#this post brought to you by me reading a fic that mentioned Klaus's outfit when he dies and google being woefully unhelpful

[locke-esque-monster]

I was re-watching the scene at the end of 1x2 where we flashback (or arguably flashforward) to when Five found his siblings' bodies.

And maybe it's because I don't usually watch this scene up-close, but as they cut to Five's face for a wide shot after he finds Luther, but before walking over to Diego and Allison, just in the background there's a very familiar silhouette...

Which oh shit, finding Delores like that is a whole new layer of trauma to add to Five I hadn't even considered. Because it's one thing to think Five picked her up along the way at the department store, lonely and itching for someone to talk to, days or weeks into the apocalypse.

It's another to have her tied directly into the initial trauma of him arriving in the apocalypses and finding his family's corpses.

Was it an instant mental break, as a kid who has gone through too much trauma very quickly, and he immediately latched onto her? (It's not like Reginald made any of them well-adjusted before this either.)

Did he bury his siblings and kept coming back to the remains of his home, and eventually started talking to her and it evolved from there?

Or worse, did he keep talking to his siblings corpses until that became unsustainable, and transferred that over to Delores who was right there? Who was both more movable and not actually rotting? And the more he made her real in his head, the more he built their relationship on that "shared" trauma of not only the apocalypse, but finding her where he found his family? Saving her from the house when he couldn't save his family?