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❛ ᴡᴀsᴛᴇʟᴀɴᴅs ᴏғ ᴛɪᴍᴇ​​​​​​​​​​. ❜ ° . ༄
- ͙۪۪˚   ▎❛ 𝐄𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐓 ❜   ▎˚ ͙۪۪̥◌
»»————- ꒰ ᴛʜᴇ ɢʀᴇᴀᴛ ᴅᴇʙᴀᴛᴇ ꒱


❝ MAGIC IS SUPPOSED
TO BE A MYSTERY ❞

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Lola watched the boy in wonder. For some reason, Five had found a vast amount of patience that he'd previously been lacking. (Okay, maybe that was a slight exaggeration. He was still very grumpy.) Still, as they sat down that evening for a meager dinner of a split can of beans, she couldn't believe he'd actually answered her question instead of ignoring it.

"What?" he asked with a slightly more irritable tone.

The girl shook her head. "Never mind. Hey, since we don't have anything to do, do you wanna see a magic trick?"

The boy snorted and spooned some beans into his mouth. "Magic isn't real."

"Fine. Do you wanna see some slight-of-hand?" she specifically enunciated the last three words.

He eyed her curiously, "you know prestidigitation?"

"There's no need to show off how smart you are," Lola grumbled, "there's only one person you have to compete with and that's me so you don't have to try so hard."

Five ignored her complaining. "I mean, it's trivial to what I can do but it's an interesting skill for—" he paused, having been about to say normal people, "someone your age to have."

She huffed, "'someone my age?'" she questioned him mockingly, "you say that like you're an old man."

"There are days when I feel like an old man," he retorted lightly.

Lola rolled her eyes. "Yeah, yeah, you're better than everyone— namely the only person left alive which is me. But to answer your question, yes, that's why I offered."

"Let's see, then."

The girl pulled out her worn deck of cards and shuffled them together, feeling the familiar, plastic-y feel under her fingertips. The light from their small fire flickered against the wall they'd taken refuge against, causing the shadows of two sitting teens to shrink and grow. Outside of their circle of light, the area around them was steadily darkening into the increasingly-familiar inky blackness of night. Their wagon sat a on the other side of the campfire to help block wind. Lola showed her cards face down. 

"Pick a card, any card," she echoed her words from a simpler time. With their masks off for eating dinner, she saw him shoot her a faintly amused grin. Pleased, she watched him pull a card from the deck. "Okay, don't show me but make sure you remember it."

Five gave her a little smirk, "I've never forgotten anything."

"Yes, alright you genius. You're smart, I get it," she responded lightly.

He shrugged. "You're the one who said it, not me. Okay, I've got my card. What's next?" He slid it back into her offered deck and she hid it behind her back, flipping over all but his card. When Lola pulled out the face-up deck, his card was the only one face down.

"Not bad," Five allowed, "but pretty rudimentary. Give me a day and I'll figure it out."

She snorted, "magic is supposed to be a mystery."

"Not magic," he corrected her, "prestidigitation. Magic doesn't exist."

"What do you call your birth? Or your powers?"

"A science experiment," he answered promptly.

"Maybe in the way your father trained you," she responded, ignoring his glare, "but you weren't conceptualized like every other normal baby on earth. You were born like Athena from Greek culture except you didn't pop out of your mother's forehead. Probably."

"It's still not magic," Five insisted as he placed his finished can aside, "it's an anomaly, if anything. Besides, Greek myths aren't based on true facts."

"Isn't there a saying that there's a bit of truth in every myth? Maybe the Greeks predicted how you would be born."

"There's no way that people from thousands of years ago could have predicted events like my birth. I'll allow that they could have thought of versions of modern inventions and similar things before their time but something as unusual as super-powered babies? Do you know how many events had to line up exactly right to get the timeline we're in now?"

"And now you're bringing math into this," Lola sighed, "look, it's proven that magic is just science we don't understand yet. Therefore, your powers can be considered magic."

"But I do understand them," he argued, "I've done the math, I know how time works—"

"Not very well, though," she countered easily, "since you to get stuck here."

Five shot her another glare. "I can admit when I've made a mistake. My calculations were off, that's all. I still understand what I'm doing and could explain it to a reasonably smart person. Hence, it's not magic at all."

"What about your other siblings' powers? How do explain the ability to commune with the dead? Or to alter reality with your voice?"

He felt a prickle of anger at the subject of his family. "Leave my siblings out of this," he snapped as he tried to shut down the pang of loss that followed whenever he thought of them.

"Sorry," Lola apologized— and she meant it, "but I was just trying to point out that not even you understand how those things work. For the common layperson, your family's powers are magical."

"Well, if I had known we were talking about your average, everyday human, then there would've been no point to argue."

She couldn't help but grin, "what other topics do we disagree about?"

✧✧✧

Of course, not all their debates ended in agreement. As the days rolled from smoggy summer to ashy fall, Lola approached the boy one evening.

"I'm leaving," she announced.

He barely glanced up from his book, "what?"

"I'm leaving," the brunette enunciated, "you said I could tag along until I was strong enough to survive on my own. I am now, so I'm leaving."

Still scribbling away, Five rolled his eyes. "No, you're not. You wouldn't survive."

She glared at the back of his head. "I would too. You've taught me how to make a fire. I'm better at finding food than you. I know how to make a shelter. I can survive."

"Oh yeah? And how would you defend yourself if you needed to?"

"We haven't seen anything larger than a rat since we've been here. I'll be fine. Besides, I'm only distracting you from your precious equations." Okay, that was a little passive aggressive. In her defense, she'd been thinking about this for so long but hadn't had the courage to broach the subject until now and he was only making things worse. "If I didn't know any better, I'd think you wanted me to stay."

"It's a good thing you do then, isn't it?" he asked, "I just don't want to come across your dead body, thanks."

She scoffed, "I'd rather not come across yours."

"You wouldn't," his tone was edging on irritability now, "and you're not going, so sit your ass down and be quiet so I can concentrate."

Lola's teeth clicked together and she glared at him bitterly, "I'm leaving."

"You're not," he repeated in an almost sing-song tone, "otherwise why are you asking for my permission?"

"I wasn't asking," she shot back, "I was doing the polite thing and informing you. It was you who misunderstood the sentiment, you asshole."

"Wow, name calling already?" the boy sounded less than impressed, "go on then. See if I care. I bet I'll see you tomorrow."

"I bet you won't."

He didn't even deign to respond to that except to give her a tiny, insolent shrug that made her blood boil. Lola turned on her heel and stalked over to the wagon to collect her books and meager assortment of goods that she'd claimed as hers. After piling everything in one arm, she walked back to the fire and picked up one of the loose pieces of wood in the small stack. She dipped the end into the flame and once it was lit, used it as a torch.

She gave the boy a cold look, "I won't be seeing you around," she said by means of goodbye and turned her back on him before she strode out into the night.

Not even twenty feet away from the campfire, darkness enveloped her. Lola could feel the creeping sensation of being trapped and out of the corner of her eye, outside the flickering glow of her torch, the juggling circus monkey mocked her. The girl squeezed her eyes shut. She'd be better off without that prick. Her eyes opened and she continued walking, steeling herself against the temptation of going back and admitting he was right.

The thought of the smug look on the boy's face was enough to prevent her from returning. She wasn't sure how long she walked— especially without the light of the moon or stars— but eventually she deemed herself far enough away to settle down again for the night. So, she sat with her back pressed against the remaining half-wall of concrete of some building, her books clutched in her arms and the torch staked into the ground in front of her as the flames ate up the stick of wood.

✧✧✧

Lola wasn't didn't know what woke her but she startled awake and listened. Then, she realized two things: one, she'd almost had a full night's sleep. And two, the absence of the irritating boy was more noticeable than she'd originally thought.

Her torch had burned out to leave an ashy stump and the wind whistled around the makeshift barrier, causing her to shiver. Fall was definitely coming even if there was no discernible change in lighting. She wondered what she would do once winter came and the thought alone chilled her. Five's prediction would probably come true. She pushed it away, reassuring herself she'd cross that bridge when she came to it.

Pushing herself up on her feet, Lola began her usual routine of walking but this time it wasn't aimless. She wanted to go back home and find her family. While she knew the effort would be futile and a waste of energy, she had been thrown into these new circumstances without a thought of her past, a past that had been her present only hours before she'd been trapped. So, even with a voice that sounded suspiciously like Five's telling her that this would not help her survival, she turned her feet towards her broken home.

Her neighborhood was unrecognizable. The brunette's vision hadn't been to its usual strength when she'd left with Five so the crumbled houses and piles of rubble had been indistinct blurs that she'd seen as she squinted against the then-glaring light. Now, under the dark, gray sky, the beige-brown-tan of the new world hardly resembled the neat city blocks and bright lawns of the town homes that Lola was familiar with. She sucked in breath, almost unable to process the absolute devastation that surrounded her even though she'd lived in it for more than a two months now. At least then she'd been able to convince herself that somehow, her world was still intact, just not accessible.

Now, as she stared at the changed landscape, she couldn't convince herself of the lie anymore. Even the forbidding Umbrella Academy block-sized house was no longer standing as all of the buildings had collapsed to nearly the same height. Lola carefully picked her way along the rubble-filled streets as she tried to remember what the noises of cars passing by and horns honking outside her window had sounded like. In the silence of the city, it was almost ghostly. She shivered.

When the girl arrived to the place she thought her house was, she stopped and stared again at the pile of cement blocks that made up the place she'd once called home. A feeling of something like vomit rose in her throat but she forced it back down. She didn't have enough food to spare to upchuck it. Steeling herself, she gingerly clambered over the fallen bricks as the wind tugged at her clothes and threatened to send her face first into the remains of her house.

She made her way to the back corner where the kitchen had been and started removing the bricks she could, trying to unearth the food that had survived. As she did this, Lola thought about what could have possibly ended the world. Nukes? No, the air was still breathable and neither she nor Five had gotten radiation poisoning or whatever side effects those types of bombs had. Earthquake? More possible, but even she would have noticed the entire floor moving. Besides, there were no cracks in the ground to say so unless the epicenter had been elsewhere. Some type of horrible hurricane or twister? Again, possible, but with the state the natural water was in and the lack of flooding— their basement had usually leaked during large storms— it probably wasn't that.

It also wasn't any type of snow or freezing event as winds strong enough to fell cities probably didn't come with them. That caused her to think of other things: were there other survivors? What about the rest of the world? Was it just where they were? How was she supposed to find out if there was no way to contact other places? The thought that maybe, maybe they weren't alone and were just out of service brought a spark of hope. But then again, surely such devastation would be on the news and relief organizations would be swarming all over the country trying to help, right? It had been months now and they'd seen no one but each other and heard nothing but wind.

The clatter of rocks being tossed stopped as Lola uncovered a few minimally-damaged cans of food. Using her already-dirty nails to scratch at the caked on dust, she uncovered the label and saw that it was a can of beans. After cleaning off a few more she found peas, carrots, diced tomatoes and— in the oddest find— sauerkraut. She'd never been a fan of the last one since she'd always thought cabbage had a funny texture but she'd take what she could get. Too bad she'd left Five with the wagon.

Lola continued to pick through the remains of her house and her heart broke a little each time she found something she remembered. A few scraps of clothing from her favorite shirts, the melted crown of one of her hats, books with pages torn and burnt that she'd read. Some pieces of rubble were too big to move on her own and covered what she assumed were the beds or large pieces of furniture that hadn't broken under the weight of the crumbling house.

Her hands were dry and cracked and the sharp edges of the concrete cut easily into her skin, which left her palms bloody and stinging but she still continued looking. A part of her dreaded finding her family's bodies because after more than one hundred days they would certainly be unrecognizable. Still, another part of her wanted to see them because if she didn't, she knew she'd think that maybe, just maybe, one of them had made it (even if most of her knew this wasn't so.)

She found a few broken pieces of the knickknacks her mother had set on the tables— glass paperweights, figurines of cats, interesting rocks or pine cones— that had always driven her father mad but he'd let her put them there anyway. She could even hear their arguments if she listened closely:

"You'll run out space eventually, Diana! What are you even going to do with all of this junk?"

"DO? You're not supposed to do anything! They're nice to look at! If it was left up to you this house would empty! Boring!"

"Boring? Well at least I'd be organized!" he would pick up one of the items and wave it around, "how's anyone supposed to clean with this lying everywhere?"

"You pick it up! And put him down before you break him."

"Him? This is an object Diana! They don't have genders!"

"They do in other languages! Have you never taken Spanish, Edmund? El Gato!"

They would continue on for hours sometimes until her father would roll his eyes and grumble incessantly. Neither of her parents would ever actually be angry at the other, though. Just exasperated. Lola supposed that it was a form of love that despite how much it irritated him, her father never truly hated her mother's habits. It went both ways, too, with her mother being annoyed at how her father— despite wanting to be organized— never cleaned properly.

"Look at all this dust, Edmund! You call this cleaning?" her mother would start, and she would show one of her fingers coated in the stuff from some obscure place.

Her father would roll his eyes, "no one will look behind the fridge, love."

"I do! And guess what I found?"

"Dust?"

"Yes! Dust! And do you want to know where else I found it?"

"No, but you'll probably tell me anyway."

"Underneath our dresser! That's a simple fix! You just need a dry mop! And what about the molding? People will see that! Did you do anything at all?"

"Of course! I swept the floors and vacuumed!"

"Oh, great, you vacuumed! People will always use a magnifying glass to inspect the carpet but never look directly at the molding!"

"Forget about the molding! The floor's so clean you could eat off it!"

Her mother would scoff and mutter about where exactly he would be putting his food but eventually she would clean to her standards. Lola never thought she'd miss the sound of her parent's mundane fighting so much. She closed her eyes and let out a shuddering breath as she realized that sooner or later, she'd forget what her parents voices sounded like. She'd forget what they looked like exactly, too. She'd forget how her mother's eyes would flash when she was angry and her father would be slow to the bait and always, always call her love to try and calm her down.

The memory of her mother's hugs and her uncle's teasing would fade and so, too, would the recollection of the most annoying boy in the world once he found a way back. She'd be alone for the rest of her life and was probably destined to forget everything that humanity had once been. Lola sat down heavily on a particularly large boulder and scooped up her three books to bring them close to her chest as she wrapped her arms around them.

She squeezed her eyes shut and began to sob as the thought of being alone forever was too bleak and terrible to comprehend. Five was right, she thought, I probably won't last long on my own. She hated that he was right, that he would always be right. The thought of being wrong forever made her sob even harder as her fingers clutched desperately at the books as if they would anchor her to some form of safety, away from the thoughts of her new, barren existence.

Her fingers brushed the familiar edges of the thickest book and she gave a startled sob-gasp, tilting the pile away to look at the face of the brown-eyed, blonde-haired girl on the cover— the girl she'd always looked up to because she was a survivor. She, Lola, was not.

Through blurry eyes, she read the recognizable, comforting title written in lowercase script: the book thief. Reading had always made her feel better.