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Vanya woke up with a gasp.
What happened?
Her heart beat in her throat and she wanted to cough it up, to stop the tremors that racked her body, to calm the panic that wrecked her mind and was made only more overwhelming for having no cause that she could remember. Everything had been white, and blue, and then black.
Where am I?
She was lying in a narrow bed. In front of her, the blank wall was only brightened up by a framed watercolor painting depicting a mountain landscape. Next to the bed was a chair, with a uniform neatly draped over the back. This was all very familiar and yet incomprehensible, and the pieces only started to fit together when she saw her hands.
What the—
She had small hands, but the hands that she could see laying on top of the sheet weren’t just small. They were the hands of a child. They were her hands, she knew them, but they weren’t her twenty-nine-year-old hands.
She sat up, looked down at herself and saw the familiar pale blue uniform pajamas. Her earlier panic increased, only this time she knew what it was about: she was back home as a young girl. Back in time. Swallowing thickly, she wracked her brain trying to remember what had happened before. She remembered playing at the Icarus Theater in front of an enthralled audience, she remembered the white power that had uplifted her, casting her beyond worry, fear and anger. She remembered Allison and her small proud smile, her brothers rushing at her, a gunshot booming next to her ear. And then, for the briefest moment, she remembered groggily opening her eyes, feeling like she was cradled in someone’s arms—Luther, it could only have been Luther. She’d seen Five’s face, contorted in pain and swathed in wavering blue light. A tell-tale sign of time-travel. He must have brought them back in time.
She sat in her bed for a long moment, her mind going through her fragmented memories while she shook like a leaf. A shrill ringing startled her, and before she’d even realized that it had been her alarm clock, she was already out of bed, her feet instinctively finding her slippers. On her nightstand was a glass of water and two pills, where Mom had put them last night so that Vanya could take them first thing in the morning. To look at them, knowing what exactly what they were for, made Vanya feel sick and angry. She drank the water, because panic had dried her mouth, but opened the window to throw out the pills.
She dressed numbly, muscle memory carrying her through the task. Precisely fifteen minutes after her alarm clock had rung, it was the turn of the clear tinkle from Mom’s bell in the dining room to make itself heard. Vanya opened the door and looked as her siblings walked past her in the hallway. She should have taken advantage of that moment to ask them what was going on, what had happened after she fainted at the theater, whether she—But they seemed to be going through the motions of their morning ritual, only barely awake and not paying her any attention. It was easier to keep her head down and follow them downstairs, as she’d done every day for her whole childhood.
One by one, they trickled into the dining room and positioned themselves behind their respective chairs. Early morning light cast a pale glow over the details of the dining room—the chandelier hanging over the table, the golden archways, the columns, the paintings on the walls, the stuffed stag head and its beady black eyes that had scared her so much as a kid. She could remember that room crumbling around her. She’d destroyed it all, and yet here she was again.
“Sit!” their father barked, and his command was followed by the squeaky sound of chairs’ feet being dragged on the floor.
At first, Vanya focused on her food and looked at nothing else, as she’d done most of the time during meals, so caught up she was in the surreal routine. But then she remembered that she wasn’t a child anymore and that she had to know whether her siblings were on the same page as her. She risked a glance and found them all absorbed in their breakfast. They weren’t trying to make eye contact with her and didn’t look like they were struggling to adjust to their sudden travel back in time. A thought made Vanya’s stomach clench: what if they’d already convened and were deliberately shunning her, as a punishment for what she’d done to the house? That thought was followed by a hot surge of anger—what right did they have to be mad at her after they’d left her down below, in that awful soundproof room? She gripped her fork and knife so hard that the strain hurt her fingers, and it was that little bit of pain that helped her emotions settle down.
The flip between cold and hot, between dread and fury, left her faint from the emotional whiplash. She had to drink from her glass so she could swallow a piece of pancake that wouldn’t go down. She didn’t recognize herself; since she’d stopped taking her pills she went from one extreme to another so fast that she made herself dizzy. It scared her, but also made her feel furious, so she pushed the thought at the back of her mind. She needed to be able to think clearly to handle the current situation.
She looked again at the table and at her siblings, and it was only then that she noticed something she’d failed to see before. One huge, crucial detail that she’d unforgivably overlooked: the chair on her left was empty. There was no plate, no cutlery and no glass. Five wasn’t there.
Her breath caught in her throat. Her heart started to race again. She examined every face in the room—her siblings’, her father’s, her mother’s as she stood one step behind her master’s chair—but no one seemed alarmed at Five’s glaring absence.
Vanya fingered nervously the hem of her napkin. The person sitting closest to her was Ben—a living and breathing Ben, and Vanya was afraid that if she talked to him, he would vanish like a mirage.
“Ben,” she whispered as loudly as she dared.
Fortunately, he wasn’t engrossed in a book or it might have been impossible to get his attention without alerting their father. He gave her a sideway glance, which allowed her to see that his eyes were red and puffy.
“What?” he whispered back with a frown.
“Where’s Five?”
Ben’s fork clattered in his plate when he dropped it, and the noise made their father look up and scowl. “Number Six,” he said sternly.
Ben bowed his head and mumbled, “Sorry.”
For another long moment, only the clinking sounds of knives and forks against plates could be heard in the dining room.
“Really, Vanya?” Ben murmured in a barely audible voice.
“What?”
“Five left, remember? You of all people—"
Five had left. She now knew how old she was supposed to be, how old they all were. They were about a month past their thirteenth birthday and Five had left in huff during lunch time. November 2003, the month of the second major change in their orderly lives—the first being the opening of the Umbrella Academy.
“He’s—” she said, not sure how she wanted to end that sentence.
She saw Five’s face in the eerie blue light that his time-travel caused, his features twisted in pain. Traveling back in time was harder for him than traveling forward, and he’d never had to carry anyone with him before. If Vanya and her siblings had ended up in 2003 and Five wasn’t there, then where was he? What had happened to him? What if he—
She felt her eyes prickle with tears from the thought that she didn’t even dare form completely. If something had happened to Five, then it would be her fault. At the Icarus Theater, she hadn’t cared what happened to him. She hadn’t cared what would happen to anyone, even herself, but now she was thirteen again, her brother was missing, and she wanted everything from the moment she’d discovered her power to be a nightmare.
“Vanya?” Ben said in a low voice, sounding uncertain.
They were drawing attention to themselves. Diego looked up at Vanya from across Five’s empty chair. “What’s wrong?” he whispered, but he was too close from their father and thirteen was when his voice had started breaking and sometimes slipping out of his control.
“Number Two!” their father snapped. “Number Six, Number Seven! If you keep disturbing breakfast, then I will have to assume that you don’t need it to face the rest of your day. You might not need lunch either.”
It was their cue to look down at their plates and not say anything else for the rest of the meal. Vanya could feel her father’s presence at the other end of the table like a black hole trying to suck her in. She hadn’t thought she would ever see him again. When he’d died, she’d regretted never being able to make some kind of peace with him, never finding any closure. What she’d found out afterward had burned to the ground any desire she might have had to understand him or to get him to understand her. She ate the delicious food Mom had prepared without tasting any of it, wondering if her father was looking at her but too afraid to check.
The rest of the morning only got more awkward and surreal. None of her siblings were trying to communicate with her about time-travel, even though they had several opportunities to do so, but they didn’t look like they were plotting anything with each other either. They acted pretty much like what had been habitual for them at that age, albeit a little subdued. It seemed like Vanya was the only one who’d switched her thirteen-year-old self with her adult self, which begged the question of where the others were. Were they with Five? Had they all been dispersed in time? She’d felt alone most of her life, but she’d never felt so completely misplaced and isolated. How could she go back to her own time? Was there even anything to go back to? She could only remember releasing a huge amount of energy at the sky, but Five wouldn’t have taken the risk to travel all of them back in time if there had been any other choice. Have I destroyed the world? This felt too crazy to contemplate. She, little Vanya Hargreeves, Number Seven, the most inconsequential of them all, destroy the world like a nuclear bomb and cause Five’s prophesized apocalypse? And yet, this was what all evidence pointed to.
Morning lessons were math and history, meaning that it was Thursday morning. They were subjects that Vanya had enjoyed, but Pogo was the one tutoring them and this made it absolutely impossible for her to focus on the lessons. She spent the whole morning looking down at her copybook and pretending to take notes, Pogo’s death playing in her mind over and over again, the images filling her both with horror and fury. His betrayal was a bleeding wound and the sound of his voice explaining the context of the Civil War was salt being poured over it. The fact that she was capable of such brutal murder was so shocking that her mind could only shy away from it.
Pogo talked. Pencils scratched on paper. The clock on the wall went tick tack tick tack. Her siblings coughed, swallowed, sniffed, made their chair creak or whine. Klaus’ knee kept bumping against the leg of his desk—bang, bang, bang. Vanya’s ears latched onto that last sound and it swelled inside her chest, built up, until she knew it was going to explode messily out of her and she jumped to her feet, pushing back her chair in a hurry.
“Miss Vanya?” Pogo asked. He looked so earnestly puzzled and concerned. She couldn’t reconcile that expression with the secrets she knew he was keeping.
“Ineedtogotothebathroom,” she said quickly, the words stumbling out of her. She was out of the door before he had time to give her permission to go.
She locked herself in the bathroom and took a moment to breathe. Vanya, breathe. Leonard—or Harold, whatever—may have been a snake, but he’d done more to help her control her powers than her father ever had. Vanya hated that it was the memory of his voice guiding her that eventually got her to calm down enough that the energy she released only made the toilet paper flutter and the water in the toilet gurgle.
She stayed in the bathroom, sitting on the cold tiled floor, for at least half an hour. She went to her room after that and stayed there for the remainder of their lesson time. If her father punished her for it, then so be it. Whatever the punishment turned out to be, it wouldn’t be the worst thing he’d ever done to her.
At half past eleven, the others were sent back to their rooms to get ready for lunch. She’d left her door half open and heard them walk past her room. She was sitting on her bed with her arms wrapped around her knees, wondering if any of them was going to stop by and ask her what was wrong, then telling herself that she should just stand up and go talk to them so she could finally know for sure whether they had their adult minds or not. She didn’t move, like she’d really reverted back to thirteen and to waiting for the others to make the first move, seething in resentment when they didn’t.
“Hey.”
She’d been so lost in thoughts that the sound of Allison’s voice made her jump. Her heart beating quickly from the rush of adrenaline, she looked with wide eyes at her sister standing on her doorstep.
“Sorry,” Allison said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“It’s fine,” Vanya said. “Am I in trouble for leaving the lesson?”
“Oh, Dad must have been busy, because he didn’t come to check on us.”
“And Pogo didn’t tell on me?”
Allison quirked an eyebrow, like the thought had never occurred to her. “No, of course not. Why would he?”
“I don’t know,” Vanya said, trying not to sound as bitter as she felt. She didn’t ask if any of the others had told on her, because even at the lowest point of her relationship with their siblings she’d known that they would never do that.
“Are you okay? You were acting weird at breakfast and even weirder during lesson time.”
Allison at thirteen hadn’t been one to mince her words. Vanya assumed that having to navigate among the sharks in Hollywood had forced some diplomacy into her—there was only so much rumoring she could do before it started turning against her. She was coiling a strand of her curly hair around her finger in a nervous tick that she’d lost as an adult. This wasn’t twenty-nine-year-old Allison in a kid’s body. This was Allison as a young teenager.
“Vanya?” Allison said. “You’re staring at me.”
“Ah, sorry,” Vanya said, feeling a blush rise to her cheeks and dropping her head so her fringe would cover her eyes—a nervous tick that she’d lost as an adult, but that she seemed to have picked back up instinctively. “No, I’m fine. I didn’t sleep well and I had some… some nightmares, but I’m fine now.”
“About Five, huh?” Allison said sympathetically. “I have some too. About—” She chewed on her lower lip and looked away. “I should have tried to rumor him when he ran out of the house. I should have made him stay.”
“He would have hated it. And Dad would have punished you.”
“I know, but it would have been worth it. What if he’s hurt or lost or in danger? What if he’s—”
With a mix of bemusement and horror, Vanya watched as Allison’s eyes brightened with tears that didn’t spill. When Vanya had been really thirteen and Five had disappeared, she’d retreated so completely into herself that she could barely remember the months that had followed, and even though she’d lived in the same house, she knew little of how her siblings had handled it.
“Oh, Allison,” she said, getting off from her bed and cautiously approaching her sister.
Allison looked so young. Vanya had always looked up to her, admiring and envying in equal measure her poise and self-confidence, and she’d never thought of her as someone vulnerable. She could feel the sixteen-year gap that separated her from her teenage sister and it was like looking at a room from an unusual angle and finding it startlingly different. From the little amount of bonding time that she’d had with Allison at twenty-nine—before you slashed her throat, a vicious voice whispered at the back of her mind—she already knew that Allison didn’t really have it all under control. Still, it was wrong-footing Vanya to see that the cracks had been there when they were kids together.
“Don’t cry,” she said helplessly.
“I’m not crying,” Allison replied at once, turning her head so she could wipe her eyes hurriedly. “I’m just worried about Five. He’s an ass, but I don’t want anything bad to happen to him. I wish he’d come back already.”
“He’ll be back,” Vanya said. In more than sixteen years, but at least she knew that she wasn’t just saying empty words of comfort.
Her confidence seemed to surprise Allison. “You think so?” she said, a hesitant note to her voice. Then, shrugging on Vanya’s assurance like it was her own, “Yeah, of course he’ll be back.”
It would have been a good moment for a hug. Vanya remembered Allison awkwardly hugging her when she’d arrived at the Academy for their father’s funeral, how low she’d had to stoop to be at Vanya’s level. This was a rather nice memory, but because Vanya’s brain hated her, the next image to flash through her mind was Allison’s stunned expression as she lifted a hand to her throat, blood spilling over her fingers.
She felt her own blood leave her face. “Are you all right?” Allison asked. “You got really pale, all of a sudden.”
“I think I’m just hungry,” Vanya said faintly. “I’ll feel better once I’ve eaten.”
“Well, Mom should call us in—” The bell jingled from downstairs. “Right now. Let’s go.”
Lunch was a silent affair, since Vanya didn’t cause a commotion this time. It was scary how quickly she was getting back into the rhythm of things at the Academy, almost as though the last decade had never happened. Afternoon was two more hours of lesson, then training time for her siblings, both individual and team practice under their father and Pogo’s supervisions. When she’d been younger, Dad had sometimes let her assist with the training—she’d been in charge of the whistle, the timer, of installing the props. It had stopped… well, pretty much around the time Five had gone missing. By then, she’d picked up the violin, so while her siblings were training, she generally practiced her instrument under Mom’s watchful eye.
Playing her violin did wonders for her frayed nerves. If she closed her eyes, she could almost ignore where and when she was, and pretend that she was practicing at her apartment, or maybe playing at a concert in front of an audience that drank in her music. Mom came to check on her a few times between washing the dishes and dusting the furniture, but she was a pleasant, undemanding presence that didn’t affect Vanya’s concentration.
When it was time for dinner, she was in a much more appeased state of mind and wasn’t worried about her powers getting out of control again. Maybe it was because she was back in her younger body, but they didn’t feel as overwhelming as when she had been an adult. At dinner, she kept sneaking surreptitious glances at her siblings. This time she wasn’t looking for signs that they remembered the same things she did. She was now convinced that she was the only one who’d traveled back in time. She was just curious to see what differences her adult mind could pick up from when she’d been a child. Growing up in the shadows of her super-powered siblings, all she’d wanted as a kid was to be accepted as one of them. Now she was super-powered too as well as a lot older than them, and her conversation with Allison had highlighted how much that changed the way she saw her sister at thirteen.
They all looked tired. Vanya had always known that their training was rough and their exhaustion was something she was used to seeing. At thirteen, she hadn’t thought anything of it, except for wishing that she could join them and be part of the team. But now, as an adult who’d had years outside of the Academy to see that a lot of things about their childhood weren’t normal, she was looking at them with new eyes. Klaus was skittish, getting startled any time a fork scraped a plate a little too loudly. Diego was almost falling asleep in his food, only narrowly avoiding a disaster because Luther kept elbowing him in the side, which invariably had Diego alert and glowering at his brother. Ben was very pale and moved slowly, almost dreamily. If there hadn’t been a risk that it would get both of them in trouble, Vanya would have called his name and asked him if he was all right.
After dinner, they were supposed to do their homework and Vanya was slightly embarrassed to realize that she could only vaguely remember some of the material. Doing homework at her age felt silly anyway, and the thought of asking for help only made her mortification worse. Not that the others were all that focused on their work either: Allison was painting Klaus’ fingernails under the table, which seemed to be helping him calm down, Ben and Diego were playing tic-tac-toe in the margins of their copybooks—from the scowl on Diego’s face, he was on the losing side—and Luther looked at first glance like he was working, hunched over his books with his head in his hands, except that he hadn’t turned a page in at least ten minutes. Mom was sitting by the window, embroidering a napkin and humming to herself. Had she been human, Vanya would have said that she was too distracted by her work to notice what the kids were doing, but as a robot she was capable of efficiently multitasking. Was Diego right—was this a sign of autonomy, her giving her children this moment to unwind even though her task was to make sure they did their homework?
None of them had gotten much work done by the time they were sent upstairs to shower before bedtime. Vanya trailed behind her siblings, her ears catching the tail end of Klaus saying to Luther, “—something for the pain?”
“Put it back where you found it, Klaus,” Luther said tiredly. “Mom will find out that pills are missing and you’ll be in trouble.”
“Don’t worry about it, I didn’t get them from the cabinet.”
“What? Where did you—”
Luther and Klaus’ conversation dissolved into furious whispering that Vanya couldn’t make out anymore, and she slipped away to her room to get her pajamas so she could change after her shower. On their rooms’ floor were two bathrooms, one for the boys and one that Vanya shared with Allison. The unfairness of the girls having a bathroom for two while the five boys had to share one was balanced by the fact that Allison spent more time cleaning than all the boys put together. She always took her shower first—or rather, Vanya had always let her go first in unconscious submission to the pecking order and Allison had never questioned it. Vanya had never wondered what her sister would say if she asked to go first for once.
Well, time to find out.
Vanya was about to knock on Allison’s door when the door opened on Allison carrying her pajamas, obviously intending on going to the bathroom.
“Hey, Allison, um.” Stupid thirteen-year-old shyness blocked her throat for a moment. Get over yourself. She’s only a kid and she’s your sister. “Do you mind if I take my shower first?”
Allison blinked. “Oh, uh. I guess not.”
“I’ll be quick.”
“No, you don’t have to hurry. I’ll just—” She cut herself off when Ben’s door opened and he poked his head out, calling her name. “What is it?”
“Would you mind—” Ben did a vague hand motion that Vanya didn’t know how to interpret, but that seemed to speak to Allison.
“All right,” she said.
Vanya watched as her sister joined Ben on his doorstep, out of sight from the camera that filmed the hallway, which she was pretty sure was intentional. Allison murmured, “I heard a rumor—” and Vanya shivered when she saw Ben’s eyes shine silver. “—that you didn’t have any dreams tonight.”
Ben’s eyes turned back to their normal black color and he let out a shuddering sigh. “Thanks,” he said, giving Allison’s hand a squeeze.
“No problem.”
Allison walked back to her room. “You can go to the bathroom first,” she said to Vanya.
“Yeah, in a minute. Do you—do you do that often?”
“No, not really.” For some reason, Allison looked embarrassed. “But you know, with you he was the closest to Five. He’s taking it really hard. And training is, well. It can get pretty tough. Do you want me to—”
“No!” Vanya exclaimed, a little more forcefully than she’d meant to.
“Okay, fine,” Allison said, looking wounded, and before Vanya had the time to say anything she’d retreated to her room.
“Sorry,” Vanya murmured at the closed door.
She’d hoped that a warm shower would help her go to sleep quickly, but two hours after curfew she was still wide awake. She’d forgotten how much the house creaked and groaned, especially when the wind picked up like tonight. At some point she heard a sob that she thought was coming from Klaus’ room and wondered if she should go check on him. Her younger self wouldn’t have done it, assuming that she wouldn’t be welcome. She hesitated for too long and found herself dozing off, only waking up to the sound of the grandfather clock downstairs ringing 4 am. She was thirsty and uncomfortable, an itch under her skin that she couldn’t relieve, so she put on her bathrobe and quietly made her way to the kitchen.
When she saw that the light in the kitchen was on, her heartbeat quickened in alarm. Mom was programmed to go recharge in the evenings and turn back on in the mornings unless something urgent required her attention. Was it Pogo in the kitchen? Was it Dad? Neither options were appealing, yet Vanya still walked to the kitchen entrance on her tiptoe.
It was Luther, whose head was buried in the freezer. Vanya made a surprised sound, loud enough that he heard her and startled. He hurriedly closed the freezer and stepped away, almost falling into a rigid military stance before he saw Vanya and visibly relaxed. Vanya, on the other hand, had immediately tensed up. It was better to come upon him than Dad or Pogo, but not by much. She realized that she’d been unconsciously avoiding him since she’d landed in 2003; she’d avoided looking at him, thinking about him, stepping into his path. This Luther didn’t have any reason to lock her up, but she couldn’t help her instinctive wariness. She knew he was capable of doing it if he deemed it necessary. Even at thirteen, the seeds had been there.
“Oh, it’s you, Vanya,” he said. “You scared me.”
How ironical, she thought. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s fine. I was just—”
Vanya had assumed that he was looking for food—at that age all of her brothers had been ravenous ogres, Luther most of all—but then she saw that he was holding an icepack.
“You came to make Five’s sandwich, right?”
Luther’s comment sidetracked Vanya as she was about to ask him about the icepack. “What?”
“Yeah, I mean. You’ve been making them every night since he went missing.”
Vanya’s face grew hot. She’d thought herself so sneaky when she was a child, but Pogo had admitted he knew about the sandwiches, and now Luther. Did everybody know and laugh about it behind her back?
“You think it’s stupid,” she muttered, not making it a question.
“What? No!” Luther said, waving the pack he had in his hand. Condensation pearled on the plastic envelop and dripped on the kitchen table. “It’s not stupid. I don’t think you really need to leave the lights on because… well, Five knows the way. But if he comes back in the middle of the night, he might be hungry. Like, maybe he doesn’t have anything to eat wherever he is and, uh—”
His voice trailed off. Like a puppet whose strings had been cut, he sat down heavily on one of the kitchen chairs. His head dropped and his shoulders sagged. Like with Allison, Vanya was struck by how young and burdened he looked, and it mitigated some of her initial wariness. She swallowed against a lump that had lodged itself in her throat. She hadn’t come down here to make Five a sandwich because she knew what Luther didn’t—that Five wouldn’t be coming back any time soon. That he was probably hungry right now, as well as scared, lonely and desperate, and there was nothing any of them could do about it.
She found herself tearing up again, but fortunately Luther was looking down at the table and couldn’t see it. “Sometimes I think…” he started, his voice low like he was sharing a secret with her. “You know, maybe Five found somewhere he liked better than with us. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t—that’s why he isn’t coming back.”
Five hadn’t found a place he liked better. But even if Vanya had managed to tell Luther her mad tale of being from the future in a way that would convince him, would it bring him any comfort to know that Five was stuck in hell? She was still standing all the way across the kitchen from him and wanted to get closer, until she remembered Luther hugging her and turning that hug into a chokehold.
Luther sighed and brought the dripping icepack to his shoulder, wincing as he moved. He leaned back into his chair and closed his eyes, exhaustion obvious in the slump of his body. It was a disturbing sight; Luther’s power meant that he was pretty much indestructible and this was the image she’d always had of him.
“Did you get hurt during training?” she asked.
Luther’s eyes shot open. “Uh, no?” he said with a questioning intonation, like he wasn’t certain about it himself.
“What with the icepack, then? And I saw you wince.”
“Ah, no, that’s just training pain. It’s nothing.” He sat up straighter, which made him wince again. “I have to be better. I need to—I don’t know, be able to protect everyone. Dad has been, um, stricter with me lately, but he’s right.”
There were plenty of things that Vanya could have replied to this. That Dad wasn’t right about anything, ever. That Luther pushing himself too much, making himself harder the way their father wanted him to be wasn’t going to help anyone, least of all his siblings. That he wouldn’t be able to help Five that way, because she had the confused sense that this was about Five, even though she didn’t know what Luther thought he could do for Five by training more. Instead of saying any of it, Vanya went to the shelves where Mom stored food and asked her brother, “Do you want me to make you a sandwich?”
“Um. Sure.” She wasn’t looking at him, but his perplexity was palpable in his tone. She started cutting bread and spreading peanut butter on one of the slices. “Don’t you want to make it for Five?”
“I can make Five another one.” She sprinkled the slices of bread with marshmallows and pressed them together. “There you go.”
“Thanks.”
He took a bite of the sandwich and grimaced. “It’s so sweet. How can Five eat that?” he said.
But he took a second bite, then another one. Vanya poured herself a glass of water and watched as he devoured the sandwich, complaining about how sweet it was with his mouth full. Thirteen-year-old Luther was only a few inches bigger than her. When he was sitting and she was standing, she was tall enough that could look down at him. In the future she was coming from, he was almost twice her size and moved around awkwardly, as though apologizing for the space he occupied, right until he thought he had to use his strength and his size for a purpose. He’d used it to subdue her, but he’d also used it to protect her a few days before that.
“Thank you,” he said again, picking up crumbs of bread on the table with his thumb. “Are you going to make another sandwich for Five?”
“Yeah, I guess,” she said, because he would have found it weird if she’d said no.
“I think I’ll just stay here while you make it.”
She wished she knew how to tell him that she would prefer it if he went back to bed, but his silent company as she made Five a sandwich that he would never eat became pretty comfortable after a few minutes. They went back upstairs together and Luther’s whispered ‘Good night’ as she went into her room made her feel surprisingly warm.
—-
The next day, their routine was upset by the alarm signaling a new mission. Watching the pre-mission effervescence from the sidelines put Vanya in a morose mood. She’d never felt more transparent than when her siblings were rushing to get ready to leave, apprehensive and excited, entirely absorbed in the anticipation of what the mission would entail. The missions meant they were going places, seeing new things, meeting people; they meant that they were leaving the house without having to worry about getting caught. And Vanya could only watch, feeling sick to her stomach with envy.
Their state of mind when they returned was unpredictable. Sometimes they came back overexcited, almost manic with nervous exhaustion. Sometimes they were surly and irritable, and any question about how it had gone would get Vanya snapped at; other times they were mute and drained, and if one of them was wounded Vanya wouldn’t get to see him or her for days.
This time they came back early evening and Diego was injured. Not very badly, and by dinner time he was sitting at the table with them, his arm in a sling. Luther’s offer to cut his food for him didn’t go well, although Diego was kept from blowing up by Dad’s presence. In the end, Mom cut him his food and Vanya almost laughed at how red his face became.
Even with the imposed silence of meal times, Vanya could tell that the general mood was pretty bleak. She knew that they’d successfully completed the mission, because Dad’s dissatisfaction when they didn’t was hard to miss. Fatigue was probably the main reason why they looked so down, but it also occurred to Vanya that this might have been the first mission they’d done without Five. The first in a long list, until they’d done more missions without him than with him.
Because it had been a mission day, homework time was shortened and they were sent to bed earlier. Vanya wasn’t very tired, but her siblings were all yawning so wide it drew tears from their eyes. As she looked at them, at the clumsy, bone-weary way they moved, at Diego who flinched when he accidentally bumped his injured arm against a door, she thought again about making that sandwich for Luther the night before. It had been a small attention but it had seemed to cheer him up; maybe she could do something like that for all of them. They were her siblings, whose adult selves were God knew where, way out of her reach. She loved them and resented them at the same time, but to see them again as children moved something in her—they were really just kids, raised to be weapons that their father would use like blunt instruments until they broke.
She asked Allison again if she could have the first shower and got her sister’s tired assent. There was something empty about Allison’s eyes tonight that made Vanya uneasy, but she knew from experience that it wouldn’t help to ask her about it. After her shower, Vanya slipped downstairs and went to the kitchen. She’d heard her father leaving for some mysterious appointment a little earlier, but she didn’t want to meet Pogo either. Mom was in the kitchen, washing the dishes. When she saw Vanya, she lifted a perfect eyebrow and asked, “Did you need anything, Vanya dear? You’re supposed to be taking your shower.”
“I already showered,” Vanya said, pointing at her blue pajamas.
“Then you should be in bed,” Mom said in her gently chiding tone.
“I will go to bed, but I wanted your help with something.”
“Of course, love. What is it?”
“I wanted to make the others sandwiches. Something different for each. Something they would like.”
Mom blinked, as though taking a second to process the information. “But you all had dinner already.”
“I know, I just wanted… Not dinner food, but comfort food. To make them feel better about the mission today.”
Maybe it was because she’d used the word ‘comfort’, but Mom brightened up immediately and clapped her hands. “Oh, in that case. I’m sure that the both of us can make something suitable with the leftovers.”
Together, they made five sandwiches. Vanya had never cooked anything with her mother before—though what they were doing could only be loosely counted as cooking—and it was a strangely nice experience, the kind of things that children in books always did and that Vanya had thought were only fiction until she got to know the world outside of the Academy better. They made a roast beef sandwich for Luther, a grilled cheese sandwich for Allison, one with braised ham for Diego, banana and marshmallow cream for Klaus, and grilled fruits and peanut butter for Ben. Mom piled them up in a plate that she gave Vanya with an encouraging smile.
As she went back upstairs, the nice buzz Vanya had gotten from preparing food with her mother was replaced with her old fear of rejection, that slow poison that had tormented her her whole life. What if her siblings sneered at her sandwiches, laughed at her pathetic attempt at comfort? Did they really need anything that came from her?
The hallway that separated their rooms was shadowed, but even in the low lighting she could see that someone was sitting in front of one of the doors—the one to Klaus’ room, by her estimation. She approached hesitantly and recognized Diego.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.” He looked at the plate in her hands. “What’s that?”
“Sandwiches. Here for you.”
He pushed back her hand. “I’m fine, I’m not hungry, I had enough at dinner and I don’t need… Don’t need anything,” he said, the words coming out so rushed that he stuttered on the last ones.
“It’s not just for you,” Vanya said hurriedly. “I, uh, made one for each of you. Just a little, um, a little pick-me-up.”
“Oh. Okay.” He held out his hand and she gave him the sandwich she’d made for him. “Thanks.”
“What are you doing here?” she asked as he wolfed down the sandwich like he hadn’t had food in months. She would bet that he had actually not eaten enough at dinner.
“Asked Klaus something,” Diego said—at least this was what she thought he said, because he spoke with his mouth full of sandwich. He swallowed his mouthful and said, “He’s trying to—" but was interrupted by a muffled cry of frustration coming from Klaus’ room. The door flew open and a disheveled Klaus appeared.
“Well, I tried until I was blue in the face and got a big fat nothing,” he said to Diego, the closest Vanya had ever seen him to furious. “Told you so.” He only seemed to notice Vanya’s presence then, and told her in a much more normal voice, “Oh, hey, Vanya.”
“Then Five isn’t dead,” Diego said, and Vanya understood that he’d asked Klaus to conjure their missing brother. She’d known that Klaus had tried to conjure Five the first time around, in her own timeline, but she hadn’t known that Diego had asked for it.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Klaus said, combing his fingers through his hair and then tugging at it. “It’s not an exact science. Maybe Five is just being a stubborn jerk and refusing to appear to me.”
“He wouldn’t,” Vanya said with such vehemence that it got both of her brothers looking at her with startled expressions. “Five wouldn’t just refuse to be conjured and leave us wondering what happened to him.”
“Okay, I guess not,” Klaus said. “I don’t know if it’s any better. I’m not saying that I want him to be dead!” he added, waving his hands wildly in denial. “But, it’s just—if he’s not dead, then why isn’t he coming back? Where is he?”
Wandering the ruins of the world I destroyed.
“I don’t know,” Vanya lied. “But he’ll come back when he can.”
“I agree with Vanya,” Diego said, standing up with a little wince. “And I’m going to bed. Thanks again for the sandwich, Vanya. Good night, guys.”
“Sandwich?” Klaus said as Diego vanished into his room. “Why are you carrying a plate of sandwiches?”
“Made one for you,” she said, then shoved the sandwich in his hand. “I thought you might like it.”
“For me? Wow, thank you.” He bit in it. “And it’s good! Thank you so much! I’m always hungry.”
“It’s not much,” Vanya murmured, feeling herself blush to her roots at how pleased he looked. “Well, I’m going to give Ben his.”
Klaus gave her a thumb up, his left cheek bulging with food, and went back into his room. Vanya knocked on Ben’s door, but it took so long for him to open it that she’d been about to give up when he did.
“Yeah?” he said blearily. His eyes were red-rimmed and he looked a little haggard.
“Oh, sorry, I didn’t know you were asleep.”
“I wasn’t. Do you need—” He saw the plate and frowned. “Are you having a snack?”
“No, it’s for you. Well, one of them is for you. This one.”
He took the sandwich gingerly, as though afraid that it was going to blow up in his hand. “Thank you. I’m not very hungry, but it’s nice. I think I’ll keep it for later, if you don’t mind.”
“If you don’t want it, I can take it back—”
“No, no, I’ll eat it.” He gave her a wobbly smile. “Thank you.”
They stood in Ben’s doorway for another moment. Vanya didn’t really want to say goodnight—it sounded too close to ‘goodbye’. From her point of view, he’d been dead for over a decade and it was a miracle to be able to talk to him. He also looked miserable and she wished she could do more to help than giving him a sandwich that he obviously didn’t feel like eating.
“I miss him too,” she said. “So much.”
“We all miss him.” Ben looked down at the sandwich, his fingers crumbling a corner of the bread. With a heavy heart, Vanya thought that if Ben died, Five and he would never be able to meet again. “But I’m also mad at him. Why does he have to be so—”
“Hot-headed?”
He looked up at her with a half-smile. “Yeah, and stubborn.”
“And arrogant.”
They both laughed. “Really, I’m not sure why we’re missing him, after all,” Ben said.
“I have no idea.” She let out another soft snort of laughter and tentatively reached out to take Ben’s hand. “Good night,” she said.
“Good night, Vanya,” he said, squeezing her hand.
Luther and Allison both received their sandwiches with surprised gratitude, and Vanya went to bed suffused with a sense of contentment that she’d rarely felt in her life. Even playing her violin had been too often marred by the feeling that she wasn’t doing as well as she felt she could. Her sleep was sound and peaceful, and she dreamed of herself and her siblings as very small children, singing the nursery rhymes that Mom had taught them.
—-
Saturdays were when they had their only true recreative time, and by the end of the morning Vanya had come to a decision: she was going to tell her siblings about her coming from the future. There was little chance that they would just take her word for it, so she would have to be convincing. But she was trapped in the past for an undetermined amount of time, maybe for good, and she didn’t want to wait passively for adulthood like she’d done the first time. She didn’t want to lie to her siblings or to hide something so major from them for years. She was going to tell them, and she would do it today because she knew herself well enough to know that if she had time to overthink it she would chicken out.
Which was how she ended up with her stomach knotted so tight that she could barely eat breakfast. She tried to tell herself that it wasn’t a big deal. That at worst, they wouldn’t believe her and think she was a weirdo. That she was a grown-ass woman and they were a bunch of kids, which had to count for something. Her brain had always been her worst enemy and nothing she tried to reassure herself managed to dent the panic she felt at the enormity of what she was about to attempt.
At the beginning of their half-hour of playtime, Vanya was quick to announce that she wanted everyone to gather in her room so she could tell them something before they had time to all scatter across the house. They went with her willingly enough, although she could hear them murmuring to each other, wondering what this was about.
Her room looked packed with six people in it. Allison and Ben sat on the bed, Klaus sat on the floor at their feet, while Luther and Diego both stood by the window. Vanya thought about sitting on her chair, but she needed every scrap of confidence she could get and didn’t want Luther and Diego to be able to loom over her.
“So, um,” she said, then paused to lick her lips. She’d thought long and hard about how she wanted to introduce her confession, but with all of their eyes on her she had trouble getting started. She wiped her sweaty hands on her skirt. “What I’m about to say is going to sound crazy, but I swear that… You know I’m not a liar.”
“Of course not,” Ben said.
“First, I—it’s not the main thing I wanted to tell you, but… I know where Five is.”
Predictably, this made the room explode with overlapping exclamations and Vanya winced at how noisy they were.
“What, really?” Allison exclaimed.
“Did he contact you? Did he come here?” Luther asked urgently. “Why didn’t you tell us before?”
She gave them a minute to get it out of their systems, then took advantage of a lull in their ruckus to say, “I haven’t seen him and I didn’t get a message. I’ll tell you in a minute how I know. What’s important is this: Five was right all along. He could time-travel. He did do it. But I guess Dad was also right that he wasn’t ready for time-travel, because Five has messed up and found himself stuck almost seventeen years in the future.”
“Okay,” Klaus said, “just how do you know that? You can’t actually know that.”
“Because I’m from that future. I look thirteen, but my consciousness is twenty-nine. Five time-traveled all of us back in time. I don’t know where you—your adult selves—landed, but I ended up here.”
She was pretty proud of how confidently and assertively she’d said it. This time, her declaration was met with stunned silence.
“Is it funny to you?” Diego asked at last, shocking Vanya with how cold he’d sounded. “We’ve all been going crazy w-worrying about Five, and you’re making up st-stories about—”
“Hey, I don’t think Vanya is making it up,” Luther said. “Why would she do that?”
Luther jumping to her defense was unexpected, but he was the worst possible person to try to talk down Diego when he was angry and in a matter of seconds, they were shouting at each other. Allison tried to step in and it made things arguably worse. Vanya closed her eyes and pressed her hands on her ears. The sounds of her siblings yelling were burrowing into her brain. Of course they hadn’t believed her, and now Diego even thought that she was purposefully using what had happened to Five for a messed-up prank. She should have known. She should have guessed that no matter what she did, being thirteen or twenty-nine didn’t change the fact that they would never accept her, that she would always be Number Seven, the one who didn’t matter, the odd number that shouldn’t have existed.
She was so focused on her distress that she didn’t notice the energy building him inside her chest before it surged out of her. She opened her eyes and saw that Allison, Diego and Luther were a mess of piled up limbs on the floor. Ben had been thrown against the wall, and Klaus appeared to have been mostly spared because he was sitting on the floor, but he was hiding his head under his folded arms. The energy was still around Vanya, unrestrained, making the window panes shake and the framed pictures rattle against the walls. Vanya gasped for air.
Vanya, breathe.
“Vanya?” Allison’s voice sounded small and scared. Vanya had killed Allison, once—but no, she hadn’t killed her, she had merely thought she had. Allison hadn’t died but Vanya had stolen her voice.
Breathe.
She’d never made an effort as violent as the one she did to get the energy under control. It felt like walking countercurrent in a torrent. Her ears popped. Sweat dripped in her eyes. Her brain was being crushed in a vice. She crammed it all back in and then a wet blanket of silence fell over the room.
Her knees gave out and she crashed onto the floor. She heard her name being called and felt a hand on her shoulder. When she opened her eyes, she saw Klaus looking at her in concern.
“You okay?” he asked, and she felt like laughing at such an inane question. She was so far from okay that she didn’t know if she could ever find her way back to it.
“Yeah,” she said, then got back on her feet while he held her elbow to help her up.
The rest of her siblings were all staring at her. “What was that?” Luther asked, his voice a little too high-pitched.
Vanya felt like her explosion of power had washed her clean from her anxiety. She hadn’t planned to tell them about her power, at least not yet, but the cat had torn its way out of the bag and she was resigned to what was about to happen—the confusion, the fear, the mistrust. If Dad heard that she’d manifested her powers, he would probably want to lock her up in the soundproof room again. She would escape before that happened. If this last revelation burned bridges with her siblings, then there was nothing left for her in that house.
“That’s my power,” she said calmly. Her head still hurt and she massaged a thumb between her eyebrows to soothe the ache. “Dad has lied to all of us. I was never ordinary. I just had a power he didn’t know how to control, so he suppressed it.”
“Wait, wait,” Klaus said. He’d stepped away from Vanya and his hands were fluttering in the way they did when he was confused or overwhelmed. “He suppressed it—when? How? Why didn’t we know about it?”
“We were four. Remember when he told you I was sick and had to be quarantined?”
“Oh, yeah,” Klaus said. “You had, like, the smallpox.”
“Chickenpox, dumbass,” Ben said, giving the back of Klaus’ leg a kick. “Smallpox is—”
“Anyway,” Vanya cut them off before they could go off on a tangent, “I didn’t really have chickenpox. He locked me in a soundproof room while he figured out what to do about my powers. They’re related to sound, you see.”
Klaus blanched and whispered, “He locked you up? That’s—”
“He gave me mood-altering pills, the ones I’m always taking, to keep me numb, and then asked Allison to rumor me into thinking that I was ordinary. We were so young, even I forgot about my powers.”
Allison gasped and her hand flew to her mouth. “I—I think I remember that. Dad took me underground, and you were in that weird room with the spikes on the wall. Oh my God. Guys, I think she’s telling the truth.”
“There must be an explanation,” Luther said, shaking his head. “I’m not saying you’re lying, Vanya, but maybe it was for your own good that Dad—”
“It wasn’t for my own good, Luther,” Vanya said in a chilled voice. Uneasiness rippled across his features and she forced herself to speak more softly before she triggered his defensive instincts. She was the adult here. “As I said, I’m from the future. You don’t know the things he will do to you.”
Luther’s eyebrows shot up. “What do you—"
“I’m so sorry, Vanya,” Allison said in a choked voice, interrupting Luther. “I didn’t know—I didn’t understand what he was making me do. I didn’t want to hurt you. I didn’t—” In the face of her anguish, Luther forgot all about his questions and wrapped an arm around her shoulders.
“I know,” Vanya said gently to Allison. She did know, now that she’d had some time to process the reveal of what Allison had done to her. “It’s not your fault.”
“Okay, so you have powers,” Diego said. His valid arm was folded over his sling, as close as he could get to crossing his arms. His expression was sullen and angry, but it was probably covering a mix of other emotions. “And you’re from the future. Maybe. What do you want from us, Vanya-from-the-future? If you hate it here, why don’t you run away like Five did?”
“Jeez, Diego,” Ben said, throwing Vanya’s pillow at him. “I swear, the words that come out of your mouth sometimes.”
Diego dodged the pillow, but the rebuke caused him to look a little ashamed. “Well, my question still stands,” he mumbled.
“I—” Vanya said, then took a deep breath.
She’d been unsure about that last part. It was a little too daring for her, but it was time for a new, more daring version of her to emerge—not one who left destruction in her wake, but one who took steps to change things for the better, for herself and for the people that, in spite of everything, she still loved with all her stunted heart. She didn’t know if Five would or could come back for her in 2003. She could only take care of what was in front of her. If she was really stuck here, then she knew that a Five would show up in 2019 and she wanted to be able to welcome him back home and tell him that he didn’t have to worry about the apocalypse anymore. That she—that they—had fixed it while he was away and that all his suffering hadn’t been in vain. Maybe she could even keep Ben from dying again.
“I want us to run away,” she said. “Not now, of course. Maybe not tomorrow, or even in a month. But eventually. This place is harming all of us. That man who lets us call him ‘Dad’ will use you until you tell him to go fuck himself, and by then the damage will be too deep. Trust me; I’ve seen it.”
They had many things to say to that, but Vanya didn’t let it overwhelm her this time. At least they were listening to her. They accepted part of what she was telling them. She wanted to believe that she could convince them if she kept trying. This mattered; they were her family. She was getting a second chance and she wouldn’t ruin it.
See you in 2019, Five. Hope you’ll be proud of us.