definitely maybe i will live to love || Five x Reader/OC ||

i wanna grow old before i grow up

All Die Young

I assumed one of those scorned, shameful silences would follow after Dad's lecture. And, in part, it did. What could any of us say to that? Ben's death was our fault. We ate the guilt up no matter how bitter it tasted. That's the odd thing about guilt: we take it when we shouldn't, when we don't deserve it.

At the Umbrella Academy, Dad twisted us into believing that guilt was not only a flavor, but our favorite.

It came as a dull shock when Eight's voice cut through the snow falling from above.

As Dad turned to leave us to our shame, our grief, Eight said to him, "You're a terrible person, you know that? And one of these days, we'll all be gone, free from your cruelty. Then you'll have nobody but Ben's grave to keep you company, but I doubt even his ghost will want to stick around because he'll see the irony of you paying him a fraction of more attention in death than you did in life."

Eight, always the shield, always our defender. She stood there with the black umbrella held firmly above her. I had never heard her voice so frigid. I had never seen her gaze so unrelenting. She would not let Dad walk away after cutting so deep into our souls.

Nobody but Five ever spoke to Dad like she just had. Not even herself. And even then, Five spat words with wit and precision; Eight's words carried a stony weight, like a cold, single bullet in the barrel of a long-unused gun. She was a statue herself among us, unmoving and silently fierce. Unbreakable.

Dad did not respond to Eight's words. He left us in the snowy white courtyard with Ben's plaque gleaming against its color.

I have never seen Eight cry. Ben's death made no difference. Eight stood stoic, unsmiling but assuring, and when she blinked, no tears gathered on her lashes.

-

"My absolute favorite moment," Five grins. "I know I've said it a million times, but to imagine you say that...fuck. I love it. Love it."

He lets out a breath, grin fading.

"Just wish I was there for it."

-

Though we all came out of the house with our own cancers and nightmares, it is a complete mystery that Eight was the person she was and the woman she is now.

I am not only saying this because she is my editor.

If we could never have Dad's approval, then we would find it in Eight. We would all eventually gravitate to her in the end, seeking her smile, wanting our hands to be held by hers, knowing our pains could be soothed by her simple but sincere words. In some way or another, we wanted to be like Eight, to be a person seemingly unscathed by Dad and the academy. She never got angry or lashed out; her quietness, at times, could be mistaken for apathy, but just as we would ready ourselves to say something hurtful, she gave a response constructed only from thoughtful consideration.

Nobody who grew up under the roof of Reginald Hargreeves could hardly agree on a single thing, but I believe we could all agree that Eight's true power was not her unbreakable body or luminescence, but her intuition, her empathy, her healing love. And compared to eight children being born on the same day by women who were not pregnant the day before, the more impossible reality is that Eight acted solely in kindness throughout the seventeen years we lived together at the Umbrella Academy.

Once we turned seventeen, however, Eight made it clear she did not want to continue living there, much like the rest of us. The academy—and the losses within it—had impacted her far more than she would want to admit. I take a small amount of pride in that Eight took my hand, scarred from her light, and told me we would leave together. She kept her promise, even without Five to be with us, because a broken promise is a broken shield.

Out of all our siblings, Eight always saw me, and she never let me slip into the shadows of her gaze.

I try my best not to let her slip away, either. She almost did once before.

She still sways to my music sometimes, a ghost of what we did when we were children, although it happens far and few between. I think the dance in her died when Five never came home, which is a great, small tragedy lost to her locked-away despair.

Eight never cried over Five, but I think she came close, and maybe in her little room under the cover of blankets and the night, she did. She never has told me.

Mom named us all, as I've mentioned earlier, but Eight never received a name because she declined one, like Five. For the longest time, I thought she did it because she and Five were close even at a young age, and she wanted to impress him. Back then, we all craved to impress Five, to feel like we could achieve his superiority—even for a brief moment. Now, though, I see Eight did it because she didn't want Five to feel alone.

It was always her goal to make us not feel alone. Still is, however difficult we can be.

-

"Yeah, and I got mad at you for not choosing a name," Five mutters. He runs a finger over a paragraph, and if he keeps doing it like all the times he has before, the ink will rub out. "Mom had such a nice one picked for you, too." His brows quirk a little, and he sticks his lower lip out. "Don't remember what the name was, yeah, but I remember being it nice."

He's said similar words over similar topics, but it doesn't stop him from also saying, "I'm glad you got Vanya out of there. Sucks being alone." Five laughs. It's sharp and dry. He then screams to the sun-blistered void he takes shade from, "I would fucking know!"

-

Life took an interesting turn when we discovered Eight hadn't truly aged ever since her incident. Somehow, her powers had cocooned her body to keep her alive, and in the process, it kept her from growing older like the rest of us. She bore the burden well. Eight joked about just being glad her hair still grew out and she wouldn't have another period for the rest of her life.

She also mentioned hunting perverts, using her pseudo-teenage body to lure in men. Diego was very fond of the idea, and they conspired to no end about it.

I'm still not sure if they ever did, but every so often, there is an occasional rise in predator arrests in the city.

Eight lives a private, quiet life in the city as a freelance editor who works under a ghost name. Fixing little mistakes and making improvements to other's writing had always been a small passion she excelled in. Eight doesn't edit for perfection; she edits to uncover truths too hard to initially accept, but truths that make the work better.

It was a hard thing, she admitted during a round of my revisions for this book, to see the narrative so differently, especially when it ran so close yet so far from hers.

The obstacle did not stop Eight. The only thing she had truly been unable to attain, unable to complete, was getting Five back. I used to wish she had run after him sooner to stop him from testing time travel, but then again, I never ran in the first place. None of us did. Only Eight.

-

Five stares at the paragraph describing why you hadn't aged unlike the others. The empty, stale mournfulness he had long grown accustomed to in this wasteland settles around his heart like a carapace.

"I'm so sorry, Tee," he says. "I never said that to you, did I? That I was sorry. But I'm sorry, sorry for everything. Sorry you went through all this shit without me. Sorry...I never looked back. I shoulda looked back. Because, because you were right, you know? Fuck, you were right, and I didn't listen, and that made you all the more right."

He scrubs his runny nose with the back of his jacket sleeve. The mourning cracks in his chest.

"I ran too far, Tee."

A baleful wind scrapes at the wasteland.