neuronary:

number5theboy:

neuronary:

number5theboy:

Currently thinking about how one of the most heart-breaking parts of the show is that Five loves his siblings deeply, but they don’t realise it.

Five was alone for forty-five years. And as Luther once put it, it’s the being alone that breaks you. Five’s only companion in the apocalypse was someone his mind literally made up for him to love and be loved by, and at the Commission, he worked by himself. This makes his siblings the only people who ever truly loved him, in the entirety of his fifty-eight years on earth, and everything he does in the show is, at its core, out of love for them.

And they don’t know that, and a lot of that is because of Five himself, as forty-five years of solitude take a toll on your social and communication skills. Five is literally shown to be ready to kill for his siblings, and to die for his siblings, and to outdo himself with his time-travelling skills for his siblings, and they don’t know it’s for them, because he doesn’t tell them. When Five says to his younger-but-older-looking self that there wasn’t a single day in the apocalypse where they didn’t think about their family, the camera cuts to Luther looking surprised at the admission. Five is brash and rude and arrogant and exasperated, especially with his siblings, so that’s how they know him, and don’t see or don’t bother to look for anything deeper motivating his actions.

Literally all the siblings (except Ben) have called Five an asshole, or something equivalent, over the course of the show, and he usually deserves it on surface-level, but there is something more fundamental at play here, namely that he doesn’t fully grasp the depth their childhood abuse and his siblings don’t understand the trauma he suffered for forty-five years. Five has no idea what they went through after he got lost in the future, how Reginald’s abuse has stunted them all in different ways, and is thus surprised when they don’t all drop everything to help him stop the apocalypse. His siblings, on the other hand, don’t really seem to care about how forty-five years with the certain knowledge that everyone and everything he knew and loved is dead affected Five, they don’t understand why he is the way he is. There is a big sense of a rift between Five and the rest of his siblings because they don’t really understand what the other has been through, and how would they? Five has been back for less than three weeks, and he has barely opened up to any of his siblings, or they to him. He tries to save them, again and again, but they are not aware what is went through, is still going through.

And, overall, they have more history with each other than with him, and it shows in the little details. Out of all the siblings, Five is the only one without a reunion scene in Season 2 where someone is happy to see him. He is the only one in the Hargreeves household (including Pogo, Grace and even goddamn Reginald) who has not gotten a hug in twenty episodes. When Diego does his whole speech to Lila about dangerous people loving him back in the last episode, the camera cuts to every single one of his siblings. Except for one. Because Diego doesn’t know that Five loves him, loves all of them. None of them do.  

if i may add on?

i think that a big part of why five’s siblings fail to understand his trauma is because, not only were they not present for it, he doesn’t wear his trauma all over his face the way they do. their trauma is literally built into their character and costume design in a way that five’s isn’t, especially in season one.

luther’s part-ape-ness is one of the most obvious. the proof of his unerring loyalty for a man who couldn’t give less of a shit about him is now written into his dna.

diego has the scars on his face and wears knock-off vigilante gear everywhere.

allison’s made to look as glamorous and eye-catching as possible all the time because she craves attention and love from the people around her.

klaus could not look any more like a homeless junkie than he already does and has the tattoos to make him look like a human ouija board.

ben is literally a ghost.

vanya’s small, understated, easy to forget by design.

all of them are wandering around, ludicrously easy to psychoanalyse on appearance and mannerisms alone, while five has literally had all physical evidence of his trauma completely erased.

he just looks like a jumped up little kid that wandered out of prep school and started bossing everyone around like he thinks he owns them. if you were only looking at a picture of him, with absolutely no context, you’d see a privately-educated snot-nosed little shit that no one would complain about seeing knocked down a few pegs.

five fails to understand his siblings’ trauma, not because he doesn’t see it (it’s written all over their faces), but because he doesn’t understand why they can’t put it aside the way he does, and focus on the bigger picture. klaus got locked in the mausoleum for hours on end and is now terrified of the dark? that really sucks but can we deal with it next week, please, we need to stop the apocalypse. vanya feels invisible and unwanted? sucks to be you but there are higher stakes at the moment.

in a sense, five doesn’t have past trauma the way his siblings do. they’ve had the time to rest and recuperate and start to move forward. he’s been Going Through It for forty-five years straight. he doesn’t understand them prioritising their trauma and recovery because his trauma is ongoing.

anyway i made myself sad can someone please give this poor child a hug

This is an EXCELLENT addition, and I’d love to add my two cents.

The thing is that Five clocks a lot of his siblings’ trauma, or at least its repercussions, not to its full extent, but he catches the surface of what is wrong, a mixture of the knowledge he assembled in the apocalypse from the library he got Vanya’s book from, and his observational skills. He sees that Luther is uncomfortable with his body (”Luther thinks he’s fooling people with that overcoat.”), he refuses to enable Klaus’ addiction from the get-go, he spot-on calls Diego’s hero complex what it is, and he even tells Vanya that she will have to face who she is (and by extent what she did) at some point, even if that confrontation is unpleasant.

Meanwhile, Five looks like he looked when he left his siblings, down to the uniform. He is visually not differentiated from the boy who disappeared, even if he is forty-five years older now, and so his siblings still have the kind of protectiveness one would have towards a teen, and not towards an older man. Five even clocks that in the paradox psychosis scene, when he calls out Luther for listening to his younger-but-older-looking self because his appearance matches the authority he wants to exude. Five’s trauma is ongoing, but his appearance is stagnating, so no one really gets how deep his pain runs, because to them, he doesn’t look different than when he left. On some level, he is still thirteen in their minds.

but like just to expand more on his trauma being ongoing:

i’ll bet anything the reason he just expects his siblings to get up and keep moving is because he doesn’t have any idea what dealing with trauma is like. he thinks that, once everything is done and he gets to eat enough and sleep enough, he’s just gonna be fine.

because as much as ‘Number Five | The Boy has PTSD’ is popular tag on AO3, he doesn’t have PTSD. not yet. because he’s not ‘post trauma’ like the rest of his family is. he’s definitely gonna have PTSD once he like. actually saves the world, and maybe we’ll see more of that in season 3, but at the moment he doesn’t understand his siblings trauma because he doesn’t actually have firsthand experience of trauma yet. he doesn’t have the perspective of moving on because he’s still moving through.

god, i really hope they’ll all be there for him when he finally gets to the end of it all.

(or maybe i don’t, it’ll definitely be interesting either way.)