy issues. And monkey issues, if he’s being honest with himself.

Navigating the city is less a maze of streets and more a straight-ahead hike these days. Just as tiring, slightly more gory. His eye twitches as he passes over bodies much less well-preserved than his family’s (another checkpoint backing possible theory number two), hands outstretched for balance over the shifting debris. All in all, this place doesn’t even look like it’s the primary impact point, maybe a third or fourth. Smaller pieces of whatever breaking off, all of it just contributing to the chaos. The centre…the centre would be nothing but smoke, and a potential new ocean.
Hey, he gets to name an ocean. Sea. Whatever the difference is. What’s that movie again? Oceans Eight? Eleven? Well this one is Ocean Five.

What a shitty existence. A time traveller stuck in time, and the result of an extinction event named after him.

The shopping strip is just as much a mess as the rest of city. There’s glass shattered to fine dust that stings his legs in the breeze, and he takes to ducking behind various collapsed walls between sprints to shake it off. A lot of it is…burnt. Crushed. Buried beneath low hanging ceilings. Five feels like a rat, scavenging around dead bodies and dumpsters. He feels like a ghost.
He makes a point to find some unbroken water bottles first. Most chip bags are popped from pure force, but there are boxes of crackers and saltines and other stupid little carbohydrates. He finds a snack pack with dried meats and tucks them low into his bag. A torch with a loop tie he fixes to his belt. There’s a box of cereal he opens to stuff handfuls in his mouth distractedly as he walks around. Trail mix, gross, but he’s not stupid enough to be truly picky. Energy drinks, that could be important.

There are no artificial lights to distract him from the darkening sky. It’ll get cold fast, and then it will keep getting cold, he knows this. Today was only the first day of the apocalypse, still warm from leftover sun and burnt ozone layers.
He hunkers down for the night, and closes his eyes.

Chapter Text

Well it wasn’t a dream. He didn’t even get to pretend it was a dream, because he was woken up every twenty minutes by the stiffness of his shoulders, or the sound of distant buildings collapsing in on themselves, or a fucking siren or alarm going off as whatever intact cars suddenly remember their one and only purpose. Time awake was spent shivering in the new waves of cold, coughing up dust, and crying. At some point he thought he heard footsteps, frozen with fear and tenuous hope, but there is nothing human left here. So he gathers his supplies.

And he leaves.

***

Walking is good, he decides, because he doesn’t miss any of the little bits and pieces he starts to gather in an abandoned shopping cart. He finds camping gear, for gods’ sakes, he might as well be set. The glow of the sun is much less obvious today, coming from somewhere or anywhere, and the compass spins in circles no matter how still he holds it. Five moves forwards, whatever direction that may be, tossing the marble eye back and forth between his hands. The idea is starting to settle now; he is at the very end of the world, and unable to return. It’s not any more comforting for being true, or accurate. There’s nothing nice about facts. He travels as far as he can before the cold starts to itch at his toes, and sleeps slightly better in a camping tent packed with blankets on every side.

Walking is good, because he gets to log all the information he can on the world’s devastation. There’s a sharp smell leading to an electrical station that spits angrily at him. He skirts the edges of its fence to find a free space and places the odd battery-cartilage that may have served as Grace’s heart into the earth as softly as he can. It sparks in time with the rest of the power centre. He wonders if he should’ve buried his family back home. This area is a little sturdier, a little more guarded from the impact, with a pipe still running water freely on the street to wash in. He makes the most of it, ransacks old wardrobes for thicker clothes, settles in a real bed only lightly dusted with ash.

Walking is good, and he keeps walking, until he gets to an empty field. The city ends like a child had drawn a line straight through it. Here’s a building, and here there isn’t. Most of the roads don’t even connect up, and it comes to mind that the world ending did not put an end to its own problems. The fissure is…odd. The two pieces of land are so tightly squeezed together its as if they were folded by human hands. Its edges are scrunched, frozen in time as if they were pulled to some sort of centre, inching towards the city, to his idiotic family. He stands staring at it for hours, until he can barely see the hand in front of his face. He sits and stares, sleeps, curled up on a broken ley line.

***

He spends a whole day lying flat on his back.

He spends another ripping into the earth with shovels, spoons, his bare hands. A finger crumples under the pressure and he screams, face down into the ground, loud in the way people are loud only when they know they are totally alone. Five is alone.

He has never been alone before.
It’s not as simple as having grown up in a big family, either. He was part of a unit. He was Number Five, the third prime number in a set of four. He was fifth in the line, fifth down the table, fifth room in the hallway. He was Five, one-seventh of a team of seven. Even with his door tightly closed and a chair pressed against it he could hear Klaus and Diego arguing about point systems in staircase races, Ben cheering them on. He could hear Luther and Allison speaking softly as they wandered the halls. Even Vanya, an ever-present undertone, a violin note lasting on the air long after it was put away. Being Five suited him.

There’s a reason he had no other name.

Then he finds a liquor store.

It’s fucking disgusting, burning down his throat and up his nose when he coughs, and halfway through a bottle of vodka he starts throwing shit. Bottles, bottle openers, books, anything he can find. They swing through the air with abandon, hitting walls and windows as he stumbles back towards the Fissure. The bottle in his hand is empty by the time he gets there, kicking the shopping cart as he passes.

“Y’know, you…it’s per-fect-ly okay. What’s the problem? Me? Oh, oh I’m fiiiine…jus’ saying, it’s okay.” He launches the bottle next, straight into the field. “I. I am ffff…God, SHIT, fuck, fuck you!” There goes a blanket. “Fuck you, fuck you Reginald Hargreeves and your smug fucking face and your-” a box of crackers sails through the air “-your absolute inability to give a straight answer, to just be a dad.”
His breath is coming short, eyes blurring when he turns too fast. “If you wanted to be a captain so bad you should’ve just SAID SO, you FUCKING PRICK.” The next victim he grabs is small and round in his palm, and leaves in a perfect arc through the dust, and oh, oh it’s the eye, the one fucking thing he can be sure of, the reason behind it all, he needs it, he needs this, it’s the only thing that can’t leave him alone, he can’t lose this –

– he catches it.

His hands are shaking, white-knuckled around the tiny thing. He’s fifty, sixty feet into the field, burnt grass poking at his calves while his nerves buzz with energy. It’s so quiet. His skull feels tight on his brain when he shakes it, retches, walks back to his temporary camp. His ring finger is numb, bent a little odd at the second knuckle. There’s a piece of glass in the heel of his shoe that digs in with every step. His mouth tastes of bad liquor, bile, and metal. He fixes nothing, and goes to sleep.

Chapter Text

Time is difficult to track. He spends a week, two, darting in and out of the city edge collecting bits and pieces. It’s darker and colder, but he doesn’t drink, glaring distrustfully at the bottles he passes. If there is one thing about Five that has been true since birth and will likely remain so until death, it’s that he despises not being in control of himself. Drinking like that…it’s blurry with unbridled rage, all the way up until he blinked.

That’s the other thing he does: try to teleport. Last night it was instinctive in a way it never has been before, easy as breathing, a blink and he was gone. Something he’s always been proud of is his level of control, his power tied to his will the way Ben or Klaus’ never was. But this was pure emotion and it scratches at an itch he can’t quite reach. He tries it from standstill, running, leaping off a precarious piece of wall – nothing. There’s a moment the day after the drinking he thinks that maybe he’d just imagined it after all, but the memory is picture-perfect clear, and he can only deny logic so long. Five hides the emptied bottle from sight, and breathes against the pressure in his chest.

***

A week or two more.
Three, and a building two streets down collapses so violently into the ground that the whole place shivers. It’s like watching a particularly gruesome demolition scene. He eats beef jerky and cereal, and fiddles with the wires he pulled.
Four. His eyes itch constantly, and he takes to wetting a piece of fabric to tie over his nose and mouth. Water is shockingly not too scarce. Plastic stands the test of time, destruction, and hellfire as the Lord strikes the Earth for its sins, apparently.

(He read a bible out of boredom back in week two.)

Gas is a more difficult resource to hold, burnt up fast in the initial ruin for the most part, taking whatever it could along the way. Timber and railings and such (anything treated for household safety) have a thin layer of char on the surface that scrapes off easy enough, but they still don’t take to burning well. He figures he could probably find coal or something, but the sensation of ashy wood already has him flapping his hands with distaste, barely able to grab onto a bottle to wash them. Most lighters he finds are cracked or exploded, so he salvages the little bits and pieces still there and hopes that they’ll be useful. Of course it’s a box of matches that survives, stubbornly refusing its one and only purpose the same way the newspapers had (he burns a lot of newspapers).
So gas, when he finds it, he hoards.

***

He finds that his hands are rough in no time, cuts etched around the knuckles and callouses bleeding on his palms. Water does nothing now to wash away the grime, it just makes him cold.
It is very cold.

There is something innately disturbing about not being able to see the sun. Every animal instinct in him shouts wrong wrong wrong, sleep, let the night pass – but this is not something he can bury his head and hide from. He sets himself to making fires in old barrels (like in the movies), heating rocks to hold between his hands (like in the movies), and, oh god, he misses the movies.
He’d only been to the cinemas once, an afternoon snuck out with Klaus to do anything other than sit in his room. Klaus didn’t have enough money for tickets, so Five put on a bit of a show to impress the lady behind the counter into letting ‘two of those lovely superhero boys’ in anyway. They sat directly in the middle and booed the main characters when they finally kissed. It was a stupid, childish afternoon and they tried so hard to sneak back in while the sun was setting only to run straight into Grace and Diego. They alone did all the dishes that night, laughter still crowding their lips as Klaus dunked in too much dish soap.

The line between thinking and thinking aloud is thin, thinner when alone. He takes to murmuring under his breath; maths equations, book quotes, to-do lists, numbers, the steps he takes, the bricks in the wall, numbers, a lot of numbers. Logic is not kind, but that does not mean it is unkind, he thinks. It sits in the palm of his hand like a single marble eye, devoid of all intent but what the wielder wills.

“If…if only, you know, this was an equation,” he speaks measuredly to the Fissure, “A set of somethings that I could solve.”

The day 43 children are born with no prior reasoning and inherent powers (October 1st, 1989) can be a. The day the world dies (April 1st, 2019) is now b. Get from a to b, then solve for x, which stands in for the answer to why (denoted by y). The problem with this problem is that it’s simply not real. He has no proof of any connections, no pieces left over to fit together like some sort of particularly gruesome puzzle. It’s just him and a bunch of empty rooms.

“E, E equals Em Cee squared, but only once you know what the fucking E is, huh Einstein? You would have loved this. Time travel!” He kicks a rock. “An illusion, you say? Well I sure wish I’d have snapped out of it by now.” He hums lowly in his throat, scrapes his hands over his eyes.

At the end of everything, he figures the how doesn’t really matter. Physics, maths, space, the universe and all its numbers, they are nothing in the face of human will. And at its bones, all the way down through the gaping wound in the earth, there is something unmistakably human behind it all.

There is also something unmistakably human waving at him from the middle of the field.

Chapter Text

Five feels as if he’s stepped to the side of his body. His mouth is agape, jaw hanging loose while he rubs his eyes with two fists. It’s a frame from a comic book, it’s a dramatic movie shot, it’s a dream – it’s anything he can rationalise through the screaming hope and terror between his lungs.

It’s real.

The figure has been walking forwards while Five stood in shock, dust parting like curtains. He’s tall, long-legged, scruff on his chin and light brown hair that’s short and unruly. The glasses slipping down his nose have tape all down the side, and there is an easy-going smile splayed across his face as he finally comes to a stop.

“Howdy.” He waves again.

There are two people alive at the end of the world, separated by a crack in the earth.

“I’m Mark.” His smile is closed, curious.

There are two people alive at the end of the world, and Five knows the other’s name.

“I…I’m sorry, I didn’t-” his voice cracks “-think anyone else…uh, survived. I’m surprised. I…” he trails off, air only just now filling his lungs to settle his hammered heart.

“Ah, yeah, yeah, lotsa death and destruction, I know it kid. I’m sorry for your losses,” Mark speaks with a soft drawl caught somewhere under his tongue, rubbing his chin between two fingers as he looks over the broken cityscape. “Got yourself camped out on this edge here, I like that. I been running outta food so I’ll scavenge further down ‘less you already done so.”

“Right,” Five whispers.

“Right.” Mark nods back.

His voice seems so much louder than Five’s. He’s been talking to himself for days, yelling at brick walls, and yet these are the words that echo, casual and kind.

“Hey, kid, how old are-”

“There’s a water tower down that way,” Five interrupts fast, a puff of air tickling the bandana over his nose. “Tap is, um, kind of broken, you have to go in from the top with a bucket or something.” He gestures vaguely. Mark blinks consideringly.

“Well okay then, thanks very much.” He starts walking down, stepping easily over the Fissure. He’s over sixty feet away when he half turns with a hand raised. “I’ll be back in a nip!” he calls.

***

There’s a tilting sensation in his stomach. Encountering the Apocalypse was a shock, a knife to the gut, but this is something entirely different.

No one should have survived this, he thinks. The sink-stone of horror in his throat chokes him. Something is wrong. The man – Mark – hadn’t even sounded surprised at Five’s existence, which implies, it, it means, there are-
He gags onto dead grass, barely more than a string of saliva leaving his heaving body.

There are others.

He’d been alone nearly two months, surviving nearly two months with the grief of his entire family’s death, the grief of a world dispersed into nothing but dust and flames. And yet, here comes Mark. Here strolls in some random man with a camping backpack and a long straight nose and nothing at all interesting to his name other than his nonchalant politeness.

“Still water like that in the tanks’ gonna go bad soon enough.”

Five whips around, and there he is again.

“I been looking for…uh,” he hums something under his breath, snaps his fingers, “filters. Water filter things, portable ones.”

“Right.” Five nods. Mark nods. Everyone is in agreement.

Night falls faster in the dust-soaked atmosphere. Five shuffles in and out of coherence, tending his fire, tending his camp, accepting the kindling Mark pushes towards him, accepting Mark himself into this façade of routine. He’s here now. He has his own tent. He hums mildly as they settle, barely a rumble in his throat. It might have been Amazing Grace, torn to pieces in the wind.

There is a lot of time, when alone, to examine oneself. Fiveself. He is confident to the verge of cocky, dismissive at best and unsympathetic at worst, can and will argue with a wall until he’s proven right, and often talks faster than he thinks. What he doesn’t know, or, has never really needed to know, is how he’s like with company. Growing up in a big house with a gaggle of siblings doesn’t count, not when you’re all somehow competing and hating and trying to care for one another. It was the forced proximity of army barracks, not family. Not friendship.

This tastes like another issue of proximity. Like an old, angry monster is eating them whole and they can do nothing but cling to each other as they go down.

***

Waking up is a brittle affair. First he sucks in a too-big lungful of air that is stale on his tongue, then cracks his eyes open where dust and sleep have hewn them shut. His stomach is clenched around the few bits of muesli he’d eaten the night before.

Mark is up and poking at the barrel fire. He can hear the drag-scrape-clang of the poker he’d found to use some time back. Five shifts under the pile of blankets that have curled into a ball at his stomach to wrap around, detangling one hand to tug at the knots in his hair. The poking stops.

“G’morning.”

“Yeah. Morning.”

As he’s sitting up and blinking blearily at the field beyond, Mark nudges over his canteen with an unopened bag of chips beside it and Five can’t even bring himself to be suspicious. Whatever dystopian fiction he’d read in his childhood didn’t understand the scope of being alone. It doesn’t make you less likely to trust, it just makes you tired. Survival of the fittest is not so much fighting as knowing when to sleep.
He feels like he could sleep for days.

“Thinking of setting up my own lil area a bit further inward, get out of the wind a bit. Of course, you’re welcome to join me, I just don’t wanna be encroaching on your camp here already.” He squints at the rows of destroyed buildings. “Wouldn’t mind ya pointing out the places you’ve already picked clean though, just so I know what I’m workin’ with.”

Five nods vaguely. He still feels blurry, the lack of any light beyond a vague, dusted glow and the fire fuzzing over his eyesight as much as his mind. He twists the corner of his mouth down with conscious effort as he opens the chips, puff of air smelling salty and a little stale.

“Kid? You okay?” Mark has his head tipped down to stare at him.

“What? Yeah.” He shakes his head, downs a gulp of water, clutches the bag in his left hand. “Yeah, I’m good. I’ll show you around.”

Chapter Text

Mark tosses him a nub of chalk at some point as they walk, quietly picking through the outskirt remains and drawing ‘X’s on whatever walls Five had already scoured through. They pass the trashed liquor store and Mark doesn’t mention the obviously human touch to some of the shattered windows. He just talks.

“If there’s anything I miss, it’s my dad’s cooking. My mama, she hated the kitchen and it hated her right back but my dad was good. Hearty stuff, good meat and good veggies. I brought a girlfriend back home one time, years ago now, and the look on her face at that meal in the middle of summer. A whole…whaddaya call it? Like, layer of meat mince and then mash potatoes and a bit of cheese on top, all done in a tray…heavy stuff, winter stuff, and yet! He didn’t know how to make things light. Roasted veggies, the veggies are green, he'd say! That’s your greens! So we always just got premade salads from the supermarket or some such when it came down to it…”

Five tunes out, tunes in. There’s dried grass stuck in his shoe that he pulls out, hopping to keep himself moving.

“…this specific type of soup, that’s the one and only thing ma knew to cook. I had the recipe somewhere, but just never got the chance to use it. Met a lady early on into all this who was stocking up on soup. Cans and cans of the stuff. The greatest soup lady there’d ever been. She was real nervy though, always a hand on her gun, I’m not sure I like people like that. It’s sad, it is, that you gotta watch out for people who could do you harm at a time where the whole world is harming ya. If people seem twitchy, you leave ‘em be. That’s my rule. Here, you been in here? No? Okay, lets go then. We can split stuff of course, each take what we need, I’m still looking for one of those purifier things of course…”

When he tips his head up to the sky, he can almost see an imitation sun. A mirage on all the dust that the light gathers in to form a wavery circle. Five blinks, and it blinks back. His mouth feels dry.

“…when it’s not even dry? I mean sure, could be an easy mistake if some parts are painted on thicker than the rest and such, but usually I find it’s an issue of patience. People don’t wanna sit around and watch paint dry, they say! Well damn! Who said you had to sit and watch?”

“What?” Five jerks his head to look over at the man, who’s struggling with a partially collapsed chest of drawers.

“Talking about,” he huffs as the drawer releases, and gestures to the wall next to him, “Paint bleeding through. No waiting between coats, then you got people complaining about stuff like this.” He picks at the little dark streaks, screwing up his nose. The drawer had socks in it.

“Oh.” Five stares at the wall with him. “Right.” Lots of things bleed through when you aren’t patient. Not enough concealer on a bruise (Diego), not enough pressure on the wound (Ben), not enough time with a mother (Allison).
He supposes there is something very wrong about psychoanalysing his dead siblings. Probably…very rude. Disrespectful.
He breathes out hard, and the anvil-like weight between his ears seems to sink deeper.

***

The day likely gets worse from there, but Five can’t honestly remember it. He’s hyper-conscious of every breath he takes, feeling it trickle down and up and out. There’s sweat at his collar where he rubs a hand absent-mindedly, dry against the hollow of his throat. Mark talks, and talks, and shoots him odd looks out of the corner of his eye, and talks.

The buildings in this area are barely skeletons of their former glory, old industrial places turned expensive open plan apartments. The steel hangs as an outline to its frame, brick walls collapsed inwards, hiding most of anything that could be called useful. Mark is debating the worth of a metal detector as he studies the debris, presumably with himself. It takes minutes of standing, breathing carefully through his nose, for Five to notice something is wrong.

It smells like dust.
Mark tsks under his breath, shaking his hair out as he ducks between the struts of a tangled metal staircase.

“Where are the bodies?” he whispers.

“Huh?” Mark calls back, leaning back precariously. Five swallows.

“Where are the bodies?” He frowns at Mark’s raised brows. “When I was travelling, out of the centre, there were bodies. People died. And then, here, what? No one? I…” He’s rubbing harder at his collar now, irritating the skin. “I don’t think I’ve seen a body in a long while now. There should be…corpses.” He gestures, breathes deep. “It should smell.”

“Kid, kid, you’re okay. It’s okay. You won’t see any bodies or nothing.”

“I can’t see any bodies! That’s the point!”

Mark has picked through the space until he’s back before Five, hands hovering uncertainly around his shoulders. He can feel himself shaking, a buzz under his skin where he runs his hands. He’s having a panic attack. He’s going insane.

“Woah, you’re burning up, woah, woah, kid, sit down.” Mark is fumbling around in his bag, bringing out a bottle and pressing it towards his face. Five doesn’t remember closing his eyes, but it’s definitely dark and he can definitely feel a plastic lip bumping against his own. He groans and grabs at it himself, tipping it to drink. His hands are shaky, it’s so goddamn cold in the Apocalypse. Something’s patting his back as he leans into his knees, listening to the garbled voice of Mark above as if he’s one of the teachers from Charlie Brown. Wah wah wah, he hears, and coughs a laugh into his elbow.

There are arms under his shoulders, then one under his knees, and he’s up so fast his eyes open out of instinct, see the way the sky seems to sway, and promptly passes out.

Chapter Text

“I’d make you soup if I could.” His mouth twitches with a smile. Five glares at the ground between them.

“Tell me again.”

“You’d been pretty quiet and tired the whole day. I thought that was that, maybe a bit of shock ‘cos you’d said I’m the first person you’d seen through all this, or maybe just you were always quiet. Then we’re at this house and you start getting all wobbly on your feet, and, like, slurring your words. As soon as I got close I could feel the fever heat running off of ya. Got some water in you, tried to get you up, and then you fainted so-”

“I did not faint.”

“-I carried you back to here. Fine, passed out. You’re sick, kid.”

He shivers disagreeably. There are no less than four blankets wrapped around his shoulders, plus the ones gathered up under where he had been lying down. According to Mark, he’d been out only an hour or so, and ‘should in no uncertain circumstances be moving around right now’. He can feel it now at least – the way his whole head aches when he moves his eyes in their sockets, hands shaking even when held tight into a fist. It’s unfair, and completely out of left field, because Five had never been sick before. He didn’t get sick. Allison was prone to colds and hay fever that’d knock her on her ass, Klaus got pneumonia, Luther had to get his tonsils out last summer and wouldn’t eat anything but porridge for days on end. Five had never so much as sniffled.

How is it fair that he gets sick now? With a stranger, instead of his stupid, stupid, family?

Mark is pushing water into his hands again, waving a little rectangle in his other. Classic blue box pain meds, and some instinctual paranoia raises its head. What if Mark got him sick? What if it was on purpose? But whatever suspicious creature wrapped around his lungs is just as tired as the rest of him, unable to even force a jolt of panic through his chest. He tips two into his mouth, and downs the water.

“Did…” he croaks, wipes his nose hard against his sleeve like a child. “Did you ever say, or, figure out, about the bodies?”

“Kid.” Mark’s eyebrows are drawn together in a faint frown, wrapping yet another blanket around Five. “It’s been two months, more’n that now. Bodies would be…gone. Back to the Earth. You’ve been real focused on surviving, your body shut down pretty much everything that wasn’t needed-needed, that probably includes smell. And health, which is why you’re sick now. That’s my uneducated guess, at least.”

“Bu-”

“But the skeletons, you’re gonna say. You were muttering about them too while you were passing out. Yeah, a lot of them are covered up. Dust, buildings, there’s not a lot of movement so everything is just settling. I saw a leg or two. I promise you, people were here. They were here.” Mark has a strong, straight nose with dents on the side where his glasses have dug in. He can’t be older than his mid-thirties. Five feels himself tipping forwards, tremors just about shaking the flesh off his own bones. He’s too hot, it’s too cold, his eyes burn, there’s a hand smoothing over his hair as he heaves dry sobs into the blankets. A static murmur repeats above his head as he slips away.

“They were here. And you’re here, and I’m here. You’re not alone, kid, you’re not.”

***

He tips in and out of wakefulness. There’s the taste of fear under his tongue, along with the bile. The Apocalypse is no place to be sick; it’s no place to be healthy either. Mark wanders in and out of view, tending the fire that he had dragged Five closer to with nervous hands. He talks, continually, constantly, but that seems to be a basic trait rather than any attempt at comfort. It’s comforting anyway.
His stomach burbles uncomfortably when he’s sat up to eat, plain crackers and warm water with a green teabag dumped inside. It’s bitter but he’s on an edge he doesn’t even understand and the sight of it makes him cry again, mouth curling down as he huddles under the blankets once more.

He has fever dreams.

Five shakes his body awake trying to get away from the stumbling corpses of his family, dusty with ash from the house he had grown up in. They didn’t call his name, they didn’t reach for him, they just walked – past him, towards him, away from him. Another time he sits at some amalgamation of the Fissure, more a cliff that his legs dangle off of, and he’s almost convinced it’s real until he sees Vanya sitting beside him looking off into the distance. I miss you, she says, but her mouth doesn’t move. She just stares.

He's woken up to down more medication, more lukewarm water, more saltines that come straight back up. A hand runs over his back as he retches onto the dead lawn, settles him back into his makeshift bed. He goes back to sleep and wakes up sweating through his clothes, through a layer of blankets, desperate for some release from the stifling heat, whining and throwing his arms out in a way that wakes Mark to hush him like he’s a child, pulling him out of the tangle and against his chest. He has no water in his body to cry, so he just sits limply and breathes through his mouth like a dog as the man rocks them back and forth. The fever is breaking, he hears Mark say, but he can’t see his face from this position and can’t tell if his mouth moves, if this is a dream or not.

He has more dreams.

This time, they are mixed with memory. The autumn before Reginald first hit Luther, and Luther first got quiet. The courtyard is covered in leaves that Grace dutifully brushes away, quietly encouraging Diego as he stumbles through reading aloud from some old detective novel. Ben and Klaus are attempting handstands against the wall, falling over and over again while Allison scores them out of ten and Luther pretends he doesn’t want to join. It’s all golden brown and orange in the light, a breeze whisking through the slowly emptying branches overhead. When Five looks around, the image blurs. Vanya is sitting inside at the window, an absent confusion on her face. I miss you, she says. But her mouth doesn’t move.

He wakes up fuzzy with sleep, muscles aching from sleeping on the ground and clenching through feverish shivers.

“Hey kid.” Mark ducks down to look at him, a wry smile crawling onto his face. “Think you’re starting to come out of it?”

And Five, for once, trusts that maybe this time, he is.

Chapter Text

EXTRA-ORDINARY: My Life as Number Seven
by Vanya Hargreeves

*annotated by Five Hargreeves

…and with having seven children running around you’d think it would be wild and noisy, and sometimes it was. For the most part, though, the house was too big to ever feel full, and my siblings were all too often caught up in their training as organised by our father, while I was left to my own devices with a violin and little to no supervision. I would watch them a lot; an outsider at only six years old, we all quickly learned it was best to do as Reginald asked, and that included leaving me behind. I can’t fault my siblings for this when looking back. We were all the product of our strange upbringing, and in many ways they tried their best…

*It’s interesting to read between the lines of what you left out, Seven. It’s not a cruel retelling, but it’s not an entirely accurate one either. You don’t mention that the year we turned six was also the year Reginald starved Luther for the first time, locked in his room and only let out to run until he dropped. “Father”

…at twelve there was not much I could do, for neither my siblings nor myself. One to Six were out every other day or week being superheroes, and as a child there certainly was a bitter jealousy that rose out of not being powerful. Alongside this I had no one to confide in – my siblings were obviously on the total other end of the spectrum and could never understand, I had no friends or school to escape to, and even our mother was focused on taking care of the others, although that’s not something I can blame her for.
A memory that stands out to me as all-important in solidifying this isolation was a family picture day. Luther, Diego, Allison, Klaus, Five and Ben all lined up in their uniforms at Reginald’s urging, saying ‘all together, all together now’ as I watched from the sidelines. I even asked if he had forgotten me, if I was meant to be in the picture as well, but he brushed me off and none of my siblings could even look in my direction, much less defend my place in the family…

*I remember that. Sorry.

…still, there were moments when we were still just children, and still genuine. Grace would put on movie nights for us in one of the smaller living rooms while Reginald was off travelling, warm buttered popcorn between all of us as we argued over what to watch. There were a lot of superhero movies, those nights.
Or other times, Pogo would be goaded into playing hide and seek with us, which was a surprisingly even game with the powers being thrown around; Luther could lift himself onto the ceiling beams, Five would teleport to new locations whenever someone got close, and I personally was well-versed in all the mansion’s hidey-holes from my time spent alone. Even when I wasn’t close with them, we still occupied the same space, and there was a camaraderie in that…

*You’re not mentioning how much of a sore loser Allison was, that’s the important detail in my opinion. She threw a full-blown tantrum at some point over me winning, wouldn’t talk to me for three days afterwards, and because she wasn’t talking to me, Luther wouldn’t either. That was just over two years ago, I guess. Time feels weird here.

…I was always closest with Five, though…

*That’s me

…it’s not even in the sense that we had similar personalities, or wants, or goals. Five was argumentative and ambitious, always wanting to push himself further. He told me once that he felt his teleportation was directly linked to his confidence, where each movement was a fundamental truth and that if he didn’t believe in it, it would never work. He believed the same about time travel…

*I was right. I was right. I’m still right

…even in his ambition, Five didn’t exactly enjoy all the training Reginald set them to do. Often enough he would ditch as fast as he could and come sit with me in the upstairs hallways, our legs dangling through the gaps in the bannisters. He would tell me about all the things he wanted to do, and I would tell him to be careful. He liked the science behind it all, Pogo and Grace and himself and our siblings, would read aloud from physics textbooks even when neither of us understood what was being said. It’s Five’s eventual disappearance that truly knocks out the first unstable pillars our family was help upon.
Reginald hadn’t been allowing him to consider time travel, pushing it off as Five pushed forwards, and the argument…

*I already know this bit. I don’t need to read it

…run out the front door, and I ran after him only a few minutes later, scared to leave the table. I sat at the front steps for hours waiting for him to pop back into existence, to come home and regale me of whatever misadventure he’d been on. Eventually it got dark, and cold, and Pogo dragged me back inside.
Reginald was angry, but he was also aloof. The disappearance of one of his sons was a setback, a nuisance, and we all saw that. He didn’t mourn the way the rest of us did, and that was maybe the first time I was united with my siblings, in that utter grief of loss. For months I would sneak out in the late evenings to the kitchen, set up a plate of his favourite sandwich and a glass of milk just in case he was hungry when he got back. It took me over a year to accept that he was gone. Sometimes still, so many years later, I will look out the window and squint as if I could see him, lost somewhere in time and space.
In the end, he’s the only one of us that truly got away…

*No
*No
*No
*No

…and I am happy for him.

*That’s enough for today