You Better Bring an Umbrella, Vol. 1

Chapter 22: Don't Dance Away the Pain

"Out of the way, Five," I growled.

"You can't do this, Mina. I need you to take a breath, take a moment." Part of me knew he was just trying to calm me down, but that didn't exactly work. My brain had long left its place in my head, replaced with an overwhelming current of painful images threatening to sweep me away. Still, I managed to get to a point where I wouldn't scream at him.

"I just... I just have to take my mind off things, Five." I could use that excuse as many times as I wanted, it wasn't going to change the fact that all of my brothers saw through my bullshit. "I promise I'm not going to do what I usually do," I lied, "just let me go in there."

"I can't Mina, and I don't want to, truthfully. You have to break this habit, it's killing you." His voice caught in his throat toward the end there, but I thought nothing of it. These past few days had been sleepless and emotional, I'm sure that was all.

"I'm eating again, that's already a step in the right direction. I should be fine if I go in for a few minutes, right?" In the moment, that seemed perfectly reasonable. Five remained silent for too long, his head slowly falling downward as his fists clenched. I fully expected him to get angry and start shouting, but instead, his voice only got quieter.

"Let me rephrase: it killed you."

I stepped back a bit, shock overtaking me for a moment. He had to be lying to me, I hadn't danced in days. How the hell had he reached that conclusion? Did he think somehow I'd danced myself to death when he found me in the rubble?

"You're losing it," I scoffed. "You said we all died because of the apocalypse. What does my dancing have to do with that?" Five sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose before attempting to calm himself and explain.

"Look, I get this is hard for you to comprehend, but there was a whole day that didn't happen, but it did. After I left the Commission with the information, I teleported to what would have been the current time. But when I got back to the house, no one had seen you, so I jumped to your theater. You'd pushed yourself too far, and I found you dying in your dressing room. So I rewound to the start of the day so I could save you."

For a while, I didn't know how to react. I felt my body crumple a little, attempting to come to grips with the reality presented to me. Well, the alternate reality. I thought I was better, I thought I could do more than I could, and it cost me something valuable.

Healing isn't just instantaneous. It takes time, and you can't just expect to jump right back in the same way you could before. I understood that now, more than I had when it was just Klaus. All of us had been struggling with something, and it still got to us. I could make any excuse I wanted, but at the end of the day, I was relapsing.

It was a relapse. I could fight this.

Slowly, I kneeled on the ground, trying to meet my brother's eyes. We fought and yelled at each other just as often as we hugged and cried-- it was a strange cycle. As the anger subsided, the guilt still consumed me. But there were better ways to deal with it, and Five certainly didn't deserve the blunt force of it all. Not after everything he'd seen.

Rather than speaking, I just pulled him into a hug, squeezing him as tight as I could. I thought something had been off about him ever since he got back the second time, now I understood why. Everything had been thrown at him so quickly, and he had no way to deal with it except copious bottles of alcohol and a mannequin. Now, he had all of us, and we had turned our backs on him at one point or another. What the hell kind of siblings did we think we were?