Chapter Text
Vanya
When Five returned to the old storage unit the Hargreeves were using as a temporary base, she could tell something was wrong. Usually her brother was relaxed, the epitome of confidence. Now he seemed more withdrawn. His face was slightly pale, and he didn’t say anything.
“Well?” Luther asked. “How did it go?”
“Fine,” Five said. “We met, we talked. He won’t be telling dad about anything.”
“How can you be sure?” Allison asked.
“Because I know myself,” he said. “I made a deal I knew I couldn’t refuse.”
“ Deal?” Diego asked.
“Let’s just say, we’ve got ourselves a new recruit,” Five said. Breathing heavily, he sat down on an old mattress.
“Wait, so… Little Five is on our side now?” Klaus asked. He giggled. “Should we draw an X on your forehead, so we know who’s who?”
“Come near me with a Sharpie and you’ll lose a hand,” Five snapped. “Could you all stop being idiots for one second? We need to talk about our plan.”
“We’re listening, Five,” Allison said.
“Well… Good. So. Our main objective is, clearly, to stop the apocalypse.” Vanya felt her face heat up as everyone looked at her awkwardly. Her memories of the event were still patchy, but she had gotten the gist of it. “Yeah. No one’s blaming you, Vanya, but… You definitely had a part in it.”
Luther coughed slightly, and Vanya flushed an even deeper red. Apparently, at least one of her siblings blamed her. “I know, Five,” she said quietly. “But, I… I’m on your guy’s side. You all know that, right?” Luther looked away. Diego spun a knife around his finger. Ben and Klaus at least made eye contact, and the latter smiled at her, though it was rather pained. But Allison was different.
“Of course you are,” she said, scowling at their siblings. “What happened was Dad’s fault, and no one else’s.” Luther opened his mouth to object. “No, Luther, it was. You can’t always defend him. I know you and him were on better terms than the rest of us, but he did unforgivable things. Even you know how that feels. It was him, Vanya, not you.” Vanya smiled at her sister. At least one person was on her side.
“If you guys are done with the touchy-feely crap, we do have work to do,” Five said. “Let’s not waste our time questioning Vanya’s loyalty, okay? It’s annoying, and it doesn’t get us anywhere. She gets the benefit of the doubt, alright? If she starts exploding shit, then we'll return to the subject. Now. We need to identify the triggers that led to Vanya going crazy-”
Allison glared at him.
“ Temporarily crazy, and blowing up the moon. Then we eliminate those triggers.”
“Sounds simple enough,” Diego said.
“Not really, but if you want to keep telling yourself that, no one’s gonna judge. So. What are the triggers?”
Everyone sat in silence for a moment, before Klaus spoke up. “Perhaps… Dad’s child-abusing prick-ery?”
“More specific,” Five said. “Vanya, you’re the one with the details. What do you got?”
“Um…” she said. Vanya really didn’t feel like delving into her monumentally awful childhood, but here they were. “Well, there were the… The pills. He had me take them. Mom said they were anti-anxiety meds. They made me feel like I was just… Underneath clouds, all the time.”
“He was suppressing your emotions,” Five said, nodding his head.
“But wouldn’t those help prevent Vanya from blowing stuff up?” Luther asked. “What if those pills were the only things stopping her from destroying everything years earlier?’ Vanya winced. What if that was true? What if those awful pills were the only reason she hadn’t accidentally murdered her family long ago? Five thought about this.
“It’s possible,” he conceded. “Not that I’m condoning his actions,” he added. “Teaching you how to control your powers would’ve been the more obvious solution. But it’s possible. Besides, we can’t really get young Vanya off the pills right now. She won’t understand if we try to tell her, and if we introduce ourselves with the information that her dad has been wrongfully drugging her, we might dig our own graves. So, any other options?”
Vanya silently apologized to her younger self, and the poison she would continue to take twice a day. She’d be able to help her soon. Soon.
“Well…” Allison said, looking slightly pale. “I might… There was something that happened. I’m not sure if it’s relevant to this, but…”
“Any information is relevant,” Five said. “Spit it out.”
“Dad had me rumor Vanya into thinking she was normal,” Allison said. “... After locking her in a facility for almost a year.” You could’ve heard a pin drop. Diego, Ben and Luther’s mouths dropped open, and even Five looked shocked.
Klaus’s reaction was.... Unique. He laughed. It was a barking, gagging noise, completely without humor. “Yeah, that sounds like him,” he said. “Dear Old Daddy certainly had a knack for putting young children in confined spaces.” The silence deepened as everyone recalled how Klaus would look when he came back from “special training”.
“Well… So far, we can’t change any of this,” Five said.
“Why not just take care of Harold Jenkins?” Luther asked. “He caused everything, after all.”
“Oh, so now murder for the greater good is acceptable?” muttered Five.
“No,” Vanya said. The Hargreeves looked at her, surprised by the firmness in her voice. “Leonard… Harold didn’t make me do what I did. He just sped it up. No matter what, I… I would’ve found out eventually. Kill him and the exact same thing will happen, later down the line.” They all considered this.
“So what would you suggest we do, Vanya?” Five asked. “Because we’re running out of options. Why did you… Do what you did? What would change that outcome?”
Vanya thought about this. “I… I was just so, so angry. At Dad, at you guys… My whole life, I was mud off the bottom of your shoes. I didn’t matter, I wasn’t special. Number Seven was just a liability Dad couldn’t get rid of without a whole lot of bad publicity. So… When I found out I was special, it was… Amazing. But also awful. Because I had been lied to… B-by everyone. I-I messed up so badly… I didn’t trust you, Allison. I hurt you. I was just terrified of being reduced to nothing, all over again. And when Luther… When you put me back where I had been stuck so long ago, I… I decided you guys had given up on me. And that I had to show you I was worth something.”
After a long time, Diego spoke up. “So what I’m getting from this is… Everyone was a dick to you. But especially Luther. Five, can we kill Luther?” The Hargreeves sniggered.
Luther glared at Diego, looking hurt. “Vanya, I… I’m sorry for what I did,” he said, rather stiffly. “But I thought it was the right thing to do.”
“Okay,” Vanya said. She left it at that.
Five leaned back on the mattress, massaging his eyes. “This is going to be much more complicated than I thought. There’s no one thing to stop this, it’s…. Too much.”
“Are you saying we can’t do anything ?’ Ben asked. “That it’s hopeless?”
“No… I’m not quite saying that. But we’ll need to walk on fucking eggshells, understand? One slip up, and everything will go to hell. Again. Altering the future means thousands of tiny adjustments, it means operating with the highest precision.”
In the background, Klaus dropped an ornate purple vase he had been examining. He shrieked as glass went everywhere. “Sorry,” he said. “Sweaty palms.” Five groaned and flopped backwards onto the bed.
“You know… Ben started, smiling to himself. “I kind of like this idea. It’s like, ‘Operation make our childhood better.’”
“Make Vanya’s childhood better,” Five corrected.
“Well, why can’t we help everyone out on the way?” Ben asked. Five frowned, but everyone else was grinning.
“Yeah,” Allison said. “I’m definitely going to tell Little Me not to trust Little Klaus with my leather jacket.”
Klaus gasped. “But then you’re depriving Little Klaus from such a fond memory!”
“That was my favorite jacket! How did you manage to set in on fire in forty-five minutes!?”
“... Talent?”
Ben stood in the corner, smiling to himself. Vanya had a feeling she knew what he was thinking. Maybe the younger version of himself didn’t have to go what he had. But Five noticed, too. “I know what you’re thinking, Ben,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s impossible.”
“What are you talking about?” Ben said, a shadowing passing over his face. He stopped smiling.
“Some changes are too big,” Five said. “We’ll disrupt the timeline.”
“Are you saying Ben has to die all over again?” Klaus asked, sounding uncharacteristically angry. “While all of us are living our best lives, he has to get torn apart from the inside?”
“You think I don’t understand?” Five asked. “There’s a reason I told myself the future’s all fine and dandy.”
“You… You lied?” Vanya asked.
“Don’t you think I’d love to erase the forty-five years I spent in the apocalypse!?” he shouted. “Of course I would! Of course I’d love to stop him from dealing with all the suffering I had to. But I can’t. If I had never gone to the future, I never would have come back to warn you all. Basically, we’d all be dead. So, yeah. Sorry, Ben, but some things can’t be changed.”
“Five… Maybe there’s something we can do. Something we can change?” Allison said. “There has to be another way.”
“It’s not worth the risk,” Five said, sounding exhausted. “The priority is the world. Not me, not you guys. I’m gonna step outside,” he said, bending down to lift up the storage unit’s garage-style door. After a few minutes of struggling with his scrawny, preteen arms he scowled, waved away the offers to help, and jumped outside.
“Well… That was… Rough,” Diego said. “We’re all required to make sacrifices,” Luther shrugged.
“And what sacrifices are you making?” Klaus muttered. Vanya wondered how the atmosphere had gone from cheerful as can be to downright depressing. That was their family, she supposed. They could only pretend to be functional for so long before everything fell apart again. She sighed, then paused. There was a scuffling noise coming from outside. Was Five trying to get in again? It didn’t sound like it. Everyone else fell silent; they had noticed it too. Suddenly, the door flew open, creaking as the door was pulled upwards. Vanya gasped, along with everyone else. A man in a blue suit had Five in a stranglehold, a gun to his head. She recognized him as one of the people who had invaded the Academy not too long ago. At first, Vanya wasn’t too worried. Five could handle himself. But then she remembered how tired he’d been lately. Not only that, he just had to jump outside instead of letting someone help him. She wondered if he was entirely drained. Her brother’s eyes were wild, darting all over the room. She couldn’t tell if that was Five coming up with a plan, or Five panicking. Not that she’d ever seen Five panic.
“ You,” Diego said, practically snarling.
“Alright,” Allison said, her voice soothing and reasonable. “I heard a-”
“Not a word out of you,” the man said, “Or I’ll shoot. I don’t want to, but I’ll do it.” Allison closed her mouth and stepped backward, looking pale.
“What do you want?” Luther said, going into leader mode.
“I want to talk,” he said. “That’s it. So let’s all calm down and-” Before he could finish his sentence, Five was moving. He flipped the larger man over his shoulder in one fluid motion. The gun fell and skidded across the floor. The intruder jumped to his feet with surprising agility, and rushed at Five. He ducked between his legs and planted an elbow in his side. Before his opponent could recover, Five took him under the arm and flung him over his back onto the ground. Sputtering, the man went down. Diego, who had picked up the gun, came forward and pointed it at the man on the floor.
“Sorry,” Five said, groaning as he massaged the back of his neck. Now he was pale all over again, breathing hard. “But I never negotiate with a gun to my head. Now, what were you saying?”
“I want to help you,” he sputtered. “I want to help- w-with the apocalypse.”
“And why should we believe you?” Diego asked. “How many times did you and your psycho partner try to kill us?” Vanya's eyes widened. Who was this man? How did everyone know who he was? It stung, being left out of the loop. It brought her back to her youth, which was never a good experience.
“Listen, I’m the only reason the Commission hasn’t come for you yet. I’ve been interfering with their surveillance. They don’t know you’re here, but as soon as they find out, the Handler will come for you. I’ve been hearing them talk. They won’t waste their time on simple assassins anymore, they want you dead. And after she's killed you, all your siblings will be next in line.” “Tell me something I don’t know,” Five said. But if Vanya knew her brother, he was hiding concern behind his usual mask of confidence. “Let’s get to the point, Hazel. What are offering, what do you want?”
“I want is for you to stop the world from ending,” he said. “I can help. I’ll hide you from the Commission for as long as I can. Although…”
“What?” Five asked, narrowing his eyes.
“My partner, Cha-Cha. She died when everything went to pieces, back in 2019. I want your help getting her back.”