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She was always watching him.
It started when he first arrived. The mental institute was the kind straight out of horror movies. Whitewashed walls, wailing patients, forceful sedation. The works. It took two weeks for Diego to become fully conscious, and another month after that to get a handle on the outbursts caused by the inhibition of the drugs. He hadn’t seen her, at first.
It was a boring, drone-heavy day. The curtains were stained a dull yellow. Diego was on the floor. He didn’t know how he had gotten there. A torn armchair dug into his shoulder where he was slumped against it. Dust floated in the air, softly illuminated by the harsh lighting. The illusion of serenity.
There she was, big dark eyes fixed on him. Her face looked sharpened, hard, with soft glowy eyes set into her features. Her thin frame was draped over with the patient uniform and a scratchy cardigan. A bird. Part vulture, part dove.
Or maybe his mind wasn’t really clear yet.
She kept looking at him, fixated from across the room, until Marge with what he thought was dementia wandered between them and knocked a box of crayons over the woman’s drawing paper. Without hesitation, the bird-like girl snapped one in half and jammed it into Marge’s eye.
It happened again when he was required to attend group therapy sessions. Everyone was required to share, and every day she said something new and completely contradictory about her life before the hospital. Diego just tried not to answer much. They baited him into saying unprovable things and used it as a trap for sedation. Sometimes, when he was trying to sleep, he could feel hundreds of needles slowly piercing his flesh, starting with the buzzing pain of his tattoo and ending with his most recent stick by an institute orderly. He would do anything to avoid another one.
“Diego,” the doctor, or psychiatrist, or fucking laundromat clerk for all his credentials seemed to have taught him. “Do you have anything to share with the group?”
Diego glowered. He knew he couldn’t get away with saying nothing. The needle that lived just on the edge of his mind threatened him with its sharp gleam. He could never quite chase the brain fog away. He wondered how Klaus could stand it.
He quickly stopped thinking of Klaus as the sting of whatever he felt about his brother rushed through him.
Then he noticed her again. The haunting specter of the institute, for him specifically, it seemed. He didn’t know her name. She was five seats to his left, bird-gaze transfixed on his face. She tilted her head as he noticed her, and he could swear there was a challenge in her eyes.
Diego grit his teeth.
“Sure, doc,” he bit out. “What’d you like to know?”
He didn’t take his eyes off her.
“Thank you for your cooperation, Diego.” There was a note of surprise in his voice, cleverly buried under layers of his real distance and apathy. “What about your life before coming here? Some studies now suggest that your upbringing could affect what you become in life. What was your family like, growing up?
Again, Diego saw the glint of challenge. There was something, definitely, buried in her gaze. He swore that if he could break through the cloud of sedation that maybe he could see it.
He glared at her, tired of being passive. She gave him a little toying frown, teeth almost bared.
“Diego,” the doctor said, much less patient than before. “Let’s start small, shall we? Tell the group about your father.”
Just the word sent a dissatisfied rumble through the crowd and a roll of dread through Diego. He couldn’t look away from the girl, now.
“My father,” he spat. His words halted for a moment and he prayed he wouldn’t stutter. “was a piece of shit.”
“Come now, Diego,” the doctor said. “Our parents are with us to support and foster growth. Our fathers help us grow into strong, dauntless young men. No one can resist the paternal bond between their own flesh and blood.”
The girl’s eyes darkened. Diego whipped his head back toward the doctor, glowering.
“He could.” He growled. “I was adopted.”
“Ah, of course,” the doctor said, mock-delicacy shadowed in his words. “How kind and noble of him to take you out of your… situation. Rescued from a life of poverty on the streets, probably joining some kind of gang and being killed by thugs. A respectable, American upbringing was surely there to straighten you out.”
“ No ,” he said. “He took us from our homes, he hurt all of us-”
“Diego, I understand that you’re upset right now, but I need you to take some deep breaths before I have to call an orderly. High strung emotions are a perfectly reasonable reaction considering your mental instability, but this outburst is unacceptable.”
Diego’s words died in his throat. He couldn’t bear the thought of that long, glinting needle.
“I understand how it might be difficult for you to understand what your father did for you. You mentioned an ‘us’. Were your siblings also from poor, uneducated homes? Tell us about them.”
Diego could almost feel bile rising up in his throat.
“There were seven of us,” he said. The girl’s head perked up. He had nearly forgotten her, but now she stared at him as if he was an unchanging object in the universe.
“I-I was Number-” he sucked in a breath and imagined his number before him, stamped neatly on everything he owned. “Two.”
“Was this an academic ranking system? Or were you the second eldest child?”
“No, I don’t,” Diego floundered. “I don’t know, it isn’t- we were all born on the same day.”
“Second best, then.”
Diego could feel the eyes of the concious patients boring into him. The bird girl looked at him with an unreadble mix of intrigue and fire.
“I’m n-not, I w-wasn’t-”
“Diego, please, speak clearly or we will be forced to calm you.”
Speak up, Number Two. The brutal pain of the knives he couldn’t control in time. The sting of his father’s dagger.
Just picture the word in your mind, Diego.
“Diego.”
Number Two.
“Diego.”
Diego scrambled for his thoughts. He had to tell this doctor about his family, someone had to know, maybe word would get out and someone would help them. No , the world needed them, needs them, they can’t betray their calling for mere comfort. They were children, they didn’t need anything more. They were children.
“N-number On-ne, he was st-strong,” Diego tried to get the information out as his vision swam before him. The leftover sedatives blurred the memory of Number One’s face. For all Diego knew, he was just a child. Perhaps they were all children, still?
“N-n-number, n-umber three is-”
“ Diego. ” The doctor chastised him. “Remain calm or you will be restrained.”
Diego tried to draw a breath, but the world began to dim. He saw the brilliant light of Vanya’s power as the earth crashed down around them.
Two white shapes were approaching him on either side. He saw the doctor across the circle from him, the girl to his left. The rest of the world blurred and shifted. Something glinted in the orderly’s hand.
“N-no, please, not-”
Her name was Lila. She sat right next to him in the circle the next day. He was groggy, he could barely see straight. She kept poking him with a single tine off a plastic fork until he snapped at her. She grinned like this was all great fun, and poked him again.
He was always struck by how disproportionately innocent her eyes looked. The rest of her body, the easy way she held herself and hopped around like furniture was simply another piece of the floor, was always offset by her round, wide eyes.
He had literally watched her try to kill men twice his size. She blinked at him owlishly and it made her look like a child.
They shoved each other when the doctor wasn’t watching. He fell out of his chair once, and was threatened with sedation again. Afterwards, she brought him a handful of hamburger meat as penance.
It was so good to be free.
Sort of free. They were still being hunted, and now they were trapped in another scheme to save the world via Five’s brilliant intervention. There was nothing like being around his siblings again. It wasn’t really good , but it was certainly something special. In whatever context you took it.
And then he was shanked by his own father.
Not exactly the highlight of his week, but honestly that old bastard had done worse.
Lila was perched on the end of the couch, watching him stare at the ceiling. She wore the same pinafore dress, the white top now lightly speckled with his blood.
“Dear God, would you stop your bloody moping?” she complained, loudly. Everything she did was loud. He sort of loved it.
“I’m not moping ,” he scoffed.
Lila rolled her eyes in a grandiose gesture.
“Boohoo, my daddy shanked me under a bridge because I’m an idiot, this makes me so sad,” she mocked. She fixed him with a deadpan stare. “Get over it.”
“That’s a valid reason to be upset!” he objected. “I literally was shanked by my own father.”
“Like he’s never done anything worse?” she taunted him. She tossed her hair over her shoulder like she was a world-class diva and not an actual asylum escapee. “You need some more action in your life.”
Diego scoffed, but was interrupted by Lila sliding off the couch arm and plopping onto his legs, jostling his body and sending a jolt of pain through his stomach.
“Ow!” he yelped.
“Oh, shush,” she said, swatting his hip. She crawled up his body until her hands were planted on the couch cushions just above his shoulders. Her eyes, now rimmed with the eyeliner that seemed to complete her as a person, were still big and innocent, though she was smirking devilishly. She dipped down and kissed the tip of his nose, such a soft gesture that he was frozen, blinking, for a moment.
Lila grinned.
“Cheer up.”
Lila’s brown eyes were blinking back tears across the destruction of the barn. Diego had never seen her cry before.
She stood, the gun limp in her hand, as she stared at her mother. Five and the others hung back in a loose circle, watching, tense and wary. Weak sunlight streamed through the bullet holes in the worn wooden walls, casting tiny spotlights across Lila’s hair and clothing.
“Is that true?” she asked her mother, and Diego heard the underlying broken tone of the child he imagined her to be. Alone with the murdered bodies of her parents. A different kind of alone than he was, but their similarities had brought them together. Two children raised to become weapons.
He knew what it was like to witness the image of your parent splinter apart in your mind. Lila’s chest heaved as she listened to her mother’s explanations and attempts to wash away the past. Diego understood. How many times had he watched, tongue frozen, as his father convinced them of their true purpose? Of the work they needed to do to ‘save the world’? The Handler may have not had the same motives, but Diego had looked into eyes just the same as hers his whole life.
It seemed as if Lila was really seeing them for the first time now.
She tried to set her features in a mask of toughness, but he just saw her in the institute, flopped over the back of a couch and tying her own hair into knots. He saw her in Elliot’s loft, throwing popcorn at his siblings. Crying in the dark room, babbling about yogurt. She was so much more than what her mother had made her to be. She was everything.
“Lila,” Diego said. His throat was so dry it stuck to itself. There was blood dripping down the back of his head from the fight. “Lila, please, listen to Five. You don’t have to be alone. You don’t have to live like this. She’s not your family, she hurt your family.”
Lila didn’t look at him. She stared at her mother, her fine clothes and gloved hands. In stilettos on a battlefield.
“Lila,” he pleaded. He didn’t know how to say what he wanted to say, how to vocalize the words that had been pushing up out of his throat since the day they had escaped that asylum together. That was always his problem. The words were always stuck.
“Mum?” Lila’s voice was small, just like the look in her eyes.
“Lila, don’t listen to her.” He loosened his grip on the knife in his hand, not confident enough to put it down, but he had to give her something . His heart was thudding in his ears as her eyes finally flicked up to his. “We could be your family.”
She blinked away the tears.
“You’re just like us,” he said. “You could come with us. Be in our family. You belong with us.”
Lila looked at him. He tried not to blink. He took his fingers off the knife so that it was held just by his palm and thumb, as close to a surrender as he could give her.
The tension between them was worse than it had ever been, but there was also understanding. To him, she was the girl from the asylum, his fellow escapee, his partner in crime for the last weeks. She was more to him than anyone else who saw her. He remembered her teeth biting into his shoulder and he remembered her firm hands on his wounds. She wasn’t gentle, and she didn’t need to be. But she could be more than the teeth in a machine. She could be more than what she was made to be. To him, she was something else.
He hoped that he was something to her, too.
Lila’s lip trembled, and Diego thought for a moment that he might really see her cry.
A spray of gunfire ripped through the room. Bullets tore through the body of the Handler, and her body tumbled to the ground. Diego hit the ground, throwing his hands over his head and looking around frantically for his siblings. They were crouched or curled up on the rubble of the fight. Five stood brazenly in the center of the room, facing the shooter. One of the Swedish brothers, the men who had killed Elliot. Diego readied his knife between his fingers. The Swede stared Five down. Neither of them moved as the shooter’s eyes flicked between the hunched and defensive siblings. At last, Five spoke.
“Enough.”
The Swede stared at him a moment longer. Five’s hands clenched into fists.
" Tillräckligt ," he agreed. The man turned and stalked away.
Five spun on his heel.
“Everyone alive?” he shouted. Various affirmative grunts replied.
Diego shot up into standing position and helped Vanya up, checking her for injuries. Klaus and Allison gathered beside him. Luther stumbled toward them, like an idiot.
“Are you okay?” he asked Allison.
Five blinked over to the corpse of the Handler.
“Gone for real, this time,” he said. He kicked her limp arm with his dress shoes.
Diego scanned the barn.
“Lila?”
He went to the place she had been standing. Nothing. He turned to look out the barn door. The empty, devastated farm stared back.
He closed his eyes for a moment and imagined the look on her face before she left. He thought of her brown eyes, rimmed with black and shiny with tears.
He promised himself he would give her a place in their family.