1:27pm, Monday August 29th, 2019

Things might have gone differently if they'd had more time, but the progression of Five's illness was devastatingly swift, taking him from perfectly healthy young man to nearly helpless invalid in a few short months. By the time they'd realized how serious things were, it had been too late.

Of course it hadn't helped that Five had kept his condition a secret from them, until he couldn't anymore, until he was too confused to keep track of his own obfuscations. (Until he thought the only way out was suicide.) He was good at keeping them at arm's length, knew all their weaknesses and would exploit them with ruthless efficiency until they retreated, casting him long looks over their shoulder and muttering under their breath.

Vanya wonders what would have happened if he hadn't. If they could have done something, found him help before he was beyond reach. If nothing else, she would have spent more time with him. She would have done a lot of things differently, if she'd known. But she'd spent the first month back blaming herself for Ben, for what everyone had gone through because of her. She'd been wrapped up in her own guilt and preoccupation with controlling her powers and she'd missed the signs, the changes in Five.

She should have been paying more attention.

It was over a month after they'd gotten back from the past when he appeared in the middle of her living room, familiar zap of electrical fire ozone smell and right away, she knew something was wrong. He looked confused, disoriented, glancing about like a man waking from a ten year coma and Five had never looked confused about anything in his life. He'd been confused, certainly, but he'd always been too self-possessed to let it show. God forbid there ever be something Number Five didn't understand; the sky would fall.

"Five?"

His head whipped around and he stared like she was some distant acquaintance who's name he couldn't recall and she remembered thinking, There's something wrong with him.

"Vanya?" His voice came out wrong; timid and uncertain. A tocsin sounded in her head, all the fire alarms pulled at once.

"Are you okay?" she asked, worry wrapping itself around her throat and squeezing. She wanted to go to him but was afraid of getting too close just yet. There was a delicacy in dealing with Five, much the same way there was a delicacy in handling poisonous snakes. If you weren't careful, you got bit.

"...yes," he said, two seconds too slow to be genuine. His tie was on crooked, hair dusted with chalk, a smear of white at the edge of his brow and caked in the cuticles of his fingernails but he didn't seem physically harmed, just fatally distracted. She wondered if he had a concussion, some undiagnosed head injury.

"What happened?" she asked, and he blinked.

"Nothing." He lied much better the second time, but he still couldn't tell her why he was there.

She took him back to the academy with worry chewing the edges of her every thought, though in hindsight the most worrying thing about it all was how little he had protested her company. She suspected it was because he didn't know how to get back on his own.

Once there Five disappeared upstairs and the family came clustering around her like moths, mouths like fluttering wings, hasty half-whispers voicing concerns about Five's increasingly odd behavior and forgetfulness and had she noticed? No, no she had not and she realized with a stricken pain that he'd been avoiding her.

A family meeting was called in which Five deflected every question put to him, insulted each them in a commanding fashion with increasingly compelling punctuation and finally warped away in a petulant flicker of blue. They decided to start keeping a closer eye on him. (The trouble of course being that Five wasn't an easy person to keep an eye on.)

That was the first time he'd made an erratic jump, but it wouldn't be the last.

She stays at the academy almost full time now, her inheritance enough at least to ensure she wouldn't have to work for awhile so she quit the orchestra and passed off her students to other teachers and all but moved back into her childhood hell, better to give Five her full attention. (It was still hell, but for a much different reason.)

They're still going through the motions of talking to various doctors but she thinks they've mostly resigned themselves. It feels like they're all just waiting around, marking the hours and days one at a time until the inevitable end, even though none of them know how long that will be. Diego still feared Five would live for years like this, but Vanya isn't so sure. She thinks one day he may simply forget how to breathe.

She stays with him more often than her siblings, operating at least in part out of some feeling of penance, but mostly because her presence agitated him less than the others. He's calmer around her, and occasionally even lucid (at least he had been, in the beginning).

She doesn't want to admit it, but those periods of lucidity became almost unbearable towards the end. The times when he'd look at her and recognize her as Vanya were the times he recognized what was happening to him. She'd watched him oscillate through four of the five stages of grief (never quite reaching acceptance) before the fog claimed him again. It was worse the further his illness progressed, when he'd forget he was fifty-eight. When he was thirteen again and scared and confused and he didn't understand why she looked so old. (She described these moments in only the broadest terms to the family; no more than what was needed to keep an accurate medical record. The details she kept locked in her heart, no matter how deeply they cut.)

Reginald Hargreeves had been wrong: time travel hadn't contaminated Five's mind, it had devoured it.

She spends a lot of hours playing the violin for him.

It's the oldest of cliches, but her reasoning isn't entirely sentimental. Music helps her too, helps ground her and direct the immensely destructive power that swelled inside her whenever she got emotional, and she's always emotional these days. (She'd wanted practice learning how to control and manage her power. She got it.)

In a better world her music would mean something, make some kind of difference. If life were a movie her violin would be the connective tissue between herself and Five, between Five and his memories. He'd smile when she played, maybe even recognize her. At the very least he would look at her, and she'd know she was bringing him a measure of peace. It would be a healing moment for the two of them.

But this isn't a happy world and her music doesn't mean anything to him anymore. Eventually she had to admit that she's playing because she doesn't know what else to do.

She's playing because if she doesn't, she'll scream instead.

Another family meeting. Another day of somber faces around the kitchen table, going over the latest candidates for hospice providers. They've actually managed to agree on two out of three, but the last one is a sticking point. Luther's unilaterally vetoing any female applicants on the grounds that Five was a physical risk. Diego's calling him an idiot, pointing out that Allison had 'rumored the fight out of him', which Vanya thinks is a harsh way to put it even if it's technically correct. (The problem is that 'fight' seems to be all that Five had left of himself and without it he's an empty shell.)

There's a tension in the air like a cut-off scream, something too thick to account for a simple disagreement over nursing staff. Diego and Luther are getting louder, talking over each other as Klaus and Allison look on with wearied, defeated expressions and everyone's ragged, on edge and exhausted. Vanya just wants them to come to some sort of consensus; she's tired of useless meetings, empty words and lacks of progress. She's tired, full stop.

(She just wants it to end, and can't say whether that sentiment is only in regards to the meeting or not.)

She closes her eyes and rubs her temples, a headache starting behind her eyes. Had she slept at all last night? She can't remember.

"Perhaps I can be of some assistance," says a voice behind them and it takes Vanya a moment to realize it wasn't just in her head.

Diego stops mid-sentence and they all turn as one. There's a woman standing in the doorway to the kitchen; platinum blonde curls and garish red lipstick. She's wearing a half veil over her face and looks like a Stepford wife dressed for a funeral, all the way down to her black, pointed-toe heels. There's a briefcase in her hand and Vanya sees Luther's eyes go wide as he catches sight of it.

"Who the hell are you?" demands Allison, but Luther steps forward.

"You're from the Commission," he says, and the woman smiles. There's something infinitely cold and empty underneath all that lipstick and eyeliner and it makes Vanya shudder.