Date unknown, the commission, Doomsday Ward

"Good morning sunshine."

Martha looked up from her plate of breakfast at Nicoli, who had slid into the spot across from her. She was not a morning person and the rest of the experiments knew it, hence why she had been sat by herself before he walked over. He hardly winced at the glare she sent him before looking down at her food again. "It's a morning." She agreed between bites of bland eggs. "Don't know if I'd call it a good one."

Nicoli's body was 25 and, even with the 40 years without sunlight, he was still handsome. He had a fair complexion in a way that suited him and his hair was almost always closely shaven to his head. His face was angular and made it easy to be intimidating when he wanted to. But when he smiled at her sour mood he didn't look like the killer they'd trained him to be.

She had no problem admitting he was attractive. But everyone in the dining room knew her mind was on another man.

"You written any new songs?" He asked, attempting to make conversation despite the fact that she didn't converse before 8 am.

Martha nodded her head. "Yeah." She answered. "A few."

"Any of them about me?"

She snorted and looked up at him. "Why would I write songs about you?" she asked skeptically.

Nicoli shrugged his shoulders. "I would write songs about you if I was musically inclined."

Martha stared at him for a moment, trying to decide if he was being serious or not. He sometimes said things along the same lines that made her wonder if they had the same intentions behind their back and forth banter. When she couldn't decide she just shook her head at him. "Don't be such a flirt." She told him, grabbing her tray and standing up. "I'll see you at training."

Before she could walk away her chair pushed itself back in and knocked her back down into a sitting position. She glared at him, knowing he was the only one besides her that would be capable of doing such a thing. "What the hell?"

"You're a tease, Martha."

"And you're an idiot." She set her tray back down with an angry clatter. "We've been over this; I don't date my friends. And I don't date cellmates."

He nodded his head. "Right, right, you only date your partners."

Martha's cup of orange juice flew off the table and dumped itself over his head. Viktor and Daniel, sitting at the table a few feet away, looked over at them nervously. It wasn't uncommon for a fight to break out when they were all put into the same room. A lot of power and emotions running high caused that kind of thing. Being the only girl as well as the possible object of Nicoli's affection made Martha an easy target.

"I want you to listen to me very carefully because the next time we have this conversation I'm going to break your legs." She leaned over the table and watched him rub the juice out of his eyes. "Anyone and anything that was part of my life before this is irrelevant and none of your business. Especially my previous love affairs."

She stood up again and let out an angry sigh as she turned his back to him. Martha didn't get very far before she heard Nicoli speak again. "You know, Martha, you think you got everyone fooled but we all know you're not over him. And we all know that if we ever get the chance to leave this goddamn place you're gonna be the one to get us killed. So why don't you think about how it would feel to risk our lives and then do some goddamn self-reflection."

Martha didn't say a word and instead chose to go back to being locked in her room down the hall. There was no point in arguing when Nicoli, and his unmanagable jealousy, was the one that would get them killed.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Vanya fidgeted nervously on the couch and watched as Martha fiddled with the radio, trying to find a station that pleased her. Her movements were stiff with concealed pain despite the fact that earlier that morning she had insisted to continue with business as usual. The extraction of the implant hadn't happened 24 hours yet and they had all taken turns trying to convince her to slow down. She wouldn't have it. For once she had opted for a t-shirt, putting her stitched up cut and collapsed veins on display. Now that everyone knew what was the point in hiding them? She chose a station she thought might suit Vanya's liking and settled for a classical music station before pushing herself to her feet.

"Ready?"

She shook her head. "Not really." Vanya admitted.

Martha waved her worries away. "You'll do fine." She assured her, sitting on the coffee table across from her. "In order to control your abilities you need to learn to control your emotions. So let's start there; why are you so nervous?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "I caused the apocalypse. And if I can't get control I can cause it again."

"A chain of events that ended with you caused the apocalypse." Martha corrected. "You never would have lost control of your powers if you hadn't met Leonard, and you never would have met Leonard if you didn't play the violin, and you never would have played the violin if your father needed to give you an outlet for your emotions. All of those things had to happen in order for you to be in the position to do what you did. No one person is powerful enough to cause the apocalypse all on their own."

Vanya clearly didn't believe her but chose not to say anything.

"What else are you afraid of?" Martha asked.

"Losing control."

"Why?"

She shook her head at the displeasure of the memory playing in her mind. "I hurt my family. I hurt Leonard. I know he wasn't who I thought he was but…"
"What did you do to them?"

"I killed him." She squeezed her eyes shut. "I hurt Allison."

With her eyes closed she wasn't able to see the lights blinking and the pictures hanging off the wall begin to shake. A satisfied grin spread on Martha's face and she continued to bombard Vanya with questions.

"How did you hurt her?"

"I… I slit her throat."

"Why?"
"I don't remember."

"Why Vanya?"

"Because it was all her fault!" Vanya exclaimed, pounding her fist onto her leg and causing the couch she sat on to jump in the air. Both she and Martha jumped in surprise and suddenly the lights stopped blinking.

Martha reached for her and put her hands on her knees. "Just breathe, Vanya." She said softly. "Breathe and relax. We have to keep going, okay?"

Vanya nodded.

"What's her fault?" Martha asked, retracting her hands.

"Everyone thinking I'm ordinary." She answered. "That I'm nothing special. She told me what she did and I got mad and lost control."

"What did she do?"

"Our father told her to use her powers and tell me I was ordinary."

"Why?"

"He was scared of me. He…" her hands balled into fist in her lap and the lights started to blink again. "He locked me up in the basement. For years."

"What else?"

"He never let me do anything my siblings did."

The picture frames on the wall vibrated. She was holding back.

"What else Vanya?" Martha grabbed hold of her wrists. "What else did he do?"

"He medicated me. I was numb for 17 years. And now I don't know how to deal with anything."

"Deal with what?"

"How much he messed us up. How me made sure I was never close with anyone."

"What else?"

"How he ruined my life!"

The coffee table Martha sat on flew back about 5 feet. She grabbed onto the edge to keep herself from falling off and jumped to her feet as soon as it stopped. "Control that anger!" she said without missing a beat. "Your father is dead, Vanya. And you're a grown woman. You're in control."

She shook her head. "No, I'm not."

"Yes you are!"

Martha picked up the glass of water she'd been drinking from before they started and threw it across the room at Vanya. She held her hands up in front of her face and turned away in preparation but the glass shattered in mid air before it could reach her. The fragments clattered on the ground harmlessly between the two women and when Vanya looked up she saw Martha grinning at her.

"What was that?" she demanded. "Are you trying to help me or trying to make me go blind?"

"I'm helping you." Martha said, pointing at the broken glass on the floor. "If you weren't in control you wouldn't have been able to do that. Or you would have done more and wouldn't be able to stop."

Vanya shook her head, crossing her arms and hugging herself. "I can't do this."

"You can. And you will." Glass crunched under Martha's sneakers as she came over to her. "Every single person here has lost control, Vanya. Ben and the accident, Klaus and drugs, Five and the apocalypse. Don't you think I lost control when all this started for me?" she put her hands on her shoulders. "What I said to Diego about emotions being our downfall; it's true for everyone but you. Your emotions and everything you've been through is our biggest asset."

Vanya didn't want to hear any of this. She knew why she'd felt the way she had for so many years but that didn't make it any easier to ignore how insignificant she felt. The one thing she'd ever prided herself on was her music and that too had been taken away from it when it became her weapon.

"I don't want to do this." Vanya said softly. "I don't want to be special, I don't want to be invisible. I just want to be normal."

A look of pity crossed Martha's face. She was preaching to the choir. "Once we've stopped the apocalypse you can have the most average life there ever was. But we need you right now, Vanya. Yes, you were the one who started the apocalypse. But you're the only one that can stop it."

Vanya wondered how her father would react to someone speaking to her in such a way. After spending her whole life trying to convince her that she was nothing special he would have rolled over in his grave if he could hear Martha.

When Vanya didn't seem to be in the mood for much talking Martha let her hands drop to her sides. "You know something that really helped me was writing music. It was hard to find songs that perfectly articulated what I was feeling so I made me own. Have you ever tried that?"

She shook her head. "No." she admitted. "I don't even know how I'd start."

"You can try a mashup of your favorite pieces." Martha walked over to the violin in its case sitting on the armchair and brought it over. Vanya stared down at it as if she didn't quite know what to do. "Please, Vanya, just try."

She didn't want to. Not one bit. It was all too much responsibility on her shoulder. She knew Martha was trying to make her feel better by telling her how important she was in the equation but it was only making her worse. Vanya looked up at her to protest but when her eyes met the girls she found that the idea of telling her 'no' seemed impossible. She reluctantly undid the latch of the case and took the instrument out.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Five sat on the creaky fireplace outside of the London apartment, watching the view of the street and listening to Vanya playing the violin inside. Martha had kicked everyone out and insisted that they needed privacy to do their work and he had jumped onto the fire escape as soon as she closed the door. Was he being clingy? Perhaps. But he'd thought she was dead the whole time. At least she'd known he was alive and okay. He had absolutely no clue what had happened to her.

He was well aware of the fact that Martha was perfectly capable of taking care of herself without him around for an hour or two. But he also knew that anything could happen when she was out of his sight. The commission could swoop in and steal her away and he'd be totally clueless until it was too late. Another one of the effects of what she'd been through could take its toll on her. One of his siblings could scare her away.

So, after attempting to put up a fight, he settled for sitting on the fire escape and listening to her and Vanya.

After some time he pulled the polaroid picture of them out from his wallet and gazed down at it while he listened to Vanya's violin. Five wasn't a man to dwell on regrets. The past was the past and there were more important reasons for reliving history. But when he thought about being on the road with Martha his mind was filled with a bittersweet concoction of joy and guilt.

The way things went only made him more determined to destroy the commission.

He looked up at the sound of footsteps climbing down the fire escape and found Klaus coming down from the roof. For a moment he expected his brother to come down high as a kite and prepared to reprimand him but when Klaus got to his level he was as sober as he'd been since they arrived in the past. His consistent sobriety was surprising to everyone but no one dared to question him in hopes of risking their luck.

"What were you doing on the roof?" Five asked when Klaus sat down on the ledge next to him.

He shrugged his shoulders. "Thinking." He said simply.

Five had a suspicion that his consistent sobriety and recent habit of disappearing onto the roof had to do with his deceased lover he hardly spoke of. He decided to continue not mentioning it to him.

Klaus glanced behind them at the window into the apartment. "They're still at it?" he asked.

Five nodded.

"Don't you think… that Martha's wasting her time? I mean, do we really have enough time for Vanya to get a grip well enough to be useful?"

He wanted to argue that Martha knew what she was doing, as he normally would, but Klaus had a point. "I don't know." He admitted. "It's going okay right now. But they need to go faster. Martha has 60 years worth of training and experience. She's ready. Vanya, realistically, doesn't have much more than a month."

Klaus sighed and shook his head. "Maybe we should be focusing on offense instead of defense against the commission."

Five glanced at him. "Since when were you so smart?"

He laughed and put his hand on Five's shoulder. "You're guess is as good as mine, brother." For a moment he looked at Five and he eventually began to worry what Klaus might say. "You look like shit, Five."

"Thanks."

"Seriously. When was the last time you slept?"

He had to resist the urge to roll his eyes. Sleep. What a waste of time. "Klaus, I haven't slept since the apocalypse."

Klaus waved him off. "Yeah, I figured. But you don't normally look so… drained."

Instead of replying Five looked back out at the view of the street and tucked the polaroid picture that Klaus had yet to notice into his sleeve. His body had learned how to function on a minimal amount of sleep a long time ago. But even then he was awake longer hours than usual. By the time he crawled into the shared bed at night his mind was in overdrive of plans and possible tactics against the commission. When he eventually managed to calm down his brain as much as possible he found himself laying awake and unable to close his eyes. Every time he did he saw images his imagination forced on him of Martha being experimented on. For the past few days he had spent almost the entire night watching her. Seeing her sleeping form and paying the price for staying awake was a much better option than facing the nightmares he would have if he did sleep.

"Why don't you jump in and take a nap or something?" Klaus suggested. "We're not doing anything right now, you have some time."

Five simply shook his head.

"All the coffee in the world won't give your body what sleep can."

"I'll sleep when we stop the apocalypse."

"And what if we don't?" Klaus asked. "Do you want to look like shit at your own funeral?"

Five glared at his brother and the inappropriate sense of humor he'd had since they were children.

Klaus let out a sigh and stretched his legs out, leaning his back against the brick wall behind him. "You know, I'm saying all this because I understand."

He scoffed at his brother. "What could you possibly understand, Klaus?"

"That sleeping with one eye open isn't enough. Thinking that staying awake for days at a time is worth it to know she's okay every second of every day." His gaze followed Five's to the pedestrians of London, blissfully unaware of what they were working towards. "You think you're protecting her. But she can protect herself, and you'll be useless when you die from exhaustion."

Five was dumbfounded and wouldn't have known how to reply even if he wanted to.

"I couldn't sleep much without the drugs anyway." Klaus continued. "But then I ended up staying all night making sure that none of the other guys messed with Dave. They knew he was… different. They called him soft. He just had more of a heart than any of them did. So I'd stay up all night watching him to make sure no one stole his stuff or pulled anything while he was sleeping."

Klaus dug into his wallet and pulled out a folded up picture that he'd stolen from the veterans bar. He pointed at himself and another slightly taller man with a friendly smile. "He knew how to take care of himself, and I knew that, but he was such a nice guy that it made it easy to forget."

"Martha's a trained killer who can move shit with her mind." Klaus said, "I think if anything she'd be protecting you."

"That's the point." Five finally said. "She puts people before her too much."

Klaus shook his head at his younger, but older, brother. "You know, you two remind me of Dave and I."

Five laughed. "In what world?"

Klaus laughed too. "The even stranger part is that you remind me of me."

"How?"

"You're just… different around her." he explained. "You know, I remember when we were kids at the donut shop and this girl was trying to flirt with you so you were purposely really cold with her because you couldn't be bothered."

Five remembered her only because of how his siblings made fun of him. She'd been an attractive looking girl but he could tell immediately that she cared more about her appearance than her brain.

"And, I mean this in the nicest way dear brother, but you're a dick." He continued. "You think you're better than everyone and you're not quiet about it. I think she's the only one I've ever seen you treat like an equal."

Because Martha was the only one who was his equal.

"She makes you a better person. That's what Dave did with me." Klaus gazed down at the picture with the same sort of nostalgic sadness Five felt whenever he looked at his own polaroid. After a moment or two passed he folded the picture back up and tucked it back into his wallet. "I don't know, it's hard to describe. But I imagine that if Dave and I were heterosexual teens the four of us would have gone on double dates to the mall."

"I'd never say yes to that."

"No, but Martha would. And you can't say no to her."

It was true.

Five knew Klaus was saying all this in an attempt to get him to open up and spill all his secrets on his partner. They weren't even secrets. They were just private details he preferred to keep to himself. He and his family never had a typical dynamic. Did they really expect him to tell them about how they used to dance to songs on the radio in their motel room until midnight? Or that she was the first person to do more than a card and shared cake for his birthday? Or that despite the countless places they'd been and things they'd seen she had always been the most exciting part?

He slipped the photo out of his sleeve and looked down at it once more. He felt Klaus notice it and was thankful that he chose not to say anything about it. "You want me to tell you that we were like time traveling Bonnie and Clyde. But I can't. We weren't. We were never… like that. Not really."

"Why? She wasn't into you back then?"

"That's not it."

"You weren't into her?"

"Definitely not it." Five shook his head. "I just thought that there was no rush. We literally could have been partners forever. When I met her she'd been working for the commission for 115 years. If we had even half that time I wouldn't have felt pressured. Why worry about making things official when you're convinced you have eternity to be with someone?"

Klaus nodded, seeming to understand as best he could with his limited experience with time travel. "But you guys were, you know, an item?"

Five swallowed hard and nodded. He hated talking about such personal things with his family. And if someone had told him that Klaus would be the person he chose to open up to he would have laughed.

"What about Deloris?"

"Deloris is a mannequin, Klaus."

"I was beginning to think someone had to tell you that."

He allowed himself a short laugh. "Deloris was my rock when I was in the apocalypse. I always knew she wasn't really real but she kept me from feeling like I was crazy. But then I met Martha. And I knew Deloris wanted me to be happy with someone I didn't have to carry from room to room."

"Very considerate of her." Klaus said, his voice slightly sarcastic.

It was. But that was Deloris.

"So what are you gonna do now?"

"What do you mean?"

Klaus waved his hands around in reference to the situation they were in. "You guys have a time limit. There's a good chance that you might not see each other once we storm into the commission. Are you gonna make the same mistake you met last time?"

Five did what he always did when faced with an uncomfortable topic of conversation; left it.

"Being separated from Martha again isn't an option." He said, standing up from the spot where he'd been sitting. "There'll be time to think about all that once we've stopped the apocalypse."

"Five-" Klaus began, attempting to warn him that he was making the wrong choice. But his sentence trailed off when the young boy disappeared from sight.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

A little over an hour later Five only knew Vanya and Martha had finished because he heard soft footsteps approaching his shared room from the living room. They stopped in the doorway, followed by the door closing, and soon Martha stood in his field of vision. Her hair was tied up in a knot on her forehead and looked both exhausted and in pain. Yet still somehow she was beautiful. Her expression was concerned and her eyebrows pulled together when she asked him "What's wrong?"

He forced himself to sit up, his body tired and begging him to lie back down. Though he hadn't intended to lie down and teeter on the edge of sleep when he went inside Klaus had been right; his body was running out of steam. He'd never actually managed to fall asleep but for the first time in what felt like forever his mind had been clear as he fell into a zombie-like state of awakeness.

"Nothing." he said to her, standing up and turning to face her. "I'm just tired."

"Have you been sleeping okay?"

"Yeah." He lied. "Just… got a lot on my mind I suppose."

She tucked some hairs that had escaped behind her ears. "Like what? Do you want to talk about it?"

"No."

"Can I help?"

"Yes."

"How?"

Five closed the small gap between them and wrapped his arms around her waist, pulling her into a hug. Though she was clearly surprised Martha locked her arms around his neck, leaning her forehead against his cheek. It was out of character for him to be touchy. That was usually her job. But he was glad that she didn't question it since he didn't plan on explaining what he had been thinking before she came in.

"Are you okay?" She asked him. Her voice was quiet and her warm breath tickled his neck.

No. "Yeah. I just… I missed you."

Martha picked her head up enough to kiss his cheek. "I missed you too."

He could have kissed her then. He should have kissed her then. But he just hugged her tighter instead.