Chapter Text
The world danced before him in a flurry of over-exposed lights and garbled sounds.
A man was bent over him. His blurry face showed some expression of worry, and his mouth was moving quickly, but he couldn’t make out what he was saying. He felt the feather-light touches on his cheeks, forehead, neck, and even his chest, and he started to hear the muffled shouts for a medic. The man turned back to him, and in a moment of clarity, his eyes focused on him. Dark shaggy hair, a face streaked with grime and blood and tears, his mouth trying to form words of comfort that just wouldn’t come out.
Klaus. His chest heaved as he continued to call for help. But no one would come.
His own eyes began to water. He tried to take a breath but felt it gargle in the back of his throat with warm blood that spilled over his lips and instead tried to offer Klaus a warm smile. Klaus let out a watery laugh and tried his best to comfort him, despite both of them realizing that this was very much it. As soon as the echoey battle sounds around them died out, someone would come looking for Klaus and drag him off to the next event, leaving him here to finally fade.
But as Klaus finally found his voice and whispered a final “I love you”, he felt his chest seize up, and he finally let go.
He assumed the flash of blue across from him was simply a trick of the light as his life slipped away from him, but suddenly, he felt hands on him. He let his eyes slip shut as another bright flash of blue encircled him.
The new room was bright white beneath his eyelids and rather quiet, save for the gentle beep of machinery. Was this heaven? Was this really it? He could feel the small thump of his heartbeat in his chest...was that normal for the afterlife? Or…?
Dave’s eyes opened again.
(<)
The Commission had ways of making things happen, whether it’s a time-traveling assassin precisely placed to make sure a war starts, or an agent slipping an idea to a citizen to spark an uprising or invention. If an event was marked on their time-line, it happened. So when April first came and went, the new Handler was not happy. She had a massive legacy to live up to, not to mention rebuilding the Commission to its former glory.
The agents seemed to sense her dissatisfaction as they murmured to one another about how the apocalypse could have been averted or what the next plan was. No one had an answer until the Handler made her presence known in her key crew’s office. Someone finally decided to find an answer.
“Ma’am, what do we do now?” he asked while she was facing the window.
The woman stilled for a moment before turning to face him, a cold smile on her face. “We find the new weakest link.”
The office fell into silence before someone else, a woman, spoke up. “And how do we do that?”
The cold smile never left the Handler’s face as she placed a file onto the questioner’s desk. “We already have.”
The woman peeked at the folder’s label. VIETNAM, 1968. She gasped softly, a hand ghosting over the file before she pulled it back and brought her attention to Handler again.
“The plan is simple, really,” the Handler said, addressing the room calmly like she was about to announce lunch plans. “We send an agent to retrieve Mr. Katz, and use him to lure our weak link away from the rest of the Hargreeves.”
The room had an exciting buzz masked underneath its quietness, agents turning to one another with smiles.
“Is that understood?” the woman asked.
A chorus of “yes ma’ams” filled the room before the woman smiled and left the room. The agents all gathered around the folder to see the specific details of the plan before they sat at their desks once more and got to work.
Five may have stopped the apocalypse once, but they would make sure he would never see their second attempt coming.