Umbrella Academy fic: Hunger Pains (1/4)
Title: Hunger Pains
Disclaimer: These characters are definitely not mine.
A/N: So very unbeta’ed. This fits my low blood sugar square for hc_bingo. Set post season one.
Summary: Allison has no way to fix things with her daughter. Therefore, she puts all her effort into fixing Five, much to Five’s chagrin.
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
PART FOUR
-o-
Allison has concluded that Five has a messed up relationship with food.
Now, to be fair, there are a lot of messed up things about Five. In the rush of the apocalypse, they had been willing overlook a lot. They hadn’t had time to dwell on the fact that he had lived alone for 30 years or that he’d apparently fallen in love with a mannequin. Even the notion that he’d spent years as a trained assassin with nothing but his desperate notes to get him back to his family had been particularly important when the world was about to end.
That’s done now. As in, they’ve saved the world. They’ve fixed their family and reinstated the Umbrella Academy. It’s all seven of them living together under one roof, united. Those little things that were so easy to overlook then?
Well, they’re not so easy to overlook now.
And Five has a really messed up relationship with food.
That’s not to say that they all don’t have their problems. They do, and there’s no secret about it. Luther has ongoing body dysphoria, not to mention his unresolved problems with their father. Diego carries around so much resentment that anything still sets him off, and he’s just as likely to engage in polite conversation as he is to shank you. Klaus is a recovering addict, which is bad enough, but as he comes into his sobriety, he comes into new powers and, yeah, that’s exciting for everyone involved. Ben is dead, so it’s hard to know what to make of his issues. Ironically, he seems the best adjusted of them all, but that’s not particularly saying very much. And Vanya is coping remarkably well with everything she’s been through, and she only breaks down a few times a week under the weight of the fact that she’s caused the apocalypse at least two times.
So, yeah, they all need therapy and lots of it, but Allison finds Five’s attitude toward food more pressing than the rest. After all, food is sustenance. Food is survival. Without food, an underlying basis for living, everything else is resting on precarious footings. It’s a relationship that deserves attention, and Five seems less than inclined to give it that attention.
At first, it might be easy to think Five is taking food for granted. He is an asshole, and everyone knows it. He’s condescending and rude and he’s generally a prick. It’s possible that he thinks he’s too good for food -- or that he simply can’t be bothered to deal with something so mundane.
She’d buy this -- she would -- if he were just skipping family meals. It’s one thing for him to not want to waste time eating with the family -- hell, that probably has psychological foundations. The last family dinner he attended never ended so well, so maybe it’s all rolled up with PTSD.
But it’s not just family dinners.
It’s also lunch.
And breakfast.
And snacks.
Basically, she never sees him eat.
Ever.
Obviously, he has to eat sometimes. Skinny as he is, he’s not dead, so there must be some consumption. However, over the course of several weeks, Allison sees him consume half a donut, three marshmallows and a spoonful of peanut butter. In the same span, she watches him drink approximately 15 pots of coffee, 12 margaritas and various other alcoholic drinks that are way too strong for his small frame.
In short, Five’s got a messed up relationship with food.
And Allison needs to figure out why.
-o-
Why is actually a tall order, when you get down to it. She’s an actress, and there’s some psychology involved with that, but she hardly feels qualified to understand the minute facets of trauma on an egotistical personality that was stunted in early puberty.
Besides, there are a lot of other whys in her life right now.
“No, I don’t understand,” she says to Patrick over the phone. She’s pacing across one of the rooftop terraces that overlooks the city, wishing she had a pack of cigarettes handy. “Why can’t I have visitation?”
“The judge hasn’t granted the order yet,” Patrick says over the phone.
“But you know it’s coming--”
“And it’s not here yet--”
“Come on!” she implores now. “Can’t you be flexible? Just a little?”
“This is our daughter,” Patrick replies emphatically. “I can’t cut corners. She’s too important.”
“I know,” she agrees. “And don’t you think she should see her mother?”
“Yes, but only when it’s right,” Patrick insists over the line. “If you value the relationship, you’ll do it right. You’ll take the time to do it right.”
“I am doing it right,” Allison says. She shakes her head and presses her lips together. “Talking to her is the right thing.”
He sighs audibly. “You keep acting like it’s easy, but you’re the one who messed this up.”
She blows out a breath, long, hard and frustrated. She can’t argue that; she doesn’t want to anymore. “Patrick, this is ridiculous. We were married. We shared a life together. Doesn’t that relationship, our relationship, count for anything?”
“I don’t know what parts of that relationship were even real, Allison,” Patrick says, and the anger is tinged with real hurt this time. She forgets that, sometimes. That she hurt him, that she well and truly hurt him. “It’s too messed up. A relationship? Shit, Allison, I don’t even know if I can call it that.”
She swallows hard now, and she’s not going to cry. She’s spent her tears on this; she’ll allow herself no more. “It was real for me, Patrick. It was all real to me.”
“I want to believe you, I do,” he says, quieter now. The pretense is gone. The posturing is over. “I just...if this is a relationship, then you have to rebuild it.”
She nods and closes her eyes for a moment. “Okay,” she replies, opening them again. “I”m willing to work on that. Whatever it takes, Patrick. Whatever it takes.”
-o-
So, no more with the question why.
Allison, for the time being, will focus on the how.
Practically speaking, she’s done all she can in terms of Claire. She’s done the therapy. She’s appeared in court. She’s filed her motions. It’s all in the hands of a judge now, her request for custody is sitting there, waiting to be signed. There is no more how where Claire is concerned.
So if she can’t fix the mess with Claire, what can she do?
Well, Allison’s not one to be idle. Call her vain, call her duplicitous, call her untrustworthy -- but do not call Allison Hargreeves lazy.
If Claire’s a no-go, then she’ll turn her attentions elsewhere.
It’s not a question of how she can fix Claire.
It’s a question of how she can fix Five.
His caustic attitude, his penchant for scribbling on walls, his ability to kill people with hands, his habit of drinking alcohol in public, his affection for mannequins -- all problematic, to be sure.
But his eating habits.
Allison can’t get over his eating habits.
That’s a strange one.
It’s also one that Allison is pretty sure she can start addressing right here, right now.
-o-
Some people might start by actually talking to Five. That’s not a terrible notion, and in another situation, she might consider it. But this is Five. Talking directly to Five is always pretty hit or miss, and she’s pretty sure if she voices her concerns without substantiating them, he’s going to ignore her completely.
Therefore, she’ll play this the way Five would play it.
With facts. Figures. Numbers. Logic.
She can do that. She’s smart, intuitive, capable. It’s like research for a role. You have to immerse yourself into someone else’s world. You have to track them, dissect them, look for their tells. It’s a process that breaks a person down to their barest parts until you understand them in a way they don’t even grasp themselves.
Yes, Allison has rumored her way onto a movie set or two, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t work her ass once she got there. She’s learned, after all these years, that you can’t rumor an entire audience. And, contrary to Patrick’s belief, you can’t rumor your way into an Academy Award. Some things you do have to earn.
Are Five’s eating habits one of them?
She has decided yes because she cares about him.
Also, she needs the distraction.
At any rate, she makes a point to wander by his room first thing in the morning. When she finds that he’s already awake, she moseys down the stairs, trying to not to look like she’s in a hurry. The kitchen, however, is vacant. The coffee pot is still warm but empty, and there’s a used coffee cup on the table. There are not any dishes, however.
She makes a half hearted effort with her own breakfast, settling on a banana as she meanders out to the living areas. When she finds Five in the library, he’s reading a book. There is a legal pad that has been scrawled all over, and he doesn’t look up when she enters.
“Hey,” she says, like this is totally a casual meeting. “You hungry? I was thinking about making something.”
“Why would my being hungry affect your decision to make yourself breakfast?” Five asks blandly. He doesn’t bother looking up.
Allison has thick enough skin that she isn’t insulted -- even if she knows that’s what Five’s trying to do. “It doesn’t,” she says, nonchalant as ever. “Just thought if you wanted something, I’d make a little extra. Just being nice.”
Five reaches for the pad and scribbles frantically for a few seconds. He pauses, bites his lips, and scribbles some more.
When he makes no effort to say anything, she cocks her head. “Five?”
He still doesn’t look up. “I don’t need you to be nice,” he says. “Just quiet. Do you mind?”
That’s a no on breakfast, then.
Allison makes a mental note and heads back out into the hall.
-o-
The hardest part, she decides, is tracking Five discreetly. This is not so much a problem because Five notices anything. Five is oblivious, which is sort of counterintuitive. You’d think, him being a trained assassin and all, that he’d be hyper aware of his surroundings. But apparently he deems the mansion to be a safe zone. Consequently, he doesn’t notice anything Allison does.
Or, if he does, he ignores her.
She’d buy either explanation.
No, Five isn’t the problem. The others, though. She has to make lots of little excuses why she’s chilling in her bedroom with the door open to see if Five’s moving up and down the stairs. She has to lie to Luther that she’s really into her book right now as she parks herself in front of the library for half the day reading. Diego asks if she’s depressed. Klaus is worried that someone has died. Vanya, bless her, sits with her for part of the day, chatting about irrelevant things because sisters.
Of course, none of this observation is made any easier by the fact that Five can move through space. She knows he can leave the room she watching without her seeing him, so she has to devise excuses to get up and walk past his doorway. She tells Luther that she likes the light in the upstairs bathroom. She tells Diego that the chairs in the living room have better lumbar support.
She spends so much time making sure that no one notices that she’s following Five that she doesn’t devote as much attention as she wants to actually following Five.
It probably doesn’t matter all that much, however.
Because Five doesn’t eat lunch.
She thinks he might make himself a peanut butter and marshmallow sandwich at some point in the afternoon but only because he leaves most of it on a plate, abandoned and forgotten in the kitchen. She checks, multiple times. It’s still there by dinner when Vanya mindlessly cleans it up.
Speaking of dinner, Vanya has a thing for cooking, and she makes enough stroganoff to feed the family. Most of the siblings wander down because they smell food and they’re mostly lazy assholes about this kind of thing, and before they know it, it’s a makeshift family dinner. All they have to do is play a recording about mountain climbing in the background and it’s just like old times.
Luther is laughing at one of Klaus’ jokes, and Diego is carving his initials into the table -- again -- for no apparent reason. Vanya serves dinner and somehow throws together a salad and rolls, and there’s a table spot for Ben.
Allison says, “Hey, wait. Has anyone seen Five?”
They stop, Klaus mid-story, Luther mid-laugh. Diego looks up with a frown, and Ben glances down at his hands. Vanya is the only one who actually seems to think about the question, though. “You know, I haven’t,” she says. “I didn’t even think--”
“He’s not big on family meals,” Diego observes, going back to his carving.
“Next time we’ll have to make it a family meeting,” Luther says. “Official.”
“Five and family meals? Can’t imagine why that might cause some problems,” Klaus murmurs.
Allison pushes back from the table. “You know, don’t worry about it. I’ll check on him.”
She’s not sure what worries her more.
The fact that Five’s not here at dinner when she knows he has to be hungry.
Or the fact that no one else seems to notice but her.
-o-
Five is not in his bedroom. She knows he’s not on the main floor -- there’s no way he’d be lurking so close to a family meal -- which limits the possibilities a bit. Only a bit, however. That’s the thing about living in a mansion. It’s great when you want to hide. It’s a little less great when you want to find someone who is hiding.
Ever since Five has been back, she’s found him in a few of their old nooks and crannies. As children, they had all laid claim to various hideouts, but Five’s not in any of those. She has to make her way through several abandoned spaces before she finally finds him in a dimly lit room in a deserted floor on the east wing of the building. Originally, she thinks it might have been a loft apartment over one of the businesses that has been defunct for decades, but it’s so dusty and dank that it’s hard to tell.
What is easy to tell is that Five has claimed it as his own.
At least, that’s the conclusion she comes to based on the amount of Five’s handwriting all over the wall.
She stands in the doorway for a good two minutes, just taking it in.
Five steps back, chalk still in his hand. He wipes his fingers on his shorts and sighs. “You shouldn’t loiter. It’s rude.”
She takes this as an invitation and steps inside.
He looks back at her with a scowl. “I meant that you could leave,” he says. “But I guess this works, too.”
He’s serious and not, and mostly, Allison has learned not to care. “You know, everyone is back down having dinner,” she says. When this doesn’t appear to be a self evident invitation, she makes it explicit. “You should come, hang out.”
He shakes his head, wrinkling his nose. “I’ve got far too much going on here.”
She raises her eyebrows, casting a disparaging eye to the wall that he’s covered in numbers and letters.
“If I stop now, I’ll lose my train of thought,” he says, as if this is some kind of acceptable explanation.
“I’m sure,” she says.
“I will,” he says. “I’ve been working on this all day. I can’t just stop.”
Questioning his drive for mathematics is one way to go about this, but Allison isn’t questioning his relationship with numbers. “You need to eat,” she says instead.
He makes a harrumphing noise, the kind you’d expect your grandfather to make.
Allison imagines, anyway. She’s never had a grandfather she knows.
“Just a little dinner,” she implores, softer now.
He huffs, and looks back at his long and winding equation. “Dinner can wait,” he says, and he steps back up to the wall, starting to write again.
Allison watches him for several more moments, and she has to bite her tongue as she reminds herself that this is her time of observation. She needs the fact, all of the facts. Her brother isn’t going to care about social obligation or familiar concern.
But mathematical statistics?
He might well listen to.
No breakfast, no lunch: check, check.
Now, no dinner.
Check again.
It seems like a pretty strong case already.
-o-
The fact that Allison has a great time at dinner actually only makes things worse. She feels guilty about it when she goes back for seconds. She feels beside herself when she passes around the extra dinner rolls and helps herself to another. Food doesn’t define their relationships, not in the least, but it’s easy to see that this is them at their best. This is what family is supposed to be.
Sharing food, sharing time. Breaking bread, breaking barriers.
When they’re done, there’s no doubt they’re full.
-o-
After a heavy meal, Allison feels just about ready for bed. It’s still early, though, and she reminds herself that she’s not done with her tasks for the day.
Obligingly, she checks for Five and finds his room vacant. She wanders through the mansion to his new hideout, but he’s not there either. She’s concerned, even more so when Five’s not in the library or living room.
To her utter surprise, she finds him in the kitchen.
He’s squatting in front of the fridge, lifting up one of the foil covers over the leftovers of Vanya’s stroganoff. He’s clearly eating a few bites, and he has to swallow and wipe his fingers on his chalk-covered shorts before he stands up.
“You made such a big deal out of it, I was curious,” he says, managing not to blush even though Allison can see he’s embarrassed. “It was probably a lot better warm.”
With most people, Allison might take a sympathetic bent. Somehow, she doubts it will work with Five. She crosses her arms over her chest. “Well, you could have found out.”
The implication is impossible for Five to miss. He’s not good with people, sure, but he’s not stupid. He’s emotionally capable if emotionally resistant; sometimes he will surprise you.
Sometimes, he won’t.
He shrugs, and the depth of his indifference is difficult to place.
Exasperated, she rolls her eyes. “If you want, you can still find out,” she suggests. “You want me to warm it up for you?”
This question, somehow, seems to catch him off guard. “What?”
“The leftovers,” Allison clarifies. “I can warm them up.”
It’s a genuine request with no malice or hidden intent. That’s probably why Five has no idea what to make of it. “There’s no need for that,” he says, brows drawn together in consternation. “I have a few more things I need to do anyway.”
He says this dismissively, as if he’s proved some kind of point of substance. He hasn’t, of course, and Allison has no desire to baby him in this regard. “A few what?”
He looks surprised that she’s questioning him. “Equations.”
She doesn’t hide her skepticism. “Equations? For what? I thought we saved the world -- unless there’s something you’re not telling us.”
This whole conversation has caught him off guard, but that insight is one that he clearly doesn’t see coming. He blinks, almost physically recoiling, before hastily gathering his composure again. “Of course not,” he says, more than a touch defensively now. “It’s not like that.”
As Five’s agitation increases, Allison finds her composure even more solidified. “Then what?”
Five doesn’t quite splutter -- at least not verbally. She sees his mind hurtling over the possibilities to maintain a presence in a conversation it does not want to have. “Just equations.”
Allison allows her skepticism to show. She knows this is about Five’s relationship with food, but things are never that simple. Her brother is hungry, she knows he must be. And she knows that an empty stomach leads to decreased mental capacity. In other words, Five’s keen mind isn’t so keen for the lack of food right now. “For what?” she asks coolly.
This time, he glowers a little. “Does it matter?”
Still nonplussed, Allison shrugs. “You tell me.”
Five’s frustration -- which may or may not be tied to his empty stomach -- is really starting to get the better of him. “Look, it’s just that I like doing equation,” he says, flustered to the point where he sounds like the 13 year old boy he looks like. “That’s all.”
Allison knows she’s effectively won this argument. She also knows, however, that Five will never admit that. She eases her way past the idea of victory and goes for the spoils instead. “Are you sure I can’t warm something up for you?”
Five sighs, his expression flat. “I’m fine, Allison,” he says. “You don’t need to worry so much.”
There might be a trace of compassion, the slightest hint of softness, but it’s impossible to tell. Before Allison can ask another question to find out, Five blinks out of the room.
Because if you can’t win, then retreat, retreat, retreat.
-o-
Allison is in the kitchen, but she’s not the one who needs to eat. Still, she takes a few minutes to tidy up for the sake of appearances. Winning the battle, she knows, is not the same thing as winning the war. And open warfare with Five? Is no small task.
For good measure, she gets herself a glass of water and starts her trek back through the house. She’s technically looking for Five, but she doesn’t want to appear like she’s looking for Five, which means she has to be moving in the direction of her room with some purpose even while trying to look in as many nooks and crannies of the mansion as she can.
She can’t be entirely sure, but she’s fairly confident that Five is not on the main floor. With his stomach mostly empty, she wonders how much energy he has for jumps, but that’s not something she’s ever talked to him about. She knows that he has some limits on his abilities -- they all do -- but that his are more temperamental than most. Luther can’t stop himself from being strong. Klaus’ ability to connect with the dead is so pervasive that he self medicated for years to avoid it. It’s pretty hard for Allison to mess up three little words, though she wonders sometimes if her intent plays a role in the effectiveness of her lies. She imagines that Diego might have less ability to control knives if he were drunk, but there’s no enough evidence to make any real conclusions there.
Vanya is probably the closest comparison, but her powers seem to flow out of her. She has to work hard to control them. Five seems to operate in the other direction. He has to work hard to muster his powers, and he’s the only one who can seem truly exhausted when he exerts himself. She remembers how tired he’d been after jumping them to the past before the world ending. He’d slept for the better part of a week. The jump back had been even more draining.
Is this a physical drain? An emotional one?
Allison doesn’t know, and she wonders how much Five knows, how much he’s thought about it. For all that he likes to do equations, he’s not always super self observant. It wouldn’t surprise her if he’s only vaguely aware of his own limitations, as if that’s some kind of buffer between him and his weakness.
She’s somewhat relieved that Five’s in his bedroom. It’s tricky to get up the stairs without attracting his attention, but she sees him moving through the door that’s been left ajar. Somehow, he’s holding a coffee cup as he stares thoughtfully at an equation that he’s writing on the wall. She thinks it’s a new equation, etched on top of an old one, but she doesn’t really care about that. She is curious, however, where Five got the coffee.
Did the bastard sneak back into the kitchen? Or does he just have a coffee pot in his room to make things easier?
She makes a mental note to find out.
Tomorrow.
For now, she and Five are at an impasse. His problematic relationship with food will be her main task for tomorrow.
As for tonight?
Well, there’s another relationship she still needs to repair.
-o-
Back in her own room, Allison closes the door. She checks the time and does the quick math. It’s getting late here, but on the west coast it’d still be early. Claire’s probably not in bed yet.
She chews her lip, taking out her phone. She pulls up Patrick’s number and dials, hopeful. All she wants to do is say goodnight, a quick goodnight to Claire. Patrick might agree to that. He might cave.
When the line connects, Allison allows herself to hope.
That hope is stymied, however, when a woman’s voice answers.
A woman.
Not a girl.
Not a man.
A woman.
“Hello?” the woman asks, and it sounds like she’s been laughing. “Patrick’s phone.”
“Uh, hi,” Allison says, not sure if she wants to demand to know who this woman is or just demand to talk to Patrick. “Who’s this?”
There’s a giggle, and Patrick can be heard in the background calling, “Who is it?”
Somewhere, in the distance, there’s the sound of a little girl laughing. Claire giggles, and says, “Daddy!”
“Oh, just the lady of the house,” the woman says in a singsong voice. She must think this is a joke, Allison concludes. Not a joke. Just another night at home.
Allison is hot and cold all at once. The rush of blood to her head is too much. Claire laughs again and the woman asks, “Hello?”
Disconnecting the call, Allison throws her phone on the bed and stares at it for a long couple of seconds. She’s still staring at it when Patrick’s number lights -- no doubt to call her back. Patrick tries once and twice, back to back, but Allison doesn’t move.
She sits down numbly on the bed, thinking about her daughter getting put to bed by another woman. Closing her eyes, she flops back on the pillows and exhales heavily. Her phone pings -- two missed calls and a text -- but she doesn’t turn to look at it. Her stomach feels funny, it feels sick.
Maybe all that dinner isn’t settling so well after all.
-o-
Allison sleeps like that with her clothes on, on top of the covers. It’s not particularly comfortable, and her mouth tastes like it’s thick with cotton when she wakes up. She blinks the sleep out of her eyes and she’s that she’s got five messages from Patrick. She skims them and confirms what she knows already. Patrick has a girlfriend who spends the night. She’s a nice girl, a sweet girl and Claire loves her.
Allison tosses the phone aside without responding.
She knows why, of course.
Why Patrick has another girl. Why Claire likes her so much.
Because she’s there.
That’s the first key to any relationship.
Sometimes you just have to be there.
Of course, it helps when there’s not a court order preventing you from being there, but that will be sorted soon enough, Allison hopes. At least, she better be. This waiting is driving her crazy, though. All this paperwork. All this legalese.
She wants to be there more than anything.
Unfortunately, she’s still here.
Getting up, she breathes out, long and hard and presses her lips together.
She’s here, in this mansion with her family.
She’ll just have to make the most of it in the meantime.
-o-
It would surprise some people to know that Allison can be a relatively low maintenance kind of girl. Sure, when she’s working, she puts on her game face. She’ll doll herself up and look the part, but in truth, she prefers things simpler. There’s a reason, after all, when she had all the fame and money, she would look up at the moon and pine instead.
Being away from Hollywood is hell in that she’s away from Claire. It’s quite liberating in nearly every other capacity. She takes a quick shower and throws on something simple and she’s downstairs before any of her other siblings have stirred.
Almost any of them.
She’s not surprised to find Five, already nursing a cup of coffee, reading a newspaper at the kitchen table.
“Papers are obsolete, don’t you know that?” Allison quips, pulling out some ingredients to throw together breakfast.
“You could argue I’m obsolete, but I’m still here,” Five replies with his little gremlin smile. The one that makes him look 13 and 80 all at the same time. “And I find it oddly refreshing to hold something physical.”
Allison can’t argue that. “That’s why you should be eating more than coffee for breakfast,” she says. “I’m making eggs. Do you want some?”
This question sounds innocent enough, but Five narrows his eyes suspiciously. “Mom already offered.”
“But did you have some?”
“No.”
“Okay,” Allison says. “So how about now?”
Five is more skeptical than ever. He looks at Allison critically over the top of his newspaper, as if he’s assessing her, doing a probability map of her intention in real time.
“I do make some pretty good eggs,” Allison says. “Claire’s favorite is scrambled.”
Five purses his lips and looks back down. “I’m good, thanks.”
“Oh, come on,” Allison cajoles, reaching for a skillet. “You’ve got to be hungry.”
She turns back around.
He also has to be gone.
The cup of coffee, half drunk, and the newspaper have been left in his wake.
Allison turns back to her eggs and mutters, “So much for breakfast.”
-o-
Allison does make good eggs and she eats them because she’s hungry and spiteful and being hungry makes her spiteful and being spiteful makes her hungry. She eats them and thinks they’re the best eggs in the whole damn world, better than any eggs some cutesy live-in girlfriend in California could make.
Still, breakfast is more or less a failure, so Allison ups her game at lunch. She tracks Five throughout the morning, finding that he eats precisely one slice of bread and possibly a banana. It’s hard to say about the banana because there are six of them living (one not living) in the house, but Five’s the only one who likes to be in dad’s study -- besides Luther, at least, and Luther still respects their father too much to do something like eat a banana in there.
Yes, Allison has taken to checking the trash cans. She has no shame.
And besides, if someone catches, she just has to rumor them into forgetting she’s been acting weird.
Not that she would do that.
Probably.
For lunch, however, she waits until the end of the lunch hour -- just to give Five the benefit of the doubt -- before crashing next to him where he’s sitting on the couch doing an equation. This one is at least on a legal pad, though it’s just as unintelligible to her as the rest.
“So, I’m starving,” she says, playing it up as best she can.
Five glances at her with the most benign interest.
“What do you say -- we go out for lunch,” she says, nudging him in that sibling way that they’ve never had as Hargreeves. “My treat.”
Five doesn’t pull away, which you might expect for him. For all of his bristling nature, he’s surprisingly indulgent of his siblings and their whims, Allison has noticed. She’s hoping to use it against him right now.
“You don’t need me to go to lunch,” Five says, pen poised over the paper. He assesses her and then jots a few more numbers down that probably mean something, though she wonders if he spends as much time bullshitting her as she spends bullshitting him. “Just drive yourself. Last I was told, I’m the only sibling not allowed to take solo trips.”
This has been something of a sore point for Five, who interprets the orders to stay out from behind the wheel as infantilization. The fact is that everyone wants to keep him from getting arrested seems to have no bearing on his grudge over this fact.
Therefore, Allison circumvents it altogether. “I know,” she says, putting just a tinge of a whine in her voice for effect. “But seriously, eating by myself is absolutely no fun. And if people realize who I am? Then, I’m signing autographs for an hour and my meal is cold.”
Five crunches his nose up in something that resembles actual consideration of this point. “How does having someone with you help?”
“Because I can just tell them I’m having dinner with my brother and that we would like our privacy,” she says. “People don’t respect movie stars, but they sometimes respect their loved ones.”
Five makes a face at the term loved ones. Allison knows that it’s not that he wants to deny it -- he’s the guy who literally shredded time and space to get home and save them -- but she also knows that he doesn’t know how to do emotion without being confrontational about it. “So you want me to be your buffer?”
Allison rolls her eyes at his ability to take the worst possible interpretation of her motivations. “Or I could just really want to spend time with my brother.”
He huffs a little, in that perfectly old man way of his. “Well, then we can do that right here.”
“Over lunch?” she asks, daring to be hopeful.
“Knock yourself out,” Five says, scribbling a few more notes in his sprawling equation.
“But what about you?” she asks with a frown.
“Too busy to stop,” he says. “But please, don’t let me stop you. Delores used to eat in front of me all the time and I never minded. Found it kind of comforting, actually.”
There’s a lot of possible responses to that, and she finds it expressly interesting that Five has no qualms about admitting he fed his mannequin while still steadfastly refusing to eat normal meals himself. She cringes a bit, both at the notion that her brother seems to think the mannequin is still a real person and at the idea that he fed food -- a scarce commodity in the apocalypse by his own admission -- to an inanimate object.
She studies him, writing away, and wonders, not for the first time, if she’s trying to fix the wrong thing about Five. The guy who can save the world but somehow can’t make himself a sandwich.
Relationships, with food, with people, with mannequins, are always complicated, it seems.
-o-
For the rest of the day, Allison is a bit more subdued in her approach. She keeps tabs on him, but she spends time doing stuff she likes, too. The trick is, of course, remembering what she likes. She takes some time to go over correspondence from her agent, who seems to be freaking out at her extended hiatus, and she rejects several scripts that she’s been sent because they’re just not that interesting to her at the moment.
She also spends some time working out because she finds that the gym dad kept has been meticulously upgraded for Diego and Luther since they’ve been back. She’s quite keen on kickboxing, and she works up a good sweat and forgets all about Five for an hour straight while she pummels the bag and imagines it to be Patrick’s smug, little prickish face.
After a shower, she puts on some yoga pants and tells herself to hell with it and wears a t-shirt that barely fits from her teen years. She’s starving by this point, so she goes down to the kitchen to make herself a snack. She’s surprised when she sees a bag of marshmallows open on the counter. They’re half eaten.
No one else likes marshmallows. The only other person who eats them is Vanya, and she only eats them with Five. Which means…
She grabs the bag and ducks out into the library, where Five has taken up residence this evening.
“Is this yours?” she asks, holding up the bag. “You left it out.”
“Oh,” he says, looking up with a squint as if he’s trying to remember. “I did eat those.”
“Well, this isn’t much for dessert,” she says.
“It wasn’t dessert.”
Allison lifts up her brows. It’s a look she’s getting quite good at around her moronic brothers. “You can’t possibly tell me it was dinner.”
This is a concept that Five has apparently not considered, though he seems to make quick work of his assessment now. He frowns a little in consternation. “What time is it?”
“Almost nine,” she says.
He shrugs, facial expression easing. “Then, I guess it was dinner.”
That’s not the answer she wants to hear. “Five--”
Five flits his hand through the air at her, scrunched back over his work. “Shh, I’m onto something.”
“You mean like an actual dinner plan?” she prods him.
He’s hardly listening to her. “No, no -- an equation.”
“Five!”
He looks up at her again, and he has the audacity to be mildly exasperated with her, of all things. “Allison!”
It’s too much. The day has been too long. She shakes her head. “Fine, whatever,” she mutters. “I’m going to go make some spaghetti. There’ll be enough for two, if you’re interested.”
The suggestion seems vexing to him. “But I already ate dinner.”
“You do know that marshmallows aren’t dinner,” she says, and it feels vaguely like she’s talking to Claire, except Claire can be coerced into sitting at the table to eat meals. She just likes to take two hours to eat her vegetables.
Five suddenly appears quite pleased with himself. “They are when you eat them at the dinner hour.”
There it is, then. Unimpeachable logic.
Needless to say, Allison is more than happy to eat her damn spaghetti alone that night.
-o-
Later, after finding Five curled up on a couch instead of in his bed fast asleep, Allison concedes the day is done and heads back up to her own room. She’s left her phone there for the better part of the day. She’s plugged it in under the pretense of charging it, but the truth is that she just doesn’t want to check it.
She still has that choice, but she is expecting to hear from her lawyer soon about the legal case, so she really should check. To her disappointment, there’s nothing from her lawyer. There are a few pointless queries from her agent, wanting her to start working again, but most are the messages are from Patrick.
Please don’t make this a big deal. It’s not a big deal.
Allison rolls her eyes. There was a time when Patrick thought he was the luckiest man alive to be married to her. It’s pretty clear that he now thinks that he’s the luckiest man alive to be divorced from her. He doesn’t know that she’d concede all his points on alimony if he just gave her shared custody.
Claire’s therapist knows all about the relationship, and she says it’s fine.
Somehow, the fact that Claire’s therapist knows more about Claire’s life than Allison herself is not the comfort that Patrick imagines it to be.
I have every legal right to date.
That’s supposed to be his concluding point, because he’s a bastard. That’s the real problem when you rumor someone into caring about you. It’s not just that you’re manipulating them -- which, yes, Allison knows that’s bad and it’s wrong. But it also means that you don’t know the real them. Allison married an idealized version of the man. The real guy? Not quite as appealing, as it turns out.
Of course, if she hadn’t rumored him, maybe he would have been less of a bastard, but she has her doubts.
Just call me, okay?
That last message is only about 20 minutes old. Allison could call him. She might be able to leverage this to get him to put Claire on the phone for a few minutes. That might be worth it.
She tosses the phone aside and flops heavily on her bed.
Patrick said he wanted this played by the rules.
So Allison will play by the rules.
Patrick has every legal right to date.
And Allison?
Well, she doesn’t have a lot of rights at the moment, except this one: the right to not give a shit what her son of a bitch ex-husband wants.
Tomorrow, she’ll call her lawyer instead.
Tomorrow, she’ll work on getting Five to sit down for a meal.
The things that matter -- or just the things she can control.
Nuance has always been a hell of a thing.
-o-
Her lawyer is hard to get ahold of, and Allison leaves him messages daily for the next week while she ignores all of Patrick’s texts and phone calls. She focuses her attention, therefore, on Five.
She has minimal success in getting Five to sit and eat a meal, this is true, but she refuses to gauge it as outright failure. Instead, she proceeds in research mode, and she accumulates the necessary information to make a more accurate assessment of what’s actually going on between Five and his too-small stomach.
The answer is complicated, to say the least.
Five, over the course of the week, displays nothing resembling a regular eating routine. His habits are completely irregular, and there is no discernible pattern in terms of time, size and nature of his meals. In fact, if anything, she would say he doesn’t like to eat meals. He doesn’t even like formal snacks, but he is prone to grazing if there happens to be food open nearby. At least, he grazes until he notices that someone is watching. Then, he seems to think he needs to have something better to do.
When offered food, his response is always even more extreme -- and it gets even more reactionary as the week goes on and Allison’s observation becomes even more keen. No doubt, he’s realized that he’s the subject of some fascination to her, and he’s either self conscious or a prick. Likely, he’s a self conscious prick.
That said, she does know he eats. For example, by the end of the week, the peanut butter is all gone -- three jars full. She finds spoons around the house in places where Five frequents, licked clean but still smelling strongly of peanuts. At some point, they run out of bread in the house, and there’s a suspicious trail of crumbs into his room. She tracks it there one afternoon, where she finds Five passed out in a chair while the rest of the family assembles for dinner.
He also has a strange tendency to binge on fruits and vegetables. Klaus and Diego go to the store one night. By the next morning, they’re already out of carrots, tomatoes and grapes. Five says nothing of this, but he is notably in a better mood that day.
There is, undoubtedly, a lot of psychological factors at play with these behaviors. She imagines, as she must, that Five’s experience in the apocalypse taught him to not view food as a given necessity on a daily basis. Moreover, he probably learned to scavenge only when desperate. When a plentiful food source was presented to him, he had likely indulged to excess. It’s the definition of a eating disorder, but it’s too simple to label Five’s relationship with food that way. There are other profound issues at play, the same kind that make the smartest man she knows talk to an inanimate object.
The assessment is useful, but Allison knows that eventually she has to do something about it.
The question is: what?
-o-
It’s not an easy question to answer.
Therefore, Allison does the only thing she can think to do -- and doesn’t answer it. Instead, she calls her lawyer twenty times the next day, staying on hold, talking to his secretary, and tracking down his personal cell number, until he finally answers.
“Yeah, hi,” he says, like he’s been thinking about calling her for awhile. “I’ve got your messages. Just been kind of busy--”
He’s clearly trying to segue out of this conversation, but Allison’s done with shit right now. “Well, we’ll make it short, then,” she says. “How is the case going with my daughter?”
“Well, the orders are with the judge and we have every reason to expect--”
“That they’ll be sign, yeah, I know,” Allison says. “But I knew that three weeks ago. So I want an update.”
The lawyer laughs in that condescending way of his, and Allison is tempted to rumor him because he’s an asshole who deserve it, but she doesn’t. “It’s not something with updates, really. It’s either signed or not.”
“So, how do we get it signed faster?” Allison asks. “I mean, there has to be a schedule, doesn’t there? The order can’t just sit on a desk indefinitely, can it?”
“Not indefinitely, no,” the lawyer says. “But it’s not up to us how fast the judge looks at it. We really do just have to wait it out.”
Allison grits her teeth. “I’m tired of waiting,” she says tautly. “This is my relationship we’re talking about.”
“I know, I get that, I do,” the lawyer says. “Family cases are always the hardest, but the judge has countless other cases just like yours--”
“All I want to know is an update,” Allison says. “Is my case on the list for tomorrow? Next week?”
“We just have to wait, Ms. Hargreeves,” the lawyers says again. “You can’t force it.”
“Why not?” Allison asks, thinking that she probably could force it. She could rumor this lawyer and then rumor the judge and rumor the whole damn legal system if she has to. And she wants to right now. She really, really wants to. In a life of broken relationship, she’d like to mend just one. Just this one.
“Because it’s the law,” the lawyer insists.
“No, it’s my daughter,” Allison says, more than a little terse.
The response back is just as biting. “Then, with all due respect, Ms. Hargreeves, you probably shouldn’t have ruined the relationship in the first place.”
Allison is pissed as hell when she hangs up because he’s a bastard and an asshole and a self-serving jerk.
He also happens, unfortunately, to be completely right.
Disclaimer: These characters are definitely not mine.
A/N: So very unbeta’ed. This fits my low blood sugar square for hc_bingo. Set post season one.
Summary: Allison has no way to fix things with her daughter. Therefore, she puts all her effort into fixing Five, much to Five’s chagrin.
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
PART FOUR
-o-
Allison has concluded that Five has a messed up relationship with food.
Now, to be fair, there are a lot of messed up things about Five. In the rush of the apocalypse, they had been willing overlook a lot. They hadn’t had time to dwell on the fact that he had lived alone for 30 years or that he’d apparently fallen in love with a mannequin. Even the notion that he’d spent years as a trained assassin with nothing but his desperate notes to get him back to his family had been particularly important when the world was about to end.
That’s done now. As in, they’ve saved the world. They’ve fixed their family and reinstated the Umbrella Academy. It’s all seven of them living together under one roof, united. Those little things that were so easy to overlook then?
Well, they’re not so easy to overlook now.
And Five has a really messed up relationship with food.
That’s not to say that they all don’t have their problems. They do, and there’s no secret about it. Luther has ongoing body dysphoria, not to mention his unresolved problems with their father. Diego carries around so much resentment that anything still sets him off, and he’s just as likely to engage in polite conversation as he is to shank you. Klaus is a recovering addict, which is bad enough, but as he comes into his sobriety, he comes into new powers and, yeah, that’s exciting for everyone involved. Ben is dead, so it’s hard to know what to make of his issues. Ironically, he seems the best adjusted of them all, but that’s not particularly saying very much. And Vanya is coping remarkably well with everything she’s been through, and she only breaks down a few times a week under the weight of the fact that she’s caused the apocalypse at least two times.
So, yeah, they all need therapy and lots of it, but Allison finds Five’s attitude toward food more pressing than the rest. After all, food is sustenance. Food is survival. Without food, an underlying basis for living, everything else is resting on precarious footings. It’s a relationship that deserves attention, and Five seems less than inclined to give it that attention.
At first, it might be easy to think Five is taking food for granted. He is an asshole, and everyone knows it. He’s condescending and rude and he’s generally a prick. It’s possible that he thinks he’s too good for food -- or that he simply can’t be bothered to deal with something so mundane.
She’d buy this -- she would -- if he were just skipping family meals. It’s one thing for him to not want to waste time eating with the family -- hell, that probably has psychological foundations. The last family dinner he attended never ended so well, so maybe it’s all rolled up with PTSD.
But it’s not just family dinners.
It’s also lunch.
And breakfast.
And snacks.
Basically, she never sees him eat.
Ever.
Obviously, he has to eat sometimes. Skinny as he is, he’s not dead, so there must be some consumption. However, over the course of several weeks, Allison sees him consume half a donut, three marshmallows and a spoonful of peanut butter. In the same span, she watches him drink approximately 15 pots of coffee, 12 margaritas and various other alcoholic drinks that are way too strong for his small frame.
In short, Five’s got a messed up relationship with food.
And Allison needs to figure out why.
-o-
Why is actually a tall order, when you get down to it. She’s an actress, and there’s some psychology involved with that, but she hardly feels qualified to understand the minute facets of trauma on an egotistical personality that was stunted in early puberty.
Besides, there are a lot of other whys in her life right now.
“No, I don’t understand,” she says to Patrick over the phone. She’s pacing across one of the rooftop terraces that overlooks the city, wishing she had a pack of cigarettes handy. “Why can’t I have visitation?”
“The judge hasn’t granted the order yet,” Patrick says over the phone.
“But you know it’s coming--”
“And it’s not here yet--”
“Come on!” she implores now. “Can’t you be flexible? Just a little?”
“This is our daughter,” Patrick replies emphatically. “I can’t cut corners. She’s too important.”
“I know,” she agrees. “And don’t you think she should see her mother?”
“Yes, but only when it’s right,” Patrick insists over the line. “If you value the relationship, you’ll do it right. You’ll take the time to do it right.”
“I am doing it right,” Allison says. She shakes her head and presses her lips together. “Talking to her is the right thing.”
He sighs audibly. “You keep acting like it’s easy, but you’re the one who messed this up.”
She blows out a breath, long, hard and frustrated. She can’t argue that; she doesn’t want to anymore. “Patrick, this is ridiculous. We were married. We shared a life together. Doesn’t that relationship, our relationship, count for anything?”
“I don’t know what parts of that relationship were even real, Allison,” Patrick says, and the anger is tinged with real hurt this time. She forgets that, sometimes. That she hurt him, that she well and truly hurt him. “It’s too messed up. A relationship? Shit, Allison, I don’t even know if I can call it that.”
She swallows hard now, and she’s not going to cry. She’s spent her tears on this; she’ll allow herself no more. “It was real for me, Patrick. It was all real to me.”
“I want to believe you, I do,” he says, quieter now. The pretense is gone. The posturing is over. “I just...if this is a relationship, then you have to rebuild it.”
She nods and closes her eyes for a moment. “Okay,” she replies, opening them again. “I”m willing to work on that. Whatever it takes, Patrick. Whatever it takes.”
-o-
So, no more with the question why.
Allison, for the time being, will focus on the how.
Practically speaking, she’s done all she can in terms of Claire. She’s done the therapy. She’s appeared in court. She’s filed her motions. It’s all in the hands of a judge now, her request for custody is sitting there, waiting to be signed. There is no more how where Claire is concerned.
So if she can’t fix the mess with Claire, what can she do?
Well, Allison’s not one to be idle. Call her vain, call her duplicitous, call her untrustworthy -- but do not call Allison Hargreeves lazy.
If Claire’s a no-go, then she’ll turn her attentions elsewhere.
It’s not a question of how she can fix Claire.
It’s a question of how she can fix Five.
His caustic attitude, his penchant for scribbling on walls, his ability to kill people with hands, his habit of drinking alcohol in public, his affection for mannequins -- all problematic, to be sure.
But his eating habits.
Allison can’t get over his eating habits.
That’s a strange one.
It’s also one that Allison is pretty sure she can start addressing right here, right now.
-o-
Some people might start by actually talking to Five. That’s not a terrible notion, and in another situation, she might consider it. But this is Five. Talking directly to Five is always pretty hit or miss, and she’s pretty sure if she voices her concerns without substantiating them, he’s going to ignore her completely.
Therefore, she’ll play this the way Five would play it.
With facts. Figures. Numbers. Logic.
She can do that. She’s smart, intuitive, capable. It’s like research for a role. You have to immerse yourself into someone else’s world. You have to track them, dissect them, look for their tells. It’s a process that breaks a person down to their barest parts until you understand them in a way they don’t even grasp themselves.
Yes, Allison has rumored her way onto a movie set or two, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t work her ass once she got there. She’s learned, after all these years, that you can’t rumor an entire audience. And, contrary to Patrick’s belief, you can’t rumor your way into an Academy Award. Some things you do have to earn.
Are Five’s eating habits one of them?
She has decided yes because she cares about him.
Also, she needs the distraction.
At any rate, she makes a point to wander by his room first thing in the morning. When she finds that he’s already awake, she moseys down the stairs, trying to not to look like she’s in a hurry. The kitchen, however, is vacant. The coffee pot is still warm but empty, and there’s a used coffee cup on the table. There are not any dishes, however.
She makes a half hearted effort with her own breakfast, settling on a banana as she meanders out to the living areas. When she finds Five in the library, he’s reading a book. There is a legal pad that has been scrawled all over, and he doesn’t look up when she enters.
“Hey,” she says, like this is totally a casual meeting. “You hungry? I was thinking about making something.”
“Why would my being hungry affect your decision to make yourself breakfast?” Five asks blandly. He doesn’t bother looking up.
Allison has thick enough skin that she isn’t insulted -- even if she knows that’s what Five’s trying to do. “It doesn’t,” she says, nonchalant as ever. “Just thought if you wanted something, I’d make a little extra. Just being nice.”
Five reaches for the pad and scribbles frantically for a few seconds. He pauses, bites his lips, and scribbles some more.
When he makes no effort to say anything, she cocks her head. “Five?”
He still doesn’t look up. “I don’t need you to be nice,” he says. “Just quiet. Do you mind?”
That’s a no on breakfast, then.
Allison makes a mental note and heads back out into the hall.
-o-
The hardest part, she decides, is tracking Five discreetly. This is not so much a problem because Five notices anything. Five is oblivious, which is sort of counterintuitive. You’d think, him being a trained assassin and all, that he’d be hyper aware of his surroundings. But apparently he deems the mansion to be a safe zone. Consequently, he doesn’t notice anything Allison does.
Or, if he does, he ignores her.
She’d buy either explanation.
No, Five isn’t the problem. The others, though. She has to make lots of little excuses why she’s chilling in her bedroom with the door open to see if Five’s moving up and down the stairs. She has to lie to Luther that she’s really into her book right now as she parks herself in front of the library for half the day reading. Diego asks if she’s depressed. Klaus is worried that someone has died. Vanya, bless her, sits with her for part of the day, chatting about irrelevant things because sisters.
Of course, none of this observation is made any easier by the fact that Five can move through space. She knows he can leave the room she watching without her seeing him, so she has to devise excuses to get up and walk past his doorway. She tells Luther that she likes the light in the upstairs bathroom. She tells Diego that the chairs in the living room have better lumbar support.
She spends so much time making sure that no one notices that she’s following Five that she doesn’t devote as much attention as she wants to actually following Five.
It probably doesn’t matter all that much, however.
Because Five doesn’t eat lunch.
She thinks he might make himself a peanut butter and marshmallow sandwich at some point in the afternoon but only because he leaves most of it on a plate, abandoned and forgotten in the kitchen. She checks, multiple times. It’s still there by dinner when Vanya mindlessly cleans it up.
Speaking of dinner, Vanya has a thing for cooking, and she makes enough stroganoff to feed the family. Most of the siblings wander down because they smell food and they’re mostly lazy assholes about this kind of thing, and before they know it, it’s a makeshift family dinner. All they have to do is play a recording about mountain climbing in the background and it’s just like old times.
Luther is laughing at one of Klaus’ jokes, and Diego is carving his initials into the table -- again -- for no apparent reason. Vanya serves dinner and somehow throws together a salad and rolls, and there’s a table spot for Ben.
Allison says, “Hey, wait. Has anyone seen Five?”
They stop, Klaus mid-story, Luther mid-laugh. Diego looks up with a frown, and Ben glances down at his hands. Vanya is the only one who actually seems to think about the question, though. “You know, I haven’t,” she says. “I didn’t even think--”
“He’s not big on family meals,” Diego observes, going back to his carving.
“Next time we’ll have to make it a family meeting,” Luther says. “Official.”
“Five and family meals? Can’t imagine why that might cause some problems,” Klaus murmurs.
Allison pushes back from the table. “You know, don’t worry about it. I’ll check on him.”
She’s not sure what worries her more.
The fact that Five’s not here at dinner when she knows he has to be hungry.
Or the fact that no one else seems to notice but her.
-o-
Five is not in his bedroom. She knows he’s not on the main floor -- there’s no way he’d be lurking so close to a family meal -- which limits the possibilities a bit. Only a bit, however. That’s the thing about living in a mansion. It’s great when you want to hide. It’s a little less great when you want to find someone who is hiding.
Ever since Five has been back, she’s found him in a few of their old nooks and crannies. As children, they had all laid claim to various hideouts, but Five’s not in any of those. She has to make her way through several abandoned spaces before she finally finds him in a dimly lit room in a deserted floor on the east wing of the building. Originally, she thinks it might have been a loft apartment over one of the businesses that has been defunct for decades, but it’s so dusty and dank that it’s hard to tell.
What is easy to tell is that Five has claimed it as his own.
At least, that’s the conclusion she comes to based on the amount of Five’s handwriting all over the wall.
She stands in the doorway for a good two minutes, just taking it in.
Five steps back, chalk still in his hand. He wipes his fingers on his shorts and sighs. “You shouldn’t loiter. It’s rude.”
She takes this as an invitation and steps inside.
He looks back at her with a scowl. “I meant that you could leave,” he says. “But I guess this works, too.”
He’s serious and not, and mostly, Allison has learned not to care. “You know, everyone is back down having dinner,” she says. When this doesn’t appear to be a self evident invitation, she makes it explicit. “You should come, hang out.”
He shakes his head, wrinkling his nose. “I’ve got far too much going on here.”
She raises her eyebrows, casting a disparaging eye to the wall that he’s covered in numbers and letters.
“If I stop now, I’ll lose my train of thought,” he says, as if this is some kind of acceptable explanation.
“I’m sure,” she says.
“I will,” he says. “I’ve been working on this all day. I can’t just stop.”
Questioning his drive for mathematics is one way to go about this, but Allison isn’t questioning his relationship with numbers. “You need to eat,” she says instead.
He makes a harrumphing noise, the kind you’d expect your grandfather to make.
Allison imagines, anyway. She’s never had a grandfather she knows.
“Just a little dinner,” she implores, softer now.
He huffs, and looks back at his long and winding equation. “Dinner can wait,” he says, and he steps back up to the wall, starting to write again.
Allison watches him for several more moments, and she has to bite her tongue as she reminds herself that this is her time of observation. She needs the fact, all of the facts. Her brother isn’t going to care about social obligation or familiar concern.
But mathematical statistics?
He might well listen to.
No breakfast, no lunch: check, check.
Now, no dinner.
Check again.
It seems like a pretty strong case already.
-o-
The fact that Allison has a great time at dinner actually only makes things worse. She feels guilty about it when she goes back for seconds. She feels beside herself when she passes around the extra dinner rolls and helps herself to another. Food doesn’t define their relationships, not in the least, but it’s easy to see that this is them at their best. This is what family is supposed to be.
Sharing food, sharing time. Breaking bread, breaking barriers.
When they’re done, there’s no doubt they’re full.
-o-
After a heavy meal, Allison feels just about ready for bed. It’s still early, though, and she reminds herself that she’s not done with her tasks for the day.
Obligingly, she checks for Five and finds his room vacant. She wanders through the mansion to his new hideout, but he’s not there either. She’s concerned, even more so when Five’s not in the library or living room.
To her utter surprise, she finds him in the kitchen.
He’s squatting in front of the fridge, lifting up one of the foil covers over the leftovers of Vanya’s stroganoff. He’s clearly eating a few bites, and he has to swallow and wipe his fingers on his chalk-covered shorts before he stands up.
“You made such a big deal out of it, I was curious,” he says, managing not to blush even though Allison can see he’s embarrassed. “It was probably a lot better warm.”
With most people, Allison might take a sympathetic bent. Somehow, she doubts it will work with Five. She crosses her arms over her chest. “Well, you could have found out.”
The implication is impossible for Five to miss. He’s not good with people, sure, but he’s not stupid. He’s emotionally capable if emotionally resistant; sometimes he will surprise you.
Sometimes, he won’t.
He shrugs, and the depth of his indifference is difficult to place.
Exasperated, she rolls her eyes. “If you want, you can still find out,” she suggests. “You want me to warm it up for you?”
This question, somehow, seems to catch him off guard. “What?”
“The leftovers,” Allison clarifies. “I can warm them up.”
It’s a genuine request with no malice or hidden intent. That’s probably why Five has no idea what to make of it. “There’s no need for that,” he says, brows drawn together in consternation. “I have a few more things I need to do anyway.”
He says this dismissively, as if he’s proved some kind of point of substance. He hasn’t, of course, and Allison has no desire to baby him in this regard. “A few what?”
He looks surprised that she’s questioning him. “Equations.”
She doesn’t hide her skepticism. “Equations? For what? I thought we saved the world -- unless there’s something you’re not telling us.”
This whole conversation has caught him off guard, but that insight is one that he clearly doesn’t see coming. He blinks, almost physically recoiling, before hastily gathering his composure again. “Of course not,” he says, more than a touch defensively now. “It’s not like that.”
As Five’s agitation increases, Allison finds her composure even more solidified. “Then what?”
Five doesn’t quite splutter -- at least not verbally. She sees his mind hurtling over the possibilities to maintain a presence in a conversation it does not want to have. “Just equations.”
Allison allows her skepticism to show. She knows this is about Five’s relationship with food, but things are never that simple. Her brother is hungry, she knows he must be. And she knows that an empty stomach leads to decreased mental capacity. In other words, Five’s keen mind isn’t so keen for the lack of food right now. “For what?” she asks coolly.
This time, he glowers a little. “Does it matter?”
Still nonplussed, Allison shrugs. “You tell me.”
Five’s frustration -- which may or may not be tied to his empty stomach -- is really starting to get the better of him. “Look, it’s just that I like doing equation,” he says, flustered to the point where he sounds like the 13 year old boy he looks like. “That’s all.”
Allison knows she’s effectively won this argument. She also knows, however, that Five will never admit that. She eases her way past the idea of victory and goes for the spoils instead. “Are you sure I can’t warm something up for you?”
Five sighs, his expression flat. “I’m fine, Allison,” he says. “You don’t need to worry so much.”
There might be a trace of compassion, the slightest hint of softness, but it’s impossible to tell. Before Allison can ask another question to find out, Five blinks out of the room.
Because if you can’t win, then retreat, retreat, retreat.
-o-
Allison is in the kitchen, but she’s not the one who needs to eat. Still, she takes a few minutes to tidy up for the sake of appearances. Winning the battle, she knows, is not the same thing as winning the war. And open warfare with Five? Is no small task.
For good measure, she gets herself a glass of water and starts her trek back through the house. She’s technically looking for Five, but she doesn’t want to appear like she’s looking for Five, which means she has to be moving in the direction of her room with some purpose even while trying to look in as many nooks and crannies of the mansion as she can.
She can’t be entirely sure, but she’s fairly confident that Five is not on the main floor. With his stomach mostly empty, she wonders how much energy he has for jumps, but that’s not something she’s ever talked to him about. She knows that he has some limits on his abilities -- they all do -- but that his are more temperamental than most. Luther can’t stop himself from being strong. Klaus’ ability to connect with the dead is so pervasive that he self medicated for years to avoid it. It’s pretty hard for Allison to mess up three little words, though she wonders sometimes if her intent plays a role in the effectiveness of her lies. She imagines that Diego might have less ability to control knives if he were drunk, but there’s no enough evidence to make any real conclusions there.
Vanya is probably the closest comparison, but her powers seem to flow out of her. She has to work hard to control them. Five seems to operate in the other direction. He has to work hard to muster his powers, and he’s the only one who can seem truly exhausted when he exerts himself. She remembers how tired he’d been after jumping them to the past before the world ending. He’d slept for the better part of a week. The jump back had been even more draining.
Is this a physical drain? An emotional one?
Allison doesn’t know, and she wonders how much Five knows, how much he’s thought about it. For all that he likes to do equations, he’s not always super self observant. It wouldn’t surprise her if he’s only vaguely aware of his own limitations, as if that’s some kind of buffer between him and his weakness.
She’s somewhat relieved that Five’s in his bedroom. It’s tricky to get up the stairs without attracting his attention, but she sees him moving through the door that’s been left ajar. Somehow, he’s holding a coffee cup as he stares thoughtfully at an equation that he’s writing on the wall. She thinks it’s a new equation, etched on top of an old one, but she doesn’t really care about that. She is curious, however, where Five got the coffee.
Did the bastard sneak back into the kitchen? Or does he just have a coffee pot in his room to make things easier?
She makes a mental note to find out.
Tomorrow.
For now, she and Five are at an impasse. His problematic relationship with food will be her main task for tomorrow.
As for tonight?
Well, there’s another relationship she still needs to repair.
-o-
Back in her own room, Allison closes the door. She checks the time and does the quick math. It’s getting late here, but on the west coast it’d still be early. Claire’s probably not in bed yet.
She chews her lip, taking out her phone. She pulls up Patrick’s number and dials, hopeful. All she wants to do is say goodnight, a quick goodnight to Claire. Patrick might agree to that. He might cave.
When the line connects, Allison allows herself to hope.
That hope is stymied, however, when a woman’s voice answers.
A woman.
Not a girl.
Not a man.
A woman.
“Hello?” the woman asks, and it sounds like she’s been laughing. “Patrick’s phone.”
“Uh, hi,” Allison says, not sure if she wants to demand to know who this woman is or just demand to talk to Patrick. “Who’s this?”
There’s a giggle, and Patrick can be heard in the background calling, “Who is it?”
Somewhere, in the distance, there’s the sound of a little girl laughing. Claire giggles, and says, “Daddy!”
“Oh, just the lady of the house,” the woman says in a singsong voice. She must think this is a joke, Allison concludes. Not a joke. Just another night at home.
Allison is hot and cold all at once. The rush of blood to her head is too much. Claire laughs again and the woman asks, “Hello?”
Disconnecting the call, Allison throws her phone on the bed and stares at it for a long couple of seconds. She’s still staring at it when Patrick’s number lights -- no doubt to call her back. Patrick tries once and twice, back to back, but Allison doesn’t move.
She sits down numbly on the bed, thinking about her daughter getting put to bed by another woman. Closing her eyes, she flops back on the pillows and exhales heavily. Her phone pings -- two missed calls and a text -- but she doesn’t turn to look at it. Her stomach feels funny, it feels sick.
Maybe all that dinner isn’t settling so well after all.
-o-
Allison sleeps like that with her clothes on, on top of the covers. It’s not particularly comfortable, and her mouth tastes like it’s thick with cotton when she wakes up. She blinks the sleep out of her eyes and she’s that she’s got five messages from Patrick. She skims them and confirms what she knows already. Patrick has a girlfriend who spends the night. She’s a nice girl, a sweet girl and Claire loves her.
Allison tosses the phone aside without responding.
She knows why, of course.
Why Patrick has another girl. Why Claire likes her so much.
Because she’s there.
That’s the first key to any relationship.
Sometimes you just have to be there.
Of course, it helps when there’s not a court order preventing you from being there, but that will be sorted soon enough, Allison hopes. At least, she better be. This waiting is driving her crazy, though. All this paperwork. All this legalese.
She wants to be there more than anything.
Unfortunately, she’s still here.
Getting up, she breathes out, long and hard and presses her lips together.
She’s here, in this mansion with her family.
She’ll just have to make the most of it in the meantime.
-o-
It would surprise some people to know that Allison can be a relatively low maintenance kind of girl. Sure, when she’s working, she puts on her game face. She’ll doll herself up and look the part, but in truth, she prefers things simpler. There’s a reason, after all, when she had all the fame and money, she would look up at the moon and pine instead.
Being away from Hollywood is hell in that she’s away from Claire. It’s quite liberating in nearly every other capacity. She takes a quick shower and throws on something simple and she’s downstairs before any of her other siblings have stirred.
Almost any of them.
She’s not surprised to find Five, already nursing a cup of coffee, reading a newspaper at the kitchen table.
“Papers are obsolete, don’t you know that?” Allison quips, pulling out some ingredients to throw together breakfast.
“You could argue I’m obsolete, but I’m still here,” Five replies with his little gremlin smile. The one that makes him look 13 and 80 all at the same time. “And I find it oddly refreshing to hold something physical.”
Allison can’t argue that. “That’s why you should be eating more than coffee for breakfast,” she says. “I’m making eggs. Do you want some?”
This question sounds innocent enough, but Five narrows his eyes suspiciously. “Mom already offered.”
“But did you have some?”
“No.”
“Okay,” Allison says. “So how about now?”
Five is more skeptical than ever. He looks at Allison critically over the top of his newspaper, as if he’s assessing her, doing a probability map of her intention in real time.
“I do make some pretty good eggs,” Allison says. “Claire’s favorite is scrambled.”
Five purses his lips and looks back down. “I’m good, thanks.”
“Oh, come on,” Allison cajoles, reaching for a skillet. “You’ve got to be hungry.”
She turns back around.
He also has to be gone.
The cup of coffee, half drunk, and the newspaper have been left in his wake.
Allison turns back to her eggs and mutters, “So much for breakfast.”
-o-
Allison does make good eggs and she eats them because she’s hungry and spiteful and being hungry makes her spiteful and being spiteful makes her hungry. She eats them and thinks they’re the best eggs in the whole damn world, better than any eggs some cutesy live-in girlfriend in California could make.
Still, breakfast is more or less a failure, so Allison ups her game at lunch. She tracks Five throughout the morning, finding that he eats precisely one slice of bread and possibly a banana. It’s hard to say about the banana because there are six of them living (one not living) in the house, but Five’s the only one who likes to be in dad’s study -- besides Luther, at least, and Luther still respects their father too much to do something like eat a banana in there.
Yes, Allison has taken to checking the trash cans. She has no shame.
And besides, if someone catches, she just has to rumor them into forgetting she’s been acting weird.
Not that she would do that.
Probably.
For lunch, however, she waits until the end of the lunch hour -- just to give Five the benefit of the doubt -- before crashing next to him where he’s sitting on the couch doing an equation. This one is at least on a legal pad, though it’s just as unintelligible to her as the rest.
“So, I’m starving,” she says, playing it up as best she can.
Five glances at her with the most benign interest.
“What do you say -- we go out for lunch,” she says, nudging him in that sibling way that they’ve never had as Hargreeves. “My treat.”
Five doesn’t pull away, which you might expect for him. For all of his bristling nature, he’s surprisingly indulgent of his siblings and their whims, Allison has noticed. She’s hoping to use it against him right now.
“You don’t need me to go to lunch,” Five says, pen poised over the paper. He assesses her and then jots a few more numbers down that probably mean something, though she wonders if he spends as much time bullshitting her as she spends bullshitting him. “Just drive yourself. Last I was told, I’m the only sibling not allowed to take solo trips.”
This has been something of a sore point for Five, who interprets the orders to stay out from behind the wheel as infantilization. The fact is that everyone wants to keep him from getting arrested seems to have no bearing on his grudge over this fact.
Therefore, Allison circumvents it altogether. “I know,” she says, putting just a tinge of a whine in her voice for effect. “But seriously, eating by myself is absolutely no fun. And if people realize who I am? Then, I’m signing autographs for an hour and my meal is cold.”
Five crunches his nose up in something that resembles actual consideration of this point. “How does having someone with you help?”
“Because I can just tell them I’m having dinner with my brother and that we would like our privacy,” she says. “People don’t respect movie stars, but they sometimes respect their loved ones.”
Five makes a face at the term loved ones. Allison knows that it’s not that he wants to deny it -- he’s the guy who literally shredded time and space to get home and save them -- but she also knows that he doesn’t know how to do emotion without being confrontational about it. “So you want me to be your buffer?”
Allison rolls her eyes at his ability to take the worst possible interpretation of her motivations. “Or I could just really want to spend time with my brother.”
He huffs a little, in that perfectly old man way of his. “Well, then we can do that right here.”
“Over lunch?” she asks, daring to be hopeful.
“Knock yourself out,” Five says, scribbling a few more notes in his sprawling equation.
“But what about you?” she asks with a frown.
“Too busy to stop,” he says. “But please, don’t let me stop you. Delores used to eat in front of me all the time and I never minded. Found it kind of comforting, actually.”
There’s a lot of possible responses to that, and she finds it expressly interesting that Five has no qualms about admitting he fed his mannequin while still steadfastly refusing to eat normal meals himself. She cringes a bit, both at the notion that her brother seems to think the mannequin is still a real person and at the idea that he fed food -- a scarce commodity in the apocalypse by his own admission -- to an inanimate object.
She studies him, writing away, and wonders, not for the first time, if she’s trying to fix the wrong thing about Five. The guy who can save the world but somehow can’t make himself a sandwich.
Relationships, with food, with people, with mannequins, are always complicated, it seems.
-o-
For the rest of the day, Allison is a bit more subdued in her approach. She keeps tabs on him, but she spends time doing stuff she likes, too. The trick is, of course, remembering what she likes. She takes some time to go over correspondence from her agent, who seems to be freaking out at her extended hiatus, and she rejects several scripts that she’s been sent because they’re just not that interesting to her at the moment.
She also spends some time working out because she finds that the gym dad kept has been meticulously upgraded for Diego and Luther since they’ve been back. She’s quite keen on kickboxing, and she works up a good sweat and forgets all about Five for an hour straight while she pummels the bag and imagines it to be Patrick’s smug, little prickish face.
After a shower, she puts on some yoga pants and tells herself to hell with it and wears a t-shirt that barely fits from her teen years. She’s starving by this point, so she goes down to the kitchen to make herself a snack. She’s surprised when she sees a bag of marshmallows open on the counter. They’re half eaten.
No one else likes marshmallows. The only other person who eats them is Vanya, and she only eats them with Five. Which means…
She grabs the bag and ducks out into the library, where Five has taken up residence this evening.
“Is this yours?” she asks, holding up the bag. “You left it out.”
“Oh,” he says, looking up with a squint as if he’s trying to remember. “I did eat those.”
“Well, this isn’t much for dessert,” she says.
“It wasn’t dessert.”
Allison lifts up her brows. It’s a look she’s getting quite good at around her moronic brothers. “You can’t possibly tell me it was dinner.”
This is a concept that Five has apparently not considered, though he seems to make quick work of his assessment now. He frowns a little in consternation. “What time is it?”
“Almost nine,” she says.
He shrugs, facial expression easing. “Then, I guess it was dinner.”
That’s not the answer she wants to hear. “Five--”
Five flits his hand through the air at her, scrunched back over his work. “Shh, I’m onto something.”
“You mean like an actual dinner plan?” she prods him.
He’s hardly listening to her. “No, no -- an equation.”
“Five!”
He looks up at her again, and he has the audacity to be mildly exasperated with her, of all things. “Allison!”
It’s too much. The day has been too long. She shakes her head. “Fine, whatever,” she mutters. “I’m going to go make some spaghetti. There’ll be enough for two, if you’re interested.”
The suggestion seems vexing to him. “But I already ate dinner.”
“You do know that marshmallows aren’t dinner,” she says, and it feels vaguely like she’s talking to Claire, except Claire can be coerced into sitting at the table to eat meals. She just likes to take two hours to eat her vegetables.
Five suddenly appears quite pleased with himself. “They are when you eat them at the dinner hour.”
There it is, then. Unimpeachable logic.
Needless to say, Allison is more than happy to eat her damn spaghetti alone that night.
-o-
Later, after finding Five curled up on a couch instead of in his bed fast asleep, Allison concedes the day is done and heads back up to her own room. She’s left her phone there for the better part of the day. She’s plugged it in under the pretense of charging it, but the truth is that she just doesn’t want to check it.
She still has that choice, but she is expecting to hear from her lawyer soon about the legal case, so she really should check. To her disappointment, there’s nothing from her lawyer. There are a few pointless queries from her agent, wanting her to start working again, but most are the messages are from Patrick.
Please don’t make this a big deal. It’s not a big deal.
Allison rolls her eyes. There was a time when Patrick thought he was the luckiest man alive to be married to her. It’s pretty clear that he now thinks that he’s the luckiest man alive to be divorced from her. He doesn’t know that she’d concede all his points on alimony if he just gave her shared custody.
Claire’s therapist knows all about the relationship, and she says it’s fine.
Somehow, the fact that Claire’s therapist knows more about Claire’s life than Allison herself is not the comfort that Patrick imagines it to be.
I have every legal right to date.
That’s supposed to be his concluding point, because he’s a bastard. That’s the real problem when you rumor someone into caring about you. It’s not just that you’re manipulating them -- which, yes, Allison knows that’s bad and it’s wrong. But it also means that you don’t know the real them. Allison married an idealized version of the man. The real guy? Not quite as appealing, as it turns out.
Of course, if she hadn’t rumored him, maybe he would have been less of a bastard, but she has her doubts.
Just call me, okay?
That last message is only about 20 minutes old. Allison could call him. She might be able to leverage this to get him to put Claire on the phone for a few minutes. That might be worth it.
She tosses the phone aside and flops heavily on her bed.
Patrick said he wanted this played by the rules.
So Allison will play by the rules.
Patrick has every legal right to date.
And Allison?
Well, she doesn’t have a lot of rights at the moment, except this one: the right to not give a shit what her son of a bitch ex-husband wants.
Tomorrow, she’ll call her lawyer instead.
Tomorrow, she’ll work on getting Five to sit down for a meal.
The things that matter -- or just the things she can control.
Nuance has always been a hell of a thing.
-o-
Her lawyer is hard to get ahold of, and Allison leaves him messages daily for the next week while she ignores all of Patrick’s texts and phone calls. She focuses her attention, therefore, on Five.
She has minimal success in getting Five to sit and eat a meal, this is true, but she refuses to gauge it as outright failure. Instead, she proceeds in research mode, and she accumulates the necessary information to make a more accurate assessment of what’s actually going on between Five and his too-small stomach.
The answer is complicated, to say the least.
Five, over the course of the week, displays nothing resembling a regular eating routine. His habits are completely irregular, and there is no discernible pattern in terms of time, size and nature of his meals. In fact, if anything, she would say he doesn’t like to eat meals. He doesn’t even like formal snacks, but he is prone to grazing if there happens to be food open nearby. At least, he grazes until he notices that someone is watching. Then, he seems to think he needs to have something better to do.
When offered food, his response is always even more extreme -- and it gets even more reactionary as the week goes on and Allison’s observation becomes even more keen. No doubt, he’s realized that he’s the subject of some fascination to her, and he’s either self conscious or a prick. Likely, he’s a self conscious prick.
That said, she does know he eats. For example, by the end of the week, the peanut butter is all gone -- three jars full. She finds spoons around the house in places where Five frequents, licked clean but still smelling strongly of peanuts. At some point, they run out of bread in the house, and there’s a suspicious trail of crumbs into his room. She tracks it there one afternoon, where she finds Five passed out in a chair while the rest of the family assembles for dinner.
He also has a strange tendency to binge on fruits and vegetables. Klaus and Diego go to the store one night. By the next morning, they’re already out of carrots, tomatoes and grapes. Five says nothing of this, but he is notably in a better mood that day.
There is, undoubtedly, a lot of psychological factors at play with these behaviors. She imagines, as she must, that Five’s experience in the apocalypse taught him to not view food as a given necessity on a daily basis. Moreover, he probably learned to scavenge only when desperate. When a plentiful food source was presented to him, he had likely indulged to excess. It’s the definition of a eating disorder, but it’s too simple to label Five’s relationship with food that way. There are other profound issues at play, the same kind that make the smartest man she knows talk to an inanimate object.
The assessment is useful, but Allison knows that eventually she has to do something about it.
The question is: what?
-o-
It’s not an easy question to answer.
Therefore, Allison does the only thing she can think to do -- and doesn’t answer it. Instead, she calls her lawyer twenty times the next day, staying on hold, talking to his secretary, and tracking down his personal cell number, until he finally answers.
“Yeah, hi,” he says, like he’s been thinking about calling her for awhile. “I’ve got your messages. Just been kind of busy--”
He’s clearly trying to segue out of this conversation, but Allison’s done with shit right now. “Well, we’ll make it short, then,” she says. “How is the case going with my daughter?”
“Well, the orders are with the judge and we have every reason to expect--”
“That they’ll be sign, yeah, I know,” Allison says. “But I knew that three weeks ago. So I want an update.”
The lawyer laughs in that condescending way of his, and Allison is tempted to rumor him because he’s an asshole who deserve it, but she doesn’t. “It’s not something with updates, really. It’s either signed or not.”
“So, how do we get it signed faster?” Allison asks. “I mean, there has to be a schedule, doesn’t there? The order can’t just sit on a desk indefinitely, can it?”
“Not indefinitely, no,” the lawyer says. “But it’s not up to us how fast the judge looks at it. We really do just have to wait it out.”
Allison grits her teeth. “I’m tired of waiting,” she says tautly. “This is my relationship we’re talking about.”
“I know, I get that, I do,” the lawyer says. “Family cases are always the hardest, but the judge has countless other cases just like yours--”
“All I want to know is an update,” Allison says. “Is my case on the list for tomorrow? Next week?”
“We just have to wait, Ms. Hargreeves,” the lawyers says again. “You can’t force it.”
“Why not?” Allison asks, thinking that she probably could force it. She could rumor this lawyer and then rumor the judge and rumor the whole damn legal system if she has to. And she wants to right now. She really, really wants to. In a life of broken relationship, she’d like to mend just one. Just this one.
“Because it’s the law,” the lawyer insists.
“No, it’s my daughter,” Allison says, more than a little terse.
The response back is just as biting. “Then, with all due respect, Ms. Hargreeves, you probably shouldn’t have ruined the relationship in the first place.”
Allison is pissed as hell when she hangs up because he’s a bastard and an asshole and a self-serving jerk.
He also happens, unfortunately, to be completely right.