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They’d always wondered what happened to little Number Five, wondered where he went, whether he actually managed to time travel, why he didn’t come back.
Over the years, though, they stopped wondering. They stopped pleading with their father to let them look for their missing teammate. They stopped asking Klaus whether Five’s face had appeared among the dead. There was simply too much going on in their lives to spare more than an occasional passing thought for their long-lost brother.
And they certainly didn’t have time to think about him when it was discovered that Vanya—meek, ordinary Vanya—had powers. And a lying, manipulative boyfriend hissing in her ear.
They tried talking her down, tried convincing her that, no, they had no idea she had powers, but it was no use.
Vanya exploded, and in a concussive surge of white light, The Umbrella Academy, along with the rest of the world, knew no more.
---
When Allison woke up, she was surprised for a few reasons.
First, she was dead. That would surprise anyone even if they knew beforehand that death was coming for them.
Second, she didn’t appear to be in any of the beautiful afterlives that many religions spoke of. If anything, she thought she might’ve been in Hell.
Third, she was surrounded by all her siblings, who were each in various stages of waking up as well.
And fourth, she was surrounded by all her siblings except Number Five.
The last one shouldn’t have surprised her—after all, Five was long dead, right?—but it did.
“Where the hell are we?”
Everyone whipped around.
Like them, Vanya wore the outfit she’d died in; however, her eyes were brown once more, and her skin was no longer pale and glowing.
“Why are you here?” Diego growled, marching toward their sister. His hand moved as if to grab a knife from his leather harness, but there was no knife to grab.
None of them carried any weapons.
Diego snarled in frustration and started to raise his fist.
Allison broke out of her stupor and darted forward to grab his arm before he could strike Vanya in his rage. “Hey!” she barked. “It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t know!”
Diego yanked his arm out of her grip. “Didn’t know?! Didn’t know?! Allison, she killed us!”
“I’m sorry,” Vanya whispered behind Allison. “I’m so sorry. It was just— Everything was so- so overwhelming. I couldn’t control it.”
“Guys, let’s just… The past is the past. We’re dead. Do we have to fight each other even in the afterlife?” said an unfamiliar yet familiar voice.
“I don’t think this is the afterlife, Benerino,” Klaus replied.
Everyone else stared, only just then fully comprehending who else was there with them.
“Ben?” Allison said.
Ben smiled. “The one and only.”
In short, there was lots of crying—it seemed even the dead could shed tears—lots of hugs, and lots of yelling and apologizing because, apparently, Klaus had been telling the truth the entire time.
By the time they were done, the circumstances of their deaths were—mostly—pushed aside in favor of pursuing the question of where they were.
They knew they were dead. It was an innate knowledge. Indisputable. Something felt deep in their bones.
They were also pretty sure they weren’t in any sort of Heaven. As far as they understood, Heaven wasn’t supposed to look like a post-apocalyptic horror movie.
There were corpses everywhere, and everything was on fire, though they couldn’t feel the heat or smell the smoke. They also couldn’t seem to touch anything. A blue glow enveloped them whenever they tried, and they would phase through whatever object they were trying to affect.
When they discovered that particular piece of information, Ben mentioned that that was what always happened to him when he tried to touch something as a ghost.
“So… we’re ghosts?” Allison asked.
“So it would seem,” Ben sighed.
“But then…” Vanya swallowed hard. “That means that this is… this is the city?” Her voice wavered and cracked. “Did I do this?”
Allison looked around, trying to see if she could spot a landmark that would answer Vanya’s question.
Then she saw it: RED CHURCH. The second R had fallen off and the second C was likely only hanging on by a single nail, but she still recognized the words above the building’s entrance. She’d never actually gone inside before, but she remembered it because it was right next to her favorite deli in the city.
Allison didn’t know what to say.
So she didn’t say anything.
Neither did anyone else.
That was confirmation enough for Vanya, and she broke down in tears.
After a moment, Luther cleared his throat. “So if we’re dead, and Vanya… destroyed the city and also died in the process, why are we here?”
Everyone looked at Klaus and Ben.
The two exchanged a glance. Finally, Klaus gave them a helpless shrug. “I don’t know. Unfinished business?”
“What sort of unfinished business could all of us just so happen to have?” Diego asked, crossing his arms.
“Maybe it’s some sort of… family bonding thing?” Luther suggested.
Allison looked around. “Wouldn’t Five be here then?” she pointed out.
Diego huffed. “Five abandoned us. I’d hardly call him ‘family.’”
Vanya glanced at him, frowning through her tears, but didn’t say anything.
“Whatever the case,” Allison said, “I do feel like- like we need to be here. Like we’re supposed to be here.”
“I agree,” Luther added. “I’ve just got this… feeling. Like something’s grounding me here in this spot.”
“Unfinished business,” Klaus reasserted.
“But, again,” Diego pressed, “what could we all—”
A brilliant flash of blue light cut through the haze of smoke and fire.
Allison’s gaze snapped toward it.
And there he was after all these years: little Number Five, looking exactly the same as the day he’d left.
The moment he exited his portal in front of Red Church, Five stopped dead.
Vanya gaped next to Allison. “Five?”
Five didn’t react. His arrogant grin slid off his face as he took in the ash and destruction.
“Five?” Diego called, louder than Vanya.
Still, Five didn’t appear to notice them. His head whipped from side to side, horror growing on his face.
“He can’t see us,” Ben realized. “He’s not a ghost. He’s still alive.”
Allison stared. “But— What? So- So Five did time travel? This is where he ended up?”
Suddenly, Five turned around and started running down the obliterated sidewalk.
“Guys, come on!” Klaus called. “We gotta follow him!”
So they did. They followed Five through the burning wreckage, past mangled mounds of metal and crushed corpses of cars, all the way to the doors of the Academy.
Five stopped in front of the gate. He stared at the rubble of their childhood home with despair in his eyes. He looked around again as if expecting the scenery to change.
Allison felt a lump form in her throat, which was unexpected considering she’d spent the better part of her teenage years cursing her brother’s name for abandoning them.
Then Five spoke.
“Vanya!” he shouted, his voice so young and so scared—Had Allison ever heard him sound that scared before? “Ben!”
Both Vanya and Ben shifted as though to respond before remembering themselves.
“Dad!” This yell from Five was weaker, more hopeless.
“Five…” Vanya finally whispered. She was crying again.
When he heard no reply, Five turned around, now facing them. Allison stiffened, but their brother’s green eyes stared right through them as he screamed out, “Anyone!”
Diego stepped up to Five, kneeling down in front of him. “Five,” he called. “Five, we’re right here.”
Five, of course, still didn’t see him.
Their brother unwittingly turned away from Diego and clenched his fists in front of him. Faint blue light rippled weakly around his hands before sputtering out.
Five tried again, straining harder, pushing against the fabric of space that refused to tear for him. “Come on!” he shouted. His fists shook. His entire body was taut as a wire. A grimace of concentration carved deep shadows across his face.
The light around his fists faded once more and did not come back.
Five’s expression was full of anguish. “Shit…”
He dropped his hands and looked around, hopelessness setting in as he comprehended his situation.
Allison thought she might cry.
So this was where Five had been all these years?
Diego stumbled back from their brother. “No,” he whispered. “No, Five got away. He got out. He was free.”
In front of them, Five fell to his knees before the ruins of the Academy.
---
The weeks that followed Five’s arrival were torture.
Five struggled to find food, not to mention water. He kept getting hurt as he attempted to navigate the desolate city. And he’d already started talking to the mannequin he’d found like it was a real person.
After some scouting, it was determined that Vanya had not only destroyed the city but the likely entire world as well. So aside from the occasional cockroach, Five was the only living being on the planet.
Then he found them.
He found their bodies.
Allison was surprised that they hadn’t decomposed seeing as it had been a few weeks since their death, but she supposed that the lack bugs to expedite the process might contribute to that fact.
When Five first noticed Luther’s hand sticking out of the rubble, Harold Jenkins’s eye clutched in his fist, he stopped moving altogether. For a few minutes, he just stared.
Allison wondered if he already knew who it was. But that would be impossible. Five had never seen them as adults before.
A pained look crossed their brother’s face, as it always did when he came across a new corpse.
Then he walked over to Luther’s body, knelt down, and pulled the bloody eye from Luther’s fingers.
Allison and the others were silent as they watched. They’d stopped trying to talk to Five after the first week or so. And by the third week, they stopped talking almost altogether, only throwing each other a comment here or there when the motivation happened to arise. But motivation was hard to come by while they were watching their thirteen-year-old brother wither away in front of them.
After examining the eye for a moment, Five leaned across the rubble to peer at Luther’s head, the only part of him other than his hand that wasn’t crushed by debris.
An expression of dread overtook Five’s face, and again, Allison found herself wondering if he knew.
Five looked up from Luther’s body and almost immediately spotted something around the piles of wreckage.
Allison didn’t need to follow his gaze to know it was her and Diego he was staring at.
Standing quickly with the eye still clutched in his hand, Five hurried around the debris to their bodies. Ash covered their corpses where the rubble didn’t, and both of their faces were frozen in grimaces. Five dropped into a crouch in front of Diego’s body and immediately started shaking his shoulder. He didn’t say anything, but Allison could see him mouthing the words, “Wake up, wake up.”
She bit the inside of her cheek as tears welled in her eyes. In her peripheral, she could see Diego pursing his lips and crossing his arms tightly over his chest while he watched Five desperately try to reawaken his corpse.
Soon enough, Five gave up. He fell back on his rear to sit in the rubble with his hands hugging his knees. He gazed at Diego’s corpse, something like denial in his eyes.
But Five couldn’t possibly know it was them. Could he?
Suddenly, Five stood up again and started walking around, looking for something.
It wasn’t even ten steps later that he found Klaus’s body. Unlike Luther, Allison, and Diego, only Klaus’s lower half was buried.
Five froze with six feet still between him and the corpse. He stared, his expression hollow.
It took Allison a moment to realize why.
Klaus’s arm was twisted so the underside of his wrist was showing. His Umbrella Academy tattoo was on display for the world to see.
So it seemed that even if Five hadn’t known before, he knew now.
---
Five searched for Ben and Vanya for hours.
He never found them.
When he returned to the rest of their bodies, he spent the next several days burying them. It was a slow, painstaking process that had Allison and most of her siblings begging Five to stop even though they knew he couldn’t hear them.
Because he didn’t have a shovel, Five scrounged around for various makeshift tools and used them until they’d broken so many times they couldn’t even be called tools. At that point, he started using his bare hands. In the process, he scraped his palms bloody, smashed several fingers, and cracked most of his nails.
But he buried them. Their graves were shallow, barely a foot deep and therefore protruding from the ground. Lacking on energy as he was, Five was unable to properly move them because of the rubble already weighing their corpses down, so he dug directly under their bodies and made their graves right where they died. He also made two graves next to Klaus for Ben and Vanya.
Using a couple bricks for each of them, a rock, and a spike of metal, he chiseled out their names in rough handwriting and set them up as grave markers.
Once he was finally done, Five plopped down next to his wagon within which his mannequin still sat.
Allison thought he was going to cry. He looked like he might.
But he didn’t. He just gazed out over the field of rubble and shallow graves, surveying his handiwork.
Then Five stood up again. He walked over to the space between Klaus and Ben’s graves and started digging.
That was when Allison broke down. The others glanced at her and then back at Five in confusion. They didn’t yet understand what he was doing.
They understood a few hours later when Five laid down in the grave he’d made for himself and spent the night there.
---
When Five woke the next morning, he got up, stepped out of his hole, and turned to study it. The longer he looked, the deeper the crease between his brows became.
Then he spent the next thirty minutes filling in his grave.
It was only when Five left the graveyard later that morning that he lost his first tears to the Apocalypse.
Before he left, though, Five turned around for one last look. “I’m going to save you,” he promised.
Allison didn’t need to see the future to know the answers to the questions she and her siblings had been asking since they were thirteen years old.
What happened to little Number Five?
He was forced to live a far crueler life than they could’ve imagined.
Where did he go?
The future. The Apocalypse.
Did he actually manage to time travel?
Yes, but it was a one-way trip.
Why didn’t he come back?
He tried. He’s still trying.
Allison, like her siblings, didn’t want to go into the light yet. They wanted to be there for their brother even though he couldn’t see them.
But their business was finished. Their questions had been answered.
Allison just hoped that when—not “if”—Five saved them, her other self would appreciate what he had been through.
Or that she would at least give him a hug.
Despite all his arrogance and brashness, Five deserved better than what he got. A hug would be a good start.