Chapter Text
The trouble with having stopped the apocalypse, it turns out, is that now you’ve annoyed the people who want it restarted.
Diego had had big plans for after they’d won the day and prevented armageddon and gotten home safe to 2019 and all that shit. First, he was going to tell his Mom how much he loved and appreciated her. Then he was going to get his brother to conjure the woman he loved, just the one time (“no conjugal visits,” Klaus had wagged a finger at him, “I’m very easily embarrassed”). He was going to let Patch know that she could rest easy because he beat her murderer’s ass but also that, in a display of heroic self-restraint that showed what a catch he was, he had allowed the murderer in question to live. Then, serious business taken care of, Diego was going to order a jalapeño popper deep dish pizza from Zack’s and use it to finally win the argument about whether jalapeño popper pizzas sounded disgusting (Allison, Vanya), delicious (him, Ben, Klaus) or sounds weird but if it isn’t freeze-dried MREs I’m in (Luther, Five). And after all that, Diego guessed he’d take a seat, chill, and maybe think about what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.
Diego isn’t chilling right now. Nobody’s chilling. Because five minutes after they got home, just as they were slumped at the kitchen table with Vanya shakily passing round the coffee, an unspecified number of gas-masked assholes with assault weapons busted in the windows.
On the plus side, Academy teamwork is getting pretty okay. By this Diego means that, this time, the bickering is minimal before everyone agrees to Five’s plan: get them to follow Vanya to the roof and we’ll take them out from the top down while Klaus and Ben sweep from the basement up. When Diego adds, “And, Five gets Mom and Pogo somewhere safe, I’ll back up Klaus down here while he mojos up Ben,” (“Mojos up?” Klaus mouths at him), Luther replies only with a only a grumbling, “that’s what I was gonna suggest”.
He and Klaus lured a couple of the suckers into the living room, by the clever strategy of getting spotted and running their asses away. The plan now is, cover Klaus while he does his thing and then carry on covering his glass cannon butt while Ben glows up and takes care of these assholes. It’s a good plan, a great plan. They’re going to mince a bunch of time travelling home invaders in time for Vanya to power down before she ends up destroying a city block, or a city, or a moon (yeah, she’s practiced, yeah she has a handle on it, but come on, they all worry). There will be fist bumps, there will hopefully be minimal structural damage although there might be some gross house cleaning, and then there will be jalapeño popper pizza.
What actually happens is fast and nasty and pretty confusing, but it’s definitely not the plan.
Diego and Klaus have gotten through the living room door, they’re skidding to get to cover behind the bar and Diego turns, flings a volley of knives to buy them a moment, when something happens. It’s like a tornado whips up from nowhere and lifts him straight into the air. As he’s spun up to the ceiling, legs kicking at nothing, he sees Klaus still down there on the floor, spinning around in the middle of his run to stare up at Diego, all big eyes and flailing skinny limbs like Bambi watching his mom get shot. The dick in the mask is pointing some device up at Diego, something flat and solid like a damn clothes iron of all things, and the air around it is rippling, and then Diego’s head spins and his ears pop like he’s in a fast elevator, and he smashes to the ground.
He lays there stunned a moment, feeling like a swatted fly, then there are arms grabbing him, he’s on his feet with his arm slung over Klaus’s shoulder, stumbling forward —and then he’s on the floor behind the bar.
Klaus’s hands are jittering over Diego’s torso. “Shit,” he mutters. “Shit shit shit.” Diego looks down at his own shirt, blinks dizzily, sees blood on his side. Klaus has yanked one of his remaining knives free and is trying to cut the harness off of Diego’s chest.
“Hey, hey,” says Diego, annoyed and confused, fuck, how did this turn around on them so fast? “Don’t—”
“Nope, gotta get it off,” says Klaus, in that all-business voice Diego still hasn’t gotten used to, “put pressure on the wound.”
“Lemme up,” says Diego, and he can hear how stupid and woozy he sounds, “we gotta return some fire already—”
Klaus makes a sharp sound, then he’s up, head stuck under the bar, fumbling around there while Diego stares and thinks oh you are not getting a drink.
“Ha!” Klaus mutters, and he comes out with a pistol stuck up under the bar with duct tape. “Dad,” says Klaus, and that explains that. “Paranoid old bastard.” His fingers move fast and practiced as he talks: he checks the magazine, slaps it back in, racks the slide. Then he’s up: he hops right up like a freaking jack in the box, pops off a bunch of shots and hops back down into a crouch.
War certainly helped Klaus find his inner Number Five, that’s for sure.
Diego, feeling slightly steadier, sits himself up and pats at his chest. The wound doesn’t hurt much; in fact, it’s weirdly numb. He yanks at his shirt and pulls, and—there’s only clean unbroken skin. He’s not shot. He thinks, relieved, ugh, some nosebleed, and he swipes his hand across his nose and mouth.
Klaus very suddenly falls out of his crouch onto his butt, and his head rolls back on his shoulders and he’s flopped onto the floor before Diego can catch him, arms loose and face slack.
The front of Klaus’s shirt is wet and red.
Klaus stirs, pats at his chest and then raises a bloodied right hand, the hello hand, to his face. His eyes cross a little as he frowns at it. “Oh,” he says. That’s all he says. He’s panting, dopey, quiet. The stain is actually spreading in front of Diego’s eyes from the hole in Klaus’s tee, somewhere near the bottom of his ribcage.
Everything in front of Diego looks like a picture suddenly, flat and far away. Then it sharpens back in too fast, suffocatingly real, it clenches Diego’s stomach and sets his pulse thumping stupidly in his throat. That old feeling hasn’t rolled in on him so strong and fast in fucking years, of course it would be now. Diego lets himself have two rounds of box breathing: in for four, hold for four, out for four, hold. He’s good. Move.
Diego retrieves Klaus’s pistol, shoves it in the back of his own pants. Neutralise threat, deal with casualties, evacuate. A sliver of light through the old wood of the bar catches his eye, and he leans forward, tries to peek through the gap. One guy is down on the ground, nice work Klaus, and yeah, that’s the one with the assault weapon. That leaves the dude with the weird sonic clothes iron Vanya gun. He can see the guy’s legs, he’s pacing. He thinks guy, but maybe it’s a girl, who knows, sexist, Patch would say. Dickwad, perp, douche, those are all gender-neutral words, right? He’s got position on dickbag, and he shuffles back, hefts a couple of blades. Aim, throw, curve. Then there’s a satisfying thump. He peeks again. Douche is down. Blade in the neck, other blade in the thigh. He, she, they, okay, Patch? move a bit, then they stop.
Okay.
Klaus is back in the room now: well, kind of back. He’s frowning, muttering, he flaps a hand. “Ben,” he says, “appreciate the concern but, could you, pretty please, for heaven’s sake, just zip it?” Then, with shaky dignity, “I am trying to concentrate.” Klaus balls his fists, his eyelids droop and he grimaces, Diego sees him trying to shake himself awake. A vague blue light blooms under Klaus’s clenched fingers, and then—right then and there Diego sees him fade, sees his face slacken and he grabs a wrist—
“Hey, idiot, you stop that,” Diego says, shaking the wrist, “cut it out, Klaus—” And the light fades and Klaus’s hands open, ah, thank fuck, and a voice echoes and fades in Diego’s head, oh thank god, stubborn dick hasn’t been listening to a word I …
“Ben,” Diego says. It just slips out quietly on the exhale.
“Yup,” Klaus mutters. Diego grabs a bar towel, balls it up and shoves it firmly over the wound. Klaus doesn't flinch or grumble, and that gives him a nasty uneasy feeling.
Klaus rolls his head, looks Diego vaguely in the eye. “Still hot out there?” Klaus says, voice soft, casual. Close up, he looks bad: grey and shocky. “I don’t see any, any pissed-off ghosts.”
“They’re down,” Diego says, into the quiet air. Then, “They’re all down, it’s done.” He doesn’t know that for sure, fuck knows what’s happening out there in the rest of the house, but there's no point having Klaus mess himself up worrying.
“Oh,” says Klaus. “Okay. Super.” And the frown slides off his face and he sighs, lets his eyelids droop. His thumb strokes over those dog tags he wears, and Diego’s stomach flips because he sees it coming, shit, why did he say that, he practically gave Klaus permission to check out.
“Don’t—” Diego says, and his voice freezes.
“G’night, bro,” says Klaus, a breathy quiet singsong, and his eyes close the rest of the way.
A couple of moments later, the little asshole stops breathing.
***
Klaus wakes up in the back of the jeep, rattling over potholes, jarring his wound and shaking his bones. It’s dark, and the sticky heat of the day has let up some. In fact, he’s freezing, shit it’s cold, they must be pretty high up in the mountains. Someone’s holding his hand. Bold move. He squeezes the hand back, smacks his dry lips together. “Hey Dave,” he mutters, “‘m parched, gimme your canteen.”
“Oh,” says someone. The voice is shocked, uncertain, too high, familiar.
Klaus cracks his eyes open again, sees in the half-light someone small and slight, waves of dark hair, pale serious face. “Oh,” he says. “Vanya.” He blinks. “Your hand did seem weirdly little, but, uh, I thought it was just me.” His mouth is so fucking dry, he feels like someone left him out in the sun or something, like now he’s a raisin. He’s not buzzed, but he’s definitely a little numb: there’s an ache in his side when he breathes in that promises to be very unfun later. He lets go of Vanya’s hand, goes to rub his face and stops when he feels a cannula in the crook of his elbow. He squints up, picks out the line, bags of IV fluid. Ah, hence the stoned head fuzz, hence feeling like shit on toast. What was it this time? He remembers zilch, so that must have been a good time while it lasted. What did he take, and why’d they call Vanya, was her number in his pocket, or?
Ben is sitting next to Vanya, cross-legged on the floor of the van. He looks at Klaus. He looks kind of mad. He’s always mad at Klaus, death has made him so damn judgy … “Next time,” Ben says, “that you’re bleeding out from a chest wound and you decide to manifest me, and I say no, do not fucking do that”—his voice cracks on the last word. He shakes his head. “How about you just do not fucking do that?”
Oh. Yeah. That’s what happened. “That’s fair,” Klaus says.
“Ben?” Vanya twitches a hopeful smile, looks around. Klaus points out Ben with one finger. Vanya does a little wave in Ben’s vague direction.
“He’s waving back,” Klaus says, as Vanya opens, wow, yes please, a water bottle. She feeds him some in sips. That's the stuff. “Thanks,” he says, “Wow. I needed that. Why’re we in a jeep?”
Vanya pulls in a breath. “It’s a van. We stole it. So, we’re kind of on the run. I guess.” She says it like the idea is ridiculous to her.
“Who made it out?” he says.
“All of us!” she says quickly. “Luther’s driving, Allison and Diego are up front. You’ve missed some truly stellar map-reading arguments.”
Klaus grins at her. “Our boy Five actually let someone else drive?”
Vanya smiles, jerks her thumb at the corner where Five is burritoed up in a blanket, head pillowed on a backpack, out like a light. “He’s sleeping it off. He gave us a bunch of GPS co-ordinates then just, uh, took himself for a nap over there. Apparently he has a safehouse.” Klaus can feel the air-quotes around that last word.
“What? How does—?”
She shrugs. “We have literally no idea. But it’s in the middle of nowhere. Up in the woods, by the Canadian border. Guess he was prepared.”
“Like a weird, murdery little boy scout.”
Vanya smiles over at Five. Can’t live with him, can’t live without him.
“So, you saved all our sorry butts,” Klaus says. “Thanking you very much.” It’s a guess, but an easy one: Vanya’s dark shirt and sweater are bleached white in a patch from collar to shoulders.
Vanya shrugs. “I guess.” She smiles, though, taking the compliment uneasily. Klaus knows the feeling: great work with the murdering today, have a cookie.
“I know,” he says, not specifying what he knows. “But, there it is. You did it, we survived. That’s what we’re in, baby.”
Vanya just nods, eyes big and nervous. Klaus has a sense she’s maybe contemplating the idea that they have all just accidentally gone to war, and not finding it so delightful.
“You know you nearly died back there?” she says. “Diego says you stopped breathing.”
“Did he give me mouth to mouth?” says Klaus, delighted, because what a gift this will be for giving Diego shit.
Vanya doesn’t even react, just carries on. “Five got you back. He was, uh, pretty amazing actually.” Klaus blinks. Five? Well, that explains why he feels like he’s had a modest but pleasant slug of morphine. Five and his mind over matter bullshit. He’s grateful, he’s pissed off, he’s blinking at the sheer novelty of being angry at someone for pumping free drugs into his system. He’ll deal with it later, he’s too fuzzy, he’ll just have to deal with it later.
“I’m sorry,” Vanya says, clearly misreading the face he just pulled. “I really wanted to take you to an actual hospital.”
“Mom?”
“Five said she and Pogo were safer where they were. So.”
Klaus nods a little. So, they're safe too. He’s relieved. And he’s relieved a little extra for Vanya. Must be a weight off. She’s so twitchy and tender around Pogo now.
Vanya looks down for a moment, picking at her fingertips, then her eyes lock on him again. “You know—you really scared the crap out of us. Out of me. We—”
“Many apologies,” Klaus sighs, then slides right past the subject. “Anyone else get dinged?”
“Luther’s got kind of a goose egg here,” Vanya taps her forehead, “but he’s good. And I fell down some stairs on my butt, because I’m an idiot.” Her voice lowers. “Guess we were lucky.”
Klaus circles a finger at her shirt collar. “So you whited out? Was it up on the roof?”
Vanya nods again, seems to slump into herself a little. “Just for a moment there. Then I had to stop.”
“Well. You stopped when you needed to. Progress.”
“Yeah. I—got a lot of them, but, after that I couldn’t. I didn’t know if I’d be able to stop. So then I was just kind of excess baggage.” An apologetic smile. “Trying to keep up with everyone and not get shot.”
Ben says, “It’s okay, Vanya. We’ve all been there, we’ve all scared ourselves.”
Klaus says, “Ben says, it’s cool, we get it.”
“Thanks, Ben,” Vanya says to the air in front of Ben’s nose. “Now could you tell Klaus to please stop talking and get some rest?”
“Please,” says Ben, “you think he listens to a word I say?”
“Ben, Ben, couldja cut me some slack for once? I just—”
“Shut up,” Ben says, at the same time as Vanya says “I mean it, you need to,” and Klaus looks between them. Ben does silent finger-guns in Vanya’s direction, jiggles his eyebrows and grins. Klaus smiles at him, and he starts on a chuckle but then the hole in his ribs lets him know that laughing is a horrible idea, so he doesn’t. His exhaustion and his aches and the good old IV opioids and the reassuring company and the knowledge of temporary safety all begin to wrap warmly together around him. It’s a good soft feeling, floating then sinking down, and he’s never one to turn down a little peace and quiet. He lets himself sink.
***
They’re screwed, is what.
The cabin has a delightful verandah. It was one of the things about the place that appealed to Five when he picked it out as a bolthole slash safehouse slash theoretical vacation spot (not that he ever used his vacation days) slash, just maybe, retirement pad. The big shady porch is sheltered from rain and sun, with a view of the woods and the lake down the hill. It’s perfect for a spot of birdwatching, or for sipping lemonade as the sun goes down, or for pacing frantically while trying to work out five-dimensional equations, fighting off a caffeine withdrawal headache, and contemplating the prospective brutal deaths of your family and the extinction of the entire human race.
The Commission found them so fast. Five needs to know why. They didn’t find them back in 2003, didn’t see them overlaying their thirteen year old selves with such precision (Five congratulates himself) that it was barely possible to measure any temporal displacement. He’d sweated the details: what did they shift in the timeline, what did they change, what lessons and changed circumstance and muscle memory did they bequeath their younger selves (Vanya, what did they leave Vanya?)? What would prevent the ending of all but preserve the integrity of the timeline?
It had taken months, five and a half months to be precise, of experiment and calculation for him to know what needed to be done, how to aim their finest shot and, with fingers crossed, try to make the return journey home.
A leap of faith: to April 2nd, 2019, 0800 hours, hand in hand, with no briefcase and no certainty. Ben had looked at him as the electrical storm gathered, and Five had realised very suddenly that Ben knew full well what Five had left unsaid in attempted kindness, knew that the equations had not left Five as uncertain of Ben’s fate as he’d made out, had told him clearly Ben was probably returning to death. Did Ben know that Five hadn’t dared shift the timelines more? That Five was too cautious and bloodless, too hardened, too much of a coward to risk the whole world to save his brother?
Yet they’d won. “Ben says it’s cool,” Klaus had reported, his voice soft and sad, when they landed in the hall in 2019, when only six of them had landed there. “He says it’s okay, we did it, world’s still here, that was the point.”
Five hadn’t wanted to be forgiven. But he wanted the coffee Vanya brewed (the only one of his siblings who could be trusted to make a decent cup), he wanted the smiles and the relieved laughter and the bickering. He wanted Klaus putting up a hand to stop anyone sitting in the chair Ben had taken, wanted Allison’s voice restored and warming the room, Vanya’s shoulders starting to relax, Luther awkwardly hauling himself into a chair, Diego twirling a teaspoon around his fingers like a majorette’s baton and saying, okay y’all, about that jalapeño popper pizza. And then Allison groaned and shook her head at Vanya, and Klaus stretched his arms up and said ooh, we gotta get garlic cheese bread, and Five had been opening his mouth to make a pitch concerning Rita’s Frozen Custard—
—And then every window in the room had smashed at once, and the guys in masks had swung in, and all hell, to state the facts without hyperbole, had broken loose.
The Commission had known they’d all be then and there (or that they’d been there, or that they would be there). How? The why, however, is insultingly obvious. If they killed Five with his family now, they were eliminated as moving pieces. Their timelines cut off, they could do no more to derail the end of the world. Then the Commission could tweak and fix and strategically liquidate whomever they pleased to set the apocalypse back on its tracks.
“Vanya, we’ll get you to the roof,” he said, as they all took cramped temporary shelter in their father’s wine cellar. “You up to it?” She nodded, looking pale and overwhelmed, not ready at all. She could do it, he knew she could. He smiled at her.
Five found Pogo and Grace peppered with holes on the first floor landing. Pogo was dying rapidly; Grace was just Grace with a few extra holes in her shirt. She was stroking Pogo’s head and humming softly.
“Jesus, Grace,” Five said, had spat out when he found them like that, “did you think to do something?”
Grace looked at Five, soft and bland, his anger sliding right off her, and she smiled her toothpaste ad smile, and said, calm and easy as ever, “Darling, I am doing something.”
Five looked again at Pogo, at the blood pooling under him, the number of entry wounds, he catalogued the symptoms of advanced hypovolemic shock and he measured the look in Pogo’s eyes. He realised: Grace was utterly right. Comfort was all that could be done, the best thing that could be done for Pogo.
He fastened an arm around Grace’s waist. She looked up at him and tilted her head, an innocent unstated question.
Five reached out, he squeezed Pogo’s chilly hand. Pogo stirred. “I have to take her now. Someplace safe.” Then, because he should say it, “I’ll get the kids out of here in one piece. Don’t worry.”
Pogo’s mouth moved, and then he nodded, muttered. Five thought he caught, “of course, dear boy.” Then Five tightened his arm around Grace’s waist, and he jumped.
This safe house can’t be linked to him, Five tells himself. It’s remote. He was so very careful.
Their casualties were pretty light for a full-on Commission assault, and he reckons they achieved a hundred per cent kill rate in return. It was very nearly worse. Klaus is a surprisingly resilient little s.o.b.
They got off easy this time. It won’t be like that next time. And there will absolutely be a next time.
He knows they’re coming. They’re coming for him and his family. It’s all just a matter of time. Ha. Time. He smiles without humour, then shakes his head.
(What does he do now, what should he do now? It’s all on him. This is Commission business. How could he even begin to explain the truth of the Temps Aeternalis to his family?)
He paces.
When it’s too unbearable to compute in his head, he fishes a stick of chalk from his pocket and scratches on the walls, then, when he can't reach any higher, the deck. After a while he gets that hollow dizzy feeling, as if the calculations are consuming him from the inside. He’s damn hungry, that doesn’t help. This body is too small and fragile, too ravenously hungry all the time, it tires too easy. Though it's nice to be this limber again, he’s not gonna lie.
God, he misses Dolores. She’d say just the right thing to him now, she always knew what to say to get him out of a slump.
And somewhere deep inside him, something twists, and he thinks with bitterness that he is a stupid old man, that he had gone soft to think that he was truly going to get a second chance at life, that he could do something as audacious as letting Dolores go and starting again, as audacious and arrogant as thinking he’d saved the world, that after everything he’s done he gets to become human enough to sit around the kitchen table with his family bickering about what junk food to order.
“I’m too old for this shit,” Five mutters, to nobody in particular.
Then he turns on his heel, thinking, maybe there’s something edible in the pantry—chips, saltines and jelly, something—and he strides back inside.