When Five finally makes it back home with his siblings, finally makes it back to the right timeline, he finds he’s still holding his breath.
“Is it really over?” He thinks out loud.
“I guess there’s only one way to find out,” comes Luther’s response.
So they do. And everything seems…normal?
But as much as Five wants to sleep for ten days straight, he can’t help but feel on edge. He spends his time visiting each sibling, popping in for dinners or briefly making sure they haven’t felt anything out of the ordinary. One day Allison asks him if he actually wants there to be an approaching apocalypse. His eyes fall onto Claire who’s catching him up on High School Musical the Musical the Series.
“No,” he answers. “I really don’t.”
They make time for family dinners every Sunday. They still bicker and maybe swing some fists every now and then, but everyone is fast to apologize and laugh again. With room to breathe again without high stakes, the hurt finally begins to heal. They had been family before, but it slowly begins to feel like a real family.
And for the first time, they really get to know each other. For all the crap they gave Luther about the moon, they listen as he shares the misery and loneliness and betrayal he felt. Allison describes her time as a Black woman in the 60s without her voice. Literally. Viktor tells them about what it was like growing up powerless only to end the world twice. How he lost his memory and found the one he loved only to lose that too.
Klaus manifests Ben (who is still a ghost but as alive as he could get) and together they tell of their adventures growing up and the cult Klaus accidentally created. In between laughs, they also learn about Klaus’s harrowing experiences with drugs and death.
And Five? He has over 40 years of stories, and at first he doesn’t want to share any of it. His time in the Apocalypse, his time in the Commission, murdering for the sole purpose of survival in order to get back to his family—it’s not a side to him he wants his family to know about.
But at the same time for reasons he can’t explain, he does want them to know. For the first time, he wants to talk to his family, the family he worked tirelessly to save.
Little by little, he does just that. Every now and then he will start a sentence with, “Back in the Apocalypse…,” during dinner or his visits with them. Silly ones at first, like the time he had the nasty Twinkie. The time he sang all the Beatles songs he could remember and pretended he was having a concert. The time he found Umbrella Academy action figures and reenacted missions with them.
When he’s alone with another sibling, he starts sharing some of the hard stuff too.
He tells Allison how starved during his first winter alone and hallucinated that she had helped him find food. When he woke up he found himself in a storage house full of canned goods and bawled his eyes out.
He tells Diego about the first time he killed someone. How the scariest thing was that he wasn’t shaking.
He tells Viktor how he sometimes still wonders if he deserves everything he got for messing with time in the first place. How he’s afraid that one of these days he’ll wake up and be alone again.
He tells Klaus about the time he thought about giving up and ending it all.
He tells Luther about Dolores. About how even though he knew he was crazy for talking to a mannequin, Dolores was the better part of him that salvaged his sanity.
He tells Ben (and Klaus, by default) that his biggest regret is not being there. That he tries not to think about how things might have been different if he’d stayed.
Slowly, slowly, bit by bit, the tension eases from his shoulders. He stops worrying so much about the world ending and how to keep everyone alive. Instead, he spends his time going to the park with Claire, helping Diego and Lila with the babies, having midnight food outings with Klaus, and listening to Viktor play his music.
At their weekly family dinner, Luther tells Five he has a present for him and pulls out a box of Twinkies, saying, “I know you want to try one.”
Five gives him a practiced glare and says, “I would rather swim in a pot of boiling oil.”
Before, his family might have stared at him like he grew two heads, but now they laugh and think his retort is hilarious. Luther opens the box and pulls out a bag of marshmallows instead, and Five can’t help but crack a smile.
One day they ask him what his plans are—what’s next for the oldest sibling.
Five warms his hands on a hot mug of coffee. “I’m tired of thinking about the future,” he tells them. “Right now, I just want to spend time with my family.”
That earns him plenty of “aww”s and “You’re such a softie, Five.” He waves them away and tries to duck out of their hugs, but they get him in the end. And even if he could teleport, he doesn’t want to.
He hadn’t been looking for happy, but he found it anyway.
