Chapter Text
There is a woman standing in front of Five.
This is far more unexpected than it sounds. As far as Five was aware, there were no women left alive on the planet. It’s kind of arguable if Delores counts, but even if she did she doesn’t have legs and thus couldn’t stand.
Five was under the (well-substantiated) impression that he himself is the last living human on the planet. Klaus is the last ghost, as well. They’ve spent the past eighteen years that way, and Five didn’t expect it to change until he figures out the last of his equations and they jump back.
But now there is a living, breathing, human woman standing in front of them, and if Klaus’ panic attack is anything to go by there’s just been a significant increase in the local ghost population.
Five has always hated not knowing what the fuck is going on.
“What does that mean?” he snaps at her, moving to place himself in front of Klaus. There have been very few times where Five has seen him this scared, and he imagines that his own shock at seeing another person must be magnified tenfold for Klaus, who is seeing the return of the ghosts he’s always been so afraid of.
“Just what I said,” the woman - the Handler, she called herself - says, smiling. She moves her hands, and Five nearly jumps to stab her before he sees she’s only taking out a cigarette. He still remains on high alert, the only thing taking away any attention from her is Klaus on the ground behind him. It sounds like he’s still hyperventilating.
Five wants so badly to turn around and hold him until he stops shaking, like Klaus always did for him, but he can’t turn his back on whoever this woman is. He glares at her.
She raises an eyebrow. “I work for The Commission. We are an organization dedicated to preserving the timeline. Making sure everything that should happen, happens.”
Five stares at her.
The concept is….ludicrous, he wants to say, but then again so is the concept of forty-three women around the world spontaneously giving birth to babies with superpowers. Five has always wondered whether there were other inexplicable things out there, because in all other respects the world has always seemed perfectly normal. Perfectly, utterly ordinary in every way, except for one. So it would make sense that there are other strange things out there, and there’s nothing saying that one of those strange things can’t be an organization called The Commission that ‘preserves the timeline’.
And as much as Five wants to find holes in her story, he’s kind of distracted by the fact that he’s talking to an actual living person for the first time in nearly two decades. It’s rattling and offputting and he knows he’s completely on the back foot, even moreso with Klaus defenseless and terrified behind him, and from the self-assured confidence she carries with her like a mantle she knows she has the upper hand here.
“....Okay,” Five says slowly. “So you preserve the timeline. And - you can time-travel.”
“Naturally,” she says. She takes a puff of her cigarette.
“Why don’t you fix this?” Five gestures to the wasteland surrounding him. “Make it so it never happened?”
Except he knows the answer as soon as he says it, and the amused look on her face just clinches it. “Because it was meant to happen, Five. We don’t fix what’s not broken.”
The unfamiliar sound of someone other than Klaus or Delores saying his name is almost enough to distract him from the surge of anger that roars up at the rest of her words.
“Not broken?” he repeats incredulously. “Everyone’s dead! It’s the end of everything!”
“Not the end of everything,” she says. “Just the end of - something.”
Five grits his teeth so hard he thinks his jaw might break. “So what?” he says. “Why are you here, if this is what you want?”
“Do you need your hearing checked, Five?” she chides, looking slightly annoyed now. Five feels a sense of accomplishment at putting that look on her face. “I said I have a proposition for you two.”
“And that is?” he snaps. Klaus has gone worryingly silent, and Five thinks he might have fallen off the physical plane. He hasn’t done that on accident in nearly a decade, and in light of that Five is not feeling a lot of patience towards the Handler.
“You two survivalists are quite popular back at the office, you know,” she says. “And someone had the idea of offering you a job. Five years of service each, in exchange for getting out of here and eventually retiring to the time period of your choice. What do you say?”
Five is….speechless.
He remembers Reginald Hargreeves, the man he refused to call ‘father’ as soon as he understood what the word meant, because that man was not a father. He remembers cameras throughout the house, staring down at them with baleful red light, recording every moment. He remembers being painfully, constantly aware that every movement he made was recorded and saved and looked over by Reginald’s critical, uncompromising eye.
He thought that was done. He thought he was free of that. Eighteen years, and the one thing good about the apocalypse was that Reginald’s special brand of torture and surveillance was gone from his life. He could do what he wanted, whenever he wanted, because no one was there to see it. No one there to set up tests or judgements or take pleasure from watching him fail over and over again.
And now he finds that people….people knew about them? Knew about their struggles and triumphs and obstacles over the years? Their arguments and traditions and jokes and compromises, formed over and over again, each time stronger than the last? Their grief for their family, their longing to return home, their work to get there, their hope that they could save everyone? People knew about all of that, and saw it as - as entertainment?
Five remembers when he lost his arm. Those days were harrowing, and painful, and altogether horrible. Five was crippled for life, and even if he’s used to it now it was just so avoidable. Klaus nearly went insane, and Five didn’t know enough to stop it until it was almost too late. It remains the darkest time they ever went through, months of struggle and despair followed by years of recovery. It made them stronger, but it also nearly broke them.
The Commission watched that.
And they didn’t care.
Five feels something hot and ugly rising inside him. He stares at the Handler, standing there with her smug little smile and burning cigarette.
She tilts her head a little. A silent question. Well?
He wants to jump over to her and snap her neck. He wants to pull out the knife he keeps on his hip and sink it into her chest (between the ribs, directly into the heart - he remembers his training). He wants to fall to his knees and scream and scream and s c r e a m.
But.
But he can’t. He can’t, and it takes several seconds to find all of his reasoning because his emotions are blotting out rationality, taking over his brain, and he promised himself that wouldn’t happen again but he wants to kill her.
Except he can’t, and he struggles to list the reasons why as the silence rolls out between them.
One: Klaus. Klaus comes first, he always comes first, and right now Klaus is behind him having a panic attack because there are ghosts, and Five cannot add another one. His fingers itch to end the Handler’s life, but then he would just be shunting the problem off to Klaus, who has no way to deal with his fear of ghosts anymore, not after eighteen years of atrophy. Klaus wouldn’t be able to survive. So Five cannot kill her, no matter how much he wants to, because Klaus needs him not to and he will always do what Klaus needs him to do. Doing anything else is unthinkable. That one reason is enough to make him calm down and analyse the situation more intelligently. He takes a deep breath and thinks.
Two: ‘Organization’ implies numbers. It implies many, many more people than just one person, especially if they look after the entirety of human history. However much Five hates the Handler, if he kills her she’ll probably just be replaced. She’s a representative of The Commission, not the actual Commission itself. Killing her would be briefly satisfying, but ultimately gains him nothing.
Three: If the scope of the Commission is as large as the Handler implies, he needs to find out more. Not just because such an important part of the world has slipped by his notice and he needs to rectify that immediately (although that is part of it), but because they want the apocalypse to happen. They wanted it to happen, they may have even helped engineer it, they consider his family’s death the preferable outcome -
They will try to prevent him from stopping the apocalypse.
Five stares at the Handler.
“What kind of job?” he croaks out.
She raises an eyebrow. “Our modus operandi is to find irregularities in the timeline and then….remove them. Usually via assassination. I understand you’re quite good at killing people, Number Five. And your brother’s abilities would be incredible in the field.”
That, Five thinks with a dawning sense of horror, would probably be the reason Klaus is freaking out. He doesn’t know how often The Commission kills people, but there must be a lot of ghosts around this woman. She has that air.
Five’s first thought is to reject her.
It’s not that he couldn’t do it. Five knows his abilities and his morals very well, and neither prevent him from killing people. He’d killed a double-digit number of people by the time he was thirteen, and it never really troubled him - score one for Reginald’s desensitization training. He would make an excellent assassin, and while he wouldn’t precisely like it he wouldn’t drown in regret and guilt. If it got him back to his family, let him save them, he wouldn’t care at all.
Klaus, though.
Klaus is the sticking point. Just as Five knows himself, he knows Klaus, and his brother wouldn’t be able to handle working as an assassin. Even on top of seeing the ghosts of his victims following him around everywhere he goes, there’s the shock of being pulled back into a world of constant noise and gore. They’ve discussed the problem several times over the years, how Klaus will have to adjust once they go back, how he’ll have to build up his walls again and find new coping mechanisms and pray to god that being a ghost himself will grant him some form of immunity. Klaus is terrified of going back, Five knows, and even if he’s agreed to it that doesn’t mean he isn’t happier here.
It was difficult for Five to accept that. Very difficult.
But accept it he did, and the thought of throwing Klaus back into the world of his nightmares and making him kill people as well is -
He can’t do that.
But he can’t say no, either.
“One day,” Five says abruptly. “Come back in one day, and you’ll have our answer.”
The Handler raises an eyebrow incredulously. “You want a grace period? Five -”
“You have time-travel,” Five snaps. “Don’t tell me this is a concession for you.”
The Handler looks at him speculatively. Five resists the urge to kill her all over again.
“Well. Alright,” she says, and smiles. “I’ll see you in a day.”
Then she’s gone. Vanished, like she was never there at all.
Five refuses to crane his neck around like a moron searching for her. Either she’s well and truly gone, or she isn’t and can observe him without him being any the wiser. Apparently it’s been going on for years.
Instead, Five turns around. Sure enough, there’s no sign of Klaus.
Five swallows. Even after eighteen years, he always gets a little, niggling feeling of nervousness whenever he’s alone. It’s not rational, because he knows Klaus would never leave him, would never break his promise, but those first six months of the apocalypse are always crouching in his memory, waiting to ambush him at the slightest hint of similarity. The stillness, the desolation, the silence -
“Klaus?” Five says. “Klaus, she’s gone. Are the ghosts gone?”
There’s no answer. Five can admit that he wasn’t expecting one, just from that.
Five sits down, carefully, on the dusty ground. He looks at where Klaus last was.
“Klaus,” he says. “It’s okay. She’s gone. You can come back now. The ghosts are gone. Just come back to the physical plane. Breathe. They’re all gone, just breathe. In, and out. In, and out….”
It takes twenty minutes of talking in a calm, even tone for Klaus to reappear. He looks twitchy, ragged at the edges. He blinks slowly at Five, like he’s underwater.
“Five?” Klaus says uncertainly.
“Klaus,” Five breathes out, and despite the situation, can’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of relief. “Hey. We need to talk.”