How much damage can one person do?
Quite a lot. Just ask school shooters or the Boston marathon bombers. Spiral down the entire misfortune that is Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" and add the big names of Al Capone, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and- generally -anyone who works for the Commission.
A single person can cause a lot of damage.
A damage which leads to a domino effect which leads to a cultural and historical significance or an abundance of 'isms' which grow painfully specific.
This weeks ism?
Mannerisms.
Five is a prick. No one refutes this - much less himself.
Words like knives, a tongue of sharp silver. The thing is... it isn't jabs but bristles- a porcupine's defense. He's all barbed up and no one can approach. With spikes laced in venom and set to every known weakness. If he hurts them first? They can't hurt you... even accidentally.
But isolation hurts. Wanting to prevent the inevitable contusions hurts. He feels it every time. The detriment of close combat and the problem with caring is that you feel when your blows sink in.
Being called a prick hurts, by the way.
It's just that control is well and truly gone, yeah? He has always erred on the side of independence. Always sought his own path. And yet his entire life has been one apocalyptic hell to another purgatory where control is scraped from the bottom of the barrel he and Dante have been shoved in, rolled over and dumped upside down under.
Being physically thirteen sucks. He never noticed it before as it was more of a natural progression instead of a sudden difference. And besides, when one's first puberty was spent with a mannequin in a dead world full of ash and where bugs were better than desert?
Greasy hair and noticeable body odor weren't too striking.
What is unfathomably frustrating is how hard it is to focus when there are conversations leaking through your door all the time. Living with paper thin walls is a nightmare when you're naturally introverted and quite used to the solitude.
Sure, there's a lot of shit that's wrong with him thanks to 40+ years of his apocalyptic cocktail and the wonderful chaser of working as a temporal assassin. Being stuck in your family home and not taken seriously then being bombarded with sensory overstimulation at every goddamn hour… it's hard not to wish to be alone again. He has to stop himself from even thinking such lest reality take it as an added challenge.
And all the while he's yelling, wanting desperately for their voices to just shutup or for them to not wear boots inside? And he's being unpleasant and ghosty in his desire for time alone. Listening as his anxiety roars. Waiting for them to pass so he can leave or enter or even go to the bathroom- anything to avoid them.
He just needs to get his thoughts in order.
Because even when he isn't overworking himself… Even when he slows down to wait out a hand cramp or those irritating footsteps.
Then he's battling the absolute despair which chokes him, trying to ignore when chalk wafts into his face and trying to avoid how deeply unhappy he is.
And when the silence actually feels tangible? When he feels he's been such a jerk for so long despite his siblings attempts to help - in fact- blatantly and to their faces when they were only being kind.
Those quiet moments shatter his glass heart because he knows he's ruined so much already. In trying to get to point B with precision, he has missed his opportunity for reconciliation.
At what point do they no longer love you unconditionally? At what point does his self-hatred manifest in their hearts as well?
At what point is it irreparable?
When he's taken the small fragments that might redeem him and crushed them into the ash he hopes to never breathe in again?
Even as he seeks to prevent the apocalypse, he is creating a new one for himself.
Isolated and surrounded by damage. So much goddamn damage.
And surely it all can't be fixed.