8 ○ Umbrella Academy

And It Was AKWARD For EVERYONE

For those of you who find Ada and Diego wierd.... You've been warned. PS - I'm sorry it took so long to update, I needed to upload this chapter and the next within the same time so it didn't seem like an afterthought... Well, you'll see...

Back at the television store, the lady with the accent - who, Five informed me, helped Diego get out of the looney bin - was cauterizing Diego's stab wound and unknowingly causing me immense amounts of pain. With Lila, the woman, fixing up Diego all I could do was listen to his screams and her scolding him, wishing Klaus was here to make me one of his specialty drinks.

In the meantime, I had the comfort of Diego clinging to my mind the way I often did his. Only, squeezing felt more appropriate, like he was trying to displace his pain. The problem was, he was doing it on two parts now and I wasn't sure how much more I could handle. After a short panic over his missing clothes, his wide eyes shooting to me, Lila forced him to lay back down using her makeshift cauterizing tool. Funnily enough, it also put him back to sleep. The relief, however, was only slight; I could still feel my skin burning as she finished what she was doing.

My head pulled up at the sound of Five blinking, a tight line of a smile pulling on my lips when he looked at me with concern. He then turned to Lila, who still crouched over Diego. "Oh, he isn't dead." I fought the urge to roll my eyes, he was such a grumpy old man, but with the three harsh lines on his neck I can't say I blamed him.

"Disappointed?" Lila checked, turning her focus to Five.

"Oh, to see you? Always." I couldn't stop the eye roll that time, at least she was helping us. She didn't have to help Diego or fix him up. There was something odd about her, but every time I looked in her head I found nothing out of the ordinary. A tragic past, sure, but her memories were almost too clean. Especially for someone Diego found in a psych ward.

"So much hostility in such a tiny package," Lila admired. That's Five for ya, I thought with a soft breath. "Did you cut yourself shaving? I could teach you to shave like a big boy." If only shaving were the worst of Five's problems; he left one apocalypse just to come back and immediately need to prevent another. He needed the break more than any of us did.

"No, just ran into an old family friend," Five sighed, his voice surprisingly more docile than it was seconds ago. With that Lila decided she couldn't pick more fun at him, returning to Diego's wounds and sending my pain through the roof. "You didn't untie him?" I looked up to the man with the painted toes, snoring soundly around a gag in the same chair we'd left him in.

"Was I supposed to?" Lila asked with a soft breath. She paused in her work just long enough for me to release a strangled laugh, standing and patting Five on the shoulder as I passed him to head downstairs. Maybe there I could experience pain in peace.

●

I sat outside Vanya's door with my eyes closed, listening so hard to her violin practice that I didn't catch any thoughts until a person sat beside me. "Is your head hurting again?" Ben's voice was small, hesitantly leaning against my side.

"Yeah," I mumbled, sitting upright and turning towards him. He didn't have skin contact with me, so he saved me from that portion. Holding a conversation meant I couldn't space out and listen to Vanya, but I didn't mind talking to Ben when I felt like this. He wasn't demanding like Diego was, or Allison who didn't know how to comfort me, or Klaus who only wanted to get me high as a solution. Ben just wanted to help, even if that meant sitting near me in silence. "Thanks, Ben," I mumbled, leaning further against him.

"For what?" I chuckled at his confusion and shrugged.

"For being a good brother, what else?" He didn't say much after that and after listening to Vanya play for an hour or so helped the pound reduce to a small ache. Ben was mostly silent, joining me in Vanya's two-man audience but prodding a question every now and again. When the pounding lessened enough to discriminate through the thoughts in the house, I perked up at the way a muddled mess of thoughts came closer to our spot outside Vanya's door. "Klaus is coming," I hummed, slowly getting my feet under myself.