9:04pm, Sunday September 8th, 2019

Listening to him talk, Vanya's reminded of the first night after Five stumbled his way back from the future. The night she found him sitting in her apartment alone in the dark with blood on his clothes, smelling of what she now recognizes as gunpowder and telling her about impossible things. About the apocalypse, about a world on fire and ash that fell from the sky like snow. Telling her it would happen in a week. Telling her because he had to tell someone, and he knew she would listen.

She didn't listen.

She heard, certainly, but she didn't listen, not in the way he'd needed her to. In her defense, her listening skills were rusty; she wasn't used to being confided in by anyone. But that seemed like a cheap excuse even to her own ears.

But how could she have known? How could she have known that the brother who came back looking like he hadn't aged a day had lived a lifetime? Those youthful hands growing rough like leather, the hair turning tombstone grey. So much easier to believe that he'd just gotten confused, that the leap forward had damaged him in some fundamental way. (Except now, of course, she's seen him damaged from time travel. She knows what it looks like when his mind's been 'contaminated' and it's not delusions about the end of the world.) It would have been different, she thinks, if he hadn't still looked like a child. If he'd been able to wear the years on his face and-

"How old are you?" she asks suddenly, realizing at least part of what has been nagging at her, the hole running through the middle of his story. (One of them, anyway.)

He pauses to look at her, blinking. "What?"

"How old are you?" She asks again, holding his gaze.

He hesitates, then scowls. "That's not important," he says dismissively, and she instantly disagrees.

"When Five came back he was fifty-eight and looked thirteen," she counters. "You look twenty-five? Thirty? Nearly as old as us. But how can that be, when you said you escaped the Commission before they had a chance to do anything to you. So how old are you, really?" He wouldn't have spent two decades at the Commission without being 'programmed', and he certainly wouldn't have lived that long in the world without coming to find them before now.

He hesitates again, chewing the inside of his lip before sighing in something like defeat. "On a cellular level, around twenty-five, give or take. In linear time ...not too sure, but we think it's about five weeks, maybe six."

Six weeks.Her siblings stare open mouthed, too shocked to speak but Vanya finds she isn't as surprised as she might have been. She's long since given up the idea that anything about her brother or his timeline could be simple and direct. Five, after all, was only simple and direct when he was killing people.

There's a feeling like a hand around her throat and she shudders.

On the other side of the table Diego is the first to recover. "You're six weeks old!?" he blurts out, looking like he's rethinking a lot of things. "And you don't think that's important information?"

"It really isn't," Five says, the exasperation in his voice tinged with a weary kind of resignation. Taking in their incredulous stares he sighs again and squeezes his eyes shut, pinching the bridge of his nose. "We're a clone, and age is just a number. Our physical bodies can be whatever the Commission wants them to be. Fifteen, twenty five, fifty eight; they can stop the process wherever they like. It's the difference of a couple days linear time. And as far as we know, this body's been active a little over a month."

It hasn't been a month since Five disappeared, Vanya thinks, but what did that matter? It hadn't been forty-five years either.

Luther shakes his head, confusion crushing his face together. "If you're twenty-five, then- do you still remember everything Five does? I mean, he was fifty-eight..."

Five looks annoyed by the question but answers it anyway. "Not everything," he admits. "If we remembered everything, things would be a lot easier." She wants to ask him what that means but surprisingly doesn't have to. "We remember what the Prime remembers, our life from before the mental degradation occurred. But, during the time we were sick- we don't remember very much of that, and neither will he."

Two out of four siblings open their mouths to talk but Five ignores them, running ahead as if his explanations weren't simply giving them more questions. "The Commission can repair neural damage, but they can't retrieve memories that were never formed. When the mind's infected by time sickness it becomes incapable of distinguishing between past, present and future events. Everything- everything exists as an eternal 'now'. Impossible to create memories when the brain can't understand the concept of time." He's talking with his hands now, the way he always had, fingers sculpting pictures from his words and it comforts Vanya in some nebulous way. Unlike the strange boy who'd appeared in the kitchen, this one really did seem like their brother. Even if the years were different, he felt the same.

"Past, present and future?" Allison cuts in, sounding skeptical.

"We're a time traveler," he reminds her, but it's not an answer that satisfies anyone.

"That doesn't make any sense," Diego says, giving Vanya a sudden jolt of deja vu and she wonders if that's what it's like to have time sickness, the feeling of everything happening at once, even the things that hadn't happened yet...but that didn't make sense either. How could you remember something that hadn't happened to you yet?

For his part, Five looks done with all of them, thin veneer of patience vanishing under what he obviously thought were a lot of very stupid questions. "Nothing about any of this is going to make sense until you accept that time doesn't move in a straight line. It only seems like it does because your dumb, 3-manifold monkey brains can't process it any other way!"

"And you can?" Diego shoots back.

"Yes," Five hisses from between clenched teeth.

"Guys-" Vanya warns, not wanting to derail the conversation with arguments because Five's actually talking to them and giving them answers and she wants to keep the streak going because she's afraid as soon as he realizes it he'll stop.

Diego casts a heated look in her direction but backs down. Sort of. "Fine, all right, fine. We're a bunch of dumb monkeys that don't understand time. Whatever."

Vanya and Allison share a look. Here we go again.

Surprisingly it's Luther who jumps in, trying to shift the topic away from monkey brains which admittedly was probably not what they should be focusing on right now. (But somehow, whenever they all got together conversations always devolved into things like that.) "Is that what all that's for?" he asks, nodding to the stack of papers Five had taken from his room.

"Yes," he acknowledges, resting his hand on them. "They're whatever thoughts we managed to scrape together while our brain was imploding."

"And there's something in there that will help you find Five?" Vanya guesses, remembering what he'd said back at the mansion. The twins said we'd written it down.

"Maybe," he says, then gives a strange laugh. "I hope so, because it's the only chance we've got."

"The chance to do what?" Klaus says, the broken bell over the door giving a pathetic, tinny sounding clunk as he sauntered in, "What'd I miss?"

Vanya isn't even sure where she should begin.

"Do you have my shirt?" Five snaps and Klaus grins like a school boy.

"Oh, yea-" he says, tossing over a faded brown button up, "-here ya go." Five gives it a delicate sniff and wrinkles his nose in distaste but puts it on anyway, not bothering to be discreet as he changes in the middle of the diner. No one seems to care, the waitress glancing over with indifference before going back to rolling silverware, a fine grey ash filtering down from the cigarette in her mouth.

Suddenly Five pauses while doing up the buttons, blinking at Klaus with a strange look on his face. "What the hell are you wearing?" he demands, and Klaus looks down at himself in admiration.

"What, this? Just picked it up. Like it?" He holds himself out for inspection, wearing what was probably supposed to be a shirt, if it had been designed by a ward full of mental patients. Vanya's getting a headache just looking at it.

"No," Five says with utter sincerity, but he's still staring at it, oddly puzzled look on his face. Then his eyes widen. "We need to leave," he says suddenly, urgency in his voice that makes Vanya's gut clench and she looks out the window, expecting Temps agents with guns and face masks, or assassins with briefcases. Any number of catastrophes run through her head, but there's nothing there. Just an empty, rain washed street, the on-off buzz of a broken neon light.

"Why?" Allsion asks, but she's already shrugging on her jacket.

"There's something we need to do."

"What do we need to do?"

"No, not you guys, us- me. There's something I need to do." He's already turned towards the door and hovering, impatience making him jittery. Something's happened, she's smart enough to know that. She just doesn't know what it is and that sets her on edge.

"What about the answers you promised us?" Diego asks, and something dark flashes over Five's face.

"You've got them," he says curtly, "Let's move."

Vanya doesn't think they're anywhere close to getting all the answers but what else was to be done? She knows her brother well enough to know she can't force him to stay anywhere, talk about anything (she's tried before). When Five was ready to go, he left.

So she doesn't bother trying. Instead she fishes her wallet out and drops some money on the table because in her experience Five never carried any cash with him. Why should he? He'd never needed it in the apocalypse and anything he wanted nowadays he could get without paying for it.

A few minutes later they're following him out the door and into the cold night air, and Vanya has no idea where they're going next.