REWRITTEN.
Violet felt sick.
She was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, half hidden behind the door frame as she gripped it tight like a crutch that was keeping her standing.
Everything felt so surreal that it was difficult to ground herself to reality. Like she was drunk. But she had never properly been drunk, so she didn't know what that felt like, but it had to have been this.
She refused to sit down with the others, sticking to where she was away from the group.
Five couldn't help but watch her sadly. He could see in her eyes that she was so, so different to the girl he had left behind and that made his chest hurt. But then he supposed he had changed a lot too.
"What's the date? The exact date," Five clarified as he pulled out a chopping board.
"The twenty fourth," Vanya responded.
"Of what?"
"March."
He nodded to himself. "Good."
Luther looked around in astonishment. "So are we gonna talk about what just happened?" He stood, cutting off Fives path to the cupboard. "It's been seventeen years."
Sixteen and four months, Violet thought. Sixteen years. And four fucking months.
"It's been a lot longer than that," Five stated. He spatial jumped around Luther and grabbed what he needed from the cupboard then jumped back.
"I haven't missed that," Luther muttered.
She felt sick.
Diego glanced behind him to catch a sight of Violet before speaking and crossing his arms over his chest.
"Where'd you go?"
"The future," Five answered simply. "It's shit, by the way."
His eyes met hers for a second and she felt herself flicker without meaning to.
Her mind went to her room, her books, the mess. She itched to leave but she couldn't. Instead she was watching Five pick out the ingredients to his old favourite, the peanut butter and marshmallow sandwich.
Sugar, protein, carbs - for energy to spacial jump, his voice rang in her head.
"Called it!" Klaus announced in triumph.
"I should have listened to the old man," Five opened the fridge. "You know jumping through space is one thing, jumping through time is a toss of the dice." Violet mentally chanted the same words she had heard years ago as he said them. He blinked at Klaus. "Nice dress."
"Oh, danke."
"Wait, how did you get back?" Vanya asked, confused.
Violet stared at five from her space half behind the doorway, wondering exactly that and so, so much more. Her nails dug into the wood of the frame.
"In the end I had to project my consciousness into a suspended quantum state version of myself that existed across every possible instance of time." He explained all in one breath.
Violet wrapped her head around his words rather easily; she had done all of her own research into time travel after he had gone. She needed something to keep her mind working, to keep her occupied. To give her a shred of hope that he might return.
But so many years ago she had convinced herself that he was dead, and he wasn't. He was there. In front of her.
Violet glanced over her shoulder up towards the stairs.
"That makes no sense."
"Well, it would if you were smarter," Five jabbed back.
Luther's arm shot out to stop Diego going to attack the teenager and she gripped the doorframe harder.
"How long were you there?"
"Forty one years," he commented as he prepared his sugar rush of a sandwich. "Give or take."
"So what are you saying? That you're fifty eight?" Luther asked, burrowing his eyebrows.
Five glared. "No, my consciousness is fifty eight, apparently my body is now sixteen again." He sighed, eyes flickering to the girl in the doorway, who let some hair fall in her face as though having something else to hide behind was more of a comfort.
They were in a similar situation in a roundabout way.
But while Reginald had done his research, the conclusion for her was much different. He believed it to be a way of her body keeping herself in her fittest and healthiest state subconciously.
Violet had never told him about the electric shock she'd felt from trying to grab Five when he teleported. How it had made her fingers feel numb for weeks. How it gave her a strange sense of energy for once, and how she got pins and needles at the base of her skull for months after. She thought it was a combination of that and her bodies way of healing.
She'd read Peter Pan a million times as a kid. She even got Grace to read it to her when they were supposed ot be in bed.
Maybe not having to grow up was a nice little daydream she'd got herself too caught up in.
Which brought her to the thought that it was one of her books currently lying on her bedroom floor.
"Wait, how does that even work?"
"She kept saying the equations were off," Five took a bite of his sweet sandwich, looking down. "Bet she's laughing now." Five hummed to himself and looked at the newspaper. "Guess I missed the funeral."
"Howd you know about that?" Luther crosses his arms, oblivious to the looks hes getting from both him and Violet.
"What part of the future do you not understand?" He asked sarcastically.
Violet, thoughts racing, turned herself invisible and darted out of the doorway. She rushed upstairs, Five's voice going round and round in her head like a record on repeat. He was back from the future. Why now? What had happened?
Five was different. She could see it in the way he held himself, too confident and mature for what he should have been. They had both changed.
But this confidence within him bad outgrown his bones. His eyes were too wise for someone who was supposed to be a teenager.
Violet found herself in her room, flitting around to collect the objects that had fallen during his arrival. Her pens, her lamp, her books.
She needed to fix it or else she might go insane.
Her hands shook as she feverishly grabbed her books, smoothing out pages and checking covers over for damage. Any nicks, dents, tears. Her eyes worked rapidly to check, double check, stacking them.
She grabbed Peter Pan, running her fingers over the silver embellished hard cover with threaded greys and rich greens, hugging it close to her chest when she found it in decent state.
When Five got upstairs, the first place he went was to her bedroom, directly opposite his own.
He stopped in the doorway, surprised to see books seemingly levitating themselves to slot back onto the bookshelf. That's what it looked like anyway. The room appeared to an outsider, empty.
He wanted to smile at the familiarity of it all. Of her.
The books slotted into place in order of series and then by size, then by if they were hardback or not.
Hardbacks on the top shelves, everything else below, he thought to himself.
Gently, his knuckles rapped against the door frame.
The girl suddenly blinked into appearance, facing him, hands holding her Peter Pan book against her chest. Hesitance crossed her face.
A million things were on the tip of her tongue. If only she could say it all.
If only she could say a single word of it.
Violet held the book as though it was a lifeline, unable to think again. Her heart hurt. She forced herself to turn away, glancing over her neat shelves.
"The truth?" She murmured, slotting the book back on the top shelf in the centre.
Five moved towards her, hands in his pockets. "I told the truth," he responded, furrowing his eyebrows cautiously.
He didn't mention how the sound of her delicate voice gave him shivers.
She shook her head, brushing her fingers over the books just because before clutching her fingers tightly to stop herself from shaking.
Her voice wasn't strong, or clear. Some words faded so quietly they didn't even reach his ears.
But he heard her without having to try.
"You told them something vague, something- something that they would... have to believe," she headed for her desk and started mindlessly making everything line up, adjacent and neat, making sure it was all in place.
Five stared at the girls back in wonder and cursed himself. How could he forget how she could see through him like a book? She was too smart for her own good.
He debated inside his mind as she organised her desk to organise her thoughts. It wasn't working.
"You really want to know?" He asked lowly.
The girl hesitated at the tone of his voice.
She recognised the tiredness of someone who had been suffering too long. She glanced at him and finally stopped her tinkering, clenching and clenching her fists.
She sat down with her back against the bookcase, legs crossed.
"I want..." she whispered, closing her eyes tightly. "Truth."
Five sat himself on the opposite side, against the end of her bed, legs outstretched with a sigh.
"When I went forward in time, I got myself stuck. I don't know how or why, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get back. I couldn't go anywhere," she saw him swallow thickly, averting his eyes. "Everything was on fire. Destroyed and... there was no one."
Violets eyes traced the lines of his face to memory. She drew her knees in and averted her gaze when he looked at her to gauge her reaction.
"Everyone dies."
Alarm bells rang in the back of her mind. She buried the lower half of her face against her bundled sleeve, unable to keep herself from fidgeting.
"Everyone?" She whispered.
"Everyone." He echoed, eyes hollow, haunted.
Forty one years... give or take.
He had been alone. For that long. Everyone dead. Everyone. The world.
Pain shot right through her chest as she blinked at him. He sat staring off at a spot on the floor between them, mind trailing off to darker thoughts, memories, feelings. She saw something shift in his eyes.
A pained look flashed across his face. He released a breath. "I found out the date it happens...eight days from now."
Anxiety clawed at her throat. Her eyebrows knitted together, her own eyes staring of at the floor, mind racing along with her heart.
"I've got a lead. I just need to figure all this out and find a way to stop it," he revealed.
She nodded slowly, despite it all, the panic and the pain and the realisation that things were not going to be better now that he was back.
As Violet drew her knees in closer to herself for comfort, she didn't even realise he had gotten up until he sat himself down next to her.
She closed her eyes as heavy emotion overcame her. She covered her face with her sleeve covered hand.
"Do you believe me?" He asked uncertainly, voice smaller than she had probably ever heard in her entire life.
She nodded, trying to swallow past the lump in her throat.
He was beside her, a thin gap between them but close enough to where she could feel his warmth.
Her knee was bouncing up and down, foot tapping as she tried to work through every emotion she felt at once, too overwhelming to even comprehend.
"Violet," his voice is gently but wary. He hesitated before speaking again. "Can I hug you?"
She struggled to form words.
Violet gravitated to his side immediately, turning into him and burying her face in his shoulder. Her arms circled around him and his followed a second after the initial shock wore off. She clutched him tightly, tighter than he expected, so certain of this one thing. Her hands tightened around fistfulls of his blazer at his back. He could feel her shaking in his hold.
Her shoulders shook as she silently sobbed against him. Tears slid freely down her face as he held her close, taking in her warmth and the soothing scent of lavender that he had been chasing for what felt like his whole life.
"I thought you were dead," she managed to hoarsely whisper, voice breaking and barely audible.
"I never meant to get stuck where I did," he said back, and with her face against his neck she could physically feel the waver in his voice. "I wanted to come back, Violet. I tried so hard."
She just held him tighter and closed her eyes. He rested his chin on her shoulder and closed his eyes too, savouring the moment that he had been waiting for for so long.
A few minutes passed before she pulled away gently, sniffling. A hand reached up to wipe away her tears but they just kept coming. She was far too overwhelmed to stop the floorworks now.
She thought she even saw him quickly wipe beneath one of his eyes out of the corner of hers but couldn't have been sure.
"Sorry," he muttered with a sigh, resting his head back against the shelves.
She glanced at him in question.
"That it took so long to get back." He said sincerely.
She rested her head against his shoulder tiredly, saying nothing.
The two sat together in the quiet for a long while, saying nothing, just existing in eachothers presence.