Umbrella Academy fic: Changing All the Scenery (1/20)
Title: Changing All the Scenery
Disclaimer: None of this is mine.
A/N: This fic is kind of timey-whimey, covering some preseries spec, using events of the series to project some S1 resolution. It’s just a very time travel plot. Title with apologies to Sara Groves. Unbeta’ed. Fills my secret identity square in hc_bingo.
Summary: Five has killed a lot of people. One of those victims matters more than the rest.
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
PART SEVENTEEN
PART EIGHTEEN
PART NINETEEN
PART TWENTY
-o-
ONE
Is it bad that Five has no idea what year it is? That’s what happens when you travel through time; honestly, it’s probably to be expected. Time, for most people, dictates everything. For Five, time is malleable, it’s a matter of perspective. No, it’s not bad that he doesn’t know what year it is. He suspects the real problem is that he doesn’t care.
He used to care. On his early missions -- that’s what he calls them, that’s what he likes to call them -- he was meticulous about it. He did his research to blend in; he took great pains to understand context for a seamless execution of the task. He’d worried about time back then, about the integrity of the timeline. It seems silly now, how he’d tried to keep track of the days, like he could somehow figure out how much time he had left on his contract. Five years, the Handler had said. Five years of service.
Five years could be a lifetime.
It is a lifetime.
It’s also a blink of the eye. Insubstantially.
Some people would say it can’t be both, but it can. It really can.
Back in the apocalypse, he’d clung to time viciously. He’d scratched out the days on any surface he could find like a promise. Like a record that he was still alive. That he had existed at all.
He wonders sometimes if the marks are still there, etched into an eternity he hopes to never live again. Time isn’t permanent. Life isn’t permanent. Nothing is.
Nihilism is a dangerous coping mechanism, but Five thinks he’s figured it out. It’s enough to keep him going. That’s all he needs. He needs to tally all the moments together, add them up until he has what he needs to get back to a place where time still matters. Five’s traveled all through time, but there’s still just one present that matters to him.
So, no, he doesn’t care what year it is.
He doesn’t care who he’s supposed to kill. They’ll die anyway, just like anyone dies, and five years is a lifetime and a blink of the eye, and Five doesn’t think it matters if someone dies today, tomorrow or yesterday. He’s lived a life in a world where everyone has died, so the sanctity of life is all about perspective, too.
Feeling weary, he stops asking the questions. The metaphysical ones are the ones that can’t be reasoned. He prefers the ones he can boil down into numbers. That’s how he passes the time now. That’s how he marks the moments of his tenuous existence.
The year is as unimportant as the task at hand.
He scrawls a new equation in his worn copy of Vanya’s book and pins his hopes, instead, on tomorrow.
-o-
Five doesn’t know what year it is, but he knows the place. Well, generally speaking. He knows he’s in Vietnam and he knows there’s a war going on. He knows that this is a war that no one will win, and he knows that a lot of people will essentially die for nothing. That’s reductive, of course. With enough time, all things are reductive, though. Life makes more sense in broad, sweeping terms. The details are annoyingly difficult.
So he has a habit of only parsing the most salient points.
One, he is in Vietnam.
Two, he is supposed to kill a man named Li Shikata. It doesn’t much matter if he’s a good person or a bad person. Five tracks him down, stalks him, and promptly puts a bullet in his head.
That’s the convenient thing about war. No one thinks to second guess a sniper’s shot. There’s no trail to clean up. Just a dead body, delivered as ordered. Shikata dies quietly, almost painlessly. Five finds it very efficient when they don’t know what’s coming.
Back at the hotel, he burns any trace of himself. He cleans a few small wounds he’s accrued throughout the mission, gives himself a little shave and tidies his room. As he readies the briefcase for the next jump, he’s surprised by the whoosh of a pneumatic tube.
It’s a sound he knows well, of course. It’s a signal of a new mission, an addendum. It’s a reminder that some things -- the important things -- transcend time, just like Five. He doesn’t have to look far but opens the drawer in the bedside table. Instead of a holy book, there’s a tube. Five opens it and withdraws the scrap of paper.
Attention: Agent Five
It’s short and to the point; it’s a kill order.
They’re all kill orders.
Five doesn’t even blink. He reads the name once and twice. It’s unusual to have two kills in one mission -- two assigned kills anyway, incidental damage is sometimes unavoidable -- but he doesn’t work at the home office. He finds some comfort in the idea that they get their equations wrong sometimes, too.
At any rate, an order is an order.
A mission is a mission.
That’s that.
He crumples the paper and throws it in the trash can. When he turns around, he’s surprised to see the Handler herself.
She’s lounging, or trying to, in one of the stiff armchairs in the room. Her hair and dress are impeccable, but her makeup looks a little heavier than normal. Her smile isn’t quite right, and there’s almost a manic gleam in her eyes as she looks at him.
“Did you get that message?”
Five hasn’t had anyone check up on him in the field in years. He thinks it’s been years, but he’s not actually sure. He’s not sure what the concept of a year is anymore. At any rate, he’s not sure if he’s offended or flattered by her visit. “Of course I did,” he says, matter of fact. He eyes her cautiously. She’s never been anything but magnanimous, which is why he’s never trusted her. “I do know how to do my job, after all.”
Her smile widens, and she seems to tremble a little when she takes a breath. The heavy makeup seems to quaver over a fresh mark on her chin. “I know, I know,” she says. “I’m not here to question your ability.”
He frowns quizzically. “Then why are you here?”
“This mission, this last minute change,” she said, pausing to wet her lips. “It’s personal.”
That’s strangely revealing. For a woman who has thrived on anonymity, Five’s not sure what to make of it. “I thought home office protocol dictated that we maintain a healthy distance from the timeline.”
She nods along, but it’s like she’s rolling her eyes. “Of course, of course,” she says. “All the same. This one is just a little bit different. Special, you might call it.”
Five shrugs, not sure what to do with that. “Okay,” he says, hesitating. “Well, consider it done.”
She bites her lip in anticipation. “I know that home office doesn’t like to interfere. I know that we give field agents freedom to work as they must. But I do have a few requests for this job.”
Five considers this, eyes narrowed.
She holds up a hand disarmingly. “Nothing you can’t handle; trust me.”
“I guess,” Five says slowly, finding no reason to disagree.
“Excellent,” she says, and she’s beaming now as she gets to her feet. She crosses toward him until they’re eye to eye and she looks him up and down with some apparent pleasure. “This is your prime, you know. This is you at your best.”
Five backs up a step. “I’m just doing my job. We have a deal, remember?”
Her laugh is harsh and bitter but wrapped in a sunny lightness that cuts like a knife. “Oh, I remember, Five. I definitely remember.”
-o-
The request is strange and against protocol, but Five can see no reason not to indulge it. It’s not a complicated change, and it only puts Five back one day. He spends the night doing some quick research to pinpoint his mark, and then passes the early morning on his equations. When it’s time, he catches a ride to the predetermined location, takes up position, and waits. The mark is easy enough to see. Five fires precisely one bullet, packs up his things, opens the suitcase and leaves.
Time still presses on, taking Five with it.
For now, he follows. Until it takes him back to his family, he follows.
-o-
It’s a matter of time before he finally gets back home.
Literally. It’s time. He spends time to break through time, and his calculations are so focused on how to breach time that he doesn’t much keep track of the passing time. That’s convoluted, but seems pretty par for the course, and Five doesn’t care how old he is as long as he’s not dead yet. As long as there’s time to save his family.
You pick and choose, you see. You have to know what matters and you have to sacrifice everything else. He doesn’t bother fighting the Handler on the missions she gives him, and he doesn’t squabble about his contract. Instead, he skips through the years, eeking out equations in the margins of Vanya’s book.
Then, as President Kennedy makes his way down the street in Texas, Five has a breakthrough. He opens the book to the chapter, scrawls one last calculation and just like that, time’s up.
The years collapse, the minutes fold in on themselves, and it seems like all of eternity has sucked itself into this one, tiny moment. The endlessness of the possibility is breathtaking, and he’s overwhelmed by the fact that he’s waited a lifetime to get here. Life is but a breath; eternity a sigh. He’s climbed over the seconds to get here, to get now, and there’s nothing left to wait for.
He puts the gun down and doesn’t take the shot. He balls his fists, gathers his strength and rips through time with every ounce of himself. It’s nearly tearing him apart at the seams, and he feels like his essence is being stretched across all of time and space. The years fold together. He’s 13 and walking out at dinner. He’s 45 and blinking his eyes as his hands tremble on a gun aimed at a person who can’t be there. He’s 10 and sneaking donuts with Vanya. He’s 22 and puking his guts out after a bad Twinkie in the apocalypse. He’s 51 and he pulls the trigger in Vietnam, and he can still hear the gunshot as it reverberates through the ages.
It’s time, he tells himself.
The blue light engulfs him and a scream is ripped from his throat.
It’s time.
-o-
All those years Five has dreamed of seeing them, and he’s here now, and they’re here, and the whole thing is frustratingly underwhelming.
Luther blinks wide eyes like an idiot. Diego is still too bitter to ever be smart. Allison has grown into her diva ways, and Five finds himself doubting the words that come out of her mouth out of habit. Vanya looks weary in a way that sort of breaks his heart a little, but she’s the only one who seems to be willing to listen to anything that he’s saying.
And Klaus -- well, it’s hard to say with Klaus. Five has serious doubts that Number Four knows who he is with all the drugs he’s taken to forget it. He compliments the skirt because it seems like the most real thing about them.
All these years, he knows exactly who they are.
He takes his sandwich and eats it in his room because they don’t know who the hell he is at all.
Part of him thinks it’s better that way.
In the apocalypse, there had never been a reason to keep secrets.
But he’s not in the apocalypse any longer.
Disclaimer: None of this is mine.
A/N: This fic is kind of timey-whimey, covering some preseries spec, using events of the series to project some S1 resolution. It’s just a very time travel plot. Title with apologies to Sara Groves. Unbeta’ed. Fills my secret identity square in hc_bingo.
Summary: Five has killed a lot of people. One of those victims matters more than the rest.
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
PART SEVENTEEN
PART EIGHTEEN
PART NINETEEN
PART TWENTY
-o-
ONE
Is it bad that Five has no idea what year it is? That’s what happens when you travel through time; honestly, it’s probably to be expected. Time, for most people, dictates everything. For Five, time is malleable, it’s a matter of perspective. No, it’s not bad that he doesn’t know what year it is. He suspects the real problem is that he doesn’t care.
He used to care. On his early missions -- that’s what he calls them, that’s what he likes to call them -- he was meticulous about it. He did his research to blend in; he took great pains to understand context for a seamless execution of the task. He’d worried about time back then, about the integrity of the timeline. It seems silly now, how he’d tried to keep track of the days, like he could somehow figure out how much time he had left on his contract. Five years, the Handler had said. Five years of service.
Five years could be a lifetime.
It is a lifetime.
It’s also a blink of the eye. Insubstantially.
Some people would say it can’t be both, but it can. It really can.
Back in the apocalypse, he’d clung to time viciously. He’d scratched out the days on any surface he could find like a promise. Like a record that he was still alive. That he had existed at all.
He wonders sometimes if the marks are still there, etched into an eternity he hopes to never live again. Time isn’t permanent. Life isn’t permanent. Nothing is.
Nihilism is a dangerous coping mechanism, but Five thinks he’s figured it out. It’s enough to keep him going. That’s all he needs. He needs to tally all the moments together, add them up until he has what he needs to get back to a place where time still matters. Five’s traveled all through time, but there’s still just one present that matters to him.
So, no, he doesn’t care what year it is.
He doesn’t care who he’s supposed to kill. They’ll die anyway, just like anyone dies, and five years is a lifetime and a blink of the eye, and Five doesn’t think it matters if someone dies today, tomorrow or yesterday. He’s lived a life in a world where everyone has died, so the sanctity of life is all about perspective, too.
Feeling weary, he stops asking the questions. The metaphysical ones are the ones that can’t be reasoned. He prefers the ones he can boil down into numbers. That’s how he passes the time now. That’s how he marks the moments of his tenuous existence.
The year is as unimportant as the task at hand.
He scrawls a new equation in his worn copy of Vanya’s book and pins his hopes, instead, on tomorrow.
-o-
Five doesn’t know what year it is, but he knows the place. Well, generally speaking. He knows he’s in Vietnam and he knows there’s a war going on. He knows that this is a war that no one will win, and he knows that a lot of people will essentially die for nothing. That’s reductive, of course. With enough time, all things are reductive, though. Life makes more sense in broad, sweeping terms. The details are annoyingly difficult.
So he has a habit of only parsing the most salient points.
One, he is in Vietnam.
Two, he is supposed to kill a man named Li Shikata. It doesn’t much matter if he’s a good person or a bad person. Five tracks him down, stalks him, and promptly puts a bullet in his head.
That’s the convenient thing about war. No one thinks to second guess a sniper’s shot. There’s no trail to clean up. Just a dead body, delivered as ordered. Shikata dies quietly, almost painlessly. Five finds it very efficient when they don’t know what’s coming.
Back at the hotel, he burns any trace of himself. He cleans a few small wounds he’s accrued throughout the mission, gives himself a little shave and tidies his room. As he readies the briefcase for the next jump, he’s surprised by the whoosh of a pneumatic tube.
It’s a sound he knows well, of course. It’s a signal of a new mission, an addendum. It’s a reminder that some things -- the important things -- transcend time, just like Five. He doesn’t have to look far but opens the drawer in the bedside table. Instead of a holy book, there’s a tube. Five opens it and withdraws the scrap of paper.
Attention: Agent Five
It’s short and to the point; it’s a kill order.
They’re all kill orders.
Five doesn’t even blink. He reads the name once and twice. It’s unusual to have two kills in one mission -- two assigned kills anyway, incidental damage is sometimes unavoidable -- but he doesn’t work at the home office. He finds some comfort in the idea that they get their equations wrong sometimes, too.
At any rate, an order is an order.
A mission is a mission.
That’s that.
He crumples the paper and throws it in the trash can. When he turns around, he’s surprised to see the Handler herself.
She’s lounging, or trying to, in one of the stiff armchairs in the room. Her hair and dress are impeccable, but her makeup looks a little heavier than normal. Her smile isn’t quite right, and there’s almost a manic gleam in her eyes as she looks at him.
“Did you get that message?”
Five hasn’t had anyone check up on him in the field in years. He thinks it’s been years, but he’s not actually sure. He’s not sure what the concept of a year is anymore. At any rate, he’s not sure if he’s offended or flattered by her visit. “Of course I did,” he says, matter of fact. He eyes her cautiously. She’s never been anything but magnanimous, which is why he’s never trusted her. “I do know how to do my job, after all.”
Her smile widens, and she seems to tremble a little when she takes a breath. The heavy makeup seems to quaver over a fresh mark on her chin. “I know, I know,” she says. “I’m not here to question your ability.”
He frowns quizzically. “Then why are you here?”
“This mission, this last minute change,” she said, pausing to wet her lips. “It’s personal.”
That’s strangely revealing. For a woman who has thrived on anonymity, Five’s not sure what to make of it. “I thought home office protocol dictated that we maintain a healthy distance from the timeline.”
She nods along, but it’s like she’s rolling her eyes. “Of course, of course,” she says. “All the same. This one is just a little bit different. Special, you might call it.”
Five shrugs, not sure what to do with that. “Okay,” he says, hesitating. “Well, consider it done.”
She bites her lip in anticipation. “I know that home office doesn’t like to interfere. I know that we give field agents freedom to work as they must. But I do have a few requests for this job.”
Five considers this, eyes narrowed.
She holds up a hand disarmingly. “Nothing you can’t handle; trust me.”
“I guess,” Five says slowly, finding no reason to disagree.
“Excellent,” she says, and she’s beaming now as she gets to her feet. She crosses toward him until they’re eye to eye and she looks him up and down with some apparent pleasure. “This is your prime, you know. This is you at your best.”
Five backs up a step. “I’m just doing my job. We have a deal, remember?”
Her laugh is harsh and bitter but wrapped in a sunny lightness that cuts like a knife. “Oh, I remember, Five. I definitely remember.”
-o-
The request is strange and against protocol, but Five can see no reason not to indulge it. It’s not a complicated change, and it only puts Five back one day. He spends the night doing some quick research to pinpoint his mark, and then passes the early morning on his equations. When it’s time, he catches a ride to the predetermined location, takes up position, and waits. The mark is easy enough to see. Five fires precisely one bullet, packs up his things, opens the suitcase and leaves.
Time still presses on, taking Five with it.
For now, he follows. Until it takes him back to his family, he follows.
-o-
It’s a matter of time before he finally gets back home.
Literally. It’s time. He spends time to break through time, and his calculations are so focused on how to breach time that he doesn’t much keep track of the passing time. That’s convoluted, but seems pretty par for the course, and Five doesn’t care how old he is as long as he’s not dead yet. As long as there’s time to save his family.
You pick and choose, you see. You have to know what matters and you have to sacrifice everything else. He doesn’t bother fighting the Handler on the missions she gives him, and he doesn’t squabble about his contract. Instead, he skips through the years, eeking out equations in the margins of Vanya’s book.
Then, as President Kennedy makes his way down the street in Texas, Five has a breakthrough. He opens the book to the chapter, scrawls one last calculation and just like that, time’s up.
The years collapse, the minutes fold in on themselves, and it seems like all of eternity has sucked itself into this one, tiny moment. The endlessness of the possibility is breathtaking, and he’s overwhelmed by the fact that he’s waited a lifetime to get here. Life is but a breath; eternity a sigh. He’s climbed over the seconds to get here, to get now, and there’s nothing left to wait for.
He puts the gun down and doesn’t take the shot. He balls his fists, gathers his strength and rips through time with every ounce of himself. It’s nearly tearing him apart at the seams, and he feels like his essence is being stretched across all of time and space. The years fold together. He’s 13 and walking out at dinner. He’s 45 and blinking his eyes as his hands tremble on a gun aimed at a person who can’t be there. He’s 10 and sneaking donuts with Vanya. He’s 22 and puking his guts out after a bad Twinkie in the apocalypse. He’s 51 and he pulls the trigger in Vietnam, and he can still hear the gunshot as it reverberates through the ages.
It’s time, he tells himself.
The blue light engulfs him and a scream is ripped from his throat.
It’s time.
-o-
All those years Five has dreamed of seeing them, and he’s here now, and they’re here, and the whole thing is frustratingly underwhelming.
Luther blinks wide eyes like an idiot. Diego is still too bitter to ever be smart. Allison has grown into her diva ways, and Five finds himself doubting the words that come out of her mouth out of habit. Vanya looks weary in a way that sort of breaks his heart a little, but she’s the only one who seems to be willing to listen to anything that he’s saying.
And Klaus -- well, it’s hard to say with Klaus. Five has serious doubts that Number Four knows who he is with all the drugs he’s taken to forget it. He compliments the skirt because it seems like the most real thing about them.
All these years, he knows exactly who they are.
He takes his sandwich and eats it in his room because they don’t know who the hell he is at all.
Part of him thinks it’s better that way.
In the apocalypse, there had never been a reason to keep secrets.
But he’s not in the apocalypse any longer.