magnanimous | umbrella academy

C H 1 8

I walk through the quiet halls of the Academy. I had begun to feel better, after taking some medicine and resting for a few minutes. My wounds didn't ache as much and the bruises felt better.

I think Klaus and Diego left. Vanya and Allison weren't even in the house when I had arrived, and I don't think they have returned yet. Due to almost all of the siblings being out, the halls held a looming quietness.The quiet halls were something of a normalcy to me. When Reginald was still alive, that's all the halls would ever be, a suffocating silence.

I pad softly through, hand gently trailing on the wall. I was still a little unsteady while walking, but the wall helps.

Five's door slowly comes into view, the door open. As I get closer Five comes into view, his back facing the door. He is standing in front of his room's wall, writing on it.

I walk up to his door, letting go of the wall. I softly knock on the door. Five turns around from his wall, his eyebrows still furrowed in thought. When Five sees me, I see his eyes soften slightly.

"You busy?" I ask, walking into his room. I look around his room, writing in chalk is coating at least half of the walls.

"Slightly," he says, looking over the equation he was just working on.

"I can come back later."

"No! I mean, I can talk as I work." He says, stuttering just slightly. Five turns back to his wall, chalk tapping again. I smile slightly and walk to the chair that sat in the corner. Delores was propped up on Five's bed frame.

"I'm not angry at you." I tell him, relaxing in the chair.

"Of course you aren't. Why would you be angry?" He tells me, still working on his equations. He isn't bringing up what he had said in Klaus' room.

"You are such a prick sometimes," I say softly to myself, no malice in my voice. "I can understand why you would leave this timeline, go back, try to stop this differently."

"It's just when I heard you say that you had been planning on leaving. Leaving this future. Leaving your siblings. Leaving me. I was hurt. I've been hurt,abandoned a lot, and I-i just didn't want to imagine you doing that to me too."

From my chair, I could see Five look down from his wall, down at his feet. His chalk had stopped its tapping.

"I'm not going to leave. I promise. Even if I wanted to, there is no briefcase, no way of going back. You're stuck with me." I smile at him and say nothing as he continues to write on the wall.

"So what are you working on? Is it some sort of probability?" I ask, inspecting his writings on the wall.

"Something of that sort. This should tell me who starts the apocalypse. Who I need to kill." Five saying that he would kill someone didn't surprise me. Hell, the death of one person could save the entire planet. Besides having been stuck in the apocalypse, he knew how bad it was, how we need to stop that.

"Good. So this one person causes everything to go to shit." I say, still looking at Five's equations. They were quite advanced. I look to Five and stand up wanting to look more at the math Five has been doing.

"How did you learn all of this?" Five continues his writing.

"There were a lot of books left in a library I stayed at, during the apocalypse. Tons of time on my hands, you know. I also did some more studying while I was a hit-man."

"How was that? Being a hit-man?"

Five's eyebrows furrow, as he looks at his equations and thinks about my question.