Umbrella Academy fic: Childish Things (1/3)
Title: Childish Things
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
A/N: Fill for my kidnapping square on hc_bingo. No beta because that’s life.
Warning: Deals with violence toward a minor (who is technically 58)
Summary: Five is kidnapped for ransom. It doesn’t go quite the way anyone expects.
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
-o-
Five looked like a child.
He knew this; the concept was not difficult to grasp conceptually. Logically, he could even explain the strange and extenuating scientific and mathematical reasons for his appearance. If necessary, he could provide a simplified explanation that made the fact that he looked like a child completely sensible and irrefutable.
Logic and reason aside, that didn’t make it any easier to live out. Theory did not always correlate to application in terms of palatability.
The simple fact was that he hated it. He hated the way he looked, the way he sounded, the way he was. Hate was not an adequate description. Five loathed it, abhorred it even. He hated the way people looked at him, the way they talked to him. The way they acted like he couldn’t do things, like he didn’t know. Even his siblings, whom he had saved, fell into the trap sometimes. They had a tendency to remind him to eat his dinner or to go to bed on time. As if he needed the reminder.
Five hated that. He hated being coddled, babies and generally treated like some infantile version of himself. He couldn’t stand any part of it. Because Five was not a child. Not in any way, shape or form.
Sooner or later, he had to hope people would realize that.
Sooner or later.
But not today, apparently.
-o-
In the apocalypse, it was easy, in some ways, to get around. Sure, there was debris everywhere. The streets were cluttered and dangerous, and buildings were prone to falling over with little notice. These were inconveniences, to be sure, but they weren’t terribly difficult to mitigate as long as you were smart and capable. Five was both smart and capable, which made navigating the apocalypse lonely, depressing, demoralizing and, in the end, relatively without problem.
With the Commission, he’d had the privilege of being a man without time. He had no ties, no connections. His job was not to make friends; his job was to kill people. Five found this to also be relatively easy in the scheme of things. Killing a person took little effort when you used your logic and knew the body’s inherent weaknesses. Actual talking to that person, by contrast, was a messy process of give and take.
For all the he’d wanted to save humanity, Five found it rather inconvenient to deal with humanity.
That was why walking down the street always proved to be one of the more difficult tasks for him in any given day. Staying in the mansion was easy. Dealing with his siblings could be stressful but it was at least predictable. He found it to be a controlled environment with acceptable margins for interaction and distraction.
His siblings did not agree. They decided -- without his input, for the record -- that he needed to be socialized. As if he were some stray dog.
Five resented the implication but could not deny them their logic. Five had saved the world. It was time for him to actually live in the real world. It was like Hazel had recommended. This was his chance, for better or for worse, to grow up.
That wasn’t to say Five was about to start going to school or joining some infantile soccer club. He wasn’t going to make little 13 year old friends to talk about their changing body hair and how girls made them horny. No, Five would simply attempt simpler, less immature ventures. He would go to the library. He would visit the store. Sometimes, he might even eat a meal out. Once, under duress, he went to an actual movie.
Today, as it were, Five was doing his due diligence to grow and going to the electronics store. For all they had in the mansion, they didn’t have any modern frills. For Reginald, running water had been an extravagance. And seeing how Five was a few days shy of 14 in this existence, he figured he would buy himself a phone.
Klaus had offered to go with him, but Five declined. Diego had pointed out that he might need an adult to get a contract, but Five assured him that wouldn’t be a problem. He could, after all, be quite convincing. Luther, worried that something might go wrong, told him to come home if he needed adult supervision, and Allison merely rolled her eyes at the lot of them and told Five to take simply have Vanya pick him up in an hour to solidified whatever contract the company deemed necessary and inappropriate for an alleged minor.
Five found this acceptable. He would get his phone on his own terms while not drawing unnecessary attention to the fact that he was a 13 year old without supervision in the modern world.
The modern world was not the future world. It was not the apocalypse.
Therefore, Five had to adapt.
Fortunately, he was generally good at adapting. You didn’t survive a literal apocalypse if you weren’t.
However, walking down the street from his own front door, he had to admit, it was somehow easier to adapt to the apocalypse than it was the real world. The real world was full of people. People who were loud and inconsistent and stupid. He had to deal with little kids picking fights over matchbox cars. He had to deal with old men smoking on their stoops. He had to deal with women hailing taxis while they wore high heels. It was awkward; it was weird.
Turning the corner, Five contemplated the next batch of men. He wasn’t a block from home, and these idiots looked to be the dumbest he’d seen yet. They were wearing uniforms -- street workers, then, by the look of them -- but where the hell was the rest of their crew? Where was the equipment? These assholes had showed up on the wrong job site. It was remarkable and not in a good way how easy it was for the average person to lose the plot of their life -- as their lives were so complicated or so important. Fixing streets wasn’t exactly saving the world, and he’d managed to never look like a moron in the process.
Fine, so he managed to look 13 but that was a mathematical miscalculation. Not a personality flaw.
Five scoffed despite himself, moving past them with an air of indignation. Stupidity always offended him. Sure, he knew he had worked hard to save people just like these men and their pitiful attempts to provide use to the world. But still. The constant affronts of stupidity was what made getting around the streets these days so hard. There were all these people, doing mundane, stupid, silly things. They couldn’t possibly know how close they’d come to annihilation. They had no idea that there was a future out there, just barely diverted, where their trivial existence had been snuffed out in the blink of an eye.
Yet, here they were. People just like these morons, going about their lives, doing their jobs.
People waving goodbye. People telling the same joke with a punchline that never made anyone laugh. People giving each other the finger. People whistling under their breath, a song they didn’t really know.
People walking too slowly behind him.
Five turned, surprised to see one of the men in the uniforms behind him. The man was closer than Five had anticipated; only seconds ago, he’d been several yards away. Now, he seemed to be actively following him, given his sudden proximity. Five glared, wondering if this imbecile somehow thought that Five knew where he was supposed to be.
Five didn’t, and he had no desire to help out with directions. He supposed that he looked like an easy, sympathetic target. Just a kid, wandering down the street in a schoolboy uniform. He looked as mundane as the rest of them, no doubt. A stupid, anonymous kid.
He hated that.
Almost as much as he hated idiots.
Turning back around, he nearly ran into the other man, who had worked his way in front of Five and stopped abruptly, facing him. His dim, broad face was serious, and Five saw that he wasn’t as much an idiot as he’d thought. Not that Five would call him smart, but there was something going on that didn’t quite make sense.
Behind him, the other man closed in, and Five found himself vexed. Walking down the street was a simple, easy task. A mundane task. Why did these two have so much desire to make it unnecessarily hard? He’d already saved their asses, what more did they want?
Feeling perturbed now, Five opened his mouth to tell the men to leave him the hell alone. He was mustering up something witty and insulting when the man in front of him winced. There was a rush of movement behind him, and Five was too confused to react when something hard came down on the back of his head.
The impact was hard and sudden, and Five blinked dumbly as he tried to understand. His consciousness abated rapidly, his senses abandoning him in quick successful. He felt himself going down but was unable to stop it, and the air left his lungs in a rush as the world went spectacularly dark.
Stupidity, as it turned out, was possibly contagious.
As he fell, an ungraceful and jumbled heap of uncoordinated limbs, Five fit in with the modern world better than he could have possibly hoped.
-o-
Existence was fleeting.
That was a thing, wasn’t it? The temporality of it all. Five had seen so many endings that he knew they were inevitable, even if he’d spent his life, his long, long life, fighting them. That was irony, for the record. Lots and lots of irony.
Because Five had spent so much time clinging to life only to find it was never, ever his to hold in the first place. Time was inconsistent in that way. It dragged when you wanted it to fly; it evaporated in an instant when you wanted a lifetime. Right about the time you were ready to retire, you wake up and you’re 13 again.
See?
Irony.
Five’s life was a cautionary tale about the perils of irony and the incomprehensible overconfidence of youth. Hence why he was a kid again. Because of course he was. He couldn’t possibly move past the worst moment of his life. He had to be perpetually reminded of it every time he looked in the damn mirror and saw his 13 year old self looking back.
Shit, existence was fleeting and still, not nearly fleeting enough. Five grappled with its permanence and impermanence simultaneously, unable to hold onto either without letting go of both. He tried this time, to be fair. He tried to hold on, but it was harder than he thought it should be. His head hurt, a deep ache that seemed to tingle down into his fingers and his toes. His stomach was taut, and his eyes rolled behind his lids. When he breathed, it only made things worse.
It occurred to him, rather belatedly, that he was moving. This was a strange sensation, primarily because he had no part in making it happen. He was moving without his consent; not that his consent had ever meant much to anyone, but still.
Still.
Through the pounding headache, Five tried to cut through the irony, trying to tighten his grasp as his existence ebbed and flowed. He made an effort to focus, but it made the pain worse, and it reached a blinding point. He thought this time he might be sick, but the thought of evacuating his stomach required too much energy, and he sagged in the face of it.
For a period of time, that was really that. He didn’t understand what was happening to him; he could come to terms with the movement or what it meant. However, the impetus to understand it was muted somehow, and he would have drifted easily back into the dark if given the choice. People might think Five would be defined by a dogged determination to survive, but they would be wrong. He could be better defined by his contrary ability to survive, even against his own good intentions.
Surrender wasn’t so much a weakness as it was a means of survival in and of itself. Sometimes, the reality was too much. Sometimes, you just needed to drink yourself into oblivion. Sometimes, you just needed to resort to mass murder. Sometimes, even when you didn’t know why, you just needed to pass out and worry about the reasons why later.
And if later was never, then that was no concern of his.
Until, of course, it was.
Unceremoniously, Five lurched. He thought it was more of the same, but the sudden downward motion was more jarring than the rest. For a split second, he was weightless, but then he hit the ground -- hard.
The pain ignited anew, and the lights exploded behind Five’s closed eyes. He heard a sound -- a strained, choked mewl -- and he was grappling through his loss of equilibrium before he realized that the sound came from his own throat.
“Shit! Watch it!”
“Careful! His head--”
“He’s heavier than he looks--”
“He’s just a kid, damn it. Be careful.”
Someone grabbed his arms, hoisting him up as his head falls back, face turned up. Someone else took him by the legs, and he was effortless lifted off the ground. The movement was too much; it was all too much.
Existence didn’t have to be fleeting, but his consciousness was.
Five would contemplate it later, he was sure. He was too busy being unconscious now to worry about it.
-o-
The next thing he knew, Five was more or less upright. He was sitting for some reason, in a chair that was hard and strangely cold. There was a pressure around his chest, matched only by the pounding his head. It was worse than before.
A lot worse.
Eyes still closed, Five could feel the tension trembling up and down his limbs. His hands were being pulled behind him, stretched too far as his wrists were twined with coarse rope. The rope was adjusted once and twice before someone uses another length of rope to tie his feet to the legs of the chair.
There was a part of him that knew this wasn’t good. It wasn’t good at all, and Five was in trouble. It was probably a good reason to be concerned, but Five couldn’t focus enough to muster anything resembling concern. In fact, sleep sounded good right now. Sleep.
His head was lifted, rough hands pushing back his hair. He flinched, groaning as his eyes flickered.
“I’m worried we killed him. Look at him.”
“Uh, yeah. I see him opening his eyes. No way he’s dead.”
The fingers took him by the chin, and Five’s slitted gaze struggled to make sense of the image in front of him. Broad features; tanned skin. Dark, worried eyes. A frown.
“But we hurt him, man. I didn’t think we were supposed to hurt him.”
The confirmation of injury was something. Five thought it was probably something, but he couldn’t quite bring the information into perspective. Errant variables in an equation he could solve. Understanding was just beyond his reach, hiding beneath the throbbing of his head and the constriction in his chest.
“Well, shit. What did you think would happen?”
That was laughable, that. The idea that you could predict anything. Five spent years trying to prevent the apocalypse only to discover too late that it was his own sister who caused it. What you thought and what actually was were two totally different things. Five might be smug about that were he not so badly concussed.
That was what he was: concussed. He had a concussion, and a bad one at that. These two assholes, whoever they were, had knocked him out and dragged him off the street. Now, they had tied him up somewhere, and were clearly looking to leverage him for something.
It was a startling moment of clarity.
It didn’t last.
Five’s eyes slipped back into his head, and he slumped against his bonds again.
“I don’t know, okay? I just know I didn’t sign on to beat up a kid. He’s a kid! How bad did we hurt him?”
There was a note of genuine concern, for whatever that was worth. Five thought it to be relevant, but he couldn’t figure out why.
“How the hell should I know? He better be okay, though. We need him alive.”
The grip on his chin dissipated, and Five couldn’t stop his head as it flopped forward. He couldn’t stop the pain as it spiked through his head. And he couldn’t stop his consciousness from leaving again.
-o-
The dark was never quite dark enough. It never hid the nightmares. It never extinguished the nagging doubts in the back of your mind. The dark was as much a fallacy as anything else, teasing you with oblivion when it really wanted to torture you with snippets of light.
In the apocalypse, there had been no sun. But that didn’t mean it was dark. It was light in an insidious way. Light in a way that left the corners dim. Light in a way that never made you feel warm. It was a veiled sunlight, warmth filtered through grime, a pale approximation of what it was supposed to be. The sun was there; Five knew that or he never could have survived. But it was just out of reach. The promise of hope beyond his grasp. The idea of renewal beyond his imagination.
This was the same kind of dark. Veiled and distant, cold and empty. A yawning chasm that only made you wish it could swallow you whole. Five floated there, and it was not a matter of volition. Few things were, he found. The variables within his control could be increasingly scant. The questions of how and why screamed in the back of his throbbing mind, but there was no way to assuage them. The answers only yielded more questions, and Five chased equations around in his head until the strings of numbers led to nowhere.
In darkness like this, you had to make your own light. You had to build your own hope. You had to scavenge for it deep inside yourself, hold it tight in your hand like a glass eyeball you found in your dead brother’s stiff fingers.
That was family to him. Not sentiment. Not emotion. Pure utility. He had to have family to ground him. The idea of saving them, the idea of sparing their lives, was the only grounding force in a world that had become unmoored. Family was the constant, and with family, he was still 13.
He didn’t admit to that. Pride, maybe. The only vestige of it he had left. The apocalypse took so much for him, everything else, so it seemed silly to begrudge himself that. That stubbornness saved him, after all. That pride kept him alive when anyone else would have died. That pressing, unyielding need to be right had saved the world, in the end.
He had saved them.
In a cold world, that was warmth. In the darkness, that was light. In the suffering, that was hope.
And fine, so Five looked like a kid, but they were kids to him.
Maybe that made them equals, in some ways.
Maybe that was just irony.
Maybe it didn’t matter.
In the darkness, truth was hard and unadorned. Five knew -- he knew -- that the light, when it came, would hurt -- more than he cared to think about. But he’d settled for the pain; he’d embrace it. For their sake. For his own.
As with most things in Five’s life, the choice wasn’t exactly his to make anyway.
He was always going to spend the rest of his life paying for the mistake he made when he was 13 years old, no matter how long he lived.
-o-
This time, when Five woke up, he was at least coherent. He knew he was tied up, likely still in the city, in a run-down building in one of the abandoned neighborhoods in the poorer district. He knew that he had been abducted off the street and that it could have been a matter of hours since he was taken. By this estimation, his siblings had probably noticed he was missing by now, though it would be debatable if his absence would be a cause for concern yet. Five had to take it upon himself to figure out a way out of this mess, and he started in on the rope that was wound around his wrist, testing its strength and the tone of the knots.
Coherent, but pained.
Shit, he was in a lot of pain.
The throbbing in his head hadn’t gone away since the abduction, but now that he was awake, he realized just how intense it was. It was blinding -- to the point that he couldn’t look toward the windows. Movement was a perilous notion; the instant he started to pull at his binding, his stomach lurched and he thought he was going to be sick. The whole notion of it only intensified his headache, and Five thought for a few horrible, coherent seconds that he was about to pass out again.
It took several minutes for his vision to clear and for his stomach to settle. Breathing steadily through his nose, he tried to steady himself, willing his shaky nerves to come back into check. Escape was a good idea, but passing out in the process would defeat the purpose. No, this was not a time for brute strength -- not that he had much of that as a 13 year old -- but rather a call to think his way through this.
With some resolve, Five slowed himself down. He slowed his breathing, steadied his heart rate and measured the pace of his thoughts. With this intentionality, he conducted a much more thorough assessment of his situation.
The basic facts still held true, but the nuances mattered. This was clearly an apartment, which meant that the building was most likely abandoned. Taking someone off the street carried certain risks, and even if the men who took him weren’t concerned with him making noise, it would arouse suspicion to carry an unconscious child up a few flights of stairs in the middle of the day.
It had been the morning when he’d been taken; it was still light outside. This meant that only hours had passed. His headache was bad, but he doubted that he’d been unconscious for more than 24 hours. He supposed that was an assumption, but he felt comfortable enough making it. It didn’t change his assessment of the fact that this was an abandoned apartment building. The room layout was not indicative of a house, and he could see other ramshackle buildings outside the window. He roughly judged their height and made an approximation that he was probably in an apartment on the third or fourth floor. There was no other view to speak of -- no sign of the skyline -- which meant they had travelled some distance. With a little more calculation -- based on the sun’s position -- he might be able to pinpoint a location more specifically, but his head hurt too much for minute calculations to that degree.
Besides, the exact location was not of primary concern. It didn’t matter where he was. It only mattered that he could get the hell out of there and fast.
To that end, the outlook was mixed. The fact that this was an abandoned building did make it harder to attract attention, but it did make it that much easier to hide. The apartment itself was mostly vacant, sparsely populated with a few mismatched pieces of furniture. Most of it was broken -- a pile of shattered chairs, a table propped up on a pile of crates, and a sagging coach with a few cushions missing.
The fact that ropes had been used was interesting. Rope may have seemed like an obvious choice, but the fact was that rope was not something most people just had on hand. At least, not normal people. People like Reginald Hargreeves had mountains of it stored away for special circumstances. But it begged the question -- under which circumstances did you actually need rope? Mountain climbing with Herr Asshole.
Five had to scoff at the thought despite himself. It was unlikely that these men were mountain climbers -- that was just an instinct, not an actual observation -- which meant that they either preferred old school methods or simply did not realize there were more efficient ways. Rope was either a sign of loyalty to established methods or an indication of a severe lack of creativity. It was hard to say, at this juncture, which was more probable.
The rest of the apartment wasn’t much help either. There was junk everywhere, wrappers, cans, unwashed clothes and the like. The general vicinity of his chair -- which was the only one still in working order nearby -- had been cleaned up. But the trash had clearly only been displaced, pushed to the side.
Which meant this was likely not a permanent residence or of any particular significance. The location would not be tied to the men who took him. It was merely a matter of convenience; a place to stash him.
But to what end?
This assessment provided insight into where he was and who had taken him, but why.
Why had he been snatched off the street?
Who had the motivation to stage such an abduction?
What did they hope to gain from these extreme measures?
The first thought was perhaps the most obvious. The Commission had the means for an abduction, and given his tumultuous history with the Commission, it would not be impossible to speculate a motive. It could be as broad as a plan to reset the timeline. It could be as petty as simple revenge. Five didn’t exactly leave the Commission on good terms. In fact, he basically blew the place up and tore it down. It had rarely been personal with the Commission, but he had a feeling, for him, they might make an exception.
Or this could be a rogue action. A specific enemy. The Handler had a thing for him, and the fact that the world wasn’t over had to piss her off. Hazel and Cha Cha were also possibilities, though the former was less likely than the latter. He and Hazel had left on good terms, and assuming that Hazel’s investment in a donut shop had paid off, he could imagine the man would have much reason to come after him. Cha Cha was another story entirely. She was a career woman, and Five had likely ruined her career. It hadn’t been his intention necessarily, though he hadn’t felt much guilt over it. Of course, that was assuming that any of them had survived the second apocalypse, which was a mathematical probability that Five’s muddled brain couldn’t wholly compute just yet.
Though honestly, the more he thought about it, this didn’t feel like a Commission hit. The Commission was clean and efficient.
This?
Was anything but.
The abduction itself had been sloppy in its execution, and this whole set up seemed half-assed. Why would they leave him alone? When they knew he could jump through time and space. There was no way anyone with that knowledge would be so cavalier as to tie Five up with piddly ropes and leave him wholly unattended. All he had to do was focus his energy and jump.
Wait.
Of course.
All he had to do was focus his energy and jump.
Then, this whole ill fated abduction would be over just like that.
Five must really be concussed if that wasn’t the first thing he’d considered. He could have escaped by now, been all the way back home in the blink of an eye.
The notion was solidifying, and Five drew on his powers. He found his mind still muddled and the process was harder than he expected. Gritting his teeth and closing his eyes, he dug deeper for his power, doing his best to harness it appropriately. His power was vast and wide; the reservoir of it likely limitless. His performance only faltered when his ability to grasp it was diminish. The mental load, the physical toll were substantial when taken together. When he was exhausted, mentally or physically, his ability to use his power was greatly diminish.
Right now, he was both.
He hissed between his clenched teeth, annoyed that he couldn’t quite pull things into focus. He knew that the head wound alone would make it hard to focus his powers for a successful jump, and he was only letting his frustration at the situation get too deep a hold on him. The power surged but he found no means to control it.
It pulsed and he mentally stumbled. His breathing hitched, and Five felt the power ready to burst inside his already damaged skull. For a split second, he could feel the power as it tingled along his skin, and he clenched his fists, ready to make a jump, with just another burst of power, another second of concentration.
The power was too much.
His concentration was too scattered.
The power overtook him and the pain reached a blinding pitch before he passed out once again.
-o-
To say Five woke up with a headache would be pointless and redundant.
Instead, it was more relevant to say that Five woke up with a headache and the pressing notion that he wasn’t alone.
Now, Five had not been stranded in the apocalypse for quite some time now. He had lived among people, in various fashions, for years.
And still, waking up around people always caught him off guard.
Always.
If only his siblings knew how unexpected morning wake up calls made him vaguely homicidal. Klaus had no idea how lucky he was not to be dead.
The two assholes who abducted him would not be spared such a fate. The instant Five opened his eyes, he seized upon his rage, instinctively lashing out with a snarl. If not for the bonds still holding him back, he was quite confident that both of the men would have been dead by now. One with a broken neck. The other thrown clear out the window, thank you very much.
As it was, his murderous intent was a mere fantasy. Still restrained, he was resigned to snarl ineffectually, glaring at them angrily. The entire process would have been much more gratifying if they had responded with the appropriate terror of having pissed off a timeless assassin.
Instead, the men just looked relieved.
“Oh, thank goodness,” the one said, actually having the audacity to smile. “You’re awake!”
The second one -- the one Five can connect to the throbbing in his skull -- didn’t smile, but his gait physically relaxed as he stood behind the first guy’s shoulder. They were both in their 30s by Five’s estimation. The second man, the one with moderate control over his emotions, had light brown hair and a deep tan. He was lankier but his blue eyes were harder. The first man, who was still smiling like the idiot he was, had longer, darker hair. He was stocky to the point of almost being pudgy, and he was still wearing the work uniform he’d donned on the street.
They both looked like street workers, honestly.
But what the hell was a street worker doing abducting him off the street?
“See? He’s fine,” the second one said. He paused to chew at a hangnail viciously. “We should make the call now.”
“Okay, okay,” the first said, holding up his hands as if to relent. He still smiled at Five. “Just want to make sure the kid knows he’s okay.”
Five sighed. Getting hurt was exhausting. Being restrained was annoying. But dealing with morons who said shit like that? It was practically intolerable.
“Yeah, I’m not sure he’s going to believe you,” the skinny one said, shaking his head. He shrugged his shoulders, making eye contact with Five for the first time. “But if you shut up, sit chill and keep calm, then I’ve got no reason to hurt you.”
This was, of course, ridiculous. He scoffed. “You already hurt me,” he said. “Unless you think that the concussion you gave me was an appropriate way of saying hello. I know we’ve all got our quirks, but even I understand that a handshake is more appropriate.”
The second one raised his eyebrows. The first looked concerned again. “You feeling all right, kid?”
Five made a face. “Of course I’m not,” he said. He tipped his head to the side. “Concussion. Remember?”
The man reached up, touching at the matted hair on the back of Five’s head. He flinched away out of frustration, and the man winced as if in sympathy. “Well, we won’t do it again, okay?” he said, trying to rally something that resembled enthusiasm now. “You’ll be okay, kid.”
Five worked his fingers, testing the bonds again. They weren’t tighter than before, that was good. Apparently no additional measures had been taken to secure him. That was weird, though, wasn’t it? Unless these asshols really didn’t know who he was.
How could they not know who he was?
Five was missing something here; something important, something obvious. His head still throbbing, he wrinkled his nose. “Be okay with what exactly?” he demanded, letting his tone inflect what his posture could not right now. “What is your plan here?”
All his reasoning aside, he had no cause to beat around the bush. He had questions, and these assholes had to have the answers. If he wanted to know who they were, he needed to ask them. Even if they didn’t reveal their true identity, anything they said could reveal important clues. If they weren’t from the Commission -- and that still seemed unlikely to him -- maybe they were other people he’d pissed off. Maybe he’d killed one of their relatives. Maybe the Commission had sold out his identity, let as many of his victims’ descendents know who he was. Maybe they would all be coming from him now, the Commission’s means of getting back at him for his meddling.
The blonder one grunted. “The plan is for you to shut up and let us do our thing.”
The other one nodded, a bit more emphatic. “This isn’t personal, kid. You’re just our way to a quick payday. You get to go home, your family gets their kid back, and we get paid. Easy as that.”
Five, still tied, still concussed, stared at him. His struggling fingers went limp, and his eyes flickered between the two, looking for some kind of indication that they were lying to him. Sure, he’d asked the question, but he hadn’t exactly expected a straightforward answer. What kind of criminal mastermind gave a straightforward answer to that question?
Five’s concussed brain sluggishly came up with the answer. No kind of criminal mastermind gave a straightforward answer to that question. It shouldn’t have been a surprising revelation by this point. Everything about these two morons indicated that they were amateurs. From their hockneyed attack on the street to their uncreative and uneven attempts to control him, these two were anything but criminal masterminds. They hadn’t even covered their faces or taken any actual security precautions.
They didn’t even know who Five was.
They had picked a mark, almost at random, in some pathetic attempt to make a quick buck.
It was all so stupid, so utterly and categorically stupid, that Five was certain that his concussion had affected his ability to fully process what was going on. “Wait, let me get this straight,” Five said, almost laughing now, the bonds forgotten. “You kidnapped me?”
The big man nodded. “Yes. For ransom.”
Five was all but gaping now. “So you don’t know who I am?”
The second one snorted again, this time rolling his eyes. “You’re some little rich kid who lives in some big fancy house with loads of cars and wait staff,” he said with a smirk. “That’s the only thing that matters. Not you, but your folks and all the money they got.”
Five was almost at a loss. He may have been kidnapped off a street corner, but this was the first time he’d felt well and truly surprised during this whole process. “So you don’t know who I am.”
“Like I said, pipsqueak,” the skinny one said. “It doesn’t matter who you are as long as your parents pay up. Big time.”
The first one reached over and actually patted him on the shoulder. “No one has to get hurt. I promise. No one else gets hurt.”
Five endured the touch in his utter shock.
Kidnapping.
Ransom.
Actual kidnapping.
Like he’s an actual kid.
Shit, Five must have hit his head a lot harder than he thought, because this whole damn thing was surreal.
He waited for a moment, as if he might wake up or pass or anything to explain this abrupt disconnect he was having with reality. When it became clear that no such out would be easily provided, he shook his head. “You two have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.”
The skinny one pursed his lips, pulling a phone out of his jeans pocket. “Yeah, well, let’s find out then,” he said. “Tell me the number to call your family, and we’ll get this thing started.”
Five looked at the phone then lifted his quizzical brow to the man. It hurt, but he didn’t care. He’d take the pain over the emotional humiliation over being kidnapped by assholes any day. “Are you serious?”
“Just give us the number,” the other one implored.
“Are you actually serious?” Five repeated, almost starting to laugh now as the pressure pulsed in his head again.
The skinny one put the phone down and pulled out a gun. He leveled it at Five’s head while the other guy muttered a curse and picked up the phone.
“Hell, yeah, little man,” the man said, staring at Five down the barrel of the gun. “I’m pretty damn serious.”
Five eyed the man, taking little note of the gun. It wasn’t an impressive gun; it wasn’t even loaded and Five knew it. It was intended to be seen as a bold move, but it was all bravado. A small man trying to hide behind a gun; it only diminished the effect.
Coolly, Five shrugged. “Okay, then,” he said, because at this point, he was actually a little curious about what came next. “Let’s call my family.”
-o-
The second man, the skinny one in the jeans, seemed to be in control of the situation now, at least in comparison to the would-be nice one. With the gun in his hand, he was clearly calling the shots now, and the other man scrambled to comply even as Five observed it all with an air of indifference.
These two weren’t actually much of a threat. Sure, he knew that didn’t say much about him, but to his credit, he hadn’t been anticipating any kind of attack. If they hadn’t hit him so hard, he would have been out of there by now. Besides, at this point, he was vaguely amused at the prospect of seeing these two face off against his siblings.
His superpowered siblings.
Who had been trained to fight crime since childhood.
Who had saved the world.
Those siblings.
And they wanted a ransom. Morons would be lucky if they got out of this alive.
With minimal prodding, Five provided a phone number to the mansion, skipping the lines in the study and lower levels. He wanted his siblings to pick up, not Pogo or Grace. With his hands still tied -- he had started to loosen then, but just a little -- the nicer guy was holding the phone to his ear while it rung. The other one stood nearby, the gun pressed closer still to Five’s head.
“Hello?” a voice answered after several rings.
Five smiled. Luther.
The gun flashed toward him, all but pressed against his temple now. “Answer him,” he whispered angrily. “But no funny business.”
This whole thing was funny business, as far as Five was concerned, but he complied anyway. “Luther,” he said. “Hi.”
Over the line, there was a small intake of air. “Five? Is that you?”
“Yeah,” Five replied. “It’s me.”
“But where are you?” Luther demanded, his concern audible. “Vanya said you didn’t show--”
“Yeah, well,” Five said, arching an eyebrow as he looked at the now-seething man holding the gun. “Slight change of plans.”
Frustrated, the man with the gun reached for the phone. He pulled it away, letting the gun hang idle while he turned away and pressed the phone to his ear. “A major change of plans,” he said. “We got the kid. He’s safe, like you heard, but he won’t be if you don’t give us money. A million. Small bills, untraceable. We want it delivered tomorrow morning to the abandoned post office in the East Village. Warsaw Street. Do it or we leave the kid there for you, full of holes.”
The demands were related in a litany, impressive only in that the man had delivered it in one breath. When he hung up, he threw the phone on the counter nearby, and turned back toward them, looking abjecting relieved as his chest heaved for air.
“You did it!” the first one said, sounding genuinely overjoyed. “See? I told you we could do it!”
The skinny one nodded, clearly trying to get his rush of adrenaline back under control. “Just like we planned. It’s going well.”
The two gave each other self congratulatory looks, but Five rolled his eyes. “Right,” he said. “You two just keep telling yourself that.”
The man with the gun tightened his grip on it again, scowling as he advanced on Five. “I don’t have to kill you, but that doesn’t mean I won’t. So shut the hell up.”
The more he spoke, the more clear it became to Five that he was bluffing. Clocking Five upside the head was plainly the most successfully violent thing he’d ever done. If this thing went sideways, this asshole might attempt violence. The other one wouldn’t until under duress. The odds of them being successful again, however -- well, Five’s head still hurt too much to do the calculations. But he could surmise, by rough estimation, that the odds were in his favor.
Substantially.
The other man came back toward him with a soothing nod. “I’m telling you, kid. Just relax. This will be over soon enough. You’ll be fine.”
Five shrugged diffidently. “I’m not worried about me right now,” he said. “You two, on the other hand….”
“Whatever,” the second guy said, nudging the other guy in the shoulder. “He’s talking shit; don’t listen to him. He’s just some stupid kid. What’s he going to do?”
Five’s face twisted in offense. He wasn’t some stupid kid. What was he going to do? He was going to kill these assholes. He was going to rip their throats out and tie them up with their own innards. All he had to do was get out of these bonds, focus his energy and jump and--
His power wouldn’t be rallied, though. His hands were still tied tight.
The first man nodded in agreement, and they both turned away from Five with some lame-ass discussion about who was going to pick up dinner.
Five didn’t mind being abducted. He didn’t even inherently mind being held for ransom. He didn’t mind the fact that he’d screwed up, even.
He definitely minded the fact that they looked at him like he was just some kid.
And he really minded that he had no way right now, concussed and tied up and powerless, to prove them wrong.
-o-
To his frustration, they left him like that for a bit. He knew it was a prideful frustration, but that didn’t make it any easier to deal with. Five was a force of nature when he wanted to be. He was the best damn assassin the Commission had ever had. He had survived an apocalypse, damn it. Who did these assholes think they were?
They thought they were kidnappers, apparently.
And they thought Five was their mark.
After stewing on that to no avail for several minutes, Five acknowledged that he was being vain. He was prone to that -- his ineffable need to be right -- but the reality of the situation trumped his feelings. He had to be practical; he had to be pragmatic in his approach. The last time he let himself be guided by emotions, he’d gotten stuck in the apocalypse. The key was to avoid disaster, not create it.
Fortunately, he concluded while sitting there as the two men disappeared into the other room, this situation did not seem to be well out of hand. Sure, it looked bad at first glance, but two kidnappers with questionable credentials were not a substantial threat. Now that his family knew he was missing, they would be working to find him.
And besides, if he applied himself, he wouldn’t need to wait for them. In the absence of his would-be kidnappers, Five blinked a few times, steeled himself and got to work. His mind was still hazy from the concussion, but enough points had been clarified for him now. He didn’t need to make a probability map to know that his best chance was to escape now, while these two idiots weren’t in the room.
He worked at the bonds, twisting his hands repeatedly and pulling in as many directions as possible. It chafed -- and badly -- but he figured that a little blood would only serve as a lubricant. When it got too much, he allowed himself a respite, focusing his energy inward instead, trying to summon his powers once more.
They were easier to access this time, but still not easy to focus. His concentration was improving, but his mental capacity had been diminished by the head injury. He couldn’t quite muster enough wherewithal to channel it effectively. He made himself glow blue a few times, but other than looking like Klaus momentarily, it was of no impact.
He stayed where he was, tied up and concussed, stubbornly stuck in this present moment. It was progress, he supposed, that he hadn’t passed out this time, but the effort still left his head spinning and his breathing short.
He was thus exhausted when the kidnapping duo came back in. The one was still holding a gun, trying to look menacing and failing. The other was at least trying not to smile anymore. He was holding the phone.
At first, Five thought it was for another pointless phone call, but these imbeciles weren’t that smart.
“Okay, kid,” the gruff one said, snapping his fingers as if to call Five to attention like he was a dog. “Photo time.”
Five knew the words had a simple meaning, but for the life of him, he couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to do that. It was utterly cliche, was what it was. It was a silly, meaningless endeavor that seemed to do nothing more than check the boxes of what a stereotypical case of kidnapping might entail on a prime time cop show.
So naturally, these two yahoos clearly thought it was the best idea ever.
The nice one, pudgy and smiling again -- he seemed to be 50 IQ points stupider when he smiled -- brought the phone to bear in front of him. “You don’t need to smile. It’s just for proof of life.”
Five gave them both a plaintive look. “You mean like the phone call we placed earlier in which I said hi and confirmed my identity?”
The dumb one blinked balefully at him, as if Five’s words were mumbo jumbo. The gruff one rolled his eyes, waving the gun through the air impatiently. “Let’s just get it done.”
Dumbly, the other seemed disconcerted by Five’s insinuation. “We just want them to know we haven’t hurt you,” he said. “That you’re okay, you know? That we’re good to our word?”
“Yeah, that point might have been more effective if you hadn’t bashed me upside the head,” Five pointed out.
“So we take it from the front,” the one with the gun said with a sigh. This process seemed to put him out; the moron had no idea. He fiddled with the gun in some vague gesture to move this along. “Proof of life, boom. Good on our word, yadda, yadda, yadda.”
The fact that he didn’t think he needed to contemplate this more was plainly indicative of his lack of intelligence. The dumb one sounded dumb, but Five would require more time to calculate the probability of which one was more of an idiot. “You literally already provided proof of life,” Five said, more emphatically than before. There was a principle involved. There had to be some standard of intelligence in order for him to function reasonably. He was the one with a serious head wound and he was the only one thinking clearly at all. “And you’re kidnappers. I’m not sure what good you think your word could possibly have.”
“Shut up, punk,” the one with the gun said, and he brandished it toward Five in a failed attempt to look threatening.
“It’s just standard,” the other one explained with a note of apology in his voice. Like he wanted Five to know he was sorry for the inconvenience of being kidnapped. “You know.”
Five didn’t know, and these two didn’t either. He shook his head, wriggling his fingers with fresh avail. He had tolerated this long enough; it was time to blow this joint. If he could just get some leverage; just focus a little more. He worked his jaw in contempt. “Just so you know, the number you called earlier? It’s a landline. If you’re hoping to text that picture, you’re going to have some trouble.”
“A landline?” the dumb one repeated, as absolutely dumb as ever.
“No shit, man,” the other one said. He laughed. “No one even has a landline anymore. The punk is messing with us.”
“As much fun as that sounds, no dice,” Five said. “My family really does use landlines almost exclusively.”
“But you’re rich,” the dumb one said. “Surely you can give us another number.”
“The kid is lying,” the other said, this time gesturing with his gun toward his partner. It still wasn’t loaded. They clearly didn’t know that Five knew that.
Five was able to twist his wrist now, but it still wasn’t quite enough to make any actual progress on escaping. Even if he got his hands free, he had made almost no progress on his feet. “You’re wasting your time,” Five hissed. “You’re wasting my time and insulting my intelligence.”
Five was getting pissed now, well and truly pissed. He was pissed that the ropes were so tight and that his head hurt so damn much. He was pissed that these men were assholes and that they were stupid and he was pissed that he had been kidnapped like an actual child.
And you know what?
He was still kind of pissed that he looked like a child so much that no one would blame these ignorant neanderthals for not knowing the difference between a school boy and the world’s best assassin.
Mostly, Five was just pissed. Well and truly pissed and ready to be done.
Now.
“Look, just take the picture,” the gruff one said. He turned the gun tersely back on Five. “Let’s wrap this shit up.”
“Okay, okay,” the other said while fumbling with the camera. “Just look this way.”
It was an easy invective. A lot easier than anything else that had happened to him today. But this time, Five was of sound mind. This time, Five was pissed. This time, Five wasn’t ready to play the stupid game of stupid people. Humanity was so stupid that it made him want to say screw it and end this entire planet himself.
Since that was not currently within his capabilities, he would settle for making life difficult for these two in any way possible.
So when they said smile?
Five promptly started thrashing and threw himself to the floor, chair and all. The impact was harder than he expected, but he clung viciously to consciousness and he was still seething when the nice one scrambled forward to pick him up. As the man asked if Five were okay, Five responded by hissing viscerally, bucking his body wildly, gaining enough leverage to throw the other man off balance.
He crashed to the floor again, vision whiting out momentarily. As the second man swooped over, swearing as he tried to hoist Five up, he literally gnashed his teeth, wrenching his fingers so hard that he could feel the blood slip between his fingers and the rope gave slightly. It hurt -- a lot -- and he felt violently sick. He pushed back the urge to vomit and bucked again. He might throw up; he might pass out. Hell, he might accidentally kill himself. But all that mattered was that tweedle dum and tweedle dee wouldn’t get the shot they wanted.
Still thrashing, this time the bigger one managed to get him upright. “Hold him down! Just hold him steady!”
The other one pressed in closer, grappling with Five’s writhing body as he shook so hard that the chair clattered noisily on the floor of the abandoned apartment. They thought he was just some kid, but he wasn’t. Five wasn’t some stupid kid to be kidnapped. And he wasn’t playing this game, not anymore. They thought he was panicking. Fine, they could think that to their own naive peril. Five was doing the thing Five did best, better than killing, better than jumping through time. Five was surviving.
Screw the odds.
To hell with probabilities.
To think he saved humanity for this.
Five lashed out, almost tearing his wrist and shoulder out of their sockets with the force of his movements.
Humanity?
Right now?
Can go to hell
“Damn it, I can’t!” the other one hissed, jerking back as Five’s head comes perilously close to contacting his exposed chin. “This little asshole is like an eel or something!”
Five smiled, deep and feral, as he made contact with the man’s chest, nearly upsetting them both over again. The gun skittered away harmlessly.
“Just do it! Do it!”
As reckless as Five was, he was still tied up. His efforts, though vigorous, were uncoordinated and haphazard at best. He knew it would just take one lucky break in his direction to gain the upper hand.
On the other side of things, it would only take one unlucky break to thwart all his efforts.
Five was many things.
Lucky, however, had never been one of those things.
With a vice grip that burns his skin with its intensity, the skinny one bears down on him, holding him down to the chair with the full force of his weight. Anticipating the camera to flash in his face, Five snarled. If they insisted on taking this picture, he could at least make sure it wasn’t the shot they wanted of some defenseless kid they’d snatched off the street.
There was no camera, however. To Five’s surprise, the pudgy man stayed to his side, and something pricked sharply on the fleshy part of his arm. Startled, Five craned his neck, where the man was pulling the needle free of Five’s bicep.
“There, there,” the man said, recapping the needle as he smiled at Five. “No sense working yourself up about this. Just relax a little, and I promise, things are going to be fine.”
Angrily, Five struggled again, but his adrenaline was flagging now. He could feel numbness buzzing through his arm, spreading like ice water through his chest.
“Are you sure you did it right?” the other man asked, his grip still unrelenting.
“Sure, look at him,” the other said. “It’s already working.”
Five grunted, but there was no way to deny it. He could feel the cold as it laid like a heavy blanket over his whole body. His ears were buzzing, and it wasn’t the concussion anymore. His vision was dimming; he was fading.
“But what if you kill him?” the other asked. “People don’t pay you for dead kids.”
“Nah, it’s simple math. I read about it online,” the pudgy one said, watching Five as his struggles diminished. “You don’t have to be some kind of genius to plug numbers into a formula.”
Five had a few scathing thoughts about that, but his tongue was no longer working. In fact, it took all his energy to keep his head from flopping forward as his eyelids threatened to droop.
“I even asked a friend I’ve got about it,” the pudgy one said, putting the needle on a nearby table. “Nice guy. A nurse.”
The skinny one still hadn’t relinquished his grip, despite the fact that Five’s struggles had dissipated entirely now. “You talked to a friend? About kidnapping?”
Five might share in the man’s indignant question were he not as much an idiot as his friend. The worst part of it was that they had still managed to get the best of Five -- twice now. How had Five survived the apocalypse -- twice -- if he could handle these two morons?
The other one rolled his eyes, sitting down on the dilapidated couch as he watched Five fade. “Not the kidnapping, just about his job. He sedates people all the time in the hospital. I was just making small talk, asking him about what he does and all that. It’s a way to show people you care about them. You have to invest in your lives.”
Five’s eyes were slitted now, the tension fully drained from his body. He could feel his heart slowing down. He could feel the air drag slower and slower in his lung. The synapses in his brain were firing less and less and less. The irony of it was still not lost on him. Humanity was like that, though. Inconsistent. How one person can be so nice in one way and heartless in another.
It was either humanity condemning truth or its saving grace.
“Aw, just relax, kid,” the nice one way. “Close your eyes. Just sleep. I swear to you, on my life, everything is going to be okay.”
Five didn’t believe him, not for a second, but it didn’t much matter. His head flopped forward and he sagged against his bonds. You might think, after all these years, Five was used to humiliating failure.
Consciousness fleeing him entirely, Five knew that he wasn’t.
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
A/N: Fill for my kidnapping square on hc_bingo. No beta because that’s life.
Warning: Deals with violence toward a minor (who is technically 58)
Summary: Five is kidnapped for ransom. It doesn’t go quite the way anyone expects.
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
-o-
Five looked like a child.
He knew this; the concept was not difficult to grasp conceptually. Logically, he could even explain the strange and extenuating scientific and mathematical reasons for his appearance. If necessary, he could provide a simplified explanation that made the fact that he looked like a child completely sensible and irrefutable.
Logic and reason aside, that didn’t make it any easier to live out. Theory did not always correlate to application in terms of palatability.
The simple fact was that he hated it. He hated the way he looked, the way he sounded, the way he was. Hate was not an adequate description. Five loathed it, abhorred it even. He hated the way people looked at him, the way they talked to him. The way they acted like he couldn’t do things, like he didn’t know. Even his siblings, whom he had saved, fell into the trap sometimes. They had a tendency to remind him to eat his dinner or to go to bed on time. As if he needed the reminder.
Five hated that. He hated being coddled, babies and generally treated like some infantile version of himself. He couldn’t stand any part of it. Because Five was not a child. Not in any way, shape or form.
Sooner or later, he had to hope people would realize that.
Sooner or later.
But not today, apparently.
-o-
In the apocalypse, it was easy, in some ways, to get around. Sure, there was debris everywhere. The streets were cluttered and dangerous, and buildings were prone to falling over with little notice. These were inconveniences, to be sure, but they weren’t terribly difficult to mitigate as long as you were smart and capable. Five was both smart and capable, which made navigating the apocalypse lonely, depressing, demoralizing and, in the end, relatively without problem.
With the Commission, he’d had the privilege of being a man without time. He had no ties, no connections. His job was not to make friends; his job was to kill people. Five found this to also be relatively easy in the scheme of things. Killing a person took little effort when you used your logic and knew the body’s inherent weaknesses. Actual talking to that person, by contrast, was a messy process of give and take.
For all the he’d wanted to save humanity, Five found it rather inconvenient to deal with humanity.
That was why walking down the street always proved to be one of the more difficult tasks for him in any given day. Staying in the mansion was easy. Dealing with his siblings could be stressful but it was at least predictable. He found it to be a controlled environment with acceptable margins for interaction and distraction.
His siblings did not agree. They decided -- without his input, for the record -- that he needed to be socialized. As if he were some stray dog.
Five resented the implication but could not deny them their logic. Five had saved the world. It was time for him to actually live in the real world. It was like Hazel had recommended. This was his chance, for better or for worse, to grow up.
That wasn’t to say Five was about to start going to school or joining some infantile soccer club. He wasn’t going to make little 13 year old friends to talk about their changing body hair and how girls made them horny. No, Five would simply attempt simpler, less immature ventures. He would go to the library. He would visit the store. Sometimes, he might even eat a meal out. Once, under duress, he went to an actual movie.
Today, as it were, Five was doing his due diligence to grow and going to the electronics store. For all they had in the mansion, they didn’t have any modern frills. For Reginald, running water had been an extravagance. And seeing how Five was a few days shy of 14 in this existence, he figured he would buy himself a phone.
Klaus had offered to go with him, but Five declined. Diego had pointed out that he might need an adult to get a contract, but Five assured him that wouldn’t be a problem. He could, after all, be quite convincing. Luther, worried that something might go wrong, told him to come home if he needed adult supervision, and Allison merely rolled her eyes at the lot of them and told Five to take simply have Vanya pick him up in an hour to solidified whatever contract the company deemed necessary and inappropriate for an alleged minor.
Five found this acceptable. He would get his phone on his own terms while not drawing unnecessary attention to the fact that he was a 13 year old without supervision in the modern world.
The modern world was not the future world. It was not the apocalypse.
Therefore, Five had to adapt.
Fortunately, he was generally good at adapting. You didn’t survive a literal apocalypse if you weren’t.
However, walking down the street from his own front door, he had to admit, it was somehow easier to adapt to the apocalypse than it was the real world. The real world was full of people. People who were loud and inconsistent and stupid. He had to deal with little kids picking fights over matchbox cars. He had to deal with old men smoking on their stoops. He had to deal with women hailing taxis while they wore high heels. It was awkward; it was weird.
Turning the corner, Five contemplated the next batch of men. He wasn’t a block from home, and these idiots looked to be the dumbest he’d seen yet. They were wearing uniforms -- street workers, then, by the look of them -- but where the hell was the rest of their crew? Where was the equipment? These assholes had showed up on the wrong job site. It was remarkable and not in a good way how easy it was for the average person to lose the plot of their life -- as their lives were so complicated or so important. Fixing streets wasn’t exactly saving the world, and he’d managed to never look like a moron in the process.
Fine, so he managed to look 13 but that was a mathematical miscalculation. Not a personality flaw.
Five scoffed despite himself, moving past them with an air of indignation. Stupidity always offended him. Sure, he knew he had worked hard to save people just like these men and their pitiful attempts to provide use to the world. But still. The constant affronts of stupidity was what made getting around the streets these days so hard. There were all these people, doing mundane, stupid, silly things. They couldn’t possibly know how close they’d come to annihilation. They had no idea that there was a future out there, just barely diverted, where their trivial existence had been snuffed out in the blink of an eye.
Yet, here they were. People just like these morons, going about their lives, doing their jobs.
People waving goodbye. People telling the same joke with a punchline that never made anyone laugh. People giving each other the finger. People whistling under their breath, a song they didn’t really know.
People walking too slowly behind him.
Five turned, surprised to see one of the men in the uniforms behind him. The man was closer than Five had anticipated; only seconds ago, he’d been several yards away. Now, he seemed to be actively following him, given his sudden proximity. Five glared, wondering if this imbecile somehow thought that Five knew where he was supposed to be.
Five didn’t, and he had no desire to help out with directions. He supposed that he looked like an easy, sympathetic target. Just a kid, wandering down the street in a schoolboy uniform. He looked as mundane as the rest of them, no doubt. A stupid, anonymous kid.
He hated that.
Almost as much as he hated idiots.
Turning back around, he nearly ran into the other man, who had worked his way in front of Five and stopped abruptly, facing him. His dim, broad face was serious, and Five saw that he wasn’t as much an idiot as he’d thought. Not that Five would call him smart, but there was something going on that didn’t quite make sense.
Behind him, the other man closed in, and Five found himself vexed. Walking down the street was a simple, easy task. A mundane task. Why did these two have so much desire to make it unnecessarily hard? He’d already saved their asses, what more did they want?
Feeling perturbed now, Five opened his mouth to tell the men to leave him the hell alone. He was mustering up something witty and insulting when the man in front of him winced. There was a rush of movement behind him, and Five was too confused to react when something hard came down on the back of his head.
The impact was hard and sudden, and Five blinked dumbly as he tried to understand. His consciousness abated rapidly, his senses abandoning him in quick successful. He felt himself going down but was unable to stop it, and the air left his lungs in a rush as the world went spectacularly dark.
Stupidity, as it turned out, was possibly contagious.
As he fell, an ungraceful and jumbled heap of uncoordinated limbs, Five fit in with the modern world better than he could have possibly hoped.
-o-
Existence was fleeting.
That was a thing, wasn’t it? The temporality of it all. Five had seen so many endings that he knew they were inevitable, even if he’d spent his life, his long, long life, fighting them. That was irony, for the record. Lots and lots of irony.
Because Five had spent so much time clinging to life only to find it was never, ever his to hold in the first place. Time was inconsistent in that way. It dragged when you wanted it to fly; it evaporated in an instant when you wanted a lifetime. Right about the time you were ready to retire, you wake up and you’re 13 again.
See?
Irony.
Five’s life was a cautionary tale about the perils of irony and the incomprehensible overconfidence of youth. Hence why he was a kid again. Because of course he was. He couldn’t possibly move past the worst moment of his life. He had to be perpetually reminded of it every time he looked in the damn mirror and saw his 13 year old self looking back.
Shit, existence was fleeting and still, not nearly fleeting enough. Five grappled with its permanence and impermanence simultaneously, unable to hold onto either without letting go of both. He tried this time, to be fair. He tried to hold on, but it was harder than he thought it should be. His head hurt, a deep ache that seemed to tingle down into his fingers and his toes. His stomach was taut, and his eyes rolled behind his lids. When he breathed, it only made things worse.
It occurred to him, rather belatedly, that he was moving. This was a strange sensation, primarily because he had no part in making it happen. He was moving without his consent; not that his consent had ever meant much to anyone, but still.
Still.
Through the pounding headache, Five tried to cut through the irony, trying to tighten his grasp as his existence ebbed and flowed. He made an effort to focus, but it made the pain worse, and it reached a blinding point. He thought this time he might be sick, but the thought of evacuating his stomach required too much energy, and he sagged in the face of it.
For a period of time, that was really that. He didn’t understand what was happening to him; he could come to terms with the movement or what it meant. However, the impetus to understand it was muted somehow, and he would have drifted easily back into the dark if given the choice. People might think Five would be defined by a dogged determination to survive, but they would be wrong. He could be better defined by his contrary ability to survive, even against his own good intentions.
Surrender wasn’t so much a weakness as it was a means of survival in and of itself. Sometimes, the reality was too much. Sometimes, you just needed to drink yourself into oblivion. Sometimes, you just needed to resort to mass murder. Sometimes, even when you didn’t know why, you just needed to pass out and worry about the reasons why later.
And if later was never, then that was no concern of his.
Until, of course, it was.
Unceremoniously, Five lurched. He thought it was more of the same, but the sudden downward motion was more jarring than the rest. For a split second, he was weightless, but then he hit the ground -- hard.
The pain ignited anew, and the lights exploded behind Five’s closed eyes. He heard a sound -- a strained, choked mewl -- and he was grappling through his loss of equilibrium before he realized that the sound came from his own throat.
“Shit! Watch it!”
“Careful! His head--”
“He’s heavier than he looks--”
“He’s just a kid, damn it. Be careful.”
Someone grabbed his arms, hoisting him up as his head falls back, face turned up. Someone else took him by the legs, and he was effortless lifted off the ground. The movement was too much; it was all too much.
Existence didn’t have to be fleeting, but his consciousness was.
Five would contemplate it later, he was sure. He was too busy being unconscious now to worry about it.
-o-
The next thing he knew, Five was more or less upright. He was sitting for some reason, in a chair that was hard and strangely cold. There was a pressure around his chest, matched only by the pounding his head. It was worse than before.
A lot worse.
Eyes still closed, Five could feel the tension trembling up and down his limbs. His hands were being pulled behind him, stretched too far as his wrists were twined with coarse rope. The rope was adjusted once and twice before someone uses another length of rope to tie his feet to the legs of the chair.
There was a part of him that knew this wasn’t good. It wasn’t good at all, and Five was in trouble. It was probably a good reason to be concerned, but Five couldn’t focus enough to muster anything resembling concern. In fact, sleep sounded good right now. Sleep.
His head was lifted, rough hands pushing back his hair. He flinched, groaning as his eyes flickered.
“I’m worried we killed him. Look at him.”
“Uh, yeah. I see him opening his eyes. No way he’s dead.”
The fingers took him by the chin, and Five’s slitted gaze struggled to make sense of the image in front of him. Broad features; tanned skin. Dark, worried eyes. A frown.
“But we hurt him, man. I didn’t think we were supposed to hurt him.”
The confirmation of injury was something. Five thought it was probably something, but he couldn’t quite bring the information into perspective. Errant variables in an equation he could solve. Understanding was just beyond his reach, hiding beneath the throbbing of his head and the constriction in his chest.
“Well, shit. What did you think would happen?”
That was laughable, that. The idea that you could predict anything. Five spent years trying to prevent the apocalypse only to discover too late that it was his own sister who caused it. What you thought and what actually was were two totally different things. Five might be smug about that were he not so badly concussed.
That was what he was: concussed. He had a concussion, and a bad one at that. These two assholes, whoever they were, had knocked him out and dragged him off the street. Now, they had tied him up somewhere, and were clearly looking to leverage him for something.
It was a startling moment of clarity.
It didn’t last.
Five’s eyes slipped back into his head, and he slumped against his bonds again.
“I don’t know, okay? I just know I didn’t sign on to beat up a kid. He’s a kid! How bad did we hurt him?”
There was a note of genuine concern, for whatever that was worth. Five thought it to be relevant, but he couldn’t figure out why.
“How the hell should I know? He better be okay, though. We need him alive.”
The grip on his chin dissipated, and Five couldn’t stop his head as it flopped forward. He couldn’t stop the pain as it spiked through his head. And he couldn’t stop his consciousness from leaving again.
-o-
The dark was never quite dark enough. It never hid the nightmares. It never extinguished the nagging doubts in the back of your mind. The dark was as much a fallacy as anything else, teasing you with oblivion when it really wanted to torture you with snippets of light.
In the apocalypse, there had been no sun. But that didn’t mean it was dark. It was light in an insidious way. Light in a way that left the corners dim. Light in a way that never made you feel warm. It was a veiled sunlight, warmth filtered through grime, a pale approximation of what it was supposed to be. The sun was there; Five knew that or he never could have survived. But it was just out of reach. The promise of hope beyond his grasp. The idea of renewal beyond his imagination.
This was the same kind of dark. Veiled and distant, cold and empty. A yawning chasm that only made you wish it could swallow you whole. Five floated there, and it was not a matter of volition. Few things were, he found. The variables within his control could be increasingly scant. The questions of how and why screamed in the back of his throbbing mind, but there was no way to assuage them. The answers only yielded more questions, and Five chased equations around in his head until the strings of numbers led to nowhere.
In darkness like this, you had to make your own light. You had to build your own hope. You had to scavenge for it deep inside yourself, hold it tight in your hand like a glass eyeball you found in your dead brother’s stiff fingers.
That was family to him. Not sentiment. Not emotion. Pure utility. He had to have family to ground him. The idea of saving them, the idea of sparing their lives, was the only grounding force in a world that had become unmoored. Family was the constant, and with family, he was still 13.
He didn’t admit to that. Pride, maybe. The only vestige of it he had left. The apocalypse took so much for him, everything else, so it seemed silly to begrudge himself that. That stubbornness saved him, after all. That pride kept him alive when anyone else would have died. That pressing, unyielding need to be right had saved the world, in the end.
He had saved them.
In a cold world, that was warmth. In the darkness, that was light. In the suffering, that was hope.
And fine, so Five looked like a kid, but they were kids to him.
Maybe that made them equals, in some ways.
Maybe that was just irony.
Maybe it didn’t matter.
In the darkness, truth was hard and unadorned. Five knew -- he knew -- that the light, when it came, would hurt -- more than he cared to think about. But he’d settled for the pain; he’d embrace it. For their sake. For his own.
As with most things in Five’s life, the choice wasn’t exactly his to make anyway.
He was always going to spend the rest of his life paying for the mistake he made when he was 13 years old, no matter how long he lived.
-o-
This time, when Five woke up, he was at least coherent. He knew he was tied up, likely still in the city, in a run-down building in one of the abandoned neighborhoods in the poorer district. He knew that he had been abducted off the street and that it could have been a matter of hours since he was taken. By this estimation, his siblings had probably noticed he was missing by now, though it would be debatable if his absence would be a cause for concern yet. Five had to take it upon himself to figure out a way out of this mess, and he started in on the rope that was wound around his wrist, testing its strength and the tone of the knots.
Coherent, but pained.
Shit, he was in a lot of pain.
The throbbing in his head hadn’t gone away since the abduction, but now that he was awake, he realized just how intense it was. It was blinding -- to the point that he couldn’t look toward the windows. Movement was a perilous notion; the instant he started to pull at his binding, his stomach lurched and he thought he was going to be sick. The whole notion of it only intensified his headache, and Five thought for a few horrible, coherent seconds that he was about to pass out again.
It took several minutes for his vision to clear and for his stomach to settle. Breathing steadily through his nose, he tried to steady himself, willing his shaky nerves to come back into check. Escape was a good idea, but passing out in the process would defeat the purpose. No, this was not a time for brute strength -- not that he had much of that as a 13 year old -- but rather a call to think his way through this.
With some resolve, Five slowed himself down. He slowed his breathing, steadied his heart rate and measured the pace of his thoughts. With this intentionality, he conducted a much more thorough assessment of his situation.
The basic facts still held true, but the nuances mattered. This was clearly an apartment, which meant that the building was most likely abandoned. Taking someone off the street carried certain risks, and even if the men who took him weren’t concerned with him making noise, it would arouse suspicion to carry an unconscious child up a few flights of stairs in the middle of the day.
It had been the morning when he’d been taken; it was still light outside. This meant that only hours had passed. His headache was bad, but he doubted that he’d been unconscious for more than 24 hours. He supposed that was an assumption, but he felt comfortable enough making it. It didn’t change his assessment of the fact that this was an abandoned apartment building. The room layout was not indicative of a house, and he could see other ramshackle buildings outside the window. He roughly judged their height and made an approximation that he was probably in an apartment on the third or fourth floor. There was no other view to speak of -- no sign of the skyline -- which meant they had travelled some distance. With a little more calculation -- based on the sun’s position -- he might be able to pinpoint a location more specifically, but his head hurt too much for minute calculations to that degree.
Besides, the exact location was not of primary concern. It didn’t matter where he was. It only mattered that he could get the hell out of there and fast.
To that end, the outlook was mixed. The fact that this was an abandoned building did make it harder to attract attention, but it did make it that much easier to hide. The apartment itself was mostly vacant, sparsely populated with a few mismatched pieces of furniture. Most of it was broken -- a pile of shattered chairs, a table propped up on a pile of crates, and a sagging coach with a few cushions missing.
The fact that ropes had been used was interesting. Rope may have seemed like an obvious choice, but the fact was that rope was not something most people just had on hand. At least, not normal people. People like Reginald Hargreeves had mountains of it stored away for special circumstances. But it begged the question -- under which circumstances did you actually need rope? Mountain climbing with Herr Asshole.
Five had to scoff at the thought despite himself. It was unlikely that these men were mountain climbers -- that was just an instinct, not an actual observation -- which meant that they either preferred old school methods or simply did not realize there were more efficient ways. Rope was either a sign of loyalty to established methods or an indication of a severe lack of creativity. It was hard to say, at this juncture, which was more probable.
The rest of the apartment wasn’t much help either. There was junk everywhere, wrappers, cans, unwashed clothes and the like. The general vicinity of his chair -- which was the only one still in working order nearby -- had been cleaned up. But the trash had clearly only been displaced, pushed to the side.
Which meant this was likely not a permanent residence or of any particular significance. The location would not be tied to the men who took him. It was merely a matter of convenience; a place to stash him.
But to what end?
This assessment provided insight into where he was and who had taken him, but why.
Why had he been snatched off the street?
Who had the motivation to stage such an abduction?
What did they hope to gain from these extreme measures?
The first thought was perhaps the most obvious. The Commission had the means for an abduction, and given his tumultuous history with the Commission, it would not be impossible to speculate a motive. It could be as broad as a plan to reset the timeline. It could be as petty as simple revenge. Five didn’t exactly leave the Commission on good terms. In fact, he basically blew the place up and tore it down. It had rarely been personal with the Commission, but he had a feeling, for him, they might make an exception.
Or this could be a rogue action. A specific enemy. The Handler had a thing for him, and the fact that the world wasn’t over had to piss her off. Hazel and Cha Cha were also possibilities, though the former was less likely than the latter. He and Hazel had left on good terms, and assuming that Hazel’s investment in a donut shop had paid off, he could imagine the man would have much reason to come after him. Cha Cha was another story entirely. She was a career woman, and Five had likely ruined her career. It hadn’t been his intention necessarily, though he hadn’t felt much guilt over it. Of course, that was assuming that any of them had survived the second apocalypse, which was a mathematical probability that Five’s muddled brain couldn’t wholly compute just yet.
Though honestly, the more he thought about it, this didn’t feel like a Commission hit. The Commission was clean and efficient.
This?
Was anything but.
The abduction itself had been sloppy in its execution, and this whole set up seemed half-assed. Why would they leave him alone? When they knew he could jump through time and space. There was no way anyone with that knowledge would be so cavalier as to tie Five up with piddly ropes and leave him wholly unattended. All he had to do was focus his energy and jump.
Wait.
Of course.
All he had to do was focus his energy and jump.
Then, this whole ill fated abduction would be over just like that.
Five must really be concussed if that wasn’t the first thing he’d considered. He could have escaped by now, been all the way back home in the blink of an eye.
The notion was solidifying, and Five drew on his powers. He found his mind still muddled and the process was harder than he expected. Gritting his teeth and closing his eyes, he dug deeper for his power, doing his best to harness it appropriately. His power was vast and wide; the reservoir of it likely limitless. His performance only faltered when his ability to grasp it was diminish. The mental load, the physical toll were substantial when taken together. When he was exhausted, mentally or physically, his ability to use his power was greatly diminish.
Right now, he was both.
He hissed between his clenched teeth, annoyed that he couldn’t quite pull things into focus. He knew that the head wound alone would make it hard to focus his powers for a successful jump, and he was only letting his frustration at the situation get too deep a hold on him. The power surged but he found no means to control it.
It pulsed and he mentally stumbled. His breathing hitched, and Five felt the power ready to burst inside his already damaged skull. For a split second, he could feel the power as it tingled along his skin, and he clenched his fists, ready to make a jump, with just another burst of power, another second of concentration.
The power was too much.
His concentration was too scattered.
The power overtook him and the pain reached a blinding pitch before he passed out once again.
-o-
To say Five woke up with a headache would be pointless and redundant.
Instead, it was more relevant to say that Five woke up with a headache and the pressing notion that he wasn’t alone.
Now, Five had not been stranded in the apocalypse for quite some time now. He had lived among people, in various fashions, for years.
And still, waking up around people always caught him off guard.
Always.
If only his siblings knew how unexpected morning wake up calls made him vaguely homicidal. Klaus had no idea how lucky he was not to be dead.
The two assholes who abducted him would not be spared such a fate. The instant Five opened his eyes, he seized upon his rage, instinctively lashing out with a snarl. If not for the bonds still holding him back, he was quite confident that both of the men would have been dead by now. One with a broken neck. The other thrown clear out the window, thank you very much.
As it was, his murderous intent was a mere fantasy. Still restrained, he was resigned to snarl ineffectually, glaring at them angrily. The entire process would have been much more gratifying if they had responded with the appropriate terror of having pissed off a timeless assassin.
Instead, the men just looked relieved.
“Oh, thank goodness,” the one said, actually having the audacity to smile. “You’re awake!”
The second one -- the one Five can connect to the throbbing in his skull -- didn’t smile, but his gait physically relaxed as he stood behind the first guy’s shoulder. They were both in their 30s by Five’s estimation. The second man, the one with moderate control over his emotions, had light brown hair and a deep tan. He was lankier but his blue eyes were harder. The first man, who was still smiling like the idiot he was, had longer, darker hair. He was stocky to the point of almost being pudgy, and he was still wearing the work uniform he’d donned on the street.
They both looked like street workers, honestly.
But what the hell was a street worker doing abducting him off the street?
“See? He’s fine,” the second one said. He paused to chew at a hangnail viciously. “We should make the call now.”
“Okay, okay,” the first said, holding up his hands as if to relent. He still smiled at Five. “Just want to make sure the kid knows he’s okay.”
Five sighed. Getting hurt was exhausting. Being restrained was annoying. But dealing with morons who said shit like that? It was practically intolerable.
“Yeah, I’m not sure he’s going to believe you,” the skinny one said, shaking his head. He shrugged his shoulders, making eye contact with Five for the first time. “But if you shut up, sit chill and keep calm, then I’ve got no reason to hurt you.”
This was, of course, ridiculous. He scoffed. “You already hurt me,” he said. “Unless you think that the concussion you gave me was an appropriate way of saying hello. I know we’ve all got our quirks, but even I understand that a handshake is more appropriate.”
The second one raised his eyebrows. The first looked concerned again. “You feeling all right, kid?”
Five made a face. “Of course I’m not,” he said. He tipped his head to the side. “Concussion. Remember?”
The man reached up, touching at the matted hair on the back of Five’s head. He flinched away out of frustration, and the man winced as if in sympathy. “Well, we won’t do it again, okay?” he said, trying to rally something that resembled enthusiasm now. “You’ll be okay, kid.”
Five worked his fingers, testing the bonds again. They weren’t tighter than before, that was good. Apparently no additional measures had been taken to secure him. That was weird, though, wasn’t it? Unless these asshols really didn’t know who he was.
How could they not know who he was?
Five was missing something here; something important, something obvious. His head still throbbing, he wrinkled his nose. “Be okay with what exactly?” he demanded, letting his tone inflect what his posture could not right now. “What is your plan here?”
All his reasoning aside, he had no cause to beat around the bush. He had questions, and these assholes had to have the answers. If he wanted to know who they were, he needed to ask them. Even if they didn’t reveal their true identity, anything they said could reveal important clues. If they weren’t from the Commission -- and that still seemed unlikely to him -- maybe they were other people he’d pissed off. Maybe he’d killed one of their relatives. Maybe the Commission had sold out his identity, let as many of his victims’ descendents know who he was. Maybe they would all be coming from him now, the Commission’s means of getting back at him for his meddling.
The blonder one grunted. “The plan is for you to shut up and let us do our thing.”
The other one nodded, a bit more emphatic. “This isn’t personal, kid. You’re just our way to a quick payday. You get to go home, your family gets their kid back, and we get paid. Easy as that.”
Five, still tied, still concussed, stared at him. His struggling fingers went limp, and his eyes flickered between the two, looking for some kind of indication that they were lying to him. Sure, he’d asked the question, but he hadn’t exactly expected a straightforward answer. What kind of criminal mastermind gave a straightforward answer to that question?
Five’s concussed brain sluggishly came up with the answer. No kind of criminal mastermind gave a straightforward answer to that question. It shouldn’t have been a surprising revelation by this point. Everything about these two morons indicated that they were amateurs. From their hockneyed attack on the street to their uncreative and uneven attempts to control him, these two were anything but criminal masterminds. They hadn’t even covered their faces or taken any actual security precautions.
They didn’t even know who Five was.
They had picked a mark, almost at random, in some pathetic attempt to make a quick buck.
It was all so stupid, so utterly and categorically stupid, that Five was certain that his concussion had affected his ability to fully process what was going on. “Wait, let me get this straight,” Five said, almost laughing now, the bonds forgotten. “You kidnapped me?”
The big man nodded. “Yes. For ransom.”
Five was all but gaping now. “So you don’t know who I am?”
The second one snorted again, this time rolling his eyes. “You’re some little rich kid who lives in some big fancy house with loads of cars and wait staff,” he said with a smirk. “That’s the only thing that matters. Not you, but your folks and all the money they got.”
Five was almost at a loss. He may have been kidnapped off a street corner, but this was the first time he’d felt well and truly surprised during this whole process. “So you don’t know who I am.”
“Like I said, pipsqueak,” the skinny one said. “It doesn’t matter who you are as long as your parents pay up. Big time.”
The first one reached over and actually patted him on the shoulder. “No one has to get hurt. I promise. No one else gets hurt.”
Five endured the touch in his utter shock.
Kidnapping.
Ransom.
Actual kidnapping.
Like he’s an actual kid.
Shit, Five must have hit his head a lot harder than he thought, because this whole damn thing was surreal.
He waited for a moment, as if he might wake up or pass or anything to explain this abrupt disconnect he was having with reality. When it became clear that no such out would be easily provided, he shook his head. “You two have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.”
The skinny one pursed his lips, pulling a phone out of his jeans pocket. “Yeah, well, let’s find out then,” he said. “Tell me the number to call your family, and we’ll get this thing started.”
Five looked at the phone then lifted his quizzical brow to the man. It hurt, but he didn’t care. He’d take the pain over the emotional humiliation over being kidnapped by assholes any day. “Are you serious?”
“Just give us the number,” the other one implored.
“Are you actually serious?” Five repeated, almost starting to laugh now as the pressure pulsed in his head again.
The skinny one put the phone down and pulled out a gun. He leveled it at Five’s head while the other guy muttered a curse and picked up the phone.
“Hell, yeah, little man,” the man said, staring at Five down the barrel of the gun. “I’m pretty damn serious.”
Five eyed the man, taking little note of the gun. It wasn’t an impressive gun; it wasn’t even loaded and Five knew it. It was intended to be seen as a bold move, but it was all bravado. A small man trying to hide behind a gun; it only diminished the effect.
Coolly, Five shrugged. “Okay, then,” he said, because at this point, he was actually a little curious about what came next. “Let’s call my family.”
-o-
The second man, the skinny one in the jeans, seemed to be in control of the situation now, at least in comparison to the would-be nice one. With the gun in his hand, he was clearly calling the shots now, and the other man scrambled to comply even as Five observed it all with an air of indifference.
These two weren’t actually much of a threat. Sure, he knew that didn’t say much about him, but to his credit, he hadn’t been anticipating any kind of attack. If they hadn’t hit him so hard, he would have been out of there by now. Besides, at this point, he was vaguely amused at the prospect of seeing these two face off against his siblings.
His superpowered siblings.
Who had been trained to fight crime since childhood.
Who had saved the world.
Those siblings.
And they wanted a ransom. Morons would be lucky if they got out of this alive.
With minimal prodding, Five provided a phone number to the mansion, skipping the lines in the study and lower levels. He wanted his siblings to pick up, not Pogo or Grace. With his hands still tied -- he had started to loosen then, but just a little -- the nicer guy was holding the phone to his ear while it rung. The other one stood nearby, the gun pressed closer still to Five’s head.
“Hello?” a voice answered after several rings.
Five smiled. Luther.
The gun flashed toward him, all but pressed against his temple now. “Answer him,” he whispered angrily. “But no funny business.”
This whole thing was funny business, as far as Five was concerned, but he complied anyway. “Luther,” he said. “Hi.”
Over the line, there was a small intake of air. “Five? Is that you?”
“Yeah,” Five replied. “It’s me.”
“But where are you?” Luther demanded, his concern audible. “Vanya said you didn’t show--”
“Yeah, well,” Five said, arching an eyebrow as he looked at the now-seething man holding the gun. “Slight change of plans.”
Frustrated, the man with the gun reached for the phone. He pulled it away, letting the gun hang idle while he turned away and pressed the phone to his ear. “A major change of plans,” he said. “We got the kid. He’s safe, like you heard, but he won’t be if you don’t give us money. A million. Small bills, untraceable. We want it delivered tomorrow morning to the abandoned post office in the East Village. Warsaw Street. Do it or we leave the kid there for you, full of holes.”
The demands were related in a litany, impressive only in that the man had delivered it in one breath. When he hung up, he threw the phone on the counter nearby, and turned back toward them, looking abjecting relieved as his chest heaved for air.
“You did it!” the first one said, sounding genuinely overjoyed. “See? I told you we could do it!”
The skinny one nodded, clearly trying to get his rush of adrenaline back under control. “Just like we planned. It’s going well.”
The two gave each other self congratulatory looks, but Five rolled his eyes. “Right,” he said. “You two just keep telling yourself that.”
The man with the gun tightened his grip on it again, scowling as he advanced on Five. “I don’t have to kill you, but that doesn’t mean I won’t. So shut the hell up.”
The more he spoke, the more clear it became to Five that he was bluffing. Clocking Five upside the head was plainly the most successfully violent thing he’d ever done. If this thing went sideways, this asshole might attempt violence. The other one wouldn’t until under duress. The odds of them being successful again, however -- well, Five’s head still hurt too much to do the calculations. But he could surmise, by rough estimation, that the odds were in his favor.
Substantially.
The other man came back toward him with a soothing nod. “I’m telling you, kid. Just relax. This will be over soon enough. You’ll be fine.”
Five shrugged diffidently. “I’m not worried about me right now,” he said. “You two, on the other hand….”
“Whatever,” the second guy said, nudging the other guy in the shoulder. “He’s talking shit; don’t listen to him. He’s just some stupid kid. What’s he going to do?”
Five’s face twisted in offense. He wasn’t some stupid kid. What was he going to do? He was going to kill these assholes. He was going to rip their throats out and tie them up with their own innards. All he had to do was get out of these bonds, focus his energy and jump and--
His power wouldn’t be rallied, though. His hands were still tied tight.
The first man nodded in agreement, and they both turned away from Five with some lame-ass discussion about who was going to pick up dinner.
Five didn’t mind being abducted. He didn’t even inherently mind being held for ransom. He didn’t mind the fact that he’d screwed up, even.
He definitely minded the fact that they looked at him like he was just some kid.
And he really minded that he had no way right now, concussed and tied up and powerless, to prove them wrong.
-o-
To his frustration, they left him like that for a bit. He knew it was a prideful frustration, but that didn’t make it any easier to deal with. Five was a force of nature when he wanted to be. He was the best damn assassin the Commission had ever had. He had survived an apocalypse, damn it. Who did these assholes think they were?
They thought they were kidnappers, apparently.
And they thought Five was their mark.
After stewing on that to no avail for several minutes, Five acknowledged that he was being vain. He was prone to that -- his ineffable need to be right -- but the reality of the situation trumped his feelings. He had to be practical; he had to be pragmatic in his approach. The last time he let himself be guided by emotions, he’d gotten stuck in the apocalypse. The key was to avoid disaster, not create it.
Fortunately, he concluded while sitting there as the two men disappeared into the other room, this situation did not seem to be well out of hand. Sure, it looked bad at first glance, but two kidnappers with questionable credentials were not a substantial threat. Now that his family knew he was missing, they would be working to find him.
And besides, if he applied himself, he wouldn’t need to wait for them. In the absence of his would-be kidnappers, Five blinked a few times, steeled himself and got to work. His mind was still hazy from the concussion, but enough points had been clarified for him now. He didn’t need to make a probability map to know that his best chance was to escape now, while these two idiots weren’t in the room.
He worked at the bonds, twisting his hands repeatedly and pulling in as many directions as possible. It chafed -- and badly -- but he figured that a little blood would only serve as a lubricant. When it got too much, he allowed himself a respite, focusing his energy inward instead, trying to summon his powers once more.
They were easier to access this time, but still not easy to focus. His concentration was improving, but his mental capacity had been diminished by the head injury. He couldn’t quite muster enough wherewithal to channel it effectively. He made himself glow blue a few times, but other than looking like Klaus momentarily, it was of no impact.
He stayed where he was, tied up and concussed, stubbornly stuck in this present moment. It was progress, he supposed, that he hadn’t passed out this time, but the effort still left his head spinning and his breathing short.
He was thus exhausted when the kidnapping duo came back in. The one was still holding a gun, trying to look menacing and failing. The other was at least trying not to smile anymore. He was holding the phone.
At first, Five thought it was for another pointless phone call, but these imbeciles weren’t that smart.
“Okay, kid,” the gruff one said, snapping his fingers as if to call Five to attention like he was a dog. “Photo time.”
Five knew the words had a simple meaning, but for the life of him, he couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to do that. It was utterly cliche, was what it was. It was a silly, meaningless endeavor that seemed to do nothing more than check the boxes of what a stereotypical case of kidnapping might entail on a prime time cop show.
So naturally, these two yahoos clearly thought it was the best idea ever.
The nice one, pudgy and smiling again -- he seemed to be 50 IQ points stupider when he smiled -- brought the phone to bear in front of him. “You don’t need to smile. It’s just for proof of life.”
Five gave them both a plaintive look. “You mean like the phone call we placed earlier in which I said hi and confirmed my identity?”
The dumb one blinked balefully at him, as if Five’s words were mumbo jumbo. The gruff one rolled his eyes, waving the gun through the air impatiently. “Let’s just get it done.”
Dumbly, the other seemed disconcerted by Five’s insinuation. “We just want them to know we haven’t hurt you,” he said. “That you’re okay, you know? That we’re good to our word?”
“Yeah, that point might have been more effective if you hadn’t bashed me upside the head,” Five pointed out.
“So we take it from the front,” the one with the gun said with a sigh. This process seemed to put him out; the moron had no idea. He fiddled with the gun in some vague gesture to move this along. “Proof of life, boom. Good on our word, yadda, yadda, yadda.”
The fact that he didn’t think he needed to contemplate this more was plainly indicative of his lack of intelligence. The dumb one sounded dumb, but Five would require more time to calculate the probability of which one was more of an idiot. “You literally already provided proof of life,” Five said, more emphatically than before. There was a principle involved. There had to be some standard of intelligence in order for him to function reasonably. He was the one with a serious head wound and he was the only one thinking clearly at all. “And you’re kidnappers. I’m not sure what good you think your word could possibly have.”
“Shut up, punk,” the one with the gun said, and he brandished it toward Five in a failed attempt to look threatening.
“It’s just standard,” the other one explained with a note of apology in his voice. Like he wanted Five to know he was sorry for the inconvenience of being kidnapped. “You know.”
Five didn’t know, and these two didn’t either. He shook his head, wriggling his fingers with fresh avail. He had tolerated this long enough; it was time to blow this joint. If he could just get some leverage; just focus a little more. He worked his jaw in contempt. “Just so you know, the number you called earlier? It’s a landline. If you’re hoping to text that picture, you’re going to have some trouble.”
“A landline?” the dumb one repeated, as absolutely dumb as ever.
“No shit, man,” the other one said. He laughed. “No one even has a landline anymore. The punk is messing with us.”
“As much fun as that sounds, no dice,” Five said. “My family really does use landlines almost exclusively.”
“But you’re rich,” the dumb one said. “Surely you can give us another number.”
“The kid is lying,” the other said, this time gesturing with his gun toward his partner. It still wasn’t loaded. They clearly didn’t know that Five knew that.
Five was able to twist his wrist now, but it still wasn’t quite enough to make any actual progress on escaping. Even if he got his hands free, he had made almost no progress on his feet. “You’re wasting your time,” Five hissed. “You’re wasting my time and insulting my intelligence.”
Five was getting pissed now, well and truly pissed. He was pissed that the ropes were so tight and that his head hurt so damn much. He was pissed that these men were assholes and that they were stupid and he was pissed that he had been kidnapped like an actual child.
And you know what?
He was still kind of pissed that he looked like a child so much that no one would blame these ignorant neanderthals for not knowing the difference between a school boy and the world’s best assassin.
Mostly, Five was just pissed. Well and truly pissed and ready to be done.
Now.
“Look, just take the picture,” the gruff one said. He turned the gun tersely back on Five. “Let’s wrap this shit up.”
“Okay, okay,” the other said while fumbling with the camera. “Just look this way.”
It was an easy invective. A lot easier than anything else that had happened to him today. But this time, Five was of sound mind. This time, Five was pissed. This time, Five wasn’t ready to play the stupid game of stupid people. Humanity was so stupid that it made him want to say screw it and end this entire planet himself.
Since that was not currently within his capabilities, he would settle for making life difficult for these two in any way possible.
So when they said smile?
Five promptly started thrashing and threw himself to the floor, chair and all. The impact was harder than he expected, but he clung viciously to consciousness and he was still seething when the nice one scrambled forward to pick him up. As the man asked if Five were okay, Five responded by hissing viscerally, bucking his body wildly, gaining enough leverage to throw the other man off balance.
He crashed to the floor again, vision whiting out momentarily. As the second man swooped over, swearing as he tried to hoist Five up, he literally gnashed his teeth, wrenching his fingers so hard that he could feel the blood slip between his fingers and the rope gave slightly. It hurt -- a lot -- and he felt violently sick. He pushed back the urge to vomit and bucked again. He might throw up; he might pass out. Hell, he might accidentally kill himself. But all that mattered was that tweedle dum and tweedle dee wouldn’t get the shot they wanted.
Still thrashing, this time the bigger one managed to get him upright. “Hold him down! Just hold him steady!”
The other one pressed in closer, grappling with Five’s writhing body as he shook so hard that the chair clattered noisily on the floor of the abandoned apartment. They thought he was just some kid, but he wasn’t. Five wasn’t some stupid kid to be kidnapped. And he wasn’t playing this game, not anymore. They thought he was panicking. Fine, they could think that to their own naive peril. Five was doing the thing Five did best, better than killing, better than jumping through time. Five was surviving.
Screw the odds.
To hell with probabilities.
To think he saved humanity for this.
Five lashed out, almost tearing his wrist and shoulder out of their sockets with the force of his movements.
Humanity?
Right now?
Can go to hell
“Damn it, I can’t!” the other one hissed, jerking back as Five’s head comes perilously close to contacting his exposed chin. “This little asshole is like an eel or something!”
Five smiled, deep and feral, as he made contact with the man’s chest, nearly upsetting them both over again. The gun skittered away harmlessly.
“Just do it! Do it!”
As reckless as Five was, he was still tied up. His efforts, though vigorous, were uncoordinated and haphazard at best. He knew it would just take one lucky break in his direction to gain the upper hand.
On the other side of things, it would only take one unlucky break to thwart all his efforts.
Five was many things.
Lucky, however, had never been one of those things.
With a vice grip that burns his skin with its intensity, the skinny one bears down on him, holding him down to the chair with the full force of his weight. Anticipating the camera to flash in his face, Five snarled. If they insisted on taking this picture, he could at least make sure it wasn’t the shot they wanted of some defenseless kid they’d snatched off the street.
There was no camera, however. To Five’s surprise, the pudgy man stayed to his side, and something pricked sharply on the fleshy part of his arm. Startled, Five craned his neck, where the man was pulling the needle free of Five’s bicep.
“There, there,” the man said, recapping the needle as he smiled at Five. “No sense working yourself up about this. Just relax a little, and I promise, things are going to be fine.”
Angrily, Five struggled again, but his adrenaline was flagging now. He could feel numbness buzzing through his arm, spreading like ice water through his chest.
“Are you sure you did it right?” the other man asked, his grip still unrelenting.
“Sure, look at him,” the other said. “It’s already working.”
Five grunted, but there was no way to deny it. He could feel the cold as it laid like a heavy blanket over his whole body. His ears were buzzing, and it wasn’t the concussion anymore. His vision was dimming; he was fading.
“But what if you kill him?” the other asked. “People don’t pay you for dead kids.”
“Nah, it’s simple math. I read about it online,” the pudgy one said, watching Five as his struggles diminished. “You don’t have to be some kind of genius to plug numbers into a formula.”
Five had a few scathing thoughts about that, but his tongue was no longer working. In fact, it took all his energy to keep his head from flopping forward as his eyelids threatened to droop.
“I even asked a friend I’ve got about it,” the pudgy one said, putting the needle on a nearby table. “Nice guy. A nurse.”
The skinny one still hadn’t relinquished his grip, despite the fact that Five’s struggles had dissipated entirely now. “You talked to a friend? About kidnapping?”
Five might share in the man’s indignant question were he not as much an idiot as his friend. The worst part of it was that they had still managed to get the best of Five -- twice now. How had Five survived the apocalypse -- twice -- if he could handle these two morons?
The other one rolled his eyes, sitting down on the dilapidated couch as he watched Five fade. “Not the kidnapping, just about his job. He sedates people all the time in the hospital. I was just making small talk, asking him about what he does and all that. It’s a way to show people you care about them. You have to invest in your lives.”
Five’s eyes were slitted now, the tension fully drained from his body. He could feel his heart slowing down. He could feel the air drag slower and slower in his lung. The synapses in his brain were firing less and less and less. The irony of it was still not lost on him. Humanity was like that, though. Inconsistent. How one person can be so nice in one way and heartless in another.
It was either humanity condemning truth or its saving grace.
“Aw, just relax, kid,” the nice one way. “Close your eyes. Just sleep. I swear to you, on my life, everything is going to be okay.”
Five didn’t believe him, not for a second, but it didn’t much matter. His head flopped forward and he sagged against his bonds. You might think, after all these years, Five was used to humiliating failure.
Consciousness fleeing him entirely, Five knew that he wasn’t.