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It’s finally quiet.
The subway is near-silent. The only sounds he can hear are the rattling of the train on its tracks, hurtling toward some untold destination, and his own soft breathing, which barely registers in his ears.
There’s nothing to see but the walls of the tunnel racing past. When Five looks up, the window only reflects his face back at him. He tries to search the eyes of the empty expression in the glass; it’s unrecognizable.
He tries to anchor onto a single thought, but it’s impossible. The erratic thrum of his pulse, the staccato rhythm of his heart, the fleeting images of—Ben, Jennifer, that thing that had taken his brother away from him, again. Away from all of them, again. Everything feels distant, like he’s peering in on this from a thick pane of glass. He hadn’t even known where he was going until he’d found himself slumped in the seat.
Maybe he was living someone else’s life. He’d jumped timelines and the Five in that timeline had ceased to exist, so he’d taken his place, and this was the result. Maybe if he went back, he’d emerge in the right place, in the right time. No Commission, no barn, no Sparrows. Just…home.
The train slowly comes to its next stop. He watches himself pass through the station. The shadow turns, meets his gaze, and - smiles. Then it keeps going.
He feels like he’s landed on the other side of a blink: the second when he lurches out of space, matter becoming non-matter becoming matter, back in his body all at once. He cruises on the momentum to throw himself out onto the platform, doors slamming closed behind him, and he heads in the vague direction of his—the shadow.
Five calls out. There is no response. He jogs down the brief set of stairs and pushes forward, in disbelief that he’s pursuing his own hallucination but unwilling to give up the chase. It turns the corner. So does he.
They wind up at Max’s Delicatessen - there’s a fucking deli in the middle of the time subway, because of course there is. Whatever this is, it’s not a platform, so the shadow doesn’t have any way out than to go inside. And if Five deliberates here about whether he’s died, or gone insane (again), he will be here forever. Inside it is.
The deli is not quiet. There’s soft jazz playing faintly overhead. To his right, there’s a cluster of various older men playing a round of poker, a collective of salt-and-pepper heads with puffed mustaches. Nearly every booth of the diner is full. There’s a young-looking man, drunk as a skunk, being propped up by his twin, who’s got a spaced-out look, pupils blown wide, their suits crumpled and stain by who knows what; a smattering of kids pile all too tightly into a diner, none older than their mid-thirties, clearly arguing over something insignificant - one of them reaches across the table to flick the other between the eyes, just like how his siblings used to, when they were irritated with Five.
And they all look like him. Not exactly: some are older, some are younger. There’s a self that appears to be 13, perhaps literally, dark ash smudged on his face as he hunches in on himself, sharing a meal with a self that must be 58, definitely literally. Fresh out of hell, in two senses of the word. A young woman with shoulder-length hair squints at him as he breezes past. Waiters shuffle from table to table, each with their own neatly ironed vests and draped aprons, hair combed back. But they’re still him.
He doesn’t linger on any of these. He’s trying to hunt down the shadow from the station, but it feels like an impossible task. Five lets himself be pulled along by his feet. They seem to know where to go instinctively, even if he does not.
He ends up in the corner of the diner, quietly sliding into a seat. The vinyl is slightly scratched right where it hits up against the wall. Five glances up and makes eye contact with - himself. Okay. This is getting ridiculous.
“What is this?” he asks.
His shadow (the shadow?) doesn’t respond. But it could be him. It could be any of them in this damn diner, but it might be this one. Maybe not, with that dazed look on his (its?) face.
“Are you listening? What - what is this place?”
It mumbles something.
“I can’t hear you. Speak up.”
The thing is saying words, by the way its lips are moving, but the music’s too loud, or the people are.
Five thinks it might be motivated if he takes away the coffee cup sitting in front of it, but the mug is cold in his hands. His eyes flit to the side of the table where an uneaten sandwich lies. There’s mold forming on a corner.
He leans in.
“It’s my fault,” the thing is saying. “I did it. I killed them. It’s my fault.”
“What did you do?”
“It’s my fault. Everything is my fault.”
“Are you - can you hear me?”
Just as he’s about to reach over and shake the stupid fucking thing awake, a voice startles him. Funny, considering it’s his own. “You’re looking for me. Don’t bother him. It never works, anyways.”
Now settled in the right seat, he tries to swallow that feeling of unease that’s settling in his stomach. “It’s you.”
“It’s me.” The other Five spreads his hands, as if to say, you got me. “I’m sure you’ve got a lot of questions.”
“No shit.”
“Easy, cowboy. You’re one of us now.”
“What happened to - that?” He points over his own shoulder. Not his. The - not-shadow’s, to the dark booth in the corner. His other self turns briefly.
“Oh, him? We call him the Loon. He’s been like that ever since…well, ever since he got here.”
“Bit harsh.”
“What do you suggest we call him? ‘Five’? Been there, done that.”
“No, but—” He’s getting off-track. The Loon can wait. “What’s the deal here?”
“No deal. It’s a deli. You can be Slow Five.” One of the many hundred waiters slinks over to their table, gracefully slides down two plates of pastrami sandwiches and coffee, and leaves without saying a word. “I went ahead and ordered for us.” The other Five takes a contented sip. “Just how I like it.”
Five takes his own unhesitating sip, and immediately regrets it. “This is dogshit.”
“It’s how I like it, not how you like it.”
“You’re—”
“You? Yeah, and?”
“I don’t have time for this,” Five snaps.
“Why not? If you’re waiting for Paradox Psychosis to kick in, don’t worry. It won’t.”
“God, you piss me off.”
“I get that a lot. Sometimes they call me ‘Annoying Five.’” Annoying Five glances up and grimaces. “Oh, don’t look. Drunk Five is about to spew everywhere.”
“Can someone get Drunk Five out of here?” someone shouts. There’s a rattling clamor as the chaos starts to spread, then becomes rather self-contained.
“You said Paradox Psychosis doesn’t exist here.”
“Believe me, it doesn’t. Even if it looks like we’re about to murder the Drunkard. Better eat that before it gets cold, it won’t taste the same once it is. How’s it taste?”
“It’s alright,” Five mumbles through a mouthful of sandwich. It’s good. The hot meal soothes his nerves a little. Suddenly, the situation goes from unsettling to bearable.
“Right, so now you won’t interrupt me. The problem with paradoxes is… you can’t have more than one of any person in a given timeline, see? So, let’s say, instead of jumping forward or back in time - you jumped sideways, right into someone else’s timeline. It has to account for both copies, but obviously it can’t do that.
“But here, there’s no timeline. In fact, there’s no time at all. You haven’t gone forward or backwards or sideways - you’ve gone out of bounds. Strike out.” Annoying Five takes a sip of his coffee.
“There’s no time in the deli? How does that work?”
“Well, delis are a little magical. No, dumbass, there’s no time anywhere in the subway. It’s the in between place between time.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Is it?”
“For one, it doesn’t make any sense. How can something ‘exist’ outside of time?”
“You should know, given that you worked at such a place for five years.”
“The Commission didn’t exist outside time, it was stranded in—”
“Five,” his self says, cutting him off. There’s some kind of warning belying his tone, but during the pause, Five can see exhaustion pulling at the mirror of his face. “You think you’re the first one to come up with those same questions? Arguing about how nothing makes sense, prattling on about how much of an idiot you are, refusing to accept it. Look around. They all have. So just…” He sighs. “Accept it.”
“I don’t—I’m not here to ‘accept’ anything. I want answers.” He drops his half-eaten pastrami sandwich onto his plate and pushes it away, still somewhat hungry. “I have to go back. I’m not staying here.”
“Hm?” The other Five genuinely looks surprised at that. He tilts his head slightly, but he forms a mocking sort of smile as if he’s reading Five like a book. As if he knows what’s up with him, what his deal is. “Go back to what? Your world’s gone, or it will be, soon enough. That’s why you ran away.”
“I didn’t run away.”
“No? Where were you going, then?”
“I,” Five tries to say. He tries to reach for an explanation, an excuse, anything. But nothing comes to mind. “I was—”
“Back to the Apocalypse? Back to the Commission? Or, what, the strawberry farm?”
“I wasn’t running away. I just needed time to think. Alone.”
“I’ll save you the time. You want to know what causes the Apocalypse so you can go back and stop it. Well.” This ridiculous doppelganger raises a hand to lazily gesture over to their left.
Five hadn’t noticed it before, coming in, or maybe he had dismissed it as a mundane detail. There’s a crowded smattering of photographs on the wall, their mismatched and intricately ornate frames pushing up against each other as they vye for limited space. Some of them are things he remembers: the ash-caked earth of the First Apocalypse, Viktor blowing up the moon, the Cold War finally turning hot in the ‘60s, the implosion of Hotel Oblivion.
“It’s different every time,” his voice narrates. “Not always Viktor. Who knew? So there’s a common denominator. Three guesses as to who.”
His breath catches in his throat. “It’s—”
“Us!” Someone calls out across the deli.
“Oh, not literally ‘us,’” Annoying Five reassures. If Paradox Psychosis isn’t real, then why does Five feel such an urge to lunge across the table and kill him right here? “He means our family. But it might as well be your fault. No amount of ice or acorns could have prevented this outcome, but it sure would’ve been nice of dear old Dad to warn us.”
“How’s it our fault? We’re the only ones who can reverse—”
Annoying Five laughs at him. “No, I don’t mean us, I mean you. What did you think was going to happen when you went gallivanting through time? You left your timeline and killed its stability, fucking the rest of us over; where do you think the tangents draw from? But maybe, now that the main timeline is home, the rest of them will follow.”
“I don’t understand,” Five says dumbly. “I don’t understand why I don’t understand.”
“Every tangent thinks they’re the main timeline.” Annoying Five shrugs. “We all branch off somewhere. I guess that makes you the real ‘Five,’ so no nicknames necessary. How do we know you’re the real one?” He pulls aside a napkin and a pen from his pocket and starts scrawling away. “Well, if we start from the base…”
Five falls quiet. It feels like any minute now, he’ll wake up from this weird dream, and things will go back to how they used to be. Not ‘good or ‘fine’ or any of that, but maybe to the day he sauntered out of the CIA headquarters and had way too much to drink. He’ll get up tomorrow and be hungover for the first day at work, scrambling to get up off the floor. Yeah.
Everything is too bright and too loud and too fast. He closes his eyes to get his thoughts in order. Think, Five, think - if he has all the moving parts of this equation, then all he has to do is put them together and solve for x. Subway, timelines, apocalypses, his family = save the world, somehow.
Make it right, somehow.
He opens his eyes.
“This is really how the world ends? Every time?”
“It is. More coffee?”
“That’d be great.” He readjusts his suit jacket. “I’ll get it to go.”
Annoying Five scoffs. “Here we go again. The world is going to end. It’s your fault. There’s nothing you can do to save it - to save any of them. They’ll be dead by the time you get back.”
“I’m not like you. I have to try.”
“You say this each time. ‘I’ll save them. Just watch.’ Then you come crawling your sorry ass back. You cry, or you get mad, but it doesn’t matter. It won’t fix anything.” His other self’s gaze is piercing, and nearly pins him to his seat. “You can’t save anyone.”
“Maybe,” Five says, like it’s the easiest thing in the world. “If I was a tangent.”
“Where will you go?”
“Home.” He slides out of the booth. Knocks over Annoying Five’s coffee and watches as it spills over the pristine marble table, onto his lap. It’s not even warm. “God, how much time have I wasted here?” But it’ll be okay, he thinks, if he arrives at the last minute. He can go back. Seconds, not minutes.
A waiter hurries over to them, pressing a paper cup of coffee in his hand. “Here’s your order, sir.”
“You can’t be fucking serious,” Annoying Five interrupts, glaring at him. “How many of us do you think have tried? I’m doing you a favor, so just listen.”
“I can’t - give up.” Out of all the things he’s ever said, this one feels the most childish. But it also feels the most important.
“You already did! That’s why—” The other self makes to grab him by the shoulders. “You’re no better than any of us.”
It happens before he can consciously intervene: he rears his free hand back and, in an eruption of the building desperation and guilt and anger, rocks his own self’s shit. His shadow - that’s all it ever was, a shadow - stumbles back in surprise, holding up a hand to his face.
His heart flutters. He thinks of everything he’s left behind. His family. Ben. Jennifer. A moving, struggling mass limping across the abandoned mall, reaching for the only people he’s ever cared about, the only people he’s ever loved. All the cockroaches he’d ate, all the bottles of his own piss he’d drank, the people he’d shot.
He can still feel Hazel’s warm hand pressing the tape into his, hear the gunshots ringing out in the barn, the towering walls of the Umbrella Academy rushing past as he races out those concrete steps. What he’d give to take it back.
But he’d do it all over again. And again, and again, and again, and again.
Five runs to the door. The deli, which had fallen silent, has fallen into an uproar of noise yet again. Things will carry on here, never moving forward, with or without him.
As he shoves his full weight onto the exit, he looks back. His gaze sweeps across all else until it lands in that dark corner, connecting with The Loon.
For a moment, he swears those eyes go sharp in focus. A nod. Go.
“I’ll save them,” he mumbles. “I will.”
The bell rings behind him as he leaves.