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faye_dartmouthPART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
-o-
This day was really getting to be rather long.
That was saying something since Five had spent a good portion of the day in various states of unconsciousness. This time, his consciousness was deeply cloying but somehow light. He hovered just beneath the surface, able to look up and see the light but unable to bring himself to ascend. The metaphor wasn’t perfect, but Five was having kind of a bad day. Literary aspirations would have to take a back seat for the time being.
As it was, Five was dimly aware when the men lifted his head. He saw the flash of the camera from behind his closed eyelids before someone muttered something gruffly and dropped his head back down unceremoniously. Five tried his best to lift it back up, to open his eyes, to say something clever and sarcastic, but two hours later, he was only dimly aware that the efforts were in vain.
At this point, his head was lifted again. The touch was gentler this time, and someone used meaty fingers to pull his eyelids open. Any effect this might have had on Five was negated by the sudden use of a penlight, shone directly into his eye. Numb as he still was, he could muster no response, but his consciousness scrambled, and he felt distantly like he might be sick again.
His other eye was checked in a similar fashion, and Five managed something he hoped looked like a scowl. In response, there was a soft clucking noise, like some kind of misplaced mother hen.
This day was really just getting worse and worse with each passing second. It was bad enough to be kidnapped like a child, but now to be babied like one? Five willed himself to fight but the drug was still too strong. His fingers curled against his bonds, but that was about all the fight he could muster.
“You’re doing great, kiddo,” the man said, sounding like he might actually be proud.
This man clearly had child issues. Maybe he had been dispossessed of his own children. Maybe his ex-wife had taken them and moved across the country before marrying a much better man. Maybe he’d been neglected by his own parents, forced to raise his younger siblings. Maybe he just needed to shut the hell up and leave Five the hell alone.
The man, however, had other ideas. Since the man was the one who wasn’t tied up and drugged, Five was forced to endure his take on things.
“Your pupils look good, so I think you’re coming out of the drug here in a bit,” he said. “And I mean, I’ve checked your breathing and that seems fine. I’m sure when you come to, your head will still hurt, and I’m sorry for that, I am, but you’re going to be okay, kid. I promise you. I have no interest in hurting you. I don’t want to hurt you.”
This was all well and good and overly sentimental for a kidnapper to his victim, but Five riled. All this talk of playing nice, not wanting to hurt Five.
Well, that ship had sailed.
And if only this man knew that Five wanted to hurt him.
Badly.
Once that drug wore off, then they would see.
Five swore to himself as his head was lowered again and he plunged into the dark, they would see.
-o-
This time, Five woke up on his own. And he really woke up. His eyes open, he wet his lips and he lifted his head all of his own accord. That was the good news.
The bad news was that he felt horrible, worse than before. The drug’s impact had abated sufficiently to let him wake up, but he could still feel it hanging over him like a cloud. It was like cotton between his ears, and the fuzziness in his skull was only countered by the return of his throbbing headache. At this point, it was impossible to say which one was impairing him more: the concussion or the drugging.
Whichever the case may be, Five was in a poor state. Blinking a few times, he managed to clear his vision enough to see that he was alone in the room. There was still a phone on the counter, which mean that his kidnappers weren’t far, but they still hadn’t quite grasped the importance of being diligent. This type of unprofessional before made Five’s skin crawl, though he had to admit it might be rather useful for him at the moment.
With no one around, he had time to refocus and calculate the state of his current predicament. Clearly, his position had not changed, which meant that he was still in an abandoned apartment complex not too far from his neighborhood. Outside, the light had shifted substantially, showing it to be in the late afternoon probably past the dinner hour if he had to guess. He had hoped to be out of this mess by now, but by now, his siblings have surely been sent confirmation of the kidnapping and the terms for his release. They would have started searching for him by now.
Five found this fact to be both reassuring and mortifying. On the surface, Five hated the notion. He didn’t want to be saved. He wasn’t a damsel in distress, and he certainly wasn’t an actual child. If he was a helpless idiot, he would be dead by now, no questions asked. His siblings had never explicitly doubted his claim that he was 58, but he knew it was hard for them to believe. He didn’t need incidents like this, working against his claims.
He already had trouble getting them to trust him to live his life as an adult. They frowned when he drank coffee; they constantly reminded him that he could go around town driving or making big ticket purchases without them. They had absolutely restricted his access to alcohol, and Five fought tooth and nail for the respect he deserved after saving their asses.
To have them swoop in and rescue him would send entirely the wrong message. It went against the image Five had worked so hard to cultivate.
And yet, it was reassuring. To live in a world where someone gave a shit about him. In the apocalypse, it had just been him. As much as he loved Delores, she wasn’t very good at playing backup. She had lots of opinions, but she was not so good with actions. You might think it was better with the Commission, with an entire organization behind him, but if anything, that made it worse. Sure, he had backup, but it came with all sorts of strings attached. If you needed anything while on the job, the Commission made sure you knew how much it would cost you. You asked for help at your own expense.
Accordingly, Five had learned to never ask for help.
Most of the time, it didn’t come.
The rest of the time, it just made things worse.
But this was his family.
His family.
The very people he’d risked everything to come back and save.
The fact that he could count on them to rescue him was a sign of his own success, in a way. The inkling of a reminder that he never probably should have left in the first place.
Really, in that light, Five didn’t have to do anything. He didn’t have to get out of his bonds; he didn’t have to overpower the two morons who had taken him hostage. He didn’t have to escape. He could sit here and be rescued and this would be over by morning. There was no way his siblings would go to the meet. They would find him; they would rescue him.
All Five had to do in this process was keep his mouth shut and sit still.
Easy as pie.
For anyone else in the world, maybe.
But keeping his mouth shut and sitting still? Were unfortunately two things that Five had never been very good at.
-o-
Five spent the next several minutes working at his bonds with limited success. There was definite give in them now, both in his arms and in his legs. This gave him more room to wiggle, but it was hardly actionable at this time. At best, it gave him a better chance to orchestrate an escape, but he was still a ways from making substantial progress.
Before he could advance his cause further, a door from what Five assumed was a bedroom opened. The nicer man came out, smiling widely. “Hey! You’re awake!”
He strode across the floor toward Five. Five forced himself to stop working the bounds and scowled up at him instead.
“So, how are you feeling?” the man asked.
Five didn’t not return the smile “Bad,” he said sourly. “I have a bad concussion, remember?”
The man sighed. “I know. I’m still sorry about that,” he said. “My friend -- he’s not used to working with kids. He doesn’t understand how small you are.”
This was meant as some kind of solace, but it only made Five more annoyed. “Apology not accepted,” he said. “Let me go and I’ll reconsider.”
“Oh, you know I can’t do that,” he replied, sounding a little surprised that Five was still transfixed with the notion of not being kidnapped.
“You have hands, they’re even untied,” Five pointed out to him with a nod. “You can.”
At this, the man swallowed and glanced anxiously over his shoulder. He dropped his voice. “Look, kid, I know you’re scared--”
Whatever cliche, whatever platitude, whatever idiotic excuse came next, Five had absolutely no patience for. He tightened his jaw and shook his head venomously. “I’m not a kid, and I’m not scared.”
The look Five garnered in return was one that you might give to a puppy when it tried to bite you. “I know, buddy,” he said, just barely refraining from patting Five on the head. “I know.”
The worst part about it was that Five had absolutely no means to prove him right.
Yet.
He promised himself.
He had no means to prove him wrong yet.
The day, he decided, was not over yet.
-o-
For the next hour and a half, the two men ate their dinner. Noisily and messily in front of him. The nice one offered Five several bites of pizza, but the thought of being hand fed was more important than the growling in his stomach.
Besides, he still felt vaguely nauseous every time he turned his head. Throwing up all over himself would hardly help prove to anyone that he was a force to be reckoned with.
Anyway, food was a luxury. He had survived on less for longer. He could outlast this assholes; that much was certain.
Finally, after two hours, the nice one nodded at him. “You got to go to the bathroom, kid?”
It was hard to say who looked more surprised by the question -- Five or his partner. Five was still gauging the best response when the partner leaned over to the man and asked, “How the hell is he going to take a leak tied up?”
“Well, we’ll have to untie him, his legs and chest anyway,” the man explained. “I know it’s still awkward, but you’ve got to go by now, kid. It’s been all day.”
It had in fact been all day, but Five had been so transfixed with the side effects of his concussion that he had barely noticed that his bladder felt full. He was prone to that, to selectively focusing on things to the point of ridiculousness. It had been a useful ability on his own, though it did sometimes have unintended consequences.
Wetting his pants would be atrocious.
But that wasn’t Five’s motivation when he nodded his head in thoughtful reply. “I do have to go to the bathroom.”
The other man looked a bit like he was panicking. “You seriously want to untie him?”
“Just his legs,” the first one cautiouned. “We can keep him between us, stay with him the whole way.”
“Oh, so you’re not just kidnappers, you’re perverts, too,” Five quipped.
The second man blushed deep scarlet.
The first was more measured. “We won’t look, okay?” he said. “But you got to understand, we have to be there, right? You understand that.”
The man was trying to sound like a reasonable human being, and he did sound that way. Of course, in full context, it was still an unseemly business. Keeping a captive and treating them humanely was often more trouble than it was worth; Five had avoided it at all costs during his time with the Commission. Besides that, all abductions required interaction. They required relationship. Keeping that relationship purely professional was hard, and any compromise for the sake of humanity was a weakness.
Humanity was a weakness.
Five felt a shiver go down his spine.
It was a matter of perspective, he supposed. Humanity could kill you. It could also save you.
Five was willing to take the gamble that it could save him right here, right now.
“Yeah, okay,” he said, willfully making his expression more neutral. “I could use a trip to the bathroom.”
-o-
Five’s head was still fuzzy, but with the adrenaline picking up in his system, he could feel his senses start to sharpen. He tended to perform well under pressure; he could think fast on his feet and he was at his best in conflict. Compared to complex equations, killing people was an easy solution.
It required focus, precision, timing, force and skill.
Five tensed as they untied his legs, one at a time. The angry one had taken to pulling out his gun again, holding it on Five while his partner struggled with the ropes with his sausage fingers. Keeping himself steady and ready, Five supposed he looked enough like he was frightened of the gun being waved in his face.
In fact, he was just waiting for his moment.
The gun still wasn’t loaded, and Five wasn’t afraid of a gunshot or two. If he did this right, these assholes would be shooting at air.
With both legs free, the dim man helped Five up off the chair, his arms still bound behind him. No one had taken time to notice that the bonds were loose, and Five made no effort to draw attention to that fact. Instead, he allowed himself to be led forward, shuffle stepping his way with the nice man guiding him by the arm. The other man followed on his other side, the gun hovering somewhere in Five’s general proximity.
As they entered the narrow hallway, Five was able to see that this was a two bedroom, one bath apartment. The bathroom door at the end of the hall was slightly ajar, and Five had to walk slightly ahead of the men due to the narrowed space. He winced, rallying his strength, but when he reached for his powers, he still found them muddled. The concussion, the drugs -- it was no good. He wasn’t going to be able to jump yet or worse -- the jump would fail and then he’d be screwed.
No, he was going to have to tackle this the old fashioned way.
A narrow hallway was a great place for a fight, after all. All those surfaces nearby for leverage. Plenty of drywall to slam heads against. Five had killed lots of people in hallways. Now, he had been older then, and he also hadn’t been tied up, concussed and drugged, but whatever, Sometimes, you had to work with what you had, and Five had never been anything short of resourceful.
He pretended to stumble, going down to one knee. The kinder man scooped down to help him up, and Five grinned, thankful for his opening. He rammed himself, knocking into the other man, the top of his head colliding hard with the man’s chin. They all fell back, ramming into the other man as they slammed against the opposite wall before crashing toward the ground.
In the melee, Five’s hands were still tied. He struggled with them, but had to focus on getting his footing. He rolled away, getting up quickly, before realizing with annoyance that instead of rolling toward the open room, he’d rolled himself closer to the hallway. The nice man was dazed on the floor, but the second one was angrily getting to his feet, cursing while he looked for his gun.
Five wasn’t sure what he thought he was going to do with an unloaded gun, but whatever. Five used the distraction, lunging forward again. It was all the grace of a linebacker without any of the weight. Still, for someone unprepared, it could still pack a punch, and the man went down again, Five landing on top of him.
Still bound, Five’s movements were uncoordinated and limited. He snarled, rolling over and kneeing the nice man in the groin while making his way to his feet. He only made it half way before the other man returned the favor in kind, tackling Five.
There was something to be said for the fact that this man at least wasn’t treating him like a kid.
Unfortunately, that meant that Five hit -- and hard. Without his hands to protect himself, Five’s head hit the ground and his hearing started to buzz. White lights exploded behind his eyes, and before he could right himself, the man was above him, wrestling him off the ground in a headlock.
It was a frantic scramble at this point. If the other man locked in an arm around Five’s throat, he would have little he could do without his hands. He’d go down without a fight.
Five couldn’t abide by that.
He wouldn’t.
Viciously, he bucked, and they grappled back and forth. When Five caught sight of a piece of flesh in front of his face, he did the only thing he could think and bite down.
Hard.
The man howled, and Five could actually taste blood. Usually, he drew the line at biting, this was true, but he at least could identify a proper extenuating circumstance unlike some members of the Hargreeves family. Brutal and animalistic, the move was also effective. The grip eased and Five staggered to his feet, mustering up what he could to blink his way to freedom.
Dazed and bleed again, Five knew it was a long shot, but adrenaline could do amazing things sometimes. He felt his power respond for a moment, a split second before the kind man was on his knees, holding his hands up. “No, don’t!”
Five thought he was speaking to him.
But then he felt something hard smash into his head for the second time that day.
Five’s power evaporated, along with his pride, his belief in humanity and his consciousness, as he slumped back down to the floor.
-o-
Honestly, Five was getting kind of used to this. It was funny, how you could get used to all the wrong things. You could get used to eating cockroaches. You could get used to talking to a mannequin. You could get used to killing people and telling yourself it was all in the name of some poorly defined greater good of humanity.
As it turned out, you would also get used to getting knocked out and kidnapped.
This time, when Five woke up, it was without fuss. He was tied up again, seated back in the chair. The ropes had been retied, but Five could tell instantly that it was a hackneyed job. The ropes were loser, and when he looked up, the two men were in front of him. The angry one was staring him down while his gentler partner paced anxiously.
Clearly, they were at least taking him a little seriously now. It seemed likely that he wouldn’t have much time to himself anymore, and Five might take some pleasure in that were he capable of thinking of anything except the agony inside his head.
And it was agony now. It took him a moment to realize it, but the sensation was nearly overwhelming. Whatever head injury he’d had earlier, it had been intensified now, and even after several minutes of consciousness, Five had trouble thoroughly clearing his vision and his ears were still ringing. The disorientation was so strong that he couldn’t even think much about the nausea.
“Kid’s awake,” the one with the gun said, and Five wished he could see clearly enough to tell whether or not the thing was loaded now.
The other man stopped, and dazed as he was, Five could still tell that the man was vexed. “Okay,” he said. He hesitated and stepped closer to Five. “Look, kid. You got to work with us here. I mean, there’s no where to go.”
There was no promise this time, no vow that things would be okay, no comfort that he’d be fine. Instead the man drew a shaky breath and let it out.
“We just have to get through this night, okay?” he said. “We’re all just going to stay here, in this room. Just make it through the night.”
It was what the man needed to say for his own peace of mind.
It was also the singular motivation Five had.
These kidnappers wanted to just get through the night.
Five had the night to get through them.
Time would tell, literally, who was successful on that front.
-o-
Five waited.
He would like to call this strategy, because it did work as strategy. He could tell the story later, about how he waited patiently for his attackers to succumb to sleepiness. They had gone from being too lax to over-vigilant, and now they had spread themselves too thin. By insisting on both keeping watch, they ensured that neither one would be awake enough to sufficiently take watch, giving Five the opening he might need to attempt escape again.
That would be the nice spin on the story.
In truth, Five was in and out of consciousness a lot that night, dazed throughout most of the evening. He blacked out randomly for undefined periods of time, and he struggled to clear his vision, hone his hearing and generally coordinate his movements. It was only after a period of prolonged unconsciousness sometime after 10 PM that he woke up to realize that the men in the room were both, in fact, asleep.
That was the thing about humanity. Or, the other thing. They could aspire to greatness sometimes, yes. Most of the time, however, they would fail to impress.
He was going to seriously reevaluate this humanity thing when he got out of this mess.
And that was the thing.
Five was going to get out of this mess.
He absolutely was.
Because he was a trained, skilled assassin with a honed mind. He was an adult, damn it.
This time, he didn’t bother to think about it. He didn’t do any calculations or attempt to reason any of his probabilities. No, this time, Five went on pure instinct.
His powers were a mess, and his focus was scattered, but he didn’t give a shit this time. All he needed was one blink, one blink out of this ropes, out of this room. One blink and he would have a headstart. That was all he needed. He needed a headstarted. He needed to get out. He needed to go.
Now.
Channeling his power was nearly impossible, but he accessed it recklessly. The focus needed to plan his jump was lost on him. He had no way of predicting how far he would get, but all he could do is close his eyes and hope for the best.
The build of power swelled in him, and he swallowed back his nausea to let it continue unabated. He could feel it tingling now, haphazardly rocketing up and down his spine as he spread his fingers wide and fisted them tight.
Just a little more.
A little harder.
He closed his eyes, bringing his fledgling focus to bear. He was losing control, and he knew it. It was burning and freezing in equal turns, and he felt his consciousness flicker as it pulsed against the throbbing of his concussion.
Desperation could make you do amazing things.
It could also make you do stupid things.
Somewhere, out there, his siblings would be looking for him.
Five would do everything he could to get back to them.
That was what his life was about, wasn’t it? Getting back to his family. It was that belief, that guiding principle, that had made a man out of him.
Maybe -- just maybe -- it would do the same for a second time.
He inhaled sharply and held it, grunting as the power threatened to break him again. He could feel the pressure of it, expanding in his chest, clawing at his brain, singing in his fingers. Somewhere inside of him, he could feel a hole in space open, and he reached for it, willing it to open for him further.
Somewhere outside of him, Five could hear voices.
“Whoa, kid -- are you okay?”
“What the hell is he doing!?”
With reckless abandon, Five screamed. His head felt like it was exploding as he pushed himself through the hole, the rough edges of space grating on him as he slipped through it, down and down and--
-o-
Five’s tenuous grip on his power vanished as he hit the ground ass-first. The impact was sudden, and he felt the reverberation up his spine into his battered head. This time, there was nothing he could do against the nausea. He barely had time to turn over and wretch, bringing up bile onto the floor.
He retched again before he managed to catch his breath, and it took several more seconds before he could wetly start to clear his vision. He felt sick and small, and for a moment, he was afraid he hadn’t actually pulled it off.
After all, the apartment he was in now was the same layout as the last one, and it was in just as bad of shape. Except there was no furniture in this one; one of the windows had been blown out.
So he had managed a jump, but not very far. He was still in the same building.
Sitting himself up, wobbling, he noted with some relief that he at least had managed to jump without his ropes. That was a pretty good start, at least.
Staggering, Five attempted to get to his feet. The effort was more than he’d expected, and it occurred to him as the room spun and he fell back to his hands and knees that he had underestimated his own strength. He’d managed to jump, sure. But the effort had been more than somewhat taxing. It had literally wiped him out. He was exhausted, both emotionally and physically now, and the idea that he was going to be able to continue his escape was quickly becoming unlikely.
Shit, Five thought, breathing through the pain. It was unlikely that he was even going to stay awake. Darkness was pulling at him and the pain was nearly unbearable. He was going to pass out if he wasn’t careful.
He closed his eyes, focusing on his breathing.
Maybe passing out would be good.
A little sleep.
He’d escaped the room. For all those assholes knew, he could be anywhere. They probably wouldn’t start their search in the same building, thinking he’d flee quickly. Rest might be a strategic choice. Rest might be the best option.
Five was drifting, still on his hands and knees, until he heard a frantic sound coming from the stairs. There was thumping, footfalls.
“Where the hell, man!”
“We need to find him!”
“But where did he go?”
Five looked toward the noise out of instinct, and it was a mistake. The slight movement jarred his head, and his equilibrium, so precariously gained, was lost again. The spinning of his head didn’t mesh well with his still abating powers, and Five’s stomach roiled again. There was nothing he could do but vomit, heaving all over the floor in front of him.
He didn’t bring up much, but the process cut deep. He felt like he was trying to tear his stomach out through his throat, and he was crying and breathless by the time he collapsed back on the floor.
Outside, the footfalls ceased.
Five dared to hope.
The door slammed open.
The two men were standing in the door. The angry one has his gun. The nice one, who looked more terrified than Five felt right then, was brandishing a switchblade. Things, after all, were getting serious. Desperation looked differently for all of them, but he had a feeling it might play out the same.
Fate was fickle, after all, but hope was a very foolish thing in the end.
-o-
Still badly disoriented, Five blinked his eyes and zoned out. He came back to his senses marginally when he was lifted off the ground. He realized belatedly that the men had come for him and picked him up, carrying him between them so that his legs were dangly on the ground.
Briefly, he considered actually trying to move his legs. Being dragged like a sack of potatoes was without any advantage, and if he was going to be humiliated in captivity again, it might be nice to retain something of his dignity. This thought process was so consuming that he had already been dragged to the door by the time that he realized that it was also very moot. His legs were not responding to him at this point, and as they crossed the threshold of the apartment it was all he could do to keep his eyes open.
At the base of the stairs, Five grunted as they started dragging him up. From his vantage point, he had a good view of their feet but that was about it. His kidnappers didn’t seem very talkative at this point, and Five could feel their fingers cutting into his skin as they hoisted him up stair by stair.
Stair by stair and to where? Back to that same apartment? Back to his little chair with his little ropes? Where they could watch him until dawn and then drag him to a ransom drop? Was that all this was? A quick buck.
His family would come for him.
His family had to be coming.
And what was Five doing?
He was being useless, getting his ass kicked by amateur, slumming with the worst of humanity. Was this how he survived the apocalypse? Was this how he came to be the most renowned assassin the Commission had ever known? Was this how he’d saved the world?
Five looked like a kid, but he wasn’t a kid.. Not even now, when he’d been concussed badly and pushed to the point of absolute exhaustion. Five wasn’t a kid. He refused it.
As they neared the top of the stairs, Five rebelled. Fate had handed him a lot of shitty things and he’d taken all of it in stride. But he wasn’t going to take this. Not now; not ever. He flailed, frantic and uncoordinated and utterly determined. The haphazard movement caught his feet against the stairs. He heard the skinnier man grunt in annoyance while the other tried to adjust his grip.
Five didn’t imagine this was much of an advantage, but he also didn’t much care. He flailed again, summoning a raw strength born of his contrary nature more than anything else. With a heave, he threw his body weight to one side, ripping his arm from the dim man’s looser grasp. With this, he had his full weight to throw at the other man. With a yelp, he was caught off guard, and Five seized upon him again. With an ungraceful forward motion, he all but tackled the man, sending him sprawling him back a step.
With a rush of air, the man missed the step and pinwheeled. He hit his back going down before tumbling and skidding the rest of the way to the landing they had just vacated. The gun fell clear, and the man didn’t get back up.
Five knew that success could be unpredictable, and sometimes you really had to take what you could get. With one man down, Five would more than take it.
Lifting his head, Five found his wobbly feet strong enough. He set his jaw, narrow his eyes and threw any concept of caution to the wind. The other man, pudgy face shocked and wide-eyed, stared at him, as if in supplication, but Five didn’t wait to hear his request. Instead, he charged at him, diving at him with the full force of his body.
The impact, after so many throughout the day, was not as jarring as you might expect. Of course, Five was still mostly numb, and though he was coherent, he was not fully connected to the full breadth of his senses. He could see, but things were haloed and fuzzy. He could hear, but only as one could hear underwater. His movements were slow and sluggish, and everything hurt so much that nothing much hurt at all.
He also figured that his mental processing speeds were greatly reduced otherwise he would have remembered something rather important.
Desperation made humanity change. It made good men into villains. It turned bad guys into heroes. And it pushed simple, nonviolent men to pick up arms against a child.
Five and the man went down, hitting the ground. The momentum kept them moving, and their mismatched weight sent them tumbling, rolling across the landing to the open door of the apartment where Five had been kept all day. He landed on his back, head spinning as the man stumbled off of him.
He staggered back a step, and Five saw the blood. It was coating his hand, and they both stared at his blood stained fingers for a long moment. The man looked at Five, horrified.
Five looked back.
It took him another second before remembered.
The angry man had an unloaded gun.
The pudgy man, standing above him, had a knife. The gun was gone; the knife was nowhere to be seen.
Five blinked, looking down.
Unless…
It took his eyes a moment to focus, his brain longer still to understand.
Because sticking out of his stomach, the hilt glinted off the light from the dawn that broke through the dirty windows. It glimmered, shiny and red, off the blood that was spreading rapidly across Five’s torso.
That was the thing, Five supposed, about going down fighting.
He lifted his hand shakily, dipping it in the blood and holding it up to the light for confirmation.
It still meant you went all the way down.
-o-
“Oh, shit,” the man said. He fell to his knees next to Five. “Oh, shit. Shit. Oh my -- shit. I didn’t -- you weren’t -- shit!”
The incoherent nonsense was so bad that even Five, in his semiconscious state, knew it was idiotic. He forced himself to swallow as the rest of his senses caught up with him.
The man hovered, his hands milling uselessly around the hilt, clearly trying to figure out what to do. “That’s -- too much blood,” he muttered. “I don’t know -- I mean, do we take it out? Kid, do we take it out!?”
Five wasn’t sure why this man was asking him that. It didn’t much matter. As soon as he asked the question, Five realized just how much it hurt.
That was to say: it hurt a lot.
Five had been injured numerous times before, but he’d never taken a knife to the gut. As far as injuries went, this one was pretty horrific. The pain alone threatened to take him under and he choked on his next breath, feeling goosebumps as they spread across his flesh and he started to tremble.
“No, no, no,” the man muttered, lifting his hand to run through his hair. “Kid, come on. Stay with me, kid. Stay with me.”
Five wasn’t sure if it was a request or an order, but he wasn’t sure he could oblige either. He could taste the blood now, burning in the back of his throat. His eyes were wet; he might be crying.
The man shrugged out of his jacket, balling it up and placing it tentatively around the knife still lodged in Five’s intestines. It felt terrible, and Five knew it was woefully ineffective. There was no way the man was applying enough pressure to stem the flow of bleeding.
And it was bleeding.
A lot.
“I need help!” the man screamed, and it was unclear if he was alerting his partner or seeking assistance from someone who might happen to be near. Both ventures would be futile. The man at the bottom of the stairs probably wasn’t getting up for a while, and the whole point of picking an abandoned building was that no one would hear the screams. But then, intelligence had never been this one’s strong suit. “Please, help!”
When no help was forthcoming, he started to panic. Crying and wheezing, he leaned back toward Five. “I’m sorry -- I didn’t mean to -- I didn’t,” he said, starting and stopping haltingly while he took a ragged breath. “Oh, shit, kid. You weren’t supposed to -- you weren’t -- I didn’t--”
It was a lot of words to say something that he couldn’t formulate, but lying there, Five came to two conclusions.
First, he was bleeding out. Whatever damage the knife had done, it was significant. He was going to die from this without immediate medical care. He might have an hour at max. 30 minutes was more likely. Possibly less.
Second, this man -- this kidnapper, this idiot -- didn’t want him to die. He was terrified and besides himself. He was a pisspoor kidnapper, to be sure, and he would be the worst killer in the world. That was what made him human in a way Five wasn’t, when you got down to it. Five could kill without remorse. This man, for all his faults, grieved at the idea of a life lost, even a life he was trying to leverage for his own gain.
Humanity was inconsistent. It was difficult and complex and Five had spent a lifetime pining for it and never quite understanding it, not even when it was staring him right in the face.
The man broke with a sob, and then gathered himself, looking Five squarely in the eye. “Okay, kid,” he said. “Let’s get you home.”
It should have been a debate. The man should have weighed the pros and cons. He should have made himself a probability man, considering the consequence of taking a hostage back without waiting for possible payment. There was a cost benefit analysis which had to be correlated between the risk of getting pinned for murder against the risk of getting taken in on kidnapping charges. There would be no way to justify it as an accident, and self defense would be eliminated by the extenuating circumstances of Five’s kidnapping.
Really, the smartest thing would be to let Five bleed out and burn his body, spreading his remains in as many locations as possible before scrubbing down the scene with as much bleach as possible to eliminate DNA evidence. That might be effective enough to keep Five’s case from becoming anything more than a missing person’s case, thereby giving the men every opportunity to flee town and rebuild their lives.
After all, Five was already dying.
What would the value be in going down with him?
That was the pragmatic decision. You could be sorry, you could know you made a mistake, and you could move on. That, more than anything else, was how Five had survived.
But humanity, in the end, was never pragmatic.
There was no debate.
The man, face set now, reached down and laced his arm under Five’s legs. He used his other arm to lift Five up under the shoulders, gently scooping him up off the ground and mindfully positioning him in his arms. Small as he was, Five’s slight frame fit perfectly.
“We’ll just take it easy here,” he said, gingerly stepping across the ground while Five felt the knife in his gut settle. “We’ll just take it real easy, kid.”
The guy should at least take the knife out. Sure, it might make Five die faster, but it was evidence. Anything that could be traced back to the man was a liability, a mistake, a--
“Let’s get you home, kiddo,” the man said with a smile. “What do you say to that?”
Shocked, Five didn’t try to move as the man navigated him down the stairs, past the limp form of his partner. They went down several more flights before coming out onto a street lined with old buildings full of broken out windows. There was a work van parked out front, and the man finagled the door open, putting Five carefully in the passenger’s seat before hurrying around to the driver’s side.
“Sorry, kid,” the man said as the engine rumbled to life. “This might be a little bumpy.”
Five huffed in disbelief.
As if the rest of this had been so smooth.
-o-
Five could still remember, funnily enough, his first night in the apocalypse. He could remember watching the light dim -- the sun was nowhere to be seen through the haze -- but its absence stole the heat and Five was forced to cower next to the burning embers of society to stay warm.
In the dark, he’d had no choice but to hunker down. It was too dangerous in the dark, too easy to get lost or hurt. He’d tried his powers a few more times to no avail. Even when he was able to muster up enough focus to move through time, time travel was beyond him.
It had probably always been beyond him, but he hadn’t realized it until it was too late. Because now Five was beyond help, beyond fate, beyond hope.
Five was beyond humanity.
He thought about quitting that night. He thought about throwing the towel and finding a cliff to jump off of. He thought about what it meant to be the last person alive and how much that scared him. The best -- and worst -- of humanity rested with him, and he didn’t know if he could do that, if he could be the last hope for a world that had none.
He’d thought about the people, then. All those people. The ones who had died. They had never seen it coming; they’d never had a chance to prepare. Good people, bad people, old people, kids -- just people, in the end.
Just people.
In the end.
That was his only thought when dawn broke on his second day in the apocalypse. His first day, Five had jumped to the future as nothing but a smart ass kid. The second day he woke up, and he wasn’t a kid anymore.
He was humanity.
It was a day that Five would never forget.
PART TWO
PART THREE
-o-
This day was really getting to be rather long.
That was saying something since Five had spent a good portion of the day in various states of unconsciousness. This time, his consciousness was deeply cloying but somehow light. He hovered just beneath the surface, able to look up and see the light but unable to bring himself to ascend. The metaphor wasn’t perfect, but Five was having kind of a bad day. Literary aspirations would have to take a back seat for the time being.
As it was, Five was dimly aware when the men lifted his head. He saw the flash of the camera from behind his closed eyelids before someone muttered something gruffly and dropped his head back down unceremoniously. Five tried his best to lift it back up, to open his eyes, to say something clever and sarcastic, but two hours later, he was only dimly aware that the efforts were in vain.
At this point, his head was lifted again. The touch was gentler this time, and someone used meaty fingers to pull his eyelids open. Any effect this might have had on Five was negated by the sudden use of a penlight, shone directly into his eye. Numb as he still was, he could muster no response, but his consciousness scrambled, and he felt distantly like he might be sick again.
His other eye was checked in a similar fashion, and Five managed something he hoped looked like a scowl. In response, there was a soft clucking noise, like some kind of misplaced mother hen.
This day was really just getting worse and worse with each passing second. It was bad enough to be kidnapped like a child, but now to be babied like one? Five willed himself to fight but the drug was still too strong. His fingers curled against his bonds, but that was about all the fight he could muster.
“You’re doing great, kiddo,” the man said, sounding like he might actually be proud.
This man clearly had child issues. Maybe he had been dispossessed of his own children. Maybe his ex-wife had taken them and moved across the country before marrying a much better man. Maybe he’d been neglected by his own parents, forced to raise his younger siblings. Maybe he just needed to shut the hell up and leave Five the hell alone.
The man, however, had other ideas. Since the man was the one who wasn’t tied up and drugged, Five was forced to endure his take on things.
“Your pupils look good, so I think you’re coming out of the drug here in a bit,” he said. “And I mean, I’ve checked your breathing and that seems fine. I’m sure when you come to, your head will still hurt, and I’m sorry for that, I am, but you’re going to be okay, kid. I promise you. I have no interest in hurting you. I don’t want to hurt you.”
This was all well and good and overly sentimental for a kidnapper to his victim, but Five riled. All this talk of playing nice, not wanting to hurt Five.
Well, that ship had sailed.
And if only this man knew that Five wanted to hurt him.
Badly.
Once that drug wore off, then they would see.
Five swore to himself as his head was lowered again and he plunged into the dark, they would see.
-o-
This time, Five woke up on his own. And he really woke up. His eyes open, he wet his lips and he lifted his head all of his own accord. That was the good news.
The bad news was that he felt horrible, worse than before. The drug’s impact had abated sufficiently to let him wake up, but he could still feel it hanging over him like a cloud. It was like cotton between his ears, and the fuzziness in his skull was only countered by the return of his throbbing headache. At this point, it was impossible to say which one was impairing him more: the concussion or the drugging.
Whichever the case may be, Five was in a poor state. Blinking a few times, he managed to clear his vision enough to see that he was alone in the room. There was still a phone on the counter, which mean that his kidnappers weren’t far, but they still hadn’t quite grasped the importance of being diligent. This type of unprofessional before made Five’s skin crawl, though he had to admit it might be rather useful for him at the moment.
With no one around, he had time to refocus and calculate the state of his current predicament. Clearly, his position had not changed, which meant that he was still in an abandoned apartment complex not too far from his neighborhood. Outside, the light had shifted substantially, showing it to be in the late afternoon probably past the dinner hour if he had to guess. He had hoped to be out of this mess by now, but by now, his siblings have surely been sent confirmation of the kidnapping and the terms for his release. They would have started searching for him by now.
Five found this fact to be both reassuring and mortifying. On the surface, Five hated the notion. He didn’t want to be saved. He wasn’t a damsel in distress, and he certainly wasn’t an actual child. If he was a helpless idiot, he would be dead by now, no questions asked. His siblings had never explicitly doubted his claim that he was 58, but he knew it was hard for them to believe. He didn’t need incidents like this, working against his claims.
He already had trouble getting them to trust him to live his life as an adult. They frowned when he drank coffee; they constantly reminded him that he could go around town driving or making big ticket purchases without them. They had absolutely restricted his access to alcohol, and Five fought tooth and nail for the respect he deserved after saving their asses.
To have them swoop in and rescue him would send entirely the wrong message. It went against the image Five had worked so hard to cultivate.
And yet, it was reassuring. To live in a world where someone gave a shit about him. In the apocalypse, it had just been him. As much as he loved Delores, she wasn’t very good at playing backup. She had lots of opinions, but she was not so good with actions. You might think it was better with the Commission, with an entire organization behind him, but if anything, that made it worse. Sure, he had backup, but it came with all sorts of strings attached. If you needed anything while on the job, the Commission made sure you knew how much it would cost you. You asked for help at your own expense.
Accordingly, Five had learned to never ask for help.
Most of the time, it didn’t come.
The rest of the time, it just made things worse.
But this was his family.
His family.
The very people he’d risked everything to come back and save.
The fact that he could count on them to rescue him was a sign of his own success, in a way. The inkling of a reminder that he never probably should have left in the first place.
Really, in that light, Five didn’t have to do anything. He didn’t have to get out of his bonds; he didn’t have to overpower the two morons who had taken him hostage. He didn’t have to escape. He could sit here and be rescued and this would be over by morning. There was no way his siblings would go to the meet. They would find him; they would rescue him.
All Five had to do in this process was keep his mouth shut and sit still.
Easy as pie.
For anyone else in the world, maybe.
But keeping his mouth shut and sitting still? Were unfortunately two things that Five had never been very good at.
-o-
Five spent the next several minutes working at his bonds with limited success. There was definite give in them now, both in his arms and in his legs. This gave him more room to wiggle, but it was hardly actionable at this time. At best, it gave him a better chance to orchestrate an escape, but he was still a ways from making substantial progress.
Before he could advance his cause further, a door from what Five assumed was a bedroom opened. The nicer man came out, smiling widely. “Hey! You’re awake!”
He strode across the floor toward Five. Five forced himself to stop working the bounds and scowled up at him instead.
“So, how are you feeling?” the man asked.
Five didn’t not return the smile “Bad,” he said sourly. “I have a bad concussion, remember?”
The man sighed. “I know. I’m still sorry about that,” he said. “My friend -- he’s not used to working with kids. He doesn’t understand how small you are.”
This was meant as some kind of solace, but it only made Five more annoyed. “Apology not accepted,” he said. “Let me go and I’ll reconsider.”
“Oh, you know I can’t do that,” he replied, sounding a little surprised that Five was still transfixed with the notion of not being kidnapped.
“You have hands, they’re even untied,” Five pointed out to him with a nod. “You can.”
At this, the man swallowed and glanced anxiously over his shoulder. He dropped his voice. “Look, kid, I know you’re scared--”
Whatever cliche, whatever platitude, whatever idiotic excuse came next, Five had absolutely no patience for. He tightened his jaw and shook his head venomously. “I’m not a kid, and I’m not scared.”
The look Five garnered in return was one that you might give to a puppy when it tried to bite you. “I know, buddy,” he said, just barely refraining from patting Five on the head. “I know.”
The worst part about it was that Five had absolutely no means to prove him right.
Yet.
He promised himself.
He had no means to prove him wrong yet.
The day, he decided, was not over yet.
-o-
For the next hour and a half, the two men ate their dinner. Noisily and messily in front of him. The nice one offered Five several bites of pizza, but the thought of being hand fed was more important than the growling in his stomach.
Besides, he still felt vaguely nauseous every time he turned his head. Throwing up all over himself would hardly help prove to anyone that he was a force to be reckoned with.
Anyway, food was a luxury. He had survived on less for longer. He could outlast this assholes; that much was certain.
Finally, after two hours, the nice one nodded at him. “You got to go to the bathroom, kid?”
It was hard to say who looked more surprised by the question -- Five or his partner. Five was still gauging the best response when the partner leaned over to the man and asked, “How the hell is he going to take a leak tied up?”
“Well, we’ll have to untie him, his legs and chest anyway,” the man explained. “I know it’s still awkward, but you’ve got to go by now, kid. It’s been all day.”
It had in fact been all day, but Five had been so transfixed with the side effects of his concussion that he had barely noticed that his bladder felt full. He was prone to that, to selectively focusing on things to the point of ridiculousness. It had been a useful ability on his own, though it did sometimes have unintended consequences.
Wetting his pants would be atrocious.
But that wasn’t Five’s motivation when he nodded his head in thoughtful reply. “I do have to go to the bathroom.”
The other man looked a bit like he was panicking. “You seriously want to untie him?”
“Just his legs,” the first one cautiouned. “We can keep him between us, stay with him the whole way.”
“Oh, so you’re not just kidnappers, you’re perverts, too,” Five quipped.
The second man blushed deep scarlet.
The first was more measured. “We won’t look, okay?” he said. “But you got to understand, we have to be there, right? You understand that.”
The man was trying to sound like a reasonable human being, and he did sound that way. Of course, in full context, it was still an unseemly business. Keeping a captive and treating them humanely was often more trouble than it was worth; Five had avoided it at all costs during his time with the Commission. Besides that, all abductions required interaction. They required relationship. Keeping that relationship purely professional was hard, and any compromise for the sake of humanity was a weakness.
Humanity was a weakness.
Five felt a shiver go down his spine.
It was a matter of perspective, he supposed. Humanity could kill you. It could also save you.
Five was willing to take the gamble that it could save him right here, right now.
“Yeah, okay,” he said, willfully making his expression more neutral. “I could use a trip to the bathroom.”
-o-
Five’s head was still fuzzy, but with the adrenaline picking up in his system, he could feel his senses start to sharpen. He tended to perform well under pressure; he could think fast on his feet and he was at his best in conflict. Compared to complex equations, killing people was an easy solution.
It required focus, precision, timing, force and skill.
Five tensed as they untied his legs, one at a time. The angry one had taken to pulling out his gun again, holding it on Five while his partner struggled with the ropes with his sausage fingers. Keeping himself steady and ready, Five supposed he looked enough like he was frightened of the gun being waved in his face.
In fact, he was just waiting for his moment.
The gun still wasn’t loaded, and Five wasn’t afraid of a gunshot or two. If he did this right, these assholes would be shooting at air.
With both legs free, the dim man helped Five up off the chair, his arms still bound behind him. No one had taken time to notice that the bonds were loose, and Five made no effort to draw attention to that fact. Instead, he allowed himself to be led forward, shuffle stepping his way with the nice man guiding him by the arm. The other man followed on his other side, the gun hovering somewhere in Five’s general proximity.
As they entered the narrow hallway, Five was able to see that this was a two bedroom, one bath apartment. The bathroom door at the end of the hall was slightly ajar, and Five had to walk slightly ahead of the men due to the narrowed space. He winced, rallying his strength, but when he reached for his powers, he still found them muddled. The concussion, the drugs -- it was no good. He wasn’t going to be able to jump yet or worse -- the jump would fail and then he’d be screwed.
No, he was going to have to tackle this the old fashioned way.
A narrow hallway was a great place for a fight, after all. All those surfaces nearby for leverage. Plenty of drywall to slam heads against. Five had killed lots of people in hallways. Now, he had been older then, and he also hadn’t been tied up, concussed and drugged, but whatever, Sometimes, you had to work with what you had, and Five had never been anything short of resourceful.
He pretended to stumble, going down to one knee. The kinder man scooped down to help him up, and Five grinned, thankful for his opening. He rammed himself, knocking into the other man, the top of his head colliding hard with the man’s chin. They all fell back, ramming into the other man as they slammed against the opposite wall before crashing toward the ground.
In the melee, Five’s hands were still tied. He struggled with them, but had to focus on getting his footing. He rolled away, getting up quickly, before realizing with annoyance that instead of rolling toward the open room, he’d rolled himself closer to the hallway. The nice man was dazed on the floor, but the second one was angrily getting to his feet, cursing while he looked for his gun.
Five wasn’t sure what he thought he was going to do with an unloaded gun, but whatever. Five used the distraction, lunging forward again. It was all the grace of a linebacker without any of the weight. Still, for someone unprepared, it could still pack a punch, and the man went down again, Five landing on top of him.
Still bound, Five’s movements were uncoordinated and limited. He snarled, rolling over and kneeing the nice man in the groin while making his way to his feet. He only made it half way before the other man returned the favor in kind, tackling Five.
There was something to be said for the fact that this man at least wasn’t treating him like a kid.
Unfortunately, that meant that Five hit -- and hard. Without his hands to protect himself, Five’s head hit the ground and his hearing started to buzz. White lights exploded behind his eyes, and before he could right himself, the man was above him, wrestling him off the ground in a headlock.
It was a frantic scramble at this point. If the other man locked in an arm around Five’s throat, he would have little he could do without his hands. He’d go down without a fight.
Five couldn’t abide by that.
He wouldn’t.
Viciously, he bucked, and they grappled back and forth. When Five caught sight of a piece of flesh in front of his face, he did the only thing he could think and bite down.
Hard.
The man howled, and Five could actually taste blood. Usually, he drew the line at biting, this was true, but he at least could identify a proper extenuating circumstance unlike some members of the Hargreeves family. Brutal and animalistic, the move was also effective. The grip eased and Five staggered to his feet, mustering up what he could to blink his way to freedom.
Dazed and bleed again, Five knew it was a long shot, but adrenaline could do amazing things sometimes. He felt his power respond for a moment, a split second before the kind man was on his knees, holding his hands up. “No, don’t!”
Five thought he was speaking to him.
But then he felt something hard smash into his head for the second time that day.
Five’s power evaporated, along with his pride, his belief in humanity and his consciousness, as he slumped back down to the floor.
-o-
Honestly, Five was getting kind of used to this. It was funny, how you could get used to all the wrong things. You could get used to eating cockroaches. You could get used to talking to a mannequin. You could get used to killing people and telling yourself it was all in the name of some poorly defined greater good of humanity.
As it turned out, you would also get used to getting knocked out and kidnapped.
This time, when Five woke up, it was without fuss. He was tied up again, seated back in the chair. The ropes had been retied, but Five could tell instantly that it was a hackneyed job. The ropes were loser, and when he looked up, the two men were in front of him. The angry one was staring him down while his gentler partner paced anxiously.
Clearly, they were at least taking him a little seriously now. It seemed likely that he wouldn’t have much time to himself anymore, and Five might take some pleasure in that were he capable of thinking of anything except the agony inside his head.
And it was agony now. It took him a moment to realize it, but the sensation was nearly overwhelming. Whatever head injury he’d had earlier, it had been intensified now, and even after several minutes of consciousness, Five had trouble thoroughly clearing his vision and his ears were still ringing. The disorientation was so strong that he couldn’t even think much about the nausea.
“Kid’s awake,” the one with the gun said, and Five wished he could see clearly enough to tell whether or not the thing was loaded now.
The other man stopped, and dazed as he was, Five could still tell that the man was vexed. “Okay,” he said. He hesitated and stepped closer to Five. “Look, kid. You got to work with us here. I mean, there’s no where to go.”
There was no promise this time, no vow that things would be okay, no comfort that he’d be fine. Instead the man drew a shaky breath and let it out.
“We just have to get through this night, okay?” he said. “We’re all just going to stay here, in this room. Just make it through the night.”
It was what the man needed to say for his own peace of mind.
It was also the singular motivation Five had.
These kidnappers wanted to just get through the night.
Five had the night to get through them.
Time would tell, literally, who was successful on that front.
-o-
Five waited.
He would like to call this strategy, because it did work as strategy. He could tell the story later, about how he waited patiently for his attackers to succumb to sleepiness. They had gone from being too lax to over-vigilant, and now they had spread themselves too thin. By insisting on both keeping watch, they ensured that neither one would be awake enough to sufficiently take watch, giving Five the opening he might need to attempt escape again.
That would be the nice spin on the story.
In truth, Five was in and out of consciousness a lot that night, dazed throughout most of the evening. He blacked out randomly for undefined periods of time, and he struggled to clear his vision, hone his hearing and generally coordinate his movements. It was only after a period of prolonged unconsciousness sometime after 10 PM that he woke up to realize that the men in the room were both, in fact, asleep.
That was the thing about humanity. Or, the other thing. They could aspire to greatness sometimes, yes. Most of the time, however, they would fail to impress.
He was going to seriously reevaluate this humanity thing when he got out of this mess.
And that was the thing.
Five was going to get out of this mess.
He absolutely was.
Because he was a trained, skilled assassin with a honed mind. He was an adult, damn it.
This time, he didn’t bother to think about it. He didn’t do any calculations or attempt to reason any of his probabilities. No, this time, Five went on pure instinct.
His powers were a mess, and his focus was scattered, but he didn’t give a shit this time. All he needed was one blink, one blink out of this ropes, out of this room. One blink and he would have a headstart. That was all he needed. He needed a headstarted. He needed to get out. He needed to go.
Now.
Channeling his power was nearly impossible, but he accessed it recklessly. The focus needed to plan his jump was lost on him. He had no way of predicting how far he would get, but all he could do is close his eyes and hope for the best.
The build of power swelled in him, and he swallowed back his nausea to let it continue unabated. He could feel it tingling now, haphazardly rocketing up and down his spine as he spread his fingers wide and fisted them tight.
Just a little more.
A little harder.
He closed his eyes, bringing his fledgling focus to bear. He was losing control, and he knew it. It was burning and freezing in equal turns, and he felt his consciousness flicker as it pulsed against the throbbing of his concussion.
Desperation could make you do amazing things.
It could also make you do stupid things.
Somewhere, out there, his siblings would be looking for him.
Five would do everything he could to get back to them.
That was what his life was about, wasn’t it? Getting back to his family. It was that belief, that guiding principle, that had made a man out of him.
Maybe -- just maybe -- it would do the same for a second time.
He inhaled sharply and held it, grunting as the power threatened to break him again. He could feel the pressure of it, expanding in his chest, clawing at his brain, singing in his fingers. Somewhere inside of him, he could feel a hole in space open, and he reached for it, willing it to open for him further.
Somewhere outside of him, Five could hear voices.
“Whoa, kid -- are you okay?”
“What the hell is he doing!?”
With reckless abandon, Five screamed. His head felt like it was exploding as he pushed himself through the hole, the rough edges of space grating on him as he slipped through it, down and down and--
-o-
Five’s tenuous grip on his power vanished as he hit the ground ass-first. The impact was sudden, and he felt the reverberation up his spine into his battered head. This time, there was nothing he could do against the nausea. He barely had time to turn over and wretch, bringing up bile onto the floor.
He retched again before he managed to catch his breath, and it took several more seconds before he could wetly start to clear his vision. He felt sick and small, and for a moment, he was afraid he hadn’t actually pulled it off.
After all, the apartment he was in now was the same layout as the last one, and it was in just as bad of shape. Except there was no furniture in this one; one of the windows had been blown out.
So he had managed a jump, but not very far. He was still in the same building.
Sitting himself up, wobbling, he noted with some relief that he at least had managed to jump without his ropes. That was a pretty good start, at least.
Staggering, Five attempted to get to his feet. The effort was more than he’d expected, and it occurred to him as the room spun and he fell back to his hands and knees that he had underestimated his own strength. He’d managed to jump, sure. But the effort had been more than somewhat taxing. It had literally wiped him out. He was exhausted, both emotionally and physically now, and the idea that he was going to be able to continue his escape was quickly becoming unlikely.
Shit, Five thought, breathing through the pain. It was unlikely that he was even going to stay awake. Darkness was pulling at him and the pain was nearly unbearable. He was going to pass out if he wasn’t careful.
He closed his eyes, focusing on his breathing.
Maybe passing out would be good.
A little sleep.
He’d escaped the room. For all those assholes knew, he could be anywhere. They probably wouldn’t start their search in the same building, thinking he’d flee quickly. Rest might be a strategic choice. Rest might be the best option.
Five was drifting, still on his hands and knees, until he heard a frantic sound coming from the stairs. There was thumping, footfalls.
“Where the hell, man!”
“We need to find him!”
“But where did he go?”
Five looked toward the noise out of instinct, and it was a mistake. The slight movement jarred his head, and his equilibrium, so precariously gained, was lost again. The spinning of his head didn’t mesh well with his still abating powers, and Five’s stomach roiled again. There was nothing he could do but vomit, heaving all over the floor in front of him.
He didn’t bring up much, but the process cut deep. He felt like he was trying to tear his stomach out through his throat, and he was crying and breathless by the time he collapsed back on the floor.
Outside, the footfalls ceased.
Five dared to hope.
The door slammed open.
The two men were standing in the door. The angry one has his gun. The nice one, who looked more terrified than Five felt right then, was brandishing a switchblade. Things, after all, were getting serious. Desperation looked differently for all of them, but he had a feeling it might play out the same.
Fate was fickle, after all, but hope was a very foolish thing in the end.
-o-
Still badly disoriented, Five blinked his eyes and zoned out. He came back to his senses marginally when he was lifted off the ground. He realized belatedly that the men had come for him and picked him up, carrying him between them so that his legs were dangly on the ground.
Briefly, he considered actually trying to move his legs. Being dragged like a sack of potatoes was without any advantage, and if he was going to be humiliated in captivity again, it might be nice to retain something of his dignity. This thought process was so consuming that he had already been dragged to the door by the time that he realized that it was also very moot. His legs were not responding to him at this point, and as they crossed the threshold of the apartment it was all he could do to keep his eyes open.
At the base of the stairs, Five grunted as they started dragging him up. From his vantage point, he had a good view of their feet but that was about it. His kidnappers didn’t seem very talkative at this point, and Five could feel their fingers cutting into his skin as they hoisted him up stair by stair.
Stair by stair and to where? Back to that same apartment? Back to his little chair with his little ropes? Where they could watch him until dawn and then drag him to a ransom drop? Was that all this was? A quick buck.
His family would come for him.
His family had to be coming.
And what was Five doing?
He was being useless, getting his ass kicked by amateur, slumming with the worst of humanity. Was this how he survived the apocalypse? Was this how he came to be the most renowned assassin the Commission had ever known? Was this how he’d saved the world?
Five looked like a kid, but he wasn’t a kid.. Not even now, when he’d been concussed badly and pushed to the point of absolute exhaustion. Five wasn’t a kid. He refused it.
As they neared the top of the stairs, Five rebelled. Fate had handed him a lot of shitty things and he’d taken all of it in stride. But he wasn’t going to take this. Not now; not ever. He flailed, frantic and uncoordinated and utterly determined. The haphazard movement caught his feet against the stairs. He heard the skinnier man grunt in annoyance while the other tried to adjust his grip.
Five didn’t imagine this was much of an advantage, but he also didn’t much care. He flailed again, summoning a raw strength born of his contrary nature more than anything else. With a heave, he threw his body weight to one side, ripping his arm from the dim man’s looser grasp. With this, he had his full weight to throw at the other man. With a yelp, he was caught off guard, and Five seized upon him again. With an ungraceful forward motion, he all but tackled the man, sending him sprawling him back a step.
With a rush of air, the man missed the step and pinwheeled. He hit his back going down before tumbling and skidding the rest of the way to the landing they had just vacated. The gun fell clear, and the man didn’t get back up.
Five knew that success could be unpredictable, and sometimes you really had to take what you could get. With one man down, Five would more than take it.
Lifting his head, Five found his wobbly feet strong enough. He set his jaw, narrow his eyes and threw any concept of caution to the wind. The other man, pudgy face shocked and wide-eyed, stared at him, as if in supplication, but Five didn’t wait to hear his request. Instead, he charged at him, diving at him with the full force of his body.
The impact, after so many throughout the day, was not as jarring as you might expect. Of course, Five was still mostly numb, and though he was coherent, he was not fully connected to the full breadth of his senses. He could see, but things were haloed and fuzzy. He could hear, but only as one could hear underwater. His movements were slow and sluggish, and everything hurt so much that nothing much hurt at all.
He also figured that his mental processing speeds were greatly reduced otherwise he would have remembered something rather important.
Desperation made humanity change. It made good men into villains. It turned bad guys into heroes. And it pushed simple, nonviolent men to pick up arms against a child.
Five and the man went down, hitting the ground. The momentum kept them moving, and their mismatched weight sent them tumbling, rolling across the landing to the open door of the apartment where Five had been kept all day. He landed on his back, head spinning as the man stumbled off of him.
He staggered back a step, and Five saw the blood. It was coating his hand, and they both stared at his blood stained fingers for a long moment. The man looked at Five, horrified.
Five looked back.
It took him another second before remembered.
The angry man had an unloaded gun.
The pudgy man, standing above him, had a knife. The gun was gone; the knife was nowhere to be seen.
Five blinked, looking down.
Unless…
It took his eyes a moment to focus, his brain longer still to understand.
Because sticking out of his stomach, the hilt glinted off the light from the dawn that broke through the dirty windows. It glimmered, shiny and red, off the blood that was spreading rapidly across Five’s torso.
That was the thing, Five supposed, about going down fighting.
He lifted his hand shakily, dipping it in the blood and holding it up to the light for confirmation.
It still meant you went all the way down.
-o-
“Oh, shit,” the man said. He fell to his knees next to Five. “Oh, shit. Shit. Oh my -- shit. I didn’t -- you weren’t -- shit!”
The incoherent nonsense was so bad that even Five, in his semiconscious state, knew it was idiotic. He forced himself to swallow as the rest of his senses caught up with him.
The man hovered, his hands milling uselessly around the hilt, clearly trying to figure out what to do. “That’s -- too much blood,” he muttered. “I don’t know -- I mean, do we take it out? Kid, do we take it out!?”
Five wasn’t sure why this man was asking him that. It didn’t much matter. As soon as he asked the question, Five realized just how much it hurt.
That was to say: it hurt a lot.
Five had been injured numerous times before, but he’d never taken a knife to the gut. As far as injuries went, this one was pretty horrific. The pain alone threatened to take him under and he choked on his next breath, feeling goosebumps as they spread across his flesh and he started to tremble.
“No, no, no,” the man muttered, lifting his hand to run through his hair. “Kid, come on. Stay with me, kid. Stay with me.”
Five wasn’t sure if it was a request or an order, but he wasn’t sure he could oblige either. He could taste the blood now, burning in the back of his throat. His eyes were wet; he might be crying.
The man shrugged out of his jacket, balling it up and placing it tentatively around the knife still lodged in Five’s intestines. It felt terrible, and Five knew it was woefully ineffective. There was no way the man was applying enough pressure to stem the flow of bleeding.
And it was bleeding.
A lot.
“I need help!” the man screamed, and it was unclear if he was alerting his partner or seeking assistance from someone who might happen to be near. Both ventures would be futile. The man at the bottom of the stairs probably wasn’t getting up for a while, and the whole point of picking an abandoned building was that no one would hear the screams. But then, intelligence had never been this one’s strong suit. “Please, help!”
When no help was forthcoming, he started to panic. Crying and wheezing, he leaned back toward Five. “I’m sorry -- I didn’t mean to -- I didn’t,” he said, starting and stopping haltingly while he took a ragged breath. “Oh, shit, kid. You weren’t supposed to -- you weren’t -- I didn’t--”
It was a lot of words to say something that he couldn’t formulate, but lying there, Five came to two conclusions.
First, he was bleeding out. Whatever damage the knife had done, it was significant. He was going to die from this without immediate medical care. He might have an hour at max. 30 minutes was more likely. Possibly less.
Second, this man -- this kidnapper, this idiot -- didn’t want him to die. He was terrified and besides himself. He was a pisspoor kidnapper, to be sure, and he would be the worst killer in the world. That was what made him human in a way Five wasn’t, when you got down to it. Five could kill without remorse. This man, for all his faults, grieved at the idea of a life lost, even a life he was trying to leverage for his own gain.
Humanity was inconsistent. It was difficult and complex and Five had spent a lifetime pining for it and never quite understanding it, not even when it was staring him right in the face.
The man broke with a sob, and then gathered himself, looking Five squarely in the eye. “Okay, kid,” he said. “Let’s get you home.”
It should have been a debate. The man should have weighed the pros and cons. He should have made himself a probability man, considering the consequence of taking a hostage back without waiting for possible payment. There was a cost benefit analysis which had to be correlated between the risk of getting pinned for murder against the risk of getting taken in on kidnapping charges. There would be no way to justify it as an accident, and self defense would be eliminated by the extenuating circumstances of Five’s kidnapping.
Really, the smartest thing would be to let Five bleed out and burn his body, spreading his remains in as many locations as possible before scrubbing down the scene with as much bleach as possible to eliminate DNA evidence. That might be effective enough to keep Five’s case from becoming anything more than a missing person’s case, thereby giving the men every opportunity to flee town and rebuild their lives.
After all, Five was already dying.
What would the value be in going down with him?
That was the pragmatic decision. You could be sorry, you could know you made a mistake, and you could move on. That, more than anything else, was how Five had survived.
But humanity, in the end, was never pragmatic.
There was no debate.
The man, face set now, reached down and laced his arm under Five’s legs. He used his other arm to lift Five up under the shoulders, gently scooping him up off the ground and mindfully positioning him in his arms. Small as he was, Five’s slight frame fit perfectly.
“We’ll just take it easy here,” he said, gingerly stepping across the ground while Five felt the knife in his gut settle. “We’ll just take it real easy, kid.”
The guy should at least take the knife out. Sure, it might make Five die faster, but it was evidence. Anything that could be traced back to the man was a liability, a mistake, a--
“Let’s get you home, kiddo,” the man said with a smile. “What do you say to that?”
Shocked, Five didn’t try to move as the man navigated him down the stairs, past the limp form of his partner. They went down several more flights before coming out onto a street lined with old buildings full of broken out windows. There was a work van parked out front, and the man finagled the door open, putting Five carefully in the passenger’s seat before hurrying around to the driver’s side.
“Sorry, kid,” the man said as the engine rumbled to life. “This might be a little bumpy.”
Five huffed in disbelief.
As if the rest of this had been so smooth.
-o-
Five could still remember, funnily enough, his first night in the apocalypse. He could remember watching the light dim -- the sun was nowhere to be seen through the haze -- but its absence stole the heat and Five was forced to cower next to the burning embers of society to stay warm.
In the dark, he’d had no choice but to hunker down. It was too dangerous in the dark, too easy to get lost or hurt. He’d tried his powers a few more times to no avail. Even when he was able to muster up enough focus to move through time, time travel was beyond him.
It had probably always been beyond him, but he hadn’t realized it until it was too late. Because now Five was beyond help, beyond fate, beyond hope.
Five was beyond humanity.
He thought about quitting that night. He thought about throwing the towel and finding a cliff to jump off of. He thought about what it meant to be the last person alive and how much that scared him. The best -- and worst -- of humanity rested with him, and he didn’t know if he could do that, if he could be the last hope for a world that had none.
He’d thought about the people, then. All those people. The ones who had died. They had never seen it coming; they’d never had a chance to prepare. Good people, bad people, old people, kids -- just people, in the end.
Just people.
In the end.
That was his only thought when dawn broke on his second day in the apocalypse. His first day, Five had jumped to the future as nothing but a smart ass kid. The second day he woke up, and he wasn’t a kid anymore.
He was humanity.
It was a day that Five would never forget.
