Chapter Text
May 30th, 2022
It takes three years.
Three years of once-a-week therapy and piles upon piles of self help books, of mandated counseling sessions and court appearances, of slowly being allowed access back into PTA meetings and soccer practices and dance recitals. Three years of maintaining the bare minimum of an acting career, three years of taking part in some of the lower risk Umbrella Academy missions that her siblings have picked back up, three years of reporting back to her therapist that she’s doing something constructive and meaningful with her abilities. Three years of absolutely relentless jet lag.
It takes three years, but the hard work finally, finally pays off.
Three years culminate in three little words stamped onto a court order in the mail:
PARTIAL CUSTODY GRANTED.
Patrick is there when she receives it, because of course he must have known it was coming. He’d have had to sign off on it to make the whole thing official, and he’s been watching dutifully from the sidelines all this time as Allison’s pushed and pushed and pushed to get better, to be better, for their daughter. What started off as an uneasy sort of alliance between them, an extension of… maybe not so much his faith that Allison could fix herself, but perhaps at least the hope that she could, for Claire’s sake, has gently settled into something of a real friendship, one that Allison is not entirely sure she could have managed any of this without.
She opens up the court order and immediately, embarrassingly, dissolves into a mess of tears, but Patrick holds her through it, rubbing her back as she cries and all but crushes the paper in her fist.
“You earned this,” Patrick murmurs, and she can hear the earnestness in his voice. He’d never wanted his daughter to have to live without her mother, of course he hadn’t, and God, Allison can’t believe she let things get so out of hand that he’d ever had to make that choice.
“You earned this,” he repeats. “I am so proud of you.”
That night, Allison sits herself down at the head of Claire’s bed, lightly running her fingers over her baby girl’s hair as she falls asleep, and somehow, she works up the nerve to ask Claire if she’d like to spend the next few weeks in the big mansion with her mommy and her uncles and her grandma, instead of the usual once-in-a-blue-moon weekend trips.
“Like a vacation?” Claire asks.
“Exactly like a vacation, peanut,” Allison says. “But only if you want to.”
Claire burrows herself deeper into her small hoard of pillows, pulling her comforter all the way up to her neck, and she sleepily asks, “Will Nana make me those smiley face eggs for breakfast?”
“Oh, I’m sure she will, every day if you want.”
“Hmm,” Claire hums, like she’s really thinking it over, even with her eyes closed and looking seconds from being pulled under into a deep sleep. “Will Uncle Klaus make a blanket fort with me again?”
Allison scoffs. “Pff, are you kidding? Of course he will.”
Claire gives a sleepy little smile, her eyes still closed, and Allison swears her heart feels a million times lighter when her little girl mumbles, “Okay, Mommy, that sounds fun. I wanna go.”
———
June 2nd, 2022
The grogginess of a long and restless red eye has Allison’s brain feeling like mush, the familiar headache of sleeplessness pinging like a bell chime behind her right eye, her shoulders already sore from the two huge duffle bags she’s lugging up the front steps to the Academy — and there are three more of their bags left behind at the bottom of the stairs that she is so not looking forward to coming back for.
But Claire is bouncing on her toes as she hops up the steps, wheeling her little suitcase behind her and excitedly recounting to Allison all her most favorite things that happened in one of her comic books, and really, all the headaches and sore muscles in the world couldn’t bring down Allison’s mood right now.
She can’t be anything but ecstatic when her baby girl is this happy.
It feels like they’ve hardly crossed the threshold through those massive double doors, their feet just hitting the tile floor of the foyer, when a voice sounds from the living room.
“Uh oh,” Diego half-whispers. “You hear that, Five?”
Claire giggles and covers her mouth, abandoning her suitcase in favor of shuffling behind Allison’s legs. She leans over, ducking down a bit to peer beneath one of the duffle bags at the living room doors.
There’s a sigh, then, and the sound of a page being flipped. Five answers, “I dunno, Diego. I think you’re imagining it. I didn’t hear anything.”
“Nah, I heard something for sure,” Diego says, just loud enough for his voice to carry into the foyer. “Could be an intruder. Think I better go sneak up on ‘em real quiet, yeah? Gotta be sure the house is safe.”
The couch gives off a faint creak as he stands, and Claire grabs the back of Allison’s shirt at the waist.
And the thing is, Diego is very adept at making his footsteps silent when he needs them to be. Allison knows this. Everyone knows this.
That’s how Allison knows he’s purposely hitting every single squeaky floorboard on his way out of the living room, slowly and dramatically so they can trace his every step. Claire ducks further behind her when Diego finally comes into view, walking on the balls of his feet with his shoulders hunched, his narrowed eyes sweeping around the foyer.
“Oh yeah, definitely smells like trouble out here,” he says. “Allison, you seen any suspicious movement?”
Allison gives as much of a shrug as she can with the two duffle bags still weighing her down. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Diego.”
He squints suspiciously at her, though the effect is a little ruined by the smirk on his face, and then he shakes his head.
“Nah, I know there’s gotta be a troublemaker around here somewhere,” he says, “but I wonder…”
He inches a little closer to where they're standing.
“… where…”
He takes another few steps, creeping around to Allison’s right.
“… they could be!”
That’s all the warning Claire gets before her uncle dives in a tight circle around Allison, ducking down to throw an arm around Claire’s waist and scoop her up into the air.
“GOTCHA!”
Allison nearly topples over when he knocks into one of the duffel bags, but she regains her balance just in time to watch Claire let out a high-pitched squeal and wrap her arms tight around Diego’s neck. He spins her around and around, spinning until she’s red in the face from giggling and yelling, spinning until he’s a little red in the face, too, either from laughing or from dizziness or from the exertion of holding up an eight-year-old for that long. Probably a bit of all three.
There’s a familiar shh-fwump from the living room, and then again a few seconds later in the foyer. In the few seconds it takes Diego to slow to a stop, it seems Five’s already teleported out onto the front steps, teleported the rest of Claire’s and Allison’s luggage into the foyer, and had enough time to lean back against the wall beside the living room doors like he’s been standing there this whole time, arms crossed over his chest.
“Oh, Claire, it’s just you,” Diego says, a little breathless as he sets her down. “My bad, kid. Thought you might’ve been a bad guy.”
“Nuh-uh,” Claire says, rolling her eyes. “You knew it was me.”
“I did not.”
“Did too.”
“Did not.”
“Yuh-huh!”
“Nuh-uh.”
Allison clears her throat, because she knows from experience that this particular back-and-forth is never going to end otherwise, and the two of them turn toward her.
It’s then that Claire notices that Diego isn’t the only one of her uncles that’s come to greet them, and her eyes go straight past Allison to lock onto her Uncle Five — her Uncle Five who’s been watching them with only the slightest hint of bemusement on his face, one eyebrow raised and his fingers drumming on his upper arm. Claire wastes absolutely no time in barrelling across the foyer to throw her arms around his middle.
“Hi, Uncle Five!”
Five lets out a little, “Oof,” as Claire knocks the wind out of him, and he freezes for half a second, blinking wide eyes down at the top of her head.
And Allison knows, in the years since they averted the end of the world — the Notpocalypse as Luther has taken to calling it, or the Apocawasn’t if you asked Klaus — that her youngest but oldest brother has been slowly acclimating to life around other people, a life where real human contact is a common occurrence and where the end of everything no longer looms over him every second of every day. Each time Allison visits, she sees him smile just a bit more often, and sometimes, in rare little precious moments, one of those smiles will actually reach his eyes.
This is one of those moments.
His shoulders relax. He uncrosses his arms so that he can drop a hand on top of his niece’s head, the corners of his eyes crinkling a bit as he smiles down at her. “Hey, Claire.”
Claire extricates herself from her uncle’s waist, stepping back and bouncing on her toes again. “Is Uncle Viktor here? Is Uncle Luther here? What about Uncle Klaus and Uncle Ben?” Then she gasps and adds, “Oh! Is Nana here? I’m really hungry, can she make me some smiley face eggs?”
“Claire,” Allison cuts in before Five can decide on which question to answer first. “Everyone’s home, but it’s still early, peanut. They’re probably still asleep. Besides, the first thing we need to do is get our bags upstairs, and—”
She’s interrupted, though, by a loud and theatrical gasp from the stairs, and Allison closes her eyes and lets out a sigh.
Damn it. She’s never getting up to her bedroom, is she?
“Ooh, what is that?” Klaus cries out as he strides into view at the top of the first flight of stairs. He hops up onto the handrail and slides down it toward them, his feathery robe billowing out behind him like a cape, and when his bare feet hit the tile floor he’s already got his arms flung out in anticipation of a hug.
“UNCLE KLAUS!” Claire screams as she runs straight toward him and nearly knocks him over.
“I thought that was the cutest kid in the whole world I heard down here!” Klaus says, bending down to hug her back just as fiercely, and then he adds, with a bow of his head in Five’s direction, “Oh, no offense, brother dearest, you know you’re a close second.”
He leans back and lifts Claire off her feet with a grunt of effort — effectively cutting off her view of everyone else so she doesn’t see her Uncle Five mouthing a fuck off at Klaus from behind her back — and he sets her down half a second later.
“Yeesh, you’re growing like a weed, huh? Look at you! What are you, six, seven feet tall now?”
Claire giggles. “I’m four feet and seven inches.”
Diego lets out a whistle and mutters, “Like mother like daughter, huh?”
Klaus continues, “You gotta stop growing so fast, you’re breaking your poor old uncle’s heart.” He lets out a watery little sigh, placing his hand on his chest and blinking away fake tears, which only makes Claire giggle more before he straightens up and smiles all over again. “Oh, and hey, Uncle Ben says hi, too! I just need to wake up a little more before I’m up for the whole manifesting gig. Tummy’s rumbling, too. What do you say, you hungry?”
“Yeah!”
Allison sighs again, finally dropping the duffel bags to the floor and rubbing out a kink in her neck.
So much for unpacking and getting a shower. She can hear, somewhere above, the sound of a bed creaking. That can only be Luther, waking up because of all the noise they’ve been making, and if the noise is enough to wake Luther, it’s got to be plenty to wake Viktor, who can hear a pin drop from halfway across town when he really puts his mind to it.
It’s only a matter of time before the whole family’s here, and Allison is savvy enough to know when it’s time to accept defeat.
“Alright, you win, Claire. Breakfast first,” she relents. Then she raises a finger at her daughter and adds, “But right after, we’re gonna unpack and clean ourselves up. Sound like a deal?”
“Deal!” Klaus shouts at the same time that Claire answers an enthusiastic, “Okay, Mom!” and the two of them turn away and start sprinting together toward the kitchen in a whirlwind of laughter and shouts. Five rolls his eyes, but there’s a remnant of that genuine smile still on his face as he disappears in a ripple of blue — and reappears with a crash down in the kitchen and a startled shout from Klaus half a second later.
“This place is about to get a whole hell of a lot louder, isn’t it,” Diego says, partly to himself and partly to her, staring off in the general direction of where the other three have disappeared to.
Then he shrugs as if to say, Ah, well, what are you gonna do, and he bends over to heft up one of the duffel bags up onto his shoulder. He slings his free arm around Allison, squeezing her to his side in a one-armed hug, almost like it’s an afterthought.
“Partial custody, huh,” he says, in a low murmur meant for only her to hear, like they’re not the only ones left in earshot anyway. “Told you you’d get there, didn’t I?”
Allison nods, a lump rising to her throat at the mention of it, and even though she knows the hug is only meant to be a passing thing, she turns and winds her arms tight around Diego’s waist, pressing her cheek into the dip between his shoulder and collarbone. Even from all the way in the kitchen she can hear Klaus and Claire laughing, but she feels rather than hears Diego chuckle as he rubs his hand up and down her arm.
“Yeah, I did. Proud of you, sis.”
Breakfast is a chaotic, loud, disheveled frenzy, and Allison would have expected nothing less.
Mom flits around the room, all smiles as she sets about cooking enough eggs and bacon and toast and pancakes to feed a small army, as she always does. Klaus chugs a full mug of scalding hot tea and slams it down onto the table with his fingertips already glowing blue, and Ben starts flickering into existence in the chair beside him so that Claire, sitting on his other side, can start talking Ben’s ear off about all the books she’s read since she last saw him. Viktor, still evidently half asleep, greets Claire with a loose hug and a kiss on the top of her head before he beelines for the coffee. Luther gives Claire a sleepy smile as he enters the kitchen, murmuring a little, Hey there, munchkin, and ruffling her hair as he passes behind her. His jaw cracks with a yawn, and he starts wordlessly opening up cabinets to help Mom out with the cooking, handing off supplies from the higher shelves down to an equally quiet Viktor, who then hands them off to Mom. Allison and Diego, meanwhile, weave around all of them to grab plates and silverware and set them out.
And Five, sitting in the middle seat directly across from the trio of Klaus-Ben-Claire, gives Allison the uncanny impression of a point of calm at the center of a hurricane. He leans over a cup of steaming coffee and squints at the newspaper laid out in front of him, ignoring all of them with the practiced ease of a man in his sixties who’s lived the last three years surrounded by some of the loudest siblings on the face of the Earth.
It’s not until the table’s nearly set and the toaster dings that Luther utters the first words he’s spoken in a full ten minutes.
“Hey, are we out of peanut butter again?”
Allison raises an eyebrow at him as she places the last plate in front of her own seat, because really, peanut butter? For breakfast?
“And then,” Claire continues to Ben and Klaus, “the wizard exploded the whole castle—”
“No way,” Klaus breathes, leaning his chin on both hands, at the same time that Ben asks a disbelieving, “Whaaat?”
In response to Luther, Five doesn’t look up from his newspaper, but he gives a hum of agreement and adds, “We’re out of marshmallows, too.”
Luther lets out a sigh and shuts the cabinet, leaving the barest crack of it still open; he always overcompensates when he’s trying to be gentle. He scratches the back of his head and says, “I could have sworn I bought the jumbo sized jar this time.”
Klaus glances up from Claire’s story and says, “That you did, big guy!”
“Then how…?”
“Because this one,” Klaus says, stretching across the table to ruffle Five’s hair and yanking his hand away with lightning speed to avoid Five’s slap, “is tearing through food like it’s nobody’s business, that’s how.”
Viktor raises an eyebrow at him, cradling his coffee mug in both hands. “Come on, Klaus, he definitely didn’t finish a thirty-two ounce jar in a few days. Right, Five?”
Allison watches as Five keeps his eyes down on the newspaper, sipping at his coffee, and that’s enough answer for all of them.
“Seriously?” Luther asks, sounding more impressed than upset. His eyes are wide, a faint grimace on his face like he’s imagining the kind of stomachache he’d get from that. “Thirty-two ounces? In three days?”
Five still doesn’t look up. “It’s been four days, actually.”
Diego, taking the liberty of digging into the buffet that he and Mom have just finished setting out, scoops a massive pile of scrambled eggs onto his plate and says, “Still, that’s what, five thousand calories in peanut butter alone?”
“Sixty-five hundred, if we’re being technical.”
Diego lets out a low, impressed whistle. “You’re gonna make yourself sick, old man.”
Five bites back a yawn, flips a page in his newspaper, and he shrugs. “I’m always hungry. Side effect of the teenage body, I guess.”
“Ooh, yeah, I remember what that was like,” Diego says wistfully through a mouthful of eggs. “Used to wipe out the whole fridge every week, right Mom?”
“Used to,” Allison says, raising her eyebrows at Viktor and earning a sleepy little smile.
“Yes, you did, dear,” Mom answers, sliding another plate of pancakes onto the table.
“Guess nowadays there’s no better place than here for a couple of growing kids,” Diego adds with a nod in Claire’s direction. “Never gonna go hungry when Mom’s around, that’s for sure.”
Klaus chimes in, “Even if you are scarfing down elephant quantities of P.B.”
Five shrugs again. “True,” he says, taking another sip of coffee. “It is inconvenient, but so is pretty much everything about the age regression, so whatever.”
“Hey,” Klaus says, leaning forward on his elbows to point at Five with his fork. “You keep on complaining, but wait ‘til we’re all gray and wrinkled and you’re still looking like you’re this age,” he says, waving the fork in a circle at his own face, “all young and dapper and still in your thirties while we’re forced to check poor old decrepit Luther into a nursing home—”
“Hey!”
“— and then we’ll see who’s complaining,” Klaus finishes, ignoring both Luther’s protest and Diego’s snorting laugh.
“Yeah, well, for your information,” Five says as he finally stands up, leaning across the table to slide a few pancakes onto his own plate, “I actually liked my gray hair. I kind of miss it. The mustache, too.”
Allison chokes on a sip of her orange juice. Diego drops his fork.
“Stop,” Klaus says, a smile growing on his face.
Viktor’s jaw hangs open, and he asks, “The what?”
Five pauses halfway through reaching for the syrup, and he sweeps a confused look over everyone at the table. “The… mustache? Why?”
Diego asks, “How in the hell have you not mentioned that until now?”
“What did it look like?” Claire asks, finally distracted away from the story she’s been telling to her Uncle Ben.
“Uh… gray,” Five answers Claire, shaking his head and returning to the task of pouring syrup over his plate. “Like the rest of me. Seriously, guys, how is that so weird? I’m a sixty-one-year-old time traveling assassin, I lived in a literal Apocalypse—”
“Armageddidn’t—”
“— and I’m stuck in a sixteen-year-old’s body,” Five goes on like Ben hadn’t interrupted at all. “And you’re all that surprised by the fact that I had some facial hair?”
“But why a mustache?”
Five throws his hands in the air. “Because I looked good with a mustache, Klaus!”
“No one looks good with a mustache!”
“You have a mustache, ass—” Five starts to say, glances at Claire, and corrects himself. “Idiot.”
“Yeah, with a goatee, though. There’s a huge difference there, bro—”
“There is not—!”
And the whole table, predictably, dissolves into an indistinct cacophony of bickering.
Luther comes to Five’s defense, saying something like mustaches aren’t that bad, come on, guys, while Viktor gives a little shrug and a wince that means he definitely agrees with Klaus, and Diego says something about letting the old man make his own horrible cosmetic mistakes if he wants to, and Five argues loudly that none of them know what the hell they’re talking about, and Mom smiles at all of them and asks if she should make more pancakes. Ben leans his chin on his hand with his elbow not quite touching the table, looking down with a smile at Claire as she forgets all about the argument happening around them and picks her story right back up.
“I’m only on chapter twelve so far—”
“Oh, you kidding? Chapter thirteen’s where the good part starts, did you bring it with you?”
“Yeah, and —”
“— for the last time, Klaus, I’m not taking fashion advice from someone wearing feathers —”
“— are very fashionable, how dare you —”
“— guys, really, come on —”
“— just ‘cause the old geezer doesn’t —”
“— you look like a giant lanky bird —”
Allison sighs and leans back in her seat, and as she glances toward Claire she catches Ben’s eye over her daughter’s head.
“Home sweet home, huh?” Ben asks.
“Yeah,” Allison agrees, unable to hold back a smile, and she lifts her orange juice in a little mock toast that only he notices. “Home sweet home.”