End of the Beginning [Five]

Two

What sport/activity would you add to the Olympics if given the choice?




Six years later

Emery never managed to make it very far into the house before the light on the upstairs landing was flickering on and two figures were treading down the steps.

He remembered most the feeling of apprehension the few seconds before as he stood at the sink, water dripping from his hands and from his hair where he'd raked it to rid the blond of the red blood.

His lips had curled into a smile then upon seeing his sister well and alive and his mother, his father joining a moment later, a dog bounding in on the man's heels, shaggy hair covering its eyes and obscuring its vision so that it head butted right into Emery's shins with the force of a small bull. It was still small enough that Emery could stoop down and hold the puppy beneath his arms like a football with sentient palpable excitement.

They peppered him with questions, doting over him, making him his first real meal since sushi at the hotel.

And Emery had responded gladly, sitting down on the corner cushion of the worn lemon-colored couch, hands raking through the familiar fur of his dog. Adele. His sister had been the one to name her when she was just a child after watching one of the celebrity's performances on television.

He answered their questions with a masked smile, pushing down the sinking feeling in his gut when his parents told him that he— or his other version, had simply disappeared a week before, muttering something about a journal and walking out the back door without a single look back.

They thought he had died. That he was never coming back.

And Emery realized with a sinking sensation that if this other version of himself had indeed died, that he had just filled in his own role.

And six years later, he still was acting the part.

He told himself he was just doing it until he could find Five, that he would leave the moment he made any headway in understanding what had happened to him when dearest Reggie fucked everything all up.

And he went about life in a constant state of anxiety, rivaling that of even the dog's own who attached herself to Emery's hip the moment he'd first sat down with her all those years ago.

He lay awake every night, bags beneath his eyes, head so full of thoughts that he didn't know what to do with them. Each morning he swore it would be of him waking to the sound of angered shouts and tears, of blame thrown this way and that, ultimately landing on him and his broken powers for the death of his sister.

Chronic obtrusive pulmonary disease or COPD was the disease that had taken his sister in the original timeline. It was the trigger point for a broken family. He remembered relenting the information to Five when he'd been pressed about it back before they were separated and remembered the conversation with a pang.

But every morning, Emery woke and found everyone well, alive, and happy.

And every morning, Emery forced himself to go to school, fingers anxiously drumming in the hem lines of his pants As he tried to piece together the impossible: how to travel to another timeline.

He found quickly that there was no record of an Umbrella Academy existing here and quickly established that he'd been dropped in an alternate timeline.

He finished high school, burying his head in books and newspaper clippings and news series on the television and all without luck. He interviewed skeptics who believed (though they were always on some type of drug or another) that they weren't alone in this world, that the concept of timelines coexisting was possible, and still after two years, he was no closer to getting back to Five as before.