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I.
Five doesn’t want to believe it's really them until he has to, but he recognizes his siblings the second he sees them, dead or not, grown up or not. It’s easy, as if he saw them as adults just yesterday and not as kids years and maybe a day ago both.
For a moment after seeing Klaus and his tattoo, Five just stumbles around doing absolutely nothing of use, aching and unsure, throat burning as he breathes in ashes. His chest hurts.
“What do I do?” Five asks, and he could be asking either thin air or the mannequin he found in the wreckage of a Gimbel Brothers. “I should bury them.”
For half a useless second he worries it’s a little crazy to talk to a mannequin, but he’ll go nuts if he can’t hear even his own voice, and it feels better to talk to something. He liked its eyes. The way they’re painted on makes him feel like it’s looking at him. “You’re supposed to bury dead people,” he says. His mouth tastes like copper and salt, and it makes him want to puke, but he swallows it down.
There’s rubble everywhere, and when Five looks at the rocks on his siblings they look so heavy that he wants to cry.
But Five isn’t weak, and so he stumbles back over to Luther and starts trying to pry a rock off of him.
Luther’s so big. He’s always been the biggest, and he stayed that way. He grew up huge, and when Five gives up on the rock and just tries to pull Luther out from under the rubble, he doesn’t even budge. Five’s head is buzzing. His vision is blurry. His breathing is ragged. For the first time, he wishes he had a power that wasn’t his, wishes he had Luther’s strength.
Five tries to move Diego next, and then Klaus, and then Allison, but they’re all so heavy, and the rocks on them just make it worse. Five’s going to have to dig straight through the rubble. What if they rot before he can get them out? Before he can bury them? Where’s he supposed to bury them?
Five is very, very smart. He’s sure he’s being silly, he’s sure there’s a way to use his powers to fix this and he’s probably feeling so weak because the ashes are going to his head, but any ideas he might have get eaten up in the roaring in his brain. His head feels all cottony, and he’s crying. He never cries. The others cry sometimes, but not him. That’s for kids, it’s for stupid kids.
He lets out a sob and starts digging through the rocks again, the ones on Klaus this time. Klaus is the one with the least rubble on him.
Night falls, and Klaus is mostly uncovered, and at some point Five passes out. The only reason he knows that is because he wakes up, and when he wakes up his mind is a tiny, tiny bit clearer, and he thinks very hard about what to do with his siblings. He knows he should walk away, but he also knows he’s not going to, and so the choice is eliminated.
You bury dead people, Five said yesterday, but when he looks around him, he sees the smoking remains of building after building, and it clicks: he was wrong. You don’t always bury dead people, and if his siblings had died at some other point in time, they’d have been cremated.
“Gasoline,” he says to the mannequin. “I need gasoline.”
It’s not hard to find. Scavenging won’t be as hard as it could be, he supposes, with nobody else out there.
What happened?
A mass extinction event, clearly. The only reason Five’s not dead is because he time traveled to after whatever happened. Lucky, lucky him.
It takes a while to slog back from his gasoline trip to his personal Ground Zero. By the time he does, the smell when he gets close enough to Luther to pour gasoline on him and his surroundings makes him puke.
(After death, the organs start liquifying. Then, a few days later, the body starts bloating and the tissue decomposes and it smells fucking terrible, and that’s where Five’s siblings are, in the stages of decomposition. That’s where most everyone around him is.)
The smell of the gasoline is strong enough to overpower the smell of their rotting bodies, which Five notes. Maybe he can pour gasoline on a rag and put it over his face while nature takes its toll on all the bodies around him, because already the dirty oxygen is taking on a sickly sweet smell.
This is what Five thinks about while he pours gasoline all over, keeping it off of his hands and clothes without thinking.
In the back of his mind, Five knows he should say something before he burns them, but he doesn’t. He feels hollowed out. The only things in him are his brain and his heart beating all over his body.
After pouring out at least four cans of gasoline, linking all of the disparate bodies together so that the fire will touch them all, Five goes to the outskirts of the destruction and tosses a match right at Luther’s blue-green face.
Woosh. Luther goes up in flames, and soon the fire is raging out of control.
Five runs, grabs his stuff and runs far and fast until he’s coughing so hard he thinks his throat is bleeding and the fire is far enough in the distance that it won’t hurt him.
He watches it, and he wishes it had hurt him. He wishes his survival skills hadn’t overpowered him when the fire got too hot. Throwing matches at gasoline—it was stupid and he should’ve been burned alive, should’ve died like stupid people do, but he didn’t.
He considers, for a moment, telling the survival instincts that have been programmed into him to shove off and walking right back up to the burning bodies of his siblings, the spreading fire, and walking into the middle of it. Dying with them.
The idea of living all alone in this destroyed world makes him sick. He’d rather join the other four than be alone, he’d rather—
Five’s brain suddenly pauses, and his sadness is shoved away by realization.
The other four.
Five, like any other genius, has moments of epiphany, but this one is shamefully mundane, though he’s too excited to feel like an idiot, which is a rather unfamiliar feeling to him anyway.
There are seven Hargreeves siblings.
Five called out for Vanya, he called out for Ben, and neither of them answered, but he didn’t see them there. He didn’t see them dead.
Five turns to the mannequin and says, “They’re still out there!”
(Everyone in the world is dead. Five should be smart enough to extrapolate that from the situation he’s in.)
They’re still out there.
Five walks away from the fire.
II.
Five eats whatever he can find when he’s hungry enough, and tries really hard not to think about how much he misses his mom’s cooking.
He writes equations on any relatively intact pieces of walls he finds. There are equations for everything, maybe there are equations for going back in time. At the very least he thinks that there may be ones that’ll help him go through space more effectively. That’ll help him look for Vanya and Ben. He misses them. A part of him that should feel guilty but doesn’t is glad that they’re the ones who made it, especially Vanya. He likes talking to Vanya. He’s going to be glad to talk to her again, to catch up.
Days and days and then weeks pass, and Five is still in his dirty uniform. He needs new clothes. He’s pretty sure that the mannequin, who he’s named Delores because he kept hearing the name in his head when he looked at it, would agree. Five thinks that clothes must be very important to mannequins.
Curled up in the gutted ruins of a building, Five looks at Delores next to him and says, “I don’t know what they look like anymore.”
He could swear that Delores’ brow furrows a little.
“I mean, I don’t know what Vanya and Ben look like anymore,” he explains, and Delores’ expression smooths out. “But I’ve guessed. I think I have a pretty good idea of what they look like now, how they would’ve grown. Like how they can age up missing kids. I did that in my head.” Five takes a deep breath against the rag—this one not soaked in gasoline, which turned out to go right to his head—around his face. He stares up at the dark sky and says, “They have to be alive.”
In his mind, he knows it’s next to impossible. Something cataclysmic happened. He hasn’t been able to reach anyone anywhere, hasn’t found a single living person. He tunes radios into every possible frequency, and it’s all white noise. The white noise is invading his skull, buzzing around like bees, and Ben and Vanya can’t possibly be alive, and there is no reason for Five to look for them. He shouldn’t be writing equations with the goal of finding them. He should just be calculating for his own survival, and he should really start on figuring out how to time travel again.
And yet he still thinks, Maybe if I go farther, maybe if I go somewhere more hidden, I’ll find them.
“I know they’re alive,” he explains to Delores. “That’s the thing. It doesn’t make sense right now, but look at how many scientific theories didn't seem to make sense at first! I can prove it. I’ll prove it when I find them.”
The mannequin looks at him blankly, and he suspects that it doesn’t have much faith in his words.
III.
The blue gash in the universe closes behind him, and Five is in what’s left of the library. His lips quirk up in a smile. “I used to come here all the time,” he tells Delores. “I’d sneak out with Vanya.”
“That sounds nice,” Delores offers in her soft voice, and his smile grows bittersweet.
“It was.” He takes a deep breath and says, “But I have to work. There have to be books around here that can help me. You’re right—I can’t learn everything myself.”
He’s very glad that Delores decided to start talking to him. She makes a lot of good points, and he’s much less lonely now, even though sometimes he thinks she’s hiding things from him too.
He walks through the stacks of books, ignoring the ones that are torn up beyond repair and the Harlequin novels, unless...“Do you like romance novels?” he asks Delores. “I could pick some up for you.”
She lets out a huff. “Don’t stereotype. I much prefer detective novels.”
Five chuckles. “Didn’t mean to offend. Detective novels it is.” He keeps an eye out for them as he goes back to his search for books that may help him in his quest to save the world, and maybe his other quest, the one that’s faded to the back of his mind, to find Vanya and Ben.
He finds a couple of books that may be of help to him before he stumbles on something that stops him cold.
Vanya Hargreeves, the spine of the dusty paperback reads, and Five’s breath catches. He wonders if he’s imagining things, if it’s one of those moments where he shoots a stick thinking it’s a snake or sees one of his dead siblings out of the corner of his eye. He swallows heavily, and takes the book from its shelf.
With trembling fingers, he looks at the cover, and he lets out a strangled little sound he’s never made before.
It’s Vanya. On the cover of the book, it’s Vanya. She looks just like she did when he left her behind. He rubs his thumb over the dust on the cover. Extra Ordinary: My Life as Number Seven. Five smiles. Of course Vanya would choose the one good pun in existence as a title.
He turns to Delores, who is watching him with her usual even look, and he says, “Vanya wrote a book!”
Her eyes widen in surprise.
“I know,” Five says, grinning. “And it’s a memoir. It’s a tell-all.”
This is the closest he’s ever going to get to his family again, a little voice in his head tells him, but he ignores it, and turns the book over. A shaky breath escapes him as he looks at the photograph on the back. It’s Vanya again.
Vanya, grown up. The same age as the siblings he saw dead and broken months ago. Five blinks dust away from his eyes, sits down, and reads.
The book is vicious, and he’s so proud. Maybe he’s prouder than he would be if she’d been vicious towards him, but she wasn’t, and he’s glad. He was always afraid she hated him for leaving her.
Then the book tears his world apart in just a few words, leaving him scrambling to stitch it back up into something he can live with.
He must not look well, because Delores asks, “What’s wrong?”
Five takes a few short, shaky breaths, and finally is able to say, “Ben is dead. He’s dead. He was already dead by the time the others died.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”
Flowing through her words, he can hear an undercurrent of I’m not surprised.
Neither is he, because it’s the world he lives in, isn’t it? A world where it’s just him and Delores and the animals and the ghosts and monsters and voices, and Delores tells him not to be silly, that the voices and the visions aren’t real, and he believes her.
Swallowing the lump in his throat, Five goes to a calm, cold, quiet place inside of himself, and turns back to his book. Ben is dead. Such is life. “Maybe Vanya’s still out there, though,” he suggests casually.
“Maybe,” Delores agrees, but he can hear it in her voice that she doesn’t think so, that she thinks his hope is so pathetic that she's willing to humor him.
He lets her.
IV.
Five scribbles numbers in the margins of the book. He has notebooks, and he has the walls, but Extra Ordinary is his favorite to write in when he’s working on the really important things. The time travel things.
At the very least he and Delores agree that with his powers, with what he knows he can do, and with his mind evolving, someday he actually may be able to go back in time. Save the world, even.
Five stares at the back of Vanya’s book, at her face, all grown up. She’s older in that photograph than he is now, but he’s starting to feel like he’s catching up. He wonders if her hair’s going gray, if her skin isn’t so smooth anymore, if she still has the same smile. He can’t remember her smile. He wishes she’d smiled for the photograph. She’ll smile when she sees him again, though, he’s sure of it.
Assuming, of course, that she’s still alive, and the inevitable truth gnaws on his mind like a rat. “She could be anywhere,” he tells Delores, who is sitting across from him. “It hasn’t been that long, I haven’t looked in every possible place yet.”
But in all the places he looks, there’s no one, and if even his siblings couldn’t survive the apocalypse, why would Vanya? She was special to him, the only one of his siblings who was ever really capable of intellectually stimulating him, but in the end, she was as ordinary as anybody else. Her book made that quite clear.
She’s worth holding out hope for, Five tells himself, but in his bones he knows that that's just not true anymore.
Five is not an impractical person, and hope is not always an impractical thing, as long as it’s not pointless. For example, the possibility of going back in time someday, of the equations he can’t stop writing finally doing something for him, that’s not an impractical hope. That’s a genuine possibility.
But Vanya isn’t a genuine possibility. Even if she’d somehow made it through the end of everything, it’s been years. She wasn’t like Five, she wouldn’t have been able to survive all on her own, and he’s been thinking it for years.
He’s thinking about Vanya in past tense, he notes. Just like he started thinking about everyone but Vanya and Ben in past tense after finding Luther and Klaus and Diego and Allison's bodies.
His mind rolls and shudders, and when he turns his head he sees Allison, grown-up Allison, give him a little wave. He shakes his head and Allison is dead and gone again. Frustration rises in his throat and he wonders whether he’s thinking clearly. Maybe Vanya is alive. Allison isn’t, and yet Five just saw her.
Five needs another opinion on this. A real opinion.
He knows Delores won’t judge him for this, but he still makes sure his voice doesn’t shake when he finally asks her, “Do you think Vanya’s still out there?”
The silence stretches out for what seems a very long time, and Five frowns, looking up at Delores. She looks back at him with sad eyes, and he knows that, for a change of pace, she’s reluctant to answer. She doesn’t want to hurt him, but Five is already hurt, he’s cut up and sunburnt and skinned alive, and he finally got up the strength to ask the question, to willingly consult with the only other being in the world on his level, and he’s tired of pretending. “Tell me,” Five insists. “I need to hear it, Delores. Do you? Do you think Vanya’s still out there?”
Delores’ painted eyes shine, her red lips curve downwards. “No,” she says, her voice as gentle as a lullaby. “No, I don’t think so.”
Five knew she was going to say that. He knows that she never did believe that Vanya was alive. It’s why he never asked point blank.
The answer still hurts like a rusty nail through his heart, but he bites his tongue to keep himself from spitting that hurt at Delores, from lashing out. She’s just being honest. Indeed, she’s saying what he wanted her to say, because life just keeps going and going and Luther is dead and Allison is dead and Klaus is dead and Ben is dead and Vanya is dead and so is any hope for the future.
Five knows it, and he decides that he can’t bring himself to care anymore.
He still wishes he’d found Vanya in the rubble with the others, wishes he’d lit her up with the rest of them. It’s a terrible thing to think, but Five is a terrible thing and always has been. He is a terrible thing and he is not a child anymore and he has to stop halfheartedly assuming Vanya is alive. Five can’t afford to have even half a heart, and it’s time to tear it out and stomp it into the ground like a cockroach and eat it and let his stomach acid burn it all away.
Do you think Vanya’s still out there?
No. No, I don’t think so.
He tells Delores, “Neither do I.”