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Vanya. Vanya did it. The thought repeats over and over in his head even as he grips his siblings hands tightly and tries to rip time and space open wide enough for the six, or is it seven even though Ben is a ghost, to fit through. How far back to take them though, how to reshape Vanya’s past?
He jumps, and the world goes a bright and painful blue. He’s lost within the interior of the portal, reaching out for an end that he cannot quite see. It’s never taken him this long to move before.
Agony ripples through him. He feels as though his pores as each being ripped apart individually. He can feel blood dribble down his face, and he knows instinctively that it isn’t just his nose, but rather his eyes as well. It’s the most pain he’s ever felt, even worse than when he was shoved back in the body of his 13 year old self.
A quick glance at his siblings reveals that they’re unconscious, though seemingly uninjured by the process.
He can’t do it. His abilities simply aren’t that strong, at least not with all the power he’s expended recently and the shrapnel wound from his recent excursion to the Commission. There’s simply no way he can take everyone, and the longer he tries the less likely even one of them will make it.
He thinks he’s crying. He thinks he’s breathing. He doesn’t know. Everything is blue and everything hurts and he just.. lets go.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
He watches his siblings disappear in the mist, and he knows that he’s let them die a second time, this time by his own hand.
He’ll stop the apocalypse. He’ll stop it and they’ll live.
There’s light at the end of the tunnel now, there’s light and he reaches…
Reaches
Reaches
Reaches
~
He comes to in a puddle of his own blood and vomit on the floor of the Icarus Theatre. He is singularly, painfully alone and for a moment he allows himself to lay there and mourn. Years of suffering and apocalyptic living and killing on the command of the Commission, for what? They had died. Again. He had let go of them; he’d sealed their fates when all he had ever wanted to do was save them.
He allows himself this sentiment for exactly one minute, then he forces himself to stand. It’s time to get to work now.
His powers are inaccessible, though it’s not surprising considering what he’s put them through recently. With a heavy sigh, he puts one foot in front of the other, making his way towards the Academy. Halfway there, he catches sight of his reflection in the window of a shop and comes to a halt.
There’s no way he can go back to the Academy like this; he’s lucky no one has stopped him in the streets. If he’d arrived any time during the day he never would have made it this far. As it is, blood cakes his face, trails of it form his eyes and nose cutting through the pin pricks that seem to make up the rest of his face. His uniform is crusted in the drying material, and he knows that there will be brown stains on it for the rest of its life, not to mention the acrid scent of vomit that wafts up from the cloth.
He breaks into a nearby store and helps himself to their bathroom, taking advantage of their soap and hand towels to clean his face of blood and dab at the uniform in an attempt to clean up at least some of the mess. There is nothing to be done about the stains however, so he steals a polo and some khakis from the boys department instead.
When he looks in the mirror, he has to bite back a scowl. There is a child looking back at him, one that he doesn’t like the sight of. Worse yet, it’s one that he’ll have to pretend to be. He can’t tell his siblings about his trip to the future. More importantly, he can’t tell Reginald, meaning he’ll have to play the part of a thirteen year old runaway returning with his tail tucked between his legs.
Not to mention, there’s still the matter of the Commission. Upon seeing the alteration of the timeline, seeing that he has returned to the Academy, they’ll no doubt try to take him out. He’s far enough away from the Apocalypse that it could come at any moment, though he suspects it will be soon so as to maintain the integrity of the timeline in which Vanya never learns of her powers.
He needs a plan to take care of them permanently, to ensure that he won’t be looking over his shoulder for the next 17 years.
Five scrubs a hand over his face and keeps walking. This is his only choice, but that doesn’t make it a good one. The Commission has all of the advantages.
He resumes walking to the Academy.
~
When he knocks, Grace opens the door. He’s glad it’s her; he doesn’t know what he would do if faced with his siblings right now. It’s been so long since he saw them as the children he remembers, he’s a different person, a man now. He doesn’t to now how he can fit into the shoes that they’ll expect him to, only that he’s scared of how it will all shake out
“Five!” Grace exclaims. “Welcome home.”
“Grace,” he nods curtly. “How long was I gone?”
“It’s been approximately five months since I saw you last.”
He curses silently. He’d been aiming for around one month, though he supposed that given his level of exhaustion he’s lucky that he’d managed to even hit the right year. It will be more difficult to explain away where he’s been, though perhaps easier to ignore the changes that he can’t quite hide.
“Is my room still available?”
“Of course,” Grace smiles, artificially warm. “Breakfast will be served at the usual time if you wish to go to bed now.”
He nods once, and makes his way back to his once room. He debates finding his siblings and telling them of his return, getting the reunion out of the way, but deems himself incapable of maintaining the necessary charade at the moment.
There will be time in the morning, plenty of it.
Five wakes up to six curious faces peering down at him.
“He’s awake!” Klaus whisper-screams, hand coming to poke Five in the cheek.
Five catches his hand and pushes it away. “You’re all watching me sleep?”
“Mom told us you must have slept through breakfast,” Vanya tells him, shy.
His heart clenches. Had her seclusion begun so soon? Had they really been responsible for a woman so lonely that she’d destroyed them all from the strength of it?
“We c-came to c-check as s-soon as we c-could,” Diego informs him and Five nods once.
“I see.”
He swings his feet over the edge of the bed, noting the way his family moves with him, following his movements. It seems his reappearance has impacted them greatly, and none seem too eager to let him out of their sight.
“And what are you supposed to be doing at the moment?”
“It’s our 30 minutes of free time,” Ben replies and Five closes his eyes briefly.
“How much longer do we have left?”
Luther answers before the others can,” About twenty-eight minutes. We got here as soon as we could.”
There’s a brief minute of silence, one that Allison breaks, “So? Where were you?”
Five stands, taking his time as he heads to his closet in search of a clean uniform. He’d slept in his polo and Khakis, but it would be smarter to dispose of it before Reginald could find it. Still, as he grabs a uniform he’s forced to realize that his siblings won’t be giving him a chance to change, and he can’t do it in front of them lest he want them to see his wounds from blowing up the Commission as well as whatever damage he’d done to himself by jumping with his siblings.
“All over,” Five replies, throwing the uniform on his bed. “I didn’t stay in any one place long.”
It’s true really, but not for the reasons they may think. In the apocalypse there hadn’t been enough food to scavenge in one spot, and moving kept him fed and safe; after that the Commission had kept him busy, jumping from time to time.
“Wh-why did you come back?” Diego asks, and Five can see the fear in his eyes, the worry that the outside world is worse than life with their father.
“I couldn’t leave you all.”
Couldn’t leave them dead. Couldn’t live with the knowledge that things could have been different, that he had the power to change it all.
“Children,” Reginald's voice cuts through the room, and Five bites back a grimace as he watches his siblings step away from him, straightening into a position of attention. “Utilize your free time elsewhere. I wish to speak to Number Five.”
His siblings file out of the room, and Five stares down a man who hasn’t been part of his life even longer than his siblings. Five stands at his full height, not too tall at this age, though he knows he has several bursts of growth left in him, but enough for him to meet Reginald’s eyes.
He lets Reginald see it all, the age and the weariness and the anger, Five lets him see a side that he hopes his siblings won’t ever see, that of a killer, an assassin.
“Reginald.”
“Five.”
There’s a long silence, as though Reginald expects Five to speak first, to break and apologize, ask for forgiveness or even perhaps his affection. Five won’t give him the satisfaction, wouldn’t even if he cared what the old man thought.
He wonders if Reginald has realized what his return means, if he recognizes how precarious his position really is, that Five could leave and that means his siblings could too.
“I expect you to report to your regular training sessions. You will resume your personal training tomorrow.”
Then Reginald leaves and Five runs a hand through his hair. He’d forgotten about personal training, more importantly, he’d forgotten how well he should be doing at this point in his training. He doesn’t want to reveal depths to his power that shouldn’t exist yet, not that it’s a huge concern at the moment. Five isn’t even sure he could jump once, still too weak from his travel back to this time.
Donning his uniform and walking down the stairs towards his siblings is in some ways scarier than trying to survive in an apocalyptic wasteland. At least then he had had some sort of routine, of monotony. He’d had steps he knew he had to take to survive. Here and now, everything is old and new at once and he isn’t quite sure what is expected of him.
They reach the gym and line up for training, and falling in line between Klaus and Ben is surreal. His brothers, both tangible and real and alive are at his sides.
Then Reginald blows a whistle and training begins. Unlike in his childhood, Five was actually quite good at sprints as an adult. The Commission requires agents to be in excellent shape, even if one has the power to jump through space to whatever location he desires.
Now though, now he has a child body, frail and unconditioned and still injured from his rough use of it. Five scowls and tries not to grip his side as his stitches pull. He needs the exercise anyway if he wants to be in shape to take on the Commission.
That night he steals a first aid kit and patches himself up again. He can’t have anyone knowing what he’s been up to, especially not Grace. Best to hide his injuries.
He’s only just tucked the first aid kit away when he hears footsteps outside of his door. He turns, crouching low, ready to jump and snap a neck, when the door opens and Vanya pushes her way in.
“Oh,” he says, straightening up. “Vanya.”
“I…” she smiles softly, “I just wanted to make sure you were still here.”
“I am,” Five answers, quick and calm.
He judges from the expression on Vanya’s face that this is the wrong thing to say, and he internally curses his inability to talk to another living being.
He sits and pats the bed besides him. When she sits, he realizes that perhaps she expects him to speak, to voice some kind of thought. He has nothing for her though, he doesn’t know how. In the Commission small talk was a weapon, used for information gathering and before that he had only Delores.
Vanya breaks the quiet. “Five?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you leave?”
“Arrogance,” Five replies. He can admit that now. “I thought I knew best. I had done the math and thought it would be enough, that there was nothing holding me back from trying. I couldn’t let Reginald be right.”
He gets an odd look when he calls him Reginald rather than Dad, but he refuses to backtrack, or to call him that. Reginald was many things, but a father was not one of them.
“Was he?”
“In part. I wasn’t right about time travel, it’s more than math. But Reginald, there’s so much more that he’s wrong about.”
“Like what?”
Five hesitates. “The world, us.”
They sit in silence for a long while before Vanya heads off to bed.
~
Breakfast the next morning is… hard. The food consists of perishables: toast, eggs, bacon. There’s nothing saveable, not long term, but Five still squirrels away his bacon for short term storage. He nibbles his toast and manages to eat all of his eggs, but his handful of years at the Commission aren’t enough to outweigh the food habits of four decades in the apocalypse.
Grace loads his plate high though, and Five can’t stand to watch food go to waste. So he eats, even though the amount he manages to get down, not all of it despite his efforts, makes his belly ache and swirl with nausea.
Then training begins once again. He doesn’t jump, not once all day, and he knows that Reginald notices though he’s unsure about his siblings.
Sparring is an interesting experience. He’s fought as a thirteen year old several times since he lost his adult body, but then he’d still had his abilities on his side. Now he’s fully reliant upon his skills which, though plenty, are built on memories of a different body in a different time. As he fights off Allison’s attack, easily because though he is unfamiliar with his body he is also decades older and built to be a killer whereas she is thirteen and usually relies on avoiding a fight, he catalogues the differences and resolves to practice later.
Luther is a challenge. Not only is the boy stronger and larger, Five simply can’t see any non-lethal options. He wasn’t trained to take people down peacefully, he was trained to kill or be killed. When he watches his brother, all brute strength, lunge for him it’s all he can do not to kill him on the spot.
He taps out of that fight, feigning defeat. It troubles him how easily Luther could die by his hands.
When they’re dismissed for their studies, Five barricades himself in his room. He doesn’t come out, not when Ben asks him for help with math or Diego says mom wants his laundry or Klaus shows up to ask, only half joking even at the young age of thirteen, if he’d met any drug dealers in his time away.
There’s no time for those distractions, though a voice in his head that sounds suspiciously like Delores tells him that they aren’t distractions, they're his life now. He scribbles across the walls, trying to calculate, to determine what would happen if he killed Harold Jenkins now, what the Commission's response would be.
“Five.” It’s Allison’s voice. “It’s almost time for your individual training. You’re going to be late.”
He glances at a clock. She’s right. When did it get so late?
Grinding the heels of his palms into his eyes, Five makes his way to the basement.
Reginald is waiting, a chair and chains ready.
“Good evening Five, today we will continue your work on jumping while bound. I’m not expecting much success from you. It’s clear that being away from here for so long has led to an atrophy of your powers; not once today did I see you make use of them. So you’ll simply be left here until you manage to escape.”
Five sits, and allows himself to be bound. He’s sure that he can do it. He has in the past, but never while so exhausted. He can feel the chains, cold and heavy, resting against his stomach wound, and he bares his teeth at Reginald’s back as the man walks away.
Still, he’s endured worse, war worse, and after putting on a show of trying to jump (he knows, from the ache in his bones, that he can’t do it again yet, that he has to wait) he scarfs down the bacon in his sleeve and falls asleep.
He dreams of dust and ash and the corpses that would be strangers if not for the little umbrellas on their wrists. He dreams of Vanya, white eyes and glowing and the moon falling down on him.
He dreams of failure, of letting go of his siblings, of writing them out of existence.
When he wakes up, he can feel it, a small trickle of power that slowly fills the reservoir within him. There’s not enough to do anything, but at least now he can feel his return.
Three days after his return and two after his special training began, Five jumps out of the basement and into his room. He’s hungry, but that feeling had been so constant for so long that he can easily suppress the sensation; instead he treats his wounds, infection is always a deadly risk, and assesses his powers.
The jump had taken all of his reserves, but he can feel the power’s return, quicker now than before. Another night's rest and he should have several jumps within him.
He scribbled another question on the wall.
Three weeks. Three weeks to return to the same level of power that he’d once possessed.
It seems impossibly long, but Five comforts himself with the knowledge that he’ll still be able to jump, just not as far or often.
Slowly, the world begins to reset. Five adapts, as he’s always done. He forms a food cache in his room, cans and other non-perishables hidden away from polite company. His siblings adjust to his return, asking less and less though he can see the way their regard for him has changed.
He invites Vanya to any plans he makes with them, though he finds it hard to integrate with them. They’re children, children who missed him but still. He’s never been around a child.
They’re a week and a half in from Five’s return date when Five walks into his room to discover Grace scrubbing away the equations covering the walls.
“No, no, no, no!” Five throws himself at her, ripping the washcloth out of her hands and shoving her back. “Get away!”
“Five?” She asks, “Is everything okay?”
“Don’t touch that! Don’t ever do that again.”
“L-let Go!” Diego yells, and Five realizes with a start that his hands have wrapped around Grace’s throat. It’s ineffective of course, she’s a robot, but he can see how the imagine could be alarming to his siblings.
Trembling, he notices that they’re all gathered around his door, staring into his room with a mixture of shock and fear and anger.
He pulls his hands from her throat, and stands tall. “Apologies, Grace. However, I’d like you to stop cleaning this room, I’ll take care of it.”
“Of course,” Grace smiles, and Five closes the door on his sibling's curious stares.
He sinks down on his side of the door and sobs silently, wishing for Delores, or at least someone who recognizes that he’s more than he seems. Someone who has a chance in hell of understanding.
When Five makes his way downstairs in the morning, none of his siblings will meet his eyes. It isn’t shocking, at their age he wouldn’t have accepted that any of them were filled with the same violent rage that Five himself has. He’s dangerous, a hazard to himself and others, and his siblings are no doubt wondering how and why he is the way he is, how six months changed him so much.
Over the past few weeks, Five has taken to escorting Vanya to breakfast, forcing at least one sibling relationship into her life. He hasn’t quite worked out how to make his other siblings remember her and treat her well, but he knows he will before too long.
The day after the Grace Incident, Five steps out of his room to find her walking securely between Diego and Allison with a look that screams confusion and joy.
He doesn’t stop them. He needs them to accept Vanya even if they do so by uniting against him. He’s lived without his siblings for forty-five years and watching them grow up, even if it’s without him, will be enough. It will have to be.
Two weeks into his return and after four days of his siblings' unbridled distrust, Reginald elects to send them on a mission. The briefing Reginald gives doesn’t ring any bells, so he knows it isn’t an event that was worth mentioning, at least not in Vanya’s book in the last time line, but his presence has the potential to alter the timeline for the worse if he isn’t careful.
There’s a creeping thought in his mind that this would be a good time for the Commission to strike.
He arms himself with stolen knives and a gun from Reginald’s safe. The gun he’ll save for emergencies- the Umbrella Academy isn’t meant to use them and Reginald will notice missing bullets- but the knives will come in handy until he can steal the Commission's own weapons to use against them. That is, what little they have left after his blow to their field office.
He smiles. Still, he knows that more will come, after all, not all agents had been at the office when he’d struck. Their best bet would be to remove him from the timeline as soon as possible, but they’re likely waiting for him to leave the Academy. The trauma of a home invasion and his siblings watching him die has the potential to shift the timeline in unpredictable ways. Better to kill him off on a mission where it could be written off as an accident.
~
It’s a hostage situation, because of course it is. It's a hostage situation, and Five has to pretend to care, pretend that people outside of his family matter to him. He’s killed more people for less, and as he stares down the man holding a gun to the head of a bank teller he has to suppress the urge to simply jump behind him to disarm and kill him.
He can’t. The Five his siblings know wouldn’t have the control to do that.
“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Luther tells the man, stalling as Allison deals with the room over. Had they realized there was a hostage, they would have sent her in here first. “You can surrender now; they’ll go easier on you if you do.”
“There’s only one way out of this,” the man says, but his eyes are focused on Five. “Nobody gets off easy.”
He moves his gun quickly, shifting his aim from the woman he’s holding to Five. He pulls the trigger, once, twice and waits for the satisfying sound of bullets hitting flesh.
It never comes.
Five jumps as soon as he sees the gun moving, one hand reaching out to grab Luther and take him along. They land behind the man, and Five darts forwards, inhibitions forgotten. He knocks the gun to the ground, and holds a knife to the man’s throat.
“Who else did they send? What were your orders?”
“You know as well as I do that answering that would be a mistake, Number Five,” the man smiles, then he jerks his head back, away from the blade, and forwards once more with enough force to slit his own throat.
Sighing, Five drops the corpse. He hadn’t expected answers, not really, but he is surprised by the route the Commission had taken. He’d expected to be separated from the group and met with a large team like the one that had attacked at Griddy’s. There is no way that they really thought that man could take him alone, he wasn’t even talented enough for Five to recognize him, let alone know his name.
“What was that,” Luther demands, ripping Five away from the corpse before he can search it.
He sighs. Perhaps this was their play, weakening his bonds with his siblings, so they trust nothing he says. Maybe they’d finally realized just how much work it would be to kill him while maintaining the timeline. Creating a rift between him and his siblings would offer them the time and space necessary to figure out how to kill him off unobtrusively.
Five shrugs, “What do you mean?”
“That man, he knew you.”
“Knew of me, but who doesn’t. We are famous, Luther.”
“Why were you asking him about his orders then; this is just a bank robbery.”
Five shrugs. “I don’t trust anything to be what it seems. For all we know, this is a test Reginald set up.”
“Dad would never put civilians in danger! And you shouldn’t call him that.”
Five is saved from having to answer when Allison and Diego enter the room, followed closely by Ben and Klaus.
“What happened here?” Klaus asks, surveying the scene.
Five watches the weeping hostage impassively as the woman runs to Allison for comfort. He wonders if she really was a hostage, or if she was a Commission plant. Both are possible, and so he commits her face to memory, well aware that if she ever comes near his family again he’ll choose to kill her, just to be safe.
Briefly, he wonders if that makes him a monster. Then he pictures the Handler, and he knows what real monsters look like.
“Five killed him,” Luther informs their siblings pointing at the dead man on the floor.
Five scoffs. “He killed himself! On my knife, sure, but he did it to himself.”
His siblings eye him, and Five resigns himself to even more distrust. The initial response to his actions against Grace are quite fair, after all, normal thirteen year olds don’t violently attack their mother for scrubbing the walls, but he finds their distaste for the dead robber to be a bit much. It isn't as if this is the first time the Umbrella Academy has killed, in fact Ben kills every time he uses his powers on a mission.
~
“Five,” Grace’s voice cuts through the wood of his door. “Five, you missed dinner, are you feeling well?”
Five doesn’t answer. He rolls over in his bed and stares at the ceiling. He misses his siblings. He’d worked so long and hard to get back to them, to save them, and instead he’d brought them together to die. He’d spent forty five years in the apocalypse and for what? So that he could watch his family die yet again. Worse, so that he could kill them himself.
“I’ll leave your dinner at your door then,” Grace tells him.
He doesn't move, He can’t
~
“What is this?”
He stares at Allison, standing in his room, holding a can.
“Green beans? Why are you in my room?”
“You’ve been acting odd ever since you came back, I want to know why.”
“I was gone for a while,” Five tells her. “Things changed, I saw life outside of the Academy.”
Allison narrows her eyes, “What did you see that makes you attack Mom and hoard food? Or kill that robber? And why did you start being so nice to Vanya?”
“I saw what happens when you’re alone.” Five answers. “I saw things I never want to happen to us.”
Allison sets the green beans on his bed, folding her arms. “That’s not good enough, Five. I heard a-”
Five jumps. He hears the beginning of the rumor and he jumps away. He cannot afford to tell Allison more, he can't afford to have it recorded by Reginald’s cameras. It was a mistake to allow his siblings a glance of who he really is, the things he can do. Now they won’t stop until they know the truth.
He sighs, looking down off of the rooftop he’d appeared on.
He’d always been better with murder than relationships.
~
Vanya is the first to speak with him again, claiming that it isn't fair for everyone to ignore him for something that isn’t his fault. She blames Reginald, the fact that he’s conditioned them to react like soldiers rather than children.
Soldiers. The term makes him want to snort. The commission had tried that narritavive once, painting the Temps Committee as soldiers rather than assassins. It had ended after Five had been forced to kill not only his target, but also the whole team assigned to him for the mission.
Vanya blames Reginald. In a way, he does too.
Afterall, if not for him, would Five have even lived long enough to become the Commission's little project.
~
Surprisingly, even Diego forgets and forgives the incident with Grace. His siblings still prefer the company of one another to him, habits formed in the months he was gone and compounded by their recent distrust of him, but outside of the occasional odd look from Luther and Allison, he is generally left alone. He’d forgotten how quickly children forget, and after four months of pretending to be a prepubescent school boy, Five decides that it’s time to act. Not only is his power back up to full strength, but his shrapnel wound is healed as well.
He waits until late at night, when he knows that his siblings are sleeping, and then he jumps. He knows even as he lands that his aim was true, that he's made his way inside of Harold Jenkins home.
It’s easy to slit the boy's throat. After all, it’s hardly the first time he’s killed a child, and for once he has his own personal motivation. He can’t forgive Leonard, not for the apocalypse, and not for Vanya.
He watches him bleed, and returns home.
~
“Klaus,” He calls as he jumps into the mausoleum. He wonders how he never knew that this was his brother’s special training, how the younger version of him was so ignorant. He vows never to let Klaus suffer alone again.
“Five?” Klaus replies. “Five, oh god, oh no. Who did this to you? How did you get here?”
“Klaus,” Five repeats, reaching for his hand. It's the first time he’s touched any of his siblings since he strangled Grace. “I’m here. I’m alive. You can feel my hand can’t you?”
“Five? How- How did you get here?”
“I jumped. I found out where Dad had you and I couldn’t leave you here alone. I won’t let you suffer alone.”
Klaus pulls Five down onto the cold hard ground besides them and snuggles in close. It’s only later, when Klaus is on the verge of falling asleep, his face buried in the crook of Five’s neck, that he speaks again.
“I’m glad you came home.”
“Yeah, me too.”
~
He replaces Vanya’s pills with placebo. Not all of them, but enough that she is neither quitting cold turkey nor drugged to the gills. He allows her access enough to her powers that she knows something strange is going on, enough for the others to notice as well.
“Is it just me or has Dad been acting stranger than normal around Vanya?” Ben wonders one late evening when they’ve snuck out to Griddy’s. Vanya herself is not there because Reginald has recently added extra cameras outside her door. Five promised to bring her a donut however, and he would’ve just jumped in and grabbed her if he hadn’t been planning to broach this very subject.
“That’s not all that’s been strange.” Five cuts in, wondering how to force them to consider the truth when the idea of Vanya being perfectly ordinary has been ingrained in them for years now.
“You mean the lights and the earthquakes?” Klaus asks. Five pretends not to notice as he tips a flask into his coffee, it's a problem, but one for later.
“It’s unnatural,” Five comments, trying to lead them to the right answer.
“Well yeah, it isn’t normal,” Luther allows, “but what could it be outside of odd weather patterns this year?”
“It’s not like we don’t have proof that people have the ability to alter the world.”
Diego raises a brow, “You think it’s p-powers? Who’s?”
“Well,” Five drawls. “We all have powers already.”
“What? You think it’s Vanya?” Luther shakes his head. “It can’t be her, she’s ordinary, besides she would know.”
“Ordinary?” Why do we always say that, never anything else? We always call her ordinary. You don’t think that’s odd? Besides, you know as well as I do how easy it would be to make her forget she was anything else.”
“Guys,” Allison says slowly. “I think- I think Five is right. I think I rumored Vanya into forgetting. Not on purpose, but I remember Dad asking me to tell her that she thought she was ordinary.”
“But why wouldn’t we know?”
Five scoffs. “When have we ever paid attention to anyone outside of ourselves?”
The expressions around the table quickly turn pensive.
~
Allison admits to the rumor. Vanya, having spent less time feeling rejected and ordinary, and having been involved in her siblings lives, is angry, but forgiving. She gives them all, because she knows that they live her whether or not she’s ordinary.
Allison lifts the rumor, and life moves on, albeit with secret training sessions for Vanya.
Five, Ben, and Vanya are in a training session, Five because he has seen her powers before, not that they know it, and the other two because they both have high destructive potential, when Reginald finally catches on.
The man who ruined Vanya’s life, who ruined all of their lives, who inadvertently caused the apocalypse, barges into the room and instantly begins to bark out orders.
“Number Seven, stop that immediately! Numbers Five and Six, return to your rooms and expect later discipline.”
Everything that Five hates and regrets and has suffered through has stemmed from this man and his actions, that is something Five can never forgive. As is the fear on his siblings' faces as Ben shuffles out of the room and Vanya lowers her violin.
“No,” Five replies. He has never felt as old as he does in this moment. He stares at his father, fully cognizant of all of his flaws, and he sees the fear rippling across his face. “I don’t think so.”
Nobody is expecting Five to reach out and grab Reginald’s arm, nobody is expecting Five to jump away with him, afterall, the Five that they knew mere months ago would have been incapable of doing so.
~
“How did you do that?” Reginald demands, but Five doesn’t answer. Instead, he allows his eyes to roam about the room that he’d brought Reginald to. It isn’t his, that wouldn’t be nearly as effective as what he suspects will happen now that he’s left the grounds of the Academy. Still, the abandoned construction site offers him some things to work with.
Reginald scrambles to his feet and rushes towards Five, “Number Five! This kind of behavior is unacceptable. Not only have you removed me from the Academy against my will, but you’ve obviously been pretending that your powers are less advanced than they are. I’;ll have to punish you for this.”
“You can try,” Five scoffs. “For now we have bigger problems. The security camera caught the flash of blue that my jump created. They won’t have seen us, but it’ll be enough. They’ll be here soon. They won’t expect me to have brought you though, so arm yourself before they arrive.”
“Whatever are you talking about?” Reginald asks, but Five simply tosses him a broken off drill bit and grabs a hammer for himself.
“I expect this to serve as proof that I know what I’m talking about in our conversation after this.”
Then there is a flash of blue, just slightly off from the shade of Five’s own jumps, and the two of them are surrounded by heavily armed men and women, all of whom have their weapons pointed at Five.
It’s disorienting, to watch a thirteen year old boy, even one that you yourself have trained in combat, to destroy a whole team of armed men with nothing more than a hammer and a wild, broken smile. Yet that’s exactly what happens. By the time Reginald has moved towards one of their attackers, Five has already slaughtered four. By the time the drill bit is buried in his opponents eye, Five has disposed of the rest of them.
Five smiles at Reginald, but there is no joy in those cold eyes, there is nothing, and Reginald cannot help the small trickle of fear he feels. It isn’t the killing that frightens him, no, he had always believed that Five had potential, that he would do anything to protect those he loved. What scares him is how he missed just how much Five had changed. He’d known, of course, that the son who returned from his disappearance was no longer exactly the same, but he’d never expected him to have evolved to the point of such brutality, and, perhaps more importantly, hidden talent.
“Now,” Five tells him, straightening his tie. “Listen very closely to what I say next.”
He does. He listens, and Five spins a wondrous tale.
Five walks a very fine line between truth and lies in what he tells Reginald. He admits to time travel, to an apocalypse, to the Commission. He lies about how long he was gone, exactly what he did for them, and outright refuses to tell Reginald what causes the apocalypse, claiming that the foreknowledge could endanger the timeline's stability. He may also imply that Five isn’t alone in his efforts to save the timeline, that there are other rebel commission agents preserving as much as they can while averting the apocalypse.
“There’s no reason for you to know.” Five tells him. “People much better informed than you are working on the problem. All you need to know is that we’ll need Vanya, when the time comes. She has to know how to control her powers.”
Reginald looks at the blood soaked boy, and, mind racing with his own plans, agrees. “Very well, Number Seven shall learn among the rest of you.”
“And one more thing,” Five demands and his eyes are oh so cold. “Her name is Vanya.”