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The loneliness gnaws at her.
It's quite the biting feeling - an ache in her heart, bitter and so desperately overwhelming she wants to scream. She never does, though.
Vanya wants to say that after a childhood of isolation, she's used to feeling empty and out of place. She should be, anyways. However, somehow, life keeps finding new ways to drag her through the mud.
She supposes that's why she wrote the book. Her therapist had suggested writing her feelings down, but she probably hadn't meant it like that. Still, it is rather fitting; Vanya is the weak link, the hidden family secret - that's always how the novels work, isn't it? In all the books she read, her character - the unloved one, the quiet one, the one with the horrible life - is the charming protagonist, destined to one day find happiness and save the world along the way.
Well, that isn't her life.
Vanya tries to drown her sorrows - to bring sound into the void that is her soul - with her violin. She practices, and teaches, and plays, and several times she thinks that maybe she's found her calling. It never lasts long though. It's so… easy to sink back down into the depths of the ocean of her own despair.
On those days, she swallows pills and curls into her bed, gripping her blanket with white fists. Misery tears her mind apart, yet her eyes remain dry, empty, blank. Numb.
How ironic, Vanya thinks on the day of her father's funeral, when she cancels lessons for the week and pulls out of the orchestra because she knows she can't continue to merely exist when her family's concerned. How ironic, she thinks, that the only time she feels anything is when Diego snaps at her. Not when Allison tentatively wraps arms around her in a mockery of an embrace, not when she defends her with lackluster words. It's as if her sole existence is to be mocked, ridiculed, ignored.
The day gets weirder.
Vanya hardly notices the appearance of a brother long thought lost. Once, he had been her favorite - the only one that took time to talk to her, the only one to include her. Now, she looks back and wonders how much of his affection had been genuine and how much had been spite.
Five doesn't so much as look at her the entire time he's there in the kitchen. She takes this as a sign and leaves, not even bothering to wait for a taxi. It's a long walk to her apartment, but it's one she endures.
That night, as she curls up in her blankets, a cup of tea sitting untouched on her nightstand, she almost misses the flash of blue light peeking in from under her door. It's startlingly familiar.
"I'm in here," she calls after a couple of minutes without seeing the light again.
Her door creaks as it opens, Five peering at her inquisitively. It's a stare she feels intimately familiar with, and it sends minute shivers down her spine. She clenches her blankets a little bit tighter.
"It's late - what do you want?" She says with a harshness that surprises her - she thought she lost the ability to be curt with her siblings ages ago.
"I wanted to talk to you," he sits on the corner of her bed, his expression softening in the tiniest of ways, "you really should lock your windows, by the way."
Vanya shrugs, because yeah, she knows rapists can climb, but she severely doubts anybody would pick her out of the millions of other young women in the city.
"Well, you're here, keeping me from sleeping," she internally winces at how dead she sounds - she doesn't really want anybody else to catch on to the despair lurking inside - and attempts to change the tone of her voice, "go ahead. Talk."
Five frowns at her but he doesn't say anything about how she sounds. Instead, he talks. He talks about the world he jumped into, the apocalypse he lived in. He talks about how he got stuck, how it took him forty five years to figure out a way back.
He says they have eight days to stop the world's impending doom.
Needless to say, it's a lot to unpack.
"Why me?" She asks when he's done. She now sits up against her pillows, gaze darting to the cup of tea she had left abandoned.
His answer - his first answer - confirms her thoughts entirely.
"Because you're ordinary."
Five had always been the one - the only one - to remind her of how special she was. How it didn't matter if she didn't have powers - she was a good person, she was better than her siblings. He told her over and over again that she was anything but ordinary - she was important to him.
Despite already questioning Five's motives, the echo of her childhood - ordinary ordinary ordinary - said by the one person who had told her she was anything but hurts. Her despair latches onto the word, onto the feeling, gobbling it up so it can grow.
Five rescinds the statement a minute later, saying that she listens. The damage, however, is done.
She doesn't voice her doubts about his supposed apocalypse, if only because she knows it doesn’t matter. Five isn’t going to include her in his plans. He’s not going to ask her for help. He’s here telling her that she listens because that’s all he really needs. Somebody to vent to. Somebody to hum along and nod appropriately.
She offers up her couch half-heartedly, saying that they can talk more later. He agrees. She knows he won’t actually stay.
( she still winces when she wakes and he’s gone).
She spends most of the next day curled up in bed, still staring at that cup of tea. Staring, staring. Somebody knocks at her door, but she only faintly hears the sharp raps of knuckles against wood and she ignores it. Eventually, it goes away.
Her depression has always been a constant in her life, more so than any feeling she can remember. Yet, it’s never been this oppressive. Before, she could at least function; now, a cloud keeps her pressed to the bed, misting up her thoughts and hazing her vision. She barely has the presence of mind to dry swallow two of her pills, and she barely drags herself out of her bed to force a muffin into her mouth later that evening.
Allison shows up the next day, all but breaking the door down when Vanya attempts to ignore it again. She last left it unlocked, though, so instead Allison pushes into her bedroom, breaking her concentration. She didn’t even notice that she had been staring at that stupid mug of tea until then.
“Vanya?” Allison questions, worry coloring her voice, but Vanya knows better. She knows that Allison loves grabbing attention and views her estranged siblings as some sort of pet project( local celebrity is nice to her siblings, look how much they love each other) and Vanya can’t be fooled. Not anymore.
“I was just getting up,” she says simply - a lie, but Allison doesn’t know that - and slides out of bed, staring at her sister, “why are you here?”
“Family meeting,” Allison explains, hands wringing together, “something’s wrong with Mom, we need to discuss it.”
Mom is one of the most controversial topics of Vanya’s life, and her feelings are very mixed, but she does care, so in the end she follows her sister back to the Academy, drawing too-big sleeves over her hands as if to swallow herself whole in the fabric.
As it turns out, Mom’s protective programming has been turned off - go figure, Vanya thinks - and now they have to decide what they should do. The argument to turn Mom off strikes a chord somewhere inside the hollowness of her soul; if the “only solution” to malfunctioning hardware is to shut it off…
...what would they do to a person who proves to be useless?
Is she, too, destined to be tossed aside, thrown away, discarded once she proves to be broken?
The thought should terrify her, but all she feels is numb.
After the rather explosive argument, Vanya wanders around the mansion, lost in her own thoughts. The building is so large - she hadn’t noticed when they were kids, since they were pretty confined to their own little corner - and it’s so easy to get lost in the corridors. She wanders, and wanders, until gunfire snaps her out of her own head.
Gunfire?
“Guys?” Vanya questions aloud, creeping towards the entrance of the Academy. She had just passed the sitting room when a blur of a man(wearing some sort of kid mask, no less), flashes by and then something heavy catches her in the head, and she stumbles back and falls-
“Hey asshole!”
Vanya hardly has the presence of mind to drag herself off of the floor, her vision spinning even as she presses herself against the couch, shaking like a leaf. She refuses to move from her spot(she doesn’t think she can move from her spot), and doesn’t even realize that the gunfire is over until Allison is pulling her to her feet, shoving her roughly onto the couch with a wet rag pressing insistently at her head.
“Are you alright?” Allison asks, the rag digging into her scalp just a bit too deep.
“I’m fine,” Vanya says, although she knows her voice lacks sufficient enthusiasm to properly convince the other.
“Are you insane?!” Diego appears in Vanya’s line of vision, looking as furious as his voice lets on. “You could’ve been killed!”
She must be more delirious than she thought, because her filter fails her and she mumbles a bitter, “would that be so bad?” just loud enough for both siblings to hear.
Funnily enough, Allison draws back as if burned - Vanya never thought she’d have to reveal her own selfish thoughts to get her sister to just leave her alone - while Diego just stares at her. For a moment, neither of them speak, and Vanya seizes the opportunity to stand - spinning, spinning vision - and step away from the couch.
“Thanks for the input,” she says dryly, now that she’s effectively destroyed her filter, “I’m glad you care so much.” She can’t help the sarcasm dripping from her words, saccharine sweet and effectively keeping Allison pinned to the couch and Diego frozen in place. She leaves them exactly where they are.
(She’s already out the door by the time Allison releases a choked “Vanya!”)
In lieu of another place to stay, Vanya simply heads back to her apartment - she has nowhere else to go, after all. It’s almost fitting that when all is said and done, the only place she could ever belong is by herself, alone.
This time, she locks the door behind her, hands shaking so badly she can hardly complete the motion. Her mind replays her words from before like a broken video camera on loop, over and over and over again.
It’s a good thing she acknowledges her own depression, she thinks dryly, as she slumps into her bed with an exhausted sigh. A good thing, because she can well and honestly say that she meant every word. Would it be so bad for her - useless Number Seven, the weak link, the ordinary one - to have been killed? Would it be such a huge loss? Better her than one of her siblings, after all.
She swallows down a pill, hardly able to keep the bottle steady. Her hands shake and shake and shake, and she starts to wonder if maybe she is a bit concussed because she’s not really thinking straight. Despair creeps into her thoughts, drowning out the edges of rationality, swallowing every other emotion in one fell swoop until all she can feel, all she can think, is how miserable she is.
Nobody knocks at her door.
It’s nearly dawn, and Vanya’s tearing a piece of paper out of her notebook, fumbling with the cap of her pen and giving up when it clatters to the floor. The lines of her letters jerk messily, but it’s legible and that’s all that matters.
( When her book first came out, she was praised for being such a good author. Very eloquent, very flowery. She had allowed the praise to float into her head, keeping her upright until she realized that the only reason people read her book was for more information about the Umbrella Academy. Her name was finally out there, she was finally known, and still nobody saw her.)
She fills up the page with writing before the pen falls to the floor, slipping out of a loose grip and quaking hands. Vanya places the paper on her nightstand, trades it for the mug of tea that had been stewing for weeks now. Perhaps the tea had once been jasmine, she thinks, but not so much anymore. Still, she wants to be completely sure, and she swallows the rest of the pills in her little orange bottle.
She drinks the tea.
The taste is the same, with only the slightest hint of suspicious bitterness, and Vanya smiles at the familiarity of it all. She’s glad she chose such an effective instrument - it makes things so much easier to swallow.
She lays down, pulls her blankets around her shoulders. For the first time in ages, her despair is pushed away by something else - something just as heavy, but not quite as overbearing. A cushiony drowsiness, soft and comforting.
Vanya closes her eyes.
She doesn’t open them.