Chapter Text
Alex
He walked into his math classroom and immediately noticed three things.
First, there was a new kid. Dark hair, wiry frame, around thirteen or fourteen years old — which was odd, because this was a high school calculus class, not whatever pre-algebra class middle schoolers were usually in.
Second, the kid was sitting in the seat in the back corner of the classroom farthest from the window — Alex’s usual seat. ( The most defensible position , his mind supplied. Shut up , Alex told it.)
Third — the kid was looking directly back at him with an unnervingly intense gaze.
Alex’s shoulders tensed involuntarily, and he took a moment to consciously relax his body. He was just being irrationally paranoid again, wasn’t he? After all, this was just a kid. A weird kid, maybe, but just a kid. Not an assassin, or a spy, or a terrorist.
(Probably. Right?)
Outwardly calm, Alex made his way toward his usual seat. He thought about trying to reclaim it, but ultimately decided it wasn’t worth it and dropped into the next desk over. The kid watched him the whole way, and once Alex had slipped his backpack off his shoulders, he met the kid’s pale eyes and gave a small nod of greeting. That seemed to satisfy the boy, who nodded back and then returned his attention to the notebook he was writing in. They sat in silence until the bell rang and the rest of the students entered in a chattering stream.
The teacher cleared her throat before they began.
“Class, we have a new student,” she said in her usual perky tone. Alex could never understand how someone could be perky about math at eight in the morning, but Ms. Alder always was. “Fievel Hargrove, would you give a wave?”
The class rippled, heads turning to stare at the kid next to Alex, who jerkily raised his hand. His eyes were narrowed, lips pressed together, other hand clenched in a first, shoulders tense — Alex processed all this almost unconsciously and came up with a question mark. Nervous, he could understand, but why was “Fievel” angry ?
Never mind. Ms. Alder was talking again.
“I know Fievel’s a little younger than most of you —” A couple of snorts and coughs. “— but he’s perfectly qualified to be here, so let’s all be welcoming, all right?” Ms. Alder smiled brightly, waited for a few bored nods from the students, then picked up a whiteboard marker. “Great! Now, let’s pick up where we left off yesterday with integration…”
When the bell rang at the end of class, no one approached the corner. The corner, after all, was where Alex usually sat, and Alex was the loner no one ever talked to, the guy whose haunted eyes kept everyone except Sabina Pleasure away even now, months after he transferred in. Alex didn’t really mind — he wasn’t sure he was ready to stop grieving either.
Fievel gave him an assessing glance when he stood up, then nodded sharply before leaving. Alex wasn’t sure what test he’d passed, but the next day, and the next, and the next, he and Fievel sat peaceably next to each other in calculus, never exchanging a word, and yet he felt more at ease next to the boy all the same.
~.~+~.~
Five
“How was your first day of school?” asked Vanya when she picked him up at the end of the day.
Five resisted the urge to snap Don’t patronize me . (They were all working on not insulting each other and besides, this was Vanya.) “Fine.”
She glanced sideways at him. “That’s it? No complaints about the idiot children? The incompetent teachers?”
“If you know it already, what’s the point of me saying it?” Five snarked back without heat.
Vanya smiled gently. Several minutes passed in comfortable silence — Vanya driving, Five sipping from the coffee she’d brought him.
“Did you make any friends?” she asked.
Five scoffed. “No.”
This time she sighed. “Five…”
“Why would I want to be friends with prepubescent morons who can’t tell Uranus from Neptune?”
“Because that’s the point of you going to school,” Vanya chided. “Remember? To have social interactions and reacclimate to the modern world, like we discussed as a family?”
Right, and hadn’t that been a fun time. In a once-in-a-blue-moon phenomenon, all six of his siblings had agreed to stage an intervention over absolutely nothing. Five personally didn’t see what was wrong with doing theoretical math and quantum physics in his room all day with occasional breaks for coffee and sometimes a walk in the park (he liked being able to see green, living scenery, all right?). Besides, it was late April. What was the point of starting in late April, when the school year was almost over? But noooooo, once Diego found out Five had never heard of Facebook, and Vanya realized he couldn’t work a smartphone, and Klaus and Ben saw him ( one time! It was just one time, Ben, shut up! ) flinching from a stranger’s casual touch, and Luther caught him skipping meals to work equations — well. Middle school it was.
At least they let him take a placement exam for math, so he wouldn’t be stuck with imbeciles learning pre-algebra when he could be stuck with imbeciles learning calculus instead.
The rest of his academic knowledge was patchy. Reginald Hargreeves had given the Umbrella Academy a thorough education, but — as Allison pointed out — that was almost fifty years ago for Five. His knowledge of science and social studies was limited to the basics plus whatever he’d picked up in his time with the Commission.
(“I could tell you the exact mechanics of the Hindenburg explosion,” Five had hissed indignantly. “The exact chemical process to synthesize Agent Orange, the exact price of eggs in Germany after World War One, the exact layout of JFK’s assassination —”
“All of us could tell you that,” Diego snorted.
Allison shushed him. “But could you tell me who the current vice president of the US is?”
Five opened his mouth. Closed it. And that was that.)
“I didn’t meet anyone interesting,” Five said to Vanya, who pursed her lips. But even as he said it, his mind flicked back to the boy from calculus, the one with blond hair, athletic build, and shadowed brown eyes. There was something about him — the way he moved, maybe, or the way he’d looked at Five — that made him seem like he was walking on a different plane of existence than the rest of the students.
Five could relate to that feeling. He did it, literally, all the time.
Anyway, he was potentially interesting. Maybe. Five decided he would tolerate the boy’s presence for now, at least until he could figure out what it was about Alex Rider that seemed so familiar.