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kaybreezy3000 · 3 months

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In The Flesh

Five Hargreeves / Reader Insert

Imagine that Five wasn't alone the entire time he was in the apocalypse...

-This is a special reader request for an extended scene from my Five Centric fanfic 'The Anti Hero's Pitfall of Arrogance.' Set during the apocalypse and Five is only 21.

-This request is a bit of a spoiler alert to the story that inspired it. It's written with a non-descript female character with no name, only referred to as she or her, so it's sort of a reader insert/you sort of vibe, or you can think of it as simply someone that Five loved. Think of it as you or someone else, either way, it's sad. 😭

Heed the warnings and click the link in the summary to read the full story if you want to get the full picture of what led up to this very sad moment for our favorite guy.

Warning: possible triggers, suicidal thoughts/behavior issues, alcohol abuse/excessive drinking, extreme grief/loss, graphic description of death/corpse, we get some Dolores in this, meant to be very sad, this fic this is based on is not all gloom and doom but it's clearly not all pretty either.

(5312 words)

In The Flesh

The funny thing about rock bottom is I’d thought I’d hit it many times before she saved me but really there is no depth far enough down to describe where I was after finding her body and where I would be for a very long time after that.

Like I’d done every day since I saw her favorite baseball cap bobbing on that partially submerged branch stuck out in the depths of the churning flood waters, I was out looking for her. On my endless searches, I would yell her name, over and over, till my voice was nothing more than a pained screech of air.

It was as I was scouring a new area that the water had receded that I went to shout her name again but stopped with only the first faint syllable.

The moment I saw her distinctly colorful sandal and what appeared to be the discolored fragments of flesh still clinging to the bones trapped in it, the wind shifted, and my nostrils were filled with a pungent, sickeningly sweet, earthy odor.

That is what the smell of death is like if a body has been exposed to the elements for ten days or more. The anatomy and physiology decomposition literature states, a body exposed to the elements begins to decompose within less than 1 hour postmortem. That rate is accelerated if the tissues are exposed to other factors such blunt force trauma or heat and moisture.

She had been exposed to all of it.

I could still hear the ominous sound of the huge trees snapping and boulders grinding over things in the swift current as I walked along the road, just hours after she’d gone, only then, I didn’t know she wasn’t coming back. I didn’t know what was being done to her.

Now her body was there, under the hardened soil, but her foot was the only part of her that was visible other than her twisted tangle of hair wrapped around a river beaten branch.

For the last week I’d been lying to myself, trying to hang on to the idea that she was still out there, that she was just too mad at me to come home. But really, in that time, she’d been first submerged in the torrents of flood water decimating that landscape, and then after, (not long based on the murky pool of muck and the very small cracks in the clay at my feet), she’d been there, encased in the ground.

I cried out her name.

I dropped the stick I’d been using to poke and prod the underbrush, my body instantly disappearing for a fraction of a second into the snapping vacuum of my portal. Stepping out of it a few yards away, I fell to my knees, my trembling hands not knowing what to do or what was safe to touch. I moved to her foot, then pulled back as the tiny black flies that were startled by my presence flew up in an angry swarm.

The temperature since the day she disappeared had been colder but that had done nothing to prevent her rapid decay.

Entomology and Body Decomp 101: A decomposing body will attract all manner of life forms within 24 after death. If allowed access, scavengers are ruthless in their pursuit of the flesh of the dead.

Having been well read prior to my time in the apocalypse and being well acquainted with death in the years before this, I was still not prepared for what I saw or had to go through over the next several hours it took to free her.

Her body was no longer her anymore, but I couldn't accept that. My mind told me she was under there and she was so scared.

Frantically, I started digging with my bare hands. No matter how careful I was clawing at the clay that had molded her in the ground, anytime my fingers came close to her, they crushed her slick, wet remnants of flesh, tearing it through.

At this point, she had surpassed the early stages of decomposition. Gone was the bloating. The gases and liquids had mostly expelled, and her skeleton was letting go of her skin, though in some areas it remained in denser sections that were identifiable but mostly because her clothes had embedded in her. Her jean shorts made clear where her abdomen was, what was left of her chest was now part of her t-shirt.

What I was seeing and touching and smelling made my stomach heave over and over but still I had to save her.

She had needed me, and I wasn’t there.

Stage 4 post-decay lacks some of the first levels of putridity, but even though I had seen hundreds of thousands of faces of death, seeing hers will always represent the loss of everything; even more so than the day I’d foolishly ran into the future, lost my family, and found I couldn’t get back.

“No, no, no,” I sobbed, my filthy, bloodied fingertips inching along her face, or what should have been her face. “I am so sorry… Please! No! God, please!”

The mouth I had cherished was gaping, her once perfect teeth were more exposed than they should have been due to the skin around them receding or simply just not being there at all.

Her eyes…

Where once someone had looked back at me with so much love and endless understanding, now there was horror, both mine and hers.

Sickness took me again.

Dizzy, I frantically scrambled back, away from where I had unearthed most of her, my stomach emptied, but nothing but acid spilled onto the scattering of broken foliage off to my side.

My ears were filled with the evil buzzing sound of insects that were warming themselves in the open area around us as the sun relentlessly beat down.

I couldn’t take it.

A feral sound of pure agony crawled out of my chest, getting eaten away by all the nothingness.

“Please, I am so sorry… Please forgive me, I never meant for…”

She wouldn’t except my words and I couldn’t blame her.

My broken cries were lost in my delirium. On hands and knees, I came back to her, lifting her to me even though I shouldn’t have.

The gruesome sound of parts of her stickily pulling free from the ground and the sight of the parts of her that remained in the soil were enough to fracture what was left of my sanity.

“It’s okay. I’ve got you, we can go home now,” I shushed her, in my head believing I had the ability to soothe her pain.

She still said nothing, and I told myself it was because she was just too weak.

She just needed my help. She was just mad. She was just…

“You are safe now,” I said, my hand sinking into her, her spinal column hitting my palm not even enough to shock me back into reality.

After cradling her for far too long, I said, “I am not leaving you here.”

Lightly as possible, I let my shaking hand touch her hair, seeing but not acknowledging that it was starting to detach from her scalp. Without thinking, I forced the massive amounts of energy I needed for a jump, the blue power expanding from my hands, then around us.

I only took us across the drying riverbed, up the steep embankment and up the hill to where the road hadn’t been washed out, and that was far, but it was not even close to getting us back to our cabin. For that, I had planned to teleport again and again, as many times as it took but when my feet smacked the ground the force of it made the tendons holding her right thigh to her hip give way and the length of her leg landed at my feet.

“Fuck!” I screamed, slamming to my knees to grab her.

Like a madman, I could at least put together that she was falling apart and that this wasn’t going to work. Even jumping with her was too much. She was so fragile; she’d always said she wasn’t, but she was…

“I am so-ssss-sorry,” my voice cracked as I carefully laid her down again.

The sight of those tiny black bugs as they fought to get a piece of the woman I loved, caused me to feel the burn of violent anger and that almost brought me to my senses, but even that too, I washed away with another imaginary idea, that if I just covered her, somehow all the severed openings that were now more her than anything else, would be spared from further ruin.

In a frenzy, I stripped off my shirt, covering her with it the best I could. The moment I was able to get to my feet again, I swayed, the world spun, but when it came back into focus, I could see again like lightning struck my head, brightening the gray world around me, making the colors of her bright sandals and her hair and the tattered remains of her clothing stand out in stark contrast to the deep darkened purple of her rotting body.

My filthy hand came up, rubbing my face and my blurred eyes, then my fingers tore back as I painfully yanked at my hair.

I had done this to her.

Sniffling and on the verge of a full screaming fit of rage, I turned and started making my way up the road, a few steps away, my hands coming together, my fingers like claws, I tried to gather the light in my hands to blink again, but instead I was met with the impotence of the faintest swirls of azure static crackling to life then fizzling out.

Turning back to the motionless pile on the ground, I again assured her I’d be back. Then in a haze, like a zombie on empty, I mindlessly made my way back, my mud-covered boots trudging up the steep hill, my balance faltering over and over as I’d tripped over the uneven surface.

If you ask me what I was thinking during that walk, I couldn't tell you. All I knew was that I was empty and that a horrible numbness was taking hold.

Even still, I came back fast, like I’d promised. First, I placed her in a thick blanket, sure to get every bit that was her that was there, anything that wasn’t, I never found.

“There,” I breathed, positioning her leg that had been torn off at the hip in such a way that looked less painful. Then flapping away any visible bugs from her, I covered her completely. Knowing that she was in the later stages of decomposition but that it was far from over and she was seeping fluids, I lifted her, and laid the cocoon of wool on top of a tarp.

I could have carried her the whole way but not wanting to hurt her or break her apart more than she already was, I only carried her to the cart I’d brought back with me, then I carefully laid her in.

Though she didn’t answer no matter how much I wanted her to, I spoke to her the whole way as I tugged the wagon with her in it up the hill.

Getting back to our home, the mud encrusted wheels clattered to a stop in the yard right next to the chair I had been sitting in the day we had gotten into our fight. It was dead silent and getting so dark by that point that the stars were coming out but as if in a time loop in hell, I could still hear the cruel things I’d said to her on that sunny morning.

Looking down at the small mound of blanket with her in it, I said, “You have to forgive me. I don’t know what to do without you. I don’t want to live with-”

My heart was racing, I couldn’t breathe. My chest felt a new tightness where before, since the hours after she’d gone and not come back, I’d only felt the stabbing pain of regret and fear, now it was like an aching void as if there were an actual hole inside me.

I stood there blankly staring at the door, then back to her, my mind not working at all but somehow still functioning enough to make the start of a string of very bad decisions.

Taking her up in my arms, we went inside. “We’re back. You're not alone anymore. I never meant to leave you out there like that. I tried so hard to find you,” I said, smothering my words against her wrap. “It’s okay now…we are okay…”

I kicked the door closed then I moved straight for our bed, and I would have laid her down in it and climbed right in if not for the fact that Dolores was sitting in the chair next to it, staring at me looking horrified.

‘No, Five, don’t!’

Saying nothing, I spun around to instead place the bundle in my arms on the couch in front of the fireplace. It wasn’t lit and it needed to be. That’s what she and I did at night. That was our other special place.

Memories of sitting there together, her behind me, reaching around to place my fingers correctly to play the chords she was trying to teach me filled my head. I could almost trick myself into thinking I could hear her beautiful playing and that I could hear her laugh at me every time I’d try to get out of my lessons.

“This is okay. I’ll fix this. We are going to be okay,” I said, as I started to unwrap her.

Dolores panicked at the sight in front of us. ‘Five, no. She’s gone. This isn’t right. What are you doing?”

I stopped, leaving her under wraps but I ignored Dolores’ s warning and started to light the fire.

Again, Dolores asked, ‘Five, what are you doing? She is dead. You can’t do this to yourself.’

“She’s not dead!” I shrieked, my eyes filling with welling tears as I clenched my hands, my broken fingernails slicing half-moons into the flesh of my dirty palms.

‘I am sorry, Five, but she is. You knew that after she didn’t come back.”

My head turned back and forth as I shook away a flood of tears threatening to come out and drown me like the water had done to all that I loved. I pinched my eyes shut, a broken whimper squeaking out of my throat.

‘Look at yourself, Five… You are not okay. That is why she can’t stay here. I love her too, but she is gone.’

I opened my eyes and looked at myself. I had no shirt on, my body was covered in mud and death.

The smell of me…

The smell of her poor body…

‘You need to bury her. She wouldn’t want this.’

“No,” I whispered as my body trembled and I stared blankly at the floor. “No,” I said again, then screamed, “Stop!!!! Just stop! Don’t you fucking talk to me! I didn’t ask for your help! It didn’t ask for any of this!”

Refusing to look up and see the hurt on Dolores’s face, I looked to the motionless pile of fleece blanket.

“I am not putting you out there all alone again, sweetheart.”

With that affirmation, and me placing a kiss to her covered face, the night did not get better.

In the light of the fire, I sat there on the floor in front of the couch as close to her as I could be without touching her. I wanted to protect her. I needed to keep my promise that I wasn’t going to leave her.

So many times, she and I had discussed the possibility of me being able to jump back in time and the fact that doing so with her was going to make it all the harder for me to pull off. Even with the right math, and just me, the energy needed to do it was something I hadn’t figured out how to achieve. Even though she had said that me getting back was all that mattered, I refused to consider leaving without her.

I couldn’t leave her, not then and not now; that was what I kept telling myself.

Sometime late into the night, slumped against the plaid couch, my head resting near hers though she remained covered, my demented and wrong train of thoughts slipped away, and sleep took me but in it l found no solace.

~~~

As I came to in the early hours of the next morning with my body crumbled on the cold floor, I knew instantly that everything I wanted to believe was okay was not.

The dimly lit cabin smelled of death and I was graced with the buzzing sound of a half a dozen or more flies that had found their way in somehow in the tiniest of cracks.

The decay had been clinging to me since I found her, but I refused to acknowledge it even as the putrid odor only added to my ongoing nausea. I clumsily reached for the stale glass of water I’d left at some point on the end table. Drinking it burned my cracked lips and the taste of it felt laced with a bitter acid. I wanted to retch but managed to refrain.

Then, wanting to remain living in the land of make believe, I got up, went to our small kitchen area, and proceeded to grab several bottles of liquor.

Dropping down next to her again, I twisted a cap, sloshing the clear liquid as I tipped it back, dumping the alcohol down my raw throat.

It was awful but that was not the only time I’d drank to forget, or that I’d drank things that were questionable in their quality.

“Remember when we found that stash of cheap wine with the seals broken,” I quietly asked.

I took a long pull at the bottle, then another as I peered over my shoulder at her laying there on under her favorite blanket.

“Smarter than me as always, you refused to drink any of it, but not me… Stupid as always, I gave it a try and boy did I pay for it. You had to baby me for the entire next day. God, I am such a lightweight. I’d be dead if not for you.”

I laughed, the sound of it thick with irony.

“You were always so good to me…”

Eyeing the dried mud and smears of her flesh on my pants, my eyes blurred.

“I didn’t deserve you and you didn’t deserve this.”

I started to cry. Then I started to hyperventilate, my breaths coming too fast and my head spinning.

Shuddering, I drank more and more but I could never turn the image of my girl’s face staring back at me from that riverbed into the beautiful living version I wanted so badly to believe was still with me.

Hours later, I was disturbingly drunk.

One minute I was musing to myself about our better times, talking out loud like a maniac about something so wonderful, like one night that she and I were out scavenging too far to come back, and we’d camped out under the stars. I’d told her the names of all the constellations I knew and there were many. She’d quietly listened, cuddled up next to me, both of us just happy to be in love and together even if our world was a landscape of tragedy.

Together, we could have done anything. We were going to save the world.

Now she was gone.

I had nothing.

She’d been everything and now I had no one again.

With the room spinning, I abruptly got to my feet, stumbling towards the window above the sink basin. The flies zipped and buzzed in front of me, landing in the vomit I had left there after I’d finished the first bottle of liquor. Knowing that those same dirty insects were landing on my beautiful girl made me quake with not just sickness but unmeasurable self-hatred.

I was a fucking mess, and I wasn’t doing right by her.

Dolores was right.

Glancing back to where I had abandoned Dolores almost two days prior, the room tilted in my vision. I dizzily turned back, clutching the white cast iron basin.

The light outside was fading. I wanted to go along with it. I wanted all the horrible pain and debilitating heartache to stop.

Laying on the butcher block counter space where we prepared our meals, was a sharp kitchen blade. With where my head was at, seeing it, I immediately thought of my gun and other times of morbid desperation.

My tears burned down my cheeks.

I hated myself so much for what I had caused. If I had not yelled at her, and if I could only have seen through my arrogance and own my deficiencies, she would still be here. I didn’t and instead did what I’d always done and blamed anyone but myself for my problems.

I’d taken out everything on her, again…

If I’d only learned from my mistakes, things that weren’t okay never would have been said. She never would have felt the need to be away from me. She never would have gone for that walk, and if she had, I would have been by her side. If I had just agreed with her to go to the city to try something new, I may not have had the breakthrough we needed so badly but at least she’d be there.

Feeling on the verge of vomiting again, I wanted to disappear into an alcohol induced coma.

I pushed off the sink, staggering like a drunken idiot the whole way back to the dresser that was next to my side of the bed. In a blur, I saw Dolores sitting there on her chair, but she didn’t say anything. She looked every bit the inanimate object she was.

It was as if I’d killed her too.

I yanked the top drawer open, my hand tearing through the clothes to find the heavy black metal object that my fucked-up mind craved.

My fingers grazed the cold instrument of death. I could feel the barrel of the pistol sticking down my throat, the oiled slickness of it slipping past my parting lips.

Just the thought made me gag but with sick fascination, and I didn't’ stop thinking about it.

All it would take is one second and my finger on the trigger and no more guilt. My brain would be a splatter of nothing, painting the bedspread behind me. The place we’d slept and loved would be ruined just like we were.

Images of us, heated tangled flesh, together in those same blankets filled my mind.

To get away from the hurt that memory caused, I looked up, the weapon in my hand but my eyes aimed at the small dresser mirror. It was as if a stranger was looking back at me. My stomach felt like it was trying to crawl out of my mouth and my vision was closing in with blackness threatening to pull me under.

I was seeing things and hearing things.

The loud pop of the bullet; the sound of my body hitting the floor.

I saw bugs crawling out of the jagged rotting hole in my skull.

Then I saw her face, only not the destroyed one that was hidden under the blankets on the couch.

That was when I finally came back to myself.

“Don’t you fucking do it,” I furiously screamed at myself, throwing the gun back down in the drawer.

My ears were ringing from my own terrified voice reverberating in them, then a few seconds later, the silence of death and that room returned.

It was just me, the mannequin and the body.

Dolores was right, I needed to let her go.

I had to bury her.

~~~

Over the next several hours, through the task of digging a hole in the ground, I sobered up significantly. Having done that, I re-entered the dank, horrid smelling cabin, removing the small pile of remains that had been the love of my life.

I was still covered in layers of filth and knowing that even if Dolores wouldn’t speak to me, she’d loved her as much as me and she’d want to be there to say goodbye, I quickly washed myself outside under the spout attached to the spring fed line that was rigged to the house. Splashing my face with a mix of soap and water, I cleaned my battered hands, and my arms, and I removed my soiled pants, tossing them in the woods.

The water streaming down my body was ice cold and disgusting. My fleshly cleaned and very pale skin ran under my fingers, standing in stark contrast to the filth that I was and the sight of it only furthered the much-needed reality check I'd only recently found.

Once I’d made myself somewhat more presentable, I redressed, then silently approached Dolores.

My voice cracked from being burned by stomach acid so many times and by my screams and lack of simply drinking or eating appropriately for days, but I had the strength and weakness to ask her for something I didn't deserve.

“Please come with me…I don’t want to do this alone.”

When Dolores responded with her softly spoken words of devotion, ‘You are never alone, Five. You will always have me,’ I was nearly beside myself with emotion. I’d thought I’d lost her along with everything else.

“Oh, my God, thank you,” I sobbed as I lifted Dolores up and carried her outside into the yard.

We approached the hole I’d dug. It wasn’t that deep, and it wasn’t that big, but it didn’t need to be. It was in front of an ancient but long dead ash tree that she had once told me had to have been something truly beautiful at one point in time when it was alive.

It was just like her.

The burial was silent, save for the sound of the blade of my shovel slicing through the softened pile of dirt I had removed and then replaced.

The sky was getting dark, the woods full of shadows of monstrous things that looked like they could come out of the night and pull you away forever.

I sat, folded in on myself at the base of the old ash tree, the disturbed soil at my feet as I looked up to the highest branches of the barren tree. Its flesh had been taken. Remanence of its bark were scattered all around me. It would someday be nothing but dust.

We all would be, but it was not my time-yet.

Burying my head in my hands, I kept telling myself that.

~~~

In the days that came after that, it rained and rained. My mind tormented me constantly with the flawed idea that she was trapped out there in the crushing wet ground. One second, I’d be haunted by images of her so scared and trying to breath and break free as then dirty water filled her lungs, and then the next, I’d come back to the dimly lit room I was in; Dolores worriedly watching me as I slowly organized things and cleaned up my many messes.

We couldn't stay there, but I couldn't bring myself to leave either, not when everything I had that she'd ever touched was right there. All around me were parts of her life that she’d shared with me. I’d clung to every trinket; every item of fabric that bore her scent.

Lying in bed at night, I’d break down into sobbing fits of anguish with my face buried in her pillow. I could stay like that for hours on end, fading in and out, tricking my mind and heart into thinking I hadn't lost her and that she was right there in bed next to me. But it would never last because the damp coldness of the empty space around me that had once been warmed by everything that was her was an inescapable reminder that I had failed the woman I loved and who had saved me.

It was in a notion during one of these times of despair that I realized the only thing I could do to redeem what I had done was to fix this like I'd always promised her I would. Out there somewhere in time there was a place where the world was still alive, and she was in it and everyone I ever cared about was still flesh and blood and filled with life.

I had to get back.

The pain that happened here was real and always would be but somewhere out there, there was a chance of better things.

There was a chance of seeing her again.

That idea of saving her and my family was the only way, and it was my reason for breathing again.

Broken, but somehow still standing, my heart though not the same was still beating. The flesh covering my hand could still feel hers in it and it was while cherishing that feeling that I made the decision that it was time to go.

On our final day, I got up like every day since I’d put her in the ground under that tree. I came outside, picking up the wildflowers I had left for her the day before, then I went for a short walk, talking to her in my mind the entire time, making my usual promises while I worked through ideas and math and things that gave me hope. Then I’d come back, refill her favorite vase with new water and place the colorful blooms there above her.

Alone, the sun shone down on me, my shadow stretching across the earth above her, giving the illusion that we were laying there together.

“I love you,” I whispered, my eyes blinking back the enormous weight I felt from her loss and would always feel.

I liked to think I heard her say she loved me back, but I knew she didn’t; it was just a memory of her words tickling my ear as her lips gently kissed along my neck.

I shivered from head to toe as I felt the ghost of her touch but not in a bad way.

I smiled, sniffing like a baby as I rubbed my eyes.

Then, making one last promise I said, “You will be okay. I’ll fix this.”

Going back in the house, with Dolores watching all the while, obedient and loyal and loving with words of encouragement, I packed my final things.

I left our cabin spotless and set up as if we were coming back to it. It was as if I could see us in there again, spending our nights in front of that fireplace, laughing and endlessly teasing each other; our bed ready for us to lay down in and explore each other in new and exciting ways that only made our love stronger. I saw all that but in the back of my head I knew I was never going to come back to that place because it was gone, and if I did return, I may never leave her.

So, it was with that in mind, late in the morning, I loaded Dolores with our supplies, setting her next to the hard black guitar case that held her cherished Christmas present I'd given her and so many other things I couldn’t let go. I pulled a blanket around Dolores and the case, as if the instrument inside it had become something in a way of being the woman I’d lost, so much the way Dolores was a real thing that needed my care and love.

I walked to the old, grayed ash tree, its wind worn and smooth branches shone in the warm sun as I looked down at the ground where I’d left a piece of my heart. I could almost hear the sound of her playing my favorite sone and I knew that when I plucked those strings, a piece of my heart would break a little more with each strum, but I’d be back with her.

My lower lip trembled, and my nose burned with the same heat as my eyes.

“Until we meet again, my love…”

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