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❛ ᴡᴀsᴛᴇʟᴀɴᴅs ᴏғ ᴛɪᴍᴇ​​​​​​​​​​. ❜ ° . ༄
- ͙۪۪˚   ▎❛ 𝐅𝐈𝐕𝐄 ❜   ▎˚ ͙۪۪̥◌
»»————- ꒰ ᴅᴏɴ'ᴛ ʟᴇᴀᴠᴇ ᴍᴇ
ᴅʀᴏᴡɴɪɴ' ɪɴ ᴍʏ ᴛᴇᴀʀs ꒱


❝ I'VE GOT LOVE ENOUGH FOR
TWO / BUT I'LL NEVER USE IT
IF I DON'T HAVE YOU ❞

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At the same moment that Klaus was questioning Five about his marital status, Dolores was pushing one of the rotating doors of Hotel Oblivion open. That, at least, had been the easiest of her uncle's riddles to answer: wherever the Hargreeves went, trouble was sure to follow. She strolled up to the check-in desk and dinged the bell. As she waited for an employee to appear, she took a sip from the fat straw that was stuck in her milkshake.

A wizened man with wispy, graying hair appeared moments later. For someone who acted as the face of the staff and dealt with people on a regular basis, he certainly had an unpleasant scowl on his face. It only adjusted into a slightly more pleasant look by the time he got to the desk. Dolores smiled despite his unwelcoming air. "I'd like a room, please."

With a faint grunt, he shuffled behind the lip of the desk before he placed a tented sign that read Cash up front onto the counter in front of her. She smiled agreeably and shifted the hat that she was carrying in her hand to under her arm. The brunette placed her milkshake on the surface in front of her and dug through the back pocket of her new dark-wash jeans. She pulled out a wad of folded bills and counted over a couple hundred— enough for several days since she didn't know how long they'd be staying here. The man eyed her money warily for a moment before he accepted it. After he handed her the set for her room, he wasted no time in picking up the leash that rested next to a silk cushion. Deciding that he'd enough care of this particular customer, he resumed his search for his missing dog.

Dolores shrugged off his eccentric behavior— she'd dealt with the Hargreeves, after all— and gathered up her things. She placed the hat on her head to free up her hands as she made her way over to the bar area. While she walked, she took another sip of her milkshake and began to swing her keyring in around on her finger in a jaunty manner.

She caught sight of the Hargreeves brothers almost immediately so she made a beeline for their high top. One seat was empty but the other three were occupied by Klaus, Luther and Five. Her husband looked to be on the verge of punching someone, so she did everyone a favor and drew their attention away from each other. "Hey, guys."

Almost in unison, their heads snapped towards her. Three pairs of eyes scanned her with varying degrees of suspicion with Klaus' being the least assuming. Luther's gaze caught on the items in her hands. "What do you have there?"

"A milkshake," she answered obliviously, and then she took an obnoxiously loud slurp of her drink.

"No, not that. Did you get yourself a room?"

"Oh, the keys." Dolores shrugged. "Yeah, I did."

"Where did you get the money for all of that? And are those new clothes, too?" He leaned forward to inspect her outfit.

"What is this, a crime scene investigation? I mean, you wouldn't be far off— I did break into my house to steal from my parents, but is it really against the law when it's your own family from another timeline?"

The man's eyes widened. "Yes, yes it is! You didn't leave any evidence, did you?"

Klaus, of course, had a completely different reaction. He gasped and clapped his hands together. "A woman after my own heart!" He beamed happily at her. "I'm proud to call you my sister-in-law."

Dolores grinned at him and held out her dessert. "That response earns you a reward. D'you want some?"

He took it from her without further prompting and stirred her straw around. "What flavors did you get?"

"Just one flavor— chocolate. But I splurged for the Oreo pieces." Klaus nodded in approval and took a sip.

"Uh, guys, I think we have to focus a little more on the important part," Luther cut in. "You committed a crime—"

"Hey, hey, hey!" The brunette acted as if he hadn't said anything and reached out to take her milkshake back. "I said you could have some, not all. Where are your manners? Were you raised in a barn?"

The larger man sighed. "Dolores—"

She pointed at him. "No milkshake for you." Then she lifted the plaid fedora from her head and turned to her husband. "I got this for you. I thought you'd look cute in it." The brunette placed it carefully on top of his dark hair and her lips pulled into a smile. "I was right."

"You only got me a hat? You didn't get anything else to go with it?" Five took the hat off of his head to turn it around in his hands.

"If you don't want it—"

He jammed it onto his hair again. "Back off, I'll wear it."

Dolores wondered if their little spat— whatever his problem had been— was over now. He seemed to be acting normally again, bar the fact that he still refused to meet her eyes. Except for the initial surprise of her appearance, his attention had mostly stayed on the Chinese food in front of him. She frowned thoughtfully. "If you're mad because I didn't get you a milkshake, you can finish the rest of this one." She held it out to him as a peace offering.

Unfortunately, that didn't smooth things over as much as she'd hoped it would. "It's not about the milkshake." Five finally looked up from the table— though still not at her. "Can we go somewhere to talk?"

✧✧✧

Dolores' new room was the ugliest thing that she'd ever seen— and she'd thought the Quail Room where they'd met The Handler had been bad! It was quite large, though, which she would've appreciated if it had not been aiding in putting distance between her and her husband. Five stood at the complete opposite end of the room and stared out the window at the street below. His hands were tucked into the pockets of his bathrobe as he kept his back to her.

The brunette did her best to be undeterred by his positioning despite the sense of foreboding that was slowly forming in the pit of her stomach. She almost regretted drinking the whole milkshake because surely that was what was contributing to the nausea that she was currently feeling. It had to be. There was absolutely nothing that could go wrong! There was no apocalypse, they'd escaped the Sparrows relatively unscathed. . . and sure, there was the little matter of her uncles' unsolvable riddles but those were probably pointless, right?

Beware Hotel Obsidian. Her skin crawled with unease and she shoved the thought aside.

"So. . . what's up?" Dolores finally broke the heavy silence that had hung in the room for the last several minutes.

Five had never been good with words— not like she had. It had never come out right when he'd tried to tell her how much he loved her; the most he'd been able to get out was a simple I love you. He hadn't even been able to properly ask her to marry him; she'd assumed the end of his question and had enthusiastically said yes.

He was a good thinker, though. He could puzzle out any equation and come up with an answer. He was a certified genius— and she'd said as much, anyway. His mind was hardly ever quiet as he thought and thought and thought. . . right into the dilemma they were facing now.

The thing about math was that once an equation was proven true, it was set in stone. Numbers and figures weren't malleable once a conclusion was made; two plus two would always, always equal four, no matter how many times a person checked it in their calculator. In his science-oriented mind, Five had come to another irrefutable conclusion: he was the cause of all of the pain that Dolores had gone through.

His family had been responsible for the first apocalypse she'd survived, the one that had torn her away from her family and everything that she'd known. He'd been the cause of her worry all those years wasted in The Commission. His brother had been the one to drag her to Vietnam. She'd died for him. In every situation, the answer always came back to him. So, that only left one answer: in order to keep her safe, he had to remove himself from the equation.

The solution had come to him in the hours they'd been apart and he'd stewed in his thoughts all through his shower and rest period. It is important to clarify that his decision had nothing to do with his feelings for her, for math was not a field where emotions were important. It certainly wasn't because he loved her less; he still loved her just as much as he had yesterday and every day before that. He just couldn't bear the thought of putting her in danger like that again. So, he put aside everything personal about their relationship and had gone about detaching himself from her, no matter how much pain it would cause him (now) in the long run.

Five didn't answer her right away; he ran all of the scenarios in his head again and they came to the same conclusion: this was what he had to do to keep her safe. To prepare himself for the inevitable fallout, he took a deep breath and balled his hands into fists inside the pockets of his bathrobe. "It's. . . time for you to go."

At first Dolores wasn't sure if she heard him properly. She laughed with disbelief. "I'm sorry, what?"

"You heard me." He kept his tone clipped and short; there was no use drawing this out and making it more awful than it had to be. "It's time for us to go our separate ways."

"Sure. Alright. I'll see you in the room we'll be sharing for the foreseeable future."

Her almost lighthearted tone irked him— good. This would go more easily if he could convince himself that he was mad at her. "I'm serious, Dolores. We've had a good run but it's time for a fresh start. I. . . don't need you anymore."

The use of her real name was probably more jarring than the rest of his words put together. To be honest, she didn't much care for what he was saying; there was no merit to his words, after all. She could tell by the way he kept his gaze on the window and how he hunched his shoulders that he was lying. What she didn't know— or understand— was why.

"Five, you don't mean that. Look, let's just sit and talk about whatever's bothering you. We'll work through it like we always do. If it's something I've done— I know what it is! It's because I let Klaus try my milkshake first, isn't it? Aw, Five, I just want to spend more time with your family because they're my family now, too. You don't have to worry— you're still my favorite. There's nothing to be jealous of."

There was no emotion in his tone when Five replied: "there's nothing to be jealous over."

The brunette froze as the amused smile slid off her lips. She stared at his back— he didn't even have the decency to turn around and face her— as the finality of his words stabbed her in the chest. Her voice dropped. "You don't mean that."

"Believe what you want, Dolores. We've been through too much together and this isn't something that we can get through. It's better to have a fresh start on our own paths."

"Too much being thirty-plus years of loving each other and making a commitment to be together for the rest of our lives?"

"And three apocalypses, Paradox psychosis and your death." The last words were flung at her as if he were using them as a barrier to keep her away.

Dolores placed her hands on her hips as she stared him down. While she normally looked at the dark-haired boy with an expression that held at least some aspect of love in it, her gaze was hard and steely as her eyes bored holes into his back. Her tone was sharp as she retorted: "see, that's the difference between you and me. That's the only part of our relationship you choose to remember. The bad. I remember how great we are together and how much we love each other. This fresh start could be what we need to have the life we've always wanted."

"Yeah, well, things got a little off track when you died."

"Jesus, would you let that go? You brought me back! I'm perfectly fine, so can we move on, please?"

Finally, Five turned around to face her. His eyes held an equally unfriendly expression but unlike hers, it wasn't genuine. "What if it happens again? I can't be the reason you die a second time. You don't know what was like—"

"You're right," the brunette agreed calmly. "I don't. But if it happens again, you can just reverse time and I'll be fine."

He didn't understand how she could believe in him so much when he'd already screwed up the timeline on three different occasions. "What if I can't? It was awful, Dolores. Just thinking about it makes me feel miserable and devastated and crushed. You get to escape all of those things because you don't even remember it."

"What, so you've decided you don't want to be with me anymore because I'm mortal? Well sorry, Five, that I'm not some god like you and your siblings are. Heaven forbid that a normal person plays the hero! It isn't fair that you get to be the judge, jury and executioner in our relationship when it takes two people to be in one in the first place.

"But you know what? I'm not going to let you end this— us— without you knowing that I love you. I've said it a million times before and I'll say it as many times as it takes to convince you that I don't regret my choice for a second. We've been married for thirty-plus years, Five. I don't know about you, but loving someone isn't something that you can stop doing overnight. Sure, it hasn't been easy for us and our love has grown and become a little weathered, but it's still how I feel about you. And it goddamn hurts that you're willing to turn your back on a three decades of commitment just because you're having a hard time accepting my decision."

Dolores finished saying her piece and let her words fade into the air between them. Five's expression was so still and statuesque that his face could have been carved from marble. What was worst was that his eyes lacked any emotion at all. His indifference infuriated her and she knew that her eyes were sparking with anger as she glowered at him. After all of this— her rebuttal, her confession, everything— he didn't even deign her a response— and that was what hurt more than anything he could've said.

In all the time Dolores had known Five, he'd never been one to give up. Even in the depths of the apocalypse when food had been scarce and morale had been low, he'd pushed on. He'd pushed on despite messing up his equations and the failure to save the world the first time. He'd even pushed on throughout 1963 when he hadn't even known where she was. And now. . . now he was ready to give up on her. On them. It didn't make sense to her that this was where he threw in the towel. He could do everything to save the world but was willing to cut all ties with her at the slightest upset?

When he finally spoke, it was far from the words that she wanted to hear. Instead, his tone held the slightest hint of indignance as he said, "I'm not running. I'm not a coward—"

"That's such bullshit," the brunette cut across him. "You can't face your own feelings so you're running like hell away from them. Away from me."

His eyes began to spark at her accusation which was better than the blank nothingness they'd been minutes ago. "This has nothing to do with feelings."

She let out a caustic laugh. "Doesn't it? I know you, Five. You can't stand letting people know that you care about them, so you push them away so you can pretend that you don't feel anything at all. It's exactly what you're doing now even though it's pointless— I already know that you care about me. So as always, you know best and you're going to end it for both of us before we can resolve this—before I have a chance to hurt you again, right?"

The boy didn't answer but he didn't need to. She could tell by the look in his eyes and the way his jaw tightened at her question that she wouldn't get a response. He'd already come to his conclusion and there would be no going back. She wanted him to stand up for them. To stand up now and argue with her. She could handle hours of arguments with him, because at least then he'd be present in the relationship. The two of them, fighting for what they both deserved. But this silent Five? That she couldn't handle, because it meant he didn't goddamn care enough to try and save what they had.

And if he didn't, then neither did she.

Dolores reached up and unclasped the necklace that she'd worn for years now. It seemed like so long ago that she'd stolen the silver chain from Allison's room in the original Umbrella Academy. It had travelled with her all through the 2019 apocalypse, the 1970s apocalypse and then the 1960s. The golden ring— which was worn and weathered, just like them— hung off of it and seemed to glint mockingly at her in the light.

Since Five didn't seem to be willing to compromise on this, there was only one thing left to do. Dolores was far too proud to be the jilted one so she held out the necklace on her finger once she'd reclasped it. "If your stubborn ass is really set on cutting ties, then let me make this very clear: I'm the one that's leaving you. It's been nice knowing you, Five. Now get the hell out of my room."

Don't pull your love out on me, honey
Take my heart, my soul, my money
But don't leave me drownin' in my tears!

A/n: some parts of Five and Dolores' argument is inspired by the book Hope Burns by Jaci Burton, which can be found in chapter 33.