The Umbrella Academia

Way Too Old For This Shit

There's a large gap in his memory, that much he knows.

One minute he's standing in the doorway to the diner's kitchen, with several guns pointed at him and a writhing man in his arms. The next, he's staring out at a sea of red.

Blood pools from underneath the bodies of dead men and women, seeping into the soles of his shoes, undoubtedly dampening his socks. There's seems to be a little bit of it everywhere. It sticks to the skin on his stinging knuckles, smears across his face, drips from his hair, stains his torn and rumpled uniform crimson, mixes in with the grit already under his nails...

They all seem to have been killed in different ways— except for two men, who shot each other in about the same place: the heart. Both were likely aiming for Five's face, which he doesn't dwell on because it's frankly a little insulting. But there's a tall, gangly man on the ground that had his jugular stabbed with a fork, a woman that looks vaguely like she could be related to him that's had her neck snapped, a guy with a near unrecognizable face now that it's been smashed in with a coffee pot, a girl with a skull that's been cracked against the counter, another lady with a knife shaped shard of glass jutting out of her ribcage, and the one he had held hostage earlier, now sporting a slit throat and wide, unseeing eyes.

Oh, and the blonde bitch? He'd introduced a plate to her cranium, and now those same (probably bleached) blonde locks were dyed deep red with blood.

Ha, he thought, now she's a true redhead.

A spark of hysterical laughter bubbled up in his throat. He pushed it down.

His hands are shaking, from what exactly he doesn't know. Could be fatigue, could be stress, could be PTSD, who the hell knows at this point. There's a faint, dull pain filtering in now that the adrenaline is dying down, which turns into a pulsating throb, which turns into an unbearable ache that sends agonized shudders throughout his whole body, not just his hands.

His head is pounding, his ears are ringing, and he feels like he's about to collapse. Those are the most prominent feelings, even if they're far from the only ones, and yet somehow, none of those sensations were from any sort of injury.

Last time he did this (Was it a month ago? It feels like a lifetime. Hell, it was plenty of lifetimes ago, technically.), he was able to keep his head perfectly fine. So why is it different all of a sudden? Why is it now that he can barely stand up straight? It's not because they're dead, because he's seen a lot of death, killed so many people. It's not because of any of that. There's absolutely no logical reason he could have for freaking out like this, right?

A pair of wide, green eyes travel from the man with the bullet through his torso up to Five standing over him, and why does the brat have to look at him like that?

Right. He promised he was done with killing, didn't he? And yet here he is, breaking that same vow the second he was backed into a corner, like a dog with no leash, a wild animal without a purpose except to hunt and survive—

Oh look, the blonde bitch is still kicking.

Just barely though. She looks up at him, bits of broken glass still in her red soaked, straw-like hair, and it's running down her face too. Her face turns up to look at him, pale and barely flickering with life. Her watery blue eyes are unfocused, glassy. One pupil seems to be more dilated than the other.

She's not long for this world, that he can tell. But then again, with his amount of injuries, neither is he.

Oh well.

The girl tries to crawl to him— either to beg for her life or use her final moments to fulfill her goal, who knows. But there are tears in those eyes, however unseeing they may be. It's like looking at a China doll with a sad expression painted on its face. It looks pitiable enough to be recognized as the 'sad' expression that it's supposed to be, but not enough to be real, or even genuine.