#attempted canon-compliant angst featuring a bunch of the emotionally stunted man-children

[circumstellars]

Hello there! Can I have a ficlet with dialogue prompt, 'What's making him scream like that?' for Five and Diego, or any siblings you like ;)

[Ok so this turned out slightly longer than intended, but I was able to blend it together with another idea I had for a follow up to this ficlet.

The context is that this is canon compliant in that it happens somewhere near the end of S1EP4, when passed out drunk Five is recovering in Diego’s bed.

Basically Five has an PTSD episode, or a night terror if that’s easier, and the line you prompted I rearranged and altered a bit to fit the scene, so I hope that’s okay?

In this addition to the canon, when they were little Ben begins to have trouble controlling the otherworldly monster he uses, and Five has made a promise he won’t let things get out of hand. Fast forward to S1, where Luther and Diego are taking care of him, but before Al comes to deliver Eudora’s message, and it is sandwiched between two Five apocalypse flashbacks.

So so so many thanks to @michlle, or @/kkie on TUA Adult Fan Discord server. She’s an amazing beta that helped me in a pinch! So the only reason my grammar is so much better than usual is entirely thanks to her.

Very angsty. Blood, just a snippet a violence. Brotherly pain all around, emotional suffering. Enjoy! I hope you like it.]

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⟨p⟩=md⟨x⟩/dt=mddt∫∞−∞x|ψ|2dx=m∫∞−∞x∂|ψ|2∂tdx.­­­ 'It's a simple fucking equation, what is wrong?' His shaky fingers struggled with the chalk, accidentally snapping off one end against the concrete wall. Five swore, making a face at the broken piece of chalk like it spoke ill of his mother.

Oh god. Mom.  His face crumpled. 'The expectation values of displacement and momentum... obey time evolution equations analogous with,' a wet cough interrupted his deflated musing. He spun around and rested against the concrete he had been writing on moments before, before turning an eye to Dolores. '... the mechanics of Schrödinger’s equation.'  Dolores gave him a weary look. Five avoided her gaze. She didn't know. It's not like she had been forced to pick up quantum physics at age ten, and really, he had to forgive her for that.  The sun was powerful today, as it had been at least seventeen of the twenty-six days he'd been stuck in the apocalyptic ruins of his former city. It should have only been the end of April, if that newspaper clipping he held close was in fact the last thing to have been printed, but it felt hotter than middle July easily. The aggressive winds of mid-afternoon whipped all sorts of debris into his frail body and any exposed skin, and Five simply couldn't risk any injuries that could deplete his energy. He was on the cusp of fixing this, he could feel it in his exhausted bones.

He swallowed down the start of a painful sob, careful to steel over his expression. 'I know you said something about the farthest right term Dolores, but I'm not neglecting it,' Five chided, breathing into the dirty scarf around his face.

He turned around and scooped up the chalk he had rejected moments ago. 'The spatial extent of the particle wavefunction isn't smaller than the variation length-scale of the potential. You're clever, and pretty, but not that clever.' 

Five snorted at his own banter, smiling into the trails of chalk spilling from his hand as it ran across the rubble. 'Now, listen carefully this time...' --- Diego unceremoniously dropped Dolores on a nearby chair.  The fuck is this for?  He gave the mannequin an odd look. A few steps away Luther lowered their brother carefully into Diego's roomy, luxurious twin cot, rolling the sleepy, drunken Five so that he was resting comfortably on his side. 

Diego sidled next to Luther, joining him in looking over their tiny brother. Small, frozen in time for them both in memory and now, awkwardly, in reality too. The baby fat still very much clung to his still rounded features and made him look impossibly younger in a way that brought nostalgia roaring up the esophagus like heartburn. He was supposedly twice their age now? Diego scrunched his nose; to think this child, for all intents and purposes, laid here so serenely- so sweetly, dare he say it, looked like a boy who'd just tired himself out at school that day. Yet he knew, the moment Five sobered up, the illusion would crumble swiftly and without mercy. 'Funny, if I didn't know he was such a prick, I'd say he looks almost adorable in his sleep.' 

Luther snorted. 'Well, don't worry. He'll sober up eventually... and be back to his normal, unpleasant self.'

That's not good enough. 'Yeah - I can't wait that long.' Diego spun on his heel, intending to grab provisions. Five had about ten minutes of rest before Diego would be ready to forcibly pull him into consciousness with soda crackers and ginger-ale. 'I need to find out what connections he has to these lunatics before someone else dies.'

Luther didn't respond right away, eyes flickering to Five and back. He looked pensive, uncomfortable. Diego still hadn’t gotten used to the subtle changes in Luther's personality; it was disquieting the way he looks so much bigger than he used to, and yet now he seems so much smaller to Diego than he ever physically was. The big man had an air of constant uncertainty around him.

'That stuff he was saying before...' Luther began after a moment, 'what do you think he meant by that?' Diego glanced over his shoulder at Five's sleeping figure, curled up tightly in foetal position. His expression darkened in his sleep, and Diego frowned. 'I don't know...' The words came slowly, his focus narrowing in on his littlest brother. He turned quickly again, box of soda crackers forgotten on his dingy counter.

Five began to fuss, still unconscious, but his body began to shake some, and his entire expression was pinched in discomfort. Luther was watching Diego, puzzled, and followed his eyes back to Five on the cot behind him.

Then came the screaming.

Both Luther and Diego jumped back in alarm as the most harrowing, stomach-churning scream came from Five. He was folded into himself, clutching at his own biceps so hard his knuckles were bone-white. The screams that were coming from him sounded so raw Diego was sure he was damaging his vocal cords in some way.

Luther came down from his initial shock quicker than Diego and was at the cot in an instant. Diego held his breath, jaw fighting to unhinge. He was always quick in his reflexes, but something held Diego down and glued his feet to the floor. His body was alarmingly stiff with inaction.

Luther was gripping at Five, holding him as he jerked back and forth, scream after scream tearing through his rattled body. Over and over Luther tried to talk over Five, wake him up, continuously asking him what is wrong and 'what is happening Five? Can't you hear me?'

'W-ww-why is h-h-h-he screaming like t-that?'

Diego’s broken voice was swallowed up in the cacophony of Five's agonising wailing and Luther's panicked mantra of Five, Five, Please Five, Five!

Five's painful screams were tearing bloody wounds into Diego’s eardrums, and the sound of his little brother in such convincingly raw misery pulled terrifying tremors up from deep within his belly.

Go.

What happened?

Iego.

Five?

'-Iego. Diego! Diego!' Luther's voice hit him like an anvil. 'Hey?'

Why is he screaming like that?

All at once life moved forward with a start. Air sucked its way back into Diego's lungs and his attention snapped to his brothers. Five was no longer on the bed, but crumpled over on their large brother's lap, clutching not his own arms anymore but instead had all ten, trembling fingers gripped into Luther's jacket for absolute, dear life. Luther had a pained expression etched into his normally hard visage, and his arms came up to hold Five in place as gently as Diego had ever seen his giant brother move. It only dawned on him then, that Five wasn't screaming anymore.

Diego moved quietly, setting himself on the bed next to his brothers as silently as he could, almost as if he were afraid to spook an already terrified deer pinned between a rocky ledge and an oncoming truck. 

Mindlessly Diego laid his gloved hand to his little brother's head, cupping the back of it gingerly. Something heavy threatened to pull his heart into his guts, and the struggle disguised itself in the shadows of his expression.

For a while everything was deadly quiet. The pipes in the old building gurgled apropos nothing, the boxing business outside long closed for the evening with only Al's occasional footsteps any sure sign life still existed outside this hole he called home.

Diego couldn't hear much else, aside from the ragged breaths shaking Five's small chest. His eyes were still closed, creased with concern, delicate fans of black eyelashes twitching as his brain worked through whatever dark secrets Five hadn’t dared to yet share with any of his siblings. 

'Five...' but Diego’s voice aborted the words in his throat, and he met Luther's eyes. He found no answers.

What did you see, Five?

--- Day 42.

A rat scampered past Five’s feet and jumped into a pile of debris outside the remains of a nearby fast-food joint. He shaded his eyes with his left hand and looked over the large expanse of the now lifeless tundra he used to call home. The details of everything in the distance dissolved into the intensely hot horizon.

‘Today is as good a day as any,’ he said, exhaling loudly. Dolores agreed from where she was perched in her wagon. I’m ready.

Five ripped off his weighty, layered scarf and tossed it to the ground.  Today is the day. He was going to get back to his family.

He took another deep breath and ran over some calculations a final time in his head, his eyebrows pinching together with determination. Focus.

First, just a hum. Then, a moment later a spark. Five growled and redoubled his efforts, tightening his fists as hard as they would go, until the jagged half-moons of his nails cut right into the flesh of his palms. 

‘Come on!’  And then it appeared. Small, at first, but definitely, absolutely, positively the start of the vortex, undeniable as it began flickering into existence. It was immediately apparent Five couldn’t do this for a second longer than he had to; every muscle in his body was desperately working to help him rip a hole right into the material of the space-time continuum, and pain blossomed in every limb, one after another.

‘COME ON!’  The air around the wormhole became unstable, trying to escape the vacuum and whipping everything around Five into a frenzy. Dolores tipped over in her wagon, and Five nearly lost his grip on the material of time. He willed himself into ignoring her momentarily, letting out a howl as he pulled open the vortex as far as it would go. Five inhaled shakily, and let go.

I did it. There it was. He was finally going home.  Five’s knees nearly buckled underneath him as he was hit with a heady wave of excitement and relief. Luther. Vanya. Ben! Diego-- all of them. He was going to see them all again, today. Now. Tears spilt from his eyes, but he didn’t take any notice. There were flickers of life beyond the vortex, and then faces, and bodies, and Allison and Klaus, unmistakable as they filtered in and out of focus like the signal was dying on an old television set.  Five was animated in an instant and turned to grab Dolores. They had to go. Now.  He scooped up her feather-light body. ‘Leave it, Dolores! We don’t have time!’ He’d find her a new sweater once they were home. Hell, he’d buy her a whole rack of her own sweaters, anything Dolores wants, if only they got home right now.

And then the screaming came.

Five whipped around. 

Again. First one voice, then two. Many more joined them, and Five ran toward the wormhole. 

‘BEN!’

Ben? Five braced himself against the pull of the vortex, the air thin and difficult to pull into his lungs. It whipped around him with a force he’d never felt before, and his hat and goggles were snatched from his head and thrown well into the distance. The shrieking was getting louder, closer, and the images from the other side pieced together the closer Five inched into its grip. The voices were blood-curdling, and his whole body went cold with terror.

‘Diego, don’t!’

‘Ben! Klaus, get out of the way!’

‘BEEEEEEEEEEEENNN!’

‘BEN! WHATS HAPPENING!?’

‘BEN!’

No.

No, no.

He was going back, it was going to be okay. Five was going back, it was going to be okay.

It all happened within the span of three seconds.

The fuzzy images of his siblings running, screaming, blood soaked into their clothes, painted across their young faces – dripping from their feet as they scrambled away. 

Ben. 

Ben’s body dangling nearly fifteen feet off the ground, monstrous appendages thrashing wildly and destroying the surroundings with savage flings. 

Two grotesque limbs held his bloodied and mangled brother skywards, uninhibited by his terrified screams.

No. 

No. no. no. no.

No. no. no. no. no. nonononono-

‘Someone stop him!’

‘Klaus you can’t! KLAUS-‘

It felt like his skin was being flayed from his muscle. Five thought he might have been screaming too but couldn’t hear anything. All he knew for sure was the feeling of his molecules being pulled apart.

Everything was silent.  Like the deadness of space itself, for a fraction of a second, a microscopic fragment of time - absolutely nothing existed. Crunch.

The blood that hit his face hurt. And then someone pressed play.

Everything moved again and it knocked the wind out of his lungs. Five was violently thrown from the throes of the wormhole, sucked back into his own point in time and tossed several feet backwards into strewn debris. 

‘NO!’ 

The vortex he’d spent forty-two days working on was gone, just like that. Absorbed into the material of space, the deep wound he’d used every ounce of energy to create was now healed over in a matter of seconds, lost to some other dimension and out of his grasp. Ben. He’d promised him. He had promised his brother he would be there, that he would figure it out.

That Ben wouldn’t die. But Five let him. He watched the brutal final seconds of his brother’s life, his body torn into pieces by the beast he tried so hard to contain. Five wasn’t there.

He didn’t make it.  He had told Ben he wouldn’t let him die, but he did, and Five just watched it happen, unable to do absolutely fucking shit. The sun was merciless. It baked Ben’s blood on every part that had briefly touched the other side. It settled into the cracks of the tattered skin on his right hand, pulled at the skin under his eyes and on his cheeks – crusted where it had dripped into his mouth and over his tongue. When the trance that numbed Five finally broke, it was nightfall. 

He still sat on his haunches, a few fingers on his left hand barely curled around Dolores’ shirt.  And when it did, and his throat finally moved to swallow, his limbs twitching with overwhelming pain, and his chest trembling violently, the only thing Five could feel was the fiery strain of the unending wailing that tore ceaselessly from his lungs.