#00.02 Diego Hargreeves 🔪 The Kraken (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
deadlycurves) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
f20202020-09-08 07:05 am
deadlycurves) wrote in f20202020-09-08 07:05 am
deadlycurves) wrote in f20202020-09-08 07:05 am
i'll find a new place to be from, a haunted house with a picket fence.
And Vanya. His thoughts often turn to her on these Sundays, and it’s a question that he’s kept to himself. If she was here, would he be happier, softer, whole in a way he hasn’t felt since he made his push to the future? Could he put his head on her shoulder and tell her of everything they’ve been through — everything he’s been through? Would she be waiting for him with his favorite late night snack, having somehow remembered it through all of this time apart?
He hasn’t kicked the habit of looking for her. He doesn’t want to forget what’s important and irreplaceable.
Five is whip-smart and attentive to details, so of course he notices the changes, like a stone plunged into the water, leaving ripples and waves around him. Allison nursing a drink. That carefully held-back tension. He doubts that Claire doesn’t notice these things as well; don’t ever underestimate the perception of a child to know when something’s wrong.
He won’t address it, doesn’t have the tools in his arsenal for it; maybe Klaus could do it, he’s annoying but he has the kind of charm that Five abandons. Or Luther, whose strength can hold them all together, just as he’s carried them through these years in this strange world. Shit, even Diego might have some shot, him and Allison seem to have rebuilt their connection, stronger and steadier yet.
Five’s eyes move toward the clock on the wall and he strains and listens to that almost imperceptible tick of the arms as the hours pass them by. When you travel to the future, something in you changes. Something lost that can never be replaced, just as when a boy loses his innocence and becomes a man. It’s death, it’s a war lost, it’s an inevitability — unless you learn to be smarter, stronger, faster, and more determined than what fate places out in front of you.
Maybe he’s known the end all along and that’s the reason he holds himself back — like that inevitable procession of hours that move the evening along to its end, all things too have their end. This place isn’t forever, this home was always meant to crumble. Happiness has an expiration date, and all of these days spent here on these islands, they were only tourists, travelers, destined to be nothing to this island but a memory.
He compliments his sister on dinner, he helps to clear the table, a palm pressed to where their lost siblings still hold a place in his heart. He puts a hand on Claire’s hair; not a smile, not an embrace, just a recognition of what is and what’s going to be. When his outline disappears from the house, when Five makes that short travel to his own apartment, he doesn’t use his powers.
He counts the steps from Allison and Luther’s house to his own, marking and memorizing the distance. Cool wind moves from the beach to bite against his cheek; he remembers the dust and the whirlwinds and those graves he planted somewhere in a scorched-out earth. At home, he pours a drink, amber dark with nothing mixed in.
Five sits alone and knows the end is near.
no subject
Diego has taken a moment outside, getting a little too overwhelmed with too many stacks of apprehension laying on top of one another. He just needed a moment to breathe.
That's when he sees Five stepping out the front door himself. Strange, sometimes, how he doesn't always blink himself everywhere the way he did in his arrogance in their younger years. But then, they've all grown up so much since then, haven't they?
"Hey," he calls out to his brother as he reaches the first step off the porch. "where are you going?"
no subject
Five takes a breath, heaving out a quiet sigh before he turns to look at Diego. Where he likes to keep his feelings guarded, even now when things have been stable, some strange semblance of happy, his brother wears his feelings more openly. It's either annoying or brave of him and Five doesn't bother to determine which.
"And what are you doing out here, anyway? It's early yet, and you could help read a story and put Claire to bed. I'm sure Luther and Allison would appreciate a little help with things." A distraction, a deflect? It should be surprising, Five's thoughtfulness in terms of Claire, but he's given himself away too many times already.
no subject
When he got saddled with the very, very unwanted power to empathy upon arrival into this world, Diego had to do a whole lot of facing a lot of things. Becoming aware of the emotions of every person around him made it a lot easier to recognize certain things in himself, made him have to look at it a lot closer. It made him a little more prone to wearing it all on his sleeve, maybe more here than he ever did back home, under dad's reign. (Though, honestly-- his face had always been a betrayer of every emotion he felt, even back then).
"I'm taking a minute out here, because I've got everybody's tension screaming in my head right now. Sue me." He tries to keep the sharp snap out of his tone, but there is still a harder edge to his words all the same, if nothing else simply in a kneejerk reaction to Five's own biting words. "Empath, remember?"
if our ship does sink, we will follow it like stones / from the wreckage build a home.
Not at the head of the table, but to the immediate right-hand side of it. (He knows who's meant to be sitting at the head of the table.) Automatically reaching for his designated chair across from Allison, with Diego to his own right-hand side. And Luther had frozen like a deer in the headlights, staring at his hand on the back of the chair he'd been about to pull out, and at the shape of the seats he'd been about to steer them all into, as if the configuration had been seared into their marrow. The seats they'd sat at for every single meal for almost two decades, breakfast-lunch-and-dinner, always at the same scheduled time down to the minute, Grace setting out the plates and Reginald ringing the bell.
If he turns his head to the left, he imagines he can still see the glint of the chandelier light on the man's monocle.
But of course, Diego had elbowed him, the spell had broken, and then Luther had consciously forced himself to take a different seat. Disrupting the layout and feeling it sit ill-at-ease beneath his skin, like something undefinably wrong.
Over the years, however, that sense of dread had faded and faded, until this was the new normal: Luther planted on the other side of Claire, so that he and Allison bracketed her and either of them could feed her or clean up the inevitable messes. The others didn't all take the same seats every time, either. It varied, changed, depending on who grabbed their food first. The Hargreeves didn't hew to a strict order anymore.
And it all started to feel like home.
It's been an oasis in the middle of everything, but they can all feel the apprehension tonight, sawing on the edge of their nerves. Luther can be oblivious about so many things, but he'd always been sensitive to tension within the home: hyper-aware when something in that finely-tuned gyroscope had fallen out of joint, when something was brewing. The difference was that back when they were teenagers, there wasn't anything he could do to fix it, to stop it all from crumbling. Nowadays, though, they were stronger along those glued-together faultlines.
Perhaps this is all living on borrowed time, though. When Five falls quieter than usual, Luther glances over at him, but doesn't broach the subject — they all know what's coming, anyway. The end of the night is Five clearing the table and setting the dishes in the kitchen, Luther thanking him, then going about the washing up, while that clock ticks ever closer to the end of the day. He bundles a sleepy, yawning Claire into his arms and carries her to her room, while Allison fields yet another council-related message on her communicator. There's a cheerful hug from Klaus, Luther's clap to the shoulder to Diego, as his brothers all slip away from the house, all of them dispersing to their separate homes to wait out the last few hours before they all set off together in the morning.
Tomorrow, then.
no subject
Luther and Allison's feels as much like home as his own not all that far from here, in a different part of the island; as much as the island as a whole itself. It was the central hub for all things Hargreeves, in a way that felt right, somehow. Tension becomes a sharp knife-cut into the thread of the family when it shows up this harsh, this choking in this house. Impossible to ignore. Diego hates the way the feeling fills him up, carves out a space in his chest and burrows down to make a home there. He understands why, and knows what it's from, but it's a discomfort he doesn't like.
At one point in the evening, Diego's broken himself away from the huddle of his siblings in the living room, opting instead for a chair in the backyard. He's leaned forward against his knees, head tucked down, fingers laced at his neck, trying to breathe. He's more used to it now, all these years into owning the power, but sometimes empathy at the level he feels it, is still too much. Some emotions are stronger than others, and tonight, everyone's is like cymbals clashing in his head.
There's a shift, subtle, but there; it's familiar, the low, steady drum that always surrounds his brother. It's comfortable, more than the cymbals from inside the house, and he can't stop the slight quirk of his mouth at the familiar, steady feeling that takes root just at his presence somewhere behind him.
"Luther." His voice is a little thick, still trying to shake off the stray remnants of all that tension inside. He doesn't lift his head yet.