I know, I know, I suck for not updating often. Working full time and going to school part time is kicking my ass. But I got an idea for a sequel for this story so it's kind of re lit the fire in me for now. In the mean time I hope you enjoy!

Downtown Chicago, behind the Bunnyslope Bar, January 18th 1918

Five and Martha hovered beside the dumpster behind the bar, each smoking a cigarette and pretending they weren't paying attention to the conversation going on behind them. Johnny Caputo, a man towards the top of the Chicago Mob food chain, was in the middle of ordering a last-minute hit to a younger middle man who seemed intimidated by his presence. Snow fell from the sky above their heads and gave a certain charm to an other wise unappealing scene.

They were supposed to exterminate Caputo as soon as he was by himself but the hit order was taking much longer than they expected. Four cigarette butts lay on the ground between their feet and Martha was vibrating in an attempt to keep herself warm. As Five took a drag he grabbed her gloved hands and rubbed them as quickly as he could to create some friction.

"We should just take them both out." She whispered to him, leaning close. "I might need to get something amputated if we stay here much longer."

"Go inside." He whispered back. "I can do the job by myself."

She shook her head, the hair that stuck out under her hat flying across her face. "No way." She said. "What kind of partner would I be if I left you alone out here?"

"A warm one."

She smiled but didn't go anywhere.

It was another 5 minutes before the younger man walked away and they quickly dropped their cigarettes on the ground to extinguish them. When Five looked up and past Martha he spotted Caputo heading over to them with a certain swagger in his stature that hadn't been there before. Before he got the chance to give Martha some kind of silent warning Caputo was standing behind her and clearing his throat.

Her head snapped and she spun on her heels to face him, which only caused him to laugh. "Sorry, didn't mean to scare you like that." He said, a thick accent dripping from his tongue. "I was just coming over to ask if I could buy you a drink."

"Oh um…" Martha stuttered, glancing up at Five as if to silently ask for help.

"Oh, are you two together?" Caputo asked.

Martha's expression lit up before she looked away from Five and back at their target. "No." she said, placing her hand on Five's arm. "He's my business partner. I'd love a drink."

Five opened his mouth to protest, or to try and insert himself into the situation somehow, but before he could Caputo gestured his hand towards the door. "Lead the way."

Martha headed towards the back door of the bar, Caputo tailing behind her, and shot a look at Five over his shoulder. Stay she mouthed before disappearing inside and leaving him outside in the January cold. What other choice did he have than to listen to her?

Five alternated between pacing back and forth and smoking a bit more while he waited for her. He didn't want to take the chance of tipping their target off by going inside and hovering. Besides, he knew Martha could handle herself. She could poison his drink or lead him off to a secluded part of the club and take him out there. Five wasn't worried that she could do it. He was just worried about her doing it alone.

He was standing in a spot obscured from the view of the back door when it slammed open and there was the sound of a struggle. Five ducked behind the corner of the building, peeking around the corner and watched two people stumble out the door. One was much larger and had a grip on the back of the smaller figure's shirt collar.

"Who are you working for, huh?" A gruff voice asked, shoving the smaller person forward. "Carisi? Bruno?"

The smaller person straightened up. "No one." Martha's voice said. "You've got the wrong idea."

Five's heart stopped for a split second at the sound of her voice. He made to join them but before he could he heard Caputo's reply.

"Don't lie to me." He barked. Five stepped closer to the corner to get a better view and watched Caputo pull a gun out and point it at Martha's head. "Tell me who you're with and I might let you live."

"I'm not with anyone you know." Martha answered honestly, not sounding threatened in the slightest. "And I suggest you put your gun down."

A crack rang through the night as the barrel of the gun connected with Martha's nose. She yelped, both in pain and surprise, and stumbled back. Her hand flew up to her face as Caputo spoke again. "I don't take orders from broads."

The words had barely left his lips before Five jumped the space that separated them so he was standing behind the mob boss. In one motion he took his gun out from his holster, held it to the back of Caputo's head, and pulled the trigger. Martha screamed, covering her head as if to prepare for the bullet to pierce her, but she peeked through her hands at the sound of Caputo's dead body hitting the floor with a thud.

Five stepped over his body and reached for his partner. "Are you okay?" he asked her.

She nodded her head, "I'm fine." She answered. But the blood pooling from her likely broken nose said differently. "Good job."

He gripped both of her shoulders and pulled her towards him and in a blink of an eye they were back in their motel room. Five sat her down on her bed and rushed to get the first aid kit in the bathroom.

"You don't have to make such a big fuss!" she called after him. "It's just a little blood."

Five waited to reply until he was standing in front of her and taking gauze out of the kit. "He could have killed you." He said.

"No, he couldn't have." She replied. "Not while you were there."

Maybe she was right, maybe it wasn't such a big deal. Five had experienced a broken nose before and it certainly wasn't the worst thing in the world. It was the blood that made it seem gruesome. Perhaps he was so frazzled because he'd never seen his partner hurt before. They'd only been working together for a year and the worst he'd seen her encounter was a twisted ankle. He wasn't typically the caregiver type but she was his partner, and partially his responsibility. So he told her to shut up and let him work, and thankfully she complied.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

The radio sitting on the countertop filled the room with music from the early 90s while Klaus pursed his lips at the cards in his hand before discarding with a unsatisfied grunt. The Umbrella Academy, with the exception of Five who was in the shower down the hall, sat at the kitchen table playing Rummy with Martha. Since playing cards was one of the few things she'd had to pass the time in the commission she was pretty damn good and was wiping out the competition.

"We started to bet our chores for the week." She said when Luther asked her how she'd gotten so good. "I wasn't that good before that, but I got good. I had dish duty and was determined to give it to someone else."

"You guys had chores?" Allison asked, clearly confused how the commission had gotten people hundreds of years old to do chores like children.

Martha nodded her head. "Besides transporting us from rooms, monitoring us during training, and experiments we were pretty self sufficient." She told them. "You ever hear how prisoners are the only thing keeping jails up and running because they do everything?"

Everyone answered no except for Klaus, who had once worked in the laundry room in one of his short stunts in prison.

"Well it's kind of like that." She explained. "Daniel and I were in the kitchen, he prepared everything and I cleaned up. Though once in a poker game I got Viktor to take my chores for 3 months." She placed one of her cards into the discard pile and looked up at them. "You guys never traded chores growing up?"

Diego scoffed. "We never had chores." He answered. "That's why Grace was built."

"Oh." Martha replied shortly.

"Five never told you a lot about how we grew up, did he?" Luther guessed as he took his turn.

She shook her head. "He never really talked about himself in general." She told them. "When we first started working together he always had Vanya's book with him, and I peeked inside a few times, which is the only reason I know most of what I do. But he caught me reading it once because I didn't hear the shower turn off and he stopped bringing it with him."

Vanya's cheeks turned pink. "He kept my book with him?"

Martha nodded. "And he did tell me some stuff. But only good things. Like going to the doughnut shop on Sunday mornings or when you guys had time off from training."

"But he never said much about our dad?" Diego asked.

"No, not really." Martha said. "It was clearly a touchy subject, but I didn't ask. And since we were together all the time it was kind of hard to try to find anything out behind his back. I just figured if he wanted to tell me one day he would."

Klaus laughed, "Maybe you're better off not knowing what happened with Reggie."

"Was it really bad?"

They all nodded somberly.

"Though I guess it's better than being held captive and pumped full of steroids." Klaus commented.

His siblings all expected his joke to hit a nerve with the girl but she just rolled her eyes and punched his arm. "I'm sort of realizing I don't know as much about him as I thought I did." Martha admitted. "I mean, I don't even really know anything about what he did before the commission. I know they picked him up from the apocalypse, but I don't know how he got there in the first place."

Allison raised an eyebrow at her. "He never told you?"

Martha shook her head. "No, never." She said. "He never really talked about anything having to do with the apocalypse. It's really hard, I imagine."

"Do you want us to tell you?" Luther asked.

She quickly looked up, her eyes widening slightly. "You know how it happened?"

"We were kind of there." Allison said.

They took her setting her cards down and resting her arms on the table as a silent request for them to go on.

"He'd been talking about time travel for months." Vanya began. It only made sense for her to tell the story, being that she was the closest to him in the family. "Studying everything he could, practicing special jumps even after training hours were over. He pretty much became obsessed with it. He brought it up to our dad, and he shut it down immediately, and he stormed out. And that was the last time we saw him until he came back."

Martha's jaw hung loose. "What happened?"

"He decided to do it anyway. And he pushed himself too far into the future and got stuck in the apocalypse.

Martha's gaze fell down to the cards on the table, her eyes looking somewhere far away. "Wow." She said simply. "He never told me that."

"You guys seem so close." Allison commented, "I thought you would have known everything about each other."

She glanced up at her in a way that was almost a glare. "We are close." She said shortly. "But we never really talked about our lives before we met. Neither of us did."

"How did the commission find him in the apocalypse anyway?" Luther asked in an attempt to steer the conversation in a different direction while still staying on topic.

"Once they have their eye on a possible new hire they surveillance them for about 5-10 years." Martha explained, "So they were probably watching him even before he was in the apocalypse. I was a receptionist and had to give messages from one department to another, and you wouldn't believe how many times I heard his name."

"How did they find you?" Diego asked, raising an eyebrow at her.

"Through my mom." she answered. "They wanted her for HR. She can resolve any argument imaginable. While they were watching her, they started watching me. They knew I could defend myself because I got bullied at school, but they hired my mom before they knew for sure they wanted me so they stuck me in reception."

"What about dad?" Klaus asked, "They got a job for him too?"

Martha shook her head. "I don't have a dad. I'm adopted."

"You don't think…" Vanya's voice trailed off with uncertainty. She looked down at her hands and picked at her cuticles before she had the courage to continue. "You don't think there's a chance you were born like us, do you?"

She blinked at her a few times. "No," she said simply, "I was born in 1969 in the Hamptons."

"What if that's just what they told you?"

"The commission hired me in 1986." She reminded them, "Before any of you were born."

"They deal with time, right?" Diego countered, "They could have just planted you there."

She shook her head as if she was shaking off the possibility. "Why would they do that?"

No one had an answer to that.

"You said all the other people with you were also like us." Said Allison. "It makes sense to use drugs to enhance already existing powers. But it doesn't make sense to use steroids to create powers from nothing." she set her cards face down on the table. "We were the only ones of the 43 that were ever in the public eye. That leaves 36 unaccounted for. It might make sense for them to hide literal human weapons in plain sight, like the past. 'Track them down', that's how you said it when you told us the commission was getting them. Maybe they hid some of them so well that even they couldn't find them."

Martha didn't say anything as she looked down at her scarred arms. It wasn't until she was getting to her feet and pushing her chair out that she muttered a quick 'if you'll excuse me' and exited the room. The siblings glance at each other, realizing quickly that they had struck some sort of news.

In a matter of seconds she was outside the bathroom door knocking. "I said I'd tell you when I'm done, Klaus!" Five's irritated voice called from the other side of the wood.

"It's me." She said shortly, afraid if she said much more her voice would give away how upset she was.

There was the sound of movement and less than a minute later the door flew open. Five was dressed but his hair was soaking wet and yet to be styled. He took one look at her and stepped into the hallway to be closer to her. "What's wrong?"

Martha's bottom lip trembled and she quickly pulled him into a hug, hiding her face in his neck, before she spoke again. "Can we not talk about it?" she asked him. "I'll tell you later, just… not right now."

"Yeah, of course." He answered, his arms finding her waist. "Do you want to go do something? Maybe it will distract you."

She pulled away just enough to look at him and nod her head. "Yeah, okay." Martha answered. Her hands still on the back of his neck made his hairs stand on end. "Where do you want to go?"

"Anywhere. Let's go for a walk."

Martha's lips pulled into a smile. "Okay. I'll wait for you to dry your hair."

"No," Five said, grabbing her hand and pulling her down the hall in the direction of the front door. "Let's just go."

Martha didn't protest and soon they were out the door and heading towards the streets of London. Though Five was itching to find out what had happened to make her so upset he knew better than to press the topic. For Martha to not only admit to being hurt but to actively seek out someone to comfort her was a big deal. He knew she would get around to telling him, she always did. Five just kept his fingers crossed it wasn't anything earth shattering.