I'd love to hear more of you Daemon AU from part 6. Tell me about Five getting kidnapped and Pancha rallying the siblings to go save him
(referring to here and y’all can check out the rest of it on the masterlist ;3c)
So the Handler has reason to do more than just stall Five at a hotel meet up, she has more reason than to set out champagne and prepare a little speech. Because when Five oh so graciously blew her up with her own grenade and fought her, he revealed too much of his hand.
Because Pancha shifted in front of him, and revealed to the Handler that she was unsettled. An adult with an unsettled daemon - a time traveler in the body of a child with an unsettled daemon to match. Five turned from a failed experiment into a fun brand new experiment! So the Handler doesn’t try and stall him. Instead, she sets up a trap - and oh she’s had months to heal from the grenade that should have killed her to do just that
so Five can’t help himself, he goes with Pancha to see what the Handler has to say and he walks right into an ambush. Admittedly, he wasn’t really expecting the dart, but he’s Number Five. He’s the commissions best assassin. He might look soft and childlike, but he’s as deceptive as the hare daemon by his side that can erupt into a roaring tiger in one heartbeat and into a deadly mamba the next. He holds on long enough to push - because the dart is in his skin and the Handler’s grip on his arm is hard enough to bruise.
But the Handler doesn’t have a daemon. She made everyone uncomfortable, going around without her soul. The Handler doesn’t have a daemon, and she’s only one person, and she has a grip on Five which means she doesn’t have a grip on Pancha.
So Pancha jumps, shifting into something small and tiny and stumbling underneath a dumpster in an alley and hiding away before she passes out from the tranqs unloaded into her boy. The Commission got Five, the Handler has him, but they don’t get to have them both.
It’s not too long before she wakes up, panic under her skin and a sharp pain in the side of her face. The one boon she has is that Five can’t travel in time without her, not if they don’t want to kill them both. Not if they want them for experiments. (The Commission tried some unfortunate experiments with that early on - it’s a fact that people simply cannot time travel without their daemons) but that doesn’t mean they can’t hurt her and try get her to come to them.
(What hurts Five hurts her - and they have a high pain tolerance between them but Pancha can feel her skin getting raw already where they clearly have her boy restrained. Can feel the fear flowing between them. They never much liked to be restrained, either of them.)
So Pancha wakes up, and she doesn’t care about the apocalypse right now - because as much as she loves her siblings and wants to save them more than anything that’s her boy. And her and Five have been through so much, more than anyone should go through. They kept one another company through the end of the world, and Pancha will chew through the Handler’s jugular herself to make sure she stays dead this time.
But she needs backup. And a plan. And yes, she understands that her siblings are at one anothers throats right now and that Vanya and Pollux went crazy or whatever but Pancha doesn’t care. That shit can wait a hot second. God knows Pancha and Five have put all their very unresolved trauma on the backburner to stop the apocalypse, her dumbass siblings can put theirs on hold to save her boy.
So she jumps into the concert hall, and there are commission agents in there shooting and Pancha just sees red. Because the Commission took her boy, and so she can feel herself changing. Flitting through one form to the next, becoming a jaguar and tearing claws through a daemon before morphing into an elephant to stomp another into dust and then twisting into a hawk and plucking a mouse daemon from the floor and snapping it and -
Pancha comes back to herself pinning some idiot lackey and his weasel daemon in each paw in the form of an enormous bear, roaring in his face a terrible cry of - “Where’s my boy?” and her grief and fury and desperation is so very clear in her voice and she might be crying and she has blood running into her eyes from a wound that she didn’t receive in this concert hall -
And suddenly the background music that has been going on throughout the fight screeches to a halt. And Pancha looks up, and Vanya is sitting on the stage with a violin tucked under her chin and Pollux is perched on the music stand and they’re both still as statues and looking at her.
“Pancha?” Rowan chokes out, which is rude because is should be Pancha questioning them and Klaus considering the fact that she can still see Ben’s ghostly form and Tamaya sticking her head out of Klaus’s pocket. Silly Rowan, always keeping secrets.
There’s another shock of pain that rockets down Pancha’s arm, wrist burning where she didn’t just try and wrench it up to protect from a blow that she was never going to be able to block in the first place. She crunches the weasel daemon into dust and staggers sideways, only just realizing she’s still in the form of a bear and twisting herself into her hare form again.
That’s about the time when she realizes that oh yeah, her siblings don’t know she’s unsettled. Or, they didn’t know. This was a somewhat spectacular way to introduce the idea to them. Pancha feels a little like giggling hysterically, but she swallows down the impulse as another sharp bolt of fear runs down the connection between her and her other half.
(She isn’t even sure if it’s his fear or hers - or if the distinction even matters)
“Where’s Five?” Vanya asks, voice loud and clear from her place on the stage. Probably the concert hall acoustics at work.
Pancha blinks blood out of her eyes and bares her teeth, still absolutely furious. “They took him.” She announces, voice cold. “They took him, and I’m going to get him back. And you can all help me, or you can continue your stupid useless tantrum while they rip him apart for fun.”
She can hear Diego and Val suck in sharp breaths behind her, but Pancha doesn’t care. She locks eyes with Pollux with a challenge. She always loved Vanya and Pollux, loved them when none of their other siblings would touch them with a ten foot pole. They’re her siblings. They’re also ending the world. If Pancha was in a petty mood, she might even hate them a little bit for causing the end that she and her boy were thrown head first into and expected to survive. But she can’t quite hate them when she sees the same furious grief in their eyes that she sees in the mirror.
(But the memory of the bodies, the bodies, will always stay with her. Corpses upon corpses and so much dust it choked the sun in the sky. Pancha hadn’t been able to walk without stepping in puddles of what used to be daemons, with thoughts and hopes and dreams of their own. Pancha remembers the children, the infants in their strollers and skeletons in plastic playgrounds.
Somehow worse than all of those were the bodies from the first day. The ones with umbrella tattoos on their forearms and a grief so thick that they choked on it and retched and cried to the heavens as they vowed to change it.
Vanya and Pollux were going to end the world - they did end the world - and even though Pancha loves them, she’s not quite sure she can forgive them.)
But Vanya stands up and looks at her siblings cowering among the rows of the audience. Looks at Pancha, who is bleeding and bruised and desperate. Pollux inclines his head ever so slightly, and Vanya nods decisively. “If they took him,” She says, danger in her voice, “Then lets go take him back.”
Because Five and Pancha vanished when they were 13 and went to hell. Before they left, they were the only ones who actively sought Vanya and Pollux out. Their childhoods were filled with quiet stolen moments basking in each others company and pretending they were family.
And then they came back. Five and Pancha had sought Vanya and Pollux out first, out of all of their siblings. They’d gone to her. Asked for her to believe them and help them. They’d complimented her book, and hadn’t condemned her for writing it.
They hadn’t been there when Luther had locked Vanya and Pollux away. If they had, they would have unlocked that door in a heartbeat, or else jumped into that soundproof room with them in solidarity. They hadn’t been there at the start of the concert hall attack, either.
Five and Pancha hadn’t done anything to incur Vanya and Pollux’s wrath. He was their brother, the one they’d left out peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches for and left the lights on. Of course they were willing to put the apocalypse on hold for him, anything less would be ungrateful.
So they pile into a van with some awkwardness (because how do you address your siblings almost ending the world??) and Pancha sits on the dashboard. Allison is driving and Raph draped around her shoulders while Vanya sits shotgun with Pollux on her lap. Pollux’s feather are brown-and-white instead of white-and-brown again, and Vanya’s eyes are back to being brown, but her suit is still white and the threat of her powers hangs heavy in the air.
Daemons always know where their people are, even ones that can separate as far as Pancha and Five can. She navigates, restless and angry and shifting between being a hare and being creatures with a few too many teeth.
“Is anyone going to address the elephant in the room?” Klaus asks, incredulous as Rowan hisses at him to shut up.
Pancha, in the form of a cat herself, swings her head around and draws up her lip to show her very pointy teeth. “Why yes, Klaus.” She snarls, “Why don’t we have a good long talk about why our sister is still alive and how you summoned our brother?”
She years Tamaya squeak in Klaus’s pocket and shift further back. Pancha pretends it doesn’t hurt, and Klaus falls silent.
She turns her head to look at the road ahead. Shifting back into a hare with her long ears pressed flat against her skull. She doesn’t look at any of them. “They’ll be after me, specifically. They want - they took him because of me. Because of what I am. Or, you know, what I’m not.”
Because it’s her fault. If she just fucking settled they wouldn’t have to deal with this. They wouldn’t have to deal with all the secrecy and hiding and the terror or not being able to put a single toe out of line during their time in the commission. She wouldn’t be stupid and immature and a million other things she snarled to herself because even after all those years stuck at the end of the world it seemed they had never quite grown up. If she’d found a form for them, they wouldn’t be in this mess. She’d be settled and grown and perfect and they wouldn’t have stolen her boy.
She shifts, and feels blood run down her claws to puddle on the dashboard. Five clearly wasn’t taking the restraints lying down and if he could get out of them well enough to move then it would make their job so much easier. After all, even if they got too tired to jump (a strong possibility with all the jumping Pancha did while on adrenaline at the concert hall actually) well. Five wasn’t their best agent because of his jumping, after all. He’d never needed his powers to beat a Commission lackey in a fight (though they didn’t hurt)
and they get to the warehouses they’re keeping Five in until they can obtain his wonderful unsettled daemon for whatever experiments they want to run.
(Pancha figures it’s a toss up between trying to sever them or some equally gruesome fate and between figuring out why she hadn’t settled to they could keep other people unsettled. After all, having such a versatile daemon couldn’t be anything but a boon in their line of work.)
Pancha stops them (and by them she 100% means Luther/Andromeda and Diego/Val) from busting in without a plan - because she’s come way too far for her idiot siblings to go and die on her again. But like, their plan mainly consists of sending Ben in to scout first and then busting in soooo
(Ben comes back absolutely furious, not that anyone except Klaus-Rowan-Tamaya can see that. Ben isn’t exactly super appreciative of the fact that their little brother is tied to a chair with blood and bruising and a women tutting and caressing his face in a way that is so far inappropriate that Ben kind of wants to skewer her.
They can’t help but look at Pancha with a more critical eye, see the bloodied pawprints and blood-wet fur and the way she’s sort of swaying just a little.)
“She’s waiting for Pancha, right?” Val says, frowning. Raph is wrapped around her where he’d normally be wrapped around Andromeda. The duo were still in the doghouse regarding their treatment of Vanya regardless of this little rescue mission.
“What’s to stop this bitch from just drugging Five as soon as we march in there and making Pancha useless.” Diego points out, subtle as always and making Pancha bristle. But it’s a solid point.
Except - “Five will be free in a few minutes.” Pancha says, which is news to everyone. “Blood as a lubricant isn’t exactly ideal, but we know what we’re doing when it comes to getting out of restraints. We just need the help to get out of there, I don’t know if we’ll be able to walk.”
Yeah, the less said about Reginald’s private training which oh so nicely prepared them for this moment the better. But it had the family frowning down at Pancha.
“You’re walking now?” Rowan points out, always a master at pointing out the obvious.
Pancha shrugs, because it’s probably more strategically sound to go over weaknesses before a battle, right? “The only reason I’m awake right now is because Five keeps purposefully digging the rope into our wrists.” She admits grudgingly. The frequent jolts of pain do wonders to keep her awake and moving though (and keep Five awake long enough for a rescue attempt to commence and for Pancha to make contact with allies)
because yeah, Pancha woke up in that alley but she’s still pretty thoroughly drugged. She wouldn’t have taken half as long to realize she’d revealed her unsettled status to her siblings if she was firing on all cylinders, and quite frankly the way the room had been spinning for the last while was probably more than a little concerning.
so yeah, maybe it’s a little bit of a disaster when they bust in and five slips bloody hands from restraints and staggers towards them, and the Handler isn’t exactly alone she has goons on her side but the squad have the power of a very angry Vanya and Pollux who still have all the fun energy they didn’t use to destroy the world in order to destroy the fuckwads who took their brother so
Diego scoops Five up for the second time in as many days (and that shrapnel would still hasn’t fully healed jesus five) as he snarls curses but all of them can’t help but notice how him and Pancha flinch away in fear when the Handler raises her voice (Pancha has always been terrified of the Handler who has no daemon, and now Five is definitely coming around to her line of thinking in a way neither of them wanted)
Pancha passes out at some point in the fight and gets scooped up by Andromeda with an uncommon sort of gentleness. The next thing she knows is her and Five waking up on Vanya’s couch in very much pain with cool cloths over both their foreheads and wounds seen to. Everyone is packed into the apartment. Vanya is serving tea with Allison’s help.
Five asks for coffee in a voice that’s more like a croak and Klaus hits him on the head for scaring them all so badly. It makes Pancha wheeze a laugh that turns into a hacking cough. Five whines about her always taking other people’s sides. They both might still be a little bit drugged.
They’re both safe. The apocalypse hasn’t happened. Klaus liberated the black suitcase that the Handler had on her person before her untimely death when Vanya and Pollux introduced her to the wall with great force. They get to erase what happened, just a little bit. They get to go back to before the house was destroyed, before Grace died, before Luther locked her away
(erasing it in time doesn’t erase it from their memories, and Vanya and Pollux still won’t look at their eldest siblings and Andromeda’s tail still hasn’t come out from where it’s been firmly tucked between her legs)
it’s not the end by any means - they killed the Handler. But the Commission still exists, and the Handler is but a cog in the machine.
But for now, Pancha and Five are safe. Neither are being tortured or are in the grip of their enemies (though if Klaus makes one more inane comment they might have to change their minds about that) and Vanya and Pollux seem to have called off the apocalypse for now.
Well, the only way to go is forward, right?
(Regardless of their liberal application of time travel ;3c)
