13│KILLED FOR SPORT

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❛ ᴡᴀsᴛᴇʟᴀɴᴅs ᴏғ ᴛɪᴍᴇ​​​​​​​​​​. ❜ ° . ༄
- ͙۪۪˚   ▎❛ 𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐑𝐓𝐄𝐄𝐍 ❜   ▎˚ ͙۪۪̥◌
»»————- ꒰ ᴋɪʟʟᴇᴅ ғᴏʀ sᴘᴏʀᴛ ꒱


❝ IF WE KILL YOU, DO WE
GET OUR BEN BACK?

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Lila was yelling furiously at Diego as Five and Dolores inspected the Pachinko machine. It hadn't changed from when she'd last seen it and there seemed to be nothing special about it at all. The boy turned to face his brother first. "Congratulations, you're both mildly terrible parents. Can we focus? Come on. How did this thing open before?" He looked over at her. "Dol?"

She shook her head. "I dunno, sorry. It probably opened after we left."

Diego backed her up: "it was already kinda open."

Five sighed. "'Already kinda open?'" He repeated. "Diego, you should've been an engineer. It's a lost opportunity."

"Maybe there's a secret lever or something," the brunette suggested. "Hidden passageways always have that sort of thing." She moved forward to try one of the controls.

Her husband immediately caught her wrist as he gave her a firm look. "Don't go pushing buttons when you don't know what they do."

"But we do know what they do: they open that door!"

"Why'd you want to go in there anyway?" Lila asked frantically— though a part of that could've been a result of her continued search for Stan. "It's just sushi and death!"

The boy gestured to the door. "When we met future me in the Commission bunker, I warned myself about Oblivion. Now, Pogo told me—"

Diego stopped looking around the room to cut him off: "wait. Whoa, whoa! Pogo's alive?"

"Different Pogo, but yes."

"A worse Pogo, you mean," Dolores corrected him.

"Anyway," Five continued pointedly, "the monkey said that Dad spent years training the Sparrows for some kind of super-secret mission into. . ."

"Oblivion?" Lila finished.

He clapped his hands together and walked towards the door. "So, we come back here and find that you two sentient STDs have actually been in there. Everything's leading to Oblivion, so we have to go in there." Then, he looked over at Dolores. "Not you, though. You can stand guard—"

"What? No way! I can fight now—"

"No, he's right," Diego agreed with his brother. "While three days of my epic training can put you on the leaderboard for a bar fight, you're no match for whatever that thing was." He held up his injured hand. "I didn't get this by giving a mummy a hand job, alright? You are not ready to face that."

Dolores huffed and crossed her arms. "None of you have any faith in me."

Unfortunately, she didn't get any support from Lila, either. "Look, Diego might be ninety percent moron and ten percent pelvic thrusts but he's right about Oblivion, okay? We're not just gonna waltz back in there because you say so."

Before Five could come up with a rebuttal, Luther and the fifth Sparrow— Dolores hadn't learned her name yet— entered the room. "Good. Because you're coming with us."

✧✧✧

Grace held out a plate of cookies as the assembled adults sat in the living room of the now-Sparrow Academy. Lila took almost all of them with hardly a word except: "lovely to meet you."

𝐖𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐋𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐒 𝐎𝐅 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄 ━ five hargreevesWhere stories live. Discover now