you’d think, this is Five Hargreeves we’re talking about! he spent 45 years in the apocalypse! of course he’d be great at surviving outdoors.
but five, five who was thirteen (or ten, in the comics) and never faced a consequence for anything from literal murder to ripping the fabric of space into neat little portals, has found himself One Big Consequence when he appears on april 2nd, 2019.
and so he waits. he waits for his powers to return, as they always do, so he can just traipse back home and tell reginald exactly what just happened, if it wasn’t a dream or a hallucination to begin with; yeah, a prank, it must be, his siblings can’t be twenty-somethings and dead.
so he remembers some training, some recitation on a record, about what to do when abandoned with no resources. so he shoves it down deep, because it’d be ridiculous to actually be in an apocalypse. stupid. hilarious.
he gets better over the years. doesn’t want to admit it, that’s for sure. if—when—if he gets out of here, this will be just a blip. him and dolores will be out of here, back when it all started, so he can prevent it from ever happening in the first place, because it’s a prank, a dream, really, a hallucination of his scrambled mind from time travel. he gets better, better at finding food and setting up shelter and weaving his way through equations he finds in thick astrophysics books widely regarded as fanatical.
second, it’s the commission. they tell him how to do things he already knows, give him faces of numbers to, er, correct, and fuck around with his dna until he’s just a pile of twisted, twisted ladders, ladders that lead to the inky black soul of a mass murderer. he keeps his sister’s book on hand, uses a pencil down to a clumsy stub so he can finally wake up from this nightmare. he’s 58, fifty-fucking-eight, and his siblings actually died at twenty-nine, didn’t they? he’s not letting that happen, even if it takes him another 45 goddamned years.
five is bad at not killing people, it appears. funny, a mass murderer trying to stop billions from dying. untangling this mess of a mystery feels like plucking individual notes out of an arrangement the commission desperately wants to accompany. he’s trapped, between the sixteenth notes and the lack of rest, and hell, he’s out of tune now that he looks thirteen again.
if he closes his eyes, he might be able to forget. he might be able to reopen them and see a world where april first is just a fun holiday he celebrated with his siblings when he was little.
he can’t. it was real. is real. and these two weeks have been the longest in his entire life.
last, when it’s finally all over and done with, his siblings are cautious to ask him if he wants to go camping with them. out in the woods, where it’s fatally silent. vanya’s the one to do it, grief in her eyes and heart from what she’s caused in the past. she still blames herself for it all, even when the handler conducted it all, even when she was little and a simple crescendo and a crack of glass led to her believing she was completely ordinary. she wants to help five, help them all, into feeling like a family again.
he agrees. the car ride is long and slow, klaus and diego sharing earbuds until allison gives a big speech about enjoying things as a group and then luther is screeching off-key lyrics of tiffany. five watches the pines grow thicker and knows, knows logically speaking, that there were no forests like this in the apocalypse. he’s safe. he’s safe.
they split up into groups once they get to the area of the camp site they’re staying at. five and klaus are in charge of setting up the tents. nobody says why they specifically are in charge of this; nobody has to.
klaus sets up his half of them with ease. it’s methodical and quick, muscle memory. life skills of war. a thing expected from five.
but five, as stated earlier, is notably bad at camping. it’s a statement now, and he commits to it as he fumbles with bars and cloth and whatever the fuck that is that he’s supposed to use to build it with.
“what, fivesie, never set up one of these bad boys?” klaus asks with his usual trademark blend of masking humor and observation.
“no, klaus, i just choose to be bad at it.” five snaps back. he doesn’t really get why he snarked like that, why it’s so frustrating. shit, this was supposed to be the smooth part. all the hard bits were supposed to be over.
“hm,” klaus hums, walking over and straightening a stake. “i guess you can allow yourself to do that now, be bad at something. how does it feel?”
five freezes. his eyebrows draw together and he looks inward. it feels... cloudy, confusing, infuriating that it’s confusing.
“freeing.” he decides upon. “it feels freeing.”
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