Number Eight {The Umbrella Academy} -- [On Hold]

Seventeen

"Oh dear. Your brother has gotten himself into a pickle, hasn't he? Vivian, why don't you help me bring him to his bedroom."

"Yeah, sure." Grace moved to carry him, but I shook my head, and picked Five up, wincing as he hissed from the movement. I muttered an apology under my breath, and made my way towards the stairs, making a mental note to force Five to consume more sustenance than just coffee in the future (if we lived more than three days, of course). He was too light for a thirteen year old.

After getting Five to his bed, I sat myself down in his desk chair, sighing as Grace began to work on fixing him up. Our family was definitely prone to injury, but was it too much to ask for a break?

I swiveled around in the chair and picked up a battered copy of a physics book. When I flipped open the cover, I found a scribbled mess of words and numbers filling the margins. A bunch of math that matched the equations covering the room's walls, all boring to me, someone who had given up on math a decade ago.

Ignoring the notes, I read through the first couple chapters, deciphering a fair bit of scientific terminology to learn about the basics of how time and space works. Pretty interesting stuff.

"Hey, Viv?" Diego's voice broke through my concentration, and I looked up to find him staring at me.

"Yeah?"

"Allison and I are going to try and find Leonard. Harold, whatever his name is. The crazy dude that's dating Vanya." I nodded and stood, setting the book to the side.

"You're staying here." Before I could protest, he held up a hand to stop me. "I know you want to come, but someone's gotta tell Five what's happening when he wakes up."

"Do you remember the last time somebody tried to go on a rescue mission with no backup?" I asked, crossing my arms.

"I promise, I won't go after them before coming back here first. We're just gonna try to figure out where the hell this guy is. And I want you to keep an eye on Five. He's gonna want to keep going until he drops dead, but I need you to make sure he waits until he's not bleeding out." I looked over at Five, who looked very much dead laying on his bed, unmoving.

I plopped back down in the desk chair with a huff, and Diego thanked me, then left the room. Back to reading it was.

~~~

At what was maybe eleven at night, I finished the physics book. It was simple enough for me to understand, which I greatly appreciated, but short. It left me more knowledgeable than before I had read it, yet still with nothing to do.

I spun around in the swiveling desk chair a few times, debated whether it was worth Five's fury to draw a mustache on my sleeping brother, and ultimately decided to get another book from my room.

While going down the stairs, I decided I would finally read a sci-fi book Ben had recommended years ago, but when I reached my room, I found something much more worth my time.

On top of my bed, there was a heaping pile of folders, all of which were labeled in the top right corner with a handwritten 'Number Eight'. Pogo had completed my request.

I pulled the folders into a manageable stack, and made my way back upstairs, letting them spill across Five's desk when I reached it.

"Alright, let's do this." I looked around the room for a moment, delaying finding anything that I didn't want to find about myself, and noticed for the first time that Five's mannequin torso was sitting in a chair beside his bed.

"Wish me luck, Delores."

I then took the first folder off of the pile, and opened it, pulling myself into a world of statistics, vitals and gruesome photos of injuries I didn't remember ever having.

As the night went on, I read through countless descriptions of wounds being healed faster than medicine could ever accomplish, and found myself remembering a few of the long nights spent in the medical room, being watched by my father as I sobbed.

I discovered that the visions of my father hurting me I had seen while being tortured weren't visions: they were memories. The son of a bitch had Allison remove them as soon as I was healed. After ranting to a mannequin torso about the asshole that was my father for a solid half hour, I came across a particularly thick folder and was shocked to find that I had died when I was eight. That sent me into a bit of a spiral of thinking, then back to the folders.

In one of the more recent files I came across a record of Diego's arm being broken and healed within hours, apparently by my powers.

After blinking a few times and reading the report again, I looked up at the bed that held my brother. If I could heal others, that meant...

I crossed the room and pulled back the blankets, revealing a bandage already bloodied through. I peeled away the red cloth and made a noise of disgust at the sight of the torn open skin underneath. Grace hadn't yet stitched the wound up, so there was nothing between the insides of Five and my hand as I placed against the injury.

"I swear, if this doesn't work, I am going to be so pissed," I muttered, trying to ignore the squelching noise of the blood.

I took a deep breath, and focused on the thought of Five's skin and muscle pulling itself back together, the veins and arteries underneath healing and keeping the blood inside of them and not spilling out. My father's notes had said that while it was instinct for my body to heal itself, it took an effort on my part to heal others, and I was really hoping that I was doing it right and wasn't grossing myself out for nothing.

The skin under my hand grew increasingly hot, and when I was sure my hand was going to spontaneously combust if I held it there much longer, I drew it away.

In its place I found his skin, covered in blood but not a scratch on it.

"Holy shit!" I jumped off the bed, grinning, and immediately toppled to the floor, my vision going fully black.

"Oooohhh that's not good." I laid on my back, staring up at the ceiling until my vision was clear again. I hadn't gotten to the part of the files that had aftereffects in them, and one of those was apparently extreme exhaustion.

When I was sure I wasn't going to pass out, I used the bed frame to pull myself up, and cautiously made my way downstairs and into the bathroom, where I washed the blood off my hands.

After cleaning myself up, I walked to my bedroom, kicked off my shoes, and fell face first into my bed. I was out the second my head hit the pillow.