Umbrella Academy fic: The Start of the Story (7/16)
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
PART FOUR
PART FIVE
PART SIX
PART SEVEN
PART EIGHT
PART NINE
PART TEN
PART ELEVEN
PART TWELVE
PART THIRTEEN
PART FOURTEEN
PART FIFTEEN
PART SIXTEEN
-o-
Five, understandably, is angry. All his hard work, all his planning, all his sacrifice -- for nothing. Absolutely nothing.
His family, however, seem oblivious to the fact that they just ruined everything. Instead, they’re all over Five, rushing to pick him up, dust him off, make sure he’s okay.
He pushes them away with a growl. “Stop it,” he hisses that. “Just -- stop.”
Luther all but pries him from Vanya’s arms, standing him up on the ground while Diego circles around his back. Allison bends down to look into his eyes and Klaus is biting his nails behind them while Vanya gets to her feet. Ben is so fretful that he forgets his boundaries and passes right through Five several times with a cold rush.
“Stop!” he says, louder now while he pushes their hands away.
“We just want to be sure you’re okay,” Luther says.
“Did she hurt you?” Diego asks before Luther can finish.
Allison shakes her head. “We need to check you over.”
“I’m fine!” Five says, taking a step back while his frustration flare up uncontrollably. “I was perfectly safe until you all came in and started blowing things up.”
“I told you that was too much,” Klaus says.
“You’re the one who kept throwing the bombs!” Allison remarks.
“Because I was following orders!” Klaus protests. He nods seriously at Five. “But I did strenuously object.”
Luther shakes his head, cutting him off. “We knew we couldn’t take chances. They had to see we were serious.”
Five grunts. “Well, good job with that,” he mutters.
“How did she get you anyway? Did she make it through security?” Diego asks. He’s still behind Five, as if to guard his six. That’s exactly the way he’s thinking about it, too; Five can tell.
“Maybe the attack earlier was a decoy, a way to test our defensives to get through to nab you,” Vanya suggests earnestly. She’s on her feet now, hovering closer than Five finds comfortable.
He all but scowls. “She didn’t kidnap me.”
“So how did she communicate?” Allison asks. “Did you finally intercept one of their message points?”
Five sighs in exasperation. “No.”
Their worry, though presses, is wearing their patience thin. Five’s petulance has pushed them to the breaking point.
And beyond.
Luther frowns with his brow knitted together. “Then what the hell is going on, Five?”
There’s no way around it, then. Five had always counted on them figuring it out, and he’d always figured how mad they would be about it. He had just never anticipated having to be here for the blowback.
He’s not sure what it says about him that such knowledge would have given him pause.
“I contacted her,” he blurts, says it plainly as he can. He throws up his hands because he’s got nothing left to give and everything still to lose. “I contacted her. I brought her here. I offered her a deal.”
It’s hard to say who is taking it worst. Klaus is gaping, eyes almost comically big like he thinks this might be a hallucination. Allison folds her arms over her chest, and he imagines this is the look she gives Claire when she’s done something bad. Diego is all but aghast, like Five has had the audacity to insult him personally. Ben actually burns a little brighter, growing slightly more opaque, in the intensity of his reaction. Vanya looks a little heartbroken, like she cannot even conceive what he was thinking.
Luther wrinkles his nose. “A deal? What kind of deal?”
Five sighs, because if they hated that part, then they’re really going to despise what comes next.
This is all unscripted now. They were supposed to be safe by this point. But here they are.
Idiots can’t see their salvation when it’s staring back at them.
They’re so damn annoying that Five wishes he didn’t care so much, but there’s no escaping the fact that he does.
“A deal,” he says again, giving emphasis to his words. There’s still a fire smoldering somewhere while the dust tries to settle around them. “A deal to offer my services to them for the rest of my life if the Commission promises to leave you all alone, unscathed, in a world that doesn’t end.”
“But why?” Luther asks, sounding at the edge of his own patience. “What about the plan?”
“This was the plan,” Diego concludes for him. He shakes his head in disbelief as he walks around Five, falling in line with the others as he looks Five up and down. “Wasn’t it?”
“Of course it was,” Five says. “It was the only possible plan that didn’t involve any of you dying.”
“So, you lied to us?” Luther asks, and it’s a little funny that that’s the part he’s offended by.
“No, he was putting us off,” Allison says. “You knew we’d try to stop you.”
Five shrugs and doesn’t deny anything. “Any interference in my contact with the Handler would result in further complications,” he says. “Complications that we are now going to live out because you did the very thing I didn’t want you to do. How did you know I was gone anyway?”
“I do a nightly patrol,” Diego says.
“And I wake up to anything,” Klaus says. “It’s hell on my sleep cycle. Don’t even get me started on REM--”
“And we’re your family and we live with you!” Luther says over them both. “Of course we found out!”
“But how did you find me?” Five asks. “I mean, if you’d thought I’d been kidnapped--”
“Your phone,” Allison says. “When we bought you the phone, we turned on the GPS.”
Five’s mouth dropped open. “You were spying on me!”
“It’s on all of our phones, jackass,” Diego says.
“And you’re the one keeping secrets and running away!” Luther says.
“To save you all!” Five shouts back. He points at Luther gruffly. “I was trying to save you all. Again.”
“You think that’s what we want?” Vanya asks. “You think we want you to die so we can live?”
Five deflates momentarily. The rest of them are annoying Vanya still knows how to hit him where it hurts. He looks down, quelling his guilt. “I wasn’t going to die,” he says, voice lower now as he looks up again. “At least, not probably. They probably would have try some kind of brainwashing to make me more compliant, but it wouldn’t have been necessary. I would have cooperated with them as long as you were all at play.”
Vanya doesn’t seem assuaged by that answer. It’s Ben, though, who shakes his head. “That’s worse,” he says. “You were going to let them turn you back into their killer.”
It’s a telling statement from Ben, the only one there who knew what it was to be dead.
Which is just perfect.
Five comes up with the perfect plan.
And his family makes him feel like it’s the worst.
“You don’t understand,” he says, as seriously as he can now. He wants them to see it, to know that the stakes are real. He’s seen the end of the world; he knows that not all things are hyperbolic. Some things are as terrible and inescapable as they seem. “Giving myself over to the Commission gave me the power to barter for your safety. We would all get to live. No other approach promised that, not even close. It was the only possible plan.”
Their faces are set now, absolutely resolute.
“But you’d be stuck at the Commision,” Vanya says. “After you worked so hard to get out. Stuck there, forever, doing whatever they wanted.”
“You don’t think I knew that?” Five asks. He looks at them all and shakes his head. “I didn’t go into this blindly. I knew what I was doing. I knew what I was giving up. But it was a sacrifice I was willing to make because I also knew, more than anything, what I was saving.”
“You were ready to make the sacrifice,” Luther says, and he’s speaking for them all. “We weren’t.”
Well, if that isn’t the best and worst thing Five’s ever heard. Sure, it’s great to have a family that loves you like that, but shit, why does he have to have a family that loves him like that? Making plans in the apocalypse was so much easier when it was only Delores questioning his sanity. She couldn’t actively sabotage his best laid plans for the sake of mere sentiment. “But it was the only plan that worked,” Five says again, hoping that maybe this time they’ll understand, that they’ll see that they’ve just nixed their only possible way out of this in one piece.
Naturally, they don’t. “It was a terrible plan!”
They’re all speaking over each other in their worried indignantion.
“That doesn’t even count as a plan!”
“That’s about as good of a plan as getting high!”
“Didn’t you even think about us?”
Five closes his eyes and breathes for a moment. When he opens his eyes, they’re all quiet at least, but they look even more annoyed at him than before.
“Come on,” Luther says as Diego prods him forward. “We’re going home.”
Five drags his feet as Allison takes him by the arm and Ben hovers uncomfortably close to his shoulder. “Why?”
“To keep you safe,” Vanya tells him.
“And to sleep!” Klaus yawns. “Seriously, isn’t anyone else exhausted--”
Five miserably kicks at the ground as he walks. “But we need a plan!”
Luther shakes his head, his hulking form leading the way out of scattered debris to the exit. “We do,” he agrees, slamming the door open with absolutely no effort whatsoever. “But you won’t be the one making it.”
Well, Five tells himself as he allows himself to be dragged home in disgrace, this should be interesting at least.
-o-
When they get home, they don’t plan. No, when they get home, Five is sent to bed and his siblings literally wait outside the door while he gets changed. He draws the line at letting them tuck him into bed, but he has no choice but to crawl under the covers against his wishes and lay there while they turn out the light and close the door.
He waits several moments, then crawls out of bed. Sneaking to the door, he listens for a second. He can hear hushed voices in the hall. Peeking under the door, he can see six pairs of feet lining up and down the hall.
Clearly, he’s not going anywhere tonight.
Not that he has anywhere to go.
Devoid of a plan, devoid of a purpose, Five resigns himself to the inevitable, crawls back to bed and goes to sleep.
-o-
The next morning, Five is startled by Klaus, who is sitting on the floor next to his bed. Five is about ready to rip his throat out from the shock, but Klaus smiles at him and waves. “Hey! Good morning!”
“What the hell are you doing?” Five asks.
“Uh, keeping watch, what does it look like?” Klaus says.
Five looks around in contempt. “It looks like you’re watching me sleep. Which is creepy and weird and a serious invasion of my privacy.”
Klaus holds up his hand. “I can see that, I can, and I argued against this, I did,” he says. “I said, Five may look like a tiny little child, but he still has rights, and we have to respect those rights--”
Five makes his lips into a thin line and glares harder than before as he sits up. “That still doesn’t explain why you’re here.”
“Oh, right,” Klaus says, like he’s just conveniently forgot. “Yeah, see, the others don’t trust you not to be a total idiot.”
“I’m not an idiot,” Five says. “I was saving their lives.”
“I believe the terms that were used were suicidal and unhinged,” Klaus clarifies. He makes an apologetic face. “I would have fought them more, but it’s so nice to not be the one they trust the least in the family for once, you know?”
Five rolls his eyes, swinging his legs off the bed. “So, what then?” he asks, getting up. “They’re downstairs, making a plan?”
“What? No,” Klaus says in an unconvincing lie.
“I bet they didn’t even sleep,” Five says, reaching for his bathrobe. “One can only imagine what sort of ridiculous plan they’ve concocted.”
Klaus scrambles to his feet after Five. “It’s none of your business,” he says. “You’re not invited.”
Five turns back on him. “Of course I’m invited.”
“No, you’re not,” he says. “You made the last plan without us, so this time we get to make one without you.”
“You’re not down there,” Five points out.
Klaus opens his mouth. Then, he closes it, thoughtful. “Because my part of the plan was to distract you,” he says, snapping his fingers as he smiles proudly at remembering. “I was supposed to make sure you didn’t go down until I got the all clear.”
“You can’t stop me,” Five says.
“Oh, but I’ve been training!” Klaus says. “Have you seen me levitate? I am so good at it now, if I can just--”
Klaus starts to shudder, lifting himself off the ground.
Five, for his part, shrugs and teleports right through him.
-o-
They are gathered in the living room.
They are a motley crew this morning. He’s right in that they haven’t slept, and they look much worse for wear. They look tired and drawn, and none of them are sitting up straight when Five pops into the room with a whoosh.
“Five,” Luther says, because he’s the only one who manages to rouse himself. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
“Well, I know that,” Five says shortly. Allison seems to be blinking herself away as Diego scrambles to pick up the knife he’d dropped from his near-slumber. Ben looks nothing but bored, and Vanya is chewing her lip nervously. “But you all made me stay, remember? So I might as well help out with whatever disaster you have planned.”
Luther clears his throat and gets to his feet. This may be a ploy to be imposing. Or it could just be because he’s so tired that he can’t stay awake if he’s on the couch. “No, you can’t be here, in this meeting,” he says, correcting himself for clarity’s sake. “We decided.”
“Why?” Five asks. “I’m the only one who knows how to do any of the probability charts, and my experience with the Commission--”
Diego has rallied herself for this. “Makes you a liability,” he says, sheathing his knife. “You need to keep your plans to the here and now.”
“And then we all die,” Five says. “Is that what you want?”
“Enough probabilities, Five,” Allison says. “We can’t live our lives through equations.”
“But we can certainly die by them,” Five argues. “I was just doing the most practical thing.”
“We’re not arguing about this,” Vanya says before Five can continue gaining his steam for the argument. “We decided. A time-traveling, 58 year old assassin obsessed with saving his family can’t be allowed to make the plans. It’s like leaving Klaus in charge of making runs to the drug store. We have to protect each other from our weaknesses.”
Five’s mouth drops open at the implication. His weakness.
What the hell?
His weakness?
His only weakness is caring about them.
“You just said, though,” he says. “I’m a time-traveling, 58 year old assassin obsessed with saving my family. This is the only thing I can do, the only thing I’m good for. You all have lives to lives, you have people you can still become. I’m past all that, though. Giving myself up for you is the only and best way to redeem anything left of who I am.”
That’s the rawest truth he has, and he says it so bluntly that it surprises himself. He’s known it for years, of course. It’s known it forever, probably. But to say it, to lay it out like that -- the pragmatism only goes so far.
The confession reveals more than he intends of who he is.
It confirms the weakness that they already saw.
The weakness that he alone had yet to accept.
But, here he is.
He swallows back his thoughts, hard.
“It was the only plan I could think of,” he says in conclusion.
They’re all awake now, at least. Allison looks at her hands while Diego pulls out another knife to fiddle with. Luther steps closer to him while Ben puts his hand on Vanya’s shoulder. “I’ll make you a deal,” Luther says.
Five eyes him skeptically.
“You work with us, you make a plan with us, a plan we can all agree on, and we’ll let you help,” he says. “But only if you promise us -- you promise us right here, right now -- that you won’t do anything stupid again.”
Those terms are, in fact, terrible. Five should balk on principle alone.
And yet, what else does he have?
All of his old equations don’t mean shit now. He’s starting over from zero this morning, so maybe this time, he includes them. Maybe this time, they do it together. It probably won’t work, but then, that’s not so different than normal.
“Fine,” Five says. “It’s a deal.”
Just then, there’s a racket in the hall. Klaus frantically stumbles through the door, panting. “Five got away! Five got past me! I was distracting him, but he figured out what you were doing and he blinked -- he blinked…”
Klaus trails off when he sees Five there.
“Oh,” he says, falling short as the tension drains from him. “So I guess you know that already.”
The others roll their eyes, and Five shakes his head. Luther, at least, offers him a good natured if somewhat exasperated smile. “Yeah, we know that,” he says. He nods toward the couch. “Now, come on in and join us.”
“What?” Klaus asks, inching his way in with a note of uncertainty. “Is this an intervention? Are we have a Five intervention? I love interventions, and I’ve never done one from this position before--”
“We’re making a plan,” Luther informs him while Klaus sits gingerly next to Allison. Luther looks at Five. “Aren’t we, Five?”
Five huffs, making his way to one of the free chairs. “We are,” he agrees for the lack of something better to do. “We are making a plan together.”
-o-
Five is an honest man because, frankly, he finds falsehoods tedious most of the time. He doesn’t have the patience for them. In the apocalypse, there had been no one to tell lies to, and his years traveling through time killing people had not necessitated much dishonesty. All it had required was a well trained trigger finger and a good vantage point.
Therefore, Five does not feel particularly invested in his promise to work with his siblings. He merely sees it as the only option he currently has. Their intervention last night effectively ruined his chances; there’s no way to settle this without conflict now. And if they are going to fight, then working together is probably their best -- and likely only -- tactic.
That’s not to say that Five thinks this is going well.
To the contrary, Five thinks this is going poorly.
Very poorly, for the record.
Having spent most of the night awake, his siblings proceed to sleep the rest of the day, which is not only anticlimactic but positively irresponsible. The Academy has already been attacked once as a ploy, but now that his siblings have burned all possible bridges with the Handler, it only seems likely that another attack will be imminent. Further intervention is all but guaranteed.
There’s probably some logic that says that they need to be well rested for such an advance, but only after they have a plan.
An actual plan.
To make matters worse, his siblings no longer trust him to his own devices. They confiscate his phone, as if locking it up with Luther is actually a deterrent that would keep Five from it if he wanted it. He doesn’t, to simply clarify, because he’s never needed technology for any of his equations. As if to mitigate that risk, they refuse to leave Five to his own devices. Instead, Ben is assigned to babysit.
Yes, they use that term.
They call it babysitting.
Five thinks it’s lucky that he loves these assholes, because he really has an overwhelming urge to kill them today. Ben is fortunate, then, that he’s already dead. It means Five can’t kill him.
It also means he can stay up with Five while his siblings sleep.
The day is about as awkward as you’d expect.
It’s not just because Ben’s dead and Five is a grumpy old man who is going through puberty. It’s because the only thing Five wants to do is make a plan and the only thing he’s not allowed to do is make a plan. Of course, the very notion that he’s being told not to do something is infuriating in and of itself. Five has never taken well to direct instruction, especially when it included telling him what he couldn’t do.
The fact that his siblings have assigned a brother without any body to do the task is laughable. Ben can’t stop Five from anything.
And yet, Five endures this treatment because it’s Ben.
“It’s not that bad,” Ben tries to say to him. Without a phone and being denied access to his notebooks, Five has taken to skimming the books in his father’s library. He’d read most of them by the time he was 13, but there are a few new ones. “Really.”
Five takes one off the shelf and skims the first chapter. “Agents could be surrounding the Academy right now, while everyone is sleeping,” he says, not looking up. “They could all die in their beds within a matter of minutes. I’m pretty sure it’s that bad.”
Ben sighs a little. That’s a strange concept to Five since Ben can’t breathe, but he still seems to be partaking in normal human processes. Maybe there’s a form of oxygen in the afterlife. Maybe it’s habit. Maybe Ben is a shared figment of their imaginations. Weirder things can happen. Five fell in love with a mannequin once. “We’re going to figure it out,” Ben says.
Five puts the book back. “Unlikely,” he says. “There’s no chance that this isn’t headed for absolute disaster.”
“Well, we did avert the apocalypse,” Ben reminds him.
“On our third go,” Five points out, running his finger along the spines of another row of books. “It’s not like we’ve exactly got a stellar track record.”
“You don’t believe that,” Ben says.
Five shrugs coolly. “Doesn’t matter what I believe. You have to look at the numbers.”
Ben is unimpressed by this logic. He crosses his arms over his chest, and Five wonders idly if Ben can feel his own body even when others can’t. “The numbers don’t explain us. They can’t.”
Five makes a face. “Actually, they can,” he says. “You just have to be smart enough to understand them.”
Now Ben is wholly unamused. “Then why did you come back? Why did you even go out there and make that deal?”
“Because the odds--” Five starts to say.
But Ben shakes his head. “No, not the odds,” he says. “If you think you’ve got it all figured out, that we’re worthless, then why would you bother? Why not pick a plan that saves yourself?”
That’s a question.
That’s actually a real question.
Why does Five bother? It’s the same question the Handler had asked in so many words. Why can’t Five let go of his family? Why can’t he see that all the cost benefit analysis doesn’t add up. The risks he takes for them. The sacrifices he assumes to be normal on their behalf. It isn’t so much a fantasy, but it is an obsession.
In the apocalypse, it had been the only thing to keep him going. But the apocalypse is over. So what excuse does he have now?
Does he need an excuse?
Or is there something meaningful in the singular truth that it comes back to, the one Five can’t admit in words but can’t deny in action. The thing that defines him, more than anything else.
Five loves his family.
He loves them more than this planet. He loves them more than Delores. He loves them more than his powers, than his intellect, than his own free will. He loves them in an illogical, encompassing, irrational way.
He looks at Ben, the words dying on his tongue, closing off in his throat. In that moment, he’s not annoyed that his plans have been foiled. He’s not put out that all his hard work has gone for not. In that moment, he’s scared of a future where he outlives them again. A future where he’s the last one standing. He’s scared of a future without them.
Because he’s been there.
And he knows he can’t do it again.
He forces himself to swallow, cognizant of Ben’s gaze, which is far too piercing for someone without physical form. It’s a question, the question, and Ben asked it because he already knew the answer.
“Time is fickle,” he finally says, moving away from the bookcase. “It gives you all the opportunities you’ll ever need to fix things, to make things right. It gives you the space you need to rectify your mistakes, make your apologies. Time changes when you change.”
Ben shrugs. “So?”
“So time is powerful,” Five explains as he stops near the couch where Ben is perched. And he smiles at the irony of what comes next. “But only for the living.”
Ben, dead though he may be, still seems to pale.
“If we’re all alive, then there’s still hope,” he says.
“Not if you sell yourself to the Commission.”
“It bought us all time, and time is the only commodity that we need to make things right,” Five says. “I don’t know how. I don’t know. But I know that time gives us opportunities. Death doesn’t.”
Ben nods after a moment, and he seems to accept that. “You think we can’t do it now?”
It’s Five’s turn to shrug. “I don’t know,” he admits. “But I guess it’s some consolation that it’ll be too late to worry about it by the time we find out.”
“We could still win, you know,” Ben tells him.
Five thinks about the equations and the probabilities maps. He thinks about finding bodies in the apocalypse, bodies he had to bury by himself. “And we could lose.”
“It’s not your fault, though,” Ben tells him.
Five makes a face, cocking his head. “Do you think that’s any sort of consolation? Trust me, even when you do everything right, shitty things are still shitty. Having the moral high ground is not nearly as important as winning.”
“You don’t believe that,” Ben says.
“Yeah, I do,” Five retorts. “And you should too.”
Ben contorts his face a little. “What? Because I’m dead?”
“No,” Five returns sharply. “Because you love their stupid, short-sighted asses as much as I do.”
The words are out before he can stop them. It’s moments like these when Five wishes he had an inclination toward falsehood, a tendency toward hyperbole. There’s nothing for it now.
There’s nothing for any of it.
Ben, though he’s known the answer, seems floored to hear it. He’s rendered silent, and Five rolls his eyes, flopping onto a nearby chair. “Are you really going to keep me here all day?”
“That’s the plan,” Ben tells him.
“And it’s not occurred to you that it could be a bad plan?” Five asks.
“Your last plan involved giving yourself over to the Commission,” Ben points out. “I don’t think you get to talk.”
“Well, that’s perfect,” Five mutters, crossing his arms over his chest. “What are we supposed to do anyway?”
Ben picks at a spot on his pants, and again Five wonders if that’s a metaphysical twitch or a manifestation of Ben’s meticulous nature about such things. It’s of no consequence, and Ben smiles. “Don’t worry,” he says, trying to assure Five and failing holistically. “I’m sure we’ll come up with something.”
-o-
Something isn’t remotely productive. In fact, something is a complete and total waste of time, energy and resources. It is, however, pretty fun.
Five has weird ideas about fun, to be honest. Fun in the apocalypse was always a weird concept, and it took him a good two months of living on his own before he remembered that he was actually capable of laughter. Over the years, he’d developed a peculiar sense of humor, and small idiosyncrasies had amused him.
For example, in the apocalypse, he thought it was hilarious when mail still inside a mailbox. His favorite pastime was opening the mail, ripping it all open and reading it from start to finish. He loved seeing the bills that people never ended up paying, and he liked the birthday cards that are still stuffed with ten dollar bills, like that was going to do him any good.
And, when he really wanted to have a good time, he looked through the ads and junk mail. If possible, he’d trace an ad back to the store and see if he can still find the products. He’d bring home as much as he can and compare the product to the ad, and he and Delores laughed for hours when they thought the deal was up to snuff.
Also, Delores was a straight up comedian when she had two glasses of wine, and Five would laugh until his stomach hurt and the stars came out.
It never felt normal, though. The way his voice was the only sound that echoed across the whole planet.
These are the kind of jokes that no one gets anymore, and Five has acclimated to many parts of being back among the world of the living. He doesn’t write on walls much anymore. He’s learned to, yes, throw away his coffee cups in the trash can and not just throw them on the floor. But you know what he’s not all that good at?
Fun.
To be fair, there’s not really a good time for fun. There’s not even an appropriate context. Sure, he likes to chuckle at Klaus antics, and he thinks that Allison actually tells really amusing stories, but the Commission is after them. The equations say that everyone is going to die. So Five hasn’t really had much time for fun.
Today, it is apparently all he has time for.
None of it, for the record, is Five’s idea. He sulks on the chair, arms crossed over his chest, ignoring all of Ben’s advances. No, he doesn’t want to watch TV. No, he doesn’t want to play cards. No, he doesn’t want to turn on some music.
After an hour, Ben is the one who is bored. In what appears to be sheer desperation, he sits forward and narrows his eyes on Five.
“I’ll bet you I can get through that wall faster than you,” he says.
This is not what Five is expecting. He’s so wrapped up in sulking that he’s convinced himself that all of Ben’s overtures will be boring and pointless. “What?”
Ben nods to the wall. “I’ll bet that I can get through that wall before you can,” he reiterates.
That statement is indeed pointless, but Five sits up, trying not to look as interested as he is. Because it’s not boring. Something, it seems, might mean anything. “That’s not fair,” he says. “You’re ethereal. You can literally cease existing when you choose.”
“I’m adapting,” Ben says, and he looks more than a little smug. “Unless you’re scared I’ll beat you.”
Now, Five knows Ben’s trying to get a rise out of him. The psychology is not all that subtle.
But Five also knows that he wants to find out.
And he mostly wants to prove Ben wrong.
“That wall?” he clarifies, pointing at the wall opposite them.
“That wall,” Ben says.
“Any other restrictions?” Five asks.
Ben shakes his head. “We say go and the first one there, wins.”
Five would rather be planning, this is true. But if his family wants to sleep while the Commission stalks them and plans their eradication, then so be it. Five will race Ben’s ghostly ass instead.
“One,” Five starts, on the edge of his seat, his fingers in fists.
“Two,” Ben says, and he’s starting to grin.
They say it together: “Three.”
-o-
They ultimately decide it’s a tie.
After five hours of racing.
Five chooses not to believe it’s a concession that Ben is making because Five has physically exhausted himself to the point where his powers are no longer working. Choosing the narrative is another big thing you learn in the apocalypse. If you don’t, things are too shitty to keep going.
Therefore, it’s a tie.
No one will ever convince him otherwise.
-o-
Five makes dinner with Ben’s help. In other words, Five makes what Ben tells him to make and then proceeds to describe how it smells and tastes in detail so graphic that it feels almost dirty. Ben salivates, and Five eats enough to not feel like passing out anymore and that works.
After dinner, Five starts to feel morose again, so Ben orders him up to bed with promises that they’ll get down to things in the morning.
“It’s still a day we’ll never get back,” Five reflects as he trudges up the stairs. “A wasted day.”
Ben scoffs his offense. “We had fun! I thought we had fun.”
“We did,” Five says. “That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a waste.”
“You can’t be all about saving the family if you don’t have time for family,” Ben reminds him.
“There’s no time for family when we’re dead,” Five counters.
Ben sighs, and Five still doesn’t know how he does that. “I know you’re the smart one, I do,” he says. “But you still have a lot to learn.”
“I just don’t want to be too late,” Five says, and stops on the stairs to implore his brother. “I spent decades being too late and it was the worst thing I’ve ever experienced.”
Ben chews the inside of his noncorporeal lip. “You just have to be a little optimistic for once.”
Five stares at him hard for a moment. “You do remember that you’re dead, right?” he asks. “I’m not sure it’s possible for people who are dead to be optimists. Just as a matter of principle.”
Ben’s lips twist, a little bemused. “How can I not be?”
This hardly seems like a real question. Five waits for him to clarify it, but when he doesn’t, Five points out the obvious. “Possibly because you died an incredibly painful and violent death at a young age.”
Ben is so damn well adjusted that he doesn’t even flinch. In fact, of everything, this part doesn’t seem to offend him at all. “Which is why I know what value there is in hope.”
Ben can get away with saying shit like that because dead people can get away with almost anything. But Five still shakes his head because this isn’t just about Ben. This is about the family, all of them, together. “Hope can’t be blind, though.”
At this, Ben actually laughs. “Isn’t that kind of the whole point?”
“I don’t think any of you appreciate just what we’re up against,” he says. “How hard this is going to be. If you did, you wouldn’t be sleeping and jumping through walls.”
Ben rolls his eyes. “You’re the one who doesn’t get it.”
“Get what?” Five returns. “People are going to die. Our family is going to die.”
“Okay, so what?” Ben says.
Five scrunches up his face in confusion. “How can you not care? You, more than all the rest?”
“Because,” Ben says, and he’s speaking emphatically now. “You said it yourself: you don’t know what the future is going to hold. You make calculations, but that’s not certainty. And what does it matter -- as long as we’re together?”
“How does togetherness actually fix anything?” Five asks with growing incredulity now.
“Dying together is better than living apart,” Ben tells him, starting back up the stairs. “I know from experience.”
Five stares after him for a moment.
Damn it.
Ben might have a point.
Five concedes nothing, but he keeps his mouth closed as he ascends the stairs after his brother.
-o-
Ben spares him the indignity of staying in his room while he sleeps, and Five contemplates using that kindness as a way to start his equations again, but he finds himself demotivated. He’s tired, after all. He can’t possibly do the math needed to save his family if he’s as weary as he is.
That’s his rationale anyway. It’s the reason he gives for changing into his pajamas and curling up beneath the sheets. He reminds himself that today was a good day. Maybe context doesn’t matter as much as he thinks. Maybe it’s okay for a day to be good regardless of the wider events. Maybe wasting time is just another way of saying living life, and Five knows that all the things he’s mastered in his long years, that one isn’t one of them.
Maybe tomorrow will be okay, too.
He thinks, he hopes.
He dreams.
-o-
It comes in flashes of light and dark, and he’s drawn through time and space with a force that makes his head hurt. It feels like he’s being ripped apart as he makes his hands into fists and cuts through the air. It cuts like melting butter as he skips through the ages, further and further away that when he looks back, there’s nothing there.
Turning around, he finds the air cold and the sky gray. The building in front of him is dreary and sprawling, and he’s drawn up the stone steps, one, two, three, four.
When he blinks, he’s being handed a briefcase. The Handler, prim and proper with red lips, smiles. “And what would you do? To solve the problem with the Hargreeves.”
He hears himself laugh, familiar and mirthless, as he takes the briefcase. “That’s easy,” he says. “You rely on their sentimentality. You exploit the fact that they will never allow any of their members to do anything alone, which means they will always, invariably, show up together. If you can catch one of them, you can catch all of them.”
“They fight like mad to protect one another, though,” the Handler advises. “How do you compensate?”
“They’re limited, finite,” Five says. “They aren’t willing to risk each other, and we have an expendable army that can pass through the ages. Whatever resistance they mount, you simply have to overwhelm it. If it takes a while, what does it matter?”
The Handler smiles, obviously delighted. “You can never be trusted, but there’s a reason I can’t let you go,” she enthuses. She reaches out, a finger running down his cheek. “You do know the best part, don’t you?”
Five scoffs. “No. What?”
“You did all this to save them, and that’s why they’re in danger,” she says sweetly. She makes a grand gesture. “To think you saved the world. And all it cost you was everyone you ever loved.”
Five finds himself scowling. “They’ll fight you.”
“And, sooner or later, they’ll lose,” she says. She manages to almost look sad, but her eyes give her away. “What are you going to do, Five?”
“You may be right, maybe we can’t win,” he says. “But then I guess I’ll just have to lose on my terms.”
Now she looks at him like he’s the cutest thing in the whole damn world. “And how are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet,” he says, and he opens the briefcase slowly as he glares. “But I’m sure it’ll come to me.”
The light flashes again, breaking through the gray tones as the air is sucked from his lungs and he’s pulled through time and space and space and time and--
-o-
Five wakes up with a start.
A dream, he tells himself before he allows himself to acknowledge the horror. It’s a dream, a dream, a dream. He’s prone to dreams, always has been. His mind doesn’t know how to stop working, even when he’s sleeping. They’re idle; they’re nonsensical. They have no basis in reality whatsoever. Dreams are an expression of the subconscious, pulling from what you know and feel indiscriminately, creating lurid, fantastical and sometimes terrifying lies from plausible facts.
After all, there’s no basis in reality that suggest that Five is in cahoots with the Commission anymore. There is no truth to the idea that he would ever willingly work with her at his family’s expense. That’s ludicrous.
However, the notion that Five has put them in jeopardy, that Five’s past actions have formed the Commission’s current response to the threat he poses -- well, that’s valid.
And the idea that the Commission will keep coming with unrelenting force with a willingness to expend as many resources as necessary?
That’s undisputable.
Five’s dream is more truth than lie for once. His subconscious screaming to be heard.
He climbs out of bed, worry starting to build in the pit of his stomach.
He can dream of countless ways to lose his family.
And not a single one to save them.
PART TWO
PART THREE
PART FOUR
PART FIVE
PART SIX
PART SEVEN
PART EIGHT
PART NINE
PART TEN
PART ELEVEN
PART TWELVE
PART THIRTEEN
PART FOURTEEN
PART FIFTEEN
PART SIXTEEN
-o-
Five, understandably, is angry. All his hard work, all his planning, all his sacrifice -- for nothing. Absolutely nothing.
His family, however, seem oblivious to the fact that they just ruined everything. Instead, they’re all over Five, rushing to pick him up, dust him off, make sure he’s okay.
He pushes them away with a growl. “Stop it,” he hisses that. “Just -- stop.”
Luther all but pries him from Vanya’s arms, standing him up on the ground while Diego circles around his back. Allison bends down to look into his eyes and Klaus is biting his nails behind them while Vanya gets to her feet. Ben is so fretful that he forgets his boundaries and passes right through Five several times with a cold rush.
“Stop!” he says, louder now while he pushes their hands away.
“We just want to be sure you’re okay,” Luther says.
“Did she hurt you?” Diego asks before Luther can finish.
Allison shakes her head. “We need to check you over.”
“I’m fine!” Five says, taking a step back while his frustration flare up uncontrollably. “I was perfectly safe until you all came in and started blowing things up.”
“I told you that was too much,” Klaus says.
“You’re the one who kept throwing the bombs!” Allison remarks.
“Because I was following orders!” Klaus protests. He nods seriously at Five. “But I did strenuously object.”
Luther shakes his head, cutting him off. “We knew we couldn’t take chances. They had to see we were serious.”
Five grunts. “Well, good job with that,” he mutters.
“How did she get you anyway? Did she make it through security?” Diego asks. He’s still behind Five, as if to guard his six. That’s exactly the way he’s thinking about it, too; Five can tell.
“Maybe the attack earlier was a decoy, a way to test our defensives to get through to nab you,” Vanya suggests earnestly. She’s on her feet now, hovering closer than Five finds comfortable.
He all but scowls. “She didn’t kidnap me.”
“So how did she communicate?” Allison asks. “Did you finally intercept one of their message points?”
Five sighs in exasperation. “No.”
Their worry, though presses, is wearing their patience thin. Five’s petulance has pushed them to the breaking point.
And beyond.
Luther frowns with his brow knitted together. “Then what the hell is going on, Five?”
There’s no way around it, then. Five had always counted on them figuring it out, and he’d always figured how mad they would be about it. He had just never anticipated having to be here for the blowback.
He’s not sure what it says about him that such knowledge would have given him pause.
“I contacted her,” he blurts, says it plainly as he can. He throws up his hands because he’s got nothing left to give and everything still to lose. “I contacted her. I brought her here. I offered her a deal.”
It’s hard to say who is taking it worst. Klaus is gaping, eyes almost comically big like he thinks this might be a hallucination. Allison folds her arms over her chest, and he imagines this is the look she gives Claire when she’s done something bad. Diego is all but aghast, like Five has had the audacity to insult him personally. Ben actually burns a little brighter, growing slightly more opaque, in the intensity of his reaction. Vanya looks a little heartbroken, like she cannot even conceive what he was thinking.
Luther wrinkles his nose. “A deal? What kind of deal?”
Five sighs, because if they hated that part, then they’re really going to despise what comes next.
This is all unscripted now. They were supposed to be safe by this point. But here they are.
Idiots can’t see their salvation when it’s staring back at them.
They’re so damn annoying that Five wishes he didn’t care so much, but there’s no escaping the fact that he does.
“A deal,” he says again, giving emphasis to his words. There’s still a fire smoldering somewhere while the dust tries to settle around them. “A deal to offer my services to them for the rest of my life if the Commission promises to leave you all alone, unscathed, in a world that doesn’t end.”
“But why?” Luther asks, sounding at the edge of his own patience. “What about the plan?”
“This was the plan,” Diego concludes for him. He shakes his head in disbelief as he walks around Five, falling in line with the others as he looks Five up and down. “Wasn’t it?”
“Of course it was,” Five says. “It was the only possible plan that didn’t involve any of you dying.”
“So, you lied to us?” Luther asks, and it’s a little funny that that’s the part he’s offended by.
“No, he was putting us off,” Allison says. “You knew we’d try to stop you.”
Five shrugs and doesn’t deny anything. “Any interference in my contact with the Handler would result in further complications,” he says. “Complications that we are now going to live out because you did the very thing I didn’t want you to do. How did you know I was gone anyway?”
“I do a nightly patrol,” Diego says.
“And I wake up to anything,” Klaus says. “It’s hell on my sleep cycle. Don’t even get me started on REM--”
“And we’re your family and we live with you!” Luther says over them both. “Of course we found out!”
“But how did you find me?” Five asks. “I mean, if you’d thought I’d been kidnapped--”
“Your phone,” Allison says. “When we bought you the phone, we turned on the GPS.”
Five’s mouth dropped open. “You were spying on me!”
“It’s on all of our phones, jackass,” Diego says.
“And you’re the one keeping secrets and running away!” Luther says.
“To save you all!” Five shouts back. He points at Luther gruffly. “I was trying to save you all. Again.”
“You think that’s what we want?” Vanya asks. “You think we want you to die so we can live?”
Five deflates momentarily. The rest of them are annoying Vanya still knows how to hit him where it hurts. He looks down, quelling his guilt. “I wasn’t going to die,” he says, voice lower now as he looks up again. “At least, not probably. They probably would have try some kind of brainwashing to make me more compliant, but it wouldn’t have been necessary. I would have cooperated with them as long as you were all at play.”
Vanya doesn’t seem assuaged by that answer. It’s Ben, though, who shakes his head. “That’s worse,” he says. “You were going to let them turn you back into their killer.”
It’s a telling statement from Ben, the only one there who knew what it was to be dead.
Which is just perfect.
Five comes up with the perfect plan.
And his family makes him feel like it’s the worst.
“You don’t understand,” he says, as seriously as he can now. He wants them to see it, to know that the stakes are real. He’s seen the end of the world; he knows that not all things are hyperbolic. Some things are as terrible and inescapable as they seem. “Giving myself over to the Commission gave me the power to barter for your safety. We would all get to live. No other approach promised that, not even close. It was the only possible plan.”
Their faces are set now, absolutely resolute.
“But you’d be stuck at the Commision,” Vanya says. “After you worked so hard to get out. Stuck there, forever, doing whatever they wanted.”
“You don’t think I knew that?” Five asks. He looks at them all and shakes his head. “I didn’t go into this blindly. I knew what I was doing. I knew what I was giving up. But it was a sacrifice I was willing to make because I also knew, more than anything, what I was saving.”
“You were ready to make the sacrifice,” Luther says, and he’s speaking for them all. “We weren’t.”
Well, if that isn’t the best and worst thing Five’s ever heard. Sure, it’s great to have a family that loves you like that, but shit, why does he have to have a family that loves him like that? Making plans in the apocalypse was so much easier when it was only Delores questioning his sanity. She couldn’t actively sabotage his best laid plans for the sake of mere sentiment. “But it was the only plan that worked,” Five says again, hoping that maybe this time they’ll understand, that they’ll see that they’ve just nixed their only possible way out of this in one piece.
Naturally, they don’t. “It was a terrible plan!”
They’re all speaking over each other in their worried indignantion.
“That doesn’t even count as a plan!”
“That’s about as good of a plan as getting high!”
“Didn’t you even think about us?”
Five closes his eyes and breathes for a moment. When he opens his eyes, they’re all quiet at least, but they look even more annoyed at him than before.
“Come on,” Luther says as Diego prods him forward. “We’re going home.”
Five drags his feet as Allison takes him by the arm and Ben hovers uncomfortably close to his shoulder. “Why?”
“To keep you safe,” Vanya tells him.
“And to sleep!” Klaus yawns. “Seriously, isn’t anyone else exhausted--”
Five miserably kicks at the ground as he walks. “But we need a plan!”
Luther shakes his head, his hulking form leading the way out of scattered debris to the exit. “We do,” he agrees, slamming the door open with absolutely no effort whatsoever. “But you won’t be the one making it.”
Well, Five tells himself as he allows himself to be dragged home in disgrace, this should be interesting at least.
-o-
When they get home, they don’t plan. No, when they get home, Five is sent to bed and his siblings literally wait outside the door while he gets changed. He draws the line at letting them tuck him into bed, but he has no choice but to crawl under the covers against his wishes and lay there while they turn out the light and close the door.
He waits several moments, then crawls out of bed. Sneaking to the door, he listens for a second. He can hear hushed voices in the hall. Peeking under the door, he can see six pairs of feet lining up and down the hall.
Clearly, he’s not going anywhere tonight.
Not that he has anywhere to go.
Devoid of a plan, devoid of a purpose, Five resigns himself to the inevitable, crawls back to bed and goes to sleep.
-o-
The next morning, Five is startled by Klaus, who is sitting on the floor next to his bed. Five is about ready to rip his throat out from the shock, but Klaus smiles at him and waves. “Hey! Good morning!”
“What the hell are you doing?” Five asks.
“Uh, keeping watch, what does it look like?” Klaus says.
Five looks around in contempt. “It looks like you’re watching me sleep. Which is creepy and weird and a serious invasion of my privacy.”
Klaus holds up his hand. “I can see that, I can, and I argued against this, I did,” he says. “I said, Five may look like a tiny little child, but he still has rights, and we have to respect those rights--”
Five makes his lips into a thin line and glares harder than before as he sits up. “That still doesn’t explain why you’re here.”
“Oh, right,” Klaus says, like he’s just conveniently forgot. “Yeah, see, the others don’t trust you not to be a total idiot.”
“I’m not an idiot,” Five says. “I was saving their lives.”
“I believe the terms that were used were suicidal and unhinged,” Klaus clarifies. He makes an apologetic face. “I would have fought them more, but it’s so nice to not be the one they trust the least in the family for once, you know?”
Five rolls his eyes, swinging his legs off the bed. “So, what then?” he asks, getting up. “They’re downstairs, making a plan?”
“What? No,” Klaus says in an unconvincing lie.
“I bet they didn’t even sleep,” Five says, reaching for his bathrobe. “One can only imagine what sort of ridiculous plan they’ve concocted.”
Klaus scrambles to his feet after Five. “It’s none of your business,” he says. “You’re not invited.”
Five turns back on him. “Of course I’m invited.”
“No, you’re not,” he says. “You made the last plan without us, so this time we get to make one without you.”
“You’re not down there,” Five points out.
Klaus opens his mouth. Then, he closes it, thoughtful. “Because my part of the plan was to distract you,” he says, snapping his fingers as he smiles proudly at remembering. “I was supposed to make sure you didn’t go down until I got the all clear.”
“You can’t stop me,” Five says.
“Oh, but I’ve been training!” Klaus says. “Have you seen me levitate? I am so good at it now, if I can just--”
Klaus starts to shudder, lifting himself off the ground.
Five, for his part, shrugs and teleports right through him.
-o-
They are gathered in the living room.
They are a motley crew this morning. He’s right in that they haven’t slept, and they look much worse for wear. They look tired and drawn, and none of them are sitting up straight when Five pops into the room with a whoosh.
“Five,” Luther says, because he’s the only one who manages to rouse himself. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
“Well, I know that,” Five says shortly. Allison seems to be blinking herself away as Diego scrambles to pick up the knife he’d dropped from his near-slumber. Ben looks nothing but bored, and Vanya is chewing her lip nervously. “But you all made me stay, remember? So I might as well help out with whatever disaster you have planned.”
Luther clears his throat and gets to his feet. This may be a ploy to be imposing. Or it could just be because he’s so tired that he can’t stay awake if he’s on the couch. “No, you can’t be here, in this meeting,” he says, correcting himself for clarity’s sake. “We decided.”
“Why?” Five asks. “I’m the only one who knows how to do any of the probability charts, and my experience with the Commission--”
Diego has rallied herself for this. “Makes you a liability,” he says, sheathing his knife. “You need to keep your plans to the here and now.”
“And then we all die,” Five says. “Is that what you want?”
“Enough probabilities, Five,” Allison says. “We can’t live our lives through equations.”
“But we can certainly die by them,” Five argues. “I was just doing the most practical thing.”
“We’re not arguing about this,” Vanya says before Five can continue gaining his steam for the argument. “We decided. A time-traveling, 58 year old assassin obsessed with saving his family can’t be allowed to make the plans. It’s like leaving Klaus in charge of making runs to the drug store. We have to protect each other from our weaknesses.”
Five’s mouth drops open at the implication. His weakness.
What the hell?
His weakness?
His only weakness is caring about them.
“You just said, though,” he says. “I’m a time-traveling, 58 year old assassin obsessed with saving my family. This is the only thing I can do, the only thing I’m good for. You all have lives to lives, you have people you can still become. I’m past all that, though. Giving myself up for you is the only and best way to redeem anything left of who I am.”
That’s the rawest truth he has, and he says it so bluntly that it surprises himself. He’s known it for years, of course. It’s known it forever, probably. But to say it, to lay it out like that -- the pragmatism only goes so far.
The confession reveals more than he intends of who he is.
It confirms the weakness that they already saw.
The weakness that he alone had yet to accept.
But, here he is.
He swallows back his thoughts, hard.
“It was the only plan I could think of,” he says in conclusion.
They’re all awake now, at least. Allison looks at her hands while Diego pulls out another knife to fiddle with. Luther steps closer to him while Ben puts his hand on Vanya’s shoulder. “I’ll make you a deal,” Luther says.
Five eyes him skeptically.
“You work with us, you make a plan with us, a plan we can all agree on, and we’ll let you help,” he says. “But only if you promise us -- you promise us right here, right now -- that you won’t do anything stupid again.”
Those terms are, in fact, terrible. Five should balk on principle alone.
And yet, what else does he have?
All of his old equations don’t mean shit now. He’s starting over from zero this morning, so maybe this time, he includes them. Maybe this time, they do it together. It probably won’t work, but then, that’s not so different than normal.
“Fine,” Five says. “It’s a deal.”
Just then, there’s a racket in the hall. Klaus frantically stumbles through the door, panting. “Five got away! Five got past me! I was distracting him, but he figured out what you were doing and he blinked -- he blinked…”
Klaus trails off when he sees Five there.
“Oh,” he says, falling short as the tension drains from him. “So I guess you know that already.”
The others roll their eyes, and Five shakes his head. Luther, at least, offers him a good natured if somewhat exasperated smile. “Yeah, we know that,” he says. He nods toward the couch. “Now, come on in and join us.”
“What?” Klaus asks, inching his way in with a note of uncertainty. “Is this an intervention? Are we have a Five intervention? I love interventions, and I’ve never done one from this position before--”
“We’re making a plan,” Luther informs him while Klaus sits gingerly next to Allison. Luther looks at Five. “Aren’t we, Five?”
Five huffs, making his way to one of the free chairs. “We are,” he agrees for the lack of something better to do. “We are making a plan together.”
-o-
Five is an honest man because, frankly, he finds falsehoods tedious most of the time. He doesn’t have the patience for them. In the apocalypse, there had been no one to tell lies to, and his years traveling through time killing people had not necessitated much dishonesty. All it had required was a well trained trigger finger and a good vantage point.
Therefore, Five does not feel particularly invested in his promise to work with his siblings. He merely sees it as the only option he currently has. Their intervention last night effectively ruined his chances; there’s no way to settle this without conflict now. And if they are going to fight, then working together is probably their best -- and likely only -- tactic.
That’s not to say that Five thinks this is going well.
To the contrary, Five thinks this is going poorly.
Very poorly, for the record.
Having spent most of the night awake, his siblings proceed to sleep the rest of the day, which is not only anticlimactic but positively irresponsible. The Academy has already been attacked once as a ploy, but now that his siblings have burned all possible bridges with the Handler, it only seems likely that another attack will be imminent. Further intervention is all but guaranteed.
There’s probably some logic that says that they need to be well rested for such an advance, but only after they have a plan.
An actual plan.
To make matters worse, his siblings no longer trust him to his own devices. They confiscate his phone, as if locking it up with Luther is actually a deterrent that would keep Five from it if he wanted it. He doesn’t, to simply clarify, because he’s never needed technology for any of his equations. As if to mitigate that risk, they refuse to leave Five to his own devices. Instead, Ben is assigned to babysit.
Yes, they use that term.
They call it babysitting.
Five thinks it’s lucky that he loves these assholes, because he really has an overwhelming urge to kill them today. Ben is fortunate, then, that he’s already dead. It means Five can’t kill him.
It also means he can stay up with Five while his siblings sleep.
The day is about as awkward as you’d expect.
It’s not just because Ben’s dead and Five is a grumpy old man who is going through puberty. It’s because the only thing Five wants to do is make a plan and the only thing he’s not allowed to do is make a plan. Of course, the very notion that he’s being told not to do something is infuriating in and of itself. Five has never taken well to direct instruction, especially when it included telling him what he couldn’t do.
The fact that his siblings have assigned a brother without any body to do the task is laughable. Ben can’t stop Five from anything.
And yet, Five endures this treatment because it’s Ben.
“It’s not that bad,” Ben tries to say to him. Without a phone and being denied access to his notebooks, Five has taken to skimming the books in his father’s library. He’d read most of them by the time he was 13, but there are a few new ones. “Really.”
Five takes one off the shelf and skims the first chapter. “Agents could be surrounding the Academy right now, while everyone is sleeping,” he says, not looking up. “They could all die in their beds within a matter of minutes. I’m pretty sure it’s that bad.”
Ben sighs a little. That’s a strange concept to Five since Ben can’t breathe, but he still seems to be partaking in normal human processes. Maybe there’s a form of oxygen in the afterlife. Maybe it’s habit. Maybe Ben is a shared figment of their imaginations. Weirder things can happen. Five fell in love with a mannequin once. “We’re going to figure it out,” Ben says.
Five puts the book back. “Unlikely,” he says. “There’s no chance that this isn’t headed for absolute disaster.”
“Well, we did avert the apocalypse,” Ben reminds him.
“On our third go,” Five points out, running his finger along the spines of another row of books. “It’s not like we’ve exactly got a stellar track record.”
“You don’t believe that,” Ben says.
Five shrugs coolly. “Doesn’t matter what I believe. You have to look at the numbers.”
Ben is unimpressed by this logic. He crosses his arms over his chest, and Five wonders idly if Ben can feel his own body even when others can’t. “The numbers don’t explain us. They can’t.”
Five makes a face. “Actually, they can,” he says. “You just have to be smart enough to understand them.”
Now Ben is wholly unamused. “Then why did you come back? Why did you even go out there and make that deal?”
“Because the odds--” Five starts to say.
But Ben shakes his head. “No, not the odds,” he says. “If you think you’ve got it all figured out, that we’re worthless, then why would you bother? Why not pick a plan that saves yourself?”
That’s a question.
That’s actually a real question.
Why does Five bother? It’s the same question the Handler had asked in so many words. Why can’t Five let go of his family? Why can’t he see that all the cost benefit analysis doesn’t add up. The risks he takes for them. The sacrifices he assumes to be normal on their behalf. It isn’t so much a fantasy, but it is an obsession.
In the apocalypse, it had been the only thing to keep him going. But the apocalypse is over. So what excuse does he have now?
Does he need an excuse?
Or is there something meaningful in the singular truth that it comes back to, the one Five can’t admit in words but can’t deny in action. The thing that defines him, more than anything else.
Five loves his family.
He loves them more than this planet. He loves them more than Delores. He loves them more than his powers, than his intellect, than his own free will. He loves them in an illogical, encompassing, irrational way.
He looks at Ben, the words dying on his tongue, closing off in his throat. In that moment, he’s not annoyed that his plans have been foiled. He’s not put out that all his hard work has gone for not. In that moment, he’s scared of a future where he outlives them again. A future where he’s the last one standing. He’s scared of a future without them.
Because he’s been there.
And he knows he can’t do it again.
He forces himself to swallow, cognizant of Ben’s gaze, which is far too piercing for someone without physical form. It’s a question, the question, and Ben asked it because he already knew the answer.
“Time is fickle,” he finally says, moving away from the bookcase. “It gives you all the opportunities you’ll ever need to fix things, to make things right. It gives you the space you need to rectify your mistakes, make your apologies. Time changes when you change.”
Ben shrugs. “So?”
“So time is powerful,” Five explains as he stops near the couch where Ben is perched. And he smiles at the irony of what comes next. “But only for the living.”
Ben, dead though he may be, still seems to pale.
“If we’re all alive, then there’s still hope,” he says.
“Not if you sell yourself to the Commission.”
“It bought us all time, and time is the only commodity that we need to make things right,” Five says. “I don’t know how. I don’t know. But I know that time gives us opportunities. Death doesn’t.”
Ben nods after a moment, and he seems to accept that. “You think we can’t do it now?”
It’s Five’s turn to shrug. “I don’t know,” he admits. “But I guess it’s some consolation that it’ll be too late to worry about it by the time we find out.”
“We could still win, you know,” Ben tells him.
Five thinks about the equations and the probabilities maps. He thinks about finding bodies in the apocalypse, bodies he had to bury by himself. “And we could lose.”
“It’s not your fault, though,” Ben tells him.
Five makes a face, cocking his head. “Do you think that’s any sort of consolation? Trust me, even when you do everything right, shitty things are still shitty. Having the moral high ground is not nearly as important as winning.”
“You don’t believe that,” Ben says.
“Yeah, I do,” Five retorts. “And you should too.”
Ben contorts his face a little. “What? Because I’m dead?”
“No,” Five returns sharply. “Because you love their stupid, short-sighted asses as much as I do.”
The words are out before he can stop them. It’s moments like these when Five wishes he had an inclination toward falsehood, a tendency toward hyperbole. There’s nothing for it now.
There’s nothing for any of it.
Ben, though he’s known the answer, seems floored to hear it. He’s rendered silent, and Five rolls his eyes, flopping onto a nearby chair. “Are you really going to keep me here all day?”
“That’s the plan,” Ben tells him.
“And it’s not occurred to you that it could be a bad plan?” Five asks.
“Your last plan involved giving yourself over to the Commission,” Ben points out. “I don’t think you get to talk.”
“Well, that’s perfect,” Five mutters, crossing his arms over his chest. “What are we supposed to do anyway?”
Ben picks at a spot on his pants, and again Five wonders if that’s a metaphysical twitch or a manifestation of Ben’s meticulous nature about such things. It’s of no consequence, and Ben smiles. “Don’t worry,” he says, trying to assure Five and failing holistically. “I’m sure we’ll come up with something.”
-o-
Something isn’t remotely productive. In fact, something is a complete and total waste of time, energy and resources. It is, however, pretty fun.
Five has weird ideas about fun, to be honest. Fun in the apocalypse was always a weird concept, and it took him a good two months of living on his own before he remembered that he was actually capable of laughter. Over the years, he’d developed a peculiar sense of humor, and small idiosyncrasies had amused him.
For example, in the apocalypse, he thought it was hilarious when mail still inside a mailbox. His favorite pastime was opening the mail, ripping it all open and reading it from start to finish. He loved seeing the bills that people never ended up paying, and he liked the birthday cards that are still stuffed with ten dollar bills, like that was going to do him any good.
And, when he really wanted to have a good time, he looked through the ads and junk mail. If possible, he’d trace an ad back to the store and see if he can still find the products. He’d bring home as much as he can and compare the product to the ad, and he and Delores laughed for hours when they thought the deal was up to snuff.
Also, Delores was a straight up comedian when she had two glasses of wine, and Five would laugh until his stomach hurt and the stars came out.
It never felt normal, though. The way his voice was the only sound that echoed across the whole planet.
These are the kind of jokes that no one gets anymore, and Five has acclimated to many parts of being back among the world of the living. He doesn’t write on walls much anymore. He’s learned to, yes, throw away his coffee cups in the trash can and not just throw them on the floor. But you know what he’s not all that good at?
Fun.
To be fair, there’s not really a good time for fun. There’s not even an appropriate context. Sure, he likes to chuckle at Klaus antics, and he thinks that Allison actually tells really amusing stories, but the Commission is after them. The equations say that everyone is going to die. So Five hasn’t really had much time for fun.
Today, it is apparently all he has time for.
None of it, for the record, is Five’s idea. He sulks on the chair, arms crossed over his chest, ignoring all of Ben’s advances. No, he doesn’t want to watch TV. No, he doesn’t want to play cards. No, he doesn’t want to turn on some music.
After an hour, Ben is the one who is bored. In what appears to be sheer desperation, he sits forward and narrows his eyes on Five.
“I’ll bet you I can get through that wall faster than you,” he says.
This is not what Five is expecting. He’s so wrapped up in sulking that he’s convinced himself that all of Ben’s overtures will be boring and pointless. “What?”
Ben nods to the wall. “I’ll bet that I can get through that wall before you can,” he reiterates.
That statement is indeed pointless, but Five sits up, trying not to look as interested as he is. Because it’s not boring. Something, it seems, might mean anything. “That’s not fair,” he says. “You’re ethereal. You can literally cease existing when you choose.”
“I’m adapting,” Ben says, and he looks more than a little smug. “Unless you’re scared I’ll beat you.”
Now, Five knows Ben’s trying to get a rise out of him. The psychology is not all that subtle.
But Five also knows that he wants to find out.
And he mostly wants to prove Ben wrong.
“That wall?” he clarifies, pointing at the wall opposite them.
“That wall,” Ben says.
“Any other restrictions?” Five asks.
Ben shakes his head. “We say go and the first one there, wins.”
Five would rather be planning, this is true. But if his family wants to sleep while the Commission stalks them and plans their eradication, then so be it. Five will race Ben’s ghostly ass instead.
“One,” Five starts, on the edge of his seat, his fingers in fists.
“Two,” Ben says, and he’s starting to grin.
They say it together: “Three.”
-o-
They ultimately decide it’s a tie.
After five hours of racing.
Five chooses not to believe it’s a concession that Ben is making because Five has physically exhausted himself to the point where his powers are no longer working. Choosing the narrative is another big thing you learn in the apocalypse. If you don’t, things are too shitty to keep going.
Therefore, it’s a tie.
No one will ever convince him otherwise.
-o-
Five makes dinner with Ben’s help. In other words, Five makes what Ben tells him to make and then proceeds to describe how it smells and tastes in detail so graphic that it feels almost dirty. Ben salivates, and Five eats enough to not feel like passing out anymore and that works.
After dinner, Five starts to feel morose again, so Ben orders him up to bed with promises that they’ll get down to things in the morning.
“It’s still a day we’ll never get back,” Five reflects as he trudges up the stairs. “A wasted day.”
Ben scoffs his offense. “We had fun! I thought we had fun.”
“We did,” Five says. “That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a waste.”
“You can’t be all about saving the family if you don’t have time for family,” Ben reminds him.
“There’s no time for family when we’re dead,” Five counters.
Ben sighs, and Five still doesn’t know how he does that. “I know you’re the smart one, I do,” he says. “But you still have a lot to learn.”
“I just don’t want to be too late,” Five says, and stops on the stairs to implore his brother. “I spent decades being too late and it was the worst thing I’ve ever experienced.”
Ben chews the inside of his noncorporeal lip. “You just have to be a little optimistic for once.”
Five stares at him hard for a moment. “You do remember that you’re dead, right?” he asks. “I’m not sure it’s possible for people who are dead to be optimists. Just as a matter of principle.”
Ben’s lips twist, a little bemused. “How can I not be?”
This hardly seems like a real question. Five waits for him to clarify it, but when he doesn’t, Five points out the obvious. “Possibly because you died an incredibly painful and violent death at a young age.”
Ben is so damn well adjusted that he doesn’t even flinch. In fact, of everything, this part doesn’t seem to offend him at all. “Which is why I know what value there is in hope.”
Ben can get away with saying shit like that because dead people can get away with almost anything. But Five still shakes his head because this isn’t just about Ben. This is about the family, all of them, together. “Hope can’t be blind, though.”
At this, Ben actually laughs. “Isn’t that kind of the whole point?”
“I don’t think any of you appreciate just what we’re up against,” he says. “How hard this is going to be. If you did, you wouldn’t be sleeping and jumping through walls.”
Ben rolls his eyes. “You’re the one who doesn’t get it.”
“Get what?” Five returns. “People are going to die. Our family is going to die.”
“Okay, so what?” Ben says.
Five scrunches up his face in confusion. “How can you not care? You, more than all the rest?”
“Because,” Ben says, and he’s speaking emphatically now. “You said it yourself: you don’t know what the future is going to hold. You make calculations, but that’s not certainty. And what does it matter -- as long as we’re together?”
“How does togetherness actually fix anything?” Five asks with growing incredulity now.
“Dying together is better than living apart,” Ben tells him, starting back up the stairs. “I know from experience.”
Five stares after him for a moment.
Damn it.
Ben might have a point.
Five concedes nothing, but he keeps his mouth closed as he ascends the stairs after his brother.
-o-
Ben spares him the indignity of staying in his room while he sleeps, and Five contemplates using that kindness as a way to start his equations again, but he finds himself demotivated. He’s tired, after all. He can’t possibly do the math needed to save his family if he’s as weary as he is.
That’s his rationale anyway. It’s the reason he gives for changing into his pajamas and curling up beneath the sheets. He reminds himself that today was a good day. Maybe context doesn’t matter as much as he thinks. Maybe it’s okay for a day to be good regardless of the wider events. Maybe wasting time is just another way of saying living life, and Five knows that all the things he’s mastered in his long years, that one isn’t one of them.
Maybe tomorrow will be okay, too.
He thinks, he hopes.
He dreams.
-o-
It comes in flashes of light and dark, and he’s drawn through time and space with a force that makes his head hurt. It feels like he’s being ripped apart as he makes his hands into fists and cuts through the air. It cuts like melting butter as he skips through the ages, further and further away that when he looks back, there’s nothing there.
Turning around, he finds the air cold and the sky gray. The building in front of him is dreary and sprawling, and he’s drawn up the stone steps, one, two, three, four.
When he blinks, he’s being handed a briefcase. The Handler, prim and proper with red lips, smiles. “And what would you do? To solve the problem with the Hargreeves.”
He hears himself laugh, familiar and mirthless, as he takes the briefcase. “That’s easy,” he says. “You rely on their sentimentality. You exploit the fact that they will never allow any of their members to do anything alone, which means they will always, invariably, show up together. If you can catch one of them, you can catch all of them.”
“They fight like mad to protect one another, though,” the Handler advises. “How do you compensate?”
“They’re limited, finite,” Five says. “They aren’t willing to risk each other, and we have an expendable army that can pass through the ages. Whatever resistance they mount, you simply have to overwhelm it. If it takes a while, what does it matter?”
The Handler smiles, obviously delighted. “You can never be trusted, but there’s a reason I can’t let you go,” she enthuses. She reaches out, a finger running down his cheek. “You do know the best part, don’t you?”
Five scoffs. “No. What?”
“You did all this to save them, and that’s why they’re in danger,” she says sweetly. She makes a grand gesture. “To think you saved the world. And all it cost you was everyone you ever loved.”
Five finds himself scowling. “They’ll fight you.”
“And, sooner or later, they’ll lose,” she says. She manages to almost look sad, but her eyes give her away. “What are you going to do, Five?”
“You may be right, maybe we can’t win,” he says. “But then I guess I’ll just have to lose on my terms.”
Now she looks at him like he’s the cutest thing in the whole damn world. “And how are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet,” he says, and he opens the briefcase slowly as he glares. “But I’m sure it’ll come to me.”
The light flashes again, breaking through the gray tones as the air is sucked from his lungs and he’s pulled through time and space and space and time and--
-o-
Five wakes up with a start.
A dream, he tells himself before he allows himself to acknowledge the horror. It’s a dream, a dream, a dream. He’s prone to dreams, always has been. His mind doesn’t know how to stop working, even when he’s sleeping. They’re idle; they’re nonsensical. They have no basis in reality whatsoever. Dreams are an expression of the subconscious, pulling from what you know and feel indiscriminately, creating lurid, fantastical and sometimes terrifying lies from plausible facts.
After all, there’s no basis in reality that suggest that Five is in cahoots with the Commission anymore. There is no truth to the idea that he would ever willingly work with her at his family’s expense. That’s ludicrous.
However, the notion that Five has put them in jeopardy, that Five’s past actions have formed the Commission’s current response to the threat he poses -- well, that’s valid.
And the idea that the Commission will keep coming with unrelenting force with a willingness to expend as many resources as necessary?
That’s undisputable.
Five’s dream is more truth than lie for once. His subconscious screaming to be heard.
He climbs out of bed, worry starting to build in the pit of his stomach.
He can dream of countless ways to lose his family.
And not a single one to save them.