#yeAH i volunteered to do a luther and five piece bc very few people wants to tag in for luther

[in-tua-deep]

I would like to see Hargreaves family time please :3

HMMMM have a bonding scene ;3c

it is unedited though bc i never got around to it lmao

...

The thing they don’t tell you about recovering after escaping from terrible experiences, is that there are some things that you miss about them. You can be glad that you escaped while still mourning what you left behind, even if as far as you are concerned there shouldn’t be anything to mourn in the first place.

Five hated the apocalypse with something heavy and terrible that settled deep in his gut and that tended to be vomited out at the most inopportune times. Or perhaps it wasn’t hate at all, but fear that he experienced. Not that he would ever admit it, mind you.

But there were just some things that just - well. Five had spent over forty years in the apocalypse, sifting through rubble and ruin and scratching out equations on walls that were too broken to offer even the memory of the comfort and safety they’d once upheld. He’d spent forty years clinging to life by his fingernails and re-reading a book that was the only thing he had of his siblings outside of the grave sites he refused to visit,

He didn’t want to go back there. His entire life’s work was getting out of that hellscape and making it so that it never existed in the first place. Five hated and feared the apocalypse, but oh there were some days that he missed it with such a terrible fierceness it rather took his breath away.

He missed it on the days when nothing seemed to go right, when every word that came out of his mouth was wrong. When people looked at him with tightness around their eyes and pinched lips, and his siblings looked at him with pity in their eyes. Poor little Number Five, who couldn’t even accomplish the simplest of social interactions without inevitably fucking it up. Poor little Number Five, who forgot that people weren’t supposed to write on walls or hoard food in their rooms or freak out when someone burned food in a kitchen. 

Adapting to a normal life was a challenge that Five hadn’t ever thought about - because what about his life had ever been normal? He was a child soldier, and then an apocalypse survivor, and then a temporal assassin and then - he wasn’t quite certain what he was now. Was he a child, or an adult? What was he supposed to do with himself now?

He missed that sense of purpose in the apocalypse. He missed Dolores. His one companion for so many years. He’d actually known her for longer than he’d known his own family, and wasn’t that an odd thought?

He missed the spot he’d holed up in before an earthquake had ruined it almost ten years before the Commission had found him. It wasn’t much, but he’d found a handful of records that had miraculously survived and an old record player that had even more miraculously done so. 

He’d admitted to Dolores that he didn’t really know how to dance, not beyond the general flailing and swaying his siblings had used to drag him into when Luther played something from his budding collection.

(Five hadn’t had the heart to go rooting through the remains of the Umbrella Academy for things that could be salvaged, but he wondered about it often. He wondered if he’d find a whole entire collection of records, of if Luther would have lost interest and gotten rid of them all. He wondered if Allison still read through all the trashy magazines she could get her hands on as an adult, if she still tried to balance books on her head and walk regally through the house just because she’d read it once in a princess book or if she’d grown out of that. 

He was back now, and perfectly capable of asking, but he didn’t. He looked at his siblings and saw strangers and missed his childhood even with the shadow of Reginald looming over them all. He loved his siblings as they were now, but oh he ached with the knowledge that the siblings he had known, the ones he had tried so hard to get back to, were lost to time. As good as dead. But then again, perhaps so was he.

He wasn’t the child who left on that fateful November day. He would never be him again.)

He missed Dolores teaching him to dance under the pale moon. Or well, not perhaps dancing so much as gently swaying together with his arms around her, cheek pressed against hers, as he closed his eyes and pretended for a moment that he hadn’t met her in the apocalypse at all. That they’d just bumped into one another in the street and gone on dates where he made her laugh and where he stressed about what to wear - a million inconsequential moments that meant nothing and everything at the same time. He’d wished they’d had a life together instead of the slow drawn out death that was the only thing that existed in the apocalypse.

And perhaps, there were other things he didn’t know he would miss until they were already gone and out of reach. Things he didn’t even think about, until he looked up at night and wondered where all the stars had gone.

It was a silly thing to get upset over, to go tearing through the house like a man possessed to figure out what had happened to the stars.

(Or perhaps it wasn’t so silly after all - the almost-apocalypse he had witnessed destroyed the moon. Was it such a reach to wonder about the stars, as well?)

Light pollution was the simple answer. It wasn’t that the stars were no longer there, just that they were drowned out. Only a few pinpricks bright enough to shine through and be picked up by the human eye. There had been no human lights in the apocalypse, with no one to turn them on or off except one lonely man who had a flashlight with scavenged batteries. Not nearly enough to make any difference.

The stars had been so beautiful. On the clear crisp nights, he’d lay next to Dolores on the ground staring up at the brilliant specks of light and tried his darnest to remember the constellations that once upon a time Luther had enthusiastically outlined for his unattentive brother at the height of his space phase.

(“When we get back,” He’d whispered to Dolores ever so softly, in the way he whispered every wish that only seemed appropriate to utter out loud under the night sky, “I’m going to get Luther to tell me them again, and I’ll actually listen this time. I won’t tell him to shut up, or that stars aren’t important. I’ll listen.”

He’d never been very good at listening, even as a child. But outside of a seven day deadline - the apocalypse had taught him patience. It was something the Commission found to be a boon as well - there was nothing more deadly than a very patient predator on the hunt, after all.)

Klaus had told him that the apocalypse was an addiction, and Five had done his best to quit cold turkey. 

He’d returned Dolores to her store, mourning what could never be between them. In darker moments, he wondered if she would have ever actually chosen him - in that imaginary world where they met on a crowded street by happenstance. They’d been forced together at the end of the world, and even though he loved her he wondered about things like choice and happiness and shared trauma. Them breaking up was the right thing to do, he knew that, he just hadn’t realized quite how much it would hurt.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Five sought comfort where he could. That he stole a record from Luther’s collection (it had gotten bigger, a passion pursued into adulthood which was one question answered) that he must have played dozens of times on that record player in their little sanctuary at the end of the world. That he slept on the floor instead of the bed that was far too soft in so many ways.

That he crept up to the roof and lay on his back and stared at the stars that were visible, remembering a sky filled with diamonds and a cool hand in his own and whispered hopes and dreams and secrets from one terribly lonely boy to the uncaring infinity of the cosmos.

And maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it wasn’t long until he was discovered up there, gazing at the sky with such careful mourning carved across his face.

(He hated and feared the apocalypse, but he mourned it as well. It had raised him, in the harsh and terrible way that was all the apocalypse knew how to do. He’d been raised by Reginald Hargreeves and forged in bruises and thoughtless brutality, and then delivered into the arms of something else that didn’t care for him either. 

He grew into a boy with careless cruelty and harsh criticisms and a love for his siblings that burned hotter and longer than any fire the apocalypse could produce. He grew into a man, or perhaps just something man-shaped, in starvation and desperation and terrible all-consuming loneliness.

Reginald had been fond of telling them, “You will learn through suffering.” It was something trotted out whenever the children were forced to skip meals or run up and down stairs until their insides twisted and they retched on the floor barely held up by burning thighs and weak knees. It was being tossed behind locked doors until they promised their unrelenting obedience to a man who had done nothing to deserve it.

If suffering was a teacher, then surely Five was one of the wisest people alive.)

“What are you doing up here?” Luther asks, too loud in the stillness of the night. Five doesn’t begrudge him it though, it wasn’t every day one was confronted by their teenage shaped brother laying listlessly on the roof at hours when everybody should be tucked away in bed.

“What are you doing up here?” Five parrots back, melancholy mood sharpening the edge of his words into something more pointed than he perhaps meant them to be.

Luther shuffles, looking awkward in his own skin as he so often does. It’s enough to make Five soften, just ever so slightly. After all, Luther isn’t exactly the only member of the house who feels alien in their own body. 

Perhaps it’s cruel to take comfort in his brother’s discomfort. But perhaps Five is cruel. It isn’t the worst thing he’s been called in his life.

(No one speaks about the dinner where Five and Diego had been sniping at one another and pushing each other’s buttons where Diego had brought up Five abandoning the family. That had been his exact word - abandoning. Five had frozen and Diego had pressed on, snarling about Five not getting an opinion about Reginald because he’d ditched so early and left the rest of them to Dad’s tender mercies. He’d said far more, but the rest of that dinner was a blur of sound and colors for Five.

Diego had apologized over the incident and then proceeded to not look Five in the eye for the next week. The whole family were so good at picking at one another’s weak spots and hitting them hard and fast. It was practically second nature. They knew which points to leave alone when it came down to it for each other, but not for Five. Not yet.

They didn’t know him anymore. It was a work in progress navigating their respective minefields of trauma in the meantime.)

“I asked you first.” Luther says, childish statement bringing Five out of his own thoughts. At the end of the day, they are brothers.

And perhaps it is that brotherly spirit that prompts Five’s lips to quirk as he offers the equally childish response of: “I asked you second.”

Luther scowls, but he’s fully aware of exactly how stubborn Five could be. That’s Five, built out of spite and pettiness, who never knew how to just lay down and give up. But if he’d been any less himself, they would never be there that night on the roof irritating one another. The thought fills Five up with something that could almost be called fondness.

Luther crosses his arms, and looks away. “I like looking at the stars.” He admits haltingly, and it makes Five sit up from where he was still sprawled on the ground. “I just - on the moon - I don’t know. It’s stupid.”

“It’s not stupid.” Five cuts in with a fierceness that surprises them both. Five doesn’t look at Luther, just the sky. “There’s not as many stars, here. Not that you can see. It’s supposed to look different, but what’s left is still comforting because the sky is a constant. Because the stars don’t really change, even when the rest of the world does.”

“Yeah.” Luther sounds surprised at Five’s insight. There’s a moment of hesitation before Luther is gently lowering himself down to sit on the roof a few feet away from where Five is. When Five dares to sneak a glance, Luther’s eyes are trained on the sky with an almost wistful look on his face.

“I know I’m not supposed to miss it,” Luther begins, and the thought sounds so much like what Five was just pondering that he can’t help but startle. Thankfully, Luther doesn’t see. “But - it was always my dream, you know? To go up there, into space. I know it was just a rejection now, that Dad didn’t want me around so he wouldn’t have to face his failure.” Luther’s face twisted as he spat out the last word. He’d taken it hard, learning that he was just as insignificant in the grand scheme of their father’s plans as the rest of them.

“But.” Luther continues, his face smoothing out, “It was still four years of my life. I had a routine. It was lonely, but god Five. The weightless feeling? The stars? The sunrises? There’s nothing quite like it.”

There’s a silence between them for a moment that Five decides to break. Because he’s trying, he really is.

“Sometimes,” Five says, so softly that Luther actually shifts closer to hear him, “Sometimes the apocalypse was beautiful. A decade or so in, when the plants just tentatively started realizing it was safe to grow again, and the weeds came back first. Just spots of green and bright yellow dotted through the cracks and crevices.”

(Five had spent many springs of his life wandering through the rubble, leaning down to pick dandelions to admire before he ate them. Even when he was terribly hungry, he’d never eaten all of them - always leaving some to mature and bring more the next year. Picking them up and blowing softly and remembering the first time he’d seen one - on a mission where Ben had quietly and excitedly informed them that they had to blow on it and make a wish. That he’d read about it in a book.

Five had made the same wish for forty some years. He wasn’t sure what he’d wish for now, now that it had come true.)

“And when the skies were clear, at night - the stars were beautiful.” Five admitted, Luther made a sound but Five ignored it to carry on because if he didn’t speak his mind now he might never. “There were so many Lu, way more than we ever saw out our bedroom windows. And on nights where the moon was just a sliver, there were even more. We’d lay out there for hours.”

Luther coughs. Five looks over and isn’t quite sure why there’s a guilty look on his brother’s face. “’We’ would uh, be you and uh, Dolores, right?” 

Ah, that would explain it. Luther always got that look when Five brought up Dolores, no doubt thinking about when he’d held her out of a window as leverage to prevent Five from killing someone. Luther hadn’t known then, Five thinks, about exactly how much Dolores meant to him. He’d known she was important, but hadn’t known why. He hadn’t asked.

There’s nothing Five can do but nod though, in response to the question. “Yeah. She likes the stars, she’s always loved things that glitter.” It was why she loved sequins so much, and Five was secure enough to admit that he liked them as well. 

There’s an awkward silence between them now, one that Five can’t help but try and break. “I tried to remember the constellations.” He blurts out, grasping at the connection the two of them had shared before it slips between his fingers and results in them quietly going to their rooms and forgetting this conversation ever happened.

He can’t look at Luther, not as he admits this. So he doesn’t, he turns his gaze upwards to the pinpricks of light. “Do you remember, when we were eight and Mom gave you that book of constellations? And you wouldn’t shut up about it for like, a whole month? You kept waking all of us up and dragging us to the roof and you said we had to listen to you because you were Number One?”

Luther surprises Five just a little by laughing, “Yeah! Yeah I do remember that. Diego threatened to throw me off the roof if I ever woke him up in the middle of the night again after the fourth time and I’m pretty sure Klaus learned morse code to complain about me to Ben.”

Five grins, “Nah, don’t flatter yourself. He learned morse code with Ben to gossip at dinner. Your little nighttime shows were just something else he could yell about in front of Dad without anyone the wiser.”

“Of course he did.” Luther just sounds exasperated at their most colorful sibling’s antics, which is a big improvement on how he would have felt about it when they were actually eight. “To be honest, I didn’t think any of you actually listened to what I was saying at the time. I’m surprised you remembered.”

Five shuffles, not exactly wanting to admit he doesn’t remember most of the content but not quite willing to lie to his brother either. “I only remembered bits and pieces. Some names, other shapes. Those three stars that make up that one dude’s belt or something.”

“You didn’t just find some astronomy book?” Luther asks, looking puzzled. He doesn’t look offended at least, that Five didn’t pay that much attention during those lectures so many years ago. To be fair, he’s had plenty of time to come to terms with the idea.

“It felt disloyal.” Five admits after a heartbeat, only half grudgingly. He isn’t exactly the king of heart to hearts, but there is something about Luther that seems to encourage them in him. Even during the stress of the days preceding the apocalypse weighing on him, it had been Luther who Five had told about finding their bodies and who Five had told not to waste his life.

Maybe it was the certain level of kinship between them, both of them trapped in bodies that they did not choose and did not want. Both of them left alone for years on end, having to relearn how to interact with the general populace. Luther was loyal where Five was rebellious, but they had enough common ground between them to be significant.

“Disloyal?” Luther’s tone isn’t quite questionioning, just offering a way for Five to continue his thought where he’d trailed off. 

Five’s stomach squirms at the blatant emotion, but it would have to try a lot harder than that to stop him after he’d gotten used to the hollow aching pain of starvation. “I didn’t want to learn the constellations from a book.” He says, and it’s easier to admit to hopes and wishes in the dark with the stars above him. It’s familiar. It’s not Dolores next to him, but Luther isn’t half bad company when he’s by himself. “I wanted to learn them from you, except you weren’t around to ask anymore.”

Now that he’s out of that hellscape, he can half admit to himself that not allowing himself to pick up an astronomy book might have been him giving himself even more incentive to go back and fix things. Not that he needed it but - half of it might have also been a sort of punishment for abandoning his family to whatever fate left them buried in rubble and dead at the end of the world as well. Never let it be said that any of Five’s coping mechanisms were actually healthy.

There’s a silence where Luther mulls that over, before he opens his mouth with a soft expression, “I’m around now.”

It’s an offer and a question rolled into one. It’s not Luther immediately launching into a lecture assuming that’s what Five wants or needs at the moment, it’s him asking, which is an improvement all in itself. If Five was too raw tonight, he would accept that without a question and they could look at the sky in silence together until the dawn came.

The ball is in Five’s court.

“What - what’s the name of the dude with the belt?” Five asks, hesitant and careful and feeling as brittle as the porcelain vases that Reginald decorated the halls with.

Luther’s answering smile is bright and tender enough to hurt.

“His name’s Orion...” Luther explains, and Five closes his eyes and lets Luther’s voice wash over him. When he opens them, it seems like the stars twinkle just a tiny bit brighter than before.

Or that might just be his imagination.

#ask me #yeAH i volunteered to do a luther and five piece bc very few people wants to tag in for luther #look i'm not luther's biggest fan but he has some rights #then again i haven't seen s2 maybe he loses what few rights he has #but i can't help but draw parallels between his and five's experiences #me holding up luther: stinky but still good #tua #the umbrella academy #far tua long #long post #five hargreeves #number five #luther hargreeves #i don't THINK i posted this before but correct me if i'm wrong #should i put this on the masterlist ????? what would i even put it under idk #Anonymous #oneshots