Five lives alone in a tiny flat in Prague, working under the table at a used bookstore. The others are scattered across the world, unaware of their shared past.

The mornings were the worst.

It wasn’t the cold—the radiators barely worked but he didn’t care. It wasn’t the loneliness, either. Five had long since made peace with the sound of nothing. It was the dreams. And worse—the parts he remembered once he opened his eyes.Every night was a different version of the Commission: blood-soaked paperwork, glass walls that shattered like bone, the echo of briefcases slamming shut. He saw the faces of the operatives he’d killed, the numbers he calculated into extinction. Sometimes he saw the lab. The real lab—syringes and steel, sterile lights, voices murmuring about his DNA like he wasn’t there. Like he was just the failed prototype of something better.

He got up. No coffee, no appetite. Just the same cardigan he wore every day and the gloves to cover his hands—the hands that trembled when they weren’t busy.At work, he shelved books he would never read. The woman who owned the store liked to talk about her cat, and Five let her. It was better than being alone with his thoughts. She said he had kind eyes. He thought they looked like his father’s—sharp, sunken, and tired of the world.

Sometimes he thought of reaching out. Just to see.

Diego had a wife now. A normal one. Patch was alive again, and Five could see it in Diego’s eyes in the one photo he found online—he didn’t remember Lila, or Stan, or any of it. The same with Klaus, who looked joyfully unrecognizable with a son on his shoulders and Dave next to him. Viktor was out in Canada, living under a new name, smiling in photos with his partner—no violin, no apocalypse, no ghosts. They were all happy. And they had no idea what they’d lost.

But Five remembered. Every timeline. Every death. Every version of them. The childhood that was never a childhood. The siblings that both died and survived. The versions of himself that never came back from time travel. The boy who disintegrated his first body just to survive another day in a timeline that hated him.

One night he looked in the mirror too long.

He touched his face. The permanent line between his brows. The thin scar on his jaw. The tiredness that even immortality couldn’t wash away. He looked down at his hands, remembering the experiments—his own DNA used for something inhuman. Something monstrous.

“They made me from parts they thought were useful,” he whispered. “And burned the rest.” He didn’t cry. He never did. Crying was for people who believed they could still be helped. He wrote a letter he’d never send:

To whoever I used to be: You’re not coming back. They gave you a new world to forget. I stayed behind to make sure it worked.They smile now, because they don’t know. That’s the point. That’s why it’s better. You wanted peace. I gave it to you.Just promise me you’ll never come looking for the truth. It will ruin everything.

Maybe someday, someone would find it. Maybe not.But he had done his job. And that had to be enough.