Chapter Text
Through snow and sleet
It sure gets so hard to see
I'd go alone
But I fold so easily
So what do you say?
Would you walk this world with me?
Walk This World With Me | The Home Team
Day 0
Five had been down in this subway alone more times than he could count. From the moment he'd felt it, that buzzing under his skin, like the thrum of electricity that never quite silenced, he'd done everything he could think of to get a handle on what his power had become.
The Entry Point from their timeline looked the same. Clean. Pristine. Concise. The fluorescent lights unencumbered by the carcasses of insects, right out of the proverbial box. Flashing near the entrance lines was the route map, a bright, gleaming maze of color. Even the stone columns still smelled like fresh paint and concrete. A harbor for endless possibility.
Though as much as Five infinitely preferred to be alone with his thoughts; today was not one of those days. Lately, that had meant being dragged around by Lila trying to find some scrap of information about the Keepers and their goals when he wasn’t attempting for the nth time to jump the way he used to. Pushing with everything in his cells to end up where he’d intended instead of back here.
No, today a rat the size of his foot and three times as fat (and what the hell was it eating to get that big in a place like this?) cut right in front of his path, squeaking like it was being chased. Five’s gaze swept around the area. There were no shadows to hide in, no cracks in the walls. It had simply appeared out of nowhere like they had.
There was a whistle in the air, the lightest of breezes past his ear and then—silence.
What had once been an animal was now a corpse, still twitching under the weight of the knife that had almost severed it in half. Five watched, eyes squinting against the light as Diego knelt to retrieve the blade. Blood spread like a black pool on the platform.
“Bullseye, bitch.” Diego crowed, his laughter bouncing off the walls. He had obviously been cooped up too long, if this was all it took. “Looks like you might need to get pest control in here after all, Cinco.”
“I’ve never seen anything else in the tunnels before.” His voice was dull in comparison. It was hard not to be when pressed against the ever-burning force of Diego’s good mood. Pawning him off on the CIA did not go the way Five thought it would. Of course Diego would have jumped at the chance to see the ‘inner sanctum’, wouldn’t he? It was a no-brainer. Get two of the most worrisome aspects off his back and out of his way so Five could go chase his leads with relative peace of mind.
But that’s not how that went down. No, Diego, in a random fit of erudition, had sniffed out Five’s diversion like a shark to water and then there was Lila, who must have figured trashing his place of business with a reluctant Luther was the more preferable scenario.
So they both, in a fit of married-person telepathy, decided to ruin Five’s entire fucking day.
“Uh, well the exit is that-a-way.” Diego pointed at the stairs that would take them up and out into–somewhere. “If we can walk in, rats sure as fuck can.”
“You cannot just walk in here. You have to blink here. Were you asleep for that part, Batman?”
Diego smirked at him, entirely at ease in whatever liminal space the subway represented like it was just a regular day delivery packages in too-tight cargo shorts. In fact, he was almost aggressively Unbothered.
“Well unless you really are just a bunch of bitchy rodents in a trench coat, I’m just calling it like I see it.”
Five twitched his shoulder, clicking his teeth. He knew should have taken Luther.
“Unclench.” Diego flicked the blood away, leaving a splatter of red like a child in a finger-painting class. “A subway’s a subway, baby boy.”
&
Day 5
On their twenty-first stop, Diego spotted a pamphlet left on one of the benches. While he happily plopped down to study it Five kept walking, wandering around the now dark and damp tunnel.
“Oh hells yeah. They’re sending out train maps for portal jumpers now?” the pamphlet spread almost the length of Diego’s arm span as he flipped it back and forth with narrowed eyes. “See, here’s our problem! Probably missed this the first few stops. Should be nothing to get home now.”
“Wait, travel maps for what now?” Five asked, brow furrowed. “It’s not a portal, genius. This isn’t point A to point B. Each movement is a micro-tear in the space-time continuum and–”
Diego sighed, put upon. “You’ve got to catch up on video games, bro.”
Five clenched his jaw, looking around the darkened subway for any clue as to why they had ended up in the wrong timeline again. He’d sworn the last time he and Lila had been down here it was Westbound from the Entry and then East, but this was not the same. Why the fuck wasn’t it the same?
“Yeah sure,” Five scoffed, “Next’ll be the transit office. Some hokey restaurants. Maybe a boba stand.”
“Nasty,” Diego shivered, eyes still on the bright symbols and lines like there was any aspect of his big balloon head that could possibly comprehend what the fuck he was looking at. “I hate that shit. There’s just something not right about the weird little balls.”
Five sunk his hands into the pockets of his trousers, his lips already twitching despite himself. “You’d know all about weird little balls.”
The broken lights flickered, barely hanging onto the wires that kept them in the ceiling. One hovered precariously over their heads, swinging with the little vibrations of the oncoming train. He banked left, feet carrying him into the next train. Smiling now with all his teeth, he gripped onto the bar and waited for the idiot to catch up.
“What does that–hey. Hey you fucking gremlin!” Diego’s foot slid into the door as it was closing, muscling himself in as the train finally started to move again. There was a finger in his face that Five barely resisted the urge to bite. “Were you going to leave me there?!”
“Of course not.” Five said to his fingernails.
Diego reached out to smack him in the back of the head but Five ducked, laughing when the other man went flying into the seats instead as the train slowed sputtered to life with a kick. The guy was all black-clad limbs and noise, the spitting image of a beetle wiggling its limbs in the air.
“It’s like you’ve never taken public transportation before.”
The glare that met him had Five’s canine sinking into his lip as Diego scrambled back up, his feet already planted to adjust to the movement of the train. He was nothing if not adaptable.
“Bitch, I’ll show you public transportation.”
“Do your insults ever make sense or do you just say things hoping they’ll stick?”
Diego’s mouth worked, jaw moving soundlessly as his hands flexed at Five with some sort of intent his body wouldn’t let go of. “Fuck you.”
“Impressive.”
The map hit Five in the face.
&
Day 43
“Who the fuck is shooting at us!?” Diego’s head peaked up over the hood of the car they were squished behind, his fingers already twitching at his side. “Shit, hold on, I got ‘im.”
Five snatched his arm back, pulling down. For fucks sake, it was always shoot first with these people. Not even one of his siblings had an ounce of brain power in high-stress scenarios. “No! Stop. Keep your projectiles to yourself for once. It’s not necessary.”
“What?” Diego growled, ripping his arm away. “You wanna get shot in the ass that bad?”
“Who wants to get—You know what, never mind.”
Another series of shots rang out, each a little closer to their heads than either of them were comfortable with. Diego flinched, curling his body as small as it would go and narrowly avoiding a shot in the foot. “Well why the fuck not? You know this guy or something?”
“So do you.” Five’ grit his teeth, leaning into Diego’s side to avoid the bullet that blew through the tire near his shoulder. “It’s me.”
Diego squinted at him, the corner of his mouth lifting in disbelief. He tilted his head, leaning his body just beyond the bumper of the car only to snap back again when the bullet ricocheted off the dirt. “Nah.”
“’Nah?’ Oh, I’m so sorry, I wasn’t aware that you were suddenly an expert on—oh fuck this.” Five growled as another bullet skid past his shoulder. He grabbed Diego by the back of his stupid tactical gear, ensuring the skin of his fingers brushed against his neck (the last thing he needed was to end up in the tunnel with his brother’s clothes and no actual brother).
When they were safe in the subway, Five let him go and Diego immediately shook his head, blinking hard as if the whole ordeal had caused his vision to swim. His shoulders were still sitting high, braced in the way adrenaline holds the muscles hostage. If there was one thing they had in common, it was that safety was a luxury most of them had never been afforded for long.
“There’s no way that was you.” He said finally, now rubbing at his stomach and grimacing. “Fuck, I’m hungry. How much longer is this gonna take?”
“I don’t know, Diego. It’s not an exact science. Yet.” Exasperated, Five scribbled at the little icon that matched the intersection they’d just exhausted every direction from. “And it was me.”
“Bullshit.”
He scrubbed his eyes, a headache threatening behind them. “Why don’t you go back and see if I’ll let you close enough to get a confirmed ID, big shot?”
There was dirt smeared on the side of Diego’s face that made him look all of twelve years old. “Why is this the hill you wanna die on today? Of course that wasn’t you. It can’t be you because you don’t miss. Gimme a break.”
Five’s head shot up. That…Well. He’d had worse compliments.
But Diego wasn’t looking at him. He was riffling through the seemingly endless number of pockets in his gear and bitching under his breath. When the crinkle of a wrapper filled the silence, his face lit up as he pulled out a Cliff Bar with such tremendous victory that biting into the thing produced whole a series of pleased noises. It was a few steady heartbeats before he noticed Five looking at him at all.
“Whaf?” He asked with a full mouth like the Neanderthal he was. “Something on my face?” He blinked at the before holding out the other half. “Want some?”
Five could feel his face rotating through a myriad of expressions his brain and body could not settle on. “No. No, I’m good.”
Diego shrugged, shoving the rest into his mouth before rolling the wrapper into some semblance of a ball and not-so-miraculously jump shooting it into the garbage can on the other side of the subway. Five rolled an ancient and empty Coke can away with his Oxford and tried not to Think.
&
Day 119
Another dead end.
Diego braced himself against the frame of the train door, looking out into the exact same cross platform they’d hit probably a hundred times by now. He was shaking from heel to shoulder, fingers clenching so hard into the metal Five almost expected it to bend under the pressure. An ugly, animal noise was crawling up his chest, let loose only when his knees smacked against concrete.
“Fuck!”
“Diego.” Five tried.
“Fucking fuck fuck!”
Because there had to be a part of Five that was hardly human anymore, he curled his lip at the display instead of offering any semblance of comfort. Doing so would be giving in to the sick-hot burn of panic that threatened to choke the life out of him. They couldn’t both fall apart. He'd bear the burden of being the asshole, the wall in which Diego could rail against. It was the least he could do.
“Yes,” he drawled, because he was broken “that is sure helping our cause. Bravo.”
Diego whirled on him, those wild eyes large and glossy wet. “No, shut up, Five. Shut. Up. Unless you’re gonna tell me that this has all been some big fucking joke and that you know how to read this—” he waved the map, its edges already fraying from being passed back and forth between them at rapid speed. “piece of shit so that I can be home in time to put my kids to bed—I don’t want to hear it.”
Five looked away, teeth sliding hard into his lip, and wished for the thousandth time that he had managed to come alone. He loathed the idea that it was his fault but wasn’t it? The Marigold hadn’t been his idea, but what was wrong with him that his power had come back so twisted? If anyone should have been able to handle this it should have been him. Five had decades over his siblings at this point. Decades to hone his mind and his body, his control over his abilities. Where the others had simply existed within their realms Five had sought out understanding.
Fat load of good that was doing them now.
The doors had opened for them onto yet another grim and abandoned station. This one had large electric signs —or places where those signs would be– now cracked out and blackened and covered in what was probably mold. There was a stain on the ground in the shape of Ireland, Australia had been thirty-three stops ago, but other than that everything was as desperately wrong as all the other timelines they’d managed to get to. None of them were home.
Diego thrashed, a creature of pure rage. Scared out of his mind was a bad place to put a man like that, someone who had to mirror his pain on the world around him. Any previous good humor had been dwindling away like sand in an hourglass for the last couple of weeks. They had a similar vice in their pride and Diego knew, could clock Five almost as quickly as Five could clock him, when ideas were running low.
He let Diego run amok. The sounds of him throwing whatever he could lift off the ground echoed in the caverns around them. The howling, wild thing he was buffeted against the cold, metallic wall that Five was trying to climb with slippery feet. Teleportation was nice when coupled with other things; attributes Five had trained and honed and bled for to keep himself alive. But beyond his ability to move through time and space it was his mind, his ability to always stay three steps ahead that made him useful.
And he was failing.
He let his back skid against the wall, studying symbols on the map hoping something in him would crack and reveal the thing he was missing. This was space and time and physics and math, not the Shugborough Inscription. Five was in his element, God dammit.
The lines, the way they traveled through and back, the seemingly random symbols that the routes coalesced among. There had to be a pattern here. That’s all the time paradox was. A series of puzzles, pieces floating in and out of the ether that needed to be put in their places. Sometimes those pieces got mixed up, lost in other puzzles, but no matter where they landed they would always bear the mark of where they came from.
Despite everything he knew about time travel, none of this made sense. No matter how hard Five stared at the pieces, the moment they tried to put a pattern to the test it fell through.
He knew, logically, that time moved different here but that didn’t stop the physical ache in his bones, the urgency that seemed to be bred into his DNA telling him that he was wasting precious time.
It was hours, maybe minutes, but Five hadn’t realized he was cold until a body landed next to his. Diego had always run uncommonly hot. They didn’t need to touch for it to permeate the space between them, warming the thin line of his jacket in a way that reminded him of rare off days at the Academy. Of sliding his chilled, bare feet under his brother’s leg while Diego sharpened his knives and Five scribbled equations onto whatever part of the wall he could reach.
“We’re stuck aren’t we?” Diego asked, the fire in him dimming to a spread of embers.
Five eyed the flickering, never-ending rail map that stood in the center before letting his gaze drift back to Diego.
“We’re not stuck.” Because they were not. There were options, though bleak. “We’re…we’re lost. But we’ll figure out how to get back.” He tilted his head to catch Diego’s attention. “They’ll be right where you left them. I promise.” He said, because he was also a fool.
“Is this what happened last time? When you-“ he inhaled like it hurt him, “You know. Before?”
Christ. “No. I was stupid then. I thought I knew what I was doing and I had it all wrong for a very long time.” It was one of the only times Five could admit without spitting that the old man had won that round. Pride only mattered until your mind was splintering apart from sheer loneliness. “This is…new. And it doesn’t make sense yet but it will. We just have to keep going.”
Diego was staring at his hands, flexing the muscles like they hurt. Every breath he took was deliberate, on a count only he could hear in his head. After a moment he lifted his head, wiping a hand against his mouth. When he stood it was without an ounce of tremor, whatever fears had snuck through successfully pulled back behind lock and key.
“Okay,” Diego said. “Okay, so. If we can’t read the thing like a normal route map, we do process of elimination, right?”
Five scratched at his knees, fingers curling around the bone. “What, you mean just hit up everything?” That could take–“
Months, he didn’t say. Years.
He watched Deigo's face. Almost reached out to move his slightly-too long hair away from the scar near his temple, to remind himself that he was stronger than he looked.
Did Diego have it in him to do this for years?
As if unable to sit still, Diego stalked over to the railway system, fingers hovering over the flashing symbols. “These things centralize over the points where the symbols are. We don’t know what they mean yet, fine, but if we eliminate the stops around each one then at least we can start pinpointing where we should be looking instead of riding back and forth to where we think it outta be.”
“Diego–”
“Five.” Diego’s dark eyes flashed in the dim light. Five felt his breath hitch just enough to hurt. “Look, man, if you come up with anything better, we’ll take your lead but I can’t stop. I can’t.”
Because he had someone to get back to. Diego had a family–a real family. For all his questionable actions lately and all he claimed he wanted a break – Diego had a purpose.
“We won’t.” Five said. He stood up, wiping the grime off his pants and opening the map again. “There may be something to what you’re saying and right now, I don’t have any other ideas. Maybe someone will have left another clue behind for us to find. Finding the map wasn’t a coincidence.” He stood, Let’s do it.”
“Yeah?” Diego’s voice tilted, just to the left of confident. Just into the territory of fragile. Five hated it.
“Yeah,” he nudged Diego, offering what he could with the curve of his lips, “It’s a start.”
Day 283
“One hundred and…th–ree.” Diego grunted. His arms were shaking now, just enough for the burn to set in. He loved that feeling. The shuddering heat, the way his blood moved heavy in his veins. There was nothing like coming down from the high of a good workout and he needed the distraction desperately.
“Doesn’t count if your chin doesn’t go over the bar.”
But then, he usually wasn’t stuck on a train from Hell with the brother with the biggest mouth.
Diego bore his teeth, wrenching himself up and over the bar just to prove a point. “I don’t see you up here, brat.”
“Busy.”
Yes, Five had been leaving him to his own devices today. There was only so much time you could spend damn near attached to someone’s hip before shit started getting on your nerves. They’d fought and railed against each other as time rattled on ahead of them, bickering over directions like they’d just taken a wrong turn instead of gotten stuck in a loop.
Sometimes it just felt like a road-trip gone rogue. Where they could pretend the hard concrete or the floor of the train were just another shitty motel on a highway to nowhere. The rats and dried bubblegum machines just the luck of the draw when a bar hustle went sideways and left them wanting.
They could pretend until they couldn’t.
Five had retreated to the other end of the car, pouring over the map again, fingers tracing the lines only to cross off a stop with a marker they’d found in a gutter. They’d made the mistake of digging too far in their boredom; from Luther to Delores to Dad – too far, too deep, too tender in spots. They’d spent the last five hours in relative silence.
Diego suffered stir crazy like a mouse in a maze, his body craving movement and noise and purpose where Five seemed to require nothing but enough food to keep his mind working. He didn’t understand how a guy with so much energy buzzing under his skin all the time could stay so still for so long.
But an opening was an opening. “Lotta talk for a guy who probably can’t hit twenty.”
Five didn’t look up, but his eyebrow arched high. “You do not want this problem, Number 2.”
Diego’s breath rushed past his teeth as he pulled up again. His knees ached from keeping them curled so high. “Yeah I’d probably say that too if I knew I wasn’t shit.”
There was a sigh like the whistle of a train. Diego smirked, rocketing himself up again. Point, Diego.
He almost lost his hold when Five’s face materialized in front of his, mouth twisted in a scowl and piercing eyes narrowed.
“I know you’re baiting me,” Five hung by the bars like it took nothing to hold up his weight. Well, it probably didn’t when you weighed the same as a schnauzer. “But I’ve decided I don’t care enough.”
Diego’s smile was all teeth.
“Oh, please bring it.”
They made it another 106 reps before Diego’s biceps were toast. As his pride was entirely more important than his sportsmanship, and Five was swinging from his freakish monkey arms with a smirk on his face, he was not against pushing out to kick with his feet.
Five gaped at him and said, “For shame.” with such conviction Diego couldn’t help the laugh that rattled out of him. The last threads of tension melted out from the soles of his feet. How pathetic was it to miss someone who had been maybe four feet from you all day.
Of course, that was also when he noticed the legs wrapped around his waist.
Grunting at the extra weight, Diego wiggled in the octopus hold, trying to fling Five off and almost slipping off the bars in the process. He stopped and adjusted his slippery grip. “Don’t you dare.”
Five’s spring-morning eyes glimmered. He swung back with Diego’s torso still in the grip of his legs and then just – let go.
If asked later, it was the angle that got him and Five was a little cheating bastard (leaving out the fact that he started it because this was Diego’s story). His head smacked against the floor, breath immediately knocked out of him when Five landed hard on his ribs, flung forward onto his chest by the momentum.
They laid there, squished against each other while the train rattled around them as they caught their breath. Five’s body tremored, and for a senseless moment Diego was almost worried he’d been hurt.
A series of small breaths peppered the side of Diego’s neck until they gathered enough air to carry sound. Oh.
“Are you serious right now? Little shit,” He said like his cheeks weren’t sore from smiling already. The giggles trickling along his skin took on weight, and by the time Five had managed to get himself up on his knees he was laughing so hard he had to grip onto the railing.
“Y-you’re an idiot,” he managed, crawling back on his haunches to laugh at the ceiling. The apples of his cheeks were so high and round that the dimple on the left side of his face was out in full force. “Your face,” he spluttered into his hand, reaching up to swipe the dirty hair from his eyes.
It struck like a blow to the chest. He had, objectively, always known the way Five’s eyes crinkled at the corners, the way his nose wrinkled and his dark eyebrows dropped in a gentle slope when he was amused by something. It was just that he couldn’t place the last time he saw it all at once.
“I know.” Diego near-whispered. “That was the point.”
He was still just left of dumbstruck when Five finally got himself under control, offering his hand with that same fond tilt of his eyebrow.
“I hope you feel better.” Five huffed a breath through his nose. Diego took his hand.
“I really kinda do.”