Me myself this time last week- You do not need to write anything for The Umbrella Academy. You do not.
Me right now- ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Disclaimer- I do not own the mess that is The Umbrella Academy.
Nights in the Apocalypse are so incredibly dense that the darkness seems to hold its own weight.
With the sky choked full of ash and smoke, the sun has been all but drowned out, not to mention the stars and moon.
Sometimes Five will spot the flickering of flames in the distance, but there are fewer and fewer fires now. Not like how it was when he first arrived here, when the world was on fire and Five had wondered if it would continue to burn until it left nothing but ash and cinders behind.
And as the fires continue to burn themselves out, the nights become denser and denser. So thick that sometimes Five finds himself choking on them, struggling to breathe with the weight of them settling over him.
Most nights Five can deal with the sensation of it, he can ignore the sense of nothingness around him, can push away the feeling of drifting without anything to tether him to the world, can pretend that he isn't surrounded by an incomprehensible void.
Trapping him.
Pinning him down.
Suffocating him slowly.
But there are also those nights that Five can't deal with it, can't lay down and allow the darkness to envelop him, can't let himself rest without the terrifying feeling of being absolutely alone washing over him in such a violent wave that Five thinks he might just drown underneath it.
Tonight, is one of those such nights.
Five wraps Dolores in her favorite fur-coat and walks them toward one of the still-burning fires. Far away enough that the smoke doesn't get caught in his throat, but close enough to make out its light.
He rolls out his sleeping-bag and lays down across from Dolores, watching the flickering of the flames in the distance and wishing that it were the flickering of stars.
'What're you thinking about?' Dolores asks in a whisper.
Five shrugs from his place on the ground. "Nothing in particular," he murmurs.
Dolores doesn't respond, probably because she knows that Five is lying but she isn't willing to call him out on it. Not right now, while Five is tired and hungry and…something else he won't let himself think about.
'Sing me that song,' she requests after another minute of silence. 'Our song. The one I like.'
"I think you'll find that I don't have a particularly pleasant singing voice at the moment," Five says, throwing a glance back at Dolores over his shoulder.
'Oh, that's not true,' she coos at him, 'I love it when you sing.'
Five sighs, rolling back over and glancing at the flickering flames across the street. It's been a hard few days. His supplies are running low, so Five is spacing out his meals to accommodate.
He hasn't eaten in almost four days, he feels lightheaded and drained from it. So hungry that the constant pain in his stomach has built up into a pounding headache and a stabbing sensation that sometimes knocks the breath straight from his lungs.
Dolores has been doing her best to distract Five throughout it all, to give him something else to focus on other than the inevitable.
Five has been scavenging the ruins of this city for over two years. It's time to move on, to pack up and pick a direction, and start walking.
Five has been putting it off for weeks now. The thought of leaving makes him feel nauseated in a way that has nothing to do with starvation.
The city doesn't even resemble the one he grew up in anymore, there's no reason to feel attached or sentimental. The Academy is a pile of brick and stone, there's nothing for him here.
But his brothers and sisters are buried in a row of too shallow graves that Five dug with his bare hands, and even though they aren't alive anymore, it feels wrong to just…leave.
Five knows why, he knows why it feels so wrong.
It's the same reason that there is an unoccupied space between where he buried Klaus and where he marked Ben's empty grave.
Five takes in a shuddering breath and blinks back the pressure building up behind his eyes. "Fine," he says to Dolores, shoving his thoughts away.
"If I could save time in a bottle," he starts, words whispered, but so very loud with the utter silence around them. "The first thing that I'd like to do, is to save every day. 'Til eternity passes away, just to spend them with you."
His voice is muffled behind the scarf tied over his mouth and nose. It's been a constant downpour of ash lately, the air burns like acid in Five's lungs, stinging at his eyes and making his voice sound coarse and rough.
He hasn't removed his goggles in days, hasn't taken off his scarf in even longer.
Sometimes Five wonders what he must look like; dirty and malnourished, with layers of clothing draped over his scrawny frame to protect his skin against the pollution in the air, his dirty hair long and curling at the ends, grown enough to reach his shoulders.
Does he look like the sole survivor of an apocalyptic world, with fire in his heart and a mission worth fighting for? Or does he look like a boy slowly wasting away, losing the battle against the inescapable?
"If I could make days last forever," Five continues, choking on the lyrics, his voice cracking, because he hates that line, he hates it. "If words could make wishes come true. I'd save every day, like a treasure, and then, again, I'd spend them with you."
A breeze goes by, and with it, even more ash. Five watches it rain down with a sense of detachment. The flickering of flames and the smell of sulfur, ash falling down like snow as the shuffling of vermin scurrying across the dirt sounds from behind him.
These are what make up his world now, and Five can't help but feel disconnected from it all.
There's a word for that, Five knows. Dolores calls it 'disassociation', a coping mechanism. Five doesn't like to acknowledge it, doesn't like talking about it, because then he'd have to face the fact that his mind is starting to fracture.
Five's mind isn't allowed to fracture, his sanity isn't allowed to crumble, because that's all Five has left. It's his mind, his brain, that will get him out of here. If he lets himself go insane than there is no hope, there is no chance of escape, and there will be no one left to save his family.
Five can't let himself lose it, not for himself, but for them.
For his brothers and sisters.
"But there never seems to be enough time, to do the things you want t'do, once you find them," he mumbles, coughing dryly into his fist and clutching at his aching ribs with his other arm.
He bruised them a few days ago while scavenging. Five had blinked into a dilapidated house, expecting to land on solid ground, only to pop up at the top of a splintered staircase.
He'd tumbled down the stairs, spraining his wrist on the way down and bruising his ribs as well as his pride. Five had laid at the bottom of the staircase for a long while, blinking up at the concaved ceiling and waiting until the dizziness had faded back into something manageable.
It wasn't one of his finer moments, but it wasn't one of his worst either.
"I've looked around enough to know, that you're the one I want t'go through time with," Five sings a bit louder, so Dolores will be able to hear, maybe even sing along if she gets the inclination.
His voice is scratchy and strained. It reminds Five of when they were twelve and Klaus had gotten his hands on a pack of cigarettes. When they had snuck out onto the roof to smoke one in the middle of the night.
Klaus had lit one up and handed it to Five in something like a dare. So Five had taken it without a word, not hesitating before he stuck it between his lips and took a deep pull.
The moment he did, Five's nose had wrinkled up in disgust. He had held the cigarette away from himself as his eyes watered, forcing himself not to cough or splutter like an idiot.
He had held it in his lungs until he thought he could exhale without choking, and then he had turned watery eyes to Klaus and handed the cigarette back to his brother in a challenge.
Klaus had laughed at Five anyway, snickering behind his hands to keep the noise down, and laughing even harder when Five smacked at his shoulder.
Then Klaus had taken his own drag and immediately bent over and started hacking. Five had been caught between wanting to mock the other boy and wanting to shush him so they wouldn't be found.
That's what the air feels like now, like pulling in fire and smoke and letting it rot and fester in his lungs.
Five knows that it's premature to make such promises to himself, but he swears that if…when. He swears that when he makes it back to society, that he will never touch another cigarette again.
"If I had a box just for wishes, and dreams that had never come true. The box would be empty," not true, not true, not true, "except for the memory of how they were answered by you." That's Dolores' favorite line, she whispers along with Five, her voice almost drowned out by the wind.
She says that this song is about them, about how they found each other even in this wasteland, about how they have all the time in the world to be together.
Dolores doesn't mind the Apocalypse all that much. She doesn't like it, but she had never known any different. She lived in the back of 'Gimbels' where all she saw were the daily shoppers and her friends, modeling the latest fashion, the same routine day in and day out.
The Apocalypse is the only taste of the outside world that Dolores has ever had, she doesn't know what it was like, how it could be.
How incredibly desolate it is now.
She doesn't miss the way that it was before, because she never saw it. Not the way that Five had, living on the fringes of the real world, dreaming about going out there someday.
Escaping the Academy and Reginald, running away with all his siblings in tow, off to build a new life of their own. Far, far, away, where their father could never touch them, where he would never find them.
Well, Five supposes he got his wish, in a way.
His father can't reach him here in this place, he can't do anything to Five, because he's dead, along with the rest of humanity.
Five is in the real world now, he got away.
He made his grand escape.
And just like the old man said, he wasn't ready, isn't ready, he will never, ever, be ready for the things he's already lived through.
Five has a new wish now, one that he isn't sure will ever come true.
He wants to take it back.
He wants to go back to that day and never jump.
He wants to go back and erase this from ever happening.
He wants to go back.
Please, please, let him go back.
"But there never seems to be enough time to do the things you want t'do, once you find 'em," Five sings, over a shuttering exhale. His chest is too tight, his eyes hurt, his head is throbbing.
He wants it to stop, he needs it to stop, why won't this just stop?
Stop, Stop, STOP!
"I've looked around enough to know, that you're the one I want t'go through time with," he chokes out, pressing his palms against his goggles, wishing he could shove them into his eyes to stem the tears he can feel building.
Five's heartbeat is pounding in his ears, the pressure in his head has left him dizzy and breathless. He tries to calm himself down, to listen to Dolores as she gently instructs him to take a deep breath in through his nose.
But the darkness is pressing in on him, and the silence is so intense it has become its own noise. Five can't escape this. He wonders if he will ever leave this place, or if one day he'll grow so tired of the weight of the world hanging over him, that he'll take his rightful place between Klaus and Ben's graves and just lay down.
Five lets out a choked sob, and he sort of hates himself for it.
If Five wasn't so preoccupied with his mental breakdown, he might've noticed the shift in the darkness, the subtle change within the shadows.
But he doesn't, not at first, not until he hears the scuffle of footsteps in the dirt.
Five shoots up from his sleeping-bag, head spinning and heart jackhammering in his chest. He pulls his knife from his boot and brandishing it out in front of him with a shaking hand, taking a stumbling step backward as he scans the blackness.
There are silhouettes surrounding him, six figures blanketed in darkness and slowly approaching.
"Wh– what the hell?!" Five blurts, taking another hasty step back and squinting at the closest shadow. He adjusts his grip on the hilt of his knife, it glimmers with the flickering of the flames behind him, glinting as Five holds it out in front of him.
The person nearest to Five has their hands held up in a sign of surrender, movements slow and cautious as they carefully walk toward Five. And then they are close enough to the dancing light that Five can make out their face.
Allison.
It's Allison.
"No," Five chokes out. He suddenly has the intense urge to throw up, his stomach twisting.
Five stumbles backward, his knife wavering in his grip. "No," he says again, his voice small and brittle sounding. "No, you're dead. You're not here."
The five other figures finally come into the light, and though Five was expecting it, it still takes his breath away when he lays his eyes on the rest of his siblings.
They're older than he remembers, the only time Five had seen them fully grown they had been cold and stiff on the ground, eyes unseeing and blood seeping into the brickwork of a collapsed building.
But these visions aren't bloodied and disfigured.
They're clean and untouched by the destruction of this world. Dressed in all black, long overcoats like capes in the wind, leather jackets and high boots, all different variations of what Five would guess is some sort of uniform.
Five's eyes catch on Ben for a moment, scanning him with a sort of morbid fascination.
Five never found Vanya or Ben's bodies, though he searched and searched for days, until his hands were raw and his nails were bleeding. Until, finally, Five had to give up, had to put grave-markers over two empty spots in the ground.
It wasn't until he found Vanya's book that he discovered what his sister looked like in adulthood. It wasn't until he read it, that Five learned that the reason he couldn't find Ben's body was because he had died long before the Apocalypse.
Five has never seen what Ben would look like as a grown man.
He wonders how accurate his vision of Ben is, if he grew to be this tall or if his face stayed rounded, if he would have stayed this slender or if he would have filled out.
Five hates it, that his mind would even try to conjure up a version of Ben as anything other than the Ben he remembers.
"Five?" Allison asks, her voice soft and hushed.
Five catches her eye before he forces his own down and away. This isn't real, he needs to remember that. He buried them, they aren't here, they aren't here.
Five takes a deep breath and pulls at his hair with both hands, almost stabbing himself in the face with his knife before he drops it.
"No, nope," he mumbles to himself, desperate and verging on frantic. "You aren't real. You are not real," he says. Maybe if he says it out loud they will go away, maybe if he keeps repeating it Five's subconscious will register it as fact and stop torturing him like this.
"Awe," Klaus says from his place next to Vanya. "That's kinda mean. I feel de-validated as a human-being."
Vanya smacks at Klaus' shoulder. "Klaus," she hisses in reprimand.
It looks so real, they look so real.
Five forces himself to glance away from them, because if he doesn't get a grip on himself right now, then he isn't sure how he'll put himself back together tomorrow.
"Uh, Five?" Luther mumbles, sounding unsure and stiff. "We're, um, we are real."
Five shakes his head, his breathing is too quick and shallow, he better get that under control before he starts hyperventilating.
'You need to take deep breaths, Five,' Dolores tells him from her place in the wagon.
Five crouches down, pressing his knees into his chest and gritting his teeth. "I know," he snaps at her, already knowing he'll have to apologize for it later.
"You…you know we're real?" someone else asks, Five thinks it might've been Ben.
Five shakes his head violently, slapping his hands against his ears so he won't have to hear them. "No," he grits out, "you are not. You are not real. You're dead."
His chest hurts, his head is spinning.
Five thinks he might be panicking, which is ridiculous, he shouldn't be freaking out just because he's hallucinating his brothers and sisters. He shouldn't be shaking apart just because he knows that in a few moments he will blink, and they will no longer be standing there.
He shouldn't feel so incredibly hopeless just at the thought of opening his eyes only to find himself alone again.
Someone is crouching down next to Five, dirt crunching under the soles of their shoes. "You need to breathe, Five," Allision says, voice soft and sad.
Five shakes his head, shoving his face into his knees and pressing his hands against his ears hard enough to hurt.
"Stopstopstop," he mutters, feeling tears building up behind his closed eyelids. "You aren't here, you aren't here."
"Hate to break it to you, dude," Diego says from far too close, right in front of Five. "But we're as real as they get."
And then Five is being pulled forward by two big hands, falling into the warmth of another person's chest before arms wrap themselves around him.
Five's brain sort of short-circuits, his breath catching and his fingers scrambling over fabric for a moment. It feels so real, the arms pressing against his back, the puff of an exhale ruffling his hair, the scent of leather and shampoo filling his nose.
Could Five's mind conjure all this up, every single little detail, every tiny sensation?
Everything in Five wants to believe that this is real, that he is actually hugging his brother, that they've come for him, that they are here to save him.
But what if he gives into this and it turns out not to be true?
What if Five gives into the feeling of hope only for it to be snatched away come morning?
Five doesn't know what to do.
So he just cries instead.
Five presses himself further into Diego's chest and clutches the leather of his jacket between trembling fingers, before he lets out something far too close to a wail.
Diego squeezes Five tighter in response, one of his hands coming up to cup the back of Five's head, fingers tangling in Five's hair, which just makes Five cry even harder.
It would be mortifying if this were real, or if Five had any semblance of control over himself in this moment, but he doesn't, and he is still 48% sure that this is a starvation induced hallucination.
There is the sound of movement around Five, of shuffling feet and murmuring voices, and then there are more hands on him. Squeezing his elbows and resting on his shoulders, patting his head and sprawled over his ribcage.
Five is surrounded by them, in the center of a makeshift circle, with all of his siblings crowded around him and holding onto Five.
"If you assholes turn out not to be real, I'm going to kill you," Five says wetly, face still pressed into Diego's shirt.
"That's fair," Klaus says, voice coming out just as watery.
Allison gives a laugh that sounds halfway to being a sob, someone else sniffles to Five's left, Vanya squeezes his wrist in response. Everyone is still couched around him, everyone hands are still holding onto him.
Five doesn't think he could make this up, he doesn't think his mind could begin to fabricate the feeling of nine different hands pressed up against him in soft touches that do absolutely nothing to hurt and everything to comfort.
Five pulls away from Diego's embrace just enough to slip off his goggles. They're foggy and filled with tears, so Five shoves them off his head and lets them fall to the dirt.
The air stings his eyes and particles of ash get caught in Five's wet lashes, but for once he doesn't care.
"Not that this isn't riveting and all," he begins, voice rough and scratching, but more hopeful than it's been in years. "But if you don't mind, I'd very much like to get the hell out of here."
Someone ruffles his hair, Ben snorts, and Klaus says, "way ahead of you," and then he's jogging away from the group only to come back with a bulky briefcase clutched to his chest.
"Alright kids," Klaus says crouching back down between Allison and Ben. "Everyone hold onto someone else, we're blowing this popsicle-stand."
He begins to open the suitcase and Five has a sudden jolt of sharp panic. "Wait!" he yelps, pulling away from the hands on him with a dawning realization.
"Wait, just…Just one second," Five says, pushing himself off of his knees and scrambling away from the arms circling around him.
He jogs over to his wagon and scoops Dolores up into his arms, hugging her tightly to his chest as he murmurs, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," quietly enough that only she will hear his breathless apologies.
He can't believe he forgot about Dolores for even a moment, that he almost left her behind.
Five rushes back to his gathered siblings, ducking under their arms and situating himself and Dolores between Vanya, Diego, and Luther.
"Alight," he says, letting out a deep shuddering breath and trying not to catch any of their concerned gazes. "I'm ready," he says, looking up at Klaus and nodding toward the briefcase.
"Alright ladies and gentlemen," Klaus announces, "let's get the hell out of this shithole."
And then he's popping open the suitcase, and with the sound of a machine whirring to life and a light bright enough to make Five's ears ring- Five has the all too familiar feeling of falling through space and time itself.
It's like an all-over body tingle. A cold shock to the system that lights up the neurons in Five's brain like nothing else ever could. A tickle that runs over Five's nerve-endings before it dissipates out his fingertips and toes.
But just as abruptly as the sensation overtakes Five, it's gone.
He's still crouched on the ground, his siblings' hands pressed into his shoulder-blades and holding him by the elbows. His arms protectively clutching Dolores to his chest.
The first thing that Five registers is the smell.
Or well, maybe the lack of it.
The air in the Apocalypse is always chocked full of ash and smoke, the scent of sulfur and decomposing bodies.
Five had figured that he would grow immune to the stench of it, that the way the air burned in his lungs and stung at his eyes would stop registering at some point.
But he supposes that no one can grow accustomed to hell.
That's what makes it hell after all.
But the sudden absence of it, to breathe in and not choke on the acid in the air, to suck in a breath and not want to gag against the smell of the dead around him.
It's such a phenomenal (astounding, reverent, shocking) feeling that Five just sits and breathes it in for a long moment.
Five blinks away the dizziness that had enveloped him when they jumped and dazedly opens his eyes to a sight he hasn't seen in years.
There is thick green grass pressed against his knees and a bright blue sky above his head.
And suddenly, Five can no longer breathe.
He reaches down with his left hand, running his fingers through the strands of dew-damp grass, with something brittle and fragile pushing up against his sternum.
"Five?" someone says from behind him.
But Five hardly registers it, because there are rustling trees in front of him and white clouds in the sky, and there are the sounds of birds chirping as they fly through the air and the sun is shining brightly down on Five's face.
And there is not one speck of ash.
Not one speck.
Five hunches over Dolores, pressing his forehead into the (green, alive, wonderful) grass as the first relieved sob bursts from his chest.
Something I've learned while writing this fic, I will never be able to spell 'apocalypse' without spellcheck there to bail me out.
Kudo and Comments are an author's high, please facilitate my addiction. ;D