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It was a long time coming in the Hargreeves family.
Cleaning out Reginald’s stuff.
They had started small with his bedroom and office, tossing out useless documents and donating artefacts to museums and galleries. They burned the sheets and notebooks about their every waking - and sleeping, apparently - moment in a bonfire in the courtyard. Klaus had ducked out to the corner shop and came back with bags of marshmallows and chocolates.
It was like one final ‘fuck you’ to the old man.
It took a while to get to the harder stuff. The training rooms where they had individual training. It was easy to say ‘lets get rid of it, let’s smash everything’ but actually doing it was harder than anyone thought.
Klaus was fine with snapping his old ouija boards in half, claiming they never worked because they were already visible regardless. They got rid of the old animal cages, rusted from being left alone for so long and still with traces of fur and blood which was unhygienic. Ben didn’t care to be visible for this when Klaus asked.
Diego refused to step foot in the tank room at first. Stuttered his way through an excuse and went to the boxing gym for the rest of the day. He smashed them with a crowbar the next day, no one commented when he wiped away tears.
The thing is though that Five barely remembers the training. It was over 40 years ago now and ironically his concept of time has been warped from being alone for so long. He remembers being in a large room with walls acting almost like a maze and he remembers Reginald yelling at him to be faster and to jump over here and there. He remembers being hungry a lot and Reginald saying he can’t eat something until he can make a certain distance. Remembers crashing in his bed, too tired to move and just laying there staring at his trains.
The room looks like how he remembered it. Grey walls and all. He wanders over to the far end of the room, his siblings looking around curiously. There’s a table in front of him, covered in a thick layer of dust like everything here had been forgotten the moment he’d left and it probably has. He picks up an item, blows the dust off and stares at it.
“Number Five” Reginalds harsh voice rings out. Five stares at him from under his fringe. He wants it off. “Proceed”
He jumps, then jumps again. He revs up to do another when he feels the shock of electricity pulsing through his body. He lets out a yell as he collapses on the ground. It stops and he can breathe but before he can get too comfortable it happens again.
“Focus!!” Reginald yells “Faster!”
Five shakily stands up and jumps. Slower than before. He gets shocked again, his hands make their way up to the collar around his neck and he tries to pry it off knowing it won’t do anything. Fingernails dragging down his neck leaving scratches on the skin. He can’t breathe, he can’t -
“What the fuck is that?” Klaus asks and plucks the collar from his hands. Five blinks slowly as he comes back from a distant memory.
“Shock collar” he hears himself muttering “It’s a shock collar”
“A shock collar” Allison repeats in disbelief
“Just when we think Reginald couldn’t be even more sadistic” Klaus says, toying with the piece of metal.
“It was tight” Five says “I couldn’t breathe”
Five takes it back from Klaus and holds it out in front of him. Reginald treated them like animals, treated him like a fucking dog that needed to be punished when he failed a task. Shocked him with electricity like he had no care for his well being. Was that all he was to them? Some worthless animal that needed to be trained?
What if the voltage had been too high? He wasn’t wearing any safety gear? What if the repeated shocks had left damage to his heart or burned his neck? What if the electric shocks are the reasons he struggles with longer distances and time travel? Why he thinks his heart rate is faster than normal? What if it had malfunctioned and delivered non stop shocks to his body?
All these what ifs are running through his head that never crossed his mind as a naive little kid. Who wore a fucking shock collar because it’s what daddy wanted him to do and if he didn’t he wouldn’t get dinner and he’d be a miserable failure.
“Take it” Five says and shoves it at Luther. “Crush it, I don’t want to look at it anymore”