[ @violnc : no one should have to feel responsible for the entire world. ]
it's more complicated than that. or maybe it isn't, but it feels more complicated when you're the one living with the responsibility.
❝ you know what i'm going to say, ❞ number five says, leaning back on the bed next to her and staring up at the ceiling. really, there's about three different things. but here's what matters: should is the operative word. there is a difference between what should happen and what does happen.
the commission normally gets them two different motel rooms. maybe it's to keep temporal assassins stuck together for long periods from killing each other. you can work for someone with too long, you see, and with the natural danger that temporal assassins are in, the out-of-time nature of it, the displacement, the strangeness, all of it -- it becomes natural for tensions to rise. they do have that impulse. but, in a different and older way, in an a "years and years and years dependent on each other, alone at the end of the world" kind of way, five and vanya defy that.
like this. her sitting on the edge of his bed, the television playing some ancient game show with a layer of grime and grain and tinny noise. the crowd cheers for something. neither of them look like what they really are. vanya looks small and quiet, shoulders hunched, an affectation from their youth that she's never been able to shake. after how reginald treated her, it's not like five expects anything different. sometimes it can even function like some kind of benefit. people underestimate her. they shouldn't. out of the two of them, she's more dangerous than him, at least in scale. the whole world is something she can use against someone -- all that loose sound, everywhere. even someone's breathing, steady, just loud enough in dead silence, could be turned against them by her.
it's an interesting thought exercise. besides a room in the academy that swam up in vanya's memory as if through a dark haze, how many other places in the world are entirely silent? without the hum of an air conditioning unit, or even residual noise from the other side of walls? even solitary confinement in a prison has the intermittent bang of the tray being shoved through the door, something she could replicate back a thousand times as loud, enough to shatter bone with the force of it. enough to break someone apart and make their limbs move in ways that would be incredibly painful in the moments before their brain shuts off.
what they do -- what the commission asks them to do, anyway -- is something that comes with no real responsibility besides getting the job done, and trusting that what they are doing is resolving a knot of equations into neat and orderly truth. or perhaps Truth, capitalized, or that's what they seem to deal in. he's had questions, of course. is there really such a thing as a right timeline, or is there just a timeline that serves certain interests?
this isn't about saving the world. this is about preserving a series of events that favors certain people, or perhaps is just about the integrity of the commission itself. sometimes, privately, five wonders who created the commission specifically, and how they did so. could the entire aim of the commission be towards self-preservation? towards making sure that the apocalypse happens, that certain books are published in particular years, that everything unfolds in a certain way that leads right back to them?
he's been thinking about that lately. about what saving the world and saving their family might actually mean. about what it means for the commission. about whether or not vanya will go with him.
or.
or, the other option. where she doesn't. and something about that guts him when he thinks about it. maybe she can see the twist in his expression, and there's the flash of concern in her face in response. she's going to ask about what's hurting him, and he won't have an answer. so just as quick and clean as he kills, five finds the right words for now, the temporary appeasement that he's been managing to apply ever since he pulled her with him right into the end of the world. ❝ i know, ❞ he says. ❝ i know that we've got our lives now, and that... you know. we got out of the end of the world. escaped the end of everything. i just think about things a little too much, that's all. ❞
he doesn't smile. sometimes it feels like he's forgotten how.
❝ i'll be alright, ❞ he says. ❝ besides, we've got to get to work in a few hours. our guy, from what i found out earlier, works at a bar five blocks away. trucker. shouldn't be hard to track down, and probably not that much harder to fool. ❞ he can't just let this sit. he won't let this topic sit. no need to let her circle back when it's nothing but theoreticals and some scribbling in a copy of catch-22 stolen from a library that had nearly burned to the ground. ❝ ... how do you want to do this? hitchhiking angle? ❞
it's easy enough to get someone to pull over. a woman, alone and vulnerable. him, quietly teleporting behind the truck once it parks to puncture each of the tires, just as an insurance policy, and then taking care of this guy in one way or another. most times they don't even see five before it's too late. it's how he likes it. he is efficient at his work, and he is good at all of it, from beginning to end.
after a moment, five fumbles for the bottle of cheap whiskey on the side table, pouring it into one of the glasses that's probably meant to be used for tepid lukewarm sink water in the middle of the night. ❝ or something else, ❞ he says. ❝ you could just make his truck careen off the road in an unfortunate accident. that's an easy one. ❞ the same amount of effort as knocking over a child's toy car. barely anything at all, and then it's over.
lives ended like that. same way as in the apocalypse, just as simple, just as clean, just as fast. this is what they do. this is who they are. maybe he shouldn’t berate himself so much for wanting to hold something together.
