Life's lie || Umbrella academy

Chapter 13: The Swedish Job

This is a shorter chapter, but longer chapters are coming after this one again, don't worry.

She must have fallen asleep at some point, because she woke up to the screaming of her brother in another room. She noticed that a blanket was wrapped over her as she had positioned herself to lay sideways on a couch. She could see her siblings, except for Diego and Five, crowd around the door that led to the room where the screaming was coming from. She could hear Diego and Lila talking but couldn't understand their words from this distance. She had remembered that Lila had left only half an hour after she had joined their game of cards. Another scream pierced through the building, urging her to finally get up and join her siblings. In the room she could see Diego lying down without any clothes, a towel covering his private parts. She recognized the room as the main hall, making it not really a room, which surprised her since Diego had always been one for privacy. Lila was sitting on top of him, with some things in her hand. 
"What are you doing?" Zariah asked a bit worried, although she liked Lila so there was no reason for her to distrust the girl. They had spend some time together in the previous years too, which made it easy for Zariah to trust whatever the other was doing.
"I am helping your dumbass brother who managed to get himself hurt." Lila replied, there was a hint of annoyance in her voice, but that was most likely because of Diego's screaming. 
"He'll be fine if he lets Lila finish the job." Vanya told her from where she and the rest of her siblings were now standing behind Zariah. With a flash of blue Five appeared in the hall too, making Zariah jump ever so slightly. 
"Oh. He isn't dead." Five commented as he walked up to Diego. 
"Disappointed?" Lila asked.
"Oh, to see you? Always." Five answered her.
"Be nice, Five." Zariah told her brother who shot her a quick glance as if to say sorry. 
"So much hostility in such a tiny package." Lila mused. "Did you cut yourself shaving? I can teach you to shave like a big boy." It was now that Zariah too noticed the wound on Five's neck. She quickly made her way over. Her siblings weren't supposed to get hurt for nothing could touch them. Well except Diego, she thought since he had been there with her. He had already pressed some cloth to it, but she waved at him to remove it so she could take a look. He took it away, although begrudgingly, and she could see that it was only a little nick in the skin, nothing major. 
"No, I just ran into an old family friend." Five answered Lila after putting the cloth back over the wound. Zariah took the bottle of alcohol that she saw and without thinking took the cloth from Five, put alcohol on it and started cleaning the wound. It felt weird to be able to touch him, although he had touched her once before already and he likewise seemed to somewhat freeze under the touch, not willing to scare Zariah away. Does this mean they found him? She questioned herself as she worked. She had seen Five with her for the past four years, but had never been able to physically interact with him until now, likewise with Diego. There were so many questions that a headache was starting to form, a dull pain at the back of her head also pulsing. 

A soft snoring interupted their peacefull silence when Zariah was done cleaning Five's wound, allowing him to turn his head towards the noise. 
"You didn't untie him?" He questioned with a small smile on his lips. Zariah followed where Five was looking with her own eyes and saw the stranger still tied up. 
"Was I supposed to?" Came Lila's question. Five scoffed before making eyecontact with Zariah. 
"He didn't want to play cards and then I fell asleep." She shrugged as she looked over to her other siblings who also just mimiced her motions. "I guess so did the rest." She then walked over to the stranger and undid all of the restraints, waking him up in the process. 
"What?" He questioned sleepishly. 
"We let you loose, but you don't double cross us. Alright?" Five told him, even in his size he was quite intimidating, he always had been. The man nodded before standing up and sprinting towards the bathroom. It wasn't a surprise to Zariah that he needed to go there since the man had been tied up for hours, but it was a funny sight to see as it wasn't the thing that most people thought of after being stuck in a chair. 

Zariah had been reading a book she had found when an alarm went off. The man, she really should have started learning the man's name, had been working on some things that Five had instructed him about as he rolled over to the computer. 
"Hey, we got one. One of those machines you asked for is going crazy." He announced, prompting for Five to walk up to him, leaning over the man's shoulder to get a look. 
"Which one?" Five asked as Zariah joined them. She did not know what was going on, neither really cared, but her brother did so she tried to show interest. 
"It's the, uh, atmospheric radar." Zariah looked at her other siblings for an explanation, but none of them seemed to understand what it was doing either. 
"Good." Five mumbled, deep in thought as he looked at the radar. 
"I don't get it." Zariah questioned, but the man didn't seem to understand the meaning either. 
"What are you tracking?" He asked. "A hurricane? A storm front?" 
"Sound waves." Five answered.
"Sound waves." The man and Zariah repeated, although the man was in awe while Zariah was just confused. She was about to ask Five a question, but he spacial jumped away before she could. 
"Where are you going?" The man yelled after him, but the boy had already gone. 
"He does that." Zariah responded amused. She could hear the snickering of her siblings behind her at the antics of their brother. It wasn't the first time he'd randomly disappeared and it definitely wouldn't be the last. 
"And you just let him do things without telling you? Aren't you, I don't know, concerned or something?" The man asked.
"A few days ago I couldn't even touch him." Zariah confessed with a slight smile on her face. She could see the confusion on the man's face, but didn't mind. She had gotten used to getting them and had never really minded being the odd one out here. She had been that for all of her life, so what made the difference in this place? So without another word she walked off to a chair outside of the bedroom where Diego was silently snoring, he looked quite peacefull like that, ignoring the bloody bandage on his stomach. From where she was sitting she could still see him, but if needed he could also close the door when he woke up and wanted more privacy without Zariah having to move. 

The book she was reading was The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. It was a book that had caught her interest from where it was hidden away in a corner of the bookshelves as if someone was so scared of it that they tried to hide it away. She had especially taken a liking in Eleanor, interested to see how she loses touch with reality and how this affected her own experience, but also that of those around her. Vaguely in the background she could hear Diego and Lila talking. She was sitting just outside of the room that they were in, but her focus was on Eleanor instead on the two of them. She had read through the chatter of her siblings so much these past four years that zoning them out had gone automatically rather than by choice. But as Eleanor's story continued, she couldn't care less about this abillity, it was almost like she was in some kind of trance, locked away from reality, not being able to interact with it even if she wanted to. It was such a familiar feeling, but she couldn't place when or where she had felt it before. Flashes of a cabin and a small dark room shot through her mind, but they didn't hold any meaning to her.