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Five tried wearing the clothes Allison bought him. He really did. It's not like he particularly liked wearing the Umbrella Academy school uniform everywhere.
He couldn’t.
He really couldn’t.
Their trials were over- both the 2019 and the 1963 apocalypse. They'd all been returned to their time with little to no consequences. They could all rest and relax and finally live their lives. However, the clothes laid down on the bed still made his stomach turn. He doesn’t know why. Is the uniform he still clings to a symbol? Of what? Of all that he’s done? Of the past and family he can’t let go of? Of the future he can no longer be a part of? Is that it? Is the uniform a symbol that he is a creature of the past, molded and created by it, utterly unable to take that first step forwards into the future?
He doesn’t know.
He tries them on, to make Allison happy. His skin itches and the world feels entirely wrong. She sees the discomfort in his eyes and the disappointment makes something in him break. She waves him off with a tight smile at his fidgeting, telling him something about baby steps.
Five leaves and sheds the clothes like skin.
He stubbornly holds onto the uniforms and doesn’t know why.
Five had thought that the end of the apocalypse, the end of those horrific forty-five years, would be the end of his trials and tribulations.
He was wrong.
The first few days were nice, peaceful.
He decided to have a drink to celebrate the fact that it was April the seventh of 2019. One drink turned into two, after all there was so much to celebrate. Then three and four and, around the fifth drink, his memory got a little fuzzy.
He didn’t wake up until late the next day.
He hadn’t had a single thought for twelve blissful hours.
Five started drinking himself under the table in the evenings, longing for that oblivion- and then in the mornings and then every time in between. He still can’t look at his siblings without seeing their death, he doesn’t even sleep at night, too afraid to close his eyes. He is so deeply afraid that he’ll close his eyes and open them to the fires of the apocalypse. At his darkest hours, three a.m. to be precise, he peers into the darkness and thinks that this is all too good to be true, a fiction created by a senile old man dreaming of a better time.
He’d thought ending the apocalypse would end these thoughts.
He’d been wrong.
Allison said healing would take time- that this was normal.
He tries and tries but he is so damn tired.
Five grudgingly participates in family meals. He would never admit it, but they’re the highlight of his week. Five likes to sit at the table and listen to their ridiculous chatter. He won’t look at their faces, too afraid that if he looks up he’ll see rotting flesh and curdling blood. He listens instead to their laughter and sarcasm and petty quarreling. He partakes in it, happy to be able to irritate and be irritated by them again. It couldn't be farther from the apocalypse. Until one evening Klaus, in exceptional form and already annoyed by Luther and Diego’s bickering, grabs the ketchup from the middle of the table and squirts it in his brother’s face. He smirks, saying, “There. You look good in red.”
Luther gapes and then Diego hisses, “Oh it's on, shithead.”
He grabs the closest food item, mashed potatoes, and lobs it at his brother who ducks with a yelp. It hits a gobsmacked Allison. She splutters, wiping it off of her face and away from her curls. Her brows draw down, accepting the challenge. And then it's war. Its utter chaos, their shrieks of laughter filling the hall. Klaus uses the ketchup well, painting his siblings red, even if Vanya and Allison’s team ends up winning the fight. None of them noticed that Five hadn’t participated. He had stared in horror at Diego’s face after that first shot and he’d seen blood instead of food. Their happy shrieks had rung hollow, too close to the real thing for his comfort. Five slipped away in the chaos and threw up in the bathroom.
He stopped coming to family meals.
He was always too busy, too tired, too sick. Five could see the rest of them becoming worried, Allison especially pressuring him into opening up and talking about it. That only made him angrier and even more snappish. He’d nearly tore Diego's head off for misplacing the coffee.
When Vanya found him sulking in his room after that incident, she gently told him that they were all very worried, that Ben was worried. Five never could resist her pleading, damn them.
He started seeing Allison’s therapist, he stopped drinking so much alcohol and caffeine, trying to distract himself as much as he could, itching for something more. He wasn’t sure what he was here for. What was his purpose? He’d saved the world, his family was fine, and best of all they were moving on with their lives.
And wasn’t that the problem?
Five had no life to move on too. Hell, he’d been surviving for so long, he’d forgotten what it meant to live.
They had all grown up in his thirty year absence.
He hadn’t.
Five had never had the opportunity and now he never would. He just didn’t fit in, not anywhere. Diego had suggested putting him in school but the very thought of that made Five want to end everything right there. Being stuck in a school for five more years with a bunch of prepubescent twerps? Hell no. And certainly not earning a PhD- the thought of constantly fighting tooth and nail to be acknowledged as an equal made him even more tired. All the while he turned these thoughts round and round, constant as ever, rest eluded him.
He found himself left behind in that empty house full of fond and not so fond childhood memories, too young and too old for society and his family, a terrible creature of war unable to exist in a time of peace. There was no rest, not for something like him.
He wanted to end it all. Why was he even trying? What was the point? The world turned on and he stood still- a man forever out of time, a timeless child. So Number Five, the boy who’d never given up, sat on a couch and contemplated what giving up would be like.
And then, his brother walked in with a strange man in a bow-tie who falsely claimed that he was from the gas company.
And something changed.