Umbrella Academy fic: Changing All the Scenery (11/20)
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
ELEVEN
When Five comes to, he’s dizzy and nauseated. His limbs feel like they might not work, and he is keenly aware that he’s bleeding. He blinks as he tries to focus his eyes on the damaged ceiling. The room is quiet; Klaus’ powers must be spent.
Tentatively, Five manages to lift himself up into some semblance of a sitting position. It makes him feel substantially worse, but he deems that a necessary sacrifice for the time being. He actively swallows to keep the bile in his stomach, and he has to squint his eyes to look across the damaged room where Klaus has fallen back on the bed.
It appears, then, that Klaus’ powers are spent. Five’s vision is still questionable, so it’s hard to know for sure that his brother is breathing, but he feels like the odds are in his favor. He did run those calculations, after all. He would know.
He just can’t remember them right now. Probably because he has a concussion.
Wincing, he struggles to get to his feet. He gasps, and the breath grates against his ribs. He coughs and thinks he probably has broken ribs again as well. He can’t be sure about internal bleeding, but that’s something he can figure out later.
First things first.
Klaus.
It takes him several more minutes before he feels steady enough to move. Even then, he has to hobble his way over, using the wall to brace himself. By the time he makes it to the bed, his vision has marginally improved, though his pain levels have also increased exponentially. He wishes that he’d thought to pack some medicine, but he’d neglected all provisions for himself. Survival in a functional world should not be a problem.
Survival while badly injured, however, will complicate things to some degree. Especially since he has to keep a low profile. He does look like he’s 13, after all. People are likely to call the cops if they spot a damaged teenager, and Five hasn’t got the energy to deal with any of that right now.
Right now, he barely has the energy to stay upright, and he has other priorities.
Klaus, he reminds himself, struggling to keep his train of thought singular and coherent. He came for Klaus. Now, he has to leave for Klaus.
But not without a few steps of verification first.
To start, making sure Klaus is alive.
In his plan, this step had been minor. A simple visual check would be sufficient, but Five’s vision is just muddied enough that he can’t trust his own perception. Shakily, he reaches down instead, placing an unsteady hand on Klaus’ chest.
He exhales heavily in relief. Klau’s heart is beating, strong and steady. Five knows that he inflicted no harm on Klaus, but he can’t be sure what remnants of drugs are in his brother’s system. There’s also minimal evidence to suggest what happens to Klaus when he reaches a breaking point. Five knows that the strain on his body when he overextends himself is palpable. It’s entirely possible that Klaus is suffering a similar effect.
Whatever the case may be, Klaus does not appear to be in any distress. Lying on the bed, he looks almost peaceful. Five finds this comforting. He’s been looking for his brother for the better part of a month now. He’s envisioned finding Klaus too late, coming in time to find nothing but his overdosed body.
But here’s Klaus before him. Stable, calm and seemingly sober. The timing is interesting, to say the least. There’s no way his brother has stayed in this house and remained sober for any extended period of time, but time is funny like that. Five’s not particularly sure he believes in coincidence, but if this is a stroke of luck in his favor, then he will take it at face value for the time being.
He’s too weak to do much about it anyway.
That brings him to the second part of his plan. He has found Klaus and given him the choice. He provided the necessary motivation to make him choose home. Now, Five must give him the means to do so.
After all, Klaus is an addict, recovering or not. Some might think that leaving himself vulnerable to Klaus powers was the biggest risk in this plan of his, but Five would disagree. The biggest risk is leaving the choice entirely up to Klaus. He’s orchestrated this so Klaus can go home alone. However, if Klaus is alone -- in a crack house, of all places -- then there is a strong risk of relapse. Five hates to think of all of this being for naught.
Therefore, he takes several precautionary measures.
To start, he stumbles around, looking for anything that resembles shoes. Klaus is clad in his stocking feet, and the socks look like they have seen better days. The walk back home is long enough, and Klaus will need proper footwear if he’s going to make it. The last thing Five wants is for Klaus to have an excuse to stop.
He finds shoes, though it’s not clear to Five that they belong to Klaus. All the same, Five haphazardly levers them onto Klaus’ feet and they seem to fit well enough. He has to stop short of tying the shoelaces; his head is throbbing to bad to maintain that level of dexterity for any length of time at all.
Stepping back, Five assesses his brother again. Klaus is now fully dressed. True, his clothes look worse for wear -- and they don’t smell great -- but they’ll do. Once Klaus arrives home, Grace will happily do his laundry and there will be fresh clothing, folded, pressed and waiting in his bureau.
His fingers are trembling slightly as he reaches into his pocket. He’s not nervous, but he is still on the verge of passing out. He also may be in shock; it’s hard to say. Still, he remembers the other part of his plan.
Klaus is prone to distraction. If he’s going to be newly sober, he’ll need energy. Those shoes won’t get Klaus far at all if Klaus doesn’t have any fuel, so to speak. And Klaus never has money, much less a month after a bender. He extracts a neat stack of bills, which have been folded with precision and tucked into his wallet. He reaches does, fumbling with the pocket on the front of Klaus’ pants, managing to get the bills securely inside before letting his arm drop in exhaustion.
With cash in hand, Klaus could buy drugs, this is true. But he will also have the ability to buy himself a hot meal. The risk of drugs is a necessary one if Five is going to empower Klaus to make the right decisions to get himself home. He is aware, if only vaguely now, that his plan is predicated on a string of what-ifs. He’s making a number of assumptions, and he’s placing a great deal of trust in Klaus’ own commitment to the choices that he’s made.
It has to be a choice, though. If it’s going to stick, it has to be Klaus’ volition. You could drag Klaus home, kicking and screaming, and he’d be gone in a day. You could lock him up, tie him down, and they’d be no closer to getting their Klaus back. No, Klaus has to want this. Klaus has to acknowledge his choice.
It is the only way.
Still, there are ways to tip the scales. He reaches down, pulling out the dog tags and arranging them on top of Klaus’ shirt. A reminder of what matters. A way to anchor him. A path home.
With that, Five steps back from the bed. He glances at the drugs on the chair next to the bed, and makes the choice to leave them. His eyes land on Klaus again. The choice to go home will be Klaus’.
He trusts his brother.
He also trusts his own math.
This is, after all, everything he has come to do.
-o-
Leaving, as it turns out, is somewhat harder than coming. True, Five had faced various trepidations, but his arrival had been wholly unimpeded. Upon his exit, there’s still no one nearly coherent enough in the home to stop him, but given that he is concussed and bleeding, it is a precarious sort of exit. He staggers down the stairs, and he has to rest several times throughout the rest of the home. He is just barely conscious when he finally manages to open the front door and stumble onto the stoop.
The sun is gone now, and the clouds are gathering. Five doesn’t much believe in coincidence, but he also is not so facetious as to think the weather is symbolic. Still, rain will be unfortunate for the next part of his trek.
This is, of course, why leaving is so hard.
Not because he’s hurt. Not because he’s worried about Klaus. Not even because of rain.
Because Five doesn’t know where he’s going.
All the calculations, all the plans -- were about Klaus’ next step. He had left his own completely unexplored. It had seemed inconsequential at the time. Indeed, even now, as he stands on the stoop, he knows it doesn’t much matter where he goes.
The only thing of importance is where he doesn’t go.
All it takes is one foot in front of the other.
Five braces himself, maneuvers his way down the steps, and sticks to the plan.
-o-
It’s slow progress, but that’s a meaningless distinction. It’s not like Five has anywhere to be, so it’s not like he has anywhere to be fast. He can go far or he can go two blocks; it’s all the same. He just can’t go home.
He does want to make some distance, however. It’s unlikely that Klaus will stumble across him, but it’s not unlikely that his siblings will figure out that something is up. He hopes he has several hours -- until Klaus comes home or until his siblings find his note -- because Klaus may have homicidal feelings toward him, but his other siblings do not.
This is a point that Five still finds oddly confusing. It’s nice, he won’t lie about that. But the notion that he can be the worst person in the world and his siblings still want him in their lives is significant. He’s not always sure what to do with that, but then, there’s a reason he had been willing to commit murder for them in the first place.
It’s unconditional love, he has decided, though expressed in an unconventional manner.
The Hargreeves have always been unconventional. It’s what nearly destroyed them, but it’s also what saved them. Five has learned over the years that you can’t take the good without the bad. You can’t. The Commission is flawed in their approach to things like this, thinking you can control all the details. There are necessary sacrifices. Yes, sometimes those sacrifices are manifested in human blood. Sometimes it’s just the emotional choice to put someone else first.
Five has practiced the former quite frequently.
This is, perhaps, the first time he’s put the second into practice.
He limps for several blocks, keeping off main streets and sticking to alleyways when possible. His siblings won’t be out yet, but the risk of someone calling the cops about some battered kid is still very real to him. He’s willing to leave his family for Klaus’ sake, but ending up in the foster care system is not something he’s quite willing to endure. If he’s going to do this, he’s going to do it alone.
That didn’t seem so hard when he came up with this plan. He’d been on his own in the apocalypse.
The practical application of said plan is harder than he expects.
Not just because of the physical injuries.
He finds himself worrying. He worries about Klaus, waking up alone. What if he doesn’t remember their conversation? What if he changes his mind? What if he can’t resist the drugs?
And he worries about his family. What if they don’t welcome Klaus back? What if they decide to come after Five even over Klaus’ needs and objections? What if Five has put too much faith into his siblings to do what is best? What if it all falls apart and he’s not there to keep things in check?
But then, who is he to assume he can salvage things? It’s his own actions that have led to this. It’s his own doing that has torn them apart. His family has not fallen apart by random chance. Five has literally dismantled it with his own hands. The fact that he didn’t know doesn’t change the fact that he did.
Some might call this penance, then, but Five doesn’t think like that. He’s not prone to emotional justifications. He doesn’t need divine intervention to make sense of things. The only absolution he needs is Klaus’ recovery and restoration. Thats not a balancing of some cosmic weight. That is simply doing the right thing.
He’s back to unconditional love.
He squints, trying to clear his head. He’s thinking in circles; his concussion must be worse than he thought.
Breathing heavily, he makes a few more turns. He ends up in another alleyway, and he takes time to duck behind a dumpster. It smells pretty bad, but his head is swimming, so it’s not easy to tell if the nausea he’s experiencing is the rancid trash or his probable concussion. He closes his eyes, leaning against the wall, breathing in through his nose as he collects himself.
This is all part of the plan.
This is the choice he’s made.
His siblings will do the right thing.
Klaus made his choice.
It’s going to be okay.
They’re going to be okay.
Whatever happens to Five is incidental.
With one more steadying breath, Five opens his eyes and sighs. He’s tired and hurting, but there’s no point dragging his feet. He’s ready to move.
Pushing off from the wall, he makes it all of two feet. He hears a familiar swoosh and a clink, and blinks twice, looking around for the pneumatic tube that must be nearby. When he turns, he doesn’t see an opening for the pneumatic tube. Instead, he sees a fist coming directly at his face.
Well, shit, he thinks.
Then, he sees nothing at all.
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
ELEVEN
When Five comes to, he’s dizzy and nauseated. His limbs feel like they might not work, and he is keenly aware that he’s bleeding. He blinks as he tries to focus his eyes on the damaged ceiling. The room is quiet; Klaus’ powers must be spent.
Tentatively, Five manages to lift himself up into some semblance of a sitting position. It makes him feel substantially worse, but he deems that a necessary sacrifice for the time being. He actively swallows to keep the bile in his stomach, and he has to squint his eyes to look across the damaged room where Klaus has fallen back on the bed.
It appears, then, that Klaus’ powers are spent. Five’s vision is still questionable, so it’s hard to know for sure that his brother is breathing, but he feels like the odds are in his favor. He did run those calculations, after all. He would know.
He just can’t remember them right now. Probably because he has a concussion.
Wincing, he struggles to get to his feet. He gasps, and the breath grates against his ribs. He coughs and thinks he probably has broken ribs again as well. He can’t be sure about internal bleeding, but that’s something he can figure out later.
First things first.
Klaus.
It takes him several more minutes before he feels steady enough to move. Even then, he has to hobble his way over, using the wall to brace himself. By the time he makes it to the bed, his vision has marginally improved, though his pain levels have also increased exponentially. He wishes that he’d thought to pack some medicine, but he’d neglected all provisions for himself. Survival in a functional world should not be a problem.
Survival while badly injured, however, will complicate things to some degree. Especially since he has to keep a low profile. He does look like he’s 13, after all. People are likely to call the cops if they spot a damaged teenager, and Five hasn’t got the energy to deal with any of that right now.
Right now, he barely has the energy to stay upright, and he has other priorities.
Klaus, he reminds himself, struggling to keep his train of thought singular and coherent. He came for Klaus. Now, he has to leave for Klaus.
But not without a few steps of verification first.
To start, making sure Klaus is alive.
In his plan, this step had been minor. A simple visual check would be sufficient, but Five’s vision is just muddied enough that he can’t trust his own perception. Shakily, he reaches down instead, placing an unsteady hand on Klaus’ chest.
He exhales heavily in relief. Klau’s heart is beating, strong and steady. Five knows that he inflicted no harm on Klaus, but he can’t be sure what remnants of drugs are in his brother’s system. There’s also minimal evidence to suggest what happens to Klaus when he reaches a breaking point. Five knows that the strain on his body when he overextends himself is palpable. It’s entirely possible that Klaus is suffering a similar effect.
Whatever the case may be, Klaus does not appear to be in any distress. Lying on the bed, he looks almost peaceful. Five finds this comforting. He’s been looking for his brother for the better part of a month now. He’s envisioned finding Klaus too late, coming in time to find nothing but his overdosed body.
But here’s Klaus before him. Stable, calm and seemingly sober. The timing is interesting, to say the least. There’s no way his brother has stayed in this house and remained sober for any extended period of time, but time is funny like that. Five’s not particularly sure he believes in coincidence, but if this is a stroke of luck in his favor, then he will take it at face value for the time being.
He’s too weak to do much about it anyway.
That brings him to the second part of his plan. He has found Klaus and given him the choice. He provided the necessary motivation to make him choose home. Now, Five must give him the means to do so.
After all, Klaus is an addict, recovering or not. Some might think that leaving himself vulnerable to Klaus powers was the biggest risk in this plan of his, but Five would disagree. The biggest risk is leaving the choice entirely up to Klaus. He’s orchestrated this so Klaus can go home alone. However, if Klaus is alone -- in a crack house, of all places -- then there is a strong risk of relapse. Five hates to think of all of this being for naught.
Therefore, he takes several precautionary measures.
To start, he stumbles around, looking for anything that resembles shoes. Klaus is clad in his stocking feet, and the socks look like they have seen better days. The walk back home is long enough, and Klaus will need proper footwear if he’s going to make it. The last thing Five wants is for Klaus to have an excuse to stop.
He finds shoes, though it’s not clear to Five that they belong to Klaus. All the same, Five haphazardly levers them onto Klaus’ feet and they seem to fit well enough. He has to stop short of tying the shoelaces; his head is throbbing to bad to maintain that level of dexterity for any length of time at all.
Stepping back, Five assesses his brother again. Klaus is now fully dressed. True, his clothes look worse for wear -- and they don’t smell great -- but they’ll do. Once Klaus arrives home, Grace will happily do his laundry and there will be fresh clothing, folded, pressed and waiting in his bureau.
His fingers are trembling slightly as he reaches into his pocket. He’s not nervous, but he is still on the verge of passing out. He also may be in shock; it’s hard to say. Still, he remembers the other part of his plan.
Klaus is prone to distraction. If he’s going to be newly sober, he’ll need energy. Those shoes won’t get Klaus far at all if Klaus doesn’t have any fuel, so to speak. And Klaus never has money, much less a month after a bender. He extracts a neat stack of bills, which have been folded with precision and tucked into his wallet. He reaches does, fumbling with the pocket on the front of Klaus’ pants, managing to get the bills securely inside before letting his arm drop in exhaustion.
With cash in hand, Klaus could buy drugs, this is true. But he will also have the ability to buy himself a hot meal. The risk of drugs is a necessary one if Five is going to empower Klaus to make the right decisions to get himself home. He is aware, if only vaguely now, that his plan is predicated on a string of what-ifs. He’s making a number of assumptions, and he’s placing a great deal of trust in Klaus’ own commitment to the choices that he’s made.
It has to be a choice, though. If it’s going to stick, it has to be Klaus’ volition. You could drag Klaus home, kicking and screaming, and he’d be gone in a day. You could lock him up, tie him down, and they’d be no closer to getting their Klaus back. No, Klaus has to want this. Klaus has to acknowledge his choice.
It is the only way.
Still, there are ways to tip the scales. He reaches down, pulling out the dog tags and arranging them on top of Klaus’ shirt. A reminder of what matters. A way to anchor him. A path home.
With that, Five steps back from the bed. He glances at the drugs on the chair next to the bed, and makes the choice to leave them. His eyes land on Klaus again. The choice to go home will be Klaus’.
He trusts his brother.
He also trusts his own math.
This is, after all, everything he has come to do.
-o-
Leaving, as it turns out, is somewhat harder than coming. True, Five had faced various trepidations, but his arrival had been wholly unimpeded. Upon his exit, there’s still no one nearly coherent enough in the home to stop him, but given that he is concussed and bleeding, it is a precarious sort of exit. He staggers down the stairs, and he has to rest several times throughout the rest of the home. He is just barely conscious when he finally manages to open the front door and stumble onto the stoop.
The sun is gone now, and the clouds are gathering. Five doesn’t much believe in coincidence, but he also is not so facetious as to think the weather is symbolic. Still, rain will be unfortunate for the next part of his trek.
This is, of course, why leaving is so hard.
Not because he’s hurt. Not because he’s worried about Klaus. Not even because of rain.
Because Five doesn’t know where he’s going.
All the calculations, all the plans -- were about Klaus’ next step. He had left his own completely unexplored. It had seemed inconsequential at the time. Indeed, even now, as he stands on the stoop, he knows it doesn’t much matter where he goes.
The only thing of importance is where he doesn’t go.
All it takes is one foot in front of the other.
Five braces himself, maneuvers his way down the steps, and sticks to the plan.
-o-
It’s slow progress, but that’s a meaningless distinction. It’s not like Five has anywhere to be, so it’s not like he has anywhere to be fast. He can go far or he can go two blocks; it’s all the same. He just can’t go home.
He does want to make some distance, however. It’s unlikely that Klaus will stumble across him, but it’s not unlikely that his siblings will figure out that something is up. He hopes he has several hours -- until Klaus comes home or until his siblings find his note -- because Klaus may have homicidal feelings toward him, but his other siblings do not.
This is a point that Five still finds oddly confusing. It’s nice, he won’t lie about that. But the notion that he can be the worst person in the world and his siblings still want him in their lives is significant. He’s not always sure what to do with that, but then, there’s a reason he had been willing to commit murder for them in the first place.
It’s unconditional love, he has decided, though expressed in an unconventional manner.
The Hargreeves have always been unconventional. It’s what nearly destroyed them, but it’s also what saved them. Five has learned over the years that you can’t take the good without the bad. You can’t. The Commission is flawed in their approach to things like this, thinking you can control all the details. There are necessary sacrifices. Yes, sometimes those sacrifices are manifested in human blood. Sometimes it’s just the emotional choice to put someone else first.
Five has practiced the former quite frequently.
This is, perhaps, the first time he’s put the second into practice.
He limps for several blocks, keeping off main streets and sticking to alleyways when possible. His siblings won’t be out yet, but the risk of someone calling the cops about some battered kid is still very real to him. He’s willing to leave his family for Klaus’ sake, but ending up in the foster care system is not something he’s quite willing to endure. If he’s going to do this, he’s going to do it alone.
That didn’t seem so hard when he came up with this plan. He’d been on his own in the apocalypse.
The practical application of said plan is harder than he expects.
Not just because of the physical injuries.
He finds himself worrying. He worries about Klaus, waking up alone. What if he doesn’t remember their conversation? What if he changes his mind? What if he can’t resist the drugs?
And he worries about his family. What if they don’t welcome Klaus back? What if they decide to come after Five even over Klaus’ needs and objections? What if Five has put too much faith into his siblings to do what is best? What if it all falls apart and he’s not there to keep things in check?
But then, who is he to assume he can salvage things? It’s his own actions that have led to this. It’s his own doing that has torn them apart. His family has not fallen apart by random chance. Five has literally dismantled it with his own hands. The fact that he didn’t know doesn’t change the fact that he did.
Some might call this penance, then, but Five doesn’t think like that. He’s not prone to emotional justifications. He doesn’t need divine intervention to make sense of things. The only absolution he needs is Klaus’ recovery and restoration. Thats not a balancing of some cosmic weight. That is simply doing the right thing.
He’s back to unconditional love.
He squints, trying to clear his head. He’s thinking in circles; his concussion must be worse than he thought.
Breathing heavily, he makes a few more turns. He ends up in another alleyway, and he takes time to duck behind a dumpster. It smells pretty bad, but his head is swimming, so it’s not easy to tell if the nausea he’s experiencing is the rancid trash or his probable concussion. He closes his eyes, leaning against the wall, breathing in through his nose as he collects himself.
This is all part of the plan.
This is the choice he’s made.
His siblings will do the right thing.
Klaus made his choice.
It’s going to be okay.
They’re going to be okay.
Whatever happens to Five is incidental.
With one more steadying breath, Five opens his eyes and sighs. He’s tired and hurting, but there’s no point dragging his feet. He’s ready to move.
Pushing off from the wall, he makes it all of two feet. He hears a familiar swoosh and a clink, and blinks twice, looking around for the pneumatic tube that must be nearby. When he turns, he doesn’t see an opening for the pneumatic tube. Instead, he sees a fist coming directly at his face.
Well, shit, he thinks.
Then, he sees nothing at all.