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Allison frowns as she spots Five curled up on the seat of the window.
This isn’t one of his usual haunts. Or, at least, it hadn’t been the last time she’d been home a couple weeks ago.
But Five usually likes to orbit them, be near where the rest of the family is. Where she is now is in a far wing, one with a few of the never-used forty-seven bedrooms. She herself is only over here because Mom had mentioned that there was a painting in one of these rooms that she thought would be nice to move to her gallery. Allison had wanted to surprise her with it.
That’s why she is over here. Doesn’t explain why Five is.
She freezes at the corner, waiting for Five to notice her.
He doesn’t.
They’re worried about Five. Luther has sounded the alarm already that he’s drinking a lot, seems to be stuck in apocalypse memories a lot. She had found him in a depressing little ball last time she was home, lost and half-convinced that he was missing the apocalypse.
Allison creeps closer. Five still doesn’t acknowledge her.
They thought they’d been in the clear when they’d first gotten back. Everyone was happy, the world was still here and the lives they left behind still intact. Five had still been mean and quick and had math to do. Since he’s run out of that math, though, he’s been retreating. A slipping further and further away as they all fell back into their lives.
He’d had nothing to fall back into, she supposes.
She’s only a few feet behind him, now. He still hasn’t reacted to her. He’s bundled in a sweatshirt and pants despite the warm day outside, curled into a small ball in the corner of the bench, his forehead resting on the glass as he watches people scurry about on the street below.
“Hey, Five,” Allison says softly, carefully squeezing herself in to sit in the sliver of bench left next to him.
Five doesn’t acknowledge her presence, knees still tucked to his chest and arms tightly crossed to hug himself. “Hey,” he says after a long moment.
“You ok?”
“Why wouldn’t I be. Everything is fine.”
“It’s ok if you’re not even if everything is fine. Do you miss the apocalypse again today?”
He keeps watching the people below. She waits. Forehead still pressed to the glass, shakes his head.
“Do you want company?”
Five seems to come back to himself a little bit at that question. He blinks. Actually glances at her for the first time before returning to his watch. “I’m sure you have better things to do.”
Allison swallows and shifts herself to be a little more comfortable on her perch. “I really don’t. Is it ok if I sit here with you for a bit, then? I’ll leave whenever you want.”
He shrugs.
That’s not a no.
She leans so she can watch the street below, too. It’s the middle of the day, so it’s pretty quiet. Someone is getting a delivery in the shop across the street. A few cars pass. There’s a couple out on their steps, chatting. A man and his dog run past.
“Anything exciting going on down there?” she asks.
“All sorts,” Five says.
“Yeah? Like what?”
He doesn’t answer. She doesn’t press.
The couple goes inside. Another man comes out to smoke on a different stoop. Allison moves her hand so it rests on Five’s socked foot. There’s a hole in the sock, his big toe only just sticking out. “You should have told us you needed new socks. We were shopping yesterday.”
His foot twitches but he doesn’t pull away or push her off. “I’ve been meaning to fix that,” he says distantly, not looking. “Haven’t gotten around to it.”
“Yeah, but we can also just get you new socks. You don’t have to make do with holey ones.”
He twitches again, still not pulling back but it’s more of a warning. “It’s one hole. They’re fine.”
“Okay, Five,” she says softly, letting it drop. She makes a mental note to check the state of the rest of his socks later. Silence lapses back between them. Allison focuses out the window again.
The street is quiet. No one moves for a few long minutes. Then a woman holding a baby exists one of the apartment buildings. The delivery finishes and the truck pulls away. The elderly woman who runs the shop steps out to wave after them.
“Do you see that red car? The woman there?”
Allison blinks at Five’s sudden question and scans to find the one Five is talking about. There’s only one, parked a little ways down the block. “Yeah.” There’s the woman she’d spotted before, working to strap her baby into the back seat.
“I found them.”
She stops breathing.
Five doesn’t talk about this. Doesn’t talk about details about the apocalypse. Definitely doesn’t talk about the horrific sights he had to have seen in the dead world.
He keeps watching the woman, not really seeing her. She’s struggling with some part of it, still leaning halfway into the car. “She, um.” His voice breaks. He swallows. And then continues, soft and distant, “She was in the driver’s seat. Wearing a blue blazer. She was burned pretty badly by the fires. Her baby…”
Allison swallows thickly. Her eyes prickle. She doesn’t want Five to continue. She thinks he needs to.
“I didn’t know that’s what it was at first. It… had been protected from the worst of the heat by the seat. The bugs found it, though, and it. Um. It.” His eyebrows have furrowed as he’s talked. He takes in a quick breath in.
“I’m glad you saved them,” Allison says quickly before he can finish describing the state of the baby. Her imagination is filling in the horrors just fine and she’s afraid the reality of it was even worse.
He doesn’t say anything, just keeps watching as the young woman finally finishes strapping her baby in and circles around to the driver’s seat. Watches her get in. Watches as she drives off. Allison uses his silence to try and banish the images he’s conjured up in her brain, push away how she keeps substituting Claire for the baby. “How—how old were you when you found them?” she asks. He’s going to say young, but she hopes it’s older.
“Thirteen.” He’s still distant. “They were among the first I found, right by the Academy like they were. I was looking for survivors. Looking for anyone, really.” He pulls himself back to glance at Allison, offering her a small smile, absolutely only for her benefit. It’s awful. “It’s fine. It was all a long time ago. And they’re fine, now. Some things, they just… stay with you.”
“Yeah,” Allison says softly, not having anything else to say. She adds, “You were so young.”
He’s pulled back to her from returning to the window, that aching smile on his face. “You were too. Are. Well, you seemed so old in that moment, but you weren’t. Lots of life to still go. And now you get to live it, so. All’s well that ends well, I suppose.”
There’s one of Five’s problems, right there, she thinks. Another one they don’t know how to fix. “What about you?”
“What about me?” he repeats back dully, tucking himself tighter into his ball.
“What about your happy ending?”
He doesn’t respond for a long time. They watch another delivery at the florist on the corner. She thinks he’s just not going to when he mumbles, “This is it, isn’t it? My good ending.”
Allison tightens her grip on his foot. He doesn’t react to it.
“Really,” he adds, almost to himself, “what do I have to complain about? Got everything I wanted. Well, five-sixths of what I wanted. That’s pretty good.”
Her heart aches for Ben, too. She wonders how that grief, now dull and familiar after all these years, would twist if she technically had the ability to save him but still couldn’t. Five is Five, so he must have tried; the fact that they don’t have Ben means there’s something that stopped him. She won’t ask. “You did really good, Five.”
He hums absently. “Never said I didn’t. Could have done better, though.” He glances at her, an eyebrow raised in a sad mockery of playful. “’Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.’”
It’s times like this where it really slaps her in the face that her brother truly is a fifty-eight-year-old man trapped as a thirteen-year-old. The weight to his gaze around how he’s trying to lighten the mood for her is extraordinary. That did sound like a quote, though, the cadence he said it with. “Is that from something?”
Five shrugs. “Something or other. I only found the one page of it. Some play. It was at a point where most other paper had disintegrated if I hadn’t saved it, so it was an interesting find. Stuck with me.”
“It’s a good quote,” she offers.
The corner of his mouth twitches up. “It does sound rather profound. Which means it’s probably the only good line from the worst play that no one ever saw. That’s my luck.”
Allison smiles with him, although it cuts her a little bit.
Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.
She looks back outside.
“You don’t usually talk about this stuff,” she says after a beat.
He sighs. “And I shouldn’t. You don’t need to deal with any of it and here I am dumping it on you. Guess you caught me at the wrong time.”
“Or the right time. I’m always happy to listen, Five.”
He gives her a flat look. “Nothing about this is happy.”
“You know what I mean. I’d rather you weren’t stewing in it by yourself. We want to help.”
“The whole point of everything was you wouldn’t have to. I’m fine, Allison. Really. Turns out I’m just a tired and maudlin old man. Who could have seen that coming.”
Allison rubs her thumb over the top of his foot. He still hasn’t pulled it away from her so it must be ok. His word choice gives her pause. “You haven’t been drinking, right?”
Another flat look. “Three, it’s two in the afternoon.”
The not yet goes unspoken but she hears it. “Touché,” she says anyway, her heart thumping funny at him calling her by her number. It’s something he’d done when they were kids, too; they’d had real names by the time they were nine but Five, as the lone number left, was the only one still allowed to use the numbers. He did rarely, when particularly irritated or – in truly rare instances – particularly affectionate.
It's something she’d forgotten. Another piece of him, still there.
Back to watching the street below. It’s quiet, a single pedestrian walking down the block, engrossed in his phone.
“Do you do this a lot?”
“Hm?”
“Sit here and watch,” Allison clarifies.
He shakes his head. “No.” He gives her a sideways look. “So you don’t have to bother making this into a habit to check I’m not too sad.” She nudges him gently for the sarcasm dripping off his last words.
She’s going to be checking here more regularly, anyway. And other corners of the house with good nooks like this for people watching. Might loop Luther in, too, because she’s not here much and if she tells everyone they’ll get obnoxious about it and they’ll lose a rare barometer for keeping track on how Five is actually doing. “You’re already too sad,” she says, not really joking despite the levity she throws into it.
Five huffs the smallest, bitterest laugh. “I think I do pretty well, all things considered.”
Allison flashes back to when she’d found him in the library. “Yeah. You do. You really do.”
Back to looking outside. A truck takes a wrong turn in the alley and takes a while to get backed out again. A man leaves one of the apartments. Someone else chases after him and they talk before they split, the man continuing on his way and his friend returning home.
The woman and her baby come back. She takes three tries to get the parallel park right. She finally gets it and hurries to get her baby from the back, lifting him up with a smile and tucking him to her chest.
Seeing her again brings back all those dark images Five gave Allison of how he knows them.
“It’s so strange,” Five mumbles, his tone off, almost surprised. He’s gone again, far away in his memories of the end of the world as he watches the woman, too.
“What is?” Allison asks because she has to. She both wishes she hadn’t found Five, hadn’t sat down with him, and is intensely glad she had.
“That they’re all real.” He untucks one hand enough that he can drag a fingertip along the glass, tracing something.
“What do you mean?”
“I have lived this moment before, Allison,” he starts after another long pause. “This very second, I have already lived it. With you, with all these people. Physically, at least. You weren’t here, you were sixteen blocks that way, beneath a pile of rubble I put you under. These people, though. They were all right here. Or approximately right here. Wherever they were on April first around eight o’clock. That’s where they were the last time I did this moment. And now here I am again and here you all are again, in this moment with me. Except you’re all real.”
That signifier of real seems important to Five. Allison doesn’t understand. “What do you mean we’re real now?”
His expression stays shuttered. “They... weren’t real to me last time. They couldn’t be. If I thought about how… how every single body I came across had been a person, someone with a life and thoughts and family, I would have gone insane. Even worse than I did anyway. So, I didn’t. You weren’t real. But now… now I’m here and you’re all here and real again…”
Allison thinks she understands. Thinks she gets the point Five is talking around, the piece he’s stuck on today. “It means we were all real the whole time,” she finishes for him gently.
He nods slowly.
She tightens her grip on his foot. “I don’t know how to help you with that. But you’re right, I am right here. With you.”
Five swallows again. “There were so many,” he whispers, tracking a woman as she walks past with her dog.
Allison nods, chest constricted so tightly she can’t even breathe, let alone cry like she wants to.
An entire world’s worth of people.
It’s unimaginable.
“I’m sorry, Five.”
That breaks through his melancholy and he twitches to just glance at her, frowning. “For what? You couldn’t do anything about it. You were dead.”
“No, I just…”
He shakes his head, a jerky motion. “I fixed it. It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine.”
“It’s better.”
It’s also not better, not for Five, but she thinks she’s hit the end of this rare moment of vulnerability with him. “Okay,” she agrees because she doesn’t want to ruin whatever this is with a fight.
“Okay.” He heaves a sigh and rolls his shoulders slightly. He turns to look at her, really look at her, and she knows it’s over. He’s pulling away from her again, putting everything he was leaking back behind his careful walls, trying to push it back inside where he thinks they can’t see it. “Why were you over here?”
She forces a smile and lets him have the distraction. Maybe that’s better than letting him keep stewing in these awful memories. “Oh, I was just looking for a painting Mom wanted to put up in her corner. Thought I’d surprise her with it.”
Five nods. He sniffs quickly and clears his throat, still working to put himself back together. “Is it a big painting? Do you need help?”
“Yeah, that would be great. Thanks, Five.” Allison waits until he moves, for him to uncurl and slide off his perch, before she stands. She’s not sure how long she’d been sitting with Five but she is a little stiff from how she’d had to hold herself to stay balanced on the slim bench. “Come on, I think it’s in this room over here.” She starts back down the hall, to the first room, and listens for the soft sounds of Five’s stockinged footsteps behind her.
They find the painting. It is not large enough to warrant two people to carry it.
Five still follows her back to the main part of the house and where the rest of the family is.