7:23pm, Friday August 26th, 2019

Allison once thought she had the entire world at her feet.

She could have anything she wanted, all she had to do was find the right ear to whisper in. She'd relished in the power of being able to bend the world to suit her, spreading her whims about like candy. She thought it would last forever, that she was untouchable.

Then Ben died.

He died and she realized the harsh limits of her abilities. Her illusions shattered on impact against that cold wall of reality, left her holding shards of empty wishes like broken glass.

Turns out you can't rumor people back from the dead.

For all the hours of specialized training with their father, Ben's death had been her first real lesson.

(She hadn't learned it.)

She ran from it instead, as far and fast as her legs would carry her. Ran all the way to California where she put down roots and started over, rebuilding her empty life one lie after another, building the foundation of her new world on Rumor (because if everything was gained through her power, then there was nothing she could lose that her power couldn't replace). And it was good, for awhile.

But then there was Claire, and Claire wasn't a rumor.

Claire was an accident.

A happy accident, a beloved accident, but an accident all the same. She hadn't intended to get pregnant, had no pretensions to motherhood (like she knew anything about babies). But it happened and she kept her and her name was Claire and she was the light of Allison's world. She was also the fly in the ointment of her carefully constructed, prefabricated life.

Because Claire's love for her was real, the smile on her face and the light in her eyes when she looked at Allison didn't come from any rumor. It was her own; genuine, fierce and honest and it stripped Allison of every conceit, made the rest of her world feel counterfeit and hollow.

There was no lie that could withstand the reality of that love. That was her second lesson.

(She hadn't learned that one, either.)

It wasn't until lesson number three, when she lost the only real thing she had that she began to learn. By then of course, the fear was that it was all a bit too late.

But she tried. For once in her life she really tried. She put her rumors to bed and kissed them goodnight, determined to build up again. Not with lies but with the brick and mortar of hard work and her own two hands. She would make a foundation strong enough for Claire to stand on. (This time, she was going to earn her daughter's love.) So she sat through parenting classes with her face flushing with shame, complied with court-mandated therapy as she learned to live without her lies. Talked to her daughter on the phone and saw her on the occasional, CPS-chaperoned weekend (Allison wasn't allowed to be alone with her).

The withdrawal from the drug of rumor was as real to her as any junkie but she pushed through, focused on work and her daughter and then...then her father died. Then Five came back. Then Vanya and Harold happened and the apocalypse almost happened and none of it happened and the timeline reset.

Ben died again; lesson revisited.

But at the end of it all, at least she still had Claire. Thank God that for any other changes, she still had her daughter. Five had saved her along with the rest of the world.

But who was going to save Five?

This time, she doesn't run. She's learned that lesson she thinks, and so she stays. Allison stays and does what she can for her brother, but as she well knows her powers only extend so far. She'd rumor him better if she could but it didn't work that way (she knows, she's tried). She can influence people, change the way they think and act but she can't alter reality itself; can't change the nightmare they're living and make it not real. She can ease Five's pain so he could finally sleep but she can't fix whatever's wrong with his mind.

She can't make a better or softer world for any of them.

Some things just stay broken.

"I heard a rumor you ate your dinner tonight," she says gently and his eyes glow under the power of suggestion before he picks up his spoon and beings eating with mechanical indifference. She sighs, her heart a dead weight in the pit of her stomach. Somewhere back in California Claire was getting kissed on the forehead and tucked into bed. Somewhere in California Claire was living life without her. Somewhere in California the world turned and Claire was happy and Allison was here, trying to help the brother who had lost his mind to save their lives.

After Patrick and Claire she told herself never again, but here she was, night after night, rumor after rumor.

"I heard a rumor you were feeling better."

"I heard a rumor you weren't in any pain."

"I heard a rumor you took your medication."

"I heard a rumor you don't want to hurt anyone."

Five would hate her if he knew. But then again Five would hate everything about this situation; Diego had been right about that.

Grace looks up from her nigh-constant place by the door and gives an encouraging smile as he eats. Her presence was a temporary solution until a qualified staff could be put in place, a search that was proving more difficult than they'd first imagined. (There weren't that many registered nurses who were also self-defense experts.)

The fight over whether or not to start some sort of hospice had come to a sudden and irrevocable end Sunday night when Five attacked Vanya and she almost killed him on instinct, her power still nebulous and difficult for her to contain. For the next several days the kitchen table was covered in End Of Life Care pamphlets and no one went into Five's room alone.

He spent those days rumored into unconsciousness and tied to the bed. They hadn't known what else to do.

At-home care was at least a unilateral decision; none of them really wanted to think about what might happen if they sent Five away anywhere. He would probably kill someone, and he would almost certainly never come home. Besides, at the end of a long, violent and lonely life surely it wasn't too much to ask that he be allowed to die at home, even if he'd never really gotten to live there. (You couldn't have called their militia-style childhoods 'living' so much as surviving.)

That thought makes her heart hurt and her eyes sting.

He finishes eating and she takes the spoon away as a precaution. (She'd seen what he could do during their fight with the Commission and she's pretty sure he could kill someone with a plastic spoon if he wanted to.)

Not that Five looked capable of killing anyone at the moment. His mental state was deteriorating at a pace that had his doctors baffled, the periods of lucidity being few and far between. Most days he muttered to himself, scribbled on the walls, or sat doing nothing at all much as he was now. At least they could say he was only occasionally violent.

He's going to die she thinks, watching his empty eyed gaze flitter about like a tattered-winged moth. It finally settles on Dolores, the other constant presence in the room and he gives the barest shadow of a smile. Diego and Klaus had broken into Gimbel's last week and stolen her back, presented her with hopeful faces to a Five who seemed to have lost interest in everything around him.

For a few days it even seemed to work. Five had been drawn to her, something in his splintered brain seeming to recognize Dolores even as his siblings continued to be strangers. That had stung, if she's being honest with herself. But he calmed down, became less agitated, started sleeping more. Went back to scribbling on the walls instead of clawing at them.

Allison had taken some pictures of those white-chalked equations and sent them to a maths professor she knew in California. His response was what she'd expected, but it was still disheartening. They were made up of various pieces of mathematical formula mashed together and didn't mean anything at all. He acknowledged there was a scattered genius to some of it, but the larger part was unintelligible gibberish. He ended the conversation by noting that he would have liked to have known 'the boy' before his sudden mental decline.

Allison can't help but agree.