THROUGH TIME & SPACE ★ FIVE HARGREEVES X READER

CH. XIII

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RUN BOY RUN

"hello,
welcome home"

2019

"THE WORLD ENDS IN EIGHT days... and I don't know how to stop it."

Vanya stared in shock at Five, trying her hardest not to look like her brother was going crazy. It was hard to believe, sure, but after living in the Hargreeves family for most of her life? This wasn't close to one of the craziest things she's heard.

"Wh— I'm sorry, but what? This is something you tell me before (Y/N)?" Vanya's eyes went wide as she leaned in closer to the boy, lowering her voice and pointing towards the bathroom with her thumb behind her. "How—"

"I mean the world ends in eight days. That's it."

"And... you found out about this in the future? After it happens? How did you even survive?" Vanya was shooting out question after question, but Five could only answer so many at a time.

She got the hint and made an excuse to walk the feeling away by quickly getting up to pour a cold cup of coffee, that had been left in the coffee machine since she last left the house, into a blue mug. She returned and handed the coffee to Five, who looked somewhat relieved to have the chance to finish his drink he had left at Griddy's.

"I survived on scraps. Canned food, cockroaches, anything I could find." He said in exchange for the beverage, "you know that rumour that Twinkies have an endless shelf life?"

Vanya nodded.

"Well, that's total bullshit."

"I can't even imagine..." Vanya's dumbfounded expression turned into a sympathetic one as she heard his stories living all alone as a teenager to fend for himself. All alone in the whole wide world with no one else to help him.

"You do whatever it takes to survive, or you die." Five said, "so we adapted. Whatever the world threw at us, we found a way to overcome it."

So... not alone..?

"We?"

"My point is, I don't want (Y/N) to know about this." Five cut in, "she's got no reason to worry about something like this just yet."

"I don't know about that... This seems like something you might benefit from not getting your head chopped off when she hears about it from someone else."

"Who's 'someone else'?"

Vanya looked away sheepishly. She was a terrible liar and an even more terrible person at hiding that. "Look, I'm just saying that if you think that this... event, will certainly be the end of all life on earth, that's something she deserves to know. You guys are best friends. You tell each other things."

"Well, not all things." He murmured as he stared down into his mug, swirling the dark black liquid in circles along the walls.

"You... You still do?"

It was now Five's turn to look away, just to see a moving shadow from the light turned on in the bathroom down the hallway of Vanya's apartment. "You got anything stronger?" He raised his coffee cup and, once again, ignored another one of her questions.

A muffled sound of shuffling feet came from (Y/N) in the bathroom, who was unaware of the conversation the two siblings had before she arrived back in the living room by the front door.