Ash.
When the world ends, there's only ash.
Five staggers forth, arms wrapped around himself.
The heat is oppressive, a physical force bearing down on his shoulders and staggering his steps.
His toe catches on a piece of rubble and sends him sprawling.
For a long moment, Five doesn't move.
He can't move.
He's trembling all over, breaths coming so small and fast, it feels like he isn't taking any air into his lungs at all.
He wants his siblings- so, so badly and it hurts.
Ben- and Vanya… sweet, ordinary Vanya.
He hadn't… hadn't been able to find their bodies with the rest of them and he's… he's not sure if they're dead or where to look for them if they're not.
How had all of this happened?
Barely an hour ago, he'd been seated at the table, surrounded by his siblings.
And now he's here…
He'd thought he was capable, that he was ready for this, and he'd been so desperate to prove it to their father, so vain and arrogant to think that he was capable of bending the very fabric of time to his will.
And now look where it's got him.
The world is on fire and his family is dead and he can't go home.
He can't go home.
Five folds over as he gags, spewing the contents of his stomach across the ground. This is bad- he knows in order to survive, he needs to hold onto every resource he possibly can- but he can't stop.
He heaves until his stomach has nothing left to give and then he heaves some more.
Five lifts his head, beads of sweat already breaking out on his skin, and stares out at nothing.
A wasteland is spread out before him.
(Singed rubble. Smoke and ash.
And bodies.
As he comes to find over the next hellish days, weeks, months, the streets are littered with bodies.
So many, many bodies.
Including his family)
Five scrambles to his feet, palms stinging and smeared with blood from where he scraped them.
What does he do now?
The answer is obvious.
Survive.
/
Survive.
The single word plays like a mantra inside his skull.
It's the only thing he can think of.
Survive.
He's buried his siblings, dug shallow graves with whatever he could find to use, including his own hands, leaving his fingers torn and bloody, and laid them to rest.
He never was able to find Vanya and Ben.
Eventually, he'd given up searching- survival was too important- but sometimes he wondered…
There was always that sliver of doubt.
And then he finds Vanya's book.
He doesn't read it immediately. Instead, he holds it for a long time, drinking in the image of his sister's face.
His sister's older face.
He traces his fingers over the photograph, taking in her soft features, doe eyes, and wavy brown hair.
The corner of her lips are curved in what's meant to be a smile, but it doesn't quite reach her eyes.
She looks… sad.
He can't tear his eyes away from her.
There's a knot in his throat and his vision is blurring. He hugs the book to his chest, tries his best to ignore the tears.
He's going to be fine.
This is… this is temporary.
He'll figure this out and then he'll jump back and it will be like he never left in the first place.
They'll still be alive because he'll save them.
/
Five hadn't known how much he'd been clinging to that hope until it all came crashing down.
He reads Vanya's book.
All of them, their whole life together, turned inside out.
He reads how Klaus withdrew deeper and deeper into his drug addiction. How Diego distanced himself more and more while Luther clung harder to Dad's twisted ideology.
It's quite possibly the ballsiest thing he's ever read and he can only imagine how well it went over with the rest of his siblings.
It's like losing them all over again.
And Ben…
Ben.
It feels like he's been carved open, hollowed out until there's absolutely nothing left of him but an empty husk.
He doesn't even have the energy to cry.
Five. Dolores tries without success to rouse him from his stupor. Five, you need to get up!
He doesn't answer her and he doesn't let go of the book either.
He holds it like a lifeline and, in a way, it is.
It's his only connection to the siblings he inhabits a world without. His only means of knowing the people he became when he was no longer there to witness it for himself.
Five! Dolores sounds increasingly more frantic.
He jerks upright.
/
He doesn't have the energy for this.
Five sinks to the ground, resting his head between his knees, body shaking from exertion.
He knows just how dangerous it is to give in to despair- he's let himself go down that road once before.
It's too easy.
The solitude… it does things. He's still got enough of a grasp on reality to recognize this.
There are days when he thinks he sees them.
He sees Vanya a lot, although they all make their appearance from time to time.
Vanya never says anything, just watches him with that same, sad half-smile she wore in her photo on the book jacket.
And Five… Five chokes on whatever he might think to say to her, unable to lift a trembling hand.
It's always when she's gone that the words come tumbling out.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
It's not fair to the others that, sometimes, it's the separation from Vanya that hurts the most. He wonders how she fared after he left, if she missed him the same way he misses her, if she thought he abandoned her or if she knew just how desperately he wants to come home.
…it doesn't matter.
He'll find a way out of this place and, when he does, he'll find a way to save them.
All of them.
They'll never be the burned and broken corpses Five had buried.
He's gone through the equations so many times it's made him dizzy, scrawled them across whatever he could find to write on until his writing became illegible, till his wrist burned, stared at them until the marks blurred into something incoherent, but he had to keep going.
He had to find a way to get back. He had to find a way to stop this.
He had to find a way to save his family.
Breathe, Five, Dolores commands, gentle but firm.
She's his anchor, a steady presence in this hellscape, and he latches onto her.
"I'm trying!" Five snaps. Quieter then, more apologetic, he whispers, "I'm trying."
I know, Dolores assures him, patient and understanding. But you should get some rest. You aren't doing yourself any favors if you run yourself ragged.
She is far more than he deserves.
He knows he worries her, knows she's only looking out for his well being, but he can't stop.
If he could only just find that damn equation!
Rising to his feet, he hurls the closest thing he can close his hand around and screams.
He can't stop screaming, not until his throat is raw and his voice is hoarse and he's curled on the ground.
Five!
He's scaring Dolores.
"I'm sorry," he tells her because he is, but he can't bring himself to move.
Not right now.
You needed to get it out, she assures him, even though they both know it's energy he can't afford to waste, but she's never been one to rub his face in his own mistakes.
No, he does that all on his own.
Five picks himself up off the ground and tries to pretend his face isn't still damp and swollen from crying, that he's not hollow from the hunger that he let grow out of control because he was too busy, that his knuckles aren't raw and bleeding because he punched the ground in a fit of rage and now he'll need to find something to bandage himself with so it doesn't get infected, that Dolores isn't right.
(She's always right and they both know it.)
He forces himself to climb to his feet.
/
He's trembling from exhaustion by the time he's finished, having ignored all of Dolores' pleas for him to rest.
He doesn't have the time for that.
Ironic, since you have all the time in the world, Dolores snipes, the way she does when she's particularly fed up with Five running himself ragged.
"Not anymore." He grins, feeling lightheaded with excitement.
Did you…? Dolores doesn't finish that sentence. Five wonders if maybe she's afraid to.
"I think so." Shit, what if he's wrong? The thought is almost too much for him to bear.
What if he's built his hopes up for nothing?
Will he spend another year in this hell? Another ten? Twenty?
The possibility is terrifying.
You can do it, Dolores assures him quietly. I believe in you.
Five will never have the words to express just how much she means to him.
I know, Five. He can hear the smile in her words, but he can also hear her exhaustion and feels a twinge of guilt.
He's running them both ragged.
He'll make it up to her when they're both out of this place.
/
It isn't spatial jumping.
Not even close.
It isn't even like the time travel that got him stuck here in the first place.
It starts as an itch beneath his skin, hundreds of ants crawling just beneath the epidermis.
It isn't painful, but it's there and it's uncomfortable.
Every hair on his body is standing on end.
The air bends itself around him, crackling with energy, and the tear in space, when it appears, is miniscule. Little by little, it enlarges itself, becoming a gaping chasm incised into the very matter of the universe.
He feels like he's being torn apart and compressed all at the same time.
Abort, he thinks in a panic and he almost pulls back from it because what if he's wrong, what if he got the numbers wrong, what if he fails, but he can't… He's come this far already and he can't even entertain the thought of failure.
Who knows if he'll ever get the opportunity to try this again?
He feels when the lapse in concentration costs him, when he almost loses his grip on time, almost feels his last chance slip between his fingers, and he refocuses for all he's worth.
/
The first error becomes obvious when the wormhole spits him out.
Five has a moment for this to register before he drops the several feet to the ground with a startled grunt.
He lands in a heap of ungainly limbs. His head is pounding, black flecks marring his vision.
He pants, struggling to collect himself, but he doesn't think he has the strength to pick himself up off
There are people around him, gawking at the boy who just fell out of the sky.
It's been so long since he's heard a human voice that it's something of a shock to his system.
Had they always been this loud?
"Shit," he murmurs into the concrete.
It's all he has the energy for before the encroaching darkness takes him.
/
Diego remembers less of the day that Five disappeared and more of what came after.
Their father had always been an asshole, but it had only gotten worse when their brother never came home.
The personalized torture sessions he liked to call 'special training,' that damn portrait he'd commissioned and hung over the fireplace, front and center- an unspoken reminder of the consequences of failure.
Dad never said that that was what it was- not out loud- but they all knew it to be so.
It certainly wasn't a touching memorial in the same way Ben's statue never was.
It became so easy to be angry with him, to hate him, for abandoning them all. For escaping and leaving the rest of them to face the brunt of Dad's wrath.
Maybe that was just his own way of covering up the pain. Of pretending it never existed.
Because Five being selfish is easier to think about than Five being alone or scared or dead.
Diego wraps his hands around the porcelain washbasin and takes a deep breath. Water droplets from his hair fall into the sink and he watches as they slide one by one.
There are a thousand things more interesting at any given moment and yet he can't tear his eyes away.
"Do you think he's dead?" Klaus whispers, hushed in spite of their father being tucked away in his study.
Dad won't hear them, but that doesn't mean they stop worrying that he will. It's what a lifetime under his thumb will teach you.
"Of course not," Luther scoffs, in his very best 'Dad made me number one, so I must be right' voice.
Ben looks distinctly uncomfortable.
Vanya more so.
"Wait," Allison leans forward, forehead scrunching "wouldn't you know?"
"Who knows?" Klaus maybe sounds a little off-kilter and Diego thinks that maybe this is when the fractures that have always been there start to show. "Maybe he moved on." He flaps his hand aimlessly.
That's when Diego notices there's something off about his eyes…
Maybe things would have been different if he had noticed the drug use back then. If he had stepped in.
A knock on the door drags him from his memories and he straightens.
"Diego." Eudora sounds more serious than usual, which is saying something because serious is her default setting. "You're going to want to see this."
"Right." Diego sighs, because this isn't going to be good and he'd actually been hoping for a quiet evening with his sort-of, but not quite girlfriend. "I'll be out in a sec." He wrestles his pants on and steps outside.
"Alright, I'll bite. What…?" He stops the moment he sees her face.
Eudora's lips are pressed neatly into a grim line, but there's something in her eyes that freezes him in his tracks.
Sympathy. Compassion. Understanding.
All things he wouldn't need right now, unless…
Diego very suddenly thinks he might be ill.
Klaus, he thinks. Please, God… But he stops himself there because he realizes he doesn't know how to bargain with God.
"Eudora…" His voice is gravelly when he speaks, as he takes her by the arms.
Maybe he's pleading.
"It's not Klaus," she says softly, because she sees how he gets whenever there's a dead junkie, knows how his skin feels too tight and his shoulders too heavy.
"It…" He clasps his hands against his lips, shuts his eyes, and breathes deeply for a moment.
It isn't Klaus.
But Eudora had still…
He opens his eyes.
"It's your other brother." She touches his arm, offering support, but not forcing it on him. Always giving him the option to accept or not. "The one who disappeared."
Diego's mouth has gone dry and he feels weak in the knees.
After all this time… why now?
"Five," he whispers.