Currently thinking about how one of the most heart-breaking parts of the show is that Five loves his siblings deeply, but they don’t realise it.
Five was alone for forty-five years. And as Luther once put it, it’s the being alone that breaks you. Five’s only companion in the apocalypse was someone his mind literally made up for him to love and be loved by, and at the Commission, he worked by himself. This makes his siblings the only people who ever truly loved him, in the entirety of his fifty-eight years on earth, and everything he does in the show is, at its core, out of love for them.
And they don’t know that, and a lot of that is because of Five himself, as forty-five years of solitude take a toll on your social and communication skills. Five is literally shown to be ready to kill for his siblings, and to die for his siblings, and to outdo himself with his time-travelling skills for his siblings, and they don’t know it’s for them, because he doesn’t tell them. When Five says to his younger-but-older-looking self that there wasn’t a single day in the apocalypse where they didn’t think about their family, the camera cuts to Luther looking surprised at the admission. Five is brash and rude and arrogant and exasperated, especially with his siblings, so that’s how they know him, and don’t see or don’t bother to look for anything deeper motivating his actions.
Literally all the siblings (except Ben) have called Five an asshole, or something equivalent, over the course of the show, and he usually deserves it on surface-level, but there is something more fundamental at play here, namely that he doesn’t fully grasp the depth their childhood abuse and his siblings don’t understand the trauma he suffered for forty-five years. Five has no idea what they went through after he got lost in the future, how Reginald’s abuse has stunted them all in different ways, and is thus surprised when they don’t all drop everything to help him stop the apocalypse. His siblings, on the other hand, don’t really seem to care about how forty-five years with the certain knowledge that everyone and everything he knew and loved is dead affected Five, they don’t understand why he is the way he is. There is a big sense of a rift between Five and the rest of his siblings because they don’t really understand what the other has been through, and how would they? Five has been back for less than three weeks, and he has barely opened up to any of his siblings, or they to him. He tries to save them, again and again, but they are not aware what is went through, is still going through.
And, overall, they have more history with each other than with him, and it shows in the little details. Out of all the siblings, Five is the only one without a reunion scene in Season 2 where someone is happy to see him. He is the only one in the Hargreeves household (including Pogo, Grace and even goddamn Reginald) who has not gotten a hug in twenty episodes. When Diego does his whole speech to Lila about dangerous people loving him back in the last episode, the camera cuts to every single one of his siblings. Except for one. Because Diego doesn’t know that Five loves him, loves all of them. None of them do.
theartofmadeline
romaincrisis
