• DREAMER • The Umbrella Academy

10

Vanya's apartment is dark when they arrive. Quiet, quaint, cluttered around the edges with nicknaks and books and sheets of music. The furniture is mismatched but it is cosy, with soft old couches and an arm chair that Five takes to immediately.

Johanna finds herself exploring, lost in the life of the apartment while it's true inhabitant is away.

As she brushes her fingers along the edges of the room, Five speaks up.

"Why don't you talk anymore, Joey?" His voice is soft, curious.

Her fingers still over the womans violin case, a tiny nick in the grooves of leather catching her eye. In the orange glow of the lamp light everything is still including her waiting heart.

"I know Vanya wrote in her book that you stopped talking after Ben died."

She turned her head half in his direction, listening.

His eyes were wicked as they watched her. "I don't think that's it."

Johanna turns to the boy, a newfound liveliness to her face, but the sound if keys in the door pulled them out of the interaction fast.

Vanya opens the door and nearly jumps in fright at the sight of someone sitting in her armchair, like a shadow illuminated by the lamp.

"Jesus!"

"You should have locks on your windows." Five says.

She frowns, closing the door and taking her jacket off. "I live on the second floor."

"Rapists can climb."

"You're so weird."

Her eyes fall on the curly haired girl in the corner, staring at her violin with a bit of a lost look.

"Hey, Joey," she nods, placing her bag down by the door. The girl doesn't respond but she's used to that. "Is that blood?"

Johanna turns to glimpse Five brushing his sleeve back down, but nothing can hide the splatters across his collar that don't belong to him. He opts to not comment on it.

"I've decided that you two are the only ones I can trust."

Vanya sits down opposite the boy, frowning. "Why?" She asks softly.

"Because you're ordinary," he says. He realises how that sounds and reiterates, "because you'll listen."

Johanna tears her gaze from the violin and glances over her shoulder at the boy, silently wondering why he was trusting her, but he meets her eye briefly and says nothing more.

"When I jumped forward in time and got stuck in the future, do you know what I found?"

Her eyes flutter closed, her head tilting to the side uncomfortably as a pain forms behind her eyes.

A small boy stands in the centre of a long dead world, ash in his hair, fire and destruction reflected in his hollow eyes. She hears his voice in her nightmares, calling out for his family, and he finds them eventually, but not in the way he wants. Death haunts the boy just as much as it haunts her dreams, and it lingers at his back like a shadow, ever present.

Only Johanna can hear its taunting whispers. Sometimes it is hard to look at Five, because only she sees him for what he truly is.

"Nothing," he reveals, looking hollow in the memory of it all. "Absolutely nothing."

The silence in the apartment is awfully loud.

She doesn't like Five sounding so broken. Haunted. A walking cathedral holding all the ghosts of the entire world, eyes like stained glass. Sometimes the glass cracks and the ghosts howl from inside him, begging to be laid to rest that he'd not have the privilege to get.