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"She's very good, isn't she?"
At his voice, Harold—Leonard—Harold glanced over to where Number Five sat small in Vanya Hargreeves's largest armchair. Leonard had been avoiding looking at him head-on. He didn't want to be caught staring almost as much as he didn't want to fall back into the headspace of a fan. Injured, cuts and bruises littering his face, his arm in a too-large sling over his perfect Umbrella Academy uniform, little Number Five looked like something right out of one of Harold's childhood fantasies—all he needed was the mask.
Number Five, the missing boy—Harold had spent more time daydreaming about him than any other Hargreeves. First, it had been of taking his place, left vacant just for Harold. Later, it had been of saving him, of being saved by him—of running away with him alone, a pair of outcasts born together on October 1st, 1989. He'd been an unachievable goal, a safe haven.
Now he was Vanya's very alive brother, perfectly preserved, sitting in an overstuffed armchair next to Leonard and drinking Scotch whisky out of a plastic cup. Leonard twisted his hands together and then stilled them, not sure what would be the right amount of nervousness to display. Too much and he'd look guilty, not enough and it would look like he didn't care.
"Please be kind to him," Vanya had said in an undertone. "He's—confused. Don't try to treat him like a child but—just. I don't know. Time travel, it did something to him. Something terrible."
Leonard picked at his thumb. Number Five, an ideal that had remained constant. He was so much easier to stomach than Numbers One-through-Four—than Luther, Diego, Allison, and Klaus, who had grown and warped into monsters as time and clarity ate away at his perception of them.
Harold had always wondered at his remaining 'Number Five'. If old man Reginald had given his children names to humanize them, Number Five had, for whatever reason, been permitted to forgo the process. It had made him less real than the rest of them, untainted. That name, and that he hadn't been around to ignore Harold's pleas. He was like Vanya, in that way.
Her playing drifted in from the other room, the harmony of Richard Strauss's Thus Spake Zarathustra sitting between them. She wasn't yet confident in herself enough to play directly for a private audience, so they'd retreated to the adjoining room.
"Sorry?" he asked as Number Five's frown grew more and more severe, twisting his young face into something ugly.
"Vanya," Number Five said, "she's excellent."
She wasn't. Vanya Hargreeves was an adequate violinist. Good would have been stretching it, excellent was out of the question.
"She's amazing," Leonard agreed.