Umbrella Academy fic: Changing All the Scenery (17/20)
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
PART SIXTEEN CONTINUED
-o-
Inside the tube room, Klaus is struck with the realization that he doesn’t actually know how to use the tube room. In all honesty, he’s taken the concept of pneumatic tubes kind of for granted because his life has always been kind of strange. So, sure, of course it’s possible to send messages through time. Klaus can talk to the dead and he has a brother who can time travel, so there’s weirder shit out there.
But, now that he’s here, he’s struck by the practicalities of it all.
As in, if he’s going to send a message to save the world, then he has to know how to do it.
He’s contemplating this when he sees a little old lady shuffle out of her office. Her eyes goggle behind her glasses and her mouth drops open. “But what on earth--”
Klaus doesn’t have time for her drama. He quickly -- and a tad more gently -- flicks her to the side and she goes down and doesn’t get up. Is it bad that he doesn’t feel that bad about incapacitating a little old lady? Possibly. He thinks this is probably the Commission’s own fault for turning him into this kind of person.
No, he’s still not thinking about how this sentiment applies to anyone but himself.
With the little old lady out of commission -- no pun intended, but damn, that’s good -- Klaus reaches down and plucks the tube from her hand. He pries it open and finds a slip inside. He recognizes it from the one he burned in Five’s hotel room in Vietnam, but this one is directed at an Agent Coco with instructions to “Eliminate Trent Wolfe.”
He looks around, trying to come up with some kind of solution. He can hear noises outside, but he chooses not to dwell on them. Five’s trusting him, so Klaus has to return the favor. Besides, he needs to think.
Stepping over the lady, he inches his way into what he quickly discovers is an office. To his relief, there’s a typewriter on the desk. He rummages in the top drawer and comes up with a memo paper, identical to the one in his hand. A little further examination and he finds a stockpile of tubes.
He grabs both, hastily replacing the orders for poor Trent Wolfe in the other tube before trying to figure out how to work the typewriter. He has some advantage here. Telekinesis and talking to the dead don’t help necessarily, but Reginald Hargreeves had been archaic to a fault. He’s never had computers or tablets. Klaus had gotten bored many days and plucked away at one of the typewriters he found in the basement.
The good news is that he’d only been high part of the time. He actually remembers how the thing works, more or less.
Even so, he messes the first slip up. He accidentally misspells a few words on the next one, but the third one comes out perfectly. The first memo is burned into his memory -- and he hesitates as he checks it over.
Attention Agent Five:
Eliminate Private David Katz of the American Army. Use any means necessary. Extraction is not possible until target is eliminated.
He knows what he’s typed here. He understands it full well, better than anyone else possibly could. He knows what will happen. He knows how the order will condemn a good man -- the best man, the only good man -- to death. He knows Dave will bleed out on a battlefield. His face will go pale and his body will shake. His eyes will stare sightlessly at a sky with a sun he’ll never see set.
Klaus knows his blood will stain the ground. He knows it’ll be sent home in a casket draped with a flag. He’ll be buried back in his family plot, and his parents will never know he was loved so much.
This order, the one by Klaus’ own hand, will shorten a life. It will end it, cruelly, violently and prematurely.
But it’s not senseless, not quite. Klaus tries to find some consolation in that, but it’s not easy. It’s not much comfort to know that the right thing can be so very, very wrong. It’s not fair that some choices aren’t choices at all.
Still, it is a choice. Klaus holds the paper in his hand and knows that’s true. He hates it, resents it, wants to deny it, but there it is. He holds Dave’s fate in his hands. If he crumples the paper, right here and now, Dave will live. He’ll live a long, happy life
And the world will end.
Klaus closes his eyes.
He swallows hard.
Then, with trembling fingers, he rolls the paper up and pops it in the vacant tube. There are ends and means, he knows now. He knows. You don’t have to like the means -- you don’t even have to agree with them -- as long as the end is worthwhile.
Klaus hopes to God, he hopes, he hopes, hopes, that it’s worthwhile.
When he gets to his feet, he’s positively shaking. He feels like he could collapse as he steps out of the office, over the fallen old lady. The hallway of tubes isn’t as self explanatory as the typewriter, but there are no complicated dials. There are no settings, which means that the machine probably uses the details on the memo. How? Who the hell knows. But this is a company that put a time machine in a briefcase so anything is possible.
He swallows hard and opens the first chute. He slides in the orders for Trent Wolfe in with only a twinge of trepidation -- he hasn’t come this far to risk jeopardizing everything. He has to maintain the timeline, no matter what. He’s relieved when there’s a familiar whoosh and the tube shudders. He opens it again and the tube is gone.
Satisfied that he knows basically what he’s doing, he takes the other tube in his hands. He poises his hand over the opening and draws in a breath.
This is it.
This is his last chance.
This is his moment.
Choose happiness or choose the greater good.
Choose himself or choose family.
Choose himself or choose the world.
He drops the tube and closes the lid. There’s a thunk and a whoosh and it’s done.
Somewhere, across the years, Dave dies again, this time for the last time. In 2019, Klaus’ eyes open with a sober, broken heart as the sun rises.
For better, for worse, it’s done.
SEVENTEEN
Five does have a tendency to overthink things. He likes to say it’s because he’s smart; thinking things through is second nature, especially since his experience has shown him that he can think things through better than the vast majority of people around him. Really, he doesn’t know how not to think, and he’s arrogant enough to believe that’s a good thing.
Most of the time.
He’ll add that caveat because he has to add that caveat. You have to add that caveat when your overthinking leads you to disregard your father’s warning and lands you in the apocalypse for the rest of your life. The problem isn’t the thinking, though. It’s the overconfidence and the over commitment to your own personal beliefs.
Five can still think things through, yes.
But he needs to learn to listen -- really listen -- to other people. That listening should lead to an acknowledgement, when prudent and necessary, that other people may have an opinion that is worth heeding.
Because the thing is, Five overthinks and he’s overconfident, but he’s not incapable of following orders blindly. It’s not a flattering assessment of himself, but Klaus’ discovery of Five’s true identity has forced this issue. For years, Five follow orders without thinking. For years, he put his trust in the wrong organization. He can claim it was a necessary evil, he can talk about means and ends, but the truth stands.
This time, he likes to think, he can at least put his trust in the right people. Right person.
So he makes a choice.
Stop thinking.
Follow the orders, no matter what.
This is Klaus’ show now, and Five is just going along for the ride.
-o-
It’d be nice if the ride weren’t so difficult. Like, Five gets it. He knows that life is shit and that things rarely go right. He knows what it’s like to be expected to do things that are outlandish. He understands unreasonably high expectations. Hell, in the grander scheme of things, this probably isn’t even close to the hardest thing he’s had to do. You could even say that he deserves it, that this is penance.
But damn it, Five’s been through a lot lately. He’s weak and he’s emotionally compromised and he doesn’t know what’s going on and there are a lot of guards. It’s always a little funny to him, the way the Commission operates. It’s all about minimalistic approaches to start with, one or two agents to try to maintain the course of history. But when that goes to shit, they just say to hell with it and send whole damn armies after people.
Really well armed armies that have no discernment whatsoever.
Five’s never found them to be particularly nuanced, but you don’t have to be when you have the firepower and numbers these guys have. There would have been times Five might have thought he was equal to the task. Or, you know, at least able to hold his own.
This, however, is not one of those times.
This is unfortunate since he has promised Klaus to do just that.
Worse, Five isn’t the kind of guy who likes to break his promises. He’s a killer, but he’s not so much a liar. Morality doesn’t come into it. It’s just lying is inconvenient. He says what he means, plain and simple. Done and done. No fuss, no mess.
Therefore, he does intend to hold these assholes off.
There’s just no way he’s going to do it while standing here ducking and taking pot shots at any stupid guard who gets close enough for him to gouge out the eyes. He manages to down half a dozen, but he’s tiring and overwhelmed and damn it, he made a promise.
Five knows failure. Yes, he knows a lot of failure. The worst failures.
But he also knows success.
At any cost.
Every cost.
For his family.
He rallies himself because he knows he can. He knows he has to.
That’s it, then. That’s all there is for him.
The power comes from nowhere, surging into his hands. He’s got no energy reserves left, but this is prompted by sheer necessity. Without giving it much thought, he closes his eyes and channels what he can, sending himself through a conduit of space.
It’s not a long jump, but it doesn’t have to be. One of the brilliant things about a superpower is that it can catch people so offguard. It doesn’t have to be dramatic to have a dramatic effect. Accordingly, Five only manages to get himself across the hall, but it’s more than enough to throw the guards off. Bullets hit the walls; two are caught in the crossfire. There’s scrambling and yelling as they try to reconverge upon him.
They’re fast, but not quite fast enough. Mustering up another burst, he jumps again, this time behind one of the point people, establishing a position quickly enough to disarm, disable and ultimately dismember. He makes a third jump, farther down, and a fourth in rapid succession. Within less than a minute, he’s drawn their attention down the hallway.
He grins at them with an audacious salute, taking pains to physically run around the corner. It’s only when they follow that he jumps again. By this point, he’s flagging, but there’s no time to stop. He’s still too close to the tube room. If he failed, they’d be back on Klaus within seconds -- and Klaus wouldn’t have a chance since he was counting on Five to play lookout.
Lookout is not a term Klaus understands well, in truth. He’s never been good at playing lookout, and by assigning that role at this time, it’s clear that lookout is actually a synonym for distraction.
It probably doesn’t matter. Five grunts, gritting his teeth together as he feels the energy inside him pulling at the very neurons that hold his brain together. It feels like he’s coming apart at the seems sometimes; like he’s tearing himself down synapse by synapse and hoping there’s enough of him left to put back together. There’s no guarantees, no promises.
No, there’s one promise.
The one he made to Klaus.
Five jumps again.
-o-
It takes some effort, timing his jumps just so to draw the assault team away while not losing them. He needs to make sure he doesn’t get hit by a stray or lucky bullet, but he also can’t get so far ahead that they can’t find him. He realizes that it’s possible the team will be split, or a secondary team deployed, but he figures if he can just be enough of an asshole, they’ll stay on him.
So, he mocks them. “Come on,” he needles. “Surely they pay you to perform better than this.”
He jumps, using a knife he’s picked up in the melee to stab one of them in the heart. Blood squirts and he jumps, using a blood smeared hand to break the neck of another.
“Though I suppose if I kill you all, they don’t have to pay you anything,” he says, grinning as he jumps, a hail of bullets tearing up the floor where he last stood. He materializes near a door. He’d like to say that’s on purpose, but he’s losing a bit of control in his jumps right now. He’s just grateful he can pull another one off.
It is fortuitous, however.
The door is to a stairwell.
Five smirks as he opens the door and lets them see him charge in.
He knows how to have fun in a stairwell.
-o-
They start on the third floor. By the time Five gets to the basement, where he’d been previously held, half of the guards are dead. By various means, naturally. The remaining group is calling for backup, taking wild shots as Five all but skips his way to the bottom.
Not because he’s cocky.
Okay, not just because he’s cocky.
It’s also a combat tactic. He’s stymied them; he’s foiled their advances. The whole lot of them compared to him? It’s naturally a frustrating situation for those who are still breathing. This creates a recklessness that makes them increasingly easy to exploit. It also creates a desperate need to prove themselves.
In other words, they’re not going to go after Klaus, not until Five is good and dead. That’s not a good decision tactically speaking, but this is where Five has gained the real upper hand. Now, when he blinks out of their view, he knows they’ll look for him, only for him.
Of course, as brilliant as the move is for Five tactically, the toll is pressing physically. The moment he rematerializes, in a spare room, closed and nearby, his adrenaline falters. His power nearly evaporates, and without the pressing need of combat to push him on, he realizes just how spent he actually is. He’s not just tired; he’s exhausted. There’s nothing of him left.
He catches himself as his legs give out, and he slumps against the wall, not quite falling to the floor. The room spins lazily for a moment, so he closes his eyes and breathes. Breathing through his nose makes him nauseated. Breathing through his mouth makes him dizzy. Dying seems like an apt alternative in a lot of ways, but not all the ways.
He opens his eyes, exhaling heavily and out of pure necessity. He wants to give in right now, but what he wants isn’t even a consideration. He has everything to prove. Not to these asshole at the Commission, but to Klaus.
Jaw locked, Five nods to himself.
The thought of his brother is all it takes. It’s all he’s ever needed.
He balls his fist and wrinkles his nose. He’s taken this moment for himself.
Now, it’s time to get back to work.
-o-
Five leaves the room he’s in and starts on a delicate journey through the hallways. He runs into a small contingent of men -- no more than three of them -- and easily handles them. He lets the last guy live long enough to alert the others to his position. Then, he waits several seconds before he hears the sound of boots around the corner and starts to run again.
He gives them a glimpse before jumping, and he navigates a quick succession of corridors before he takes time to think about what he’s intending to do. At some point, he knows he has to get back to Klaus. In fact, that may be the most pressing matter now that he has preoccupied the guards.
Still, Five hesitates.
Getting back to Klaus is what he needs to do, but that’s a short-sighted way to look at things. And Five is many things, but short sighted isn’t one of them. At least, it hasn’t been since he made a rash decision at 13 and is still paying for it today.
The short term, yes, Five needs to get him and Klaus back to the present, hopefully with a preserved timeline. However, in the long term, there is their relationship and the overall family dynamic to consider. Five can frame it that way, a means to preserve the function of the Umbrella Academy and to reduce the strain on the rest of his siblings, but he’s not good with pretense. He’s fully resigned himself to never making proper amends with Klaus based on the severity of his trespass, but if there’s a way to change it….
If Five can make it right.
Well, that might be worth a detour.
-o-
Five uses his instincts to guide him, but it helps that the Commission is very pragmatic about its signage. There are actual signs for “Interrogation Chamber One” and “Sensory Deprivation Room Two.” Using his logic, he is able to systematically check many such rooms before finally finding the Handler in “Interrogation Chamber Four.”
Clearly, her efforts to “help” Klaus had been pretense. The Commission didn’t make offers it intended to keep in the basement. He’s a little surprised that he hasn’t found an Execution Chamber, but there are convenient incinerator drop points throughout the whole level so maybe they do like a euphemism or two.
The bastards. He’s sneering when he comes face to face with the Handler.
She’s not sneering back. She doesn’t look surprised to see him, but whether that’s because she expects him or is simply too dazed to attempt such vitriol is hard to tell. The state of this room is far worse than he might have expected. The other rooms have been spartan but impeccable. This one is in utter disarray. The walls are caved in. There’s a huge hole in the ceiling. The table is broken.
“What the hell happened?” Five asks before he can train himself to say something more intelligent.
The Handler is listing as he braces herself on a chair that has somehow survived the mess. “What do you think happened?” she says, reaching up with a hand to dab at the blood still pooling by the side of her lip. She spits red. “Another Hargreeves sibling with no regard for protocol.”
Five shrugs, diffident. That’s how he is with her. No matter how hard he tries, he will always look like a petulant child talking back to his mother. It’s not important, though. “Let me guess,” he says. “My brother kicked your ass.”
She glares at him, a bruise blossoming on her cheek. “He broke his contract,” she seethes.
“Yeah, his contract,” Five says with a roll of his eyes. “Maybe if you didn’t make such disingenuous contracts--”
She gapes like she may actually be offended. “I was going to give him back the love of his life!”
“Yeah, with stipulations and for all the wrong reasons,” Five says. He shakes his head. “Did you kill Dave just so you can manipulate Klaus into saving him?”
The Handler closes her mouth.
Five snorts. “And let me guess?” he says. “This is a last ditch effort to end the world.”
“The apocalypse is meant to happen!” she says, confirming all his speculation. She yells with such vigor that she nearly topples herself. “Why can’t any of you see that?”
“That’s probably not the question you should be asking,” Five says.
“Then what question should I be asking?” she retorts.
Five shrugs. “Why do you keep offering deals to the Hargreeves family?” he says. “And why do you never see your own failure coming?”
She steps forward, shaky but dogged. “Because you keep interfering, all of you,” she says, eyes burning red now. “And our deals are fair.”
“Fair?” Five asks. “You waited 30 years before getting me out of the apocalypse. Then, you had the audacity to offer me a 5 year contract that could never be fulfilled because I spent all my time out of the continuum.”
She bristles, straightening. “You should have died in that wasteland.”
“And I might have been better for it, I don’t know,” Five says. “But what you did to Klaus? Setting him up like this? Using his emotions like this? Offering to save the person you killed will never work. Trust me.”
“It makes no sense,” she says. “That he picked you.”
“Maybe he didn’t,” Five suggests. “Maybe he picked the world and I was just a byproduct of that.”
At that, the Handler steps back again. This time she seems amused in her surprise. “You say that like it’s not a big deal.”
“It is a big deal,” Five says. “But it’s called living with the consequences of your actions. There are some things you can’t fix. You’re better off accepting that before it kills you.”
Now, and only now, blood still oozing down her damaged chin, does she manage to sneer. “And that’s a lesson you’ve learned the hard way, I suppose?”
“Yeah,” he says, popping across the room and landing right next to her. He could kill her with a simple crack of the neck, but he slams his fist across her face instead, feeling the movement of her nose as he shatters it and she falls to the ground with a thud. “I have.”
He reaches down, rummaging through her pockets. He finds the dog tags quickly enough. It’s like she was going to keep them; relics of her conquests to stand next to Hitler’s gun and hand grenades. There are a lot of ways to destroy the world, after all. More than she’ll ever know.
Five pockets the dog tags and stands up again. He gives the Handler one last look where she lies, crumpled and unconscious. This isn’t a quick fix; in fact, it might not fix anything. Maybe it’s a token; maybe it’s silly. But it’s the right thing.
What he knows, standing there, holding these dog tags that belonged to a man he killed, years ago in the future, is that Five has taken enough of Klaus’ past. If this can restore a small bit of his future, then Five will make sure he gets it back. The delusions of grandeur fade with the reality, and he knows that this isn’t his ticket back. This doesn’t earn him anything. There is no tipping of the cosmic scales in his favor. That’s not possible.
But it’s not his future that’s in question anymore.
It’s Klaus.
Five gets back to his feet, summons his strength once more.
He looks at the Handler one more time, this time with a weary smile. “But at least I learned it,” he says.
Then, he blinks out of the room once and for all.
-o-
For once, it’s not a long, slow drag back. Five is usually get at making fast exits and bad at finding his way back. It’s a penchant that he’s come to regret. To the point, it is the defining feature and subsequently the defining failure of his long, exhausting existence.
His confrontation with the Handler, he supposes, is a long time coming. But it gives him the much needed boost he needs to make his way back up four flights of stairs. He does some of this by foot, alternating in his jumps. He comes across a few guards on his progress, but he’s gone before they can even report his location. When he makes it to the final flight, back up to the tube room, he has the strength to do it all at once. One blink, two blinks and he’s there, standing face to face with Klaus behind the locked door.
Klaus, who is apparently engaged in some serious and covert activity, startles badly. He jumps back with a gasp, clutching his chest. It’s the closest thing to swooning that Five has seen in his life, and he’s been around women in their corsets in the Victorian era.
“Shit!” Klaus is saying while he visibly tries to recover from the shock. “You nearly gave me a heart attack.”
For some reason, Five’s response is to be annoyed. This is not fair. It is startling when people appear out of nowhere and you think you’re alone. When the Handler finally revealed herself to him after three decades in the apocalypse, Five had legitimately believed he was having a stroke. Also, he had promised earnestly to play lookout.
Still. Some habits die hard. Five is not a people person. “Are you about done in here?”
Klaus still looks at him like he’s crazy. “I thought you were the lookout!” he says. He points to Five, gesturing up and down. “If you’re in here, then who’s looking out? Is someone coming?”
“Well, eventually,” Five says. “There’s only so many people I can watch trying to come to kill me -- and you, by extension -- before I need to take alternative measures.”
This only seems to frustrate Klaus. “But you’re the lookout!”
He acts like this reiteration carries some significance that it plainly does not carry.
“Sure,” Five says, plaintive. “I looked. Now, I’m out.”
Klaus narrows his eyes, pursing his lips a little. There is something he wants to say, but it’s not clear that he knows what that is.
Five decides to put them both out of their misery at the effort. “Did you finish in here?” he looks around, eyes pointedly on Klaus’ empty and idle hands. “Or do you need more time?”
At the question, Klaus looks around, as if he’s just remembering what he came in here to do. The whole of his expression is bleak; his shoulders slump ever so slightly, and he seems to become somber to the point of inaction. Desolation, they call it. When your will to act is outweighed by the pointlessness of action. From experience, Five knows it is one of the most dangerous afflictions known to man.
That, and a fully armed swat team hunting you down with orders to kill, kill and kill some more.
Five has to deal with one right now. The other will have to wait.
“Okay,” Five says, putting things in order as best he can. “What did you have to do? Do you need help?”
This is the pragmatic approach.
There is always a pragmatic approach even in especially ridiculous situations. Five needs to believe that, anyway.
Klaus, unfortunately, has never been known for his pragmatism. When precious seconds tick by without a response, Five finds himself unable to wait it out. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “It’s time to go either way.”
This, at the very least, elicits some response from Klaus. He blinks a few times and nods. “Yeah.”
Five waits for more because surely there is more. There are here at Klaus’ beckoning. He’s the one spearheading this campaign. Five isn’t even sure what the campaign is. In terms of ends and means, he’s got a habit of following orders blindly it seems. Probably not the best character trait, not even the most likely character trait given his personality, but he’s all about committing. At least this time he’s picked the right person to follow.
Klaus’ lost expression doesn’t instill much confidence, sadly.
Five hopes he’s picked the right person. He presses himself forward a step. “So?” he prompts.
Klaus looks back at him, almost put off. “So what?”
Five does his best not to roll his eyes. “So what next?” he tries again, more emphatically this time.
“Well,” Klaus says, sounding increasingly less confident as each second passes. “I mean, I thought we’d leave.”
It’s such a pathetically phrased proposition that Five spends about three seconds only gawking. “Okay,” Five finally musters up his self control to reply. “But how?”
Klaus shrugs as if this is an outlandish question. “Isn’t that your department?” He gestures at Five as if that proves anything. “That’s your thing, right?”
The implication finally becomes clear. “You want me to time travel out of here,” he ventures, half hoping he’s got the insinuation wrong. “Right here, right now. You want me to blink us to the future like nothing happened.”
The way he says it should communicate how ridiculous the suggestion is. It’s imbued with false hopes, overconfidence and a total lack of understanding of what it takes to time travel.
Klaus doesn’t quite pick up on the hint. “Sure, right?” he asks instead. “It’s not like you haven’t done it before. I know you’ve done it before. I was there when you did it before.”
“Yeah, I’ve done it before,” Five says with a scowl. “But you’re forgetting that the first time I travelled through time, I got stuck in the apocalypse for 30 years. That’s how we got into this mess in the first place -- because I used time travel badly.”
“But then you got better,” Klaus says as if this is an argument he’s trying to win. “Like, the second time. The second time worked out better.”
Five is increasingly unamused. Which is saying something, given the fact that he’s been held in isolation and tortured. “I turned into a teenager.”
Klaus doesn’t have Five’s restraint. He actually does roll his eyes. “But that third time,” he says. He points his finger at Five. “And the fourth! That fourth one was nearly flawless.”
Klaus is of course referring to the extreme measures he’d taken at the end of the world. How he had managed to jump all seven of them to the past in one piece with no side effects is still something of a mystery to him. He made the jump with minimal calculations, and every time he’s tried to recreate the conditions mathematically, he’s failed to come up with a viable computation to justify his success. The second jump, the one back to the future after fixing the past, had been more thought out, but it was not without its caveats, and Five feels compelled to remind Klaus of that now.
“Flawless?” he repeats, eyebrows arching. “You’re forgetting the part where I spent the first week back in a coma from the strain.”
“But you did, right?” Klaus says. He makes a helpless noise. “You did it.”
“Because the situation was dire!” Five insists. “We were talking about the fate of the world!”
In the distance, there is the sound of fresh yelling. There’s a commotion coming closer, and it doesn’t take any great reasoning skill to figure out that the guards are finally circling back this way. Klaus, annoyingly, takes notice. He bobs his head toward the door. “And this isn’t dire?”
The point has drama, but Five isn’t easily swayed by theatrics. He shakes his head, lips thin. “Dire, maybe. But it’s not the end of the world.”
At this, of all things, Klaus perks up. Emotions darkens his face, and it looks like pain in his eyes as he comes to full attention for the first time since Five’s come back here. “It is, though,” he says. “If we don’t get back, it is. I mean, I’ve done what I had to do, okay? I’ve restored the timeline, the damn timeline, all of it, but who’s to say that they won’t try again? We can’t protect the future if we don’t even know what it looks like anymore. We have to go back.”
It’s Five’s turn to be taken aback. This whole situation has been less than ideal. It’s been unpleasant, uncomfortable and generally stressful. It occurs to him now that he probably needs to know what it is Klaus has been doing. He can feel the dog tags, sitting heavily in his pocket. He knows the deal Klaus meant to make. He knows he broke his contract. The question is how.
“Did you change the timeline?” he asks quietly, ignoring the yelling as it circles nearer to them. “And is that why you’re here? In the tube room? Trying to restore it?”
Klaus twitches, scratching at the back of his neck anxiously as he looks at his feet. “Maybe.”
It’s an admission couched with emotion. This has been hard on Klaus, and Five understands that. He respects it.
He can’t humor it now.
Not now. “How?” he asks flatly.
Klaus looks up at him, eyes shadowed. “Does it matter now?”
Five nods, utterly emphatic. “Yes.”
Klaus wrinkles his nose with a hint of contempt. “It’s none of your business, thank you very much.”
“If this is dire enough to impact the fate of the world, then yes, I think it is my business,” Five replies, crossing his arms over his chest unyieldingly. “Tell me.”
“What?” Klaus says. “No!”
Haughtily, Five tilts his head. “Yes,” he counters. “Or I’m not jumping.”
It’s not a bluff, at least not exactly. Five’s not sure if he’d follow through on the threat or not. He knows that he doesn’t have to, however. He knows Klaus is going to agree with him.
Or they’re both going to die here.
Klaus seemingly has the same thought. He scoffs in disbelief. “That’s idiotic.”
This only cements Five’s position even more. “I need to know.”
“Why?”
“Because if we’re trying to preserve the timeline, as you say, then I need to know what said timeline is,” he said. “I don’t even know what we’re protecting it from at this point. I can’t make these decisions, these dire decisions, without all the facts.”
Klaus, as it turns out, has had enough. He throws his hands up. “Ugh, fine!” he says. He turns around and stops for a moment. Then, he turns back. “Fine. Okay, fine.”
Five waits because fine is a pretty generic descriptor.
Klaus blows out a breath, long and hard, and shakes his head. “When I went to the past, I destroyed the message, the one you got to kill Dave. I destroyed it.”
Five nods, because that much makes sense. “Which means I never kill Dave and you get to have a happily ever after.”
“Only I don’t,” Klaus says. He shakes his head, confused. “Or I wouldn’t. For long. Look, the whole thing, it wouldn’t work. I destroyed the memo so you could never kill Dave. If you never killed Dave, you would never get transferred out of Vietnam. That would keep you from continuing your work and prevent you from making it back to 2019, which in turn--”
“Leads to the apocalypse,” Five says, a little awed. It’s an impressive turn of logic. It’s not just impressive that Klaus has put these pieces together but that the Commission orchestrated it all together. With one order, sent out of sequence, the Commission was able to use Five’s connection and commitment to his family to not only destroy him and them -- but the whole damn planet.
Whoever came up with that roundabout process deserves a damn commendation. Yes, it’s a horrifying thing to conclude but it takes a certain kind of genius.
Klaus doesn’t look impressed. He merely looks resigned. “So, I came back here. I resent the message and Dave is going to die and you’re going to pull the trigger and that’s it, okay? We need to get back to 2019 and makes sure that’s it.”
Five swallows back his awe and returns to the reality of the moment. Standing here, in the tube room, with the Commission amassing outside, and Five has to appreciate not the genius of the Commission but the sacrifice of his brother. Klaus has come here on his own. Klaus has done this of his own free will and volition. Klaus has made the choice.
The choice to kill the man he loves.
It’s a choice that condemns them both to live with the consequences.
It’s a choice that saves the world.
The gravity of that cannot be understated, but what is Five supposed to do? What could Five possibly say? Klaus knows he did the right thing. Klaus knows he’s done what he had to do. Klaus doesn’t want his logic or his pity right now.
Right now, Klaus wants a way out. No, a way home. A way back to something that might make this worthwhile.
Finally, Five nods. The voices are right outside now. They’ve converged; they’re ready.
That’s fine.
Five’s ready, too.
“Okay,” he says steadily, eyes locked on Klaus.
Klaus is shaky in reply. “Okay?”
“Let’s get out of here,” Five says, decisively now. He reaches out, taking Klaus by the hand. Klaus flinches, but Five’s grip is steady. After a long second, Klaus grips back.
It’s the smallest possible hint of affirmation.
It is all Five needs.
Calculations, probabilities -- all the shit he thinks he needs to make a jump.
But there are some elements of the powers, some reality to his ability to wield them that defies logic. Logic only gets him halfway. It’s heart that brings him back.
The power draws up inside of him, and he breathes, deep and heavy through his nose. His mind rushes through the logistics, but he fixates on 2019 with all that he has. It’s not just number or odds. It’s family.
He thinks of Luther and his oversized coats. There’s Diego and his knives. Allison and Claire. Vanya and her violin. Her smiles.
Klaus.
He looks at his brother and, despite the power that rushes through him, he smiles.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Klaus yells at him. Outside, the voice are still yelling, but it’s hard to hear them as the power starts to fluctuate. It’s spinning outside of him, growing in power and strength like a vortex. The sound is rising and Five has no ability to control it.
“Not really!” Five yells back. Because control is a fallacy. The best he can hope for is to channel it, to be a vessel. All the times he’s tried to use his power, it’s failed him. Those time he’s let himself be used by his power?
Well, that’s what success is.
It also happens to be a working definition of family.
A little messed up, a little chaotic.
And everything they need.
“But we’ll figure it out!” he yells as the door opens and the sound reaches a fevered pitch. The blue light is almost blinding him now but his gaze remains fixed on Klaus. “Together!”
There’s no way in hell that should be enough.
But the world blinks out and they’re sucked down into nothing and somehow it is.
-o-
The world comes back in sharp and terrible clarity. Five’s vision returns first, overly bright and glaring. It takes him a moment to make out his surroundings, but he knows that he’s not in the Commission any longer. The sense of displacement is hard to sort through, and it’s not until his eyes focus on Klaus that he remembers to breathe.
Klaus is pale, his face strained. His eyes flicker around him, over Five’s head, and Five’s hearing returns in time to hear his brother speak. “We’re back,” he says, and he sounds surprised. “We’re back.”
It’s relief and it’s pain and a thousand other things that Five doesn’t have time to process. As the energy around him fades, everything starts to fade. This is not merely exhaustion, anymore. When his knees give out in a few seconds, there will be nothing to be done for him but let him fall.
Klaus inhales, raggedly but full. His eyes are wet when he looks at Five again. “You did it,” he says. “You got us home.”
The world still exists.
His family is presumably still alive.
Klaus is sober.
The few seconds are up. Five’s knees give out and he spirals down, taking his tepid consciousness with him. He expects the fall, one hundred percent.
He doesn’t expect Klaus to catch him.
As everything goes dim, he finds himself glad to have the probabilities wrong for once.
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
PART SIXTEEN CONTINUED
-o-
Inside the tube room, Klaus is struck with the realization that he doesn’t actually know how to use the tube room. In all honesty, he’s taken the concept of pneumatic tubes kind of for granted because his life has always been kind of strange. So, sure, of course it’s possible to send messages through time. Klaus can talk to the dead and he has a brother who can time travel, so there’s weirder shit out there.
But, now that he’s here, he’s struck by the practicalities of it all.
As in, if he’s going to send a message to save the world, then he has to know how to do it.
He’s contemplating this when he sees a little old lady shuffle out of her office. Her eyes goggle behind her glasses and her mouth drops open. “But what on earth--”
Klaus doesn’t have time for her drama. He quickly -- and a tad more gently -- flicks her to the side and she goes down and doesn’t get up. Is it bad that he doesn’t feel that bad about incapacitating a little old lady? Possibly. He thinks this is probably the Commission’s own fault for turning him into this kind of person.
No, he’s still not thinking about how this sentiment applies to anyone but himself.
With the little old lady out of commission -- no pun intended, but damn, that’s good -- Klaus reaches down and plucks the tube from her hand. He pries it open and finds a slip inside. He recognizes it from the one he burned in Five’s hotel room in Vietnam, but this one is directed at an Agent Coco with instructions to “Eliminate Trent Wolfe.”
He looks around, trying to come up with some kind of solution. He can hear noises outside, but he chooses not to dwell on them. Five’s trusting him, so Klaus has to return the favor. Besides, he needs to think.
Stepping over the lady, he inches his way into what he quickly discovers is an office. To his relief, there’s a typewriter on the desk. He rummages in the top drawer and comes up with a memo paper, identical to the one in his hand. A little further examination and he finds a stockpile of tubes.
He grabs both, hastily replacing the orders for poor Trent Wolfe in the other tube before trying to figure out how to work the typewriter. He has some advantage here. Telekinesis and talking to the dead don’t help necessarily, but Reginald Hargreeves had been archaic to a fault. He’s never had computers or tablets. Klaus had gotten bored many days and plucked away at one of the typewriters he found in the basement.
The good news is that he’d only been high part of the time. He actually remembers how the thing works, more or less.
Even so, he messes the first slip up. He accidentally misspells a few words on the next one, but the third one comes out perfectly. The first memo is burned into his memory -- and he hesitates as he checks it over.
Attention Agent Five:
Eliminate Private David Katz of the American Army. Use any means necessary. Extraction is not possible until target is eliminated.
He knows what he’s typed here. He understands it full well, better than anyone else possibly could. He knows what will happen. He knows how the order will condemn a good man -- the best man, the only good man -- to death. He knows Dave will bleed out on a battlefield. His face will go pale and his body will shake. His eyes will stare sightlessly at a sky with a sun he’ll never see set.
Klaus knows his blood will stain the ground. He knows it’ll be sent home in a casket draped with a flag. He’ll be buried back in his family plot, and his parents will never know he was loved so much.
This order, the one by Klaus’ own hand, will shorten a life. It will end it, cruelly, violently and prematurely.
But it’s not senseless, not quite. Klaus tries to find some consolation in that, but it’s not easy. It’s not much comfort to know that the right thing can be so very, very wrong. It’s not fair that some choices aren’t choices at all.
Still, it is a choice. Klaus holds the paper in his hand and knows that’s true. He hates it, resents it, wants to deny it, but there it is. He holds Dave’s fate in his hands. If he crumples the paper, right here and now, Dave will live. He’ll live a long, happy life
And the world will end.
Klaus closes his eyes.
He swallows hard.
Then, with trembling fingers, he rolls the paper up and pops it in the vacant tube. There are ends and means, he knows now. He knows. You don’t have to like the means -- you don’t even have to agree with them -- as long as the end is worthwhile.
Klaus hopes to God, he hopes, he hopes, hopes, that it’s worthwhile.
When he gets to his feet, he’s positively shaking. He feels like he could collapse as he steps out of the office, over the fallen old lady. The hallway of tubes isn’t as self explanatory as the typewriter, but there are no complicated dials. There are no settings, which means that the machine probably uses the details on the memo. How? Who the hell knows. But this is a company that put a time machine in a briefcase so anything is possible.
He swallows hard and opens the first chute. He slides in the orders for Trent Wolfe in with only a twinge of trepidation -- he hasn’t come this far to risk jeopardizing everything. He has to maintain the timeline, no matter what. He’s relieved when there’s a familiar whoosh and the tube shudders. He opens it again and the tube is gone.
Satisfied that he knows basically what he’s doing, he takes the other tube in his hands. He poises his hand over the opening and draws in a breath.
This is it.
This is his last chance.
This is his moment.
Choose happiness or choose the greater good.
Choose himself or choose family.
Choose himself or choose the world.
He drops the tube and closes the lid. There’s a thunk and a whoosh and it’s done.
Somewhere, across the years, Dave dies again, this time for the last time. In 2019, Klaus’ eyes open with a sober, broken heart as the sun rises.
For better, for worse, it’s done.
SEVENTEEN
Five does have a tendency to overthink things. He likes to say it’s because he’s smart; thinking things through is second nature, especially since his experience has shown him that he can think things through better than the vast majority of people around him. Really, he doesn’t know how not to think, and he’s arrogant enough to believe that’s a good thing.
Most of the time.
He’ll add that caveat because he has to add that caveat. You have to add that caveat when your overthinking leads you to disregard your father’s warning and lands you in the apocalypse for the rest of your life. The problem isn’t the thinking, though. It’s the overconfidence and the over commitment to your own personal beliefs.
Five can still think things through, yes.
But he needs to learn to listen -- really listen -- to other people. That listening should lead to an acknowledgement, when prudent and necessary, that other people may have an opinion that is worth heeding.
Because the thing is, Five overthinks and he’s overconfident, but he’s not incapable of following orders blindly. It’s not a flattering assessment of himself, but Klaus’ discovery of Five’s true identity has forced this issue. For years, Five follow orders without thinking. For years, he put his trust in the wrong organization. He can claim it was a necessary evil, he can talk about means and ends, but the truth stands.
This time, he likes to think, he can at least put his trust in the right people. Right person.
So he makes a choice.
Stop thinking.
Follow the orders, no matter what.
This is Klaus’ show now, and Five is just going along for the ride.
-o-
It’d be nice if the ride weren’t so difficult. Like, Five gets it. He knows that life is shit and that things rarely go right. He knows what it’s like to be expected to do things that are outlandish. He understands unreasonably high expectations. Hell, in the grander scheme of things, this probably isn’t even close to the hardest thing he’s had to do. You could even say that he deserves it, that this is penance.
But damn it, Five’s been through a lot lately. He’s weak and he’s emotionally compromised and he doesn’t know what’s going on and there are a lot of guards. It’s always a little funny to him, the way the Commission operates. It’s all about minimalistic approaches to start with, one or two agents to try to maintain the course of history. But when that goes to shit, they just say to hell with it and send whole damn armies after people.
Really well armed armies that have no discernment whatsoever.
Five’s never found them to be particularly nuanced, but you don’t have to be when you have the firepower and numbers these guys have. There would have been times Five might have thought he was equal to the task. Or, you know, at least able to hold his own.
This, however, is not one of those times.
This is unfortunate since he has promised Klaus to do just that.
Worse, Five isn’t the kind of guy who likes to break his promises. He’s a killer, but he’s not so much a liar. Morality doesn’t come into it. It’s just lying is inconvenient. He says what he means, plain and simple. Done and done. No fuss, no mess.
Therefore, he does intend to hold these assholes off.
There’s just no way he’s going to do it while standing here ducking and taking pot shots at any stupid guard who gets close enough for him to gouge out the eyes. He manages to down half a dozen, but he’s tiring and overwhelmed and damn it, he made a promise.
Five knows failure. Yes, he knows a lot of failure. The worst failures.
But he also knows success.
At any cost.
Every cost.
For his family.
He rallies himself because he knows he can. He knows he has to.
That’s it, then. That’s all there is for him.
The power comes from nowhere, surging into his hands. He’s got no energy reserves left, but this is prompted by sheer necessity. Without giving it much thought, he closes his eyes and channels what he can, sending himself through a conduit of space.
It’s not a long jump, but it doesn’t have to be. One of the brilliant things about a superpower is that it can catch people so offguard. It doesn’t have to be dramatic to have a dramatic effect. Accordingly, Five only manages to get himself across the hall, but it’s more than enough to throw the guards off. Bullets hit the walls; two are caught in the crossfire. There’s scrambling and yelling as they try to reconverge upon him.
They’re fast, but not quite fast enough. Mustering up another burst, he jumps again, this time behind one of the point people, establishing a position quickly enough to disarm, disable and ultimately dismember. He makes a third jump, farther down, and a fourth in rapid succession. Within less than a minute, he’s drawn their attention down the hallway.
He grins at them with an audacious salute, taking pains to physically run around the corner. It’s only when they follow that he jumps again. By this point, he’s flagging, but there’s no time to stop. He’s still too close to the tube room. If he failed, they’d be back on Klaus within seconds -- and Klaus wouldn’t have a chance since he was counting on Five to play lookout.
Lookout is not a term Klaus understands well, in truth. He’s never been good at playing lookout, and by assigning that role at this time, it’s clear that lookout is actually a synonym for distraction.
It probably doesn’t matter. Five grunts, gritting his teeth together as he feels the energy inside him pulling at the very neurons that hold his brain together. It feels like he’s coming apart at the seems sometimes; like he’s tearing himself down synapse by synapse and hoping there’s enough of him left to put back together. There’s no guarantees, no promises.
No, there’s one promise.
The one he made to Klaus.
Five jumps again.
-o-
It takes some effort, timing his jumps just so to draw the assault team away while not losing them. He needs to make sure he doesn’t get hit by a stray or lucky bullet, but he also can’t get so far ahead that they can’t find him. He realizes that it’s possible the team will be split, or a secondary team deployed, but he figures if he can just be enough of an asshole, they’ll stay on him.
So, he mocks them. “Come on,” he needles. “Surely they pay you to perform better than this.”
He jumps, using a knife he’s picked up in the melee to stab one of them in the heart. Blood squirts and he jumps, using a blood smeared hand to break the neck of another.
“Though I suppose if I kill you all, they don’t have to pay you anything,” he says, grinning as he jumps, a hail of bullets tearing up the floor where he last stood. He materializes near a door. He’d like to say that’s on purpose, but he’s losing a bit of control in his jumps right now. He’s just grateful he can pull another one off.
It is fortuitous, however.
The door is to a stairwell.
Five smirks as he opens the door and lets them see him charge in.
He knows how to have fun in a stairwell.
-o-
They start on the third floor. By the time Five gets to the basement, where he’d been previously held, half of the guards are dead. By various means, naturally. The remaining group is calling for backup, taking wild shots as Five all but skips his way to the bottom.
Not because he’s cocky.
Okay, not just because he’s cocky.
It’s also a combat tactic. He’s stymied them; he’s foiled their advances. The whole lot of them compared to him? It’s naturally a frustrating situation for those who are still breathing. This creates a recklessness that makes them increasingly easy to exploit. It also creates a desperate need to prove themselves.
In other words, they’re not going to go after Klaus, not until Five is good and dead. That’s not a good decision tactically speaking, but this is where Five has gained the real upper hand. Now, when he blinks out of their view, he knows they’ll look for him, only for him.
Of course, as brilliant as the move is for Five tactically, the toll is pressing physically. The moment he rematerializes, in a spare room, closed and nearby, his adrenaline falters. His power nearly evaporates, and without the pressing need of combat to push him on, he realizes just how spent he actually is. He’s not just tired; he’s exhausted. There’s nothing of him left.
He catches himself as his legs give out, and he slumps against the wall, not quite falling to the floor. The room spins lazily for a moment, so he closes his eyes and breathes. Breathing through his nose makes him nauseated. Breathing through his mouth makes him dizzy. Dying seems like an apt alternative in a lot of ways, but not all the ways.
He opens his eyes, exhaling heavily and out of pure necessity. He wants to give in right now, but what he wants isn’t even a consideration. He has everything to prove. Not to these asshole at the Commission, but to Klaus.
Jaw locked, Five nods to himself.
The thought of his brother is all it takes. It’s all he’s ever needed.
He balls his fist and wrinkles his nose. He’s taken this moment for himself.
Now, it’s time to get back to work.
-o-
Five leaves the room he’s in and starts on a delicate journey through the hallways. He runs into a small contingent of men -- no more than three of them -- and easily handles them. He lets the last guy live long enough to alert the others to his position. Then, he waits several seconds before he hears the sound of boots around the corner and starts to run again.
He gives them a glimpse before jumping, and he navigates a quick succession of corridors before he takes time to think about what he’s intending to do. At some point, he knows he has to get back to Klaus. In fact, that may be the most pressing matter now that he has preoccupied the guards.
Still, Five hesitates.
Getting back to Klaus is what he needs to do, but that’s a short-sighted way to look at things. And Five is many things, but short sighted isn’t one of them. At least, it hasn’t been since he made a rash decision at 13 and is still paying for it today.
The short term, yes, Five needs to get him and Klaus back to the present, hopefully with a preserved timeline. However, in the long term, there is their relationship and the overall family dynamic to consider. Five can frame it that way, a means to preserve the function of the Umbrella Academy and to reduce the strain on the rest of his siblings, but he’s not good with pretense. He’s fully resigned himself to never making proper amends with Klaus based on the severity of his trespass, but if there’s a way to change it….
If Five can make it right.
Well, that might be worth a detour.
-o-
Five uses his instincts to guide him, but it helps that the Commission is very pragmatic about its signage. There are actual signs for “Interrogation Chamber One” and “Sensory Deprivation Room Two.” Using his logic, he is able to systematically check many such rooms before finally finding the Handler in “Interrogation Chamber Four.”
Clearly, her efforts to “help” Klaus had been pretense. The Commission didn’t make offers it intended to keep in the basement. He’s a little surprised that he hasn’t found an Execution Chamber, but there are convenient incinerator drop points throughout the whole level so maybe they do like a euphemism or two.
The bastards. He’s sneering when he comes face to face with the Handler.
She’s not sneering back. She doesn’t look surprised to see him, but whether that’s because she expects him or is simply too dazed to attempt such vitriol is hard to tell. The state of this room is far worse than he might have expected. The other rooms have been spartan but impeccable. This one is in utter disarray. The walls are caved in. There’s a huge hole in the ceiling. The table is broken.
“What the hell happened?” Five asks before he can train himself to say something more intelligent.
The Handler is listing as he braces herself on a chair that has somehow survived the mess. “What do you think happened?” she says, reaching up with a hand to dab at the blood still pooling by the side of her lip. She spits red. “Another Hargreeves sibling with no regard for protocol.”
Five shrugs, diffident. That’s how he is with her. No matter how hard he tries, he will always look like a petulant child talking back to his mother. It’s not important, though. “Let me guess,” he says. “My brother kicked your ass.”
She glares at him, a bruise blossoming on her cheek. “He broke his contract,” she seethes.
“Yeah, his contract,” Five says with a roll of his eyes. “Maybe if you didn’t make such disingenuous contracts--”
She gapes like she may actually be offended. “I was going to give him back the love of his life!”
“Yeah, with stipulations and for all the wrong reasons,” Five says. He shakes his head. “Did you kill Dave just so you can manipulate Klaus into saving him?”
The Handler closes her mouth.
Five snorts. “And let me guess?” he says. “This is a last ditch effort to end the world.”
“The apocalypse is meant to happen!” she says, confirming all his speculation. She yells with such vigor that she nearly topples herself. “Why can’t any of you see that?”
“That’s probably not the question you should be asking,” Five says.
“Then what question should I be asking?” she retorts.
Five shrugs. “Why do you keep offering deals to the Hargreeves family?” he says. “And why do you never see your own failure coming?”
She steps forward, shaky but dogged. “Because you keep interfering, all of you,” she says, eyes burning red now. “And our deals are fair.”
“Fair?” Five asks. “You waited 30 years before getting me out of the apocalypse. Then, you had the audacity to offer me a 5 year contract that could never be fulfilled because I spent all my time out of the continuum.”
She bristles, straightening. “You should have died in that wasteland.”
“And I might have been better for it, I don’t know,” Five says. “But what you did to Klaus? Setting him up like this? Using his emotions like this? Offering to save the person you killed will never work. Trust me.”
“It makes no sense,” she says. “That he picked you.”
“Maybe he didn’t,” Five suggests. “Maybe he picked the world and I was just a byproduct of that.”
At that, the Handler steps back again. This time she seems amused in her surprise. “You say that like it’s not a big deal.”
“It is a big deal,” Five says. “But it’s called living with the consequences of your actions. There are some things you can’t fix. You’re better off accepting that before it kills you.”
Now, and only now, blood still oozing down her damaged chin, does she manage to sneer. “And that’s a lesson you’ve learned the hard way, I suppose?”
“Yeah,” he says, popping across the room and landing right next to her. He could kill her with a simple crack of the neck, but he slams his fist across her face instead, feeling the movement of her nose as he shatters it and she falls to the ground with a thud. “I have.”
He reaches down, rummaging through her pockets. He finds the dog tags quickly enough. It’s like she was going to keep them; relics of her conquests to stand next to Hitler’s gun and hand grenades. There are a lot of ways to destroy the world, after all. More than she’ll ever know.
Five pockets the dog tags and stands up again. He gives the Handler one last look where she lies, crumpled and unconscious. This isn’t a quick fix; in fact, it might not fix anything. Maybe it’s a token; maybe it’s silly. But it’s the right thing.
What he knows, standing there, holding these dog tags that belonged to a man he killed, years ago in the future, is that Five has taken enough of Klaus’ past. If this can restore a small bit of his future, then Five will make sure he gets it back. The delusions of grandeur fade with the reality, and he knows that this isn’t his ticket back. This doesn’t earn him anything. There is no tipping of the cosmic scales in his favor. That’s not possible.
But it’s not his future that’s in question anymore.
It’s Klaus.
Five gets back to his feet, summons his strength once more.
He looks at the Handler one more time, this time with a weary smile. “But at least I learned it,” he says.
Then, he blinks out of the room once and for all.
-o-
For once, it’s not a long, slow drag back. Five is usually get at making fast exits and bad at finding his way back. It’s a penchant that he’s come to regret. To the point, it is the defining feature and subsequently the defining failure of his long, exhausting existence.
His confrontation with the Handler, he supposes, is a long time coming. But it gives him the much needed boost he needs to make his way back up four flights of stairs. He does some of this by foot, alternating in his jumps. He comes across a few guards on his progress, but he’s gone before they can even report his location. When he makes it to the final flight, back up to the tube room, he has the strength to do it all at once. One blink, two blinks and he’s there, standing face to face with Klaus behind the locked door.
Klaus, who is apparently engaged in some serious and covert activity, startles badly. He jumps back with a gasp, clutching his chest. It’s the closest thing to swooning that Five has seen in his life, and he’s been around women in their corsets in the Victorian era.
“Shit!” Klaus is saying while he visibly tries to recover from the shock. “You nearly gave me a heart attack.”
For some reason, Five’s response is to be annoyed. This is not fair. It is startling when people appear out of nowhere and you think you’re alone. When the Handler finally revealed herself to him after three decades in the apocalypse, Five had legitimately believed he was having a stroke. Also, he had promised earnestly to play lookout.
Still. Some habits die hard. Five is not a people person. “Are you about done in here?”
Klaus still looks at him like he’s crazy. “I thought you were the lookout!” he says. He points to Five, gesturing up and down. “If you’re in here, then who’s looking out? Is someone coming?”
“Well, eventually,” Five says. “There’s only so many people I can watch trying to come to kill me -- and you, by extension -- before I need to take alternative measures.”
This only seems to frustrate Klaus. “But you’re the lookout!”
He acts like this reiteration carries some significance that it plainly does not carry.
“Sure,” Five says, plaintive. “I looked. Now, I’m out.”
Klaus narrows his eyes, pursing his lips a little. There is something he wants to say, but it’s not clear that he knows what that is.
Five decides to put them both out of their misery at the effort. “Did you finish in here?” he looks around, eyes pointedly on Klaus’ empty and idle hands. “Or do you need more time?”
At the question, Klaus looks around, as if he’s just remembering what he came in here to do. The whole of his expression is bleak; his shoulders slump ever so slightly, and he seems to become somber to the point of inaction. Desolation, they call it. When your will to act is outweighed by the pointlessness of action. From experience, Five knows it is one of the most dangerous afflictions known to man.
That, and a fully armed swat team hunting you down with orders to kill, kill and kill some more.
Five has to deal with one right now. The other will have to wait.
“Okay,” Five says, putting things in order as best he can. “What did you have to do? Do you need help?”
This is the pragmatic approach.
There is always a pragmatic approach even in especially ridiculous situations. Five needs to believe that, anyway.
Klaus, unfortunately, has never been known for his pragmatism. When precious seconds tick by without a response, Five finds himself unable to wait it out. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “It’s time to go either way.”
This, at the very least, elicits some response from Klaus. He blinks a few times and nods. “Yeah.”
Five waits for more because surely there is more. There are here at Klaus’ beckoning. He’s the one spearheading this campaign. Five isn’t even sure what the campaign is. In terms of ends and means, he’s got a habit of following orders blindly it seems. Probably not the best character trait, not even the most likely character trait given his personality, but he’s all about committing. At least this time he’s picked the right person to follow.
Klaus’ lost expression doesn’t instill much confidence, sadly.
Five hopes he’s picked the right person. He presses himself forward a step. “So?” he prompts.
Klaus looks back at him, almost put off. “So what?”
Five does his best not to roll his eyes. “So what next?” he tries again, more emphatically this time.
“Well,” Klaus says, sounding increasingly less confident as each second passes. “I mean, I thought we’d leave.”
It’s such a pathetically phrased proposition that Five spends about three seconds only gawking. “Okay,” Five finally musters up his self control to reply. “But how?”
Klaus shrugs as if this is an outlandish question. “Isn’t that your department?” He gestures at Five as if that proves anything. “That’s your thing, right?”
The implication finally becomes clear. “You want me to time travel out of here,” he ventures, half hoping he’s got the insinuation wrong. “Right here, right now. You want me to blink us to the future like nothing happened.”
The way he says it should communicate how ridiculous the suggestion is. It’s imbued with false hopes, overconfidence and a total lack of understanding of what it takes to time travel.
Klaus doesn’t quite pick up on the hint. “Sure, right?” he asks instead. “It’s not like you haven’t done it before. I know you’ve done it before. I was there when you did it before.”
“Yeah, I’ve done it before,” Five says with a scowl. “But you’re forgetting that the first time I travelled through time, I got stuck in the apocalypse for 30 years. That’s how we got into this mess in the first place -- because I used time travel badly.”
“But then you got better,” Klaus says as if this is an argument he’s trying to win. “Like, the second time. The second time worked out better.”
Five is increasingly unamused. Which is saying something, given the fact that he’s been held in isolation and tortured. “I turned into a teenager.”
Klaus doesn’t have Five’s restraint. He actually does roll his eyes. “But that third time,” he says. He points his finger at Five. “And the fourth! That fourth one was nearly flawless.”
Klaus is of course referring to the extreme measures he’d taken at the end of the world. How he had managed to jump all seven of them to the past in one piece with no side effects is still something of a mystery to him. He made the jump with minimal calculations, and every time he’s tried to recreate the conditions mathematically, he’s failed to come up with a viable computation to justify his success. The second jump, the one back to the future after fixing the past, had been more thought out, but it was not without its caveats, and Five feels compelled to remind Klaus of that now.
“Flawless?” he repeats, eyebrows arching. “You’re forgetting the part where I spent the first week back in a coma from the strain.”
“But you did, right?” Klaus says. He makes a helpless noise. “You did it.”
“Because the situation was dire!” Five insists. “We were talking about the fate of the world!”
In the distance, there is the sound of fresh yelling. There’s a commotion coming closer, and it doesn’t take any great reasoning skill to figure out that the guards are finally circling back this way. Klaus, annoyingly, takes notice. He bobs his head toward the door. “And this isn’t dire?”
The point has drama, but Five isn’t easily swayed by theatrics. He shakes his head, lips thin. “Dire, maybe. But it’s not the end of the world.”
At this, of all things, Klaus perks up. Emotions darkens his face, and it looks like pain in his eyes as he comes to full attention for the first time since Five’s come back here. “It is, though,” he says. “If we don’t get back, it is. I mean, I’ve done what I had to do, okay? I’ve restored the timeline, the damn timeline, all of it, but who’s to say that they won’t try again? We can’t protect the future if we don’t even know what it looks like anymore. We have to go back.”
It’s Five’s turn to be taken aback. This whole situation has been less than ideal. It’s been unpleasant, uncomfortable and generally stressful. It occurs to him now that he probably needs to know what it is Klaus has been doing. He can feel the dog tags, sitting heavily in his pocket. He knows the deal Klaus meant to make. He knows he broke his contract. The question is how.
“Did you change the timeline?” he asks quietly, ignoring the yelling as it circles nearer to them. “And is that why you’re here? In the tube room? Trying to restore it?”
Klaus twitches, scratching at the back of his neck anxiously as he looks at his feet. “Maybe.”
It’s an admission couched with emotion. This has been hard on Klaus, and Five understands that. He respects it.
He can’t humor it now.
Not now. “How?” he asks flatly.
Klaus looks up at him, eyes shadowed. “Does it matter now?”
Five nods, utterly emphatic. “Yes.”
Klaus wrinkles his nose with a hint of contempt. “It’s none of your business, thank you very much.”
“If this is dire enough to impact the fate of the world, then yes, I think it is my business,” Five replies, crossing his arms over his chest unyieldingly. “Tell me.”
“What?” Klaus says. “No!”
Haughtily, Five tilts his head. “Yes,” he counters. “Or I’m not jumping.”
It’s not a bluff, at least not exactly. Five’s not sure if he’d follow through on the threat or not. He knows that he doesn’t have to, however. He knows Klaus is going to agree with him.
Or they’re both going to die here.
Klaus seemingly has the same thought. He scoffs in disbelief. “That’s idiotic.”
This only cements Five’s position even more. “I need to know.”
“Why?”
“Because if we’re trying to preserve the timeline, as you say, then I need to know what said timeline is,” he said. “I don’t even know what we’re protecting it from at this point. I can’t make these decisions, these dire decisions, without all the facts.”
Klaus, as it turns out, has had enough. He throws his hands up. “Ugh, fine!” he says. He turns around and stops for a moment. Then, he turns back. “Fine. Okay, fine.”
Five waits because fine is a pretty generic descriptor.
Klaus blows out a breath, long and hard, and shakes his head. “When I went to the past, I destroyed the message, the one you got to kill Dave. I destroyed it.”
Five nods, because that much makes sense. “Which means I never kill Dave and you get to have a happily ever after.”
“Only I don’t,” Klaus says. He shakes his head, confused. “Or I wouldn’t. For long. Look, the whole thing, it wouldn’t work. I destroyed the memo so you could never kill Dave. If you never killed Dave, you would never get transferred out of Vietnam. That would keep you from continuing your work and prevent you from making it back to 2019, which in turn--”
“Leads to the apocalypse,” Five says, a little awed. It’s an impressive turn of logic. It’s not just impressive that Klaus has put these pieces together but that the Commission orchestrated it all together. With one order, sent out of sequence, the Commission was able to use Five’s connection and commitment to his family to not only destroy him and them -- but the whole damn planet.
Whoever came up with that roundabout process deserves a damn commendation. Yes, it’s a horrifying thing to conclude but it takes a certain kind of genius.
Klaus doesn’t look impressed. He merely looks resigned. “So, I came back here. I resent the message and Dave is going to die and you’re going to pull the trigger and that’s it, okay? We need to get back to 2019 and makes sure that’s it.”
Five swallows back his awe and returns to the reality of the moment. Standing here, in the tube room, with the Commission amassing outside, and Five has to appreciate not the genius of the Commission but the sacrifice of his brother. Klaus has come here on his own. Klaus has done this of his own free will and volition. Klaus has made the choice.
The choice to kill the man he loves.
It’s a choice that condemns them both to live with the consequences.
It’s a choice that saves the world.
The gravity of that cannot be understated, but what is Five supposed to do? What could Five possibly say? Klaus knows he did the right thing. Klaus knows he’s done what he had to do. Klaus doesn’t want his logic or his pity right now.
Right now, Klaus wants a way out. No, a way home. A way back to something that might make this worthwhile.
Finally, Five nods. The voices are right outside now. They’ve converged; they’re ready.
That’s fine.
Five’s ready, too.
“Okay,” he says steadily, eyes locked on Klaus.
Klaus is shaky in reply. “Okay?”
“Let’s get out of here,” Five says, decisively now. He reaches out, taking Klaus by the hand. Klaus flinches, but Five’s grip is steady. After a long second, Klaus grips back.
It’s the smallest possible hint of affirmation.
It is all Five needs.
Calculations, probabilities -- all the shit he thinks he needs to make a jump.
But there are some elements of the powers, some reality to his ability to wield them that defies logic. Logic only gets him halfway. It’s heart that brings him back.
The power draws up inside of him, and he breathes, deep and heavy through his nose. His mind rushes through the logistics, but he fixates on 2019 with all that he has. It’s not just number or odds. It’s family.
He thinks of Luther and his oversized coats. There’s Diego and his knives. Allison and Claire. Vanya and her violin. Her smiles.
Klaus.
He looks at his brother and, despite the power that rushes through him, he smiles.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Klaus yells at him. Outside, the voice are still yelling, but it’s hard to hear them as the power starts to fluctuate. It’s spinning outside of him, growing in power and strength like a vortex. The sound is rising and Five has no ability to control it.
“Not really!” Five yells back. Because control is a fallacy. The best he can hope for is to channel it, to be a vessel. All the times he’s tried to use his power, it’s failed him. Those time he’s let himself be used by his power?
Well, that’s what success is.
It also happens to be a working definition of family.
A little messed up, a little chaotic.
And everything they need.
“But we’ll figure it out!” he yells as the door opens and the sound reaches a fevered pitch. The blue light is almost blinding him now but his gaze remains fixed on Klaus. “Together!”
There’s no way in hell that should be enough.
But the world blinks out and they’re sucked down into nothing and somehow it is.
-o-
The world comes back in sharp and terrible clarity. Five’s vision returns first, overly bright and glaring. It takes him a moment to make out his surroundings, but he knows that he’s not in the Commission any longer. The sense of displacement is hard to sort through, and it’s not until his eyes focus on Klaus that he remembers to breathe.
Klaus is pale, his face strained. His eyes flicker around him, over Five’s head, and Five’s hearing returns in time to hear his brother speak. “We’re back,” he says, and he sounds surprised. “We’re back.”
It’s relief and it’s pain and a thousand other things that Five doesn’t have time to process. As the energy around him fades, everything starts to fade. This is not merely exhaustion, anymore. When his knees give out in a few seconds, there will be nothing to be done for him but let him fall.
Klaus inhales, raggedly but full. His eyes are wet when he looks at Five again. “You did it,” he says. “You got us home.”
The world still exists.
His family is presumably still alive.
Klaus is sober.
The few seconds are up. Five’s knees give out and he spirals down, taking his tepid consciousness with him. He expects the fall, one hundred percent.
He doesn’t expect Klaus to catch him.
As everything goes dim, he finds himself glad to have the probabilities wrong for once.