#I ran the car we were both in into a tree :3c oops

[in-tua-deep]

After all that time alone in the apocalypse do you think Five has some weird habits? He was just a kid and there must have been a a lot of free time. So maybe he has games that he played to pass the time. Or strange rituals. And his other siblings find it sad because the games are for 1 person and the rituals involve warding off death and destruction. And they can see how much of Five is still a kid.

oh ABSOLUTELY i mean humans in general tend to develop rituals no matter what - do you have a ‘spot’ on the couch or at the dinner table? Or in a class without a seating chart do you have a specific seat or a general area you sit in? There’s other things people do - my sister can’t sleep without closing the closet door, sometimes when I’m out walking I’ll watch my feet and won’t step on the cracks for fun, I know people who would touch a statue on campus before exams for good luck, someone gave my some little lucky cats and my first two years of college I would tuck them in my pocket and take them to particularly difficult exams

(my sister’s last year overlapped with my first and she would steal those little cats and take them to her exams as well - we almost got into an actual fight when we both had tough exams scheduled on the same day during finals week lmao)

But like can you imagine you spend forty years at the end of the world, depending on if Five stayed in the same general and familiar area or if he kept traveling instead of remaining stationary colors the world - because if he stayed in the same general area, he got used to it exactly like it was.

He got to know the city, knows it in ruins. Can tell exactly where he is by a particular piece of rubble. And all of his rituals would be right there. So there’s the little superstitions - don’t go into certain areas when it’s dark outside or being wary of particular spots

(his brother saw ghosts, they exist, and sometimes he thinks he can hear them - billions of people died that day. the world is haunted by the restless dead, and five can’t help but be wary.)

there are the practical rituals which are out of place in a modern world - like perhaps Five automatically boiling water before drinking it because of course he would? The water isn’t safe otherwise?

(He spent longer watching out for contaminated water than he even spent drinking clean water from a tap)

maybe he forgets about some creature comforts - a lot of his missions were very far back in history. Maybe Kennedy was the most ‘recent’ his missions ran. Maybe he forgets to turn the lights on because he forgets there’s working electricity and is content to work in the dark by the light of the window. I mean, at least he has four sheltering walls, right? That’s enough of a relief to begin with he doesn’t need electricity

maybe he makes offerings

i for one am particularly fond of the idea of Five taking his pages of failed equations and folding them into little origami offerings to the maths gods or whatever ;3c

of course he doesn’t offer food because that’s hard enough to come by, and Five doesn’t really believe in gods (or at least not in any merciful ones) but it makes him feel a bit better anyway. 

(maybe he made graves for his siblings. sometimes he would pick up something that was undeniably Klaus or Luther or Vanya and he would automatically pocket it, to deposit at their graves when he circled back around to them. Just little things he thought they might like in life. It reminded him of his mission, and was a small affirmation to himself that he hadn’t forgotten about them. 

By the end of the forty years of isolation, their graves are covered in too many knick knacks to count. Years upon years of evidence that Five never went a day without thinking about them.

He wonders if the same could be said in reverse, when he falls out of time forty five years and seventeen years after he left. He’d like to think so but - 

He knows they didn’t.)

maybe that habit keeps over. He sees something in a store that reminds him of one of his siblings and he just grabs it, no hesitation. Born out of habit. Except it’s not like he can just give it to them when they’re alive - he can’t show that level of weakness and attachment, right? 

and frankly a lot of them are probably like ?? toys? and shiny things? and lipgloss? the kinds of things teenagers would like, because they might have been adults when he found them at the end of the world but that’s not who they were to him

so he picks up the half a billion bobbie pins for Allison who was experimenting with her hair and seemed to lose them everywhere. He picks up makeup in glitter and bright colors because that’s what Klaus adores (and probably still does as an adult tbh). He picks up the toys you find in happy meals, the kind that ended up in the dumpster underneath his room that provided some of the only toys they ever got to play with as kids.

(He never did have a body for Vanya’s grave, but he leaves her the sheet music he finds with the rest of the siblings graves as well. But that’s not all, because Vanya was never just the music kid to him. He leaves her flowers pressed between the pages of books, leaves maps of the world and atlases and guidebooks for vacations of far away places. 

Vanya used to sit on his bed and smile about the sights she told him she’d see one day, fingers tracing across the wonders of the world with longing in the encyclopedias which counted among their permitted reading materials. She wants to play her violin at every corner of the world, to learn the music of every culture.)

and the GAMES. I mean, there’s what kids always do - climb on shit. I remember as a kid I was up trees whenever I could get away with it and if there were mountains of rubble everywhere I would be on that shit so fast

but of course there’s the bodies to contend with because there were people in those building and if you move and rubble swings up like a see-saw and lets out the wonderful odor of rotting flesh with the added bonus of crunching bones and bodies so maybe not

but all kids play, but it’s not quite right that he only played games for one person because to him he wasn’t alone - he had Dolores. I Spy and twenty questions and a million other games you probably played in the back of a car. Maybe he makes games of finding certain amounts of things. Find seven yellow cars in the ruins of the world and he allows himself to eat the bag of mostly melted gummy bears he unearthed

it’s like a permanent treasure hunt or hand made bingo cards - there aren’t really prizes except a weird sense of satisfaction and wasted time 

though i’m not sure so much about free time in the apocalypse since there’s always something that needs to be done since Five is living alone with no one to help. Gathering food. Gathering water. Locating or making a shelter. Finding writing materials. Finding physics/mathematical texts to see if there’s anything to help him. Doing those calculations. Basic scavenging. Doing general chores - boiling water to drink and washing clothes and gathering firewood and doing any repairs to his belongings or his bike

there’s honestly probably always something to do to keep him busy, even if that thing is trying to do maths until his eyeballs bleed because he’s determined to figure out how to get back in time

and he probably does keep busy because otherwise all he has to do is think about what an absolutely godawful situation he’s in and the fact that his entire ass family, along with the rest of the world, is dead

but when he’s scavenging he keeps an eye out for records (maybe he’ll put them at Luther’s grave later) and music players and fancy wine and picnic blankets because his most elaborate game is for the simplest reason

the game is to pretend that Dolores is alive, and the reason is loneliness

(the game is to pretend that someone is there for him, that someone loves him, that he isn’t completely and totally alone in the universe.)

honestly though the siblings kind of took Dolores in stride (though to be fair if any of them focused on anything except their own personal problems that might have been different oops) so they probably take most of Five’s weirdest and most cry worthy habits in stride as well??

I miss Dolores I hope she shows up in s2 :((