Chapter 2
There wasn’t much left to talk about, and Five had walked up into his room, looking for a more fitting set of clothes to change into to. He gets a sour reminder that the only clothes he owned as a thirteen-year-old was his Umbrella Academy uniform when he opens his closet. He sorely puts on the uniform, hating the sight of it, but some part of him would hate even more to wear anything else. He doesn’t mind how hard his early childhood had been, as he preferred it far more in the past than he did in the future.
He grimaces at the sight of himself in the mirror, but ties up his shoelaces and straightens up his tie nonetheless. He makes his way downtown, to a place called Griddy Donuts. He can recall coming here as a young preteen with his siblings, sneaking out with the money Klaus had stolen off of their dad.
They had eaten far more than their stomachs could handle, and they regretted it soon after when Grace had found them and taken them back home to face their dad’s punishment. Five sits at a stool around the counter, and soon after he had come, there he looked around the cafe. He felt disappoint wash over him, he remembers the place being far more vibrant and warm than it is right now. He rings the bell on the counter twice, and another man walked past and sit in the stool next to him.
The waitress leaves the backroom and tends to them, taking out a notepad and pen. The embroidery on her outfit reads Agnes. Her name, probably.
“Sorry,” She apologises. “The sink was clogged.” She smiles at them.
“So, what’ll it be?” Ah, Five realises, she thinks that they’re here together.
“Uh, give me a chocolate eclair.” He requests, and Five looks dubiously at the older man's gut. It no doubt wasn’t good for his health in any way.
“Mh-hm, sure.” She writes it down, before gesturing to Five. “Can I get the kid a glass of milk or something?” She asks the man, and Five gives her a blank stare.
“The kid wants coffee. Black.” There’s a moment of silence before Agnes shrugs her shoulders.
“Cute kid,” She comments, assuming Five’s joking. When he just gives her a wide, toothy smile, she stiffens and awkwardly goes to make the pot of coffee, and fetch the eclair.
“I don’t remember this place being such a shit hole,” Five tells the other man, making light conversation. He turns his head and looks at Five, bewildered.
“I used to come here as a kid. Used to sneak out with my brothers and sisters and eat doughnuts till we puked. Simpler times, huh?” He looks at Five, nodding slightly, but still confused on why the hell a young teenager was talking about coming here when he was younger as if he were a fifty-year-old man reminiscing over his youth.
“I suppose.” He supplies, unsure of the kid. The waitress brings over the eclair and Five’s coffee, and the man takes a ten dollar note from his pocket and hands it over to the waitress. “I got his.” He claims, probably worried that Five doesn’t have the money himself, out of the corner of his eye he can see the kid giving him a sideways glance. She goes into the back room, probably to get change.
“Thanks…” Five says, unsure what made the man want to pay for him. He notices the company logo on the man's shirt. “You must know your way around the city.” The man puts his wallet back into his pocket.
“I hope so. I’ve been driving it for twenty years.”
“Good, I need an address.”
The man leaves the store, and Five’s packing his things up until he sees the swat looking squad in his peripheral vision. No doubt sent from the commission.
“Hmm, that was fast.” Five comments, taking one more sip of his coffee before setting it down for good. “I thought I’d have more time before they found me.” He’s unfazed by their appearance.
“Okay. So let’s all be professional about this, yeah?” The leader had a large military grade gun pointed to Five’s head. “On your feet and come with us. They wanna talk.” Five’s oddly calm about it all.
“I’ve got nothing to say.” He rebuttals.
“It doesn’t have to go this way. You think I wanna shoot a kid? Go home with that on my conscience?” Five sighs, it seems like they didn’t know who he was, so they were probably just hired by the Commission to take him to a rendezvous point. Local hire, shouldn't be too much of a hassle. You get what you pay for, after all. The Commission wasn’t dumb enough to send a bunch of properly trained personal until they could assess what he was capable of.
“Well, I wouldn’t worry about that.” He looks to the leader with the gun pointed at his head and smiles. “You won’t be going home.”
Five grabs a knife and just like that, in a fluid motion, he’s on a killing spree. He appears behind the leader and sticks the rather blunt knife into the back of his neck. Gunshots are fired, and he jumps to a table on the other side of the cafe.
“Hey, assholes.” He calls out for their attention, for them to turn around and shoot in the direction of his voice only for him to be gone again. They’re busy shooting where he had been until they’re sure they got him. He jumps outside the cafe and knocks on the glass door, catching the attention of the closest one to him. He salutes once the bullets rain in on him, narrowly missing him as he jumps again.
Now that they’re on edge, he snaps a mop in half and stabs one man in the side, before disappearing again. He chokes one man from behind with his tie, throws a plate at another and stabs one in the eye with a pencil. The last two are on either side of the cafe, their guns trained in on him. Once they start to fire, Five jumps to a different spot in the cafe, so they end up shooting each other.
With his job almost done, he takes back his tie and places it around his neck, observes the rest of the cafe, bends down and twists a man’s neck until he can hear the sickening crunch.
There’s only one thing left to be done, he sits down gingerly back at the counter, grabs a knife and makes a short, but deep, incision in his forearm, digging out a small silver pill-shaped object that glows green every few seconds. He walks out, dropping the tracker on the sidewalk.
“What the fuck am I looking at, Hill?” Director Fury stares at the scene playing out in front of his eyes. His eyes had to be deceiving him. There was no way that this kid alone took out five fully grown professionals, at their own game.
“Footage from Griddy’s Donuts, last night. We’ve found one profile match for the boy. Five Hargreeves, born on the first of October, 1989. 13-years-old, sir. A former member of The Umbrella Academy.” Hill states, S.H.I.E.L.D. was having a field day with the reappearance of Number Five.
Now that, The Umbrella Academy, was something that Fury was familiar with. From the 90’s to the early 2000’s it had been vaguely a S.H.I.E.L.D. project, initially to be run by Howard Stark, but his obsession with finding Captain America had gotten into the way of that, and instead a billionaire that had been working with S.H.I.E.L.D. for a while had stepped up and taken in a personal interest in the program, insisting that most of the work with this Academy be left with him.
Apparently, Reginald had managed to train Five well enough that he was far better at combat than most of his Agents, arguably on par with Black Widow, if the footage had told him anything. He was efficient and didn’t hesitate at all. He would be a valuable asset if he wasn’t thirteen that was.
“And how pray tell, is he thirteen if he was born in 1989?” As far as Fury was concerned, The Umbrella Academy had been disbanded after a backlash from the combination of Five’s disappearance and Ben’s death.
“As you might recall, he went missing in 2002, sir.” She hands him a file on what they knew about Five, reported from Hargreeves himself, before his death. What catches his eye is the bold words circled in highlighter.
“Known powers,” Fury starts to read out loud. “Spatial Jumping and… Time Travel.”
“Motherfucker.”