Various The Umbrella Academy One Shots

Waiting, Waiting, Waiting

It had been a week already and the air still seemed to be just as heavy with unsettled dust as it had on the day that he had arrived. The silence was jarring, broken only by the occasional whistling of the wind through the broken remains of what had once undoubtedly been a rather nice old building. Too bad it had been reduced to nothing more than one pile of rubble among all the other destroyed husks that had once been ordinary buildings. The stench of death and decay filled the empty spaced where once people lived their perfectly ordinary lives - could this be what the world smelt like for Klaus all the time? Like death and suffering? - before the wonderfully mundane streetscape was replaced with a post-apocalyptic nightmare.

Poor Number Five was just a little lad, a child that was in well over his head and couldn't drag himself back. It's not that he hadn't tried, and goodness only knows how hard he tried. Tried to get home, tried to find someone - anyone! - else that was still alive out there, and what did he get? Every attempt to get back to his own time just fell flat, landing him in just another part of the hell that he had found himself trapped, and as for finding people, well, there was only so many corpses - family and strangers alike - that one so young could face before it simply got all too much for him.
But surely his family had realised he wasn't able to get back and was, at that very moment, plotting and scheming plans to rescue him. Surely it was only a matter of minutes before he was brought back and, even with the inevitable scolding that would come from the man who called himself their father, he would be home again. Surely it was just a matter of moments and he'd be safe and with a cup of hot cocoa clasped in his hands as he brought warnings of the world he had stumbled into. Surely!

"Get away from the fair damsel, foul beast!" Five declared heroically, his voice the only thing breaking through the maddening silence that the world had become.

The 'foul beast' in question happened to be a pile of garbage and useless scraps of ruined city that he had assembled into something that was remotely bestial in shape, while the 'fair damsel' was nothing more than a relatively unscathed clothing store mannequin that he'd stumbled upon when he was out trying to find supplies to keep him going while he was waiting. To be frank, Five was bored ad was trying to kill time in any possible way that he could in the new, somehow worse world, and if that meant he had to pretend to be fighting dragons like a knight in some legend or another then, well, it was simply what he had to do. The alternative was to try and constantly fail to find his way back and there was only so many times a child could do so before it grew too detrimental to continue.
He quite literally had all the time in the world to try and figure out what to do, and there was no crime in trying to  have at least a little fun to try and chase way the ominous storm clouds that threatened to engulf his mind.

The fearsome creature of rubble crumbled with a swing of the plank of wood that was serving as a makeshift sword, but no real monster would be bested quite so easily, this he knew as a given fact, and so took a couple of extra swings for good measure, knowing it was far better to be safe than sorry. Victory! Of course he was victorious, and even though he was very much aware that his makeshift foes were incapable of fighting back it still felt good for him to be able to claim little, insignificant victories when he was trapped by the overwhelming ramifications of his most grand, disastrous failure.

Oh, how he wished he could break the silence even for an hour, but the batteries in the portable CD player he had found was not going to last forever, even if he did go and hunt down replacement batteries. He didn't know how long he would have to wait for rescue, and so he really would rather not risk losing one of the only sources of entertainment he had on offer if the wait was longer than he anticipated. He hadn't realised how much he relied upon electricity until it was completely and entirely gone. The darkness of night would creep up far faster when the only thing to chase it away was the flickering light of a busted up torch. The chill of the air seemed more final when there was nothing he could use as a heat source beyond layers of cloth, the concept of lighting a fire when he wasn't sure of what hazardous materials might have settled into the area seemed like too much of a risk, a risk he was not willing to take. He hadn't realised how much he would be wishing for a long, warm shower until the possibility was taken from him.
The possibility for water, hot or otherwise, was dauntingly little and that made him more uncomfortable than he was really willing to ponder upon.

The Boy was miserable, he missed his family - the family that he was forced to see broken and dead when he tried to find them - and he missed the utterly abnormal way his life had been until he had made the foolish decision to jump further than he knew that he could. He had been overconfident, and got himself stuck after the end of the world, with nothing left to do but wait until his family was able to come and bring him back. Five was sure they wouldn't just leave him there, sure there must be some way for them to get to him, he just needed to keep waiting.
He just needed to keep waiting.