Chapter Text
Five is already seeing spots from the pain.
His tie is doing a shit job at staunching the bleeding from where his left arm—his dominant arm—used to be, and every pulse of his heart sends another wave of white-hot agony searing through his body. His knees threaten to buckle, and he braces his remaining hand against the floor, fingers slipping in the slickness of his own blood on the checkered tile.
He should stay down. He wants to stay down.
But his siblings are still fighting, and he cannot afford to rest. The Guardian that caught him off guard is attacking his family. His ears are full of the sounds of battle—his siblings yelling, the clash of weapons and fists against the Guardian. Somewhere in the chaos, he hears Luther’s voice. Luther, his brother that he couldn’t save.
It all hurts so much.
Still, Five grits his teeth and pushes himself upright. He sways on his feet, the world tilting dangerously, but he stays standing. He has to. There’s no time to think about the sharp, tearing pain above where his elbow was, the phantom ache where his left arm should be. No time to acknowledge the weakness clawing up his spine, screaming at him to stop.
Five struggles to his feet and down the steps.
He catches sight of his ghostly brother as he fades.
The Guardian has been downed, but it doesn’t stay that way. It’s getting up, and Reginald is shouting at them to stand on the sigils, to which most of them comply. “Seven points. Seven of us. We’re the bells?” Viktor is saying, and then there’s one sigil left. The Guardian is rising for another attack. It’s him or Allison.
Five looks back to the Guardian swinging its weapon.
One more sigil. One more bell.
Allison’s eyes are wide with fear.
And the Guardian is about to—
And Allison won’t—
Five decides then.
It’s him. It has to be him.
Five stumbles forward a few steps, then summons every bit of energy he has to blink the rest of the way, onto the last star, to become the seventh bell.
It happens all at once, the way all terrible things do.
The beams converge on Five. It’s a cascade of light, blinding in its intensity, from his siblings to him, then outward. He is at the center of it all. Of course he is. He always is. He can’t even flinch away. His body locks up, suspended in the crackling energy, every nerve screaming as if his molecules are being pulled apart and forced back together all at once. He isn’t sure if he’s breathing. If he even has lungs right now. There is only pain, white-hot and endless, sinking into his bones, hollowing him out.
It’s too much. It’s too much.
His vision whites out, drowning in the sheer force of the energy consuming him. The pain is blinding. Literally, he realizes distantly, because when the pain reaches its peak, when it burns so bright it feels like it might crack him open, everything goes dark. Not in the way that means he’s unconscious. No, he’s still aware. He can feel the floor beneath him, can feel the way his knees threaten to buckle, the way the energy is being pulled from him, drained away.
He hears Reginald speaking. He hears Allison.
He hears his siblings crying out in pain.
And then—
And then—
Five falls to the floor with a gasp.
He’s not quick enough to brace his fall with his remaining arm, but he can feel. That’s the first thing he registers, and he tries to focus on that to ground himself: the cold floor beneath his fingers, the unsteady tremble in his limbs, the lingering ache in his bones like he’s been wrung out and left to dry.
It’s dark. It’s so dark.
Five blinks hard, once, twice, willing the void around him to disperse, for the blackness behind his eyes to clear into something, anything. It doesn’t. His breath stutters, caught somewhere in his throat, and he sways as he pushes himself up onto his elbow. His brain feels sluggish, unresponsive, like it’s still trying to catch up with everything his body just endured. He hears shifting movements, the scuff of shoes against the floor, but he can’t orient himself to them. He turns his head instinctively, trying to look for his siblings, to find something to anchor himself to.
But there’s nothing.
There’s only—
“Allison, stop!”
Viktor.
His heart spikes.
Something is happening. His mind forms the picture.
Allison made a deal with Reginald. Allison is about to do something irreversible. Something permanent. Something he can’t fix if it all goes to hell. And it will, because it always does. Because his siblings don’t listen. Allison isn’t going to listen. And Five is always, always too late to stop it. Too late to stop the apocalypse. Too late to stop the Commission. Too late to stop the Handler, the Kugelblitz, Reginald.
And now Allison—
It haunts him: too late, too late, too late.
He hears the hum of Viktor’s powers. He doesn’t dare to hope.
“Do you trust me?” says Allison.
And Five thinks: no, no, no.
But it means nothing.
He’s so tired of being nothing.
Everything shifts.
He sways on his feet, disoriented by the lack of any visual input. His senses scramble to compensate, to adapt. He can hear his siblings stifled murmurs around him, hear the distant hum of machinery, the telltale ding of an elevator arriving at its floor. There is someone at his back, and they are ushering him forward.
Five steps into cooler air, but it’s still dark.
Moreover, something is different.
It’s the pain in his arm, Five realizes. Or rather, the lack of it. That burning, searing pain from where it had been severed is gone. His fingers twitch, and he realizes—his fingers. He lifts his left arm, expecting the phantom ache of a limb that isn’t there, but—it is there. He brushes his right hand over it: the back of his hand, around to his wrist, up his forearm and past his elbow. Not even the roughness of a scar where it had been cut.
His arm was whole. Undamaged.
Like it had never been taken from him at all.
And yet—
He doesn’t know where they are.
He doesn’t know, because he can’t see.
Shit, Five thinks.
He swallows hard, forcing down the rising tide of something he refuses to name. Later. He can process this later. Right now, he needs to figure out what the hell just happened. He takes several more steps forward, trying his best to follow the shuffle of footsteps in his immediate surroundings, arms slightly out to brace himself on anything nearby.
He’s met with empty air.
Somewhere ahead of him, Lila lets out a laugh, something delighted and disbelieving. It’s a louder sound that he can focus on. He feels a little more secure about them being out of direct danger with it, but out of immediate danger does not mean safety.
“Guys?” he says cautiously.
His words get swallowed by a chorus of delight from his siblings, with overlapping exclamations of Luther! from them. Disoriented as Five is, the warmth in their voices is unmistakable. He turns instinctively, orienting himself toward the sound, toward the relief in their voices. Is Luther alive? He must be, for them to be reacting this way. Luther, whose massive body had been slumped against the ground not long ago, blood pooling beneath him. Luther, whose death had been another tally mark in the long line of things Five had been too late to stop.
“You can see me? I’m alive? I’m alive!” Luther crows. “Oh! My body! It’s—I look amazing!” There’s laughter in his voice. Five wishes he could see it. His stomach sinks. There was only so much he could do to compartmentalize his new reality; the reality that his sight is gone, well and truly. Maybe it was the cost of being the seventh bell, maybe it was something Reginald had done. Five doesn’t know. He hates the not knowing. “I gotta show Sloane! Sloane—wait. Wait. Where’s Sloane?”
Sloane isn’t here?
A spike of worry shoots through his chest.
Five had assumed that they were all here, wherever this is. But if Sloane wasn’t with them now, then—double shit. Okay, okay. Focus. Perform a headcount. He heard Viktor’s voice, and Lila’s too. Klaus was responding to Luther, so they were both there as well. Was Allison here? Perhaps, but Five didn’t think so. She would have spoken by now, he would assume. It also filled in a few gaps on what happened. Still, what about Diego? What about Ben?
“Sloane was right behind me…” Klaus is saying.
“When Allison hit the bloody button.”
“She’s gone, too,” says Diego.
Two answers in one: Diego is here, Allison is not.
None of his siblings seem to have any understanding of why, though.
“Does anyone know where the hell we are?”
And there was Sparrow Ben.
“The Hotel,” answers Lila. “Or, at least, where the Hotel used to be.”
“So, is this the reset then?” Klaus asks. “That would explain why it’s all so…ugh. Y’know. Hargreeves-themed around here.”
Hargreeves-themed?
Five sincerely hopes that was an exaggeration.
Knowing his luck, it wasn’t likely to be.
Luther is still calling out for Sloane as Lila delights over Diego’s returned fingers. Five mentally catalogues that. Diego had his fingers restored—they were cut off by a Guardian. Five had his arm restored—also lost due to a Guardian. Was it the nature of his vision loss that kept it from being similarly returned?
“Where’s Sloane?” repeats Luther. His voice is closer now, stripped of all its humor. Before Five can react, rough hands seize the front of his suit and yank him forward. His balance shifts violently, but there’s no way to anticipate the movement when he can’t see it coming. He grits his teeth, jaw locking as Luther’s massive grip tightens against his chest. “I don’t care about any resets. Where is she, Five?”
He doesn’t need sight to know the expression on his face: anguish twisted into frustration, fear barely contained beneath the demand. Five wants to meet Luther’s eyes, to narrow his own in warning, to pry those desperate hands off him before he gets thrown halfway across the room, if they are even in a room. But he can’t. He can’t see the way Luther’s face twists, can’t gauge his stance, can’t even tell how close the others are to him.
“Five!” Luther shakes him, rough and impatient, his hands still fisted in the front of Five’s suit. There’s a rush of movement around them, his siblings reacting, making various sounds of alarm—disjointed protests, shuffling steps. But none of them actually intervene.
None of them help him.
Five’s pulse pounds in his ears, raw frustration rising up past the fear he’s trying so hard to swallow. Luther wants answers. Well, so does he. Luther wants to know what’s happened to Sloane—well, Five wants to know what’s happened to him.
“I don’t know!” he snaps, his voice sharp and ragged. “I don’t know, I can’t even—”
He stops himself just in time.
The words are there, heavy on his tongue, pressing against his teeth, desperate to escape. I can’t even see. But saying it would make it real. More real than it already is, more real than the suffocating blackness swallowing the edges of his mind, more real than the growing panic clawing at his ribs. Five cannot afford to succumb to weakness right now.
Luther starts making demands again.
Viktor cuts in. “Luther, stop it!”
The grip on Five’s suit loosens.
Luther lets him go, his presence pulling back in a huff of frustration.
“Screw this,” Luther mutters.
Freed from Luther’s grasp, Five stumbles, thrown off by the sudden absence of force. He grits his teeth, planting his feet firmly beneath him, trying to regain his center. The vertigo from earlier hasn’t entirely left him, a lingering disorientation that makes every movement feel uncertain.
He takes a step.
Then another.
And then—
Pain lances through his chest as he slams into something solid, catching him right in the ribs. He gasps, a sharp intake of breath, his hands automatically flying out to catch himself. His fingers find cool metal beneath them, the shape of something sculpted, smooth contours beneath his grip. A statue. A podium. He must have walked straight into it.
Because he didn’t know it was there.
It’s quiet now, eerily so. His siblings aren’t yelling anymore, and he can feel their eyes on him—watching, waiting, judging.
Then, Diego’s voice, wary and suspicious: “What are you doing?”
Before Five can answer—not that he knows what he would say—Klaus pipes up, his tone infuriatingly light. “Feeling up the statue now that Delores is gone? Gotta say, Dad’s bust isn’t my preference, but you do you, mi hermano.”
Five exhales slowly, gripping the edges of the podium a little too tightly.
He cannot find any humor in it. He doesn’t even try.
Klaus’s joke falls flat as silence lingers.
It stretches uncomfortably, layered with something Five doesn’t have a name for. It’s not quite tension, not quite suspicion, but something creeping along the edges of both. His hands stay locked around the metal bust atop the podium, fingers pressing into it like an anchor, though it provides no real comfort.
Knowing it’s apparently of Reginald doesn’t help matters.
But the longer he stands there in silence, the more the others seem to notice that something is off. He can feel it. The way their breathing shifts. The way their bodies shuffle. The restless sort of energy radiating from them, likely exchange glances that Five can’t see.
Then—Ben.
Not his Ben. The other one. The shitty one.
“What’s wrong with you?” snaps Ben, his tone sharp and impatient, like Five’s silence is some kind of inconvenience to him.
Five’s head jerks toward the voice automatically, his body orienting to the sound. But his gaze—his goddamn useless gaze—lands somewhere off, unfocused, unseeing. He knows it must look unnatural, his body turning in the right direction but his eyes refusing to follow, failing to fix on anything at all.
Something shifts in the air.
A realization sinking its claws across the present company.
Ben goes quiet for a fraction of a second, then scoffs, a disbelieving, ironic little laugh under his breath. “Oh, shit.” There’s a horrible kind of amusement laced through it, like he’s just figured out the punchline to a joke. “Are you blind?”
The words drop like a bomb.
Everything else explodes.
“What?” Diego, sharp and alarmed.
“Wait—what do you mean?” Viktor, confused and concerned.
“Five?” Klaus, suddenly serious.
All at once, the air is filled with movement, bodies shifting, voices overlapping, the others reacting before Five even has the chance to process Ben’s accusation. He can feel them gathering, moving in closer, the noise swelling around him, every single one of them demanding answers, demanding to know if what Ben just said is true.
He wants to snap at them, tell them to back off, tell them to shut up—but he can’t. His denials fall short because Ben is right and now they all know. The weight of it presses down on him, hot and suffocating. He’d been holding it together. He’d been keeping it contained. But now it’s out in the open, torn from his grasp, and they’re all reacting, all clambering over it, over him, their voices rising and tangling and making it impossible to think.
His fingers tighten around the podium. His breathing is too shallow.
He hates this.
He hates all of this.
“Shut up!” Five snaps.
Most of them fall silent. Not all, but most.
The noise dies down to a simmer instead of a full boil, but it’s not enough. The weight of their attention is still pressing down on him, heavy and unbearable. He doesn’t need to see their faces to know what expressions they’re wearing. He can feel them watching him, feel the scrutiny, the concern, the confusion, the pity.
He doesn’t want any of it. He just wants this fixed.
Lila is the one who speaks up, because of course she doesn’t know when to leave things alone. “But why?” she asks. It’s not accusatory, not mocking. Just blunt. Curious. And that’s almost worse. “Diego’s fingers were fixed when we got here,” she continues. “Luther’s alive too.”
Five exhales sharply through his nose. His head dips slightly as he clenches his hands into fists, then forces them open again. He needs to stay calm. Needs to think. Everything else was fixed. Diego’s fingers. Luther’s entire damn existence. His own goddamn arm. But not this. Not a key ability that dictated how he moves through the world, how he fights, how he survives. Not an important sense that he’d relied on to get back to his family, to save them. Of all the things to take from him, of all the punishments the universe could have chosen, why this?
It’s like some kind of sick joke; a twisted little reminder that he can never truly win, that there will always be some price he wasn’t prepared to pay, that every time he pulls them back from the brink, he is the one who has to bleed for it. His fingers twitch at his sides. He forces them still. His arm is back. His sight is not.
He’s vulnerable, and his siblings see that.
Every part of Five screams at him to leave.
He needs out. Out of this space, out of their scrutiny, out of the suffocating awareness that they are looking at him—all these people who expect him to have answers he doesn’t have, who see him different now, who won’t stop seeing him like this, even though he can’t see them at all. His instincts howl at him to move, to escape, to blink to some rooftop or alley or empty corridor where he can be alone, where he can have time, where he can claw his way through this nightmare in private before he has to face it out loud.
So, Five reaches for it: an escape.
He pulls at space, at that familiar muscle, at the instinct so deeply ingrained in his body that it should be effortless.
It should be second nature.
And—nothing.
His body jerks with the motion, but he stays exactly where he is. No slipping into the fold of space-time, no familiar rush of weightlessness, no collapse into the space between spaces. It’s not even like a door slamming shut, the wall that he hits when he’s too tired to perform a spacial jump. It’s like the door doesn’t exist at all.
What the hell?
A sick, ice-cold feeling trickles down his spine.
“What are you doing now?” asks Luther.
Five startles. His brother’s voice is closer than he expected. Not to mention, Five had thought Luther had stalked off after letting him go, too preoccupied with Sloane’s absence to keep hovering over Five’s predicament. But no, apparently not. Apparently he’s still here, watching, waiting, probably staring at him just like the rest of them.
Five’s jaw tightens. He exhales through his nose.
“I can’t blink,” he admits, trying to keep his voice steady.
That sets off another shuffle among his siblings. No one speaks for several long moments.
Then, hesitantly, Viktor says, “I think…I think all our powers are gone.”
His words land like a slow-moving blade: not immediate devastation, but something cold and creeping. Something that seeps in between the cracks of Five’s carefully built composure and wedges itself deeper, deeper, deeper still. His stomach knots itself into something tight and unnatural. He thinks he might be sick.
No powers.
That shouldn’t be possible.
Their abilities are fundamental. They are innate. They are the fabric of what makes them them. They have been ripped from time and space and thrown across history, and never once—not even when Five had de-aged himself into a child, not even when Allison had her throat sliced, not even when Klaus was drugging himself into numbness—had their powers simply…ceased to exist.
If they’re gone, then what does that mean?
His mind turns over the possibilities too fast, a churning mess of calculations and worst-case scenarios. Had they been rewritten somehow? Had they been stripped away, stolen, erased? Why? Because of the button Allison pressed? Because of whatever the hell this place is? Is there a way to get them back? If not, then what does that mean for him?
What does that mean for the world?
How many disasters have they only survived because of their powers? How many enemies has he only beaten because of his ability to move through space, to see an attack before it lands? How many situations has he only escaped because he could blink away? If his powers are truly gone, then—
SHIT, Five thinks emphatically.
He clenches his fists. Still nothing.
He’s blind. He’s powerless. He is less.
He has spent his whole damn life adapting, reshaping himself to whatever the universe throws at him, but this—this is different. This is fundamental. This is a shift he doesn’t know how to prepare for, and the fact that the others are just as lost only makes it worse.
“How do we get them back, you idiots?” Ben’s voice is sharp, cutting through Five’s spiraling thoughts, and for once, Five is almost grateful for it. Because Ben is voicing the one question Five needs an answer to.
How do they fix this?
Because they have to fix it.
Because the alternative is not an option.
Except—
Except—
Five doesn’t have an immediate plan.
So the alternative might be all they have right now.
“Forget this,” Ben says, voice sharp with dismissal. “I’m out.”
Five hears his footsteps retreating, even as Viktor calls after him, voice lined with frustration but lacking pursuit. Five doesn’t need to see Viktor to know that he won’t follow—he can hear it in his tone, in the way the words are more of an attempt to stop Ben rather than an intention to go after him. Ben doesn’t respond. The footsteps fade.
Gone.
“I need to find Sloane,” Luther announces next, and from the scuff of his boots upon gravel, it sounds like he’s already making his exit. But then he stops—pauses just long enough for Five to hear the hesitation in his stance—and then says, “Where are you guys going?”
A beat of silence.
He tries to imagine what must be filling that space. Perhaps the others are exchanging glances, gestures he can’t see, deliberations he can’t read. There is a gap in his perception now, a missing piece in his ability to navigate the world around him, and it grates at him like sandpaper against raw skin.
“Maybe we should find a place to stay,” says Viktor. “Together.”
Five doesn’t say aloud how grateful he is for that suggestion.
Because even through the throbbing frustration of being reduced to this—this helpless, stuck version of himself—he still wants to stay with his family. He needs to. The idea of them scattering, of wandering off into this new, unfamiliar world alone, gnaws at something deep inside his chest. He’s already lost so much.
He doesn’t want to lose them too.
Lila clicks her tongue. “Someone needs to be that one’s guardian.”
Five’s head jerks toward her voice, irritation flashing hot through his veins. He knows exactly who she’s talking about.
“I’m not a child,” he snaps.
Lila snorts. “You look like one. And without powers, you don’t have anything to prove otherwise.”
He is about to protest, except Lila is unfortunately right. Without his abilities, without his sight, without the time to adapt to both those losses—he’s cannot be the seasoned strategist, the battle-hardened assassin, the man who has clawed his way through time and survived things that would have killed any of them. He cannot the person they have relied on to get them through every apocalypse, every crisis.
Without his abilities, Five is exactly what he looks like.
A thirteen-year-old boy, scrawny and small, easily dismissed.
His age had never defined him before. Not when he was truly thirteen, already more skilled and capable than his siblings, rushing ahead with an arrogance that carried him far, too far, farther than he could handle. Not when he returned to them physically de-aged, because he still had his mind, his knowledge, his powers to compensate.
But now? Now Five is just a kid.
A kid who cannot see.
A kid who cannot leave whenever he chooses.
A kid who is just as lost as the rest of them.
It is a terrifying realization.
Because his powers have always been his way out. The thing that gave him control when everything else spiraled. The tool that allowed him to fix, to change, to undo. And now, stripped of it, stripped of everything—he is just stuck. His hands twitch at his sides, useless and restless, as his mind runs circles around itself, looking for solutions that aren’t there. He exhales sharply, hating the sense of helplessness it brings.
“Fine,” Five concedes. The word tastes bitter in his mouth, like defeat wrapped in something too small, too insignificant to contain the sheer weight of what it means. But what else is there to say? What other choice does he have?
He doesn’t protest when the conversation shifts, when their priorities rearrange themselves into something more logistical—where to go, how to get there, what to do next. He listens, absorbing everything while keeping his own voice at bay. There is a strange comfort in the background noise of their plans, in the way his siblings fill the space with their usual bickering and commentary, as if things haven’t fundamentally changed.
But for Five, they have.
For forty-five years, Five has carried the burden of being the one who knew more—who had seen things they never could, who had survived horrors beyond their comprehension. He had been the one who pulled them out of the fire, the one who kept going, no matter how much it cost him. And now, stripped of everything that made that possible, he can feel that balance tilting, shifting into something that makes his stomach churn.
Because now, it is he who needs to be looked after.
And what reason do they have to do that?
Love? Maybe.
But love had never been their family’s strongest foundation. They care about each other in their own broken, jagged ways, but when the world was burning, when things were falling apart, they relied on utility. What someone could do for the others. How they could contribute. Because Five loved his family more than anything, but his efforts and warnings were spurned by his siblings enough times for him to know that they would turn away from him until he could offer them something.
And Five had always had something to offer.
Without that, what was he to them?
A liability? An obligation?
He clenches his fists at his sides, jaw locking as he swallows the sharp, unfamiliar ache in his throat. He doesn’t like these thoughts. He doesn’t like the way they spiral into a place he cannot control. But they are there, relentless, digging into him like splinters he cannot remove. He wonders if his family truly needs him anymore. He doesn’t really want an answer, because he thinks he knows what it would be.
He thinks hearing it aloud would break him.
“Five,” says Diego. “You coming?”
Five nods once, a sharp motion, tilting his head slightly in the direction of Diego’s voice. He straightens, schools his features into something indifferent, something unaffected. Because none of them need to see how much he’s unraveling. None of them need to know how much this terrifies him. “Yeah, yeah, I’m right behind you,” he says, and takes a step in the vague direction of Diego’s voice.
He doesn’t request help.
If he can’t be useful, the least he can do is not be a burden.
There’s a pause, the kind that tells him Diego is probably debating whether or not to push, but then Klaus pipes up. “Aw, look at us, a big, happy, traumatized family sticking together! It’s like one of those heartwarming survival movies, except instead of banding together against zombies, we’re up against,”—he makes an exaggerated whooshing sound—“the terrifying uncertainty of our bleak and meaningless existence. Fun!”
Five exhales sharply. It’s the closest thing to a laugh he can manage right now. “Thank you for the pep talk, Klaus. Truly inspiring.”
“Danke, danke. I do try.”
Five can hear the grin in his voice.
But the image in his head isn’t the same as seeing it, and Five didn’t think that was something he’d ever have to mourn. But now, now that it’s gone, the absence of it is sharp in a way he wasn’t prepared for. He didn’t think he’d ever have to mourn something so simple, so mundane, as seeing Klaus’s insufferable, ridiculous grins. As catching the way Diego frowns in that overly serious way of his, or the way Viktor’s expression softens when he’s thinking too hard about something. He didn’t think about how much he relies on their faces to read them, to know how they’re doing, to predict their next move before they even know it themselves.
He didn’t think about how much of his life has been spent observing, watching for signs of trouble, anticipating problems before they arise. He’s always been the one who sees things first. And now? Now, there is only nothing. A blank, unyielding void where the world used to be. It is disorienting in a way that sinks beneath his skin, that curls tight in his ribs, that makes the edges of his thoughts fray with something dangerously close to panic. Because this isn’t just losing sight. It’s losing control. It’s losing his footing in a way he doesn’t know how to properly counteract. He can’t map out the room in a glance, can’t watch his siblings for unspoken tells, can’t even navigate without relying on his own damn hands to feel out his surroundings like a helpless child.
He hates it. He hates it.
Five shoves the thought away before it can sink too deep.
It won’t do him any good to wallow. He has to adapt. He always does.
“See, Five gets it!” Klaus hums, apparently having taken Five’s silence as some kind of agreement. “Nothing like a bit of soul-crushing existentialism to really bring us together.”
“Yeah, yeah, can we get moving already?” Diego huffs, and Five can practically hear the eye-roll in his voice. “C’mon, old man.” Five startles at the hand that grabs him. He forces himself to settle. Diego. It’s just Diego. “We can’t have you hobbling around like a senior citizen looking this young.”
“I am a senior,” he points out.
“Whatever, boomer. Get moving.”
He takes a steadying breath, and lets himself be led.