Umbrella Academy fic: The Start of the Story (12/16)
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
PART FOUR
PART FIVE
PART SIX
PART SEVEN
PART EIGHT
PART NINE
PART TEN
PART ELEVEN
PART TWELVE
PART THIRTEEN
PART FOURTEEN
PART FIFTEEN
PART SIXTEEN
-o-
He exercises, but it’s not as vigorous.
He recites, but the words get muddled.
He calculates, but the number have stopped parsing.
This is what happens when they don’t feed him for a couple of days. This is what happens when the hunger pains become deep and gnawing. This is what happens when he dry heaves from the nausea of a stomach that is trying to shrivel up. This is what happens.
Desperate, he tries to sleep, but that eludes him, too.
Instead, he curls himself up on the floor, knees to his chest and cries.
His pride has always been among the last to go.
But goes, it does.
When he opens his eyes, it figures that Klaus is there. He’s wearing a jumper that is clearly supposed to have a blouse under it, but it’s hanging open instead. He waves at Five, using the palm that says goodbye.
Five rolls his eyes for the lack of something better to do.
Klaus looks offended. “That’s my greeting? Really?”
Five huffs, a small and breathless sound that doesn’t sound nearly as put out as he is intending. “You’re a figment of my imagination.”
This does nothing to satiate Klaus. He gestures to his chest. “So that makes it okay to insult me? Your favorite brother?”
Five is scowling. Maybe he’s always scowling. No, probably not. It takes a lot of energy. “You’re not my favorite brother.”
“I’m not your least favorite brother anyway,” Klaus amends, taking it all in stride. “And I’m here to help.”
The insinuation is meant to be hopeful, which is probably why Five finds it wearisome. “How can you possibly help?”
“By reminding you of what matters,” Klaus says, sounding proud of himself.
“What? By telling me that I’m strong? I’m not alone? I’m not crazy?”
“Oh, no,” Klaus says quickly. “You’re really weak right now. Like, pathetically weak. And you’re totally by yourself in here. And yeah. That means you’re talking to yourself, which I think probably certifies you as crazy.”
Klaus lifts his finger and twirls it around his ear with a sage nod.
“Crazy crazy.”
Five is now scowling in earnest, energy be damned. “And how does that count as help?”
“Because!” Klaus returns with enthusiasm. “It’s okay to be crazy! I mean, look at me. Crazy is completely and totally normal.”
He says it like he believes it, which just makes Five all the more skeptical. “Your brand of craziness led you to addiction,” he points out. “You literally self medicated yourself into oblivion.”
“Well, yes,” Klaus says. “But then I got sober! Tada! It’s a whole different kind of crazy! The good kind!”
Five shakes his head. “I don’t think this qualifies you as any sort of authority I should listen to.”
“Uh, hello,” Klaus says. “It makes me the only authority you should listen to. I’m sure the others have turned up here, telling you their little nuggets of wisdom, but I’m the one that matters. I’m the one that has lived through hell. Luther’s all sad about his time on the moon, and Diego’s all angry because no one ever listens to him, and Allison never knows what’s real or not, and Ben’s dead and Vanya’s all powerful -- but me, little brother.” He gestures to himself with something that looks like a keen wink. “Me. I’m the one that can get you through this. I mean, this isn’t that unlike the mausoleum dad locked me in when I was your age.”
That’s a lot of words.
Five’s not sure he can process so many words.
Klaus groans at Five’s silence. “Oh come on! You should be glad I’m here! You! The guy who talked to a mannequin!”
“Hey,” Five retorts. “We had a relationship.”
“Sure,” Klaus says, as if it’s a moot point. “And now you’re scared of talking to your recovering drug addict brother who talks to the dead.”
“Because you’re not here,” Five reminds him.
“Oh, and that’s some huge disqualifier,” Klaus says, rolling his eyes. “I see dead people, remember!”
“What? And it’s a pastime you recommend?”
Klaus raises his finger and nods his head. “As a matter of fact, I don’t,” he says without conceding anything. “But we don’t always get to choose. Right?”
He looks at Five keenly with an annoying smile. Five narrows his eyes, hoping to make the hallucination go away.
It doesn’t, but Klaus’ smirk grows. “You said that, didn’t you?” he says, asking the question without inquiring at all. “That we didn’t pick this life, we’re just living it?”
Five exhales tiredly. “You really were sober, weren’t you?”
“And listening,” Klaus tells him earnestly.
Five shakes his head miserably, closing his eyes. “That seems unfortunate right now.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Klaus says.
Five opens his eyes. The bastard is still there. Sitting, cross legged, like he’s always been there (he hasn’t). Like he’s always going to be there (he’s not).
Klaus manages to look like he cares, which just frustrates Five even more. “I mean, we do what we have to do, right? Right? We do what we have to do to survive?”
Five lets his head drop back. “Ugh, I said that, too.”
“You lived it, buddy!” Klaus says with a rallying enthusiasm.
Five looks back at Klaus. “But you weren’t even there when I said that.”
“Crazy, huh!” Klaus says.
Five purses his lips. “This is stupid,” he says. “You’re a manifestation of my subconscious. These hallucinations are getting less convincing. I’m slipping.”
“Another reason you have to listen to me,” Klaus says with a nod. “You’re running out of options.”
“Clearly, this is the annoying part of my subconscious,” Five mutters.
“You know, I think I’m insulted.”
“Then why are you still here?” Five asks, his voice grating now. “Why are you still here?”
Klaus’ indignation disappears almost immediately. He’s earnest again. “I’m here to tell you that you’re okay.”
“You told me I’m crazy.”
“Which is okay,” Klaus says, as a matter of fact.
Five can only snort. Shit, he has to snort. If he had any ability left to feel anything, he would inevitably feel total indignation right now. “I’m a lot of things, but I’m pretty sure okay is not one of them at the moment.”
Somehow, Five’s outright rejection makes Klaus all the more sincere, all the more confident. “And that’s okay, too.”
Five frowns. “I don’t think I follow.”
Klaus smiles at him gently. “Look at this, this whole thing. All you’ve been through. There’s no way you’re coming through this unscathed. Like, you’re just not. I know, you know, everyone knows it. No one could.”
That feeling of indignation? That one that he can’t quite muster?
He’s closer to mustering it now. “So?”
“So, this stuff, me,” Klaus says, gesturing toward himself. “This is your coping mechanism. It’s a sign that you are, in fact, a lot more okay that you feel right about now.”
Does this make sense? It can’t make sense, can it? Not when this is Klaus. Not when this is his subconscious manifestation of Klaus.
Nothing makes sense.
He’s too tired, too hungry, too everything.
“Seriously,” Klaus says, and he sounds a little less like Klaus now as he sits forward intently. “Five, listen to me, listen to me.”
It takes a moment and some effort for Five to comply, bringing his eyes to focus. Even then, his heart is hammering loudly against his shrunken ribcage, and the sound rattles in his head alongside his emaciated brain.
“As long as you see us, as long as you’re talking to us, your family,” Klaus starts like this is the most important thing in the world. Maybe it’s the most important thing in the world. “Then, I think you’re okay. I think you’ve got nothing to worry about, nothing. Do you hear me? Nothing.”
Five swallows (his throat is dry). He blinks (his eyes are burning). None of these sensations compute either. Nothing (absolutely nothing) computes for him anymore.
“But listen,” Klaus says, and he says it like this is the important part, like this is the part that Five has to hear, has to listen to, has to understand. “It’s when you stop seeing us -- it’s when you can’t hear us -- that’s when you need to start worrying.”
The invective is simple enough, but Five’s habits won’t die. He’s too tired to shake his head, but he wrinkles his nose and asks, “You think?”
Klaus’ eyes are big, and Five thinks about all those years those missed, about the drugs he never saw Klaus take. He’s not sure he would have helped -- could have helped -- but he thinks the reality of addiction would have pissed him off. Klaus isn’t scared of the dead, you see. Klaus has always been scared of himself.
“I know,” is Klaus’ reply.
The certainty is nothing something Five can question. It’s more constant than the concrete floor below him. Across from him, Klaus smiles faintly. Then he raises his hand with a hello in order to say goodbye.
Then Klaus disappears in plain sight, as only Klaus is wont to do.
This is the natural conclusion of things now that Five is alone.
Again, of course. Just like he is wont to do.
-o-
He sleeps too long sometimes, so long that he forgets how to wake up. As it is, waking up is a disorienting process for him, and the hunger pains have receded into numbness. He exercises on legs he cannot feel. He recites with a tongue that can no longer taste. He calculates with a mind he’s not sure works correctly anymore.
But he’s okay.
He’s alive. He exercise, he recites, he calculates.
He’s okay.
When food arrives, he eats.
He’s okay.
Then, when the walls are too close and the air is too empty, he lashes out, thin fists against the walls. The shock of the pain as it reverberates down his arm is shocking, and he looks at his bloodied fist in surprise. He can’t remember why it’s surprising, but the shock of it sends him to his knees and he curls up on himself on the floor.
He’s okay.
He closes his eyes, the scent of his own blood in his nostrils.
He’s okay.
-o-
He’s shaking when he wakes up. The tremors are new. He’s not cold exactly, but he’s freezing. It’s like his body has lost so much of its fat content that he’s an old house without insulation, and the tremors shakes his increasingly tiny frame.
It’s the hunger, he knows. This is longer than usual, or he’s just getting less resilient. Maybe both. Probably. He’s suddenly hungry for Twinkies, so he knows shit is getting serious now.
He’s awake. He’s asleep.
It’s not clear which he is when Ben shows up. But Ben looks more solid than usual, and Five is not sure if that’s a reflection of Ben’s state or his own. Ben, unlike his other siblings, waits for Five to make the first move.
“You might as well start,” Five says, and he doesn’t bother to push himself up off the ground. Under his cheek, the cement has finally started to grow lukewarm.
Ben is reclining against the wall on his backside, one leg stretched out in front of him and the other cradled with both hands near his chest. “Start what?”
Five exhales sleepily. “Your words of wisdom,” he muses airily. “That’s why the others have come.”
Ben shrugs a little, and the way his mouth turns down in a frown is convincingly indifferent. “I don’t really have a lot of words of wisdom.”
“Of course you do,” Five retorts. “Or why else are you here?”
Ben shrugs again. “I don’t know, why are you here?”
“Because it’s the plan,” Five says, and his voice starts to trail off. He sighs. “This is all part of the plan.”
“Okay,” Ben says. “So what’s so bad about that?”
Five gives him a skeptical look as best he can without moving his head. “Well, does it look very good?”
Ben considers that, but only momentarily. “It looks pretty much like any of us could have expected,” he says.
“There you go, then,” Five says.
“But then what’s the problem?” Ben persists.
It’s Five’s turn to frown at him. “I’m sorry?”
“This is the plan,” Ben says. “So what’s the problem?”
Five gapes for a moment at that. He also gapes because he’s tired and hungry and his mental capacity is diminished at the moment. “Are you serious?”
“I mean, this is the plan,” Ben reiterates. “You’re doing it, just like you said. Nothing’s gone wrong.”
That’s so true that it’s almost horrible. That all of his misery and all of this torture are perfectly all right. It’s acceptable. Five should accept it. “Maybe,” he says finally. “But it’s hard to call any of this right.”
“I don’t know,” Ben says with a dismissive tilt of his head. “I mean, you are alive. That’s really all the plan is: all of us, staying alive. And you’re doing it.”
Five drags in a breath raggedly, feeling it as it fills his exhausted and strained lungs. “That seems like an awfully low bar.”
“I don’t know,” Ben says. “Sort of seems like the only bar that matters.”
When he scoffs, the movement pulls at his chest. He can feel it all the way down in his toes. “You just say that because you’re dead.”
Ben looks at him like this is entire obvious. “So?”
“So,” Five returns. “I’m just saying that you’ve got a skewed perspective. Maybe being alive isn’t so great after all.”
It’s a weird thing for him to say. Five has worked his ass off to survive. The things he did to make it during the apocalypse -- they’re not things that any human should have to do. The fact that he’d willingly turned himself into an assassin to get out -- that’s an indicative of just how far Five will go in order to survive.
Or, it’s indicative of how far Five had been willing to go.
Lying here, curled up on lukewarm cement, he’s just not sure anymore.
Ben doesn’t smile, doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t look away. “You don’t mean that.”
Emotion wells up in Five, almost violently. “Maybe I do.”
“But this is the plan,” Ben reminds him. “This is your plan.”
Five bites down, clenching his teeth together. “And maybe it was a bad plan.”
It’s a telling admission. It’s an admission of his weakness, then or now. Both, maybe.
Ben is ever resolute. “You don’t mean that.”
Five’s too weak to fight it now. “I’ve been wrong before,” he says. “Maybe I was wrong then, too.”
“Five, you can’t be wrong.”
“Why not?” Five asks, and his voice breaks on the words.
“Because it’s working,” Ben says. He drops his knee and sits up straight, leaning forward off the wall. “You’re alive. Your plan is working. Your calculations are wrong sometimes, but you don’t fail. You have never failed.”
It’s an encouragement and an exhortation.
It’s exhausting, is what it is.
But his heart is still beating.
His lungs are still moving air.
He’s alive.
He looks across, to the blank wall where Ben has disappeared.
His next breath is no more steady than his last. Each beat of his heart feels progressively more strained. He can’t keep on like this forever.
But he can do it for a little while longer.
The next breath, the next heartbeat. That’s the only plan that matters to him now.
-o-
The routine is all he has now.
Or, better put, the routine has all he can give now.
He can hardly do the jumping jacks -- his legs won’t leave the floor. His arms can’t support his weight for pushups, and he’s winded just walking back and forth across the tiny cell. There will come a day -- sooner, if his present condition is any indication -- in which merely standing will be enough to exhaust him, but that’s acceptable. The effort is what matters.
After exercise, Five doggedly attempts to maintain his mental stimulation. He can still recite Vanya’s book from memory, but he finds his attention span is wanting. After a few paragraphs, he realizes that he’s spaced off, and he has to start again.
The calculations far even worse, and he’s halfway through a problem when he realizes that he doesn’t remember what variables he has defined and which ones needs to be solved for. When he does come up with an answer, he forgets its significance almost immediately. It’s possible that he’s predicted an impending apocalypse in 2465. It’s also possible that he’s determined that someone will invent bacon-flavored bubblegum in 2031. Or maybe he’s figured out that human cloning will occur in 2047.
The differences are naturally significant, but the more Five tries to remember why, the less clear he is on that point.
Finally, before sleeping, he sits on the ground, crosses his legs and looks up at the ceiling. He smiles and he says it, out loud, that this is fine. He says it in a clear voice with confidence that his family is fine. He says it loud enough for the words to resound in his ears, until it fills the pit in his stomach and tingles down into his toes: this is all part of the plan.
-o-
There is food the next time he wakes up.
He’s pretty sure there’s food.
Lying on the ground again, he’s not sure if he remembers eating. It was either the best meal or the worst meal of his life. It’s possible, he decides, that it could be both. This cognitive dissonance preoccupies him for a bit, and when he flops over onto his back, he sees Vanya there.
He’s too tired to be surprised, so he smiles at her instead. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
Another thing he has decided is that talking to his siblings is probably more good than bad. In his estimation, these are not strictly hallucinations by the textbook definition. Nor do these incidences serve as a symptom of some kind of impending psychological breakdown.
Also, he likes talking to his siblings.
It doesn’t much matter if they’re real or not at this point.
Vanya smiles back, although it looks painful for her. “Five.”
“You don’t have to say anything,” he tells her. “It’s okay.”
She at least has the good sense to look skeptical. “Is it? You don’t look okay.”
“I’m not okay,” Five clarifies for her. “But it’s okay. This. The plan is okay.”
“I know the plan’s important, Five--”
“The plan is everything.”
“--but we’re not just variables in equations,” Vanya tells him.
Five shakes his head, chuckling a little. “We kind of are, though.”
“No, Five, listen to me,” she says.
He has to blink a few times in order to attempt compliance.
“If you think about it in terms of numbers, of variables -- then everything is negotiable,” she explains. “Then it doesn’t matter what you factor out as long as the equation balances.”
He stares at her, a little awed. “That makes sense, actually.”
She is exceptionally patient, Vanya. Vanya has to know how to be patient. That was her superpower as a child. That was the superpower of Number Seven. Patience and love. That’s why she’s the only one who ever really liked him.
“Five,” she says, catching his attention again. She stares at him intently to hold it. “Pay attention.”
Five lets his chuckles taper off. “Okay, okay, I’m paying attention,” he says. “What is you want to say? What’s your line?”
Vanya cocks her head. “What?”
Five lifts his hand a little off the ground. It’s the best he can do for a grand gesture. “You’re here to tell me something important, right? Something I need to know. Something to keep me going through this ordeal.”
None of this seems to resonate with her. “I don’t understand.”
Her seeming confusion leaves Five vexed. It doesn’t take much anymore, but there it is. “Well, that’s why they’ve all come. Telling me to be strong. To think about the big picture. To remember the people that matter. That crazy’s okay, I’m alive. What’s your line?”
“I don’t have a line,” Vanya says. She shakes her head. “That’s not why I’m here, Five.”
On his back, when he scoffs, it nearly is enough to make his whole body convulse. “Then why?”
When she blinks, her face goes neutral. She looks even more earnest than Klaus does, no matter how sober he is. It’s funny, Vanya. She’s changed more than any of the rest of them, and she still looks exactly the same to Five. She’s the one he looked at last when he charged out to the future. She’s the first one he called for when he screwed up and wanted to go back. She’s the one.
He knows her answer before she says it. “I’m just here,” she says. “To be here. That’s what matters, doesn’t it? Being here.”
That makes sense.
And it makes no sense.
Five understands everything and nothing.
He can’t think.
“I don’t understand,” he says when he remembers to speak. It might have been seconds. It could have been minutes.
She doesn’t flinch; she doesn’t waver. “I’m here, Five,” she says again, with more purpose than before. “That’s what matters. I’m here.”
No advice. No wisdom.
Just a simple, inalienable truth.
When the rest is stripped away, when things are broken down to their disparate parts, this is the truth that remains. When there’s nothing left of Five, there is still this.
She doesn’t quite smile. “We’re all here.”
Five doesn’t have a response to that.
He doesn’t need a response.
All he needs to do is believe.
It’s a lot to ask, when you get right down to it.
It’s the most precious thing Five has given yet.
-o-
He gives up exercising first, when his legs simply won’t support him.
He stops the recitation next, closing his eyes and seeing the words written on the back of his eyelids instead.
Finally, when the sparse feedings take hold of him, he quits his calculations. After all, he doesn’t need a probability map to tell him he’s losing his mind.
Before sleeping, he lays curled up on the ground. He can no longer see the ceiling above him, his eyes are so strained. Sometimes, there’s food to eat. Sometimes, there’s not. It hardly matters now.
And he smiles, when you get right down to it. He smiles, and the words still come.
“This is fine. Absolutely fine.”
Because his body is failing, his mind is slipping, but his family is out there, somewhere in time and space, and they’re fine. They’re absolutely fine.
These words on his lips are the last truth he knows, the first truth he knows.
This is all part of the plan.
-o-
Then, he sleeps.
And when he dreams, he dreams of the beginning.
He was younger when this story started, older, too. He was right and he was wrong, he was alone. Time changes everything. He’s two weeks after the apocalypse. He’s eight days before. He’s having dinner with his family the first time he’s 13, and he’s jumping into the future. These starts; these things end.
Five looks for the constant, but he doesn’t have to look far.
It’s his family.
It’s his always been his family.
Five’s not ahead of himself anymore.
Five thinks that he might be exactly where he belongs.
-o-
And this is the ending, as far as everyone else is concerned.
But no, that’s not quite right either.
Five’s definitely ahead of himself this time.
It’s just like him to get things like that mixed up, but the old man did say that time travel could contaminate the mind. The old man wasn’t right about everything, but maybe he was right about that.
Honestly, Five could not be more glad.
Because Five had a plan. And he’s going to fulfill his part of that plan, no matter what. Because that plan, for all that it involves pain and isolation and humiliation and torture for Five, it entails something else for his siblings. That’s why this plan works where the others failed.
This plan isn’t a solo venture.
That’s the part Five’s never let himself forget.
The part the Commission has never failed to grasp.
Five’s locked in a cell by himself, but he’s not alone. Not anymore. Never again.
Somewhere, across time and space, his family is doing their part.
Just as well as Five is doing his.
-o-
This is the beginning: Five makes a deal, giving himself up mind, body and soul to the Commission. His price is simple: he wants his family to have complete immunity.
This is the end: Five’s deal condemns him to whatever fate the Commission wants, and it gives his family the absolute freedom to save him at any and all costs.
This is the story: everyone lives.
Everyone lives.
-o-
Five doesn’t wake up when it happens.
All his planning, all his flawless execution, and he’s asleep when it comes to fruition. Curled up in the tiniest of balls, barely clinging to what’s left of his body, what’s left of his mind. He doesn’t feel the floor shake as Luther rips the door free from its hinges. He doesn’t hear Diego’s knives as they whistled through the air, perfectly aimed at every alarm on the lower level. He doesn’t hear Allison’s silky voice as she tells the guard about a rumor that he wanted to help Five escape Commission custody, once and for all.
He doesn’t even see Klaus as he musters his power -- new ones, better ones, honed in Five’s absence -- to summon multiple versions of Ben to actively man the rest of the Commission, giving a whole new understanding of the term lookout. And he isn’t awake to see Vanya step over the threshold toward him, briefcase in hand. It’s battered and bloodstained; she’s not.
No, Five doesn’t wake up for any of that.
He wakes when her fingers brush his cheek, warm and steady and real. Even then, the rise to consciousness is a struggle, a definitive choice he makes, shedding the haze that he’s descended to, and rising for her, rising for them.
It’s quite a sight to behold, the six of his siblings crowded in the room with him. It’d be tempting to think that he’s gone and truly snapped this time, but he knows otherwise. Simply put, he knows better.
Because Five’s strong. Five can endure. Five’s known all along that it’s the people that matter. Five’s okay with a little crazy, because Five’s alive. And most importantly, Five’s not alone.
“Hey,” Vanya says, like they’re sitting down for dinner. “You ready?”
He can’t even sit himself up anymore, and he doesn’t resist as Luther props him up from behind. Behind Vanya, Diego looks anxious. Allison is crying, and Klaus bites his lower lip while Ben hovers nervously at the rear. Vanya is still smiling, though, as Five’s breath hitches and he finds his voice. “Did you run into any trouble?” he croaks. The sounds he makes barely seem like words, but there’s no doubt his siblings understand him. “With the plan?”
Luther’s voice rumbles in his chest. Five feels it as much as he hears it, so damn palpable that Five nearly cries. “The Commission didn’t have a clue the whole time.”
“By all indications, they still don’t,” Diego chimes in. “It worked as well as you said it would.”
Allison looks like she wants to hug him. “It wasn’t easy to track down an agent to steal a briefcase.”
“Yeah, And then it was straight up impossible tracking you,” Klaus continues emphatically. “It took a lot of trial and error to find this place in the right year.”
Ben is somber. “We had to flip an agent in the end. That was the only way to narrow it down.”
Vanya reaches out, smooths his now long hair away from his face. “But the plan worked,” she says. “We’re here.”
All the times they’ve said this to him, and this time the immediacy is overwhelming. No more theory. Just application. It’s not hope. It’s a realized thing. It’s not a coping mechanism, it’s actual family.
Vanya continues. “When you sold yourself out, you bought your own escape plan.”
Tired and weak as he is, there is no way to be smug. Five makes the attempt anyway. It’s instinct, and damn it, it’s good to have an audience for once. “I told you it would work,” he says. He sighs, sinking a little deeper into Luther’s arms. He’s aware of how worn he is, like there’s barely any of him left. In fact, he’s not sure how much of him is left, where he ends and his family begins. “What took you so long?”
Is he blaming them? Is he poking fun? Does he just want to know? Are some things just so ingrained that not even time can erode them? Five’s never let go of his family, never. That’s the reason he’s still here. That’s why he can ask the question like the smartass he might still be one day when he gets out of this shit hole.
“We had a lot to do!” Luther protests predictably.
“No kidding,” Diego says, and he’s frowning, brows drawn together. “Your notes were a little wanting.”
“And the Commission wasn’t going to bother us, but they hid you well,” Allison says.
“Yeah, I’m not sure the full scope of our epic and very dangerous search, for the record, was adequately spelled out in your memorandum,” Klaus says.
“You didn’t even read yours,” Ben says.
Vanya shakes her head, as if to silence them all. “We came as fast as we could,” she assures him. “But we did have to search all of time and space to get here.”
It’s tempting to think of that as hyperbole, but Five knows better. Exhaling softly, he rests his head against Luther’s shoulder and hums to himself. “Is that all?”
That’s all.
That’s everything.
“Come on,” Luther says, and Five feels himself hoisted up.
“I’ll make sure our exit’s clear,” Diego says, and Five hears him scuttle out the door and down the hall.
Allison is lingering close by; Five can smell her perfume. “Pogo and Grace are on standby,” she says. “We’ll get you taken care of.”
“Time travel is so crazy like that,” Klaus says. “Here, we’ve been running around for a year trying to find you, and when we get back, it’ll be like we were only gone a minute. That’s weird! No wonder you’re a little crazy.”
Time travel can contaminate the mind, the old man had said. He should have said that isolation and torture can have an effect, too.
“Your notes helped us fine tune the calculations,” Ben says. “It took us a few tries, but we’ve got the briefcase down now, so the trip should be pretty easy.”
Five still has his eyes closed, and he tries to nod. Maybe he does; maybe he doesn’t. It probably doesn’t matter much. Five is slipping, little by little and than all at once.
Vanya leans close, her voice against his ear. “The plan’s fulfilled,” she tells him, because she knows better than the rest what he wants to hear, what he needs to hear. She knows that time travel, torture -- all of it can mess up your mind. And the thing that cures it? Is the seven of them, together. Eyes closed, he can’t see her, but he can hear the smile in her voice when she says, “Let’s go home.”
They draw close, hands grasping, arms locked. Five breathes in.
Vanya opens the suitcase.
And just like that, it’s over.
-o-
Saving the world, when they’re finally working together, turns out to be relatively easy. They travel through time, they do things right, they take care of Five and keep track of each other. By the time they get Five back to the present (or, their present, at any rate, who the hell even knows anymore), everyone is (mostly) happy and (more or less) whole and the world isn’t ending (presumably).
That’s simplifying it a bit -- or, you know, a lot -- but Five’s actually okay with that. In most instances, he doesn’t like to dumb stuff down, and he tends to be frustrated when other people make light of truly important things.
But life has been unduly complicated for the past five decades.
Like, really complicated.
Time travel and continuum corrections and saving his family. Destruction and nearly starving to death and isolation and, well, murder.
He’ll take easy this time.
Hell, he’s earned it.
Right?
-o-
That assumption is not Five’s first mistake by a long shot.
Only time will tell if it’s his last.
And time?
Well, time is a son of a bitch.
-o-
Five sleeps for about a week straight. He wakes up on an IV, and he’s been dressed in pajamas and tucked into his bed with an inordinate number of blankets. Someone has gone to the trouble of trying to clean his room, but the calculations are still scrawled over his walls as if they weren’t sure what was still important and what wasn’t. It’s clear that Mom has been bringing regular meals and Pogo has closed the door for privacy, which is a silly measure since all six of Five’s siblings have seemingly decided to keep residence with him.
It’s quite a sight to behold, honestly. Luther and Allison are propped up next to each other, fingers touching as they sleep. Diego has chosen the most uncomfortable chair for himself, as if that proves something, and he twitches while he tries to sleep. Klaus is sprawled on the floor in a position that Five cannot imagine is remotely comfortable, and Vanya is sleeping with her hand propping up her cheek, pulled closer to Five’s bed than any of the rest.
Ben’s not sleeping, because that’d be weird and probably impossible. It’s weird enough that his dead brother is watching him. “It’s about time,” he quips.
Five can only snort. “You have no idea.”
-o-
Recovery is not easy.
This is probably an expected outcome, but Five still feels it with a certain amount of trepidation. The plan has spelled all things out, but the plan hadn’t been specific. The plan had one sentence about recovery, but he’s been asleep for a week and he feels tired and weak and small. He is not certain that time can heal most of these things, but he is the only one who seems to have such reservations.
Physically, he has to rebuild much of his strength and stamina, a task which Diego takes quite seriously. After consulting with their mother, he designs an intricate training regimen with a step by step process to get Five back into peak physical capacity.
Five looks through the notes skeptically, turning the pages with his eyebrows up. “This is a 20 page manifesto,” he comments.
“I shortened it a bit,” Diego tells him. “Some of it is a bit redundant, so I left it open ended. We can fill in the gaps as we go along.”
Five reads it to its conclusion and shakes his head. “It seems a bit over the top.”
“Have you looked in the mirror?” Diego points out. “You’re nowhere near fighting capacity.”
Five glares at his brother, fingers tightening reflexively. He’s a trained assassin; he’s also a prideful asshole. And sometimes, for being the smartest sibling, he can be such a moron. “I bet I could still take you.”
Diego is not intimidated in the slightest. “Your legs look like toothpicks and you get winded every time someone walks you to the bathroom to take a shit,” he says. He shrugs, somehow passing this off as not condescending or mean. “With this routine, we’ll get you back to your usual murderous self in no time.”
-o-
Emotionally, Five wants to kill Diego for the suggestion that he’s weak.
Physically, he has absolutely no way of proving Diego wrong. Five is weak. After two weeks of recovery, he’s still far too thin and his muscles have only started to rebound after profound atrophy. For once, he moves like he’s 58 and not 13. That’s called irony at its finest.
At any rate, Diego’s first day of training is a trip up and down the stairs.
Diego is mercifully kind when Five needs to be carried the last leg.
“It’s not a big deal,” Diego tells him.
Five seethes in his bed that night.
It feels like a very big deal.
-o-
Where Diego is all about pushing Five past his limits, Luther seems reluctant to let Five do anything at all. When Luther’s around, everything is slow and steady, like he actually believes that the story about the tortoise and the hare is an accurate life lesson that Five should take to heart.
He insists on bringing meals up to Five, and he organizes a schedule so that Five’s never alone. When Luther himself is on duty, he makes sure there is no need for Five to do anything. He brings him bottles of water; he hands Five his latest book; he even fluffs Five’s damn pillow as he settles down to read the newspaper in bed. When Five asks for coffee, therefore, he expects to be indulged.
Luther, however, shakes his head. “No coffee yet,” he says, and he sounds like he’s actually sorry about it.
Surely, though, Five has misheard him. He puts the paper down in his lap. “But I want coffee.”
Luther looks increasingly guilty. It is remarkable how a man so big can make himself look so small. “Your body weight is still so low,” he explains. “I don’t think caffeine would be safe for you, not until you’re back up to normal BMI at least.”
Five stares at him, waiting for a punchline. He knows that Luther has minimal humor, but seriously, there has to be a punchline.
Complacently, Luther lifts his shoulders in a shrug. “I can get you something else, though,” he says. “Juice maybe.”
Now the offer just feels insulting. Five swings his legs over the side of the bed, ignoring the physical strain involved with the simple movement. “Don’t bother,” he says. “I can get my own drink.”
Luther is only mildly alarmed. He’s mostly skeptical. “Five, you can barely walk up and down the stairs.”
Clearly, Diego has been sharing his notes from their failed exercise sessions. Turning red, Five starts to grind his teeth. “Who says I need to walk?”
“Five, please--”
It’s all a matter of principle now. Five’s not sure what principle, but his instincts say to fight. “Just watch me.”
He says it in that way of his, determined and confident and unremitting. He says it while he balls his fists and summons his reserves. He says it like he’s at the dinner table, telling his dad he’s ready, ready to walk out and prove the world he’s right.
The problem is, of course, he’s wrong.
He’d been wrong then.
He’s wrong now.
There’s a faint spark, but the blue barely coalesces. His reserves have already been depleted, and the rising emotions have crippled his self control. He grunts, squeezing his fists tighter still, but the surge of energy is nowhere near enough.
He stays, embarrassingly, right where he is, perched on the edge of the bed.
Luther doesn’t comment about the failed attempt. Instead, he smiles kindly. “Just tell me what kind of juice,” he says. “I’ll be back in a jiff--”
The fact that he’s being nice only pisses Five off more. “I don’t want juice, moron!”
Luther is still totally nonplussed. “Milk? We have chocolate syrup--”
Five muffles a curse. “Coffee!” he says, and he’s yelling in earnest now. “I want some damn coffee!”
Five’s getting himself riled up now -- that’s what Luther is thinking.
Five’s getting more than riled.
Five’s fighting every murderous impulse he has, the ones that tell him to rip out Luther’s throat and to eviscerated him at the stomach and tie his intestintines into knots. He can feel his heart thumping in his chest, a beating drum that indicates his own growing rage. It’s irrational, Five recognizes that distantly, but it’s been too long and he’s been stripped of too much, and he can still feel the shocks jolt his body as he gets things wrong and wrong again.
He wants, you see. He needs.
Why the hell is that so hard for people to understand?
“Five--” Luther starts.
And Five has no intention of letting him finish. He shakes his head viciously. “I’m not some stupid invalid.”
“No one is saying that,” Luther says. “But you’re still getting your strength back.”
“So?” Five retorts, like he has a point.
God help him, he has to have a point.
Doesn’t all of this have to have a point?
“So,” Luther says like he knows the point. “Take it easy.”
Five is close to incredulous. That point is irrelevant and stupid. He shakes his head. “Taking it easy is what kills you,” he says. “If I took it easy, you would be dead right now.”
He says it vindictively, like it’s Luther’s fault that he died in the apocalypse.
Luther doesn’t take it that way, that bastard. “No, it doesn’t.”
Five sits back, his chest puffing out as best it can. He still looks emaciated, for what that’s worth. “It did,” he replies sullenly. If he looks like a child, he may as well sound like one.
It evokes far more sympathy than Five is counting on. “Maybe before,” Luther says, looking moderately crestfallen. “But Five, we’re here now. We’re back home, at the Academy. The world’s not ending. The Commission isn’t coming. So, yeah, take it easy. We’ll pick up the slack for now.”
A thousand witty replies come to mind, but Five can’t find the energy to give voice to any of them. Spent now, he’s at a loss.
“Please,” Luther says. “We want to take up the slack.”
It’s an appealing effort, Five can see that. Luther is framing this as though Five’s doing Luther a favor, and not like Five’s an incompetent idiot without any actual value.
It’s pity, Five realizes, and he deflates just as quickly. His shoulders fall and he sinks back against the still fluffed pillows. “I can still contribute to the team,” he says, and he knows the wobble in his voice is pronounced. “I can.”
“Of course you can,” Luther says without missing a beat. “It was your plan that got us here, after all. So, let us give back. Let us return the favor.”
Five doesn’t know how to say no.
He doesn’t know how to say yes.
So he sits back and feebly picks up the paper. “Orange.”
Luther tips his head. “Sorry?”
“Orange juice,” he says.
“Oh,” Luther says and then he gets up, eagerly. “Right, orange juice. Coming right up.”
-o-
Allison is neither challenging or complacent. Her company is usually entirely practical. She’s the only one among them that remembers to open the curtains when the sun is out, and she reminds Five that he has to get up, shower and brush his teeth. She makes sure he has clean clothes in his wardrobe, and then, after two weeks back, she comes at him with a pair of scissors.
Five’s first instinct is to disarm her and then jam those scissors into one of her eyes.
That’s probably a bad instinct.
He lacks the strength to carry it out anyway.
“Come on,” she cajoles, setting up a chair and holding out a towel. “You can’t like your hair like that.”
Five is many things, but he is not particularly vain. However, it’s not a lack of vanity that has kept him from looking in a mirror. It’s just that he’s pretty sure he doesn’t want to see the person who looks back. He’s not sure who he is after all this. Worse, he’s not sure he wants to know.
Even so, Allison has a point. In the apocalypse, long hair and a beard had been unavoidable. The first thing he’d done after the Handler offered him a job was to visit an actual barber for a cut and shave. He’d kept himself well trimmed ever since. Such was the advantage of civilization. Any reminder that he wasn’t still stuck in the apocalypse was, invariably, welcome.
Funny, he’s almost forgotten about the apocalypse.
How has he forgotten about the apocalypse?
Possibly because he’d saved the world.
And failed to save himself.
He’d always been capable of making cold hearted and ruthless decisions when lives were on the line. Those lives just didn’t usually happen to be his.
“Five?” Allison asks.
He blinks; he’s spaced out. He does that sometimes. He does that a lot of times, more now than he used to. It’s hard to remember that time matters now, that time can be measured and that his existence is connected to other people.
“Your hair,” she says, when she has his attention. “Do you want to cut your hair?”
In response to the question, he turns his head toward the mirror hanging in his room. It’s small and dirty, but his reflection is clear enough. His black hair is long and straggly, hanging past his shoulders. It should make him look older, but his boyish features are only accentuated. It doesn’t help that he’s still translucent in his complexion with sunken cheeks and dark smudges beneath his eyes.
It’s startling to see. No wonder his siblings keep treating him like he’s about to break. It looks like he’s already broken.
Absently, he wonders if he has.
When he blinks again, Allison has stepped closer to her. She waits until he meets her gaze and then reaches up a hand slowly, smoothing a few strands back from his face. “I’m pretty good with haircuts,” she says. “I used to cut Patrick’s, and he always said I could do it better than his barber.”
Five’s throat is tight. “What rumor did you tell him for him to believe that?”
He’s not trying to be mean.
That’s not true.
He is. He’s being petty and cruel and downright mean.
He doesn’t know why but he is.
Something tightens in Allison’s expression, but she smiles anyway. She’s a better actress than Five has given her credit.
“Maybe you’re right,” she says with a small chuckle. “But have you seen pictures of him since the divorce? His hair has gotten terrible.”
That’s funny.
She’s being funny.
Five has to tell himself this before he realizes it. She’s being nice, and Five’s being an asshole. He winces at the severity of the disparity. “Well, whatever you do, it can’t be worse than what it is now.”
The tension eases from her face. “Then take a seat,” she offers, gesturing to the chair.
Stiffly, he complies.
After all, what else is he supposed to do?
“Just one small thing at a time,” she says as she starts to brush his hair. “We do one small thing at a time, and we’ll get there eventually.”
-o-
Allison is about routine.
For Klaus, however, recovery is about comfort.
To be fair, Klaus is almost always seeking comfort. He always wants the easy way out. This is a gross oversimplification considering Klaus’ tortured childhood talking to dead people, but it is a telling quirk that Five finds vaguely tiring as he tries to convalesce.
Since drugs and alcohol are not an option for Klaus or Five, Klaus seems to use food as a base substitution. Luther brings balanced meals, but Klaus sneaks in decadent treats whenever it’s his turn to sit with Five. He goes out of his way to bring anything that he imagines someone recovering from trauma might want.
Spaghetti and meatballs. Chocolate milkshakes. Crab rangoons.
Coincidentally, these are food items that Klaus also conveniently craves. Therefore, when Five can only eat a few small bites before he feels full, Klaus generously agrees to consume the rest.
“No waste,” Klaus says around a mouthful of curly fries. “That’s the responsible thing to do. With all those starving children in Africa. No waste.”
He dips another fry, generously smothering it in ketchup.
Five watches warily. “Somehow I’m skeptical about your sincerity.”
“What?” Klaus protests as he swallows the fry. “I’m nothing if not sincere! If I had money, I would totally sponsor one of those kids in those commercials.”
“You have money,” Five reminds him.
“That none of you let me spend,” Klaus says. “I had to steal from Luther’s wallet to get these French fries. That’s how much I care about you. I stoop to petty theft.”
This only leaves Five all the more dubious. “How did you go out and get them? You can’t drive.”
Klaus stops, a new fry in his hand. “That is an excellent and observant question,” he says. “See? All this comfort food is helping you already.”
Five shakes his head. “At least tell me you took one of dad’s cars?”
“What? No!” Klaus says. “Luther hides the keys, the bastard. But Diego leaves his just lying around. All his talk about security--”
There are so many things wrong with all of this.
But, upon reflection, the broad strokes are still okay. Klaus may be stealing money and swiping cars, but he’s still sober. It’s remarkable what you discover is negotiable when you get right down to it.
“And I am studying to take the driver’s test -- I am,” Klaus says. “I have a record and stuff, but we changed the timeline and I think I can get an exemption and so this is really just necessary practice, if you think about it, and it’s for you. My beloved brother. You’re worth a few misdemeanors.”
This isn’t a lie.
Five’s not sure it’s the truth.
Five’s not sure of anything, actually.
“I’m glad to see you’re enjoying your second chance,” Five finally says.
Klaus brightens, licking salt off his fingers. “Of course I am! I mean, I think I’m on, like, my fifth chance, but details. I’m just so grateful for it, you know? And a lot of it is because of you, so I know I talk shit, but I mean it, okay. I’m doing this for you.”
Now Five is faced with a truth that he feels impulsively must be a lie. There are motives; there are unseen variables. Family doesn’t fit in any equation anyway, and suddenly Five is exhausted by the mere thought of it. “I’m kind of tired today.”
“What?” Klaus says, and he blinks. Hastily, he gathers up the food. “Of course you’re tired. You look tired! You should sleep, right? You should sleep?”
Five nods, and he’s already sinking back to the pillows. It’s remarkable easy for him to fall asleep. It’s as easy as closing his eyes and then it’s like he doesn’t exist at all.
“Do you want me to stay?” Klaus ask. “That’s a little weird, but I think I should stay.”
Five doesn’t nod this time, and he closes his eyes. He breathes out, and he breathes in, reminding himself that he’s on a bed and not the cold, cement floor.
“It won’t be creepy, I promise,” Klaus is saying. “I’ll just chill. You just sleep. And, you know, we’ll deal with the rest from there.”
Klaus makes it sound so easy.
Five shudders as he falls asleep because he knows that going under is easy.
Coming back is always much, much harder.
PART TWO
PART THREE
PART FOUR
PART FIVE
PART SIX
PART SEVEN
PART EIGHT
PART NINE
PART TEN
PART ELEVEN
PART TWELVE
PART THIRTEEN
PART FOURTEEN
PART FIFTEEN
PART SIXTEEN
-o-
He exercises, but it’s not as vigorous.
He recites, but the words get muddled.
He calculates, but the number have stopped parsing.
This is what happens when they don’t feed him for a couple of days. This is what happens when the hunger pains become deep and gnawing. This is what happens when he dry heaves from the nausea of a stomach that is trying to shrivel up. This is what happens.
Desperate, he tries to sleep, but that eludes him, too.
Instead, he curls himself up on the floor, knees to his chest and cries.
His pride has always been among the last to go.
But goes, it does.
When he opens his eyes, it figures that Klaus is there. He’s wearing a jumper that is clearly supposed to have a blouse under it, but it’s hanging open instead. He waves at Five, using the palm that says goodbye.
Five rolls his eyes for the lack of something better to do.
Klaus looks offended. “That’s my greeting? Really?”
Five huffs, a small and breathless sound that doesn’t sound nearly as put out as he is intending. “You’re a figment of my imagination.”
This does nothing to satiate Klaus. He gestures to his chest. “So that makes it okay to insult me? Your favorite brother?”
Five is scowling. Maybe he’s always scowling. No, probably not. It takes a lot of energy. “You’re not my favorite brother.”
“I’m not your least favorite brother anyway,” Klaus amends, taking it all in stride. “And I’m here to help.”
The insinuation is meant to be hopeful, which is probably why Five finds it wearisome. “How can you possibly help?”
“By reminding you of what matters,” Klaus says, sounding proud of himself.
“What? By telling me that I’m strong? I’m not alone? I’m not crazy?”
“Oh, no,” Klaus says quickly. “You’re really weak right now. Like, pathetically weak. And you’re totally by yourself in here. And yeah. That means you’re talking to yourself, which I think probably certifies you as crazy.”
Klaus lifts his finger and twirls it around his ear with a sage nod.
“Crazy crazy.”
Five is now scowling in earnest, energy be damned. “And how does that count as help?”
“Because!” Klaus returns with enthusiasm. “It’s okay to be crazy! I mean, look at me. Crazy is completely and totally normal.”
He says it like he believes it, which just makes Five all the more skeptical. “Your brand of craziness led you to addiction,” he points out. “You literally self medicated yourself into oblivion.”
“Well, yes,” Klaus says. “But then I got sober! Tada! It’s a whole different kind of crazy! The good kind!”
Five shakes his head. “I don’t think this qualifies you as any sort of authority I should listen to.”
“Uh, hello,” Klaus says. “It makes me the only authority you should listen to. I’m sure the others have turned up here, telling you their little nuggets of wisdom, but I’m the one that matters. I’m the one that has lived through hell. Luther’s all sad about his time on the moon, and Diego’s all angry because no one ever listens to him, and Allison never knows what’s real or not, and Ben’s dead and Vanya’s all powerful -- but me, little brother.” He gestures to himself with something that looks like a keen wink. “Me. I’m the one that can get you through this. I mean, this isn’t that unlike the mausoleum dad locked me in when I was your age.”
That’s a lot of words.
Five’s not sure he can process so many words.
Klaus groans at Five’s silence. “Oh come on! You should be glad I’m here! You! The guy who talked to a mannequin!”
“Hey,” Five retorts. “We had a relationship.”
“Sure,” Klaus says, as if it’s a moot point. “And now you’re scared of talking to your recovering drug addict brother who talks to the dead.”
“Because you’re not here,” Five reminds him.
“Oh, and that’s some huge disqualifier,” Klaus says, rolling his eyes. “I see dead people, remember!”
“What? And it’s a pastime you recommend?”
Klaus raises his finger and nods his head. “As a matter of fact, I don’t,” he says without conceding anything. “But we don’t always get to choose. Right?”
He looks at Five keenly with an annoying smile. Five narrows his eyes, hoping to make the hallucination go away.
It doesn’t, but Klaus’ smirk grows. “You said that, didn’t you?” he says, asking the question without inquiring at all. “That we didn’t pick this life, we’re just living it?”
Five exhales tiredly. “You really were sober, weren’t you?”
“And listening,” Klaus tells him earnestly.
Five shakes his head miserably, closing his eyes. “That seems unfortunate right now.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Klaus says.
Five opens his eyes. The bastard is still there. Sitting, cross legged, like he’s always been there (he hasn’t). Like he’s always going to be there (he’s not).
Klaus manages to look like he cares, which just frustrates Five even more. “I mean, we do what we have to do, right? Right? We do what we have to do to survive?”
Five lets his head drop back. “Ugh, I said that, too.”
“You lived it, buddy!” Klaus says with a rallying enthusiasm.
Five looks back at Klaus. “But you weren’t even there when I said that.”
“Crazy, huh!” Klaus says.
Five purses his lips. “This is stupid,” he says. “You’re a manifestation of my subconscious. These hallucinations are getting less convincing. I’m slipping.”
“Another reason you have to listen to me,” Klaus says with a nod. “You’re running out of options.”
“Clearly, this is the annoying part of my subconscious,” Five mutters.
“You know, I think I’m insulted.”
“Then why are you still here?” Five asks, his voice grating now. “Why are you still here?”
Klaus’ indignation disappears almost immediately. He’s earnest again. “I’m here to tell you that you’re okay.”
“You told me I’m crazy.”
“Which is okay,” Klaus says, as a matter of fact.
Five can only snort. Shit, he has to snort. If he had any ability left to feel anything, he would inevitably feel total indignation right now. “I’m a lot of things, but I’m pretty sure okay is not one of them at the moment.”
Somehow, Five’s outright rejection makes Klaus all the more sincere, all the more confident. “And that’s okay, too.”
Five frowns. “I don’t think I follow.”
Klaus smiles at him gently. “Look at this, this whole thing. All you’ve been through. There’s no way you’re coming through this unscathed. Like, you’re just not. I know, you know, everyone knows it. No one could.”
That feeling of indignation? That one that he can’t quite muster?
He’s closer to mustering it now. “So?”
“So, this stuff, me,” Klaus says, gesturing toward himself. “This is your coping mechanism. It’s a sign that you are, in fact, a lot more okay that you feel right about now.”
Does this make sense? It can’t make sense, can it? Not when this is Klaus. Not when this is his subconscious manifestation of Klaus.
Nothing makes sense.
He’s too tired, too hungry, too everything.
“Seriously,” Klaus says, and he sounds a little less like Klaus now as he sits forward intently. “Five, listen to me, listen to me.”
It takes a moment and some effort for Five to comply, bringing his eyes to focus. Even then, his heart is hammering loudly against his shrunken ribcage, and the sound rattles in his head alongside his emaciated brain.
“As long as you see us, as long as you’re talking to us, your family,” Klaus starts like this is the most important thing in the world. Maybe it’s the most important thing in the world. “Then, I think you’re okay. I think you’ve got nothing to worry about, nothing. Do you hear me? Nothing.”
Five swallows (his throat is dry). He blinks (his eyes are burning). None of these sensations compute either. Nothing (absolutely nothing) computes for him anymore.
“But listen,” Klaus says, and he says it like this is the important part, like this is the part that Five has to hear, has to listen to, has to understand. “It’s when you stop seeing us -- it’s when you can’t hear us -- that’s when you need to start worrying.”
The invective is simple enough, but Five’s habits won’t die. He’s too tired to shake his head, but he wrinkles his nose and asks, “You think?”
Klaus’ eyes are big, and Five thinks about all those years those missed, about the drugs he never saw Klaus take. He’s not sure he would have helped -- could have helped -- but he thinks the reality of addiction would have pissed him off. Klaus isn’t scared of the dead, you see. Klaus has always been scared of himself.
“I know,” is Klaus’ reply.
The certainty is nothing something Five can question. It’s more constant than the concrete floor below him. Across from him, Klaus smiles faintly. Then he raises his hand with a hello in order to say goodbye.
Then Klaus disappears in plain sight, as only Klaus is wont to do.
This is the natural conclusion of things now that Five is alone.
Again, of course. Just like he is wont to do.
-o-
He sleeps too long sometimes, so long that he forgets how to wake up. As it is, waking up is a disorienting process for him, and the hunger pains have receded into numbness. He exercises on legs he cannot feel. He recites with a tongue that can no longer taste. He calculates with a mind he’s not sure works correctly anymore.
But he’s okay.
He’s alive. He exercise, he recites, he calculates.
He’s okay.
When food arrives, he eats.
He’s okay.
Then, when the walls are too close and the air is too empty, he lashes out, thin fists against the walls. The shock of the pain as it reverberates down his arm is shocking, and he looks at his bloodied fist in surprise. He can’t remember why it’s surprising, but the shock of it sends him to his knees and he curls up on himself on the floor.
He’s okay.
He closes his eyes, the scent of his own blood in his nostrils.
He’s okay.
-o-
He’s shaking when he wakes up. The tremors are new. He’s not cold exactly, but he’s freezing. It’s like his body has lost so much of its fat content that he’s an old house without insulation, and the tremors shakes his increasingly tiny frame.
It’s the hunger, he knows. This is longer than usual, or he’s just getting less resilient. Maybe both. Probably. He’s suddenly hungry for Twinkies, so he knows shit is getting serious now.
He’s awake. He’s asleep.
It’s not clear which he is when Ben shows up. But Ben looks more solid than usual, and Five is not sure if that’s a reflection of Ben’s state or his own. Ben, unlike his other siblings, waits for Five to make the first move.
“You might as well start,” Five says, and he doesn’t bother to push himself up off the ground. Under his cheek, the cement has finally started to grow lukewarm.
Ben is reclining against the wall on his backside, one leg stretched out in front of him and the other cradled with both hands near his chest. “Start what?”
Five exhales sleepily. “Your words of wisdom,” he muses airily. “That’s why the others have come.”
Ben shrugs a little, and the way his mouth turns down in a frown is convincingly indifferent. “I don’t really have a lot of words of wisdom.”
“Of course you do,” Five retorts. “Or why else are you here?”
Ben shrugs again. “I don’t know, why are you here?”
“Because it’s the plan,” Five says, and his voice starts to trail off. He sighs. “This is all part of the plan.”
“Okay,” Ben says. “So what’s so bad about that?”
Five gives him a skeptical look as best he can without moving his head. “Well, does it look very good?”
Ben considers that, but only momentarily. “It looks pretty much like any of us could have expected,” he says.
“There you go, then,” Five says.
“But then what’s the problem?” Ben persists.
It’s Five’s turn to frown at him. “I’m sorry?”
“This is the plan,” Ben says. “So what’s the problem?”
Five gapes for a moment at that. He also gapes because he’s tired and hungry and his mental capacity is diminished at the moment. “Are you serious?”
“I mean, this is the plan,” Ben reiterates. “You’re doing it, just like you said. Nothing’s gone wrong.”
That’s so true that it’s almost horrible. That all of his misery and all of this torture are perfectly all right. It’s acceptable. Five should accept it. “Maybe,” he says finally. “But it’s hard to call any of this right.”
“I don’t know,” Ben says with a dismissive tilt of his head. “I mean, you are alive. That’s really all the plan is: all of us, staying alive. And you’re doing it.”
Five drags in a breath raggedly, feeling it as it fills his exhausted and strained lungs. “That seems like an awfully low bar.”
“I don’t know,” Ben says. “Sort of seems like the only bar that matters.”
When he scoffs, the movement pulls at his chest. He can feel it all the way down in his toes. “You just say that because you’re dead.”
Ben looks at him like this is entire obvious. “So?”
“So,” Five returns. “I’m just saying that you’ve got a skewed perspective. Maybe being alive isn’t so great after all.”
It’s a weird thing for him to say. Five has worked his ass off to survive. The things he did to make it during the apocalypse -- they’re not things that any human should have to do. The fact that he’d willingly turned himself into an assassin to get out -- that’s an indicative of just how far Five will go in order to survive.
Or, it’s indicative of how far Five had been willing to go.
Lying here, curled up on lukewarm cement, he’s just not sure anymore.
Ben doesn’t smile, doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t look away. “You don’t mean that.”
Emotion wells up in Five, almost violently. “Maybe I do.”
“But this is the plan,” Ben reminds him. “This is your plan.”
Five bites down, clenching his teeth together. “And maybe it was a bad plan.”
It’s a telling admission. It’s an admission of his weakness, then or now. Both, maybe.
Ben is ever resolute. “You don’t mean that.”
Five’s too weak to fight it now. “I’ve been wrong before,” he says. “Maybe I was wrong then, too.”
“Five, you can’t be wrong.”
“Why not?” Five asks, and his voice breaks on the words.
“Because it’s working,” Ben says. He drops his knee and sits up straight, leaning forward off the wall. “You’re alive. Your plan is working. Your calculations are wrong sometimes, but you don’t fail. You have never failed.”
It’s an encouragement and an exhortation.
It’s exhausting, is what it is.
But his heart is still beating.
His lungs are still moving air.
He’s alive.
He looks across, to the blank wall where Ben has disappeared.
His next breath is no more steady than his last. Each beat of his heart feels progressively more strained. He can’t keep on like this forever.
But he can do it for a little while longer.
The next breath, the next heartbeat. That’s the only plan that matters to him now.
-o-
The routine is all he has now.
Or, better put, the routine has all he can give now.
He can hardly do the jumping jacks -- his legs won’t leave the floor. His arms can’t support his weight for pushups, and he’s winded just walking back and forth across the tiny cell. There will come a day -- sooner, if his present condition is any indication -- in which merely standing will be enough to exhaust him, but that’s acceptable. The effort is what matters.
After exercise, Five doggedly attempts to maintain his mental stimulation. He can still recite Vanya’s book from memory, but he finds his attention span is wanting. After a few paragraphs, he realizes that he’s spaced off, and he has to start again.
The calculations far even worse, and he’s halfway through a problem when he realizes that he doesn’t remember what variables he has defined and which ones needs to be solved for. When he does come up with an answer, he forgets its significance almost immediately. It’s possible that he’s predicted an impending apocalypse in 2465. It’s also possible that he’s determined that someone will invent bacon-flavored bubblegum in 2031. Or maybe he’s figured out that human cloning will occur in 2047.
The differences are naturally significant, but the more Five tries to remember why, the less clear he is on that point.
Finally, before sleeping, he sits on the ground, crosses his legs and looks up at the ceiling. He smiles and he says it, out loud, that this is fine. He says it in a clear voice with confidence that his family is fine. He says it loud enough for the words to resound in his ears, until it fills the pit in his stomach and tingles down into his toes: this is all part of the plan.
-o-
There is food the next time he wakes up.
He’s pretty sure there’s food.
Lying on the ground again, he’s not sure if he remembers eating. It was either the best meal or the worst meal of his life. It’s possible, he decides, that it could be both. This cognitive dissonance preoccupies him for a bit, and when he flops over onto his back, he sees Vanya there.
He’s too tired to be surprised, so he smiles at her instead. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
Another thing he has decided is that talking to his siblings is probably more good than bad. In his estimation, these are not strictly hallucinations by the textbook definition. Nor do these incidences serve as a symptom of some kind of impending psychological breakdown.
Also, he likes talking to his siblings.
It doesn’t much matter if they’re real or not at this point.
Vanya smiles back, although it looks painful for her. “Five.”
“You don’t have to say anything,” he tells her. “It’s okay.”
She at least has the good sense to look skeptical. “Is it? You don’t look okay.”
“I’m not okay,” Five clarifies for her. “But it’s okay. This. The plan is okay.”
“I know the plan’s important, Five--”
“The plan is everything.”
“--but we’re not just variables in equations,” Vanya tells him.
Five shakes his head, chuckling a little. “We kind of are, though.”
“No, Five, listen to me,” she says.
He has to blink a few times in order to attempt compliance.
“If you think about it in terms of numbers, of variables -- then everything is negotiable,” she explains. “Then it doesn’t matter what you factor out as long as the equation balances.”
He stares at her, a little awed. “That makes sense, actually.”
She is exceptionally patient, Vanya. Vanya has to know how to be patient. That was her superpower as a child. That was the superpower of Number Seven. Patience and love. That’s why she’s the only one who ever really liked him.
“Five,” she says, catching his attention again. She stares at him intently to hold it. “Pay attention.”
Five lets his chuckles taper off. “Okay, okay, I’m paying attention,” he says. “What is you want to say? What’s your line?”
Vanya cocks her head. “What?”
Five lifts his hand a little off the ground. It’s the best he can do for a grand gesture. “You’re here to tell me something important, right? Something I need to know. Something to keep me going through this ordeal.”
None of this seems to resonate with her. “I don’t understand.”
Her seeming confusion leaves Five vexed. It doesn’t take much anymore, but there it is. “Well, that’s why they’ve all come. Telling me to be strong. To think about the big picture. To remember the people that matter. That crazy’s okay, I’m alive. What’s your line?”
“I don’t have a line,” Vanya says. She shakes her head. “That’s not why I’m here, Five.”
On his back, when he scoffs, it nearly is enough to make his whole body convulse. “Then why?”
When she blinks, her face goes neutral. She looks even more earnest than Klaus does, no matter how sober he is. It’s funny, Vanya. She’s changed more than any of the rest of them, and she still looks exactly the same to Five. She’s the one he looked at last when he charged out to the future. She’s the first one he called for when he screwed up and wanted to go back. She’s the one.
He knows her answer before she says it. “I’m just here,” she says. “To be here. That’s what matters, doesn’t it? Being here.”
That makes sense.
And it makes no sense.
Five understands everything and nothing.
He can’t think.
“I don’t understand,” he says when he remembers to speak. It might have been seconds. It could have been minutes.
She doesn’t flinch; she doesn’t waver. “I’m here, Five,” she says again, with more purpose than before. “That’s what matters. I’m here.”
No advice. No wisdom.
Just a simple, inalienable truth.
When the rest is stripped away, when things are broken down to their disparate parts, this is the truth that remains. When there’s nothing left of Five, there is still this.
She doesn’t quite smile. “We’re all here.”
Five doesn’t have a response to that.
He doesn’t need a response.
All he needs to do is believe.
It’s a lot to ask, when you get right down to it.
It’s the most precious thing Five has given yet.
-o-
He gives up exercising first, when his legs simply won’t support him.
He stops the recitation next, closing his eyes and seeing the words written on the back of his eyelids instead.
Finally, when the sparse feedings take hold of him, he quits his calculations. After all, he doesn’t need a probability map to tell him he’s losing his mind.
Before sleeping, he lays curled up on the ground. He can no longer see the ceiling above him, his eyes are so strained. Sometimes, there’s food to eat. Sometimes, there’s not. It hardly matters now.
And he smiles, when you get right down to it. He smiles, and the words still come.
“This is fine. Absolutely fine.”
Because his body is failing, his mind is slipping, but his family is out there, somewhere in time and space, and they’re fine. They’re absolutely fine.
These words on his lips are the last truth he knows, the first truth he knows.
This is all part of the plan.
-o-
Then, he sleeps.
And when he dreams, he dreams of the beginning.
He was younger when this story started, older, too. He was right and he was wrong, he was alone. Time changes everything. He’s two weeks after the apocalypse. He’s eight days before. He’s having dinner with his family the first time he’s 13, and he’s jumping into the future. These starts; these things end.
Five looks for the constant, but he doesn’t have to look far.
It’s his family.
It’s his always been his family.
Five’s not ahead of himself anymore.
Five thinks that he might be exactly where he belongs.
-o-
And this is the ending, as far as everyone else is concerned.
But no, that’s not quite right either.
Five’s definitely ahead of himself this time.
It’s just like him to get things like that mixed up, but the old man did say that time travel could contaminate the mind. The old man wasn’t right about everything, but maybe he was right about that.
Honestly, Five could not be more glad.
Because Five had a plan. And he’s going to fulfill his part of that plan, no matter what. Because that plan, for all that it involves pain and isolation and humiliation and torture for Five, it entails something else for his siblings. That’s why this plan works where the others failed.
This plan isn’t a solo venture.
That’s the part Five’s never let himself forget.
The part the Commission has never failed to grasp.
Five’s locked in a cell by himself, but he’s not alone. Not anymore. Never again.
Somewhere, across time and space, his family is doing their part.
Just as well as Five is doing his.
-o-
This is the beginning: Five makes a deal, giving himself up mind, body and soul to the Commission. His price is simple: he wants his family to have complete immunity.
This is the end: Five’s deal condemns him to whatever fate the Commission wants, and it gives his family the absolute freedom to save him at any and all costs.
This is the story: everyone lives.
Everyone lives.
-o-
Five doesn’t wake up when it happens.
All his planning, all his flawless execution, and he’s asleep when it comes to fruition. Curled up in the tiniest of balls, barely clinging to what’s left of his body, what’s left of his mind. He doesn’t feel the floor shake as Luther rips the door free from its hinges. He doesn’t hear Diego’s knives as they whistled through the air, perfectly aimed at every alarm on the lower level. He doesn’t hear Allison’s silky voice as she tells the guard about a rumor that he wanted to help Five escape Commission custody, once and for all.
He doesn’t even see Klaus as he musters his power -- new ones, better ones, honed in Five’s absence -- to summon multiple versions of Ben to actively man the rest of the Commission, giving a whole new understanding of the term lookout. And he isn’t awake to see Vanya step over the threshold toward him, briefcase in hand. It’s battered and bloodstained; she’s not.
No, Five doesn’t wake up for any of that.
He wakes when her fingers brush his cheek, warm and steady and real. Even then, the rise to consciousness is a struggle, a definitive choice he makes, shedding the haze that he’s descended to, and rising for her, rising for them.
It’s quite a sight to behold, the six of his siblings crowded in the room with him. It’d be tempting to think that he’s gone and truly snapped this time, but he knows otherwise. Simply put, he knows better.
Because Five’s strong. Five can endure. Five’s known all along that it’s the people that matter. Five’s okay with a little crazy, because Five’s alive. And most importantly, Five’s not alone.
“Hey,” Vanya says, like they’re sitting down for dinner. “You ready?”
He can’t even sit himself up anymore, and he doesn’t resist as Luther props him up from behind. Behind Vanya, Diego looks anxious. Allison is crying, and Klaus bites his lower lip while Ben hovers nervously at the rear. Vanya is still smiling, though, as Five’s breath hitches and he finds his voice. “Did you run into any trouble?” he croaks. The sounds he makes barely seem like words, but there’s no doubt his siblings understand him. “With the plan?”
Luther’s voice rumbles in his chest. Five feels it as much as he hears it, so damn palpable that Five nearly cries. “The Commission didn’t have a clue the whole time.”
“By all indications, they still don’t,” Diego chimes in. “It worked as well as you said it would.”
Allison looks like she wants to hug him. “It wasn’t easy to track down an agent to steal a briefcase.”
“Yeah, And then it was straight up impossible tracking you,” Klaus continues emphatically. “It took a lot of trial and error to find this place in the right year.”
Ben is somber. “We had to flip an agent in the end. That was the only way to narrow it down.”
Vanya reaches out, smooths his now long hair away from his face. “But the plan worked,” she says. “We’re here.”
All the times they’ve said this to him, and this time the immediacy is overwhelming. No more theory. Just application. It’s not hope. It’s a realized thing. It’s not a coping mechanism, it’s actual family.
Vanya continues. “When you sold yourself out, you bought your own escape plan.”
Tired and weak as he is, there is no way to be smug. Five makes the attempt anyway. It’s instinct, and damn it, it’s good to have an audience for once. “I told you it would work,” he says. He sighs, sinking a little deeper into Luther’s arms. He’s aware of how worn he is, like there’s barely any of him left. In fact, he’s not sure how much of him is left, where he ends and his family begins. “What took you so long?”
Is he blaming them? Is he poking fun? Does he just want to know? Are some things just so ingrained that not even time can erode them? Five’s never let go of his family, never. That’s the reason he’s still here. That’s why he can ask the question like the smartass he might still be one day when he gets out of this shit hole.
“We had a lot to do!” Luther protests predictably.
“No kidding,” Diego says, and he’s frowning, brows drawn together. “Your notes were a little wanting.”
“And the Commission wasn’t going to bother us, but they hid you well,” Allison says.
“Yeah, I’m not sure the full scope of our epic and very dangerous search, for the record, was adequately spelled out in your memorandum,” Klaus says.
“You didn’t even read yours,” Ben says.
Vanya shakes her head, as if to silence them all. “We came as fast as we could,” she assures him. “But we did have to search all of time and space to get here.”
It’s tempting to think of that as hyperbole, but Five knows better. Exhaling softly, he rests his head against Luther’s shoulder and hums to himself. “Is that all?”
That’s all.
That’s everything.
“Come on,” Luther says, and Five feels himself hoisted up.
“I’ll make sure our exit’s clear,” Diego says, and Five hears him scuttle out the door and down the hall.
Allison is lingering close by; Five can smell her perfume. “Pogo and Grace are on standby,” she says. “We’ll get you taken care of.”
“Time travel is so crazy like that,” Klaus says. “Here, we’ve been running around for a year trying to find you, and when we get back, it’ll be like we were only gone a minute. That’s weird! No wonder you’re a little crazy.”
Time travel can contaminate the mind, the old man had said. He should have said that isolation and torture can have an effect, too.
“Your notes helped us fine tune the calculations,” Ben says. “It took us a few tries, but we’ve got the briefcase down now, so the trip should be pretty easy.”
Five still has his eyes closed, and he tries to nod. Maybe he does; maybe he doesn’t. It probably doesn’t matter much. Five is slipping, little by little and than all at once.
Vanya leans close, her voice against his ear. “The plan’s fulfilled,” she tells him, because she knows better than the rest what he wants to hear, what he needs to hear. She knows that time travel, torture -- all of it can mess up your mind. And the thing that cures it? Is the seven of them, together. Eyes closed, he can’t see her, but he can hear the smile in her voice when she says, “Let’s go home.”
They draw close, hands grasping, arms locked. Five breathes in.
Vanya opens the suitcase.
And just like that, it’s over.
-o-
Saving the world, when they’re finally working together, turns out to be relatively easy. They travel through time, they do things right, they take care of Five and keep track of each other. By the time they get Five back to the present (or, their present, at any rate, who the hell even knows anymore), everyone is (mostly) happy and (more or less) whole and the world isn’t ending (presumably).
That’s simplifying it a bit -- or, you know, a lot -- but Five’s actually okay with that. In most instances, he doesn’t like to dumb stuff down, and he tends to be frustrated when other people make light of truly important things.
But life has been unduly complicated for the past five decades.
Like, really complicated.
Time travel and continuum corrections and saving his family. Destruction and nearly starving to death and isolation and, well, murder.
He’ll take easy this time.
Hell, he’s earned it.
Right?
-o-
That assumption is not Five’s first mistake by a long shot.
Only time will tell if it’s his last.
And time?
Well, time is a son of a bitch.
-o-
Five sleeps for about a week straight. He wakes up on an IV, and he’s been dressed in pajamas and tucked into his bed with an inordinate number of blankets. Someone has gone to the trouble of trying to clean his room, but the calculations are still scrawled over his walls as if they weren’t sure what was still important and what wasn’t. It’s clear that Mom has been bringing regular meals and Pogo has closed the door for privacy, which is a silly measure since all six of Five’s siblings have seemingly decided to keep residence with him.
It’s quite a sight to behold, honestly. Luther and Allison are propped up next to each other, fingers touching as they sleep. Diego has chosen the most uncomfortable chair for himself, as if that proves something, and he twitches while he tries to sleep. Klaus is sprawled on the floor in a position that Five cannot imagine is remotely comfortable, and Vanya is sleeping with her hand propping up her cheek, pulled closer to Five’s bed than any of the rest.
Ben’s not sleeping, because that’d be weird and probably impossible. It’s weird enough that his dead brother is watching him. “It’s about time,” he quips.
Five can only snort. “You have no idea.”
-o-
Recovery is not easy.
This is probably an expected outcome, but Five still feels it with a certain amount of trepidation. The plan has spelled all things out, but the plan hadn’t been specific. The plan had one sentence about recovery, but he’s been asleep for a week and he feels tired and weak and small. He is not certain that time can heal most of these things, but he is the only one who seems to have such reservations.
Physically, he has to rebuild much of his strength and stamina, a task which Diego takes quite seriously. After consulting with their mother, he designs an intricate training regimen with a step by step process to get Five back into peak physical capacity.
Five looks through the notes skeptically, turning the pages with his eyebrows up. “This is a 20 page manifesto,” he comments.
“I shortened it a bit,” Diego tells him. “Some of it is a bit redundant, so I left it open ended. We can fill in the gaps as we go along.”
Five reads it to its conclusion and shakes his head. “It seems a bit over the top.”
“Have you looked in the mirror?” Diego points out. “You’re nowhere near fighting capacity.”
Five glares at his brother, fingers tightening reflexively. He’s a trained assassin; he’s also a prideful asshole. And sometimes, for being the smartest sibling, he can be such a moron. “I bet I could still take you.”
Diego is not intimidated in the slightest. “Your legs look like toothpicks and you get winded every time someone walks you to the bathroom to take a shit,” he says. He shrugs, somehow passing this off as not condescending or mean. “With this routine, we’ll get you back to your usual murderous self in no time.”
-o-
Emotionally, Five wants to kill Diego for the suggestion that he’s weak.
Physically, he has absolutely no way of proving Diego wrong. Five is weak. After two weeks of recovery, he’s still far too thin and his muscles have only started to rebound after profound atrophy. For once, he moves like he’s 58 and not 13. That’s called irony at its finest.
At any rate, Diego’s first day of training is a trip up and down the stairs.
Diego is mercifully kind when Five needs to be carried the last leg.
“It’s not a big deal,” Diego tells him.
Five seethes in his bed that night.
It feels like a very big deal.
-o-
Where Diego is all about pushing Five past his limits, Luther seems reluctant to let Five do anything at all. When Luther’s around, everything is slow and steady, like he actually believes that the story about the tortoise and the hare is an accurate life lesson that Five should take to heart.
He insists on bringing meals up to Five, and he organizes a schedule so that Five’s never alone. When Luther himself is on duty, he makes sure there is no need for Five to do anything. He brings him bottles of water; he hands Five his latest book; he even fluffs Five’s damn pillow as he settles down to read the newspaper in bed. When Five asks for coffee, therefore, he expects to be indulged.
Luther, however, shakes his head. “No coffee yet,” he says, and he sounds like he’s actually sorry about it.
Surely, though, Five has misheard him. He puts the paper down in his lap. “But I want coffee.”
Luther looks increasingly guilty. It is remarkable how a man so big can make himself look so small. “Your body weight is still so low,” he explains. “I don’t think caffeine would be safe for you, not until you’re back up to normal BMI at least.”
Five stares at him, waiting for a punchline. He knows that Luther has minimal humor, but seriously, there has to be a punchline.
Complacently, Luther lifts his shoulders in a shrug. “I can get you something else, though,” he says. “Juice maybe.”
Now the offer just feels insulting. Five swings his legs over the side of the bed, ignoring the physical strain involved with the simple movement. “Don’t bother,” he says. “I can get my own drink.”
Luther is only mildly alarmed. He’s mostly skeptical. “Five, you can barely walk up and down the stairs.”
Clearly, Diego has been sharing his notes from their failed exercise sessions. Turning red, Five starts to grind his teeth. “Who says I need to walk?”
“Five, please--”
It’s all a matter of principle now. Five’s not sure what principle, but his instincts say to fight. “Just watch me.”
He says it in that way of his, determined and confident and unremitting. He says it while he balls his fists and summons his reserves. He says it like he’s at the dinner table, telling his dad he’s ready, ready to walk out and prove the world he’s right.
The problem is, of course, he’s wrong.
He’d been wrong then.
He’s wrong now.
There’s a faint spark, but the blue barely coalesces. His reserves have already been depleted, and the rising emotions have crippled his self control. He grunts, squeezing his fists tighter still, but the surge of energy is nowhere near enough.
He stays, embarrassingly, right where he is, perched on the edge of the bed.
Luther doesn’t comment about the failed attempt. Instead, he smiles kindly. “Just tell me what kind of juice,” he says. “I’ll be back in a jiff--”
The fact that he’s being nice only pisses Five off more. “I don’t want juice, moron!”
Luther is still totally nonplussed. “Milk? We have chocolate syrup--”
Five muffles a curse. “Coffee!” he says, and he’s yelling in earnest now. “I want some damn coffee!”
Five’s getting himself riled up now -- that’s what Luther is thinking.
Five’s getting more than riled.
Five’s fighting every murderous impulse he has, the ones that tell him to rip out Luther’s throat and to eviscerated him at the stomach and tie his intestintines into knots. He can feel his heart thumping in his chest, a beating drum that indicates his own growing rage. It’s irrational, Five recognizes that distantly, but it’s been too long and he’s been stripped of too much, and he can still feel the shocks jolt his body as he gets things wrong and wrong again.
He wants, you see. He needs.
Why the hell is that so hard for people to understand?
“Five--” Luther starts.
And Five has no intention of letting him finish. He shakes his head viciously. “I’m not some stupid invalid.”
“No one is saying that,” Luther says. “But you’re still getting your strength back.”
“So?” Five retorts, like he has a point.
God help him, he has to have a point.
Doesn’t all of this have to have a point?
“So,” Luther says like he knows the point. “Take it easy.”
Five is close to incredulous. That point is irrelevant and stupid. He shakes his head. “Taking it easy is what kills you,” he says. “If I took it easy, you would be dead right now.”
He says it vindictively, like it’s Luther’s fault that he died in the apocalypse.
Luther doesn’t take it that way, that bastard. “No, it doesn’t.”
Five sits back, his chest puffing out as best it can. He still looks emaciated, for what that’s worth. “It did,” he replies sullenly. If he looks like a child, he may as well sound like one.
It evokes far more sympathy than Five is counting on. “Maybe before,” Luther says, looking moderately crestfallen. “But Five, we’re here now. We’re back home, at the Academy. The world’s not ending. The Commission isn’t coming. So, yeah, take it easy. We’ll pick up the slack for now.”
A thousand witty replies come to mind, but Five can’t find the energy to give voice to any of them. Spent now, he’s at a loss.
“Please,” Luther says. “We want to take up the slack.”
It’s an appealing effort, Five can see that. Luther is framing this as though Five’s doing Luther a favor, and not like Five’s an incompetent idiot without any actual value.
It’s pity, Five realizes, and he deflates just as quickly. His shoulders fall and he sinks back against the still fluffed pillows. “I can still contribute to the team,” he says, and he knows the wobble in his voice is pronounced. “I can.”
“Of course you can,” Luther says without missing a beat. “It was your plan that got us here, after all. So, let us give back. Let us return the favor.”
Five doesn’t know how to say no.
He doesn’t know how to say yes.
So he sits back and feebly picks up the paper. “Orange.”
Luther tips his head. “Sorry?”
“Orange juice,” he says.
“Oh,” Luther says and then he gets up, eagerly. “Right, orange juice. Coming right up.”
-o-
Allison is neither challenging or complacent. Her company is usually entirely practical. She’s the only one among them that remembers to open the curtains when the sun is out, and she reminds Five that he has to get up, shower and brush his teeth. She makes sure he has clean clothes in his wardrobe, and then, after two weeks back, she comes at him with a pair of scissors.
Five’s first instinct is to disarm her and then jam those scissors into one of her eyes.
That’s probably a bad instinct.
He lacks the strength to carry it out anyway.
“Come on,” she cajoles, setting up a chair and holding out a towel. “You can’t like your hair like that.”
Five is many things, but he is not particularly vain. However, it’s not a lack of vanity that has kept him from looking in a mirror. It’s just that he’s pretty sure he doesn’t want to see the person who looks back. He’s not sure who he is after all this. Worse, he’s not sure he wants to know.
Even so, Allison has a point. In the apocalypse, long hair and a beard had been unavoidable. The first thing he’d done after the Handler offered him a job was to visit an actual barber for a cut and shave. He’d kept himself well trimmed ever since. Such was the advantage of civilization. Any reminder that he wasn’t still stuck in the apocalypse was, invariably, welcome.
Funny, he’s almost forgotten about the apocalypse.
How has he forgotten about the apocalypse?
Possibly because he’d saved the world.
And failed to save himself.
He’d always been capable of making cold hearted and ruthless decisions when lives were on the line. Those lives just didn’t usually happen to be his.
“Five?” Allison asks.
He blinks; he’s spaced out. He does that sometimes. He does that a lot of times, more now than he used to. It’s hard to remember that time matters now, that time can be measured and that his existence is connected to other people.
“Your hair,” she says, when she has his attention. “Do you want to cut your hair?”
In response to the question, he turns his head toward the mirror hanging in his room. It’s small and dirty, but his reflection is clear enough. His black hair is long and straggly, hanging past his shoulders. It should make him look older, but his boyish features are only accentuated. It doesn’t help that he’s still translucent in his complexion with sunken cheeks and dark smudges beneath his eyes.
It’s startling to see. No wonder his siblings keep treating him like he’s about to break. It looks like he’s already broken.
Absently, he wonders if he has.
When he blinks again, Allison has stepped closer to her. She waits until he meets her gaze and then reaches up a hand slowly, smoothing a few strands back from his face. “I’m pretty good with haircuts,” she says. “I used to cut Patrick’s, and he always said I could do it better than his barber.”
Five’s throat is tight. “What rumor did you tell him for him to believe that?”
He’s not trying to be mean.
That’s not true.
He is. He’s being petty and cruel and downright mean.
He doesn’t know why but he is.
Something tightens in Allison’s expression, but she smiles anyway. She’s a better actress than Five has given her credit.
“Maybe you’re right,” she says with a small chuckle. “But have you seen pictures of him since the divorce? His hair has gotten terrible.”
That’s funny.
She’s being funny.
Five has to tell himself this before he realizes it. She’s being nice, and Five’s being an asshole. He winces at the severity of the disparity. “Well, whatever you do, it can’t be worse than what it is now.”
The tension eases from her face. “Then take a seat,” she offers, gesturing to the chair.
Stiffly, he complies.
After all, what else is he supposed to do?
“Just one small thing at a time,” she says as she starts to brush his hair. “We do one small thing at a time, and we’ll get there eventually.”
-o-
Allison is about routine.
For Klaus, however, recovery is about comfort.
To be fair, Klaus is almost always seeking comfort. He always wants the easy way out. This is a gross oversimplification considering Klaus’ tortured childhood talking to dead people, but it is a telling quirk that Five finds vaguely tiring as he tries to convalesce.
Since drugs and alcohol are not an option for Klaus or Five, Klaus seems to use food as a base substitution. Luther brings balanced meals, but Klaus sneaks in decadent treats whenever it’s his turn to sit with Five. He goes out of his way to bring anything that he imagines someone recovering from trauma might want.
Spaghetti and meatballs. Chocolate milkshakes. Crab rangoons.
Coincidentally, these are food items that Klaus also conveniently craves. Therefore, when Five can only eat a few small bites before he feels full, Klaus generously agrees to consume the rest.
“No waste,” Klaus says around a mouthful of curly fries. “That’s the responsible thing to do. With all those starving children in Africa. No waste.”
He dips another fry, generously smothering it in ketchup.
Five watches warily. “Somehow I’m skeptical about your sincerity.”
“What?” Klaus protests as he swallows the fry. “I’m nothing if not sincere! If I had money, I would totally sponsor one of those kids in those commercials.”
“You have money,” Five reminds him.
“That none of you let me spend,” Klaus says. “I had to steal from Luther’s wallet to get these French fries. That’s how much I care about you. I stoop to petty theft.”
This only leaves Five all the more dubious. “How did you go out and get them? You can’t drive.”
Klaus stops, a new fry in his hand. “That is an excellent and observant question,” he says. “See? All this comfort food is helping you already.”
Five shakes his head. “At least tell me you took one of dad’s cars?”
“What? No!” Klaus says. “Luther hides the keys, the bastard. But Diego leaves his just lying around. All his talk about security--”
There are so many things wrong with all of this.
But, upon reflection, the broad strokes are still okay. Klaus may be stealing money and swiping cars, but he’s still sober. It’s remarkable what you discover is negotiable when you get right down to it.
“And I am studying to take the driver’s test -- I am,” Klaus says. “I have a record and stuff, but we changed the timeline and I think I can get an exemption and so this is really just necessary practice, if you think about it, and it’s for you. My beloved brother. You’re worth a few misdemeanors.”
This isn’t a lie.
Five’s not sure it’s the truth.
Five’s not sure of anything, actually.
“I’m glad to see you’re enjoying your second chance,” Five finally says.
Klaus brightens, licking salt off his fingers. “Of course I am! I mean, I think I’m on, like, my fifth chance, but details. I’m just so grateful for it, you know? And a lot of it is because of you, so I know I talk shit, but I mean it, okay. I’m doing this for you.”
Now Five is faced with a truth that he feels impulsively must be a lie. There are motives; there are unseen variables. Family doesn’t fit in any equation anyway, and suddenly Five is exhausted by the mere thought of it. “I’m kind of tired today.”
“What?” Klaus says, and he blinks. Hastily, he gathers up the food. “Of course you’re tired. You look tired! You should sleep, right? You should sleep?”
Five nods, and he’s already sinking back to the pillows. It’s remarkable easy for him to fall asleep. It’s as easy as closing his eyes and then it’s like he doesn’t exist at all.
“Do you want me to stay?” Klaus ask. “That’s a little weird, but I think I should stay.”
Five doesn’t nod this time, and he closes his eyes. He breathes out, and he breathes in, reminding himself that he’s on a bed and not the cold, cement floor.
“It won’t be creepy, I promise,” Klaus is saying. “I’ll just chill. You just sleep. And, you know, we’ll deal with the rest from there.”
Klaus makes it sound so easy.
Five shudders as he falls asleep because he knows that going under is easy.
Coming back is always much, much harder.