deadly little thing

THE APOCALYPSE IS COMING

[just-shower-thoughts]

Every store sells weapons if you’re creative enough.

[tempportal]

THE WALKWAY BETWEEN WORLDS.

Once he unlocks his latent ability to access alternate universes and other timelines, Five reaches a strange realm that connects all the various worlds, much like branches on a tree–essentially, it acts as a “bridge” between all the different dimensions. Though it has been called hundreds of thousands of various names throughout its history, Five always refers to it simply as “the Walkway”.

It appears to its inhabitants as a grand and luxurious hotel from the early twentieth century, with lush velvet carpets over polished hardwood floors, wide ornate windows, and large opulent stairways, but a different world waits behind every door, entire universes contained within single rooms. To enter a new dimension, it’s as easy as turning the handle, opening the door, and stepping inside.

Travelers within the Walkway can’t see each other unless they reach the room at the heart of the hotel, commonly known as “the Hub”–and it’s always best for a beginner to head straight there and find an old hat to guide them, for many of these unfamiliar realms can be confusing, dangerous, or even hostile toward intruders, and even a veteran traveler must exercise caution when they walk the worlds alone.

[tempportal]

open starter!

"Did you know that, in the early twentieth century, the terms idiot, imbecile, and moron were actually considered legitimate medical conditions?" Five says, in a tone of voice that implies he's simply sharing an interesting historical fact. "For about fifty or so years, the literal definition of idiot was 'one whose intelligence quotient ranges from zero to twenty.'

"Anyway... I formally diagnose you with idiot."

[olisgifs]

five and lila + dancing together

[mournfulroses]

“I saw the sun no more.—”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay, from Collected Poems; “The Suicide,”

[tempportal]

This is the first time Five is hearing anything about the blender, and whatever meager confidence he was beginning to have in Klaus' culinary abilities takes a sharp, sudden nosedive — though he supposes that's on him, for daring to believe any of his siblings could be competent at anything that isn't self-destructing in the most dramatic way possible, and spectacularly fucking up the timeline — but he's not particularly stressed about it, either, to tell the truth. When he thinks about the apocalyptic stakes he's usually dealing with, the consequences for messing up a meal are pretty low in comparison.

It's nice to know that the absolute worst-case scenario won't lead to anything worse than a handful of dirty dishes. It's nice to know the world isn't going to end just because he or his siblings made a mistake.

"Char the absolute shit out of the tomatoes," he repeats, dryly, as he proceeds to do just that, a small smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. "That'll go down in the Hargreeves Family Cookbook for sure." He's quiet for a while after that, enjoying the peace of the moment too much to break it — the faint sizzling of the stove burner, the popping and bubbling of the sauce as it reaches a boil it probably isn't supposed to, the heavy thud of Luther's footfalls on the upper floor as he gets ready for work, the swelling solo symphony of Viktor's violin as he practices his latest piece for the orchestra...

Five meant what he said to the Handler, somewhere in between blackmailing her best agents and blowing her up with her own grenades — he's not looking for happy. But, in moments like this, it feels almost like he's found it, anyway.

"Single gay men don't keep tea towels sounds an awful lot like a generalization," he says, at last, never mind that he doesn't know what the difference between a tea towel and a dishtowel even is. As far as he knows, they're both just pieces of cloth that go in the kitchen. "And a judgmental one, at that. Shouldn't the gayest person in the family be setting a better example for the rest of us?" He glances over his shoulder at his brother, a slight, teasing grin on his face. "Come on, don't leave me hanging. What happened next after that? Did you ever actually meet his husband?"

[theseancekid]

He's not sure it'll never not feel like an episode of the goddamn Twilight Zone, standing in the kitchen with his little brother without any shouting, or blinking, or scolding from their mother. Five repeats his own words back to him— and yeah, maybe he's poking fun at Klaus' cooking instructions, but he's listening, really listening, and that in and of itself is enough to make Klaus freeze for a moment.

It's not Five's fault in particular; somewhere around the ages of eleven and twelve, Klaus had come to the realization that he could get away with saying a lot of shit if no one ever truly listened to him (and sometimes that was for the best, really). It's hard for him to cipher the thoughts as they flood into his brain and get all jumbled with the voices from the other side; harder still to make it make sense to anyone other than his absolute lunatic of a little brother. But Five is full of surprises these days and Klaus...well, maybe Klaus is doing something right after all, if Five is still here and not blinking into oblivion.

"HAH!" He barks, when his brother picks back up the threads, asks him to continue on with his story (another first).

"Joke's on you, mon frére." He points one eggy finger in his direction. "No husband at all. WIFE! He had a wife! A wife, who picked out the tea towels and the curtains and the goddamn frying pans with green handles, which she tried to hit me over the head with when she found me in her kitchen with her beau."

A snort of laughter as he grabs a spare pan from the countertop, shakes it above his head with a strangled cry as he mimes out the fight. Pan in his left hand, his right comes to his defense, gripping onto the left wrist and pushing it away in an epic struggle.

"Anyway. Moral of the story is.....I don't know, actually."

He did have a moral, at the start of it all. Shit.

"Moral of the story, I guess, is don't fuck straight guys. Or maybe...I dunno, something about tea towels."

[tempportal]

"A wife?" Five echoes incredulously, as though no one in the history of humanity has ever cheated on their spouse before, or married somebody they don't love to conceal their sexuality, or engaged in homosexual relations behind their heterosexual partner's back. And he's so focused on that particular surprise — which shouldn't even be a surprise, really, considering straight people exist, and make up about seventy-seven percent of the global population, according to self-identification statistics — that he actually laughs at the sight of Klaus' elaborate, exaggerated performance with the skillet... and he immediately turns back to the stove again, face hot, pretending to be busy with the tomatoes in the pan so he doesn't have to look at his brother.

Despite that, though, he can't hold back another huff of laughter, a lot quieter this time, at Klaus' closing declaration. "I don't think you have to worry about me fucking straight guys. ...Or anyone else, for that matter." He's not sure that he'll ever get used to just... saying it like this — out loud, where anyone can hear him, and so casual, like it's as unremarkable a statement as the sky is blue or the sun is hot or Diego is basically Bargain Bin Batman with daddy issues — and sometimes he still can't bring himself to say it at all, not even in his own head. But he has to admit, it's nice to be able to talk about it, even if his family doesn't quite understand where he's coming from.

That's all right. He doesn't understand where they're coming from, either, and this is one instance (perhaps the only instance) in which he's completely fine with not understanding something.

A sudden, angry pop pulls him sharply back to the present, and he glances down at the pan in front of him, where something very, very black and crispy and smoking gasps its last. "Well, it looks like the tomatoes are done. ...Possibly overdone. So what's next, Gordon Ramsay?"

[tempportal]

open starter! 

“—and then Diego burst in, all puffed up and swaggery—you know how he gets when he thinks he’s, like, the biggest badass in the room? You’ve seen him when he gets like that, right?—anyway, he was all ‘get out of the way’ and ‘I’ll handle this’, and—” 

Five breaks off with a breathless little snort, grinning crookedly at the other over the rim of the half-empty glass bottle in his hand—he’s nowhere near as drunk as he’d like to be, not yet, but he’s pleasantly buzzed, warm and weightless and just this side of giddy. “—and that fucking spider jumped off the desk, right at his face, and he freaked out. Like, flailing and shrieking and shit. It was the greatest fucking thing I’d ever seen.”

[weltenwellen]

Czeslaw Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001

[holyisthenameofmyruthlessaxe]

The Book of Promethea, Hélène Cixous tr. Betsy Wing

[beif0ngs]

A brief summary of The Umbrella Academy

[ojibwa]

[soracities]

“You’re [a] monster. But so am I—which is why I can’t turn away from you.”

— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel

[lifeinpoetry]

“everything I want to say / I swallow”

— Lyric Hunter, from “A Garden,” Swallower

[tempportal]

Five rolls his eyes at his brother's useless gibbering, dropping the blazer into his lap in a crumpled heap of dark cloth and gingerly pressing the fingers of his good hand into his injured arm. It feels like an icepick drilling straight through the bone, but if he wants to do it right, he has to get a good grip. He blinks away the little white stars bursting into being behind his eyes like firecrackers, trying to come up with something to say to Luther so the big guy can't tell he's half an inch away from passing out. "Because what—what happened is... irrelevant. It's been handled." That should be enough to satisfy Luther, but his family's astounding inability to respect his privacy and not involve themselves in his business is apparently on full blast today, because now the big guy wants him to have someone look at that. Like he's such a colossal idiot he doesn't know how to set a broken bone.

"What, you mean, like a hospital?" Five has never actually gone to a hospital before in his life, and he's certainly not breaking that streak for something as insignificant as this — just the thought of it makes his stomach turn over, all those long white hallways and big white rooms and bright white lights and doctors and nurses and beds and IV drips — but he's pretty sure he knows how they work when you look as young as he does. "What, so we can turn a process that'll take me ten minutes into two hours, and they can force-feed me a bunch of drugs and tell me I'm such a brave boy and give me a lollipop? Sounds like a dream come true."

[enduranceofsurvival]

Luther lingers despite Five's warnings, hands hovering as if he feels like he should be doing something. What that was... Well he wasn't sure. But he remained, feeling like he was needed. Besides Luther worried. Five had a way of trying to deal with everything himself, which frustrated Luther to no end. "Someone hurt you Five, that doesn't sound irrelevant to me. And besides if you've pissed someone off again it'd be nice to have a heads up before they show up here looking for you!" That and he looked like colossal shit. Like he needed to stop and rest. No matter if Five could push through it or not, Luther wanted to make sure he was okay.

"I don't know, maybe?" That's what normal people did. See a doctor. Right he forgot... Normal went out the window in this family. There were no doctors visits when they were young. Any medical care usually provided by their robotic mother or the experimental methods of their father. And well it would mean Luther wouldn't have to wince with disgust when Five started poking at his arm. "Would that be so bad? At least then you'd actually get some proper treatment and rest, instead of walking around like you're indestructible and doing whatever this is!" Luther gestured at Five's arm with an exasperated look.

[tempportal]

Okay, so, Luther has officially dropped all the way down to Five's Least Favorite Sibling, and all in a span of eight and half minutes. There's plenty of competition for that particular spot, but he blew them all out of the water in one go. Even Allison, always hovering low in the Sibling Rankings for one perfectly legitimate reason or another (trying to take his hard-earned bottle of bourbon away from him yesterday, saying it's not good for your growing body, trying to get him to go on a shopping trip with her the day before that, saying you should get rid of that dusty old uniform and find clothes you actually like to wear, trying to walk him to the library like he's a goddamn toddler a week ago, saying I'm headed that way, anyway, and I could use the company) has never managed to make herself persona non grata so quickly. Way to go, Number One.

"No one is going to show up here looking for me," Five bites out, furious that he even has to say it — but that's on him, for thinking Luther could read between the lines, for thinking anyone in this goddamn family could ever understand what he means without making him spell it out like a fucking phonics class. "I told you, it's been handled. If you'd been listening to me, you'd know that."

He wipes away a thin trickle of blood weeping from the cut on his brow before it can drip into his eyes, and pretends his chest isn't caving in on him as Luther grows more and more insistent. In the back of his mind, somewhere, he knows that Luther is just being Luther, bumbling and awkward and so kind you sort of hate him for it, for being so inherently good, for having a heart bigger than the sky and open so wide anyone could step into it, and he would let them. But Five is all out of jumps, shaking and dazed from the pain still rolling through his arm in waves, cold sweat and warm blood coalescing into a tacky mixture at his temple and matting in his hair, and Luther is talking about hospitals, all wide eyes and good intentions, and Five's throat feels like it's swelling shut with sheer panic.

"No," he chokes out, blue electricity sparking to life and dancing on the tips of his fingers — trying to save him, trying to take him away from the threat — but it flickers out barely an instant later, slipping through his fingers like water. "No hospitals." His voice comes out smaller than he meant it to, desperate and pleading, and he has to work to inject the usual bite back into his tone, swallowing hard around a red-hot tide of humiliation. "I-I didn't... I didn't survive getting impaled with a chunk of rebar at the end of the world to go to a fucking hospital for a broken arm, Luther. I'm fine. Just let me set it, for god's sake, and I'll be on my merry fucking way."

[tempportal]

@enduranceofsurvival said: “Whoa, whoa, take it easy! You got pretty banged up back there, and you don’t want to go making yourself worse.” - from Luther

One thing that's remained consistent throughout the last forty-five and seventeen years is that Five can still, apparently, always count on his siblings to make everything a hundred times more complicated than it ever needed to be. "Oh, pipe down, Luther, I'm fine. I've had way worse than this." It takes a minute to get the blazer off his swollen arm, and the sight beneath the sleeve isn't pretty — already, the limb is purple-black with bruises, bursting and blooming like perverse flowers over his pale skin, but none of the bones are sticking out, which is a lucky break (ha). It's always so much harder to fix those types of fractures. And the rest of his injuries are minor enough — a shallow graze on the side of his leg, a slightly deeper cut just above his left eyebrow, and a swollen bump on the back of his head that makes him feel dizzy and vaguely off-kilter, but doesn't actually impede him in any material way — that he can easily ignore them until they've completed their objective.

"Just give me a second to set it, and then we can get back to work," he graciously decides to informs Luther of his intention before he actually carries it out, since he has it on good authority (Dolores) that watching him pop his own bones back in place is "really very nauseating" and "so unsettling". "Apparently, it's not a pretty process, so do us both a favor and look away if you think you're gonna get squeamish about it."

[enduranceofsurvival]

Complicated and messy was kind of the Hargreaves family way. Most of them were a functioning mess at best, each with their plethora of issues. Yet despite that, they always tried their best to look out for each other. "That isn't a good thing to brag about! Besides you didn't even tell me what happened." Luther often felt a little left in the dark, especially by Five. Okay his brother was under a lot of pressure - Luther knew that. But they were a team and he worried. They had a lot of dangerous enemies and the last thing Luther wanted was to risk losing his brother again. Even if right now he was being his usual pain in the ass. Although he can't lie the sight of the bruised arm made him wince. He wasn't too squeamish by any means... But still.

"Set it? What by yourself? Shouldn't you really have someone look at that." Luther knew that was little merit to argue with him. But it didn't mean he wouldn't try. Glancing at the arm he pulls a face, okay yeah that sounded unpleasant. Maybe he shouldn't look... "I'm not gonna get squeamish! It just seems a little..." Extreme? Barbaric?

[tempportal]

Five rolls his eyes at his brother's useless gibbering, dropping the blazer into his lap in a crumpled heap of dark cloth and gingerly pressing the fingers of his good hand into his injured arm. It feels like an icepick drilling straight through the bone, but if he wants to do it right, he has to get a good grip. He blinks away the little white stars bursting into being behind his eyes like firecrackers, trying to come up with something to say to Luther so the big guy can't tell he's half an inch away from passing out. "Because what—what happened is... irrelevant. It's been handled." That should be enough to satisfy Luther, but his family's astounding inability to respect his privacy and not involve themselves in his business is apparently on full blast today, because now the big guy wants him to have someone look at that. Like he's such a colossal idiot he doesn't know how to set a broken bone.

"What, you mean, like a hospital?" Five has never actually gone to a hospital before in his life, and he's certainly not breaking that streak for something as insignificant as this — just the thought of it makes his stomach turn over, all those long white hallways and big white rooms and bright white lights and doctors and nurses and beds and IV drips — but he's pretty sure he knows how they work when you look as young as he does. "What, so we can turn a process that'll take me ten minutes into two hours, and they can force-feed me a bunch of drugs and tell me I'm such a brave boy and give me a lollipop? Sounds like a dream come true."

[winter-seance]

The Umbrella Academy 3.09

[cosmogenous]

*leaves 'for a smoke' and comes back speckled with blood*