Chapter Text
On the 28th March 2019, the Temps Commission issued a recall notice to the remaining agents on the field. It read the following:
‘URGENT REMINDER: APOCALYPSE TO COMMENCE IN THREE DAYS. RETURN TO HEADQUARTERS TO CHECK IN BRIEFCASE.’
A Commission agent named Sebastian received the message via pneumatic tube whilst hiding out in the underground bunker of his latest mark. The mark was a survivalist named Robert Langley who had built the bunker below his house, ironically in preparation for an Apocalypse which he believed would be happening at any moment.
Upon reading the message, Sebastian slid his briefcase under the bed’s metal frame for safekeeping – normally agents were tasked with keeping it with them at all times, however he considered that a nuclear bunker would be considered safe enough for the time being – and exited the bunker using the vaulted door which only the mark and himself knew how to work.
He entered the mark’s bedroom and put seven bullets in his head before the man could even stir, and left the body where it was. It didn’t matter if anyone found him like that, not when the world was ending in three days.
All that mattered was that Robert Langley was too dead to start a violent confrontation today on the street which would eventually lead to a chain of events that was highly likely to reduce the probability that a man named Harold Jenkins would then trigger Vanya Hargreeves into causing the Apocalypse on the 1st April 2019.
The Commission had to be certain that nothing would prevent the Apocalypse.
With his task completed, Sebastian then went to the kitchen to fix himself a sandwich for the trip back to headquarters. As he walked towards the basement door to re-enter the vault, he accidentally tripped over his own feet and fell, cracking his head against the corner of the kitchen counter and passing out.
The knock to his head didn’t kill him instantly, but it put him in a coma. Three days later, the Apocalypse ravaged the Earth and he died when the house caved in on his body.
Back at the Commission Headquarters, a worker flagged in a post-Apocalypse debrief that eight briefcases had not been checked in before the end of the Apocalypse.
Five were retrieved, and three were left behind due to lack of accessibility. One of these was Sebastian’s briefcase, which still remained under the bed in an impenetrable doomsday bunker. Due to its location and the destruction of Earth’s population, it was deemed as low risk and written off.
Humanity was destroyed. The Commission continued to work diligently at maintaining the timeline.
One day, just before the end of his shift, an Infinite Switchboard Operator noted that an unauthorized trip was made by one of the briefcases left on Earth. The trip was completed seven months and two days after the Apocalypse took place.
A one-way trip made by a single traveler to the following date: 24th March, 2019.
The wagon was indispensable in Apocalypse life.
Five had picked it up in his first time scavenging through a row of houses. He had been struggling to find anything edible in the nearby supermarkets, and had shifted to scouring through any other buildings which hadn’t been completely razed to the ground.
The wagon had been buried under what had once been someone’s shed and was completely covered in dust, however it was functional and perfect for what he needed.
He had brought it back to the library and left it there for a few months, occasionally greasing the wheels with some motor oil he’d found in a nearby half destroyed garage. He rarely traveled far enough to actually need it, however he knew that eventually he would be forced to start thinking about moving out of the library once resources started to become scarce.
Finally, nearly seven months after he had landed in the apocalypse, and six months after he had first discovered the library and set up camp within the ruined bookshelves, he made the difficult decision to leave.
Stupidly, he let his emotions get the better of him and waited until the last moment to make his move. In truth, he was scared to abandon the relative safety of the library. It sheltered him from the coming winter and now just as the temperature was dropping to dangerous levels, he was being forced out.
He had completely run out of food for a whole day before he finally accepted his fate. It was a stupid decision on his part, and if he managed to live through this winter he would never make the same mistake again.
“Well, Dolores,” he said, turning to his only companion who he had met in a department store two months prior. Their friendship was new and blossoming, but Five had already found a kindred spirit in Dolores. “It’s time for us to head out into the Great Beyond.” She was dressed in a ladies’ parka with pink ear muffs and matching pink gloves, which he had been proud to present to her last week.
He packed up his meagre belongings, set Dolores up in a comfortable position in the corner so that she would be able to see where they were going, and tucked Vanya’s already well-read book carefully underneath a set of dirty blankets. With his most prized possessions in tow, he left the library and began to roam around looking for a better place to camp.
It only took a few hour for him to realize what a terrible mistake it had been to wait this long. The cold was biting and savage against his malnourished, underfed body, and as he trekked outside of his usual radius he found that there was even less food than he had hoped for.
By the second day he miscalculated a step and twisted his ankle badly. The pain was bearable, however he needed to take a half-day break huddled in a pile of bricks to keep warm. When they started again, it slowed him down immensely.
On the fourth day without food, he ran out of water.
On the sixth day without food and the second day without water, a wheel broke off the wagon while he was dragging it through the remains of a house. It rolled away from him after snapping off, coming to rest in a pile of ashes.
“Fuck,” he said hoarsely, his voice tinged with despair. He scrambled to pick it up and brought it back to the now unbalanced wagon, trying desperately to slot the wheel back into place. “Come on, come on!”
‘Stop, Five, it’s no use,’ Dolores said to him, worry coloring her tone.
“I know that!” he snapped, throwing the wheel away with shaking hands. He sat down heavily on the ground, burying his head in his hands. “I know that, shit!”
He wasn’t strong enough to drag the broken wheelbarrow, not now with a twisted ankle and nearly a week without food. He could barely even drag his own body down the goddamn road without gasping for breath on the ashy, smoky air. His throat was parched, unbearably parched, and the pain in his stomach was all-consuming.
For the first time since arriving, he knew with near absolute certainty that he was going to die. He was barely just fourteen years old, and he was going to die alone in a barren hellscape. Dolores would be left with his rotting corpse, and the equations which he had just begun to fill out in the first few pages on Vanya’s book would go unused.
A feeling of complete hopelessness washed over him, something he’d never experienced even in all of his time in the Apocalypse.
Around him the Earth was cold and unsympathetic.
He kneeled until his knees were numb, and only when he could finally stand it no longer did he look around himself. There was nothing but rubble and ash and the remains of what had likely been a living room
Dolores was calling for him.
‘Five, Five look! Over there!’ she said urgently. Her arm was pointed to the ground, and he couldn’t remember pointing it down there but as he followed her finger he could see something protruding from the rubble. Carefully he reached out, brushing away the dust from the metal until it was easy enough to see what was beneath him.
A vaulted door.
He swallowed dryly, feeling nothing but dust scratching his throat. A vaulted door to what? He couldn’t know what was behind it, but there was only one way to find out.
He could count the number of times he had teleported into the unknown on one hand. As a young child he had rarely even considered teleporting somewhere he didn’t know since there was never any need for it, and by the time he was old enough to contemplate it, he was also old enough to know it was a silly idea.
Behind this vault could be a bunker of some sort, or a tunnel, or at worst it could be completely cemented over. He had no way of calculating how far he should jump, and at his current capacity he could manage just about one jump, maybe two if he completely miscalculated and found himself with a 50 foot drop underground.
“What do you think, Dolores?” he asked hoarsely, his eyes never leaving the metal door. “Should I try it?”
‘What other choice do you have?’ she asked him.
He laughed humorlessly. Of course he had no other choice. Gathering up the remaining strength he had, he focused his energy into his shaking hands and jumped into the unknown.
He jumped only a meter into the vault, figuring it would be better to fall a distance and give himself time to recover than to teleport himself into the solid floor. He barely had enough time to catch himself before he landed on the hard concrete, legs buckling under him painfully and cheek smashing against the ground. He saw stars, crying out from the pain.
It took him a few moments to recover, the only sound around him his own harsh breathing and a ringing in his ears. When the dark edges around his vision cleared slightly, he took note of his surroundings.
It was pitch black around him, and he felt around until he found a switch, pleasantly surprised when the wall lights illuminated the room he was in. He wondered if they were battery powered somehow.
He was in a bunker of some sort, with a tiny kitchen in the corner, a bed with a metal frame to the side and a desk next to a small bookshelf filled to the brim with books. He could see two doors, one which must have led to the bathroom and the other he couldn’t be sure about.
Forcing himself to his feet, he began to explore. He was at a loathe to leave Dolores outside, but looking at the ladder to the vault door he knew that he didn’t have the strength to even begin to try opening it from the inside.
The first door led to a bathroom as he suspected, and the second one opened into a fully stocked pantry. It only took him a second of staring in complete astonishment before he dived straight into the first thing he could find.
A jar of strawberry jam. He twisted it open with shaking hands, nearly sobbing when it resisted for a second before popping open. Without a second thought he dug his fingers directly into the jar and began shoveling the jam into his mouth with an eagerness that would have been humiliating if he weren’t alone. His fingers were dirty and grimy, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.
“Oh my god,” he groaned. The first bite was the greatest thing he had ever experienced in his life, and he had to close his eyes for a moment to fight against the dizzying relief.
He continued to scoop out the jam and shove it down his throat while he grabbed a bottle of water, ripping it out from the six pack packaging and downing nearly half of it in one go. He had to force himself to stop when he became slightly queasy, and the thought of throwing up was enough to slow him down and take stock of what was around him.
He couldn’t believe his luck. The pantry was definitely enough to last him through the winter, maybe even a year or two if he was careful. The food had clearly been carefully chosen to be long lasting, mainly canned goods, energy bars, dried and dehydrated foods and even some alcohol.
He swiped a bottle of rum from the shelf and headed back to the main room. He was still hungry, but the water he had just downed satiated him for now and he was suddenly more interested in celebrating with his newfound alcohol. He knew it was a stupid idea, but the relief of finding a place like this in the Apocalypse as close to death as he had been, gave him what could only be described as a buzzing high that made him giddy.
He wasn’t dead yet, and he was going to celebrate goddamnit.
“Dolores, you saved my life,” he said out loud, an uncontrollable grin spreading across his face. She was still outside the bunker, but he heard her say a faint ‘you’re welcome’ and immediately felt pleased with himself. “I owe you one. Promise I’ll get you in here with me as soon as I’ve got the strength.”
He took a couple of swigs from the rum, grimacing at the taste. He had occasionally found cans of beer and a bottle here and there amongst some of the supermarkets and had always indulged. No point in wasting perfectly good alcohol after all. Even though no one was around to see him, it still felt somewhat exciting and rebellious to get drunk, and he found that when he was drunk the whole Apocalypse situation was just a little bit better to manage.
He explored the bunker on unstable legs, both still weak from hunger and getting progressively drunker. The bunker had all of the necessities of a stocked pantry, first aid kit and entertainment in the form of books and notepads.
He found a black briefcase tucked under the bed and pulled it out, sitting on the bed so that he could put it comfortably on his lap.
“What’s this?” he muttered, voice slurring slightly. He gulped down more rum, some of the jam smearing onto the lip of the bottle. He was well and truly sloshed. If only Reginald could see him now, he would surely be a proud father. “Must be something…something important, if they were hiding it in a bunker. ”
He flicked open the briefcase, ready to be met with the sight of random documents or maybe even a boatload of useless cash.
Instead there was a flash of blue. Electricity. A dizzying force pulling him and pushing him at the same time.
Then he was falling, and he landed hard on top of the briefcase. The sound of items smashing and voices yelling was sudden and jarring, and it took his brain several moments to stop spinning. Nausea erupted in his stomach and he clenched his jaw trying to push it back, breathing through gritted teeth.
He opened his eyes, vision swimming. He had landed on a table, still gripping the briefcase for dear life even as the items on the table had smashed and scattered from the force of his landing. His legs moved of their own accord, shifting him off the table until he was able to push himself upright, albeit swaying slightly.
Slowly he looked around him, unsure of whether this was some drunken trick on his mind or whether it was something else. He took in the grand living room he was standing in, so familiar it felt like he had been ripped back in time, and the group of people staring at him in stunned silence. Their expressions were varying levels of shock and confusion, and they also looked achingly familiar to him although he had only seen them once before. It took him several seconds to even realize who they were.
They had all looked so different when they were dead.
“Does…does anyone else see a small, dirty child standing in our living room with a briefcase?” Klaus asked uncertainly.
Five looked down at himself and for the first time in several months realized just how disgusting and dusty his clothes and skin were, and how grimy he felt all over. It had stopped meaning anything to him after the first few weeks, but he must have looked unrecognizable in this state.
“No, no, I see him too,” Diego said, frowning and taking a step forward. Five immediately stepped back, although he wasn’t sure why. It was instinctive, after so many months of not seeing another living person. He felt like he was in a dream, wading through water while all noises were muffled around him.
The woman who was the farthest back, Vanya, stepped forward with her brows furrowed.
“Isn’t that…Five?”
Unable to hold back the rising nausea, Five vomited straight onto the living room rug. As the others exclaimed in shock and quickly gathered around him, he found himself thinking of Dolores still sitting outside that bunker, waiting for him to come rescue her.