Mister Five Hargreeves. (vijf) wrote in noexits, @ 2021-04-22 09:45:00 |
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A drum solo starts in, loud enough to wake the dead, but Five just glares at the sky. No. Fuck no. He's not doing this.Undeterred, the drums stop, and [...] start up again. Once, twice, thrice, four times, five times. With his head held aloft and hands balled into fists, Five shows no signs of [...] willing participation. Six times. Seven times. A spotlight, filtered red, shines on him, and Five looks up, eyes blinking against the light. And then he sighs and opens his mouth to - Argue? No. And he’s not even sure if it counts as singing, but it’s finally worn him down, whatever this is.
Angrily, Five steps on an awkwardly placed piece of rubble, sending off a chain reaction that sends down what seems like an avalanche of bricks down to the Green, but Five barely gives it a thought.
Drums are joined in by guitar, and the music swells, angry, impatient and relentless.
He kicks at a single beam standing aloft among the rubble, but hilariously enough, it refuses to budge - that ends up pissing him off even more, and he kicks at it breathlessly.
Well-adjusted? Of course not. As if there was any doubt of that now, because Five will not leave that piece of beam be. His singular focus proves to be his downfall yet again, but when the song’s tempo winds up again, and so does he.
In the background, a woman, dressed in an immaculate pencil suit that evokes the swinging fifties appears, and fades just as quickly. You get the feeling you should almost be thankful Five hasn’t caught wind of that. But the chorus repeats twice more, and by then, Five has managed to topple the beam, using his tiny frame to push it from the mountainous rubble of Carter Hall. Is that a ghost of a genuine smile on his youthful face? There’s no time to double-check, because the spotlight dies. Even though it's early in the morning, everything's gone pitch-black, but the drums keep on going, and so does Five.
The sun finally breaks through the darkness, briefly revealing the man he used to be; a man who filled out this suit rather well, merely fifty-eight years old, a fedora to hair gone thin and white, and a rather sporty mustache to fill up the blanks in an otherwise haunted face. But the illusion shatters as soon as Five moves.
The music dies as suddenly as it started, leaving Five standing on the foundations of Carter Hall, his hands in his pockets, looking surprisingly pensive. "Never again," he says, before he teleports away.