Chapter Text
So, there’s something Five once read in the Apocalypse, between rubble and ashes and the delightful smile Delores got when he did things for her. There’s something about the moon and there’s something about a child and it doesn’t make sense until he rereads it for a third time. Eyes straining to read over the burnt pages and the last part entirely intelligible.
The first strophe goes like this:
The moon came to the forge
with her skirt of white, fragrant flowers.
The young boy watches her, watches.
The boy is watching her.
Five recalls the biography at the end of the book, of a writer that lived a hundred years ago and died too young. Of a tragic romance and a life of creativity.
He made poems for a painter and the painter reflected him into his works and the poet was killed at the beginning of a Civil War*. And then they called it friendship and platonic love and Delores laughed about it for so long that if she were human her cheeks would hurt.
And it’s meaningless, in face of everything around them. Five really doesn't have time for it, not between equations that seem to go nowhere and looking for shelter and barely edible food.
But Dolores liked the poems and there’s not a lot of things he can deny her. So in his searches he made sure to have an open eye for books that he normally wouldn’t have looked at twice or pulled at his memory and told her the ones they learned at the Academy, the ones that made Diego roll his eyes and Luther smile into his sleeve. The ones Ben shared with them and then stopped out of shame.
Delores liked those, even letting out a small laugh at the anecdotes that went with them, but she’s always been obvious about her favorite, about the one that always makes her smile even in the darkest moods, even* if they don’t know the ending.
"Can you tell me the one about luna again, mi amor ?" She would ask, when the world around them was dark, dark, dark, years after the fire extinguished and they couldn't see each other.
He would crack a smile, pulling the wounds in chapped lips that he barely registered anymore and turn his head at the sound of her voice.
"You always want that one." He would answer, throat closing* and tightening his hold on her hand, so she would know he's not mad.
"It 's about us!"
"Is it?" He would ask, barely a whisper before pulling her into his arms and begin to recite the poem he memorized a long time ago.
The walls of his childhood room are covered in probabilities, his hands are dripping blood and the world around him is covered in ash.
Those three are and aren’t true at the same time, but who’s to say?
Five doesn’t have the time for that, not when the clock is ticking and he’s running out of grains. The world is in balance and the only person that can stop it from becoming a wasteland is him, but the numbers in front of him don’t make sense and they weren’t the ones he was writing a second ago.
Luther is also here, in the doorway looking spooked and Five’s not sure when he arrived. Time’s slipping from his fingers and this has already happened; his eyes scan the room, looking for Delores, but she’s not there and Luther is still staring at him.
“The world,” he starts to say, but something is wrong, a piece not sliding into place and he frowns at his chalk covered hands.
His brother looks like someone kicked his puppy, eyebrows downturn, sagged posture and almost glassy eyes.
“The world it’s fine,” he says softly, like he’s soothing a child and Five bristles. “We stopped the Apocalypse, remember?”
Five scowls, something like panic rising into his chest and he turns to look at the calculations scrabbled in the walls. They’re not right, these are not the probability maps he was turning over and over in his head, it’s something else he’s having trouble putting together. He turns to Luther again.
“Today is the fifth of june 2019.” He says, earnest eyes locking with his own, it makes him want to tear his skin open, it makes him want to dive for cover. “We’re at the Academy.”
He shakes his head and turns to the calculations written in chalk and sharpie that must be his, that has no memory of. Delores is not here, she was on the chair a moment ago, wasn’t she? Telling him to look for another solution besides killing innocent people, but he was trying not to listen. Killing innocents it’s what he does. She knows that.
Luther walks inside the room, looking hesitant only for a second before lowering his hand on Five’s shoulder. It’s the touch that does it; he gasps, feeling like his head is full of bees trying to assert dominance and the piece slaps into place by force alone.
It’s the math for turning time to the beginning of the week. A preventive measure.
“Fifth of june.” Five echoes, looking at the calendar he keeps on his nightstand and the five there stares back at him mockingly.
It’s the math he works through every week since they stopped the Apocalypse two months ago. Equation figured out in Dallas, changing only in account of the new variables, it takes him less time than it should for all the work he put into it. For all the decades he spent scrabbling in burnt books and collapsed walls.
He’s been living in the Academy ever since.
He sits down in his bed and lowers his face to hide in his hands. He’s sweating through his clothes and he wants nothing more than to take a shower and pass out for a little while.
But nothing is ever that easy for him and there’s a weight that dips his cushion almost comically where Luther sits down. He feels so fucking small next to him. Luther places his hand on his arm again after a few seconds, so gently it rounds all the way to painful, but Five stays right where he is and lets it burn him.
“A nightmare?” Luther asks.
Five lowers his hands and stares at the hand resting on his arm. “Something like that.”