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“I had a feeling I would find you here.” The sound of Reginald’s footsteps thunder in Five’s ears. They always do.
“You know you can’t win, right?” Reginald asks as he takes a seat besides Five on the cold, hard concrete steps.
“Maybe,” Five admits. “But you can’t either.”
~
When Five is young, young enough that his powers haven’t come in and his father lacks even a passing interest in him and his siblings, he learns how to play chess. He learns it from books and articles on technique and he practices with a robot mother who lacks human unpredictability but benefits from more knowledge than he could ever hope to contain. He always loses, but he keeps playing, secure in the knowledge that one day, he’ll improve.
It takes a while, but eventually, he starts to win as often as he loses.
When his father notices his hobby, a mere week after he develops his powers, he makes Five stop his weekly games with his mother and begin to play with him instead. Reginald is different in how he played. Every move is calculated yes, but some risks that Grace would never have made are deemed reasonable while ones she would have taken are unacceptable.
Five starts losing again. Then months and years pass and he progresses. He wins half his games and loses the others. Then, he wins half and the others end in a stalemate.
He never loses a game again.
~
There is no chess in the apocalypse. No reasonable risk or acceptable losses. Everything is hot and fast and dangerous and there is no room for a stalemate. Stalemates are merely delaying death.
The apocalypse teaches him a lot, namely that failure is unacceptable.
~
When the Commission takes him in, he thinks he’ll return to chess. He thinks that the rules will return and things will make sense again. Things will be different, of course, he will play differently, play new people, but the game will remain the same.
The Handler doesn’t play chess though, she plays Go. Where chess was a game of elimination, of ridding the board of your opponent, Go is about conquering. The Handler is about conquering. Even as he works under her, killing who she wants killed he works against her, trying to return home, but for every obstacle he eliminates she would merely take control of more and place them in his way.
Go, for all that it is just as much strategy as chess is, is not Five’s game. He’s always preferred to take an enemy out rather than to manipulate a board. Still, it isn’t feasible to kill the Handler while he works for the Commission so when the time comes he merely jumps back to his own time.
There will be plenty of pawns to take out later.
~
Forgetting to remove the tracker is an error, a mistake Five cannot afford to make. He hasn’t played chess since he was a child and since then he’s spent literal decades in a lawless world. He’s gone soft, lost his ability to strategize. He’s playing Go when it should be chess.
He kills all of the agents the Commission sent to the dinner, and he gets to work. The sooner he gets things in motion, the better.
Digging the tracker out of his arm is nothing. Crushing it beneath his shoe is satisfying, but it would have been more so if he’d acted sooner. He’s behind now. He made the wrong initial move and now he needs to correct himself.
~
Vanya doesn’t believe him. He tells her the truth and she doesn’t believe him. Another miscalculation, one he doesn’t have time to deal with.
He’d been hoping that he could use her as a knight, to jump the obstacles he can’t get through in his child’s body. He grimaces and sends her to bed before fleeing in the night. He can’t afford distractions, not now.
~
Using Klaus to get the information is a risk, one that would’ve paid off were it not for the fact that his timeline is off and the eye hasn’t been sold yet. A dark, deep rage builds within him at this.
All these years of chess and Go and games, and for what? To lose to time, an element that he should be able to control?
Five is done. He’s done with games.
~
In the apocalypse, peeling the prosthetic eye out of Luther’s hand, Five doesn’t think about chess. He doesn’t think about the long game, or how to get himself in a position to act on the evidence he’s found. That comes later, it comes with the Commission. When Five pockets the eye he isn’t plotting, he’s running on instinct.
It’s the same force that tells him to grab his siblings hands and jump through time with five other people and a ghost. It’s the same instinct that tells him to stop playing chess and to just act, that sometimes there is no grand plan, only the ability to react.