illicit | five hargreeves - EDITING

twenty

chapter twenty: the handler

It took a while for the two gays to try and convince Luther to allow them to kill the gardener, Milton, in order to try and save the world. But being the Number One dumbass that he was, there was no way Luther was going to let them kill an innocent person. Anthony could honestly see where he was coming from, but Number Five had been rather annoyed and did say some hurtful words to hurt the man's ego, and for Luther's sake I won't repeat his words.

Anthony sat in the middle of the back seat in the late Reginald Hargreeves' car, silently disappointed that Five had decided to sit in the front seat, instead of sitting next to him. He hated the backseat, because it just made him feel like he was a stupid kid again. He just wanted to hold Five's hand, and lean his head against his shoulder.

He kept replaying the previous events that had happened earlier in his mind over and over again. "You know how much I love you, right?" Five had said it so casually, as if it was something that was obvious and already known, when in reality it meant a lot more than that.

Anthony hadn't been told the words "I love you" since he was fifteen years old. His grandmother, Peggy, was the last person before Five who had uttered those words to him, and it was the night before she had passed away.

He hadn't actually thought about her in awhile, only because it was just too hurtful to think about even after all these years. Anthony hated his family, and he expressed it often, but Peggy was the only exception to that. She was his best friend, the only person who ever really cared about him, and her death absolutely destroyed him. It was like the final straw, because once she was gone, what was really the point of anything?

It had been ten years, and Anthony was only fifteen when she died, but it still haunted him to this day. Even as an adult, he couldn't think about her too long before he would break down in tears. And it sucked, because he knew that she wouldn't have wanted him to cry, because she only ever wanted him to be happy. She would be crushed if she found out that he was crying over her.

She was the only person he officially 'came out' to, and it was ironic how the ninety year old woman was more accepting than anyone else he knew. He remembered that she told had warned him that people are going to hate him for it, but that he should simply ignored them and carry on with his life unbothered. But she knew how made it could get, and how made it would get.

Of course she would understand, she lived through so much; she lived the second world war, she lived
in Dallas during the 1960s right in the middle of the civil rights movement. She knew exactly how hateful the world and society was, and she worried that her only grandson would receive a similar kind of hate for who he was, for something that he couldn't control, although he wished he could.

She told him that it wouldn't be easy, because he came out to her in the early 2000s, where it was still frowned upon and even illegal in a lot of places. She did tell him to ignore it all, and to just go and find someone he loved, and someone who loved him back, because all that mattered is that he was happy.

Peggy would've loved Five. Anthony knew that she would have. He wished that she could've met him, and that she could've seen how far Anthony had came from when he was a stupid teenager who used to cry just at the thought of being attracted to boys.
He was never very religious, but he desperately did hope that she was somehow looking out for him and watching him, and he hoped that she was proud of him.

"Can you drive any faster Luther? My grandmother could drive faster than you, and she's been dead for over ten years" Anthony commented, because the man was truly a terrible driver, but that could probably be due to the fact he had been on the moon for years, and hadn't driven in a long time.