Chapter Text
Fractured
Five doesn’t mess up. He’s the best assassin in the entire space-time continuum, and he didn’t earn that title by making mistakes. When he gets a job, he finishes that job.
He’ll encounter the occasional hiccup every now and then - like the lady who’d barged in on him after he’d killed an entire room full of people (is there a word for when you get a rush from doing something that makes you nearly physically sick afterward? For smiling while coating yourself in something you’d be happy never seeing again? If there is, Five doesn’t know it, but maybe that's because there isn’t a word for him) and he’d had to knock her out. He takes care of those bumps in the road. Things rarely go according to plan, which is why Five only makes plans as a last resort. It’s harder for something to go wrong when you don’t know what right is.
But if Five ever were to make a mistake, it would be when he relaxed. It’d be when he let his guard down, thinking it was over (it’s never over; you’d think he’s learned that by now). It’d be when he let his always tense body uncoil.
It’s when Diego, love scrawled across his open-book face, steps forward and murmurs to Lila quietly. It’s when Five, head still pounding from the crush of falling bricks and a fucking frying pan, lets out a breath of relief because he knows Lila won’t kill Diego because she looks at him the same way Dolores looks at Five. That is when everything is ripped away from Five.
The bullets tear through his siblings’ bodies as if they’re made of paper: little origami people fluttering in a fierce wind called Chance that flung them to a place they never should have been.
The paper the Hargreeves are crafted from still bleeds, though.
Five’s covered in crimson for the second time in less than twenty-four hours, but this blood is infinitely worse because he knows this blood.
He opens his mouth to scream their names (which is cliche, he knows, but he’s not fully in control of himself anymore), and that’s when he finally realizes his paper figure was not spared in the deluge of gunfire. Hot, gushing blood spills over his hands onto the hay below. He can’t stop his fall in any way, but a part of him doesn’t want to. A part of him knows that when he’s on his back, he won’t be able to see his siblings’ ripped, unfolded corpses anymore.
He’s focusing on breathing too much to pay attention to what’s happening around him. The gun goes off again, and someone drops, but it doesn’t matter because he can’t breathe.
“Maybe your appetite is disproportionate to the size of your ability,” his father says and that makes him want to fucking scream until he’s blue in the face. “Who gave me that appetite? Who fed that appetite?” he’d wanted to shriek at the smug man behind the monocle.
But he hadn’t and he can’t now and this isn’t helping him breathe.
“Seconds, not decades.”
He’s so tired. Although this is arguably the worst time for it, Five finds himself trying to figure out when he’s slept last. He’s pretty sure he passed out from the shrapnel wound some time last week, and that kind of counts, right?
He can’t possibly use his powers now - there’s no way. He couldn’t even teleport when he’d been with Diego. How can he hope to time travel?
Distantly, he hears footsteps, and he sees the Commission agent standing over him with a gun and he can’t breathe still and his entire family is dead (which is his fault, again) and so he pulls on that energy that makes him so special, that power he despises so fucking much, harder than he’s ever pulled. He strains, yanking at it with everything he has, and he wonders if the snapping he feels is real or imagined.
Seconds.
The agent lowers his gun and walks backward, out of the barn. The Handler, then Lila, then each and every one of his paper siblings floats back to their feet. And Five is running past it all, eyes trained on the light beyond the door because maybe when he reaches it, he’ll be able to breathe again -
And then Diego is talking to Lila, and Five gasps for air so loudly he sees Luther shoot a concerned look his way, but he so does not have time for useless things like concern right now. He can breathe again, which is a huge plus, and he knows the bullets are no longer in his stomach, but his body aches something awful, and while he wants to take a moment to drink in the sight of his whole, living family, he will focus on nothing except this door.
When the Handler enters, it’s so easy to disarm her, so easy to prevent the deaths of the most (only) important people in the world to him that he almost laughs hysterically. This was all he had to do to keep them safe? He’d messed up in a big way. He deserves the sharp pain raking across his nerves, throbbing with every heartbeat.
The Handler dies, and Lila escapes, and Five would be lying if he said he cared about either event. His siblings are alive, their blood is not dyeing the straw a sticky shade of maroon, and that’s all that matters. What’s a little pain in the face of that?
He tries not to think about how he’s seen them die twice this week; three times altogether.
I should make it a drinking game, he thinks and is unable to stop the laugh that bubbles out of his throat.
Allison throws him a sharp glance - they’re in the basement of the barn as Vanya calms the boy down. Not exactly the right setting for laughter.
Five goes to wave her away - why did his siblings have to care about him so much? - when a thought slips into his mind: take a drink every time you stare into a sibling’s lifeless eyes.
He doesn’t even try to bottle the guffaw this time, and he knows he’s getting looks from all of them now, but he keeps laughing and laughing until it doesn’t feel like laughing anymore.
He can’t remember what was supposed to be so funny anyway.
“Five?” someone says hesitantly, he thinks Klaus, and a light hand rests on his arm.
He twists away, the ache in his body erupting into a full-blown explosion underneath his skin.
(He thought he was supposed to be an acorn, but acorns don’t hurt this much, do they? Is he still trapped under the ice?)
“Five.” This voice is Diego’s - he’d recognize that dagger timbre anywhere. “Are you okay?”
“Of course I’m okay,” Five says, but he realizes too late he’s curled in on himself to stave off the pain. His brain feels detached from his body. It’s almost like floating, except the edges are too sharp and focused for this not to be real.
“You’re a terrible liar,” Diego says.
“I’m a fantastic liar,” Five says. “And I’m not the one who died.”
Diego casts a bemused look at Luther, who shrugs. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“I’m always the one who lives,” Five says, wondering why he feels the need to say all of this. “I’m the only one here who’s never died - isn’t that weird? You’d think statistically I’d die at least once, but nope. Just once, I’d like to be the one whose body is found, instead of the one doing the finding, you know what I mean? Do you even understand how hard it is to save you dimwits?” This isn’t what he intended to say at all, but everything is so bright and he swears he can still feel the tackiness of their blood on his face and it burns.
“Five,” and it’s Allison this time, a worried frown attempting to masquerade as a cajoling smile plastered on her face, “why don’t you sit down?”
They think he’s crazy, he realizes with startling clarity. They think he’s lost his mind. He was the only one who’d lived, and yet he’s the crazy one?
Grab the axe from the wall. Sever the lady’s arm as she reaches for the phone. Dance in their blood, bathe in it, drink it.
He laughs until he can’t anymore.