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Five is just about ready to commit murder to get a decent sleep.
He’s standing at the edge of the argument his siblings are having with the Sparrow Academy. God, the Sparrow Academy. Reginald thought them all so repulsive that he went and unadopted them for a batch of strangers. Except Ben, apparently, who Reginald had never met. It’s nice, almost, seeing Ben again, even if this Ben isn’t quite his brother.
Voices are rising, and the world tilts.
No, not the world, that’s just his vision. He clenches his jaw, trying to push through the dizziness. It’s just the exhaustion, or the concussion, maybe. Was it from the skillet he’d been hit with? The chimney collapsing atop him? There’s a sharpness in his chest, and he thinks it must be his ribs. He’s not sure if they’re broken or just bruised. He’d hope for the latter, but hope doesn’t help with the pain. His breathing is shallow. Five lifts a hand to his chest, thinking to ground himself, steady his breath—but when he pulls his hand away, his fingers come away red.
What the hell?
His vision wavers. He blinks, trying to focus.
It takes a moment longer for his mind to put the pieces together: the gunshots. Back at the barn with the Handler. But he’d thought after reversing time would have rewound the injuries too. Apparently not. But he’d been so focused on keeping his siblings alive, undoing their deaths and getting them all back to their proper time, that he hadn’t realized his own bullet wounds hadn’t been undone, masked by the rest of the aches in his battered body.
Each breath a struggle now the adrenaline is wearing off. He’s so tired. It hasn’t even been a month after returning to his family and there have been two impending apocalypses. Probably three, his mind supplies unhelpfully, already anticipating the clusterfuck that that dealing with the Sparrow Academy would cause. He’s swaying, the ground beneath his feet feels unsteady, like someone yanked it out from under him.
He sweeps the room, grateful to find that at least his siblings don’t seem to be actively dying but—god, they’re still at it. Still arguing with the Sparrow Academy. None of them are looking at him. None of them are paying attention. None of them have noticed that he is currently bleeding out in front of them.
Of course they haven’t.
It’s always like this.
He’s saved their asses more times than he can count, thrown himself into the line of fire for them, and still, no one notices when he needs help.
I'm standing right here, he thinks bitterly. Any of you idiots care to take a second and maybe look this way?
His heart is pounding in his ears, drowning out the noise around him, and the dark spots in his vision are growing, swallowing up the room, swallowing up his family. His legs tremble, and he knows he’s losing. His body is giving out, but damn it, he doesn’t want to fall. Not in front of them. Not like this.
Not now. Not now. Focus.
His knees are about to give out beneath him.
They don’t even know, he thinks, and the bitterness sinks deep into his chest, clawing up his throat, and he wants to scream. They won’t even realize until I hit the floor.
Darkness swallows him whole.
***
Five wakes with a sharp inhale. Then, the pain strikes him. Again.
For a second, he lies there, disoriented, staring up at the ceiling. There is a floating cube above him. It glows blue. His mind feels sluggish, trying to catch up on what happened and not quite succeeding. Something’s wrong. He tries to collect his thoughts: gunshots, the Sparrow Academy, shouting—
—but the room is quiet now.
He takes in the state of the room: broken furniture, walls cracked and splintered, debris scattered everywhere. It has the undeniable signs of a fight, but his siblings, nor the Sparrows, are anywhere in sight.
Where has his family gone?
Panic slices right through the fog in his mind, sharp and immediate. He pushes himself to his feet. Ignores the way his body protests the movement. Fights the urge to rest and tries to jump, but only succeeds in landing a foot away, staggering back to the floor. Then, that damned floating cube is hovering in his face with pulsing light. Five swipes at it—him? Not-Ben had called the cube Christopher—but it floats right out of reach, humming in an odd resonance.
You look ready to pass out.
“What the hell?” mutters Five. “What are you?”
He pushes himself up again. He still feels unsteady.
That’s rude, says the cube. Number Seven. Christopher.
“Good to know,” he replies dismissively. He needs to find his family. They could be in danger. They might be—no. He refuses to even entertain that notion. Not after working so hard to save them. Keep them alive. “Now if you’ll excuse me—”
Five tries to blink away. It fails. He stumbles again.
“Damn it,” he hisses, reaching out to brace himself on something.
He meets nothing but air. He falls.
He needs to find his siblings. Get them out of here. Fix everything. Again.
Where is—Five’s gaze lands on the briefcase on the table.
Christopher hums again. This is just sad.
“I don’t care what you think.”
I’m simply stating the facts.
“Shut up,” snaps Five, voice tight as he gets up again.
The others are fighting.
“I swear if any of you—” he threatens, like he could make himself look intimidating in his state, like his siblings aren’t potentially getting hurt without him, like this whole mess isn’t spiraling out of control.
And he cuts off at the sound of a pained shout. His heart leaps into his throat. He’s blinking into the adjacent room before he can even think about it. It’s empty, too, except he can hear a fight going on from above now.
Then, Vanya crashes through the table in the room Five just left.
She’s groaning in pain—he tries to comfort himself with the sentiment that it means she’s still alive—but her crumpled form goes still a few moments after. None of his other siblings are in sight. He can hear the mockery as the Sparrows close in on Vanya. It looks like most of them have reconvened here. Where are the rest of his siblings?
If the Sparrows are here, where are they?
Five summons every scrap of energy and blinks to Vanya, then both of them to the second floor. His vision is swimming with fury and exhaustion. He can barely keep himself up, much less shoulder her weight to hide out in a hallway. Christopher flies upward, humming in a way that Five takes to mean he’s letting the rest of the Sparrows know where he’s just jumped to.
He’s preparing to blink away again but—without warning, a wave of terror overwhelms him. He is just cognizant enough to recognize that it is not normal fear. It’s sharp, consuming, paralyzing. His chest tightens, breath caught up in his lungs, and his mind links the fear to the image that he is most scared of: loss.
He’s surrounded by fire and destruction. His siblings are lying motionless on the ground, their bodies broken and bloodied in the wreckage of the Umbrella Academy, and he is back to that harrowing moment when he had found them, when he had to bury them, and they were dead, dead again, because everything he had sacrificed to get back still led to the apocalypse. Because he couldn’t get the timeline right. Because he couldn’t save them.
Because—
Because—
Five comes back to awareness, chest heaving for air, and propped up with unsteady hands. Christopher is glowing red and wobbling where he is floating. He did something. Five tries to cast aside the thoughts of his dead family. It had to have been a power. He wasn’t in that ruined future anymore. He wasn’t. And he does his best to ignore how easily the apocalypse could happen again if he isn’t careful enough.
“I’ll kill you,” he swears, because damn that floating cube for making him relive his worst fears. Vanya is slowly staggering to her feet, clutching her side as she stumbles towards where Five is. It hurts to breathe, and he can’t tell if it’s the gunshot wounds that he’s surely aggravating or everything else. Vanya stops by him, trying to help him up, but even she’s wincing at the motion. “I’ll—I’ll—”
He’s injured and possibly dying, but more than willing to push past it if Christopher tries anything like that on him again. His hands are itching for a weapon. Instead, they grip tightly onto Vanya’s as she helps him up. Five looks back to the other room, where the Sparrows are in various states of injury, watching them—watching Vanya—with wariness. He pieces together what must have happened while he was being useless, too caught up in his own head to properly protect what was in front of him.
“Come on,” says Vanya, voice hushed. Her gaze drops to his bleeding midsection, and he wraps an arm around it when her eyes go wide with horror. “Oh god, Five. You’re—”
Five cuts her off. “Where’s—?”
“Already out, I think.”
Already out. He breathes a little easier at that. Alive, alive, alive.
Just leave, comes that resonant hum of not-quite words.
Five looks back just to glare.
Christopher is hovering at the doorway, between them and the Sparrows, with an unsteadiness akin to shaking one’s head. Five looks between Christopher, then the rest of the Sparrows, and he gets the sense that they are trying to do the same thing for their respective families. He resents the similarity.
Vanya is facing him with concern. “Five—”
And he blinks them out of the house that is no longer theirs.