Latest Update: March 26, 2023
Summary: Five is chronologically challenged.
Ever since he was five years old, Five has been time travelling uncontrollably to different points in his and Klaus' lives - whether he has experienced them already or not. The displacements were mostly harmless when he was a child, and an older Klaus would sneak him out for doughnuts - but they became a lot more important after he stranded himself in the apocalypse, figuring out how to survive, and how to stop it all from ever happening.
Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27102931/chapters/66180745
Word count:140k
Chapters:40
Chapter 1: Welcome to the Apocalypse
Chapter Text
Five is around 39 years old (and 13).
"Fuck."
Five sighs, hand rising to catch the ash falling from the sky. For once, he doesn't feel the lack of clothing from his displacement so much, the pockets of fire still burning making the air hot and smoky. He coughs to try to clear his lungs (pointless) and runs his hands through his dark beard in an attempt to remove the ash that is turning it grey.
He knows when he is.
The air had remained heavy and the skies overcast for months, but the fires had only burnt for the first few days after his original arrival into the apocalypse. The ash had stopped falling from the clouds a few days after the fires had burnt out, but any gust of wind could lift it from where it had settled like a cheap and dirty imitation of snow. Until the first winter, when enough rain had fallen to turn the ash to a heavy and dirty slush, his neckerchiefs had been up there as priority clothing to try to keep the worst of it from choking his lungs.
He scouts around for anything resembling clothing, already knowing it is only going to be a partial success. Five doesn't think he'll ever forget the moment when he looked up from finding the bodies of his siblings to see a dirty, naked man climbing over the rubble in nothing but a pair of beaded sandals and a scraggy beard.
Beggars can't be choosers, but if he could choose only one thing to find in the apocalypse then shoes would be his choice. There are a lot of things he does not want to stand in, and the heat of the fires on the rubble is enough to burn even his heavily calloused feet.
When he finally spies the sandals from his memories, he kneels to remove them with efficient and impersonal hands. Whoever the lady who had owned them was, she had been crushed by the collapsed building so thoroughly that only her lower legs are poking out from the concrete. He gives a half-hearted tug to what looks like the bottom of a skirt, but the fabric is too well pinned to recover. Not for the first time he curses his inability to displace with even a knife in hand.
The shoes are a little short for his feet - his heels left hanging over the back edges - but at least he has something.
He stands and looks around, trying to spot a familiar landmark or something he can use to orientate himself. It is not as easy as he had hoped – he had moved on from his home city over twenty years ago when the supplies had run out. Towards the end of summer, he had often limited his jumps to save up the energy he needed to make the increasingly long-distance annual pilgrimage to his siblings' graves. After all this time away, rubble looks like rubble, looks like rubble, looks like more rubble.
Fuck it. He doesn't recognise where he is, but he knows where he will be, or needs to be.
He jumps.
The Glade, as he called it in an attempt to make it sound nicer, is a near perfect circle of concrete amongst the hills of crumbled brick, plaster and concrete and the trees of structural steel – the arched skeletons of the large building that must have once stood here.
He begins to climb out, scrambling up the loose slopes and swearing as pockets of heat burn his fingertips, or his toes catch on sharp edges. He is just cresting the top of the pile, about to straighten up when he hears the gasp.
And there he is.
God, he looks pitiful. His face is smeared with ash, and he has already lost the tie from his uniform (using it to tie Dolores safely into the trailer if he remembers correctly...). His eyes are wide and terrified, red from irritation and the tears make muddy streaks down his cheeks as his chest heaves with sobs.
Young Five is crouched beside Klaus, his hands are paused from where they had been tracing the cold Goodbye over and over on the palm of his hand. They stare wide-eyed at one another, and shit it may have been a long, long time for him now, but the grief still kicks him in the gut just the same when he sees Klaus pale, and cold, and lifeless in the rubble.
"Hey, Five," he rasps.
Young Five doesn't move. "Who the fuck are you?"
"You. After about 20 years or so in this shithole," Five says. He doesn't mince his words. His younger self doesn't need platitudes right now; he needs a tow rope. An assurance he will survive, because he remembers that at this moment, surrounded by the desolation, yet to find any water and sitting with the remains of his family, he hadn't been able to see how he would survive the week.
"What?"
"Yeah, sorry," he grunts, eyeing up the slope and deciding he would rather not break a leg. He blinks to the clear patch of ground behind young Five, who startles and spins around. He scans the rubble, finds the dirty red velvet chair he remembers and pulls the hinged seat down so he can sit. He crosses one leg over the other to try and maintain some decency, rather than leaving it all hanging right at young Five's eye level.
He sighs. "Welcome to the Apocalypse."
"I... I can't go back?" young Five whispers, looking more convinced at who he is talking to now he has seen him jump, even as a dust covered hand reaches up to rub his red eyes as if he can't believe what he is seeing. "I'm really stuck?"
Five softens. "We're trying. It's a lot of calculations and most of the books we need didn't survive the fires."
He remembers the build-up to the day he had jumped, how a few weeks before their thirteenth birthday a clean-shaven old-man Five had begun appearing to them at night after curfew, or very early before breakfast. He had never seen himself much older than early teens before, so it was a shock, but easily overlooked when he had spent miserable hours having advanced math and physics crammed down his throat when he should have been sleeping. He had retained very little of it, for it was far beyond the math which Pogo had been schooling all the children in (and to make it worse he didn't even particularly like math).
At the time he had assumed it was to prepare him to take the next step and control his time travel. So, he'd applied himself to learning it, however reluctantly. He just assumed that the old man had oozed frustration because at the time Five was still more interested in perfecting his spatial jumps and tackling missions with his siblings than learning new powers.
Now, with the benefit of age and experience, he knows it was a desperate move to try and teach himself what he would need to get back.
Young Five looks utterly miserable as more fat tears spill down his cheeks. Older Five has to bite his tongue to prevent himself from snapping about how he can't afford to waste body fluids like that, clean water is going to be too scarce.
"Four is dead," little Five whimpers.
"Yes."
"...And One, and Two, and Three..." his younger self sobs, still grasping at Klaus' hand. "...But I can't see Six or Seven. Did they survive?"
"I haven't seen anybody," he hedges.
"Shit."
And yes, that about sums it up, Five thinks miserably. He shuffles forward off the seat and crouches, drawing young Five to him and ignores how he flinches initially, letting him sob into his shoulder. He rubs a hand across the back of his younger self's jacket, and muses how in a way it is lucky he does get displaced in time, because otherwise he would have gone at least two decades (so far) without real touch, without any company other than Dolores. He loves her dearly, but her hugs provide little in the way of softness and warmth.
And if a few tears of his own trickle into his beard as he looks over his shoulder at his brother's body?
Well, there's nobody left to judge.
Five is 13.
It takes a week after landing in the apocalypse before Five displaces himself again.
There were no warning signs this time, the typical churning and clenching of his gut going unnoticed amongst the rest of his body's complaints. His scavenging has been impulsive and largely unsuccessful, and his digestive system has paid the price. So far, Five has found little of the right foods, and has interspersed that with eating stuff that has been contaminated or spoilt, in increasingly desperate attempts to appease the hollowness inside him.
He is surprised it has taken him this long, considering he has been living in state of constant emotional and growing physical stress since he arrived.
Tired and thirsty after another poor day of scavenging, he goes to lift Dolores from the trailer and instead finds himself stumbling into a bookcase. At first, it is all he can do to stay upright, gripping tightly to the grey metal shelves. He trembles as he stares at the rows of clean, colourful and whole books, pulling shaking breaths through his teeth.
When he finally tears his gaze away, his eyes water from the brightness of the white strip lights. Luckily, nobody seems to have seen the dirty, trembling naked boy having a breakdown amongst the aisles – or at the very least nobody is shouting at him.
He gasps when he sees Dolores next to a crumpled set of clothes, her familiar polka dot blouse looking cleaner than he has ever seen it. She's sat at the base of a wall covered in equations, and he finds a black sharpie half-tucked into the pocket of the shorts. His fingers tremble as he pulls on the uniform, eyes darting from Dolores to the empty aisles and back again, as he tightens the belt past its well-worn groove.
He hasn't got a clue why there is an academy uniform in his size existing alongside Dolores in a pre-apocalyptic library, but at this point he doesn't care. He sniffles as he straightens his shirt collar and then turns to sit next to Dolores with his back to the math, legs sprawled over the books strewn on the floor. Just one glance at the equations and he can tell it is too advanced for him, he doesn't have a clue what it is about.
In fact, he's not sure some of the symbols aren't made up entirely.
His eyes water and his stomach grumbles as he wraps an arm around Dolores, bringing her closer so that he can pretend her arm is curled around him in turn. It feels like something from a dream, yet he can't find the strength to leave this little corner of the world where everything seems okay.
There is a clink of glass.
Five looks up from where he has begun to curl into Dolores and spies a bottle of clear, clean liquid (more recently known as: a miracle). He hears a whining noise as he reaches around her to grasp the bottle by the neck, but he ignores it, too busy being grateful the bottle is already opened as he lifts it to his lips, desperate to wet his mouth and soothe his dry throat.
The strong flavour and the way it burns is enough to have him spluttering on his mouthful, but he chokes it down, determined not to waste a drop. He is so thirsty, the last of his clean water had ran out the night before and he hadn't found any when he'd weakly sifted through the rubble that day.
He has never had alcohol before (because its either that or drain cleaner he is drinking). It is sharp and burning and he wants to heave when it hits his stomach, but he keeps sipping away, determined not to waste it. Not when he doesn't have the energy to jump anywhere else or find anything better.
He has learnt very quickly not to waste resources.
***
When he comes too, his head is swimming. He groans as he feels his stomach sloshing, slowly realising he is moving. The air is cool, but his body is pressed against something warm, or most of it is – one arm is still gripping tight to Dolores, he realises when he peels an eye open to look around. It is dark and blurry, and the few lights he sees are swaying in a way that makes him feel sick.
"-waking up." He realises he's being carried when he hears a deep voice above his head. He frowns, curling his fingers tighter as he tries to lift his head, see who is carrying him. He cranes his neck to look up past the large shoulders and sees a face he barely recognises.
"-if you vomit on me..."
He belches as he stares upwards, wide-eyed. It's One – he's being carried by One. But how, just last week he-
"-buried you. World went bye-bye," he slurs, arm going slack as he tries to process what is happening. He sniffs. "Gone, s'all gone."
"Buried us?" says a new voice. He frowns, trying to turn his head, trying to bring the world into focus as another face looms in front of him.
"-Two?"
"What do you mean, the world's gone?" says One again. Five slumps, it is too much effort to hold himself up.
"The apocalypse is coming," he giggle-sobs. This isn't real, he decides. "You die, he dies, everybody dies."
"Wait-"
"-what?"
He opens his mouth to answer, but loses the battle with his stomach, heaving over One's arm, throat stinging as the vomit comes back up. He sobs as he settles back into the warm cradle, eyes closing.
"-that's disgusting."
He whimpers as he is jostled roughly by a hand on his arm. He opens his eyes to peer at Two. "No, Five, wake up. What did you mean, we die?"
"April fools… All dead. Knew it was you 'cos…" he slurs, swinging his arm in an attempt to point at where Two's umbrella tattoo would be. "Buried you all, in t'Glade."
His nose begins running, along with the tears that are escaping down his cheeks. "Couldn't lift you. Two older me's had to come back and help," he sniffs.
Whatever response they give to that he doesn't hear, their raised voices drowned out by the clench in his stomach and rush in his ears as the world swirls.
***
When the world stops blurring, he finds he is crumpled on the ground next to Dolores' trailer in the dark. He can just about see Dolores looking concerned from where she is safe in her usual seat. His knee collides with something plastic and he look down with a sniff to find a large bottle of clear water he definitely doesn't remember scavenging earlier that day. He curls up around it with a sob, uncaring that he is cold and naked in the dirt with rocks digging into his side, crying and moaning as he drifts back to sleep.
He wishes that it had been real. He wishes he could warn his siblings.
Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27102931/chapters/66180745