The Shvitz
Five Hargreeves x fem! reader one-shot, 4.7k words
After multiple apocalypses, Five's at the Hotel Obsidian and finally has two hours to himself, so he goes to the shvitz to sweat out all the trauma of his messed-up life. In the clouds of steam, a strange and lovely vision appears. Five doesn't know it yet, but he's about to enter a portal to an older self and have a encounter he'll never forget.
Warnings: smut, time portals, trauma healing
The steam room is empty.
It’s a fucking miracle.
He’s fresh from the shower and he’s been hoping against hope that none of his siblings walk in, that no other hotel guests are using the shvitz at this hour of the day. And for once in his entire goddamn life, the worst doesn’t happen. The wooden benches are all empty, and he sits down in the spot opposite the door (assassin’s handbook rules), towel tucked around his waist. He closes his eyes, leans against the wall, and lets the heat penetrate.
He’s got two hours and he intends to make the best of them. He can feel the burn in his sinuses, his lungs, chasing out a few of the toxins of decades of fear and rage and loneliness and boredom. He swallows and gives a deep sigh. No one can hear him, and he wants to relax. Or, actually, what he wants is to sweat out every fucking memory of Luther’s gray face under the rubble, of scraping squashed cockroaches into a jar, of picking glass out of his fingertips, or shooting the parents of a tiny girl, or suddenly finding himself back in his scrawny adolescent body, or seeing Allison with her throat cut, or watching the goddamn moon explode and kill billions of people and birds and shit. He wants it all out of him and running down the drain.
It becomes an obsession, getting clean of it all. He sweats and sweats as if his whole body’s crying, the crying he can’t do with his eyes. It’s liberating, he tells himself. After a while, the rage and terror and yes, the grief, seem to seep out of him, at least temporarily. He sags against the wall as if his bones have melted. He doesn’t have to save the world. Not right now. The world isn’t burning right now. His siblings have lost a whole shitload of people and that sucks, but the world’s in okay shape and he doesn’t have to drag himself through dust and driving snow and blood to fix everything. He can unclench his muscles and his bruised, half-murdered psyche. He can let go.
The steam room’s getting claustrophobic, but he doesn’t want to be done with this nearly spiritual experience of release. He dimly remembers there’s a hot tub somewhere. He gets up, pushes open the door of the steam room, and heads across the wide spa space toward the tub. Ridiculously, there’s still no one else here, as if Chet has shooed everyone out just for him. So he looks around furtively, drops the towel with a grin at his own social transgression, and splashes down the shallow stairs into the jacuzzi—the water’s close to scalding—in nothing but his birthday suit. If anyone says anything, well, he’s drowned people before.
He figures out the placement of the shelf seating and plops himself down to soak his aching muscles and his cuts and bruises and scrapes, and the almost-healed gash in his forearm where he cut the Commission’s tracker out of his body. He could start feeling sorry for himself, but the water feels so good that he parks himself in front of a jet and could almost moan from how amazing it feels on his neck and shoulders. He’s a little hungry, but he’s still not ready to go yet. His siblings will want a plan for dealing with the Sparrows and he’s not eager for all that. He wants to soak and soak until the hard shell around him softens, just for a minute.
“Delores,” he whispers, thinking of her the way he always does when he starts to feel good. He imagines her in the tub with him, the way she was in the hallucination earlier, fully embodied and beautiful, her blond hair wet from the ears down. He hears inside his mind her sigh as she luxuriates in the hot water. He reaches a foot out as if he could playfully nudge hers, signaling what he’d like to do later, in the room—or maybe even here, if she’d let him. And she’d let him, of course. God, if he had a bottle of something, he could really see her, her soft form veiled by the mist in the room. Tap back into the weird gift Jayme gave him.
He squints his eyes for just a moment, to remember the ambiance for the sake of his fantasy. Then he opens them all the way. The mist is thick, as if a cloud has rolled into the Obsidian’s spa room. And there is something there—he can see it though the heavy fog above the water’s surface. He does see Delores sometimes, he’s able to do that now and then, but this is different. He can’t quite believe his eyes.
There’s a woman across from him. She’s sitting cross-legged, almost but not quite on the edge of the jacuzzi, maybe wearing a clinging dress the color of her skin, or maybe not wearing anything much, he isn’t sure. Her hair is damp from the mist. He can just make out the curve of her breasts and hips. It’s not Delores—he doesn’t think it is. She’s more real than that. But there’s something about her that reminds him of Delores. Something that makes his face get hot, without help from the tub. The fog softens her edges somehow and gives her a magical look, which is unfair, he thinks. An optical illusion, like in a cheap circus. It’s having an effect on him that makes him nervous.
“Who the hell are you? And why are you floating in the air over my jacuzzi?” Five demands. “Not to mention that you’re in the men’s shvitz, which is rude, possibly bordering on criminal. If Klaus slipped something into that scotch…”. Jesus, I try to relax for five minutes and crazy shit has to happen just to keep me off balance.
She shakes her head. “It’s not the scotch. I’m real. I’m just not quite there. I’m looking in from a different timeline. Visiting, I guess you’d say.”
He stares. “What kind of scam are you running? Hologram?” Klaus, I’m gonna fucking kill you.
She sighs. “I have a gift, like you. I can see into other timelines, and they can see me. If there’s sufficient humidity.”
“Seriously?” Five grumbles. “A human Infinite Switchboard? That’s hard to believe, though it’s just the kind of thing I’d hallucinate. And what’s humidity got to do with anything, aside from making me sweat?”
Speaking of perspiring, her eyes seem to be following the bead of sweat that’s running down his neck right now. He becomes uncomfortably aware that he has no clothes on and his body’s only shielded by the water. He debates whether he can reach his towel, but it’s right near her and he doesn’t know what will happen if he reaches in her direction. Maybe she’ll disappear. Which might be good, but he kind of doesn’t want her to. As hallucinations go, she’s pleasant enough.
She pauses before speaking.
“I need mist, and a mirror, to see into another timeline,” she tells him. “Kind of like the witch in Snow White. A lake in morning fog works too, in a pinch. I’ve foiled three apocalypses already using hints from adjacent timelines, even though mostly no one believes the information I give them.”
“Welcome to the club,” Five snorts, a reluctant smile spreading across his face. “No one listens to me either. So you have a fortune-telling jacuzzi in your house?”
She shakes her head. “I turn the shower on full-blast and use the bathroom mirror. I told Reggie to put in a hot tub but he doesn’t give a shit about my gift. He liked it at first, when he thought he could use it to his advantage, but now he wishes he could get rid of me. He’s probably plotting to kill me. He’s afraid I’ll expose all his evil plans.”
In spite of himself, Five’s intrigued. Anyone who’s a thorn in Reggie’s side is probably worth knowing. “So why doesn’t he get rid of you?”
She laughs. She has a pleasant laugh. “Same reason he doesn’t get rid of you. He might need me when the shit all goes down.”
Five nods curtly, acknowledging what she’s said. Okay, so she’s a Hargreeves spawn with powers. This is all starting to make a little too much sense. He doesn’t like the idea of her scraping windows in time and peering through them, but it’s not any worse than what he’s done by blinking hither and yon with no care for the consistency of the multiverse.
She tells him her name. He reciprocates, seeing as she seems to know anyway.
“So why are you looking into my timeline?” Five asks. “I was trying to hit the shvitz, you know?” May as well accept the premise. I don’t have an alternate explanation for what’s happening, unless Jayme hit me with another load of spit.
“I don’t know yet,” comes the solemn reply. “What’s going on there? Anything worrying?”
“Not sure,” Five admits. “We just got here. There doesn’t seem to be an apocalypse, which is a plus, but there’s another annoying set of Hargreeves offspring occupying our house, and they already want to kill us.”
“Sounds like maybe you should try another timeline,” she says.
Five flushes. “Yeah, well, after where we’ve been, this neck of the woods doesn’t look so bad. I think we’re staying. Even though my siblings are universally unhappy.”
She looks wistful. “It’s nice that you care about them. I hate my siblings.”
Five laughs at that, almost against his will. “The truth is, I kind of hate mine too.”
“The one with the knives is kind of sweet,” she notes.
Five stares at her. “You know about him too?”
“I talk to Herb a lot.”
What the—? “You know Herb?”
She nods. “Sure. Herb is great. And I know you know him. I’ve looked in on you sometimes. Not on purpose. Just tuning the channel, you know?”
“The channel?” he asks, puzzled.
“I mean, it kind of tunes itself. Things just appear to me in flashes until the mirror settles on something. Usually, I can see into a timeline because I need to. I just have to figure out why.”
“I’m not sure why we’d need you here,” Five comments, knowing it’s snappish. “We have a few too many superheroes as it is.”
She shrugs. “Maybe you’re just lonely.”
She says it flippantly but it lands in his gut.
“That’s a rather personal observation,” he growls. “Not to mention completely irrelevant.”
She rolls her eyes. “Would you rather I make small talk across magic mirrors in time and space?”
“Not really,” Five replies, flipping his hair out of his eyes. “Good point.”
“Aloneness is an existential state with us Cassandras,” she says. “We just want to help everyone, but we know far more than we should and they all hate us for it, so we end up lonely.”
He feels irritated, but also intrigued. Like, amid the repetitive, depressing bullshit of his siblings and the Commission and the apocalypse and the whole damn universe, something new is happening.
She glances at his injuries from the battle with the Sparrows, and the still-healing wound from the tracker. “You look banged up.”
He rolls his eyes. “I’ve had worse.”
She puts a finger to her chin and considers. “I could make the healing move a lot faster.”
“Yeah?” Five asks. “How?”
She considers. “I can take you into the Timeless, if you want.”
He recoils. “You mean like when Klaus goes to heaven and sees some kid on a bicycle? No thanks.”
She smiles. “Klaus is funny. I like him. I wish I had a Klaus. But no, you don’t have to die to go there. You just have to take a half-step. Like, go to another timeline but stop halfway. In the mist. Think of King Arthur in a boat on the lake, halfway to Avalon.”
“Oh, so you’re the Lady of the Lake?” he mocks her.
She smiles. “Look at that. He read The Once and Future King.”
“I read everything. I had time and a burned-out library,,” Five growls.
“I know,” she says, looking sad. “Herb told me about it.”
No pity parties, please. “How did you find out about the Timeless?” he asks quickly.
“I kind of fell in,” she explains. “Once when I was looking in the mirror. But I can do it on purpose now. And the best part is, you can be any way you want there, more or less. Any age. Any version of yourself. Healed of your injuries. Sometimes I’ve gone there after a fight just to feel better.” She frowns and her brow furrows. “But you can’t exactly choose how you’ll be. It’s like, your unconscious chooses for you, or the Timeless does, or something.”
That piece sounds alarming, but her description awakens something in him. He longs to be himself again. A man, not a boy. Someone who could have worn that fine suit the Handler gave him just to be cruel. What would my unconscious choose for me? Can I trust that part of myself? Why would I?
She’s waiting for him to answer. And he’s curious. What would the space between timelines be like? A blur, like looking out a train window in between stations?
“I sure wouldn’t mind not being in this body for a bit,” Five admits, against his better judgment. “The injuries are no big deal, really. The thing is that I’m not an adolescent, in actual fact. I ended up this age by mistake. And the hormones suck rocks.”
She nods without any surprise. Apparently, Herb’s told her all about that too. Herb is too damn talkative and Five may need to do something about that.
“We can try it and see what happens,” she says. “You might end up with a body you like better, at least for a little bit. There’s only one thing—you can’t blink while we’re there, because it would be hard to know where you would end up. You have to let me take you back here. Agreed?”
He frowns. He doesn’t like being that vulnerable. He shouldn’t do this, not after the timeline he’s in is finally stable and his siblings aren’t destroying the entire cosmos. He should tell her to stop playing time witch and go back to her terrible family in whatever timeline she came from.
“Want to try?” she asks, with an eager smile that makes Five’s pulse race. She holds out her hand.
He reaches to take it. Her skin is smooth and her touch is gentle.
What happens is not at all like blinking. It’s more like swimming, as if melted glass was cool and weirdly pleasant to move through. He’s pretty sure he’s still in the hot tub, but he’s also not, and the woman sitting across from him looks less like he’s seeing her through a fairy filter and more like someone he might see on the street—a beautiful someone, he grants, but just someone.
He looks down, wondering if he’ll see his familiar self in late middle age, but he looks a little younger than that—twenties or thirties, maybe? He isn’t sure, actually. He’s not a kid–he’s sure about that. It’s more like when he had his strongest years in the apocalypse and could dig out a collapsed supermarket if he had to. His wounds are nowhere to be found—the arm wound just has a very faint seam, as if he was stitched closed years ago. The loose feeling from the tub is still there, but the aches are gone. He notices she’s staring at him, as if she’s shocked by what she’s seeing. What is it? he wonders. The scars?
His subconscious seems to have provided him with clothes, or not exactly clothes, but some kind of fuzzy light protecting his dubious modesty. He looks around, and there are lots of waving green columns, like he’s in a field of weird translucent sugarcane, or he’s shrunk and the blades of grass are giant. When he reaches out his hand, they feel like a cross between flower petals and mist.
“The healing doesn’t always take when you get back to the real world,” his guide says, watching him. “But sometimes it does. It’s worth a shot.”
“What are the green things?” he asks.
“Time-grass,” she says. “I don’t know if it’s real or it’s just that this timeless place is some kind of field, so the mind, like a weirdo, conjures up an actual field.” She chuckles. “I guess we should have brought a picnic.”
“Bring people here often?” he asks, cursing himself twice a moment later, once for flirting and again for flirting badly.
She laughs. He still likes her laugh. “You’re the very first.”
So I’m not just another timeline excursion. He smirks a little. She blushes and ducks her head, flashing what might be a smile.
Then her tone turns businesslike. “We can’t stay too long. The oxygen’s low here. But for a while, it’s okay.” She seems at home among the green “grass” that looks to him like the set of a low-budget fantasy movie.
He does feel dizzy. Maybe it’s the oxygen. And they’re so close to one another, and he’s becoming uncomfortably aware of his attraction to this mist-maiden who’s appeared to him. He thinks about leaning toward her. He really wants to do it, and he has the idea she wouldn’t push him away. Then he realizes that maybe Herb’s told her about Delores, or maybe she’s even seen Delores, and his cheeks burn with shame.
“You okay?” she asks.
He nods, turning his eyes away slightly to keep her from seeing his fucked-up insides.
“It might be really important for you to be okay,” she says. “Maybe that’s why I appeared in your jacuzzi. There’s always a reason for where I turn up.”
He laughs out loud. “I don’t think it’s ever been particularly important for me to be okay. Not to my family. Not to my… employer. Not to the goddamn girl on the bicycle. And not to the cosmos. If you dialed a random number on your timeline phone and ended up here, it’s an accident, okay?”
“Okay,” she says, nodding as if to appease him. Then she leans forward and presses her lips to his.
Her lips feel fantastic. She’s not rushing, but not slow either. She’s following his energy, as if she already knows him well. He’d swear the green reed things turn golden around them, as if the kiss started some kind of weird sunrise between worlds.
Well, if this is a chance to drive his new body and remember he’s a goddamn adult, he’s in all the way.
He gets a hand behind her neck and reels her in, slowly and subtly shifting the kiss until he’s got her where he wants her, her head bent back as he claims her mouth in a way he’d call forceful if he had time to think about things. Which he doesn’t, since this is starting to feel better than Delores or hookers or colleagues at the Commission or, come to think about it, just about anything that has ever happened to him in his entire damn life. Maybe it’s just the weird setting, but this feels otherworldly, not in the way the apocalypse did, but the opposite of that.
They break away from one another to breathe and get a look at each other’s state of disarray. He has an arm around her waist now and hers encircle his shoulders. She tilts her head back, inviting him. He dives into her neck, kissing along the length of it till he gets to the tip of her collarbone, where the hollow of her throat awaits. She sighs when he gets there, as if relieved of some great burden. He realizes the sound he’s making is called a moan, and maybe he should stop it, but then again, why the hell should he, when he feels this good and apparently so does she, and he doesn’t have to kill anyone or leave for some other reality?
His hands are under her clothing now, or what passes for clothing in the Timeless. Her skin is soft and wonderful and a little damp—everything’s wet from the steam of the hot tub which somehow seems to still exist in this place that can’t exist. Her nipples are hard and just right to touch, and he palms them until she groans. He’s stoked enough that he could take a run around the block just for the hell of it.
“I need you,” he gasps, and it’s not just to get her to spread her legs, he just can’t keep from saying it.
“I know,” she murmurs. “I need you too.”
She has an expression like he’s the best thing she’s ever seen in her life, which makes him suspect all over again that the whole thing is a dream, or a hallucination, or he drank way too much of Klaus’s scotch. He’s running his hands over all the parts of her, and somehow this all seems more real than any timeline he’s ever been in. He wraps his arms around her waist and pulls her down with him onto ground that looks more like cloud. The ground’s as soft as it looks, and they sink into it a little as he climbs on top of her. Her clothing evaporates, which is a goddamn good trick, and slowly, his does too. She giggles at his embarrassed expression.
“That’s quite an Excalibur you have there,” she says with an admiring glance.
“Should I make jokes about King Arthur and Morgan le Fay?” he counters.
“No,” she replies. “You should probably make jokes about Lancelot and Guinevere, because I am suddenly and maybe irrevocably really into you.”
“Hmmm.” He likes the sound of that. It confirms his sense that reality’s looking up, at least a little bit. “Maybe I’ll carry you off.”
“Erotically speaking, I could be into that.” She smiles as if he’s pleased her, and reaches out to languidly stroke him down there, with an accompanying hiss from him. His vision whites out for a moment. I’d better get down to business before she does much more of that, he thinks, or the party’s going to be over.
He kisses her once on the mouth, just to be sure this is as good as he thinks it is. And yes, it is.
“Can I…?” he asks, though he can tell he doesn’t need to ask. She nods, but she probably knows she doesn’t need to do that, either.
He’s got her hips in his hands and he uses the leverage to get himself where he needs to be. He has the sudden fear she’ll evaporate and Jayme will punch him in the face, but she stays pinned beneath him and the grass is glowing gold around them like it’s sunrise at Stonehenge or something. He rolls his hips and shoves himself inside her, and then, suddenly, it’s insanely fabulous to be him. Sounds come out of him that he would never admit to Klaus or Diego or anyone. It’s like Delores is suddenly outside his head and wrecking him beyond anything he thought possible. And she’s looking up at him like he’s the one who’s magical. He wonders if his soul’s going to be yanked clear out of him.
She’s making sounds too, desperate, vulnerable ones that tear at his heart somehow. He moves in her, grunting, determined to get them both off, as if anything could ever go that well for him. He endures long past the point where he wants to let go. The feeling’s too much—he can barely think, or breathe—and he’s going to lose it, but when the pitch of her voice gets as high as a movie damsel in distress, he knows he’s done it, and lets himself release into her with a groan that sounds like how he’d have sounded if one of the Swedes stabbed him in the gut.
“You are throwing a wrench into my life,” he tells her as they lie together, chests heaving. “Possibly a whole toolbox.” He can’t stop gasping, and he’s sweating even more than he would in a steam room. He feels like there’s a whole area of his brain and body that he just discovered, the way you wander around your house in a dream and find a set of rooms you didn’t know was there.
“Sorry not sorry,” she replies, grinning. “I’m not gonna forget you either.”
They hold one another for a while, and it feels natural, like they’ve known one another forever. Five still can’t catch his breath. His fingers are tingling.
“We have to leave the Timeless now,” she says then. “I wish we didn’t, but there’s not enough air to stay here any longer, and I don’t want to risk something happening to you. In a minute, I have to push you back into your timeline and then let myself fall back into mine.” Her voice is sad and weary underneath, like she was lost and someone found her, and now she’s lost again.
“Don’t go,” he says.
Her eyes are gentle. “I have to. For now.”
“Stay,” he tells her, holding on tight with his arms wrapped around her. “I need you to.”
“Your siblings won’t like me,” she warns.
“My siblings better not fucking get near you,” Five growls.
“You’re not ready for me yet,” she tells him. “You still have something important to do. I can feel it.”
He shakes his head vigorously. “This timeline’s stable. I’m retired. Seriously. Stay.”
She smiles. “Listen, Five, when you really retire, find a jacuzzi or something else with really hot vapor going on, and think of me. I’ll come. I’d love to see you again.” She pauses. “Maybe I’ll even stay.”
He grasps her hand, clings to it. She rolls to face him. She takes his face in her hands and kisses him hard like she means it. Like he’s her one and only. He wants to blink her away to a room in the hotel and keep her with him, but trying that would lead to disaster–she told him, earlier.
“Don’t let Reggie kill you,” he breathes. “If he does, I’ll take his vertebrae apart with pliers.”
She smiles as if that’s the nicest thing she’s heard in a long time.
“Don’t let him kill you either,” she says. “If you need a portal out of there, you know how to reach me.”
She reaches out both hands and pushes him by the shoulders. He’s falling backward through mist, and then through water, bubbles rising—and then he’s leaning back against the wall of the jacuzzi, naked as the day he was born. He looks around, but in spite of the clouds of fog, he doesn’t see a trace of her anywhere. His heart aches, but she told him how to track her down. He holds onto that.
Shaking, he climbs out of the tub, checks the mirror on the wall. Shit. He looks just the way he did yesterday. He’s bitterly disappointed. Except—maybe there’s something older about him? He isn’t sure. He for sure still looks younger than he should, but still, when he checks his wounds, they’re healed. The place where he cut open his forearm is now just a thin line, as if the injury happened decades ago. His time in the Timeless wasn’t useless.
Far from it, in fact. He’s never felt this good in his life.
Maybe she’s right that there’s a purpose to her visit. Or maybe he just got lucky.
He showers, towels off, and after a moment’s thought, puts on the fluffy robe and ties it at the waist. He can’t bring himself to change into his kid-at-school clothes. Plus, his body’s still a little loose and overwhelmed, after his encounter with the Lady of the Lake. He’s damned if he’s going to tell anyone what happened, and no one would believe him anyway, but he’s going to find her again. He knows he is.
Still dressed in the robe, he leaves the shvitz, stalks into the lobby, and pours himself a drink. He sees Diego, Klaus, and Luther at a table, and sits down to dish himself some Chinese food.
“What’s wrong?” Luther asks. “You look happy.”
“I am plenty happy,” says Five. “I had a nap and a shvitz. What does a man need?”
