Attacca ─ Five Hargreeves

28. Wicked for Good

Genevieve needed a list.

And at the top of it was probably how to stop people from dying. She didn't want to be naive—in the past four years, her hands were drenched in blood more often than not, people had died on her table multiple times. They kept finding their way to her grip, and she was forced to watch their organs fail in painstakingly precise ways, or because she wasn't fast enough. Death was not an atypical thing to her, she saw it almost every day, she even had a personal experience with it. It shouldn't have surprised her, but it still did. And it hurt even more knowing the victims were her childhood friends.

Though her memories of them weren't as sharp as they once were, she still held onto the pieces of them helping her break curfew. They went to so many places together, sliced up new adventures, reiterated the hottest gossip in the City. The two women didn't even care how bad the Kilday siblings' mother's reputation was in the public eye at that time. They were their first allies. Never once did they mention her accident, too, though curiosity was definitely squirming uncomfortably within themselves, but they valued their friendship more than crossing boundaries.

Genevieve wished she could tell more.

Perhaps if they discovered enough, it wouldn't be too late for them to reach a decision, that having a connection with the Kilday wasn't worth their lives. But she wasn't there to apprise them, she was dead to the world, and the dead weren't supposed to meddle in. Nikolai didn't know what to do with them, he was immediately disconnected from reality the moment she went into that pod. At that time nothing could make him understand, he understood too late. He had plenty of time but he didn't try to save them, maybe that was his biggest regret, maybe that was what made him who he was now.

Full of rage, full of retaliation, yet crushed by deep anguish.

"Did they die in your timeline?"

They found themselves lying side by side, blindly looking up at the dreary ceiling, lost in their own thoughts. The resonance of torrential rain hitting the ground muffled their ears. After his brief explanation, words seemed to get stuck in their throats until the silence conveyed what needed to be said. Grief, guilt, and disorientation still lingered thickly upon the atmosphere, shredding the night into something more bleak, just like that night. It was quite a dire pining for the past, they were back where they started.

"By the time I woke up, six months had passed after the apocalypse. I guess that meant everyone died then because it was an endless badlands," she remarked in a low voice, "the Commission recruited us forty-five years later, but I never saw anything that happened in the past through the Switchboard. It was just... my way of honouring the dead."

Nikolai didn't make a sound, but she heard his breath hitch.

"What if I—"

"They're still going to die, one way or another." Genevieve refused to deceive him with a false chance, there was no such thing, even if there was, the consequences would be too grave to face. She and Five were a blueprint of that. "Stopping something that's about to happen isn't that easy, you could end up being the one who dies."

"I've lived enough."

"Don't say that." Even without demoing her expression directly, the slight quiver on her lips and the sparse crack beneath her voice pulsated between the words. "Why would I risk coming back here if you weren't alive?"

Nikolai knew why, it didn't have to be articulated out loud, he felt certain of it. Despite the judder of disillusion within him, he managed to say the words in a neutral tone: "You came back because of Number Five."

After years of believing Genevieve didn't know her brother well enough, that he was someone with a riddle layered over his identity, she had found a breach, at long last. A latent dissonance in the coruscation in his eyes, though here today and gone tomorrow. His lips spat out the first thing that came to mind, yet those charcoal eyes fortified benevolence—something that proclaimed his true feelings. The corner of her lips tugged upward slightly, sadly. He kept his feelings to himself but that shaft of light in his copper-coloured eyes often duped him, she was the fool who never attempted to look at him attentively.