When you're dropped into the timeline to kill Five Hargreeves, you're really not expecting to encounter the apocalypse. You're also really not expecting to not want to kill him. Yet, somehow, here you are: pining over a lost boy who has probably gon...
It's a real bed. The sight is so strange, so jarringly unnatural, that you think it's a mirage. You stand staring at it, eyes wide, frozen like a deer caught in headlights.
Five brushes past you, pushing through a doorway off to the side. The sound he makes is downright gleeful. There's a working shower with a tub.
He takes four showers that night, combs his hair, washes his face. He no longer smells like death.
He comes out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam and delight. There's a towel around his hips, another wrapped around the back of his neck and hanging low across his chest. It doesn't matter because it sends a jolt straight through you anyway. He has freckles.
"What?" he asks, watching you gawk as he runs the towel over more of his hair.
Eloquence has abandoned you. "You look so different." It comes out breathy, and your gaze still drinks him in like wine after a long day.
He scoffs, and you'd have half a mind to be offended if it didn't sound so close to a laugh, if he wasn't smiling at you with fond, twinkling eyes. "Go shower," he advises quietly.
So you do.
The mirror above the sink is large, and you stare at your reflection after your third shower, hair washed and body scrubbed beyond recognition. Your face has changed since you last saw it. It's tired, shadowed. The skin has new, puckered scars that dance in the glow of the flickering vanity light. The Commission has fed you, too; you can see it in the subtle brightening of your face. There is life, nutrition, behind your complexion. It's a start.
You no longer look like death.
What will he think of you now?
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You realize then, wrapped in a towel, that the clothes delivery service is coming tomorrow. There is nothing to wear aside from your grimy apocalypse attire that you can't, for the life of you, will your squeaky clean body back into.
When you step out of the bathroom, you realize Five has also had that revelation. He's sitting on one edge of the bed, white towel wrapped around his waist. Your gaze can't help tracing his back, all pale ridges and sinewy muscle from digging and hauling and fighting.
His dark hair has been cut shorter. It's shaggy, obviously self-done, and its length suggests he still plans to get it chopped more. However, his bangs now drape over his face, a little too long, a little too shadowed against his bright, inquisitive eyes, much like it had the first few months after your meeting.
"Looking at you, I almost feel overdressed," you quip. Because what else are you supposed to say?
"I'll sleep on the floor if you want," he offers immediately.
The suggestion pains you in more ways than one. Beyond the devastation that he'd rather not sleep beside you now that the apocalypse is behind—or in front?—of you, it's also the most depressing offer you've ever heard. His first chance at sleeping in a clean bed in god knows how long, and he's open to sacrificing it for you.
