"I'm about to make a prediction, okay? So listen close, you punk ass cultist."
"Damn, what happened to you?" Klaus asked, narrowing his eyes at Cass who just stood before him, staring him down with a glassy look in her eyes.
"You don't wanna know, n...
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The Sanitarium was almost entirely white. The walls were all painted white with cheap paint that leaves streaks. The kind you have to use 5 coats in order to get the right colour. And the walls had only had about 2 coats. The walls were all white tiles, or had at least been white at one point. The ceilings were white, the curtains were all white. The tables, desks, chairs: white. But worst of all was the white padded cell. Diego didn't want to ever go back in there.
He had tried to keep himself busy. He didn't want to think about all the things he could stop if he were out: the apocalypse, president Kennedy's assassination. He could stop whatever he wanted. If he wasn't in a mental hospital.
Today's activity was jewellery making. That wasn't one of Diego's hobbies. But it was all he had to keep him distracted so he huddled over one of the tacky white tables, eyes squinted and tongue poking out as he tried to thread a chain of beads to make a bracelet.
Diego threw the beads down, slamming them hard on the table, in frustration. Several of them flew off the elastic string and scattered across the table. One of them shattered under his palm. He hated jewellery making. He hated the stupid sanitarium. He hated Five for sending him here and he hated Lila for pestering him 24/7. Even when they weren't in communal time and he was alone, she still managed to enter his thoughts and pester him from there.
It came as a breath of fresh air whenever the orderly would come in and say "Hargreeves, your sister's back."
It gave Diego an opportunity to escape. Even just for a while.
"And she brought her son."
Diego stopped in his tracks.
"Her son?"
*
Five sat smugly at the table in the visitors' area, looking more grown-up than Cass did, despite being trapped in the body of a puny, pubescent boy. Cass' face lit up when she saw Diego. She'd visited a couple of times before now. The orderly, true to his word, had phoned up Morty's Television and Radio and informed Cass that Diego had been deemed 'mentally stable enough' to receive visitors. Five had laughed when Cass told him this.
Diego hesitated, loitering in the doorway for a split second as he attempted to register that Five was here too. Part of him thought it more probable that Cass actually did have a son. Five had been missing for years. And now here he was, sat smugly across the table from him with his feet propped up on the opposite chair.
"Five," Diego greeted bluntly with a jut of his chin.
"Hey Diego," Five said, smiling smugly. Both of them looked to Cass who was beaming, looking like an only child at a family reunion.
"You look good in white," Five added when the conversation ran dry. None of them really knew what to say. Cass knew what she wanted to say, she wanted to get straight to business and tell Diego about the apocalypse but she remembered how last time that tactic didn't exactly work out in their favour. And now she didn't have the convenience of looking into the future to see how to do things right. Now, timing was everything.
