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On the afternoon of October 1st, 1989, two men had dinner at a cafe in Russia.
This was not unusual in itself, but the two did stand out from the local crowd. The older, monocled one was a study in lines and edges, sharp and defined in everything from his facial hair to his flight leathers. The younger, distracted one was a study in motion, all soft lines blurred by aimless energy. His knee bounced and he twirled a cane in his hands, barely touching his food. Any time his movements faltered, the table itself began to vibrate.
All at once, his motion ceased completely. A smile tugged at the younger man's lips, excitement sparkling in his unfocused blue eyes. His companion stopped with teacup half raised.
"Now?"
Harlan Cooper nodded.
Sir Reginald Hargreeves produced a pocketwatch. "Precisely noon Greenwich mean time. Extraordinary. Is it nearby?"
Harlan closed his eyes. Voices chattered around them. Car engines rumbled down the street. Birds warbled their high, sweet songs. The cool autumn breeze whispered past, stirred up a little crackling whirlwind of dry leaves. A note rose and fell on the wind, soft and far away. He shook his head.
"Well, then. We'd best be on our way." Reginald rose, peeled a handful of bills carelessly from a stack of rubles to cover their meal, and offered Harlan his arm.
Tracking down a single person, in the whole of Russia, with a single weak receiver who could not easily provide cues, was not a quick task no matter how many suspiciously advanced jet planes one might have on hand. Breaking news soon supplied the city, but even then they spent an hour circling, narrowing the area down, while Sir Reginald's local agents tried to keep things smoothed over with soviet air traffic control.
It might not be the truest test Sir Reginald's patience had ever met, but it certainly made the top ten.
They were finally back on the ground, in the car, when Harlan began to feel something was wrong. Raised voices echoed in his ears. He blinked and flashbulbs burst behind his closed eyelids. The voices became screams.
The engine roared as the gas pedal under Reginald's foot slammed down of its own accord, the steering wheel wrenching from his grasp. Reginald wisely did not fight for control of the vehicle.
The screams became whimpers, became silence. In his mind's eye a shadow loomed, hands reaching, huge and rough around a tiny, frail form.
They found the building by the glow of the fire against the clear night sky.
Harlan burst out of the car, rushing past the milling crowd of neighbors and police, heedless of the shouts after him. A startled officer tried to stop Reginald. He slipped the staying hands easily, shouting in explanation, "We're family! Mwy sem'ya!" It wasn't entirely a lie.
Harlan pelted down the narrow dark hallway, shoes striking down beside fallen bodies, to a place he had never seen before and yet knew in his soul. Oily smoke coiled into the ceiling. Tongues of flame licked at the walls. Cheap wallpaper blistered and peeled. More bodies were scattered in the remains of the tiny kitchen. A young woman -- too young, still a girl -- lay in almost peaceful repose in the middle of the floor, her face just familiar enough to twist in his gut.
There was no sign of the baby. He closed his eyes, his brow creasing in concentration. His lips formed around a name.
Vanya.
Cold night air. A flicker of light. A high squall from little lungs. A note, rippling on the wind, too low or high for ears to hear.
He took off out the back door, running full tilt into the night. Streets and alleys and side-yards passed in a blur. They weren't important. All that mattered was the note ringing in his head.
She was still here, still so close. He would catch them. He would freeze them. He would take her back. He would--
The song stopped.
Harlan drew up short at an intersection of alleys. Rough old-brick streets stretched away in front of him, behind him, to both sides. He threw out his senses as far as they would go and found nothing. Empty. No baby. No abductor. No song. Nothing. Silence. Mocking, screaming, yawning silence. And in its deafening emptiness was only his own thoughts, resounding off the walls, closing in around him, wrapping tight, suffocating, scraping him out and filling his husk with a thousand thousand roiling echoes of his failure.
He screamed. All the energy building in him released in a wave of shattering windows and broken pottery and heaving stone. Empty and raw, he sank to his knees.
That was where Reginald found him. Reginald's boots crunched cautiously on newly-fallen snow. His voice was never meant to be soft, but he consciously dulled its edges.
"Harlan?"
Harlan said, "Gone."
"Gone where?"
Harlan shook his head. "Gone." From anyone else, an obstinate non-answer. From Harlan, a world of meaning.
Reginald crouched beside him. An ungloved hand carefully reached out and squeezed Harlan's arm.
"We'll find her. We'll find all of them."
Even as he said it, he wondered if time would make a liar of him once again.
It would be thirty years before his words rang true -- and when they did, they rang twice.
Today, one Vanya sat on an ornate couch, timid and small and curled even smaller beside her brothers and sister. Last night, another Vanya had nearly killed one of his other children. Nearly all of his brood bore the marks of that battle, three in such severe condition that they were still in recovery elsewhere in the house.
That left he and Harlan recounting Russia to ten anxious faces, while Audra served tea.
"I don't understand," said Carla, her voice hoarse from where the other Vanya had turned her powers back on her. Ben slouched more or less entirely against her, eyes half-lidded, too doped up on painkillers to contribute much. Her fingers combed absently through his hair.
"No talking, dear," said Audra, handing her a steaming cup that smelled of honey.
"It's okay, mom, I let Riley take some of it."
Her brother at the other end of the couch smiled and rubbed his throat. He accepted a cup of tea gratefully. Leaning on the back of the couch, Sebastian murmured, "And what a glorious gift it is." Riley shoved him away and pointed warningly. Faith, folded over in her own chair with a hoodie pulled up over her head, waved away the offered tea.
Carla focused back on her fathers. "I don't understand. Why didn't you tell us about this?"
The other side of the room, five all squeezed onto one couch with Diego perched on an arm, wore expressions of jaded sympathy. The inaugural class of the Umbrella Academy were used to their father's miserly ideas of what constituted 'pertinent information'.
Reginald, surprisingly, had an answer that wasn't 'because you didn't need to know.' "Because you would have gone looking," he said, with a gravity that managed to sound somewhere in the vicinity of caring. "And we weren't sure there would be anything to find." His hand resting on Harlan's shoulder squeezed reassuringly.
"You thought I was dead?" Vanya asked.
"It was a possibility. One of many."
Harlan's pen rose up and began to write. Reginald read it out, his ever-sharp voice not quite matching the contrition on Harlan's face. "I sensed her now and again over the years, in snippets, brief flashes and vague impressions. Nothing as strong as when you arrived. I always held out hope, but I was afraid they were false positives."
"Do you have any idea who it was?" Luther asked. The teacup Audra handed him looked rather more substantial than the rest of the delicate set. "Any enemies? Specific enemies," Luther amended as three of his siblings snorted simultaneously. Vanya was too focused on Harlan to see the humor.
Reginald shook his head. "I've spent thirty years trying to figure that out. No one alive has the right combination of knowledge and motive."
"Anyone dead?" Klaus asked.
Reginald considered. "None that come to mind, but I may have to pursue that prospect further."
"Well, what do we know about them?" Sebastian asked.
Harlan's expression darkened. He wrote something that Reginald did not read. "Audra," he said instead. "Bring the package from my desk." Her heels clicked briskly towards the stairs.
Even half-asleep Ben sensed the rise of tension in the air. He peered at his fathers. "What is it?"
Reginald glanced at Harlan. "They have a sense of humor."
Audra returned with a long, thin paper-wrapped bundle. Reginald unrolled the paper and tossed it aside. "This was recovered from the scene," he said.
It was Diego who stated the obvious. "It's... an umbrella." A thin, straight-handled black umbrella, apparently unremarkable except for the fact that Reginald was handling it with such significance.
When no one else made a move, Klaus shrugged and reached out a tattooed hand. He was surprised when Reginald actually handed the umbrella over for inspection. There was a strange look in the old man's eye, something fierce, like triumph or confirmation.
Luther peered at it as Klaus turned it over. "There's a seam." He pointed. "Try twisting the handle."
Klaus did so, and the handle came loose in his hand, a shiny silver blade sliding free of the umbrella sheath. The metal reflected back Klaus's curious eyes.
"The fingerprints are an exact match for yours," Reginald said.
A streak of blood had dried in the blade's center groove.
Klaus went rigid. "Oh."
Diego hopped to his feet and circled to Klaus's side, squeezing his shoulder. Klaus did not resist being relieved of the murder weapon.
"Arming the assassin with an umbrella sword," Faith said. "That's definitely sending a message."
"That's sick," Carla murmured.
"They didn't just get lucky. They know about us," Diego said, closing the umbrella back together with a snap. "About the Umbrella Academy."
Allison turned back to the patriarchs. "You know they took Vanya. We can assume Diego and Klaus. What about the rest of us?"
"We found five such ransacked homes," Reginald answered.
"Five?" said Luther, a crease appearing between his brows.
"Wait, so who got left out?" Klaus said, gesturing as he mentally counted his siblings.
"Klaus recognized me," Allison said. "That just leaves Five or Luther."
Luther contemplated his teacup. "Don't know if I should feel relieved or insulted."
"You guys obviously must have existed," Vanya said. "It doesn't make sense to take all but one."
"They didn't take Ben, either," Klaus pointed out. Ben's eyes flickered open at the sound of his name.
"They might not have known about Ben," Allison said. "He wasn't with us -- not that anybody could see."
Luther nodded. "So we're thinking it's somebody from the sixties?"
"That or the Commission," Diego said.
"We sure the Handler's dead?"
"Herb confirmed it, the Swede put her down for good."
"She could time-travel," said Klaus thoughtfully, "so what if she came forward and grabbed us before she died?"
A beat of silence.
"I... don't think that's how it works," Allison said.
"But are you sure?"
"No," Diego cut in, "this timeline is dependent on Harlan, and that didn't get hard-coded until after the barn, she had no opportunities for that."
"Oh, now you're the time travel expert?"
"I have the most experience in the room, so, yes."
"Excuse me, I have time traveled exactly as much as you have."
"Yes, but you went to Vietnam, I went to the Commission, I think my claim is a little bit stronger."
"Excuse me?" Carla said, reminding the Umbrellas that they had an audience. An audience that was understandably very, very confused. "Yeah, hi, can we go back about twenty steps, please?"
Reginald took a seat. "You've mentioned this 'Commission' before. Why don't you start there?"
Everyone looked at Diego. He spluttered. "Wait, me?"
Reginald smiled thinly. "You are the 'expert'."
"Ah. Right. Of course." Diego took a deep breath, trying desperately to remember how Five had described them, one timeline and two apocalypses ago. "So. The Commission."