Umbrella Academy fic: Changing All the Scenery (9/20)
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
NINE
He shouldn’t be annoyed -- Five knows that -- but he can’t quite help himself. His siblings have been nothing if not patient and understanding with the revelation that he killed Dave, and for that Five has reason to be grateful. But they seem to be under the mistaken impression that there’s something they can do to fix it. It is this persistence that starts to grate on Five’s nerves. First, that they assume time travel is something that can be done willy nilly, when Five’s control of it is sketchy at best and the physical toll is almost incalculable. Second, that they assume that fixing an incident some decades in the past could change Klaus’ feelings about things. Saving Dave now, even if it were possible, wouldn’t change the fact that Five still pulled the trigger.
In short, this is not a fixable situation. At least, not in any way that his siblings seem to be naively hopeful.
That’s it, then. The naive hopefulness is really, truly starting to annoy him.
It is only the fact that he’s the bad guy in this situation that keeps him from telling them that they’re all idiots.
They are, for the record. They are all unremitting idiots.
Which is why they’ve called another family meeting. The sixth one since he woke up -- probably more than that since Klaus left. All the meetings discuss the same thing.
Again and again.
Ad nauseum.
“You sure you don’t remember anything?” Luther asks, looking just as genuinely vexed as he has every other time he’s asked this question. “Not a single thing?”
Five doesn’t sigh. It’s too early in this meeting to sigh. He’s calculated it. He has to wait at least 10 minutes before he starts showing signs of actual frustration. That is the right way to show that he is respectful of his actions and grateful for their acceptance of him despite said actions.
Ideally, he would not sigh at all, but Five is not a saint.
Obviously.
He presses his lips into a thin, thin smile. “I know I was in Vietnam,” he says. “What little I know of Klaus’ timeline in that era would seem concurrent with my own. Based on those conclusions, I have to say that the timing seems logical.”
“But is it likely?” Allison asks. She chews her lip somewhat, like this isn’t the first time she’s thought about this line of thought. “It was a warzone.”
“I’ve also calculated the odds of coincidence of that nature,” Five says. “They’re not good.”
“That just takes us back to the Commission,” Diego says. “The bastards must have messed with the timeline.”
“Or exploited the timeline because they can,” Vanya says. “I mean, I still don’t know. I’m not willing to just take their word for it.”
This is probably one of the more frustrating parts of these meetings. His family spends them trying to exonerate him. Five, therefore, has to spend them creating an effective condemnation of himself. It’s a lot of work with minimal gains, as best he can tell. Yet it owes it to Klaus. Considering that he cannot pay off his debt to Klaus, he will endure.
“The Commission may have sent Klaus the message, but the details of the killing were from Dave himself,” Five reminds them. “We can question whether or not the Commission interfered to set up the situation, but I can’t justify questioning the victim. The facts are clear. The circumstances supported my involvement.”
“But Dave was an innocent man!” Luther says, his voice breaking a little. He usually reaches this point later in the conversation, but the sixth time is not the charm for any of them.
“And I was a killer,” Five says without hesitation. He says it without compunction, for he is too vain to pretend otherwise. “I didn’t ask questions. I just did the job. The questions of innocence, for all that it makes sense sitting here in 2019, didn’t apply to me then.”
This is always the answer that gets them, the one that makes the silent. Five has to wait for them, wait as they process this. They will never fully understand -- they never do -- but they have to make it parse enough to move on. They have to reconcile the notion that the brother who came back to save them did so with blood on his hands. They have to consider whether or not their own lives were worth the forfeiture of so many others.
It’s something they don’t know how to comprehend.
Five is not surprised when they fail again.
Luther screws up his face, shakes his head. “You really don’t remember?”
This time, Five does sigh. He is several minutes too early based on his calculations of ideal human interaction, but he can’t stop himself this time. He’s got good self control. He does not, however, have good interpersonal instincts.
In other words, he hates people.
His desire to tolerate his family only counteracts this innate sense so much.
“I don’t,” he says as plainly as he possibly can. He’s restless, sitting there on the couch. He’s still recovering from his injuries, two weeks after waking up. He’s sore and bruised and his ribs are aching and it hasn’t been easy. But it doesn’t have to be easy. Life has never been easy, and that’s never stopped Five before. “But do you remember every star you charted out there? Every mineral sample you took?”
Luther looks down.
Five turns to Diego. “And you? Do you remember every criminal you’ve stopped? Do you even remember half the victims you purportedly saved?”
Diego’s jaw clenches.
Five then looks at Allison and Vanya. “I can’t imagine you know every line you’ve ever memorized. Or how about every note you’ve ever played? Why would you? Why would any of you? It’s business. We do our business and we move on. I don’t remember who I killed in Vietnam. I can’t. I’m not seeing how my lack of memory somehow makes me a worse person. I know I’m a killer. What else matters?”
He gets to this point about ten minutes sooner than he usually does. It’s always striking that it still surprises them, each and every time. Or maybe surprise is the wrong word. It still convicts them. It silences them. It’s the point they come to the meeting to deflect, and it’s the point they end every meeting unable to divert.
“The problem isn’t whether or not I killed Dave Katz,” Five continues, and he allows himself another, small sigh. “The problem is how do we deal with Klaus. He was able to move on because he thought the past was in the past. This has brought it to the present for him. I’m the link between Dave and 2019. Klaus doesn’t know how to deal with that, and that’s my responsibility.”
Vanya knits her brows together. “So we fix it.”
Five shrugs. “But how?”
“Well, you’re a time traveler, right? You’ve traveled through time before,” Vanya says.
Five scoffs. “I’m a bad time traveler, if you’ll recall. It took me 40 years to figure out how to get home and I screwed that up pretty much in every way possible,” he says, not hiding his skepticism.
“But you did get us to the past and back home,” Allison says. “No complications.”
“Uh, I did nearly kill myself both times,” Five counters. “And I think you’re all failing to appreciate just how lucky we were. The odds were against us both times. I’ve gone over them since we’ve gotten back. I still have no idea how I didn’t get us all killed.”
This time, Diego scoffs back at him. “No way. I don’t buy that.”
Five is unmoved. “You should,” he says. “Time travel really is a crapshoot. It’s a total gamble that should only be undertaken in cases of extreme necessity.”
“And this isn’t necessary?” Luther asks. “I mean, we haven’t seen Klaus in a month--”
“Which is why we need a solution,” Five insists. “But not time travel. Even if I could, and I do think that’s very questionable, I’m not sure I should.”
This is different, at least. They don’t usually get this far. Usually Five is too exasperated and his siblings are too much at a loss. Usually they don’t get past the question to confront the possible answers.
However, this is a question that Five knows. More than that, it has an answer that he knows his siblings won’t like.
He has to help them understand it.
That’s the only way they will ever get themselves in a position where they can help Klaus. It drives him crazy that he’s still stuck here, subject to their concerns. He hates that they’ve prioritized him for some reason, that they are still able to see him as the victim.
Five needs to dispel these misguided notions of fixing it.
That’s the only way they can put their focus back on Klaus, which is where the focus belongs.
“But you’ve never had problems messing with the timeline before,” Diego says.
“Because the stakes were different,” he says. “I knew that the end of the world outweighed the risk of any significant timeline changes. I knew that any changes that I might make would be better than complete destruction of every living thing on this planet. That’s an appropriate cost benefit analysis. When you get into this? Saving Dave? There’s not telling what implications that could have. They could be catastrophic, and the impetus, though important to our family, is not significant enough to warrant the risk. Why do you think I haven’t gone back to save Ben?”
Ben’s a sore point for all of them. Ever since Klaus left, Ben has been AWOL. This could be a simple matter of distance. It could be Klaus’ choice; it could even ben Ben’s choice.
Five has done this math as well, however. He’s had a lot of time to think, being cooped up in this house and confined to bed. The odds are that Klaus’ powers have been diminished. Probably because of chemical interference.
In other words, for a month, Five has been recovering.
For a month, Klaus has been going on a nonstop bender.
And yet they still sit here, talking like they’ve got all the time in the world.
Did Five say he was annoyed?
Infuriated is more like it.
“But we have to get the family back together,” Vanya says, and she sounds desperate on this point. “The amount we risked to get here proves that. We came so far. Are we really going to let it go so easily?”
Five gathers a small breath, finding this point salient at least. “I agree.”
They all stare at him, waiting for him to continue. Finally, Luther broaches the growing impatience on their side. “So?”
“So, there are easier ways, less dangerous ways, than time travel,” Five says. He has to gawk for a moment, but this whole line of argument is ironic. That he’s the one arguing for an interpersonal solution when his siblings are preoccupied with mechanical fixes. “I mean, last I checked, most people didn’t solve family disagreements by altering the laws of physics.”
“Sure,” Diego says. “But most family disagreements don’t involve time traveling assassinations.”
Five tips his head to the side. “Touche.”
“But you really think we should go after Klaus?” Allison asks, sounding more than a little uncertain. “You think we should try to bring him back without fixing this whole thing with Dave?”
“Fix it to what end?” Five asks. “Follow your line of thought. If Dave hadn’t died, would Klaus have come back to the present? Would Dave being alive in the past be with Klaus living in the present provide any kind of solace? If Klaus chose to remain in the past, would we have stopped the end of the world? For all we know, the Commission wants us to go to the past and fix things, thereby undoing our efforts to save the world. They could still be trying to get us to correct the timeline for them.”
This is clearly something they haven’t thought about.
It figures.
His siblings have their strengths, but probability theory and temporal mechanics are not among them.
Allison studies her fingers, and Luther reddens. Diego looks like he’s trying to figure out if he knows what Five is saying, and Vanya’s eyes are red.
“We have to approach this in more traditional methods,” Five says. “We have to go after Klaus. That’s what people do in real relationship, isn’t it? They make amends? They find closure?”
Allison looks up first, sober. “It is,” she says. “But you can’t underestimate how hard it is. How it doesn’t always work. Sometimes you have to live with the consequences of your actions. Sometimes they don’t forgive you. You murdered the love of his life. I don’t think it’s going to go well.”
Five bobs his head; another easy concession. “I think it’s fair to say that I still have to try,” he says. “It is better than risking the complete annihilation of the timeline we worked so hard to create.”
This conversation has been frustrating, yes, but maybe the sixth time is the charm. Maybe they’ll finally move beyond the questions and actually start living out the actions.
Five feels his hopes rise for the first time in weeks as Luther lifts his gaze and nods solemnly at Five. “What do you need us to do?”
“We have to track him to start with,” he says. “And then I’m going to need freedom and space to approach him.”
“You want us to do nothing then?” Diego asks critically.
“I want you to wait and be ready,” Five says.
Vanya frowns. “Ready for what?”
“To pick up the pieces in case I fail,” Five says. “Because the key here isn’t necessarily reconciliation. We need Klaus to be safe, first and foremost. We all have to agree that, short of timeline alteration, we will do whatever it takes to bring him back home. Is that understood?”
Five looks at Luther. Luther looks at Diego. Diego glances at Allison, who looks finally at Vanya. Vanya nods back at him. Her voice is strangely confident, though Five doubts she knows the full implications of what they are promising. That’s just as well, he thinks.
“Understood.”
-o-
It’s not quite right to say that things get better. Although, for Five, better has always been relative. Things had gotten better in the apocalypse when he found food stashes and started talking to inanimate objects. Things had gotten better on the road with the Commission when he’d started plotting his return to the present. Very rarely was better a complete vindication from everything bad. Typically, better is nothing more than a marginal improvement in circumstances.
By that scant standard, Five feels confident in saying that things after the sixth family meeting are, in fact, better. For one thing, he’s starting to feel better. His recovery has gotten him nearly back to normal, and with his growing confidence, his siblings stop hovering over him like he might break. However, his physical condition is only the start of things. The real improvement comes from focus.
Five needs purpose. He thrives with it. His father had always thought that his desperate insistence on attempting time travel had been hubris. It had, in fact, been an extension of Five’s personality. His father had given him a purpose to use and hone his ability. Not experimenting with time travel had been an impediment to that, one that he had deemed unacceptable.
His natural inclination, therefore, had damned him, but it had also saved him. He had found purpose even in a wasteland, and he had found purpose even while working as a temporal assassin. Five has made it this far because he has purpose.
In the first weeks after his altercation with Klaus, he had been denied this purpose. He’d been too guilty, too coddled, too broken. Now that his body is mended and his siblings have had their confidence restored in a joint plan, his purpose is stronger now than it’s ever been. Sure, the stakes may not be the end of the world, but they still seem about as pressing as anything as Five has ever approached.
In some ways, he finds this curious. It’s not exactly news to him that he can easily be painted as the bad guy. He’s never had any delusions about it; he is a murderer. The notion of not having pride in his profession is something decidedly underwhelming from a moralistic perspective. He hasn’t spent much time thinking about the simple consequences of his actions.
Has he thought about the lives he cut short? Has he wondered about the families who were shattered by his actions? Has he sufficiently considered the grief he has caused?
The simple answer is no, of course. He’s never had to before, not until Klaus. He’s never talked to the victim’s family. He’s never confronted one of their loved ones.
There is a certain amount of desensitization that must occur in this type of life. There is no way to exist as an assassin, temporal or otherwise, if you are hung up on moralistic questions. That’s a practical explanation that does not necessarily excuse the inherent moral failing.
Of course, he could be splitting hairs. Does it make him a worse person in this light? Is his indiscriminate killing of people he does not know not sufficient to damn him? Why does it matter? Would his regret somehow make him a more forgivable figure?
In this sense, Five is not sure anything is better. He finds this line of thought vexing, to say the least. He talks about closure and making amends, but he wonders if such things can apply to him. Because is he, in the truest sense, sorry? Can you be sorry if you would do it again?
Five has no way to know for sure, and he finds his own understanding of morality to be too tenuous to answer the questions sufficiently. That is all the more reason, therefore, to remember his purpose.
To find Klaus.
To bring Klaus home.
At any, and possibly every, cost.
-o-
Klaus may be high and irresponsible, but he is surprisingly good at hiding.
They spend a full week with their preliminary searches. Five is reluctant to take point on this, given everything, but it becomes clear to him that he is the only one who can take point. It ends up working well enough for him, though. He prefers to do his research first. If that means assigning the legwork to his siblings for the time being, then that seems to be acceptable.
Luther uses their father’s old contacts to check security footage throughout the city. With Pogo’s help, it is possible to check with old property managers. Apparently, their father had quite the network set up -- he owned, to some degree, large swaths of the city. Though Luther exhausts these contacts, he comes up with no trace of Klaus.
Diego also has no luck. Diego has been the closest to Klaus over the last several years, though he would be reluctant to call them close. Instead, most of their interactions have consisted of Klaus asking for favors and Diego providing said favors with groans and sighs. Despite this, Diego does know places Klaus has frequented in the last few years. Yet, when he sweeps Klaus’ old haunts, he finds nothing.
Allison takes a more diplomatic approach. In getting to know her again as an adult, he has found her refreshingly pragmatic. She makes a systematic search via official avenues. She makes inquiries at police stations to see if he has been picked up for anything from drugs to petty theft to trespassing. Then, with more reluctance, she calls all the local clinics and hospitals. She is looking to see both if he is injured and if he is seeking a drug fix through other scrupulous means. When these routes yield nothing, she stops just short of filing a missing person’s report, because they all agree that the last thing they want is the cops to be involved in finding their relapsed drug addict brother.
Five wants to tell Vanya to sit this one out, but she is insistent on pulling her weight so to speak. When no one can provide her any leads, she makes her own. After living on her own for years in the city, she has a fair understanding of its ins and outs. She has enough working knowledge of areas with people of questionable intent that she knows who to ask about local addicts looking for a fix. This worries Five in terms of her safety, but he feels compelled to let her do this. Five is not sure he is any position to tell anyone what they can and can not do at this point.
As his siblings venture out, Five locks himself in. He clears his walls, finds a few legal pads in Dad’s study, and promptly gets to work. He’s been doing math for weeks now, ever since he woke up. But before, he’d worked on calculating the odds of reconciliation. Now, he creates probabilities of where to find his missing brother.
There are a lot of variables to take into account, which is where the research from his siblings comes in quite handy. Five is able to actively rule out various locations and contacts, thus creating a more precise to chart to base his work off of. It’s still very complicated math, and Five has to use various psychological theories related to grief and addiction to best sort through the options.
This, however, is the work that Five has always preferred. Assassinations are always to the point. They require precision but very little thought. He had hated the mindlessness, and he sometimes wonders if that’s not why he’s committed so little of it to memory. Why would he remember something that required so little effort? It’s not heartless of him to admit that; it’s practical.
You think through the jobs that matter. You put the time and thought in when the conclusions matter. Maybe that’s too definitive, acting like the deaths of innocent people is without consequence, but Five is not sure how this makes him any more or less of a villain.
What matters is not that this is work Five enjoys.
What matters is that Five recognizes its importance.
All the times he’s done it wrong, this time he’ll do it right.
Klaus may be surprisingly good at hiding.
Five, fortunately, is even better at math.
-o-
This is the seventh family meeting.
Five is not annoyed this time.
Not that anyone would guess from his general disposition. That’s not Five’s fault, though. He has one of those faces, the kind that looks angry all the time. It is, perhaps, one of Five’s favorite physical features.
It is also beneficial, he decides.
If his siblings thing he’s annoyed, they’ll assume it’s because they’ve made no progress. They will not assume that Five has concluded his equations, verified his answer and knows exactly what he wants to do next.
And he also does not plan to tell them.
“We just have to keep searching,” he says instead, shaking his head in apparent frustration. “Have we considered the idea that Klaus has actually left the city?”
“I don’t think he’s ever left,” Diego says. “Would he have the money? The contacts?”
“He’s never been this motivated,” Luther points out. “If wants a clean break--”
“I can call around to the neighboring cities,” Allison suggests.
“Maybe show his picture at the transit stations?” Allison suggests.
Five nods, like these are all the best ideas he’s ever heard. “That has to be our next step,” he says. “I’m worried that we’re running out of time.”
“We’ll find him, Five,” Luther promises. “We’ll bring him home.”
Five has not felt guilty up until this point, so there’s no reason to feel guilty now. The address is written down plainly in his bedroom. If things go wrong, his siblings will find it and figure it out. If Five fails, then they will be able to finish what he started.
This has, after all, been long enough coming.
This started in Vietnam, Five can’t remember the year or the place.
But he knows it ends in 2019, right here.
In his calculations, there are some variables that are not negotiable to make this happen. His own life and well being, however, are not among them.
-o-
Five has never been one to sneak out of necessity. You might think that’s something he did as an assassin, but it was his unassuming airs and not his stealth (or lack thereof) that allowed him to move seamlessly throughout time without being noticed. In fact, he thinks he rather lacks the patience for stealth. He much prefers to do things the way they need to be done with no frills or affectations.
No, Five does not sneak in order to conceal his actions.
He sneaks because he doesn’t wish to explain his actions.
He’s never been one to offer apologies. He doesn’t particularly care what other people think about him, especially now, especially his family. He acts as he sees fit, and he has no compunction with any aspect of it. When you live in the apocalypse, there’s no need to sneak about since everyone is dead. As an assassin, you learn rather quickly that people never notice a plainspoken person just going about their lives. They simply assume that he’s an average businessman.
They aren’t always wrong.
It’s just his business is killing people.
All of which is to say that Five is not sneaking because he’s worried about what his siblings will say. He’s not worried that they’ll stop him. No, Five sneaks because it’ll be an annoyed delay for the task at hand.
Five needs to find Klaus. This is a conclusion he has made conclusively, and his siblings will feel compelled to offer advice, assistance and all the other things that Five is not interested in. He prefers to tell them after the fact, in the face of failure or success.
It’s simpler that way.
And Five knows this will be hard enough as it is.
-o-
Getting out of the house is, presumably, the hard part. Or, you would think it is, what with five other siblings living (well, and not-living, in the case of Ben) in the same space. It is, however, a very large house. His siblings are also surprisingly unobservant for would-be superheroes. As established, Five is not particularly sneak, but this is still far easier than it should be.
After this, all he has to do is find the address he has written down on his piece of paper. He has been banned from taking one of the cars -- apparently it’s too likely that Five will be picked up by a cop if he continues driving without a license -- which does make this step moderately more difficult. They live in a large city, which means that public transit is an option. Allison has even made him purchase a transit pass for cases of emergency. Five is not actually opposed to this, but he finds it tedious. He doesn’t like how often public transit has to stop to cater to the whims of other people. Logically, he knows this is the function of the service, but he is too used to minding his own business to want to be stuck minding everyone else’s.
There is also the option of calling for a cab, which is probably the option Five considers most seriously. However, he is not feeling particularly social today. To be fair, he’s not feeling social most days, but he is more surly than more. Not surly. It’s just that he knows what he has to do, and he doesn’t want to do it. The idea of exchanging polite pleasantries with complete strangers is an expenditure of emotional energy that he does not feel he can afford on a day as important as today.
Emotional energy Five has in limited, limited supply.
Physical energy, on the other hand, he has never had more of. There are many things he hates about being 13. The fact that he is able to perform physical feats at a higher level with fewer side effects is not one of them. In fact, he hadn’t realized how much he’d been slowing down in his old age. He’d never thought of himself as old until he was suddenly very young again. Puberty isn’t fun, but the vivacity of youth has distinct benefits.
Five knows he can’t do anything about his current age except wait to grow out of it like everyone else. Therefore, he is a pragmatist. He might as well enjoy the perks, few as they may be.
That said, Five decides rather quickly that he will walk to the address. It’s closer than his siblings had thought, but that’s not to say it’s a walk through the park. It’s nearly a six mile trek, and Five knows it will take him several hours to complete it. If time were of the essence, this would be a problem. And that’s not to say that time isn’t important. Klaus has been missing far too long, and Five has felt the weight of every second. He wants to rectify that -- and he wants to rectify it now.
All the same, he knows that it will not be an easy confrontation. It would be foolish to call it anything other than a confrontation. He knows it will go poorly. He knows it will be messy and emotional and possibly violent. He suspects Klaus will yell and lash out, and he is fully prepared for a full physical assault again.
(This is another reason his siblings can’t be here. No one can interfere this time. No matter what, and yes, Five is aware of the implications of his decision.)
Therefore, a six mile walk doesn’t actually sound so bad.
Five tucks the address in his pocket -- he’s had it memorized ever since he came up with it -- and he starts down the street. He turns a few corners, makes it a few blocks, and soon the mansion is nowhere to be seen. Not that Five would know. He doesn’t look back.
-o-
The day is warm by the time Five arrives at the address. The fall has been cool overall, but with clear skies and the long walk, Five is feeling the heat. It’s irony, of course. Five’s life is filled with unfortunate ironies starting at the age of 13 when he walked out of the house to prove to his father he was wrong only to prove his father completely and undeniably right.
Irony is rarely kind to Five, but he can’t view this situation with any detachment. Is it ironic that the measures he used to save his family is the very thing threatening to destroy them? Yes, it is. But irony is a dry, witty assessment, and Five has nothing for that now. All he has is an address on a piece of paper and the days of probability charting zeroed in his head.
He looks the building up and down once for good measure. This is a habit of his, one he started in the apocalypse. He’d found it to be important to make a good sweep of the area before entering any unknown building. There were many unknown dangers back then, the risk of collapse, contamination and the like. He’d learned young to always have an exit plan.
His assessment of this building reminds him of the apocalypse, actually. It’s not necessarily old, though it’s not new, but it’s likely newer than the mansion. Even so, it’s in bad repair. More than that, it’s been actively abused. Windows are missing; the siding is hanging off in places. There is trash littered about, and it smells atrocious.
In the apocalypse, Five would have kept walking.
That’s not a luxury he has right now. He has to put down that thought along with any notion he might have had about an exit plan. He doesn’t have an out. Failure is an option, of course, and Five will have to face that failure baldly.
Making his way inside, he allows himself a moment of doubt. Maybe his calculations were wrong. Maybe the probabilities didn’t play out the way he thought. Maybe he’s got the address wrong. Maybe he can turn around and go home and not do this, not here, not now.
The doubt is necessarily fleeting.
He knows why he came.
Also, he sees two people snorting coke on the table, which is a pretty good indication that Five has got the right location. He passes through the living room without notice. There’s someone passed out on the half-broken dining room table. Someone is trying to pour themselves a glass of water in the kitchen. Five checks two main floor bedrooms and a bathroom before stepping over two people having sex on the stairs.
Upstairs, one bedroom is empty. There’s two people shooting up in the sunroom. Five opens the last bedroom door, and Klaus is sitting there on the bed. He’s looking right at Five like he’s waiting for him.
Five stands in the doorway and looks right back.
It’s dire, but it’s maybe not quite as dire as he’d feared. Given the condition of the house and its other occupants, Klaus is clearly back on the drugs. His gaze isn’t quite clear, but it’s also not muddied. Sitting there, he seems acceptably cognizant. Either he’s run out of drug to take or his heart’s not really in it. Five suspects he knows which one is the truth.
And he suspects he knows the reason why.
Klaus is just high enough not to be sober, but probably not high enough to forget.
Even if he had forgotten, Five’s very presence is going to bring that memory back.
Quickly.
“Shit,” Klaus says. “I don’t suppose you’re actually dead and I’m sober and we’re not really going to have the conversation I’m pretty sure you came here to have.”
He doesn’t sound as strung out as Five knows he is. It cannot be downplayed: Klaus is back on the drugs. It is true that he’s not as bad off as most of the people in his house, but it’s still not good. Klaus is not good.
He is, however, still Klaus.
It makes Five’s chest hurt. “I came to bring you home.”
“So that means you’re leaving?” Klaus asks, not missing a beat. His tone carries the hint of a joke, but it’s one with a punchline that no one will laugh at.
“I’m here to do whatever it takes,” Five says.
This time, Klaus does laugh. It’s a short, brittle sound. “Whatever it takes? What about going to the past and undoing what you did?”
Five sighs. That’s not an unexpected answer, and this is why he’s here. “That’s not within the realm of my capabilities.”
“The realm of your capabilities?” Klaus asks. He blinks as if in shock. “The realm of your capabilities. But you travel through time! That’s literally the height of your capabilities!”
Five stands his ground, feet planted on the floor. “We all know that our capabilities are limited by a myriad of external factors. Stress, tiredness, physical condition--”
“And indifference!” Klaus interjects, sharply now. His red eyes blink back tears. “You won’t do it because you don’t care!”
“I do care,” Five tells him. “It has never been my intention to hurt you?”
“But you did, didn’t you?” Klaus asks. He laughs shakily now, the tenor of his voice hinging on the edge of sanity. Something flickers in his expression, and Five feels it as it ripples through his own chest. “You did hurt me. You tore my heart out. You ruined me.”
Five has come to take whatever Klaus has, but that doesn’t stop his heart from skipping a beat. It’s an anatomical response; involuntarily. Five’s good, but he’s not that good. And Klaus’ new powers are intimidating. Combined with his lack of total self control right now, Five is aware of the precariousness of his own situation.
Yet, nothing has changed. Five rocks back on his feet and puts his hands in his pocket. “While I still believe in personal accountability, I accept my role in your current predicament. That’s why I’m here.”
“Predicament?” Klaus asks, and he gets to his feet. He wobbles but doesn’t fall, his gaze locked in on Five ominously. He seethes, and Five feels the force of it nearly knock him off his feet. “Which part of the predicament? The part where I’m crippled by grief? Or the part where I can’t trust my own family?”
Five tips his head in acknowledge. “As well as the relapse into drug addiction.”
It’s not intended to be a smart-ass thing to say.
It is, however, kind of a smart-ass thing to say.
Most of the time, his siblings would roll their eyes and jab back.
That’s not how this is going to go.
Klaus’ face contorts. When he steps forward, Five is knocked back. He has to catch himself against the door frame. “Shut up!” he says, and Five can’t do anything but watch as he’s lifted off the ground. “I wish you had never come back!”
Five looks at the ground and refusing to let himself panic even as his heart thrums with anxiety. Klaus is more sober than Five has initially thought to have any control over his powers. Either that or he hates Five so much that the force of the power is nothing but instinctual. “I’m done changing the past,” he says, and he’s going for reasonable even as his own voice starts to thin out. “I want us to move forward.”
“How can I?” Klaus says, voice rising as Five lifts, almost touching the ceiling. “How can I move ahead when the best part of me is in the past!”
“Klaus, nothing will bring him back,” Five tells him, even as the energy starts to pulsate in the room, sending tremors down his spine.
“You can’t even apologize, you little asshole?” Klaus asks, and the air prickles like sharp knives on top of Five’s skin now. “You can’t even muster up those words?”
Five forces himself to breath as he remains as still as possible under Klaus’ power. He could blink, probably. But that’s not why he came.
He tells himself that again.
That’s not why he came.
“I can apologize, but what’s the point?” he asks. “It’s meaningless. You and I both know that I killed Dave and I did so willingly. Saying I’m sorry doesn’t change that or even start to make it better.”
It’s the truth, and Five does not intend it to be antagonizing. He’s not an idiot, though. He knows the effect is will have.
He’s not surprised, then, when Klaus bares down. He grunts, thrusting Five up until he’s smashed against the ceiling. The force of it is oppressive, and he feels the strain in his barely healed ribs. “If you didn’t come to apologize, then why are you here?”
“Because you need to come home,” Five says, gritting the words out with as much muster as he can. “You can’t be here, doing this to yourself.”
“Doing what?” Klaus asks, mockingly now. “This?”
With a tip of his head, Klaus sends Five flying. He scrapes against the ceiling painfully and smashes into one of the walls. His head rings from the impact, but he doesn’t fall. Instead, he’s sent tumbling into the far corner, where he hits the ground with enough force that he rebounds hard and puts a dent in the drywall.
Five can already feel the onset of a concussion, and he has to blink a few times before his vision even starts to clear. He staggers for breath, and he barely has time to disentangle himself from the broken wall before Klaus picks him up again. This time, he hovers off the ground, and Klaus drags him closer. “What about this?”
Without further warning, Klaus slams him back. He hits the ground on his back, his head slamming hard against the floor. His vision dims out for a second, and his breath is torn from his lungs as he is lifted into the ceiling. He tumbles, head over heels, and he is thrown into one window before being dragged back in through the broken shards. He shatters the next window before he’s pinned up to the ceiling, arms flayed out and legs immobilized by force.
Underneath him, Klaus looks up. He’s breathing heavily with exertion, a sweat breaking out over his forehead. He is visibly trembling, fresh tears streaking down his face.
“I came to give you a choice,” Five says, barely finding enough of his voice to speak. It’s hard to breathe like this, but he forces the words out without air. “A choice to make peace.”
“Peace?” Klaus asks, voice pitching hysterically. He wrinkles his nose and Five inches further into the plaster ceiling, feeling it crack around his body. “What kind of peace can I have with you around?”
Five struggles to keep himself conscious now, the pressing building in the back of his head. He clings to consciousness stubbornly, and keeps his gaze fixed on Klaus. “Therein lies your choice,” he half croaks. “You can choose for me to leave -- walk away. You can go home, and I would never go back, if that’s your wish.”
Klaus clearly isn’t expecting that. He hesitates, just slightly. “And what’s the other option? You said this is a choice, right? So what’s my other choice?
Five wants to tell him that one choice is that they say all is well and go home together. Because that is a choice, it’s the choice that Five himself craves.
It’s also not a choice Klaus wants right now.
It may never be one that he wants again.
Five knows that he took that choice from Klaus when he killed Dave. Intentionality, rationality -- none of it matters. This is an emotional issue. Everyone has a breaking point, and Five has found Klaus in the worst possible way. His brother is good, at his core. His brother is kind, where it matters. And he’s learned to cope with death in a way that no one should ever have to learn.
Dave’s death has always barely fit into that tenuous grip Klaus forges with reality. When it was firmly in the past, Klaus had been able to disassociate himself from it acceptably enough. But Five links him to it. He’s a constant reminder. Five is the manifestation of that loss and the source of the pain.
In his right mind, Klaus would never hurt Five.
But thanks to Five, Klaus has no right mind left. He has effectively taken that choice from his brother. The fact that he didn’t know doesn’t change anything. The choice is gone.
So Five has to give him another choice.
“Your other choice is to kill me,” he says. His mouth almost twitches into an approximation of a smile. He’s fought for survival for so long that it’s a weird, weird thing to make this offer. To lay down his life so willingly, so easily. For reasons that the universe would deem unworthy.
This is called doing the right thing.
Occasionally, Five can pull it off. He likes to think that he’s best when it counts the most, and he knows it counts now. For Klaus’ sake, it counts now.
“It’s justice, after all,” Five continues, the pressure building in his chest as his body trembles against the cracking drywall. “An eye for an eye. A life for a life. I know I’m a killer, Klaus. You’d probably be doing society a favor.”
On the ground, Five’s vision is just clear enough to see Klaus’ expression almost break. As angry as he is, as hurt as he is, this still runs counter to his nature. He wants to forgive Five, but he can’t reconcile any of it. “You really think it’s that easy?” he asks, his voice wavering. His power flickers with a breath, and Five feels the tension ease against his body. “You think I can just make that choice?”
He has to swallow to force the words out of his throat. “I don’t imagine any of this is easy,” he croaks. “Not for me and definitely not for you. But what you’re doing now, that’s not a choice, Klaus. You have to choose.”
“Why? When have I ever had to choose?” Klaus asks, and he’s openly crying now. He’s visibly shaking, from the exertion or emotion, Five isn’t sure. “I never chose my powers! I didn’t choose to fall in love! I didn’t choose for you to kill him!”
Five’s breathing catches. His own eyes are burning now. “All of that is true, Klaus,” he says, trying to sound sure and steady when there are black spots dancing in front of his eyes. “Life sucks, but you know that you can’t run from it. You have to face it, and I fully accept whatever means you need to do that.”
“But it’s not about me!” Klaus says, and it sounds like he’s pleading now. He turns away for a moment, face screwed up. Five falters, but Klaus turns back quickly, looking up at him with a mixture of rage and grief. “This is about Dave! Dave who made me want to try! Dave who made all the ghosts worthwhile! Dave who isn’t here because of you!”
Klaus’ voice pitches to a yell, and Five is thrust up against the ceiling again. He grimaces and blinks to clear his vision. He can taste blood in his mouth. “I know.”
“I thought the family could be enough after that, I really did,” Klaus says. “I wanted to think that we could live for each other. Band together. Use our powers.”
“We still can--”
“But you killed him!” Klaus almost screams now, and Five digs deeper as plaster rains down to the ground. “You killed him! I trusted you, and you killed him! That doesn’t even make sense to me! How am I supposed to make sense of any of it?”
Five wants to think that the drugs are speaking now, that Klaus’ addiction has muddled his thoughts, but Klaus is more sober than he wants to think. Klaus isn’t confused because of the drugs. Five is using the drugs because he’s confused. It’s a disconnect, a betrayal of an implicit family promise.
Klaus worldview cannot support Five as a loving brother with the knowledge that Five is the heartless killer who killed Dave. The two facts are incompatible.
Five has known this since the beginning.
In fact, this fact has been one of the fixed variables in all of his equations. The other variable being the fact that Five would do anything -- anything at all -- for his brother.
He looks down and sighs. He lets his heart hammer. He lets his head pound. He loosens his fingers and swallows the blood. “That’s something that takes time,” he says. “Something you need to the family for. Something you need to be sober for.”
“But you are family!” Klaus says. He points a finger at Five and then shrugs helplessly. “You are family!”
“Not if you kill me, I’m not,” Five says. “That’s why you have to make a choice, Klaus. You have to choose between forgiving me or punishing me. And then you go home. It’s your home, always. Never mine. Just yours.”
Klaus stares at him as if he’s not sure he knows what is being said. It’s not that, though. Klaus knows. He’s just not sure he’s allowed himself to consider it. Clearly, it’s crossed his mind -- Five is beaten and splayed on the ceiling, after all -- but it’s something different to make the choice. Rage can make you do sudden, irrational things, but when you make a reasoned, logical choice to end a life, it’s another thing entirely.
Five’s gotten too good at it. He doesn’t think about it nearly as much as he should.
Klaus is grappling with it now.
“I wanted this to work out,” Klaus confesses, and now his voice is small.
Five lowers, slowly and carefully, to the ground. He lands gently on his feet and he dares to hope. He wonders if this is the grace he hasn’t earned. He wonders if this is the absolution he’s never believed in. He wonders if that third choice is back on the table. He wonders if they’ll go home together this time.
“I really, really wanted this to work out,” Klaus says again, and he sniffles loudly, catching on another sob.
“I know,” Five tells him, not trusting himself to move. His balance is precarious. His consciousness is tenuous.
Klaus’ face contorts. “Why did you kill him?”
Five sighs, knowing this is the perfect time to lie. But if he lies, then he’s taking the choice from Klaus, and Five refuses to take anything more from his brother. “It was an order,” he says. “I did what I had to do to get home.”
Klaus looks down and takes a few deep breaths. It sounds for a moment like he’s laughing.
Then, Klaus lifts his head, slowly, steadily.
He looks Five in the eyes, his expression hard.
“Yeah, well,” Klaus says, eyes lighting and electricity surging through him. He lifts his hands toward Five with a rush of power. “Me, too.”
Five flies back and hits the wall with a skull-rattling thump and thinks, at the very least, the choice is made.
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
NINE
He shouldn’t be annoyed -- Five knows that -- but he can’t quite help himself. His siblings have been nothing if not patient and understanding with the revelation that he killed Dave, and for that Five has reason to be grateful. But they seem to be under the mistaken impression that there’s something they can do to fix it. It is this persistence that starts to grate on Five’s nerves. First, that they assume time travel is something that can be done willy nilly, when Five’s control of it is sketchy at best and the physical toll is almost incalculable. Second, that they assume that fixing an incident some decades in the past could change Klaus’ feelings about things. Saving Dave now, even if it were possible, wouldn’t change the fact that Five still pulled the trigger.
In short, this is not a fixable situation. At least, not in any way that his siblings seem to be naively hopeful.
That’s it, then. The naive hopefulness is really, truly starting to annoy him.
It is only the fact that he’s the bad guy in this situation that keeps him from telling them that they’re all idiots.
They are, for the record. They are all unremitting idiots.
Which is why they’ve called another family meeting. The sixth one since he woke up -- probably more than that since Klaus left. All the meetings discuss the same thing.
Again and again.
Ad nauseum.
“You sure you don’t remember anything?” Luther asks, looking just as genuinely vexed as he has every other time he’s asked this question. “Not a single thing?”
Five doesn’t sigh. It’s too early in this meeting to sigh. He’s calculated it. He has to wait at least 10 minutes before he starts showing signs of actual frustration. That is the right way to show that he is respectful of his actions and grateful for their acceptance of him despite said actions.
Ideally, he would not sigh at all, but Five is not a saint.
Obviously.
He presses his lips into a thin, thin smile. “I know I was in Vietnam,” he says. “What little I know of Klaus’ timeline in that era would seem concurrent with my own. Based on those conclusions, I have to say that the timing seems logical.”
“But is it likely?” Allison asks. She chews her lip somewhat, like this isn’t the first time she’s thought about this line of thought. “It was a warzone.”
“I’ve also calculated the odds of coincidence of that nature,” Five says. “They’re not good.”
“That just takes us back to the Commission,” Diego says. “The bastards must have messed with the timeline.”
“Or exploited the timeline because they can,” Vanya says. “I mean, I still don’t know. I’m not willing to just take their word for it.”
This is probably one of the more frustrating parts of these meetings. His family spends them trying to exonerate him. Five, therefore, has to spend them creating an effective condemnation of himself. It’s a lot of work with minimal gains, as best he can tell. Yet it owes it to Klaus. Considering that he cannot pay off his debt to Klaus, he will endure.
“The Commission may have sent Klaus the message, but the details of the killing were from Dave himself,” Five reminds them. “We can question whether or not the Commission interfered to set up the situation, but I can’t justify questioning the victim. The facts are clear. The circumstances supported my involvement.”
“But Dave was an innocent man!” Luther says, his voice breaking a little. He usually reaches this point later in the conversation, but the sixth time is not the charm for any of them.
“And I was a killer,” Five says without hesitation. He says it without compunction, for he is too vain to pretend otherwise. “I didn’t ask questions. I just did the job. The questions of innocence, for all that it makes sense sitting here in 2019, didn’t apply to me then.”
This is always the answer that gets them, the one that makes the silent. Five has to wait for them, wait as they process this. They will never fully understand -- they never do -- but they have to make it parse enough to move on. They have to reconcile the notion that the brother who came back to save them did so with blood on his hands. They have to consider whether or not their own lives were worth the forfeiture of so many others.
It’s something they don’t know how to comprehend.
Five is not surprised when they fail again.
Luther screws up his face, shakes his head. “You really don’t remember?”
This time, Five does sigh. He is several minutes too early based on his calculations of ideal human interaction, but he can’t stop himself this time. He’s got good self control. He does not, however, have good interpersonal instincts.
In other words, he hates people.
His desire to tolerate his family only counteracts this innate sense so much.
“I don’t,” he says as plainly as he possibly can. He’s restless, sitting there on the couch. He’s still recovering from his injuries, two weeks after waking up. He’s sore and bruised and his ribs are aching and it hasn’t been easy. But it doesn’t have to be easy. Life has never been easy, and that’s never stopped Five before. “But do you remember every star you charted out there? Every mineral sample you took?”
Luther looks down.
Five turns to Diego. “And you? Do you remember every criminal you’ve stopped? Do you even remember half the victims you purportedly saved?”
Diego’s jaw clenches.
Five then looks at Allison and Vanya. “I can’t imagine you know every line you’ve ever memorized. Or how about every note you’ve ever played? Why would you? Why would any of you? It’s business. We do our business and we move on. I don’t remember who I killed in Vietnam. I can’t. I’m not seeing how my lack of memory somehow makes me a worse person. I know I’m a killer. What else matters?”
He gets to this point about ten minutes sooner than he usually does. It’s always striking that it still surprises them, each and every time. Or maybe surprise is the wrong word. It still convicts them. It silences them. It’s the point they come to the meeting to deflect, and it’s the point they end every meeting unable to divert.
“The problem isn’t whether or not I killed Dave Katz,” Five continues, and he allows himself another, small sigh. “The problem is how do we deal with Klaus. He was able to move on because he thought the past was in the past. This has brought it to the present for him. I’m the link between Dave and 2019. Klaus doesn’t know how to deal with that, and that’s my responsibility.”
Vanya knits her brows together. “So we fix it.”
Five shrugs. “But how?”
“Well, you’re a time traveler, right? You’ve traveled through time before,” Vanya says.
Five scoffs. “I’m a bad time traveler, if you’ll recall. It took me 40 years to figure out how to get home and I screwed that up pretty much in every way possible,” he says, not hiding his skepticism.
“But you did get us to the past and back home,” Allison says. “No complications.”
“Uh, I did nearly kill myself both times,” Five counters. “And I think you’re all failing to appreciate just how lucky we were. The odds were against us both times. I’ve gone over them since we’ve gotten back. I still have no idea how I didn’t get us all killed.”
This time, Diego scoffs back at him. “No way. I don’t buy that.”
Five is unmoved. “You should,” he says. “Time travel really is a crapshoot. It’s a total gamble that should only be undertaken in cases of extreme necessity.”
“And this isn’t necessary?” Luther asks. “I mean, we haven’t seen Klaus in a month--”
“Which is why we need a solution,” Five insists. “But not time travel. Even if I could, and I do think that’s very questionable, I’m not sure I should.”
This is different, at least. They don’t usually get this far. Usually Five is too exasperated and his siblings are too much at a loss. Usually they don’t get past the question to confront the possible answers.
However, this is a question that Five knows. More than that, it has an answer that he knows his siblings won’t like.
He has to help them understand it.
That’s the only way they will ever get themselves in a position where they can help Klaus. It drives him crazy that he’s still stuck here, subject to their concerns. He hates that they’ve prioritized him for some reason, that they are still able to see him as the victim.
Five needs to dispel these misguided notions of fixing it.
That’s the only way they can put their focus back on Klaus, which is where the focus belongs.
“But you’ve never had problems messing with the timeline before,” Diego says.
“Because the stakes were different,” he says. “I knew that the end of the world outweighed the risk of any significant timeline changes. I knew that any changes that I might make would be better than complete destruction of every living thing on this planet. That’s an appropriate cost benefit analysis. When you get into this? Saving Dave? There’s not telling what implications that could have. They could be catastrophic, and the impetus, though important to our family, is not significant enough to warrant the risk. Why do you think I haven’t gone back to save Ben?”
Ben’s a sore point for all of them. Ever since Klaus left, Ben has been AWOL. This could be a simple matter of distance. It could be Klaus’ choice; it could even ben Ben’s choice.
Five has done this math as well, however. He’s had a lot of time to think, being cooped up in this house and confined to bed. The odds are that Klaus’ powers have been diminished. Probably because of chemical interference.
In other words, for a month, Five has been recovering.
For a month, Klaus has been going on a nonstop bender.
And yet they still sit here, talking like they’ve got all the time in the world.
Did Five say he was annoyed?
Infuriated is more like it.
“But we have to get the family back together,” Vanya says, and she sounds desperate on this point. “The amount we risked to get here proves that. We came so far. Are we really going to let it go so easily?”
Five gathers a small breath, finding this point salient at least. “I agree.”
They all stare at him, waiting for him to continue. Finally, Luther broaches the growing impatience on their side. “So?”
“So, there are easier ways, less dangerous ways, than time travel,” Five says. He has to gawk for a moment, but this whole line of argument is ironic. That he’s the one arguing for an interpersonal solution when his siblings are preoccupied with mechanical fixes. “I mean, last I checked, most people didn’t solve family disagreements by altering the laws of physics.”
“Sure,” Diego says. “But most family disagreements don’t involve time traveling assassinations.”
Five tips his head to the side. “Touche.”
“But you really think we should go after Klaus?” Allison asks, sounding more than a little uncertain. “You think we should try to bring him back without fixing this whole thing with Dave?”
“Fix it to what end?” Five asks. “Follow your line of thought. If Dave hadn’t died, would Klaus have come back to the present? Would Dave being alive in the past be with Klaus living in the present provide any kind of solace? If Klaus chose to remain in the past, would we have stopped the end of the world? For all we know, the Commission wants us to go to the past and fix things, thereby undoing our efforts to save the world. They could still be trying to get us to correct the timeline for them.”
This is clearly something they haven’t thought about.
It figures.
His siblings have their strengths, but probability theory and temporal mechanics are not among them.
Allison studies her fingers, and Luther reddens. Diego looks like he’s trying to figure out if he knows what Five is saying, and Vanya’s eyes are red.
“We have to approach this in more traditional methods,” Five says. “We have to go after Klaus. That’s what people do in real relationship, isn’t it? They make amends? They find closure?”
Allison looks up first, sober. “It is,” she says. “But you can’t underestimate how hard it is. How it doesn’t always work. Sometimes you have to live with the consequences of your actions. Sometimes they don’t forgive you. You murdered the love of his life. I don’t think it’s going to go well.”
Five bobs his head; another easy concession. “I think it’s fair to say that I still have to try,” he says. “It is better than risking the complete annihilation of the timeline we worked so hard to create.”
This conversation has been frustrating, yes, but maybe the sixth time is the charm. Maybe they’ll finally move beyond the questions and actually start living out the actions.
Five feels his hopes rise for the first time in weeks as Luther lifts his gaze and nods solemnly at Five. “What do you need us to do?”
“We have to track him to start with,” he says. “And then I’m going to need freedom and space to approach him.”
“You want us to do nothing then?” Diego asks critically.
“I want you to wait and be ready,” Five says.
Vanya frowns. “Ready for what?”
“To pick up the pieces in case I fail,” Five says. “Because the key here isn’t necessarily reconciliation. We need Klaus to be safe, first and foremost. We all have to agree that, short of timeline alteration, we will do whatever it takes to bring him back home. Is that understood?”
Five looks at Luther. Luther looks at Diego. Diego glances at Allison, who looks finally at Vanya. Vanya nods back at him. Her voice is strangely confident, though Five doubts she knows the full implications of what they are promising. That’s just as well, he thinks.
“Understood.”
-o-
It’s not quite right to say that things get better. Although, for Five, better has always been relative. Things had gotten better in the apocalypse when he found food stashes and started talking to inanimate objects. Things had gotten better on the road with the Commission when he’d started plotting his return to the present. Very rarely was better a complete vindication from everything bad. Typically, better is nothing more than a marginal improvement in circumstances.
By that scant standard, Five feels confident in saying that things after the sixth family meeting are, in fact, better. For one thing, he’s starting to feel better. His recovery has gotten him nearly back to normal, and with his growing confidence, his siblings stop hovering over him like he might break. However, his physical condition is only the start of things. The real improvement comes from focus.
Five needs purpose. He thrives with it. His father had always thought that his desperate insistence on attempting time travel had been hubris. It had, in fact, been an extension of Five’s personality. His father had given him a purpose to use and hone his ability. Not experimenting with time travel had been an impediment to that, one that he had deemed unacceptable.
His natural inclination, therefore, had damned him, but it had also saved him. He had found purpose even in a wasteland, and he had found purpose even while working as a temporal assassin. Five has made it this far because he has purpose.
In the first weeks after his altercation with Klaus, he had been denied this purpose. He’d been too guilty, too coddled, too broken. Now that his body is mended and his siblings have had their confidence restored in a joint plan, his purpose is stronger now than it’s ever been. Sure, the stakes may not be the end of the world, but they still seem about as pressing as anything as Five has ever approached.
In some ways, he finds this curious. It’s not exactly news to him that he can easily be painted as the bad guy. He’s never had any delusions about it; he is a murderer. The notion of not having pride in his profession is something decidedly underwhelming from a moralistic perspective. He hasn’t spent much time thinking about the simple consequences of his actions.
Has he thought about the lives he cut short? Has he wondered about the families who were shattered by his actions? Has he sufficiently considered the grief he has caused?
The simple answer is no, of course. He’s never had to before, not until Klaus. He’s never talked to the victim’s family. He’s never confronted one of their loved ones.
There is a certain amount of desensitization that must occur in this type of life. There is no way to exist as an assassin, temporal or otherwise, if you are hung up on moralistic questions. That’s a practical explanation that does not necessarily excuse the inherent moral failing.
Of course, he could be splitting hairs. Does it make him a worse person in this light? Is his indiscriminate killing of people he does not know not sufficient to damn him? Why does it matter? Would his regret somehow make him a more forgivable figure?
In this sense, Five is not sure anything is better. He finds this line of thought vexing, to say the least. He talks about closure and making amends, but he wonders if such things can apply to him. Because is he, in the truest sense, sorry? Can you be sorry if you would do it again?
Five has no way to know for sure, and he finds his own understanding of morality to be too tenuous to answer the questions sufficiently. That is all the more reason, therefore, to remember his purpose.
To find Klaus.
To bring Klaus home.
At any, and possibly every, cost.
-o-
Klaus may be high and irresponsible, but he is surprisingly good at hiding.
They spend a full week with their preliminary searches. Five is reluctant to take point on this, given everything, but it becomes clear to him that he is the only one who can take point. It ends up working well enough for him, though. He prefers to do his research first. If that means assigning the legwork to his siblings for the time being, then that seems to be acceptable.
Luther uses their father’s old contacts to check security footage throughout the city. With Pogo’s help, it is possible to check with old property managers. Apparently, their father had quite the network set up -- he owned, to some degree, large swaths of the city. Though Luther exhausts these contacts, he comes up with no trace of Klaus.
Diego also has no luck. Diego has been the closest to Klaus over the last several years, though he would be reluctant to call them close. Instead, most of their interactions have consisted of Klaus asking for favors and Diego providing said favors with groans and sighs. Despite this, Diego does know places Klaus has frequented in the last few years. Yet, when he sweeps Klaus’ old haunts, he finds nothing.
Allison takes a more diplomatic approach. In getting to know her again as an adult, he has found her refreshingly pragmatic. She makes a systematic search via official avenues. She makes inquiries at police stations to see if he has been picked up for anything from drugs to petty theft to trespassing. Then, with more reluctance, she calls all the local clinics and hospitals. She is looking to see both if he is injured and if he is seeking a drug fix through other scrupulous means. When these routes yield nothing, she stops just short of filing a missing person’s report, because they all agree that the last thing they want is the cops to be involved in finding their relapsed drug addict brother.
Five wants to tell Vanya to sit this one out, but she is insistent on pulling her weight so to speak. When no one can provide her any leads, she makes her own. After living on her own for years in the city, she has a fair understanding of its ins and outs. She has enough working knowledge of areas with people of questionable intent that she knows who to ask about local addicts looking for a fix. This worries Five in terms of her safety, but he feels compelled to let her do this. Five is not sure he is any position to tell anyone what they can and can not do at this point.
As his siblings venture out, Five locks himself in. He clears his walls, finds a few legal pads in Dad’s study, and promptly gets to work. He’s been doing math for weeks now, ever since he woke up. But before, he’d worked on calculating the odds of reconciliation. Now, he creates probabilities of where to find his missing brother.
There are a lot of variables to take into account, which is where the research from his siblings comes in quite handy. Five is able to actively rule out various locations and contacts, thus creating a more precise to chart to base his work off of. It’s still very complicated math, and Five has to use various psychological theories related to grief and addiction to best sort through the options.
This, however, is the work that Five has always preferred. Assassinations are always to the point. They require precision but very little thought. He had hated the mindlessness, and he sometimes wonders if that’s not why he’s committed so little of it to memory. Why would he remember something that required so little effort? It’s not heartless of him to admit that; it’s practical.
You think through the jobs that matter. You put the time and thought in when the conclusions matter. Maybe that’s too definitive, acting like the deaths of innocent people is without consequence, but Five is not sure how this makes him any more or less of a villain.
What matters is not that this is work Five enjoys.
What matters is that Five recognizes its importance.
All the times he’s done it wrong, this time he’ll do it right.
Klaus may be surprisingly good at hiding.
Five, fortunately, is even better at math.
-o-
This is the seventh family meeting.
Five is not annoyed this time.
Not that anyone would guess from his general disposition. That’s not Five’s fault, though. He has one of those faces, the kind that looks angry all the time. It is, perhaps, one of Five’s favorite physical features.
It is also beneficial, he decides.
If his siblings thing he’s annoyed, they’ll assume it’s because they’ve made no progress. They will not assume that Five has concluded his equations, verified his answer and knows exactly what he wants to do next.
And he also does not plan to tell them.
“We just have to keep searching,” he says instead, shaking his head in apparent frustration. “Have we considered the idea that Klaus has actually left the city?”
“I don’t think he’s ever left,” Diego says. “Would he have the money? The contacts?”
“He’s never been this motivated,” Luther points out. “If wants a clean break--”
“I can call around to the neighboring cities,” Allison suggests.
“Maybe show his picture at the transit stations?” Allison suggests.
Five nods, like these are all the best ideas he’s ever heard. “That has to be our next step,” he says. “I’m worried that we’re running out of time.”
“We’ll find him, Five,” Luther promises. “We’ll bring him home.”
Five has not felt guilty up until this point, so there’s no reason to feel guilty now. The address is written down plainly in his bedroom. If things go wrong, his siblings will find it and figure it out. If Five fails, then they will be able to finish what he started.
This has, after all, been long enough coming.
This started in Vietnam, Five can’t remember the year or the place.
But he knows it ends in 2019, right here.
In his calculations, there are some variables that are not negotiable to make this happen. His own life and well being, however, are not among them.
-o-
Five has never been one to sneak out of necessity. You might think that’s something he did as an assassin, but it was his unassuming airs and not his stealth (or lack thereof) that allowed him to move seamlessly throughout time without being noticed. In fact, he thinks he rather lacks the patience for stealth. He much prefers to do things the way they need to be done with no frills or affectations.
No, Five does not sneak in order to conceal his actions.
He sneaks because he doesn’t wish to explain his actions.
He’s never been one to offer apologies. He doesn’t particularly care what other people think about him, especially now, especially his family. He acts as he sees fit, and he has no compunction with any aspect of it. When you live in the apocalypse, there’s no need to sneak about since everyone is dead. As an assassin, you learn rather quickly that people never notice a plainspoken person just going about their lives. They simply assume that he’s an average businessman.
They aren’t always wrong.
It’s just his business is killing people.
All of which is to say that Five is not sneaking because he’s worried about what his siblings will say. He’s not worried that they’ll stop him. No, Five sneaks because it’ll be an annoyed delay for the task at hand.
Five needs to find Klaus. This is a conclusion he has made conclusively, and his siblings will feel compelled to offer advice, assistance and all the other things that Five is not interested in. He prefers to tell them after the fact, in the face of failure or success.
It’s simpler that way.
And Five knows this will be hard enough as it is.
-o-
Getting out of the house is, presumably, the hard part. Or, you would think it is, what with five other siblings living (well, and not-living, in the case of Ben) in the same space. It is, however, a very large house. His siblings are also surprisingly unobservant for would-be superheroes. As established, Five is not particularly sneak, but this is still far easier than it should be.
After this, all he has to do is find the address he has written down on his piece of paper. He has been banned from taking one of the cars -- apparently it’s too likely that Five will be picked up by a cop if he continues driving without a license -- which does make this step moderately more difficult. They live in a large city, which means that public transit is an option. Allison has even made him purchase a transit pass for cases of emergency. Five is not actually opposed to this, but he finds it tedious. He doesn’t like how often public transit has to stop to cater to the whims of other people. Logically, he knows this is the function of the service, but he is too used to minding his own business to want to be stuck minding everyone else’s.
There is also the option of calling for a cab, which is probably the option Five considers most seriously. However, he is not feeling particularly social today. To be fair, he’s not feeling social most days, but he is more surly than more. Not surly. It’s just that he knows what he has to do, and he doesn’t want to do it. The idea of exchanging polite pleasantries with complete strangers is an expenditure of emotional energy that he does not feel he can afford on a day as important as today.
Emotional energy Five has in limited, limited supply.
Physical energy, on the other hand, he has never had more of. There are many things he hates about being 13. The fact that he is able to perform physical feats at a higher level with fewer side effects is not one of them. In fact, he hadn’t realized how much he’d been slowing down in his old age. He’d never thought of himself as old until he was suddenly very young again. Puberty isn’t fun, but the vivacity of youth has distinct benefits.
Five knows he can’t do anything about his current age except wait to grow out of it like everyone else. Therefore, he is a pragmatist. He might as well enjoy the perks, few as they may be.
That said, Five decides rather quickly that he will walk to the address. It’s closer than his siblings had thought, but that’s not to say it’s a walk through the park. It’s nearly a six mile trek, and Five knows it will take him several hours to complete it. If time were of the essence, this would be a problem. And that’s not to say that time isn’t important. Klaus has been missing far too long, and Five has felt the weight of every second. He wants to rectify that -- and he wants to rectify it now.
All the same, he knows that it will not be an easy confrontation. It would be foolish to call it anything other than a confrontation. He knows it will go poorly. He knows it will be messy and emotional and possibly violent. He suspects Klaus will yell and lash out, and he is fully prepared for a full physical assault again.
(This is another reason his siblings can’t be here. No one can interfere this time. No matter what, and yes, Five is aware of the implications of his decision.)
Therefore, a six mile walk doesn’t actually sound so bad.
Five tucks the address in his pocket -- he’s had it memorized ever since he came up with it -- and he starts down the street. He turns a few corners, makes it a few blocks, and soon the mansion is nowhere to be seen. Not that Five would know. He doesn’t look back.
-o-
The day is warm by the time Five arrives at the address. The fall has been cool overall, but with clear skies and the long walk, Five is feeling the heat. It’s irony, of course. Five’s life is filled with unfortunate ironies starting at the age of 13 when he walked out of the house to prove to his father he was wrong only to prove his father completely and undeniably right.
Irony is rarely kind to Five, but he can’t view this situation with any detachment. Is it ironic that the measures he used to save his family is the very thing threatening to destroy them? Yes, it is. But irony is a dry, witty assessment, and Five has nothing for that now. All he has is an address on a piece of paper and the days of probability charting zeroed in his head.
He looks the building up and down once for good measure. This is a habit of his, one he started in the apocalypse. He’d found it to be important to make a good sweep of the area before entering any unknown building. There were many unknown dangers back then, the risk of collapse, contamination and the like. He’d learned young to always have an exit plan.
His assessment of this building reminds him of the apocalypse, actually. It’s not necessarily old, though it’s not new, but it’s likely newer than the mansion. Even so, it’s in bad repair. More than that, it’s been actively abused. Windows are missing; the siding is hanging off in places. There is trash littered about, and it smells atrocious.
In the apocalypse, Five would have kept walking.
That’s not a luxury he has right now. He has to put down that thought along with any notion he might have had about an exit plan. He doesn’t have an out. Failure is an option, of course, and Five will have to face that failure baldly.
Making his way inside, he allows himself a moment of doubt. Maybe his calculations were wrong. Maybe the probabilities didn’t play out the way he thought. Maybe he’s got the address wrong. Maybe he can turn around and go home and not do this, not here, not now.
The doubt is necessarily fleeting.
He knows why he came.
Also, he sees two people snorting coke on the table, which is a pretty good indication that Five has got the right location. He passes through the living room without notice. There’s someone passed out on the half-broken dining room table. Someone is trying to pour themselves a glass of water in the kitchen. Five checks two main floor bedrooms and a bathroom before stepping over two people having sex on the stairs.
Upstairs, one bedroom is empty. There’s two people shooting up in the sunroom. Five opens the last bedroom door, and Klaus is sitting there on the bed. He’s looking right at Five like he’s waiting for him.
Five stands in the doorway and looks right back.
It’s dire, but it’s maybe not quite as dire as he’d feared. Given the condition of the house and its other occupants, Klaus is clearly back on the drugs. His gaze isn’t quite clear, but it’s also not muddied. Sitting there, he seems acceptably cognizant. Either he’s run out of drug to take or his heart’s not really in it. Five suspects he knows which one is the truth.
And he suspects he knows the reason why.
Klaus is just high enough not to be sober, but probably not high enough to forget.
Even if he had forgotten, Five’s very presence is going to bring that memory back.
Quickly.
“Shit,” Klaus says. “I don’t suppose you’re actually dead and I’m sober and we’re not really going to have the conversation I’m pretty sure you came here to have.”
He doesn’t sound as strung out as Five knows he is. It cannot be downplayed: Klaus is back on the drugs. It is true that he’s not as bad off as most of the people in his house, but it’s still not good. Klaus is not good.
He is, however, still Klaus.
It makes Five’s chest hurt. “I came to bring you home.”
“So that means you’re leaving?” Klaus asks, not missing a beat. His tone carries the hint of a joke, but it’s one with a punchline that no one will laugh at.
“I’m here to do whatever it takes,” Five says.
This time, Klaus does laugh. It’s a short, brittle sound. “Whatever it takes? What about going to the past and undoing what you did?”
Five sighs. That’s not an unexpected answer, and this is why he’s here. “That’s not within the realm of my capabilities.”
“The realm of your capabilities?” Klaus asks. He blinks as if in shock. “The realm of your capabilities. But you travel through time! That’s literally the height of your capabilities!”
Five stands his ground, feet planted on the floor. “We all know that our capabilities are limited by a myriad of external factors. Stress, tiredness, physical condition--”
“And indifference!” Klaus interjects, sharply now. His red eyes blink back tears. “You won’t do it because you don’t care!”
“I do care,” Five tells him. “It has never been my intention to hurt you?”
“But you did, didn’t you?” Klaus asks. He laughs shakily now, the tenor of his voice hinging on the edge of sanity. Something flickers in his expression, and Five feels it as it ripples through his own chest. “You did hurt me. You tore my heart out. You ruined me.”
Five has come to take whatever Klaus has, but that doesn’t stop his heart from skipping a beat. It’s an anatomical response; involuntarily. Five’s good, but he’s not that good. And Klaus’ new powers are intimidating. Combined with his lack of total self control right now, Five is aware of the precariousness of his own situation.
Yet, nothing has changed. Five rocks back on his feet and puts his hands in his pocket. “While I still believe in personal accountability, I accept my role in your current predicament. That’s why I’m here.”
“Predicament?” Klaus asks, and he gets to his feet. He wobbles but doesn’t fall, his gaze locked in on Five ominously. He seethes, and Five feels the force of it nearly knock him off his feet. “Which part of the predicament? The part where I’m crippled by grief? Or the part where I can’t trust my own family?”
Five tips his head in acknowledge. “As well as the relapse into drug addiction.”
It’s not intended to be a smart-ass thing to say.
It is, however, kind of a smart-ass thing to say.
Most of the time, his siblings would roll their eyes and jab back.
That’s not how this is going to go.
Klaus’ face contorts. When he steps forward, Five is knocked back. He has to catch himself against the door frame. “Shut up!” he says, and Five can’t do anything but watch as he’s lifted off the ground. “I wish you had never come back!”
Five looks at the ground and refusing to let himself panic even as his heart thrums with anxiety. Klaus is more sober than Five has initially thought to have any control over his powers. Either that or he hates Five so much that the force of the power is nothing but instinctual. “I’m done changing the past,” he says, and he’s going for reasonable even as his own voice starts to thin out. “I want us to move forward.”
“How can I?” Klaus says, voice rising as Five lifts, almost touching the ceiling. “How can I move ahead when the best part of me is in the past!”
“Klaus, nothing will bring him back,” Five tells him, even as the energy starts to pulsate in the room, sending tremors down his spine.
“You can’t even apologize, you little asshole?” Klaus asks, and the air prickles like sharp knives on top of Five’s skin now. “You can’t even muster up those words?”
Five forces himself to breath as he remains as still as possible under Klaus’ power. He could blink, probably. But that’s not why he came.
He tells himself that again.
That’s not why he came.
“I can apologize, but what’s the point?” he asks. “It’s meaningless. You and I both know that I killed Dave and I did so willingly. Saying I’m sorry doesn’t change that or even start to make it better.”
It’s the truth, and Five does not intend it to be antagonizing. He’s not an idiot, though. He knows the effect is will have.
He’s not surprised, then, when Klaus bares down. He grunts, thrusting Five up until he’s smashed against the ceiling. The force of it is oppressive, and he feels the strain in his barely healed ribs. “If you didn’t come to apologize, then why are you here?”
“Because you need to come home,” Five says, gritting the words out with as much muster as he can. “You can’t be here, doing this to yourself.”
“Doing what?” Klaus asks, mockingly now. “This?”
With a tip of his head, Klaus sends Five flying. He scrapes against the ceiling painfully and smashes into one of the walls. His head rings from the impact, but he doesn’t fall. Instead, he’s sent tumbling into the far corner, where he hits the ground with enough force that he rebounds hard and puts a dent in the drywall.
Five can already feel the onset of a concussion, and he has to blink a few times before his vision even starts to clear. He staggers for breath, and he barely has time to disentangle himself from the broken wall before Klaus picks him up again. This time, he hovers off the ground, and Klaus drags him closer. “What about this?”
Without further warning, Klaus slams him back. He hits the ground on his back, his head slamming hard against the floor. His vision dims out for a second, and his breath is torn from his lungs as he is lifted into the ceiling. He tumbles, head over heels, and he is thrown into one window before being dragged back in through the broken shards. He shatters the next window before he’s pinned up to the ceiling, arms flayed out and legs immobilized by force.
Underneath him, Klaus looks up. He’s breathing heavily with exertion, a sweat breaking out over his forehead. He is visibly trembling, fresh tears streaking down his face.
“I came to give you a choice,” Five says, barely finding enough of his voice to speak. It’s hard to breathe like this, but he forces the words out without air. “A choice to make peace.”
“Peace?” Klaus asks, voice pitching hysterically. He wrinkles his nose and Five inches further into the plaster ceiling, feeling it crack around his body. “What kind of peace can I have with you around?”
Five struggles to keep himself conscious now, the pressing building in the back of his head. He clings to consciousness stubbornly, and keeps his gaze fixed on Klaus. “Therein lies your choice,” he half croaks. “You can choose for me to leave -- walk away. You can go home, and I would never go back, if that’s your wish.”
Klaus clearly isn’t expecting that. He hesitates, just slightly. “And what’s the other option? You said this is a choice, right? So what’s my other choice?
Five wants to tell him that one choice is that they say all is well and go home together. Because that is a choice, it’s the choice that Five himself craves.
It’s also not a choice Klaus wants right now.
It may never be one that he wants again.
Five knows that he took that choice from Klaus when he killed Dave. Intentionality, rationality -- none of it matters. This is an emotional issue. Everyone has a breaking point, and Five has found Klaus in the worst possible way. His brother is good, at his core. His brother is kind, where it matters. And he’s learned to cope with death in a way that no one should ever have to learn.
Dave’s death has always barely fit into that tenuous grip Klaus forges with reality. When it was firmly in the past, Klaus had been able to disassociate himself from it acceptably enough. But Five links him to it. He’s a constant reminder. Five is the manifestation of that loss and the source of the pain.
In his right mind, Klaus would never hurt Five.
But thanks to Five, Klaus has no right mind left. He has effectively taken that choice from his brother. The fact that he didn’t know doesn’t change anything. The choice is gone.
So Five has to give him another choice.
“Your other choice is to kill me,” he says. His mouth almost twitches into an approximation of a smile. He’s fought for survival for so long that it’s a weird, weird thing to make this offer. To lay down his life so willingly, so easily. For reasons that the universe would deem unworthy.
This is called doing the right thing.
Occasionally, Five can pull it off. He likes to think that he’s best when it counts the most, and he knows it counts now. For Klaus’ sake, it counts now.
“It’s justice, after all,” Five continues, the pressure building in his chest as his body trembles against the cracking drywall. “An eye for an eye. A life for a life. I know I’m a killer, Klaus. You’d probably be doing society a favor.”
On the ground, Five’s vision is just clear enough to see Klaus’ expression almost break. As angry as he is, as hurt as he is, this still runs counter to his nature. He wants to forgive Five, but he can’t reconcile any of it. “You really think it’s that easy?” he asks, his voice wavering. His power flickers with a breath, and Five feels the tension ease against his body. “You think I can just make that choice?”
He has to swallow to force the words out of his throat. “I don’t imagine any of this is easy,” he croaks. “Not for me and definitely not for you. But what you’re doing now, that’s not a choice, Klaus. You have to choose.”
“Why? When have I ever had to choose?” Klaus asks, and he’s openly crying now. He’s visibly shaking, from the exertion or emotion, Five isn’t sure. “I never chose my powers! I didn’t choose to fall in love! I didn’t choose for you to kill him!”
Five’s breathing catches. His own eyes are burning now. “All of that is true, Klaus,” he says, trying to sound sure and steady when there are black spots dancing in front of his eyes. “Life sucks, but you know that you can’t run from it. You have to face it, and I fully accept whatever means you need to do that.”
“But it’s not about me!” Klaus says, and it sounds like he’s pleading now. He turns away for a moment, face screwed up. Five falters, but Klaus turns back quickly, looking up at him with a mixture of rage and grief. “This is about Dave! Dave who made me want to try! Dave who made all the ghosts worthwhile! Dave who isn’t here because of you!”
Klaus’ voice pitches to a yell, and Five is thrust up against the ceiling again. He grimaces and blinks to clear his vision. He can taste blood in his mouth. “I know.”
“I thought the family could be enough after that, I really did,” Klaus says. “I wanted to think that we could live for each other. Band together. Use our powers.”
“We still can--”
“But you killed him!” Klaus almost screams now, and Five digs deeper as plaster rains down to the ground. “You killed him! I trusted you, and you killed him! That doesn’t even make sense to me! How am I supposed to make sense of any of it?”
Five wants to think that the drugs are speaking now, that Klaus’ addiction has muddled his thoughts, but Klaus is more sober than he wants to think. Klaus isn’t confused because of the drugs. Five is using the drugs because he’s confused. It’s a disconnect, a betrayal of an implicit family promise.
Klaus worldview cannot support Five as a loving brother with the knowledge that Five is the heartless killer who killed Dave. The two facts are incompatible.
Five has known this since the beginning.
In fact, this fact has been one of the fixed variables in all of his equations. The other variable being the fact that Five would do anything -- anything at all -- for his brother.
He looks down and sighs. He lets his heart hammer. He lets his head pound. He loosens his fingers and swallows the blood. “That’s something that takes time,” he says. “Something you need to the family for. Something you need to be sober for.”
“But you are family!” Klaus says. He points a finger at Five and then shrugs helplessly. “You are family!”
“Not if you kill me, I’m not,” Five says. “That’s why you have to make a choice, Klaus. You have to choose between forgiving me or punishing me. And then you go home. It’s your home, always. Never mine. Just yours.”
Klaus stares at him as if he’s not sure he knows what is being said. It’s not that, though. Klaus knows. He’s just not sure he’s allowed himself to consider it. Clearly, it’s crossed his mind -- Five is beaten and splayed on the ceiling, after all -- but it’s something different to make the choice. Rage can make you do sudden, irrational things, but when you make a reasoned, logical choice to end a life, it’s another thing entirely.
Five’s gotten too good at it. He doesn’t think about it nearly as much as he should.
Klaus is grappling with it now.
“I wanted this to work out,” Klaus confesses, and now his voice is small.
Five lowers, slowly and carefully, to the ground. He lands gently on his feet and he dares to hope. He wonders if this is the grace he hasn’t earned. He wonders if this is the absolution he’s never believed in. He wonders if that third choice is back on the table. He wonders if they’ll go home together this time.
“I really, really wanted this to work out,” Klaus says again, and he sniffles loudly, catching on another sob.
“I know,” Five tells him, not trusting himself to move. His balance is precarious. His consciousness is tenuous.
Klaus’ face contorts. “Why did you kill him?”
Five sighs, knowing this is the perfect time to lie. But if he lies, then he’s taking the choice from Klaus, and Five refuses to take anything more from his brother. “It was an order,” he says. “I did what I had to do to get home.”
Klaus looks down and takes a few deep breaths. It sounds for a moment like he’s laughing.
Then, Klaus lifts his head, slowly, steadily.
He looks Five in the eyes, his expression hard.
“Yeah, well,” Klaus says, eyes lighting and electricity surging through him. He lifts his hands toward Five with a rush of power. “Me, too.”
Five flies back and hits the wall with a skull-rattling thump and thinks, at the very least, the choice is made.