March 28, 2019 - 12:28 pm
This morning was useless. Absolutely useless. I don't even know how I could have imagined for a single second that I'd manage to get any work done. I tried to put on a brave face, I tried to work on the re-labeling of the screws, but Rodrigo saw that I was mixing up all the references, with those red eyes that wouldn't go away. He's had enough of me this week. He yelled at me. He threatened to fire me, and said he was giving ma a very last chance. I can understand that, frankly. I don't even see the point of being here anymore, if the apocalypse is going to sweep everything away.
I have with me a sandwich hastily made with Five's peanut butter, but I won't even touch it. I glance at my watch. 12:28. My whole being is wanting to get back to Hargreeves Mansion by lunchtime. Just in case. I won't leave before the the end of my shift, but I won't give this damn hardware any extra second. 12:29. I'm stupid for not having told Klaus that I'll be back. He might not even be home. 12:30.
*Crack!*
In a rip of space-time, I disappear from the storeroom, leaving screws, bolts, labels and regrets behind.
A sidewalk, a bus. I make myself invisible so I don't even have to worry about paying. Its damn engine drags, and my impatience resonates with its nuts and bolts as it finally accelerates.
*Crack!*
A crosswalk, the pedestrian light on red. Long, too long, and I stare at it as if to force it to change color. Green, finally, only to fall on the next crossing. This time, I walk anyway. Sometimes intangibility is a good thing.
I walk along Hargreeves Mansion's facade, now so familiar, and its stained-glass windows adorned with the umbrella. A few steps, old shop windows covered with out-of-date posters. I pass through the door, without even needing the keys.
*Crack!*
With a breathlessness I hadn't felt in a long time, I appear in the 'Kids' Lounge', where Luther is seated in front of an impressive pile of toast. I say nothing, and neither does he; he just chews. I scan the room with my tired eyes, and he's not even surprised.
*Crack!*
I appear in Klaus's room, where the walls covered in writing are once again the only ones speaking into the void. He's not in the bathroom, nor in the toilet, whose pale bulb lights up when I open the door. The bedroom corridor is silent, except for a few footsteps heard upstairs... I'm beginning to reach the end of what I can do, in terms of jumps in a row across space, esepcially since some of them have been quite long. But one last time...
*Crack!*
In yet another slash of blue light, I appear on the last landing, at the top of the green staircase.
The footsteps were Five's, whose uniform I could immediately make out, in his room near the attic. I try to catch my breath and keep the exhaustion at bay, my hands resting on my knees. I swallow. Damn. The last time I did this is lost in the distant past. And I'm craving coffee.
"He's not here".
I lift my head, squinting as my breath gradually settles.
"Huh?"
Five continues what he's doing on his wall, not even looking at me.
"If you're looking for Klaus, he's gone for a walk with Diego".
I nod. Suddenly, it's much easier for me to calm down. This is good. That's really good. If he's with Diego, it's absolutely perfect.
I stand up and look at what Five is doing. I freeze when I see what's around him: everywhere, on every wallpaper in his room, equations are drawn in white. A calculating obsession that keeps me on the spot, because I don't understand a word of it.
"Wow".
This interjection comes to me spontaneously, and my amazement quickly replaces the tension built up this morning. Five looks tired, and smells a bit like Klaus after a booze-fuelled day. His expression is focused, in a way that also contrasts, to say the least, with his youthful appearance. What strikes me most is that he seems to master what he's doing, with a virtuosity similar to Viktor's with his violin.
"What are you... writing...?"
"Equations".
"Yes, I can see that..."
I don't know whether to take this as scorn, or just attribute it to him being very focused and barely paying attention to me. However, he gazes at me and asks:
"What's your name again?"
I stand bewildered.
"Rin, I know, but your real name. Your full name".
It's not a question I was expecting, and I momentarily hesitate to share with him that part of me that I've so long kept to myself, and which is popping up a little too much this week for my liking, at a time I least expected it. But at this moment, I choose to let it go.
"Marine Hoang".
A name transmitted from mother to daughter, in our family's case. Stories of lonely women, tragic or astonishing, just as the universe can produce. Five puts his thumb on his lips, deep in thought, his eyes roving over the numbers and symbols, as if trying to find me in a phone book.
"Hoang, uh".
He's still searching. But he doesn't seem to see me anywhere, and shakes his head with both disappointment and relief, as I try another approach:
"Does it have anything to do... with Meritech's glass eye?"
"The glass eye is a dead end. What do you know about it?"
Finally, he deigns to turn his eyes to me, even though his question is cutting. At least I've managed to capture that.
"Klaus told me you found it in the future. That someone was going to lose it within seven days, and that it would trigger..."
"An apocalypse. Three days to go now. And you know what the most interesting part of this is?"
I shake my head.
"That Klaus listened to what I told him".
He chuckles vaguely and plunges his eyes back into his sybilline tracings while saying to me:
"Was that before, or after he complicated his life and mine by smashing that briefcase?"
I sigh as I sit down on his desk chair. I can see that Five knows about Klaus's return, although he might not know everything. And honesstly: is this the main problem to him? That Klaus destroyed the briefcase?
"Before", I say with the thought that there's no point in fueling the fire. "I don't know if he still has in mind what's going to happen".
The truth is, I don't think he cares much anymore. But since a breach has been opened, I venture to ask:
"That briefcase... he stole it from some mercenaries looking for you".
Fives chuckles with a hint of sarcasm.
"'Mercenaries'... how nice. They're mandated assassins: I was one of them not so long ago".
"Now mandated to kill you?"
"Orders are always subject to change".
I squint, trying to understand. Five's brain is as twisted as his equations: a labyrinth of logic. Different from the philosophical-depressive tumult of Klaus's mind, but the result is the same, on both their walls. So I decide to ask my questions straight out.
"Why are they after you now?"
"Because I'm trying to prevent the apocalypse, and it has to happen."
Five starts writing again, increasingly small, as he has less and less free space left, on the wall.
"Their employer was mine. The Temps Commission".
I tilt my head, calling for further clarification.
"It's an organization that supervises the space-time continuum and makes sure that what must happen happens. The apocalypse is one of those 'must-haves', according to the Commission".
I ponder his words. I too have a little logic at times. And I recall the Shakespearean quote that Reginald Hargreeves was so fond of.
"It's not coherent," I say. "If this apocalypse were indeed ineluctable, the Commission wouldn't care about you trying to prevent it. If they're after you... then it means it can be avoided".
On hearing this, Five turns his head towards me and lets me see the first real smile I've seen on his face.
" You just figured out why I'm not resigning myself".
Suddenly, I see him more eager to scribble his symbols than ever. He traces what I identify as a large integral, but that's all I can tell. Yet there's another obvious statement:
"If they want it so badly, they must have a reason. Someone on this... Commission or beyond needs this apocalypse to happen. Do you know who?"
"No".
He writes one more thing under his integral, then comes back to correct some upstream elements, which seem to change everything.
"We need to address the most urgent issue, and that's to stop the apocalypse. The eye was a dead end, I've moved on. I may have an option this afternoon, but for now..."
He rests his hand against the wall as if questioning it.
"I'm trying to find the causal nodes that would definitely prevent the end of the world, if blown up".
"Nodes?"
Five turns pointedly towards me again, while I stare around his room again, unable to make much sense out of it.
"Imagine getting trampled by a horse."
"No."
"Just suppose. You get trampled by that horse, confused because it got a midge in the eye. What would you eliminate if you could?"
I hesitate, more from surprise than because I don't know the answer. And as I take too long, he carries on on his own:
"It's pretty big, a horse. But killing the midge... would easily prevent your doom. Do you understand?"
"I see."
I nod, because his popularization attempt isn't actually that bad.
"Of course, these systems are much more complex, they're not simple causal chains, but networks, and since space-time is supposed to have a Minkowski metric and not a Euclidean one, we-"
"The horse is the apocalypse, and you're trying to pinpoint the midges".
He shuts up and nods.
"I'd like to narrow down the list I have to four names maximum, yes".
I get it. I mean. Almost all of it.
"Poor midges."
Five's analogy has this flaw: it overlooks that the midges are actually people. Innocent people, under the machine guns of mercenaries like those of the Commission, not even knowing why. But Five was once one of these assassins, and his efficient pragmatism doesn't bother with the frailty of a few lives, especially if it is to save many others. I feel it's pointless to argue and I sigh, because something's been bothering my stomach for a while now. I think it's time to ask.
"Why did you ask my name earlier? Did you want to check if I'm a potential midge?"
The same way he'd strangely studied my eyes upon our first meeting. By now, I'm sure he was trying to figure out if either was made of glass. He shrugs.
"This is a routine verification. So far, there's no indication that you're involved. I prefer to check, since you recently stepped into... our immediate landscape".
This statement doesn't make me feel any better, and it probably shows. Yet Five isn't done yet, and mutters while correcting a mistake in his equation:
"I haven't discarded the possibility of the horse... having a horseman".
My throat tightens and I gaze at my fingers. Since my conversation with Pogo, and even before this awful day, my nights have been short, and I keep spinning over in my head a detail that hadn't initially troubled me. A simple letter that has burdened my conscience ever since I heard it spoken.
"Five, is... is the name Omega in your equation?"
He raises an eyebrow and points to a symbol on the wall.
"Here in probabilities, it refers to the set of all possibilities".
I stop him once more.
"I meant... Omega as a personal name. Not as a mathematical symbol".
He pauses, seized by a sudden suspicion.
"Who are you talking about?"
I sigh and let my fingers rest helplessly on my knees. They're a little clammy now, and I can only look at Five sideways.
"That's the name your father used to address me in his notes, when he... was remotely monitoring me. Pogo told me".
For the first time, Five's hands drop to his sides, in a posture that indicates he's completely ceased scribbling. Tilting his head back, he lets out a breath of pained understanding, with an unexpected hint of empathy.
"'I can think of some insults,' he says, 'and they're all in ancient Greek.'
I run my hand over my eyes.
"This letter, Omega. I'm no good at symbolism, but it makes me think of 'the end'. If he was never doing anything randomly, then why did your father pick that?"
Five shakes his head, skeptical.
"On the contrary, I'd say Omega symbolizes ~what remains beyond~ the end. And I'd be wary of the names old Reginald chose, as he was particularly keen on playing with them."
My fists clench a little and I gasp for air. If it were that name alone...
"Matter, energy...", I say, "especially energy. You told me the other day that we might not be out of the woods yet about our powers, but it freaks me out, right now, about what I might be able to do with them.
I shudder a little, hesitating to go on.
"What if I'm the 'horseman'?".
Upon my words, the three lamps light flickers off, and I'm very sorry for that. Five looks at them too, then quietly gets down from his bed on which he was standing.
"Turn them back on", he says.
"What?"
"The lamps: switch them back on".
I gaze at him, then blink before closing my eyes. Slowly, faintly, like one learning to whistle, I make the bulb lights twinkle again. As they sizzle, they turn back on, growing brighter as I re-open my eyes, and eventually they turn back on completely. Five steps to me and looks down to me from his height, while I'm still seated.
"If you can control it, I'm not worried."
I'm not used to Five talking to me without doing anything else at the same time, and he carries on.
"Space? You do it just like me. Time? No worse, no better. The intangibility and invisibility of your matter, that's your daily stuff. And energy, look."
He points to the relighted wall lamps.
"We all have reflexes, but you can see that you mostlyl use your abilities on purpose. The real issue has never been what powers we do have, but to which extent we control them."
I swallow with difficulty. I know he's right. But I'm not one to risk anything.
"I'd rather not be able to do anything," I say, "at least for the three days ahead. Until this apocalypse, whether you stop it or not".
He shakes his head, then climbs back onto his bed before contemplating everything again and writing on a piece of paper the name KC Chávez, following that of Alexandre Cameron.
"I'm working on it," he tells me. And tracing one more thicker 'omega' carcater on the wall, he adds:
"And I'm going to get a appointment that could change everything".
Notes :
What a pleasure to write Five. His afternoon appointment is with The Handler, and it will indeed change everything.
I think he's nailed Rin's state of anxiety, but he's not that worried. Having seen the series, we know that Rin has nothing to do with this apocalypse. But what will she decide to do now?
Just as Viktor will soon be manipulating energy through sound waves, we see Rin on her way to controlling energy through mechanics and electricity. Have you noticed - in the series - that the three lamps in Five's room are still on when Luther comes to talk with him?
Any comment will make my day!