Diego's heard a lot of weird shit in his life because his life is weird and also shit and his perception of 'normal' is skewed about six feet to the left on a good day but this...this is fucked up even by his standards.

How much do you know about clones, says the man who looks the way his brother might look if he were twenty-five instead of thirteen or fifty-eight or however old he is. How much do you know about clones, says the man who moved through space the way Five did, who used a knife the way Five did, who'd saved their lives the way Five did (the only real difference being this Five bitched about it significantly less). How much do you know about clones, said the man who might be Five or just a piece of him, a clump of autonomous, knife wielding cells and Diego needs a fucking drink.

(But there's another body on the floor behind them laying in a pool of it's own blood and this one does look thirteen and there isn't enough alcohol in the whole city to make that okay. )

To be honest everything Diego knows about Clones he learned from shitty Saturday night Sci-Fi B movies so the only two reasonable responses he has to a question like that are silence and disbelief. Appropriately, he goes with number two. "I swear to God man if this is some kind of fucking joke-"

"Does that look a joke to you?" Five asks, gesturing towards the body of their un-brother. "He came here to kill you. All of you." He closes his eyes, exhausted in a way that tells Diego he's probably hit his physical limit just like the other Five had and he pictures the two of them warping all over the house, trying to murder each other. "We couldn't let that happen."

"We?" asks Luther, but Five's only response is a soul-weary sigh that pulls it's way up from somewhere deep inside him. "Five, who's 'we'?" Luther asks again, reaching out to give him a surprisingly gentle shake. He doesn't get the chance to make contact before Five grabs ahold of his wrist and pushes him away and Diego pretends he doesn't see Luther wince.

Five never even opens his eyes.

"Can you walk?" Diego asks after a moment. Five doesn't answer and that pisses him off until he realizes it's because Five's out cold, slumped against the wall with a knife sticking out of his shoulder. He'd held on just long enough to make sure they were safe and that- that was definitely Five's style.

"We should get him to the medical room," Allison says. Luther doesn't move right away, still staring at the face that was both strange and familiar, all sharp angles and corners, none of the child they knew but recognizable all the same. Five's face, a man's face, and maybe a killer's too.

"Do you think he's telling the truth?" asks Luther and Diego says yes because he doesn't want to consider the alternative.

Someone has to get rid of the body, and that job falls to Diego and Luther. Diego because he hates needles and hadn't wanted to stand around watching Five get stitched up and Luther because he was good with a shovel. They make quick work of it, burying their gruesome cargo out in the courtyard next to Ben's statue. There are several reasons for this which they don't bother sharing with each other. In fact they don't bother speaking at all.

There's too much to say.

Diego tries not to think about how small and light the body is. Tries not to think of it as his brother at all but it's not easy. Not when it's got his brother's face, death-grey and cold and his brother's dark shock of hair falling over his forehead and his brother's eyes staring sightlessly up at him.

It's still wearing an academy uniform.

Luther wraps it in a blanket before they start digging. They don't have a coffin and neither of them like the idea of simply shoveling dirt on top of it. All in all it takes a couple hours and would have taken more but the ground is soft with rain and Luther channels his grief into action, plowing through the mud with his mouth in a hard line and Diego doesn't say anything about the tears on his face.

It might just be rainwater; they both have plausible deniability.

It's not your brother, he reminds himself as he starts filling in the dirt. It was never your brother.

The words don't help as much as he hoped they would.

Back inside they trudge down to the medical room, mud on their shoes leaving an incriminating trail across the pristine tile and someone's going to have to clean it up now mom wasn't there but it isn't going to be him. He's cleaned up enough messes for one day.

The others are waiting in the surgery. They hadn't come because that would have been too much like a funeral. Vanya and Klaus are there; she's leaning against him with her head on his shoulder and he's got an arm around her like he's afraid she'll shatter without him there to hold her together.

Diego wonders who's supposed to be holding him together.

"It's done," he says, voice sawed off and rough sounding. Vanya turns her face into Klaus' chest and starts to cry again. He still hasn't gotten the story of exactly what happened to her, though he can guess at the broad strokes.

"Thank you," Allison says and he just nods, feeling like someone had taken a shovel to him, scooped him out and left him hollow and empty. He glances at the sleeping man on the bed, overcome with a sensation of weary familiarity. How many times, across how many timelines, in how many universes were they going to stand here gathered in the surgery, watching Five sleep, wondering who he would wake up as?

Klaus clears his throat and says, "Pogo took some hair samples, fingerprints too. We'll know soon enough if it's him."

"It fucking better be," says Diego, and he thinks it is, he really does but what if he's wrong? And even if it is Five, how does he know if it's a Five or the Five and he'd already said he's a clone, but that's the thing; Five had been confused long before this. Hadn't been well at all, brain scrambled by time travel and twisted in on itself and how could they be sure of anything? What if the kid they just buried in the yard had been the real Five? (He's attacked them before after all, almost killed Klaus and that's why they had to use paper plates, because you couldn't be sure one day to the next and yet, and yet even when he was in the middle of an episode he hadn't looked like the person who attacked them tonight, Diego could still recognize Five even when he couldn't recognize them but not tonight, tonight he'd been a stranger in every sense of the word and there hadn't been anything but madness in his eyes-)

"Diego?" Allison asks and he realizes she's been trying to get his attention. He focuses on her and she repeats herself. "We wanted to show you something." She gestures him forward and he goes like a puppet on strings, stiff marionette march to Five's bedside. Allison turns down the white sheet and doesn't say anything, just looks at him expectantly. He looks down.

"What-" he clears his throat, "what the fuck is that?"

He knows what he's looking at but he doesn't understand it. It's a scar - a welt - ridged white lines of raised flesh forming a perfect row of letters just over Five's heart: CHRONOS

Luther steps up beside him, dollops of brownish mud still clinging to his coat. Same uncomprehending stare on his face. "What's 'chronos'?"