Chapter 3: The Quiet Mentorship
The training room victory was short-lived. A few hours later, the mansion was back to its usual state of controlled chaos. Luther was sulking, Diego was sharpening his knives, and Klaus was trying to convince Vanya to join him for a séance. Five, however, found Number Eight in the kitchen, carefully trying to balance a stack of crackers on top of a water glass.
Eight looked up, his movements uncharacteristically slow. "I didn't know you could do that," he said, referring to Five's blink-and-grab maneuver.
"I can do a lot of things you don't know about," Five replied, grabbing a juice box from the fridge. He studied Eight. "You're fast. That's a brute force power. But speed is more than just running. It's about precision. About control."
Eight tilted his head, intrigued. "Control?"
Five set the juice box down. "Yeah. You're a human bullet. You bounce off things, you cause tremors, you break stuff. But what if you didn't? What if you could use your vibrations to... well, to go through things?"
Eight's eyes widened. "Like Ben's tentacles?"
"Not quite," Five said with a sigh. "His are... different. But in a way, yes. Your body is vibrating at an incredibly high frequency. You're already almost intangible. You just need to push it a little further. I can't teach you the exact physics, but I can show you how to feel for it."
Five took a breath, concentrating. His hand began to shimmer, a faint, almost invisible distortion in the air. He then placed his hand directly through the glass on the counter. The glass didn't break. It didn't even ripple. It was as if his hand had never been there at all. He pulled it back, and the glass was perfectly intact.
Eight stared, his mouth agape. "How...?"
"I'm bending space around me, collapsing the distance between two points," Five explained. "You're doing something similar, just with speed. You are generating so much kinetic energy, you could, theoretically, phase through matter. It's a matter of attuning yourself to the frequency of the object you want to pass through."
Over the next few days, Five became Eight's silent mentor. They would sneak away to the garage, where Five would stand a few feet from the brick wall, watching as Eight ran at it again and again, only to bounce off harmlessly.
"You're not doing it right," Five would say. "Don't think about the wall. Think about the air. The atoms. You're a part of the same thing. Match their rhythm. Vibrate with them."
It was a strange, abstract lesson, but Eight, who was more intuitive than logical, began to grasp it. He would stand, close his eyes, and hum, a low, almost inaudible vibration building within him. Then, he'd take off, a red streak aimed at the unyielding wall.
On the fourth day, something happened. Instead of a loud thump, there was a low, resonant whoosh. Eight didn't bounce off the wall. He passed through it. Not entirely, but he went in a few inches, his body flickering like a bad hologram before he popped back out, landing with a confused wobble.
A wide grin broke across Five's face. "You see? You felt that. You were in the wall and the wall was in you."
The quiet moments they shared, away from the loud dramatics of the other siblings, forged a unique bond. Five, who had already seen the horrors of the future, saw in Eight not just a sibling, but a potential asset. A fellow anomaly who could understand the physics of their existence in a way no one else could. He wasn't just training Eight; he was building a partnership.
And Eight, for the first time, had someone who understood his power. Not as a weapon to be deployed or a nuisance to be managed, but as a part of who he was. Five didn't want him to stop being fast; he wanted him to be faster, better, more controlled. They were two sides of the same coin, one bending space, the other dominating time.
One evening, as they sat in the library after a successful "phasing" session, Eight looked at Five and said, "Thanks, Five."
Five simply nodded, but for a split second, a flicker of a smile touched his lips before it was gone. He looked down at the book in his hands, but his mind was elsewhere, already calculating the next lesson. A lesson not about how to fight, but how to escape. How to survive. Because for Five, the future was coming, and he knew they would need every advantage they could get. And for the first time, he felt a little less alone in his calculations