Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Allison's used to doing things that she doesn't want to do out of stark necessity, but what she’s learning now is that they’re so much easier when the choice to do them wasn't hers to begin with. Not one of her siblings have spoken a word since assembling in her room for this clandestine, emergency family meeting that she’s insisted on, half-expecting (half-hoping?) that none of them would show up. She might have preferred it if they hadn’t; in that case she could have rested in the knowledge that she’d tried, get angry with them for refusing to cooperate, then move on, unhappy, unsatisfied, and safe in the knowledge that the endeavor had been futile. 

She surveys her brothers and sister from her position on her desk chair, positioned to face the center of the room. Klaus has colonised the pile of cushions on her bed, his limbs taking up astonishing amounts of space for someone so lanky, and unlike the others whose silences are twitchy and tense he’s perfectly still, the only indication that he’s awake at all his eyes, wide open, taking in the expanse of ceiling as he frowns to himself. 

Luther and Diego seem to share the objective of maintaining as much physical distance between themselves as possible, Diego sitting on the floor in the corner by the window, Luther next to the door, both resolutely refusing to acknowledge the other’s presence by fixing their gaze on Allison lest they accidentally make eye contact. This wouldn’t bother Allison if it wasn’t for Vanya, also on the floor, caught in the crossfire of her brothers’ animosity as she sits with her back against Allison’s bed. She has nothing to worry about, Allison thinks, they’re too angry with one another to bother with her, but she’s biting her upper lip, sitting with her knees pulled up to her chest, focusing all of her attention on picking at a loose strand in the carpet.

She’s rehearsed this in her mind for hours, polished what she's going to say until she's sure that there are no rough edges left that might scratch someone’s ego, she can do this, she can, but Diego ruins her opportunity for a compelling opening by saying, “Allison, are you gonna tell us what you want? Because I’m fucking tired, and,” -he looks at a spot on the wall above Luther's head-" Full offense, I don’t really wanna be around any of you right now.”

Fucking Diego. Of course, of course he’d have to pull something like this, ruining Allison's opening before she's even had a chance to impress anyone with it. She resolves to shift her priorities. Quality of presentation be damned; the time has come to focus on getting this over with. 

“Remember what I said today?” she asks. “About Ben. About it not being our fault.”

In earlier, imagined versions of this scenario, her brothers and sister at least gave active indications that they were willing to listen but here, now, Klaus just keeps staring at the ceiling, Vanya bites her lip harder as she continues worrying the loose carpet thread, Luther closes his eyes and leans his head against the wall, and Diego lets out an exaggerated, derisive sigh.

It would, Allison thinks, be so, so very easy to Rumor them; she could even tell herself that it would be for their own good, but- Ben, she reminds herself. Ben didn’t like her Rumoring her way out of conflicts with their brothers and sister, had always made it clear that he’d thought it cheating, cheap, and that knowledge is just enough to propel her forward without it.

“Today… Yesterday I guess, Dad said something about respect for Ben. What I want to know is, did any of you think about what that would look like? Because I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it and…” Allison pauses for effect. “I can’t come up with anything, OK? The best I can think of is not waiting around until next time, because there absolutely will be a next time.” Allison doesn’t miss the way her brothers and sister shift uncomfortably at this; how could they not have had the same thought? “I’m done,” she continues. “I think we all need to be done, because if it was me and I knew that Dad was blaming it on the rest of you not caring enough, not trying hard enough, I’d be fucking furious.” This is more like how she’d imagined this would go; Allison’s certainty rises until she’s almost shaking with how much she can feel the truth, the rightness of what she’s saying. 

Luther’s the first to respond. “No one’s saying we don’t care enough, Allison, but you’ve got to think about this from Dad’s point of view. Ben would still be here if we had just-”

He’s cut off by the sharp thwack! of a knife lodging in the wall, just behind his ear. 

Diego. Of-fucking-course Diego.

“I heard a rumor,” Allison says preemptively (because she’s tried, really, she’s tried, and it’s not as if she’s using her power on all of them, only the two that are likely to ruin this) “that you both kept quiet so Dad and Mom and Pogo wouldn’t realise we were all in here having this conversation.” She takes a moment to glare at everyone in turn for good measure and notices, then, that Vanya’s eyes are red. Allison hasn’t personally observed her crying today but she clearly has been and the way she’s blinking furiously suggests that she’s about to start once more, as though she can’t handle being in the presence of so much tension even when none of it’s directed at her.

“Chill, Allison, I can control myself,” Diego says in a whisper, and Allison’s about to say something about the knife in her bedroom wall being a really great example of Diego’s capacity for self-control, but she forgives him just a little when the next thing he says is, “I was gonna say, you’re right. Fuck Dad’s perspective. Ben’s not around to tell us what he would have wanted but I know that it sure as hell wouldn’t be a repeat of today. Maybe Five was the smartest of all of us, taking off when he did.”

This is unexpected, though not unwelcome. Allison's hypotheses about how this could go included Vanya being so grateful to be included that she wouldn’t present any difficulty and Klaus not being much more of a challenge- he’s seemed so withdrawn, lately, so defeated, even before the mission that led to Ben’s death; he’s long past ready to be done. Luther, Allison hasn’t been worried about; his determination is always more of a match for her own to start with but experience has taught her that it’s not so very hard to get him to ultimately acquiesce to whatever she pushes for. Diego was always going to be the difficult one, because Diego always has to be the difficult one; he’s so attached to Grace, so fixated on Reginald valuing him as much as he does Luther, so prone to arguing for arguing’s own sake.

Klaus knocks a few cushions off Allison’s bed, sitting up as he says, “‘Hold onto this feeling children’” in a vile caricature of their father, hitting his inflection so perfectly that Allison feels the surge of fury that first arose in response to that obscene excuse for a eulogy flaring again. “‘Let it fester in your hearts so that there is never a next time.’ Yeah, so, about that. I’m all over letting it fester so there’s never a next time. Allison’s right. I’m done.”

“So you’re going to… What? Just start refusing to go on missions?” Luther’s eyes flick from Allison to Vanya, and she knows that the question that he’s not asking is ‘And in that case, why is she even here?’

Vanya takes a deep breath and Allison starts to say ‘I heard a rumor that you got through this conversation without crying’ (because respect for Ben is one thing but Allison’s not Ben, she doesn’t have his patience, his accepting nature, she is not and has never aspired to be nice in the way he was) but Vanya surprises everyone by saying, “No. Not refusing to go, just getting out.” 

Everyone’s looking at Vanya now, so Allison does her the favour of shifting their attention away from her. “Yeah. Vanya’s got it. That’s exactly it.”

“Not like Vanya’s in danger of dying on a mission no matter what the rest of us do,” Diego mutters. 

“Maybe not, but can you imagine what it’d be like for her if we left her here?” Allison argues. She may not always see the point of her sister but Reginald barely tolerates Vanya as it is and Allison’s not about to become responsible for how much worse things would be for her if all of the children he has a use for took off without her.

“Hey asshats?” Klaus asks. “I think, since we’re talking about honoring Ben’s memory and all, he’d probably like it if you actually asked Vanya whether she wants a part in this. If she wants in she should be in, but let it be her choice.”

He’s right, damn him. Allison takes a deep breath, feigning patience for Klaus, for Vanya, that she does not feel. “What do you want, Vanya?” 

Vanya doesn’t look at Allison as she answers, but she doesn’t hesitate either. “Like you said. Not this.” She does not elaborate, though she doesn’t need to; no matter what anyone does or doesn’t think of Vanya no one envies her position in their family, the Number Seveness of her existence.

“You’re all putting me in a very awkward position.” Allison can tell when Luther’s speaking as Luther, their brother, and when he’s speaking as Number One, their father’s most esteemed protégé, and that he’s doing the latter now brings Allison to the uneasy realisation that he was actively challenging her earlier rather than simply asking for clarification about her intentions; up until this moment she’d allowed herself to hope that she'd simply misunderstood. “I just don’t think you’re thinking about what this would do to Dad. Don’t we have a responsibility? To the world? As the Academy? And as your Number One I have a responsibility to look out for the rest of you, and-”

“No,” Allison interrupts. “No. Not letting what happened to Ben happen to anyone else is our responsibility to one another, Luther. You’re in or you’re not. I want you in but we will do this without you.” She looks around the room. “Agreed?” Everyone, save for Luther, nods.

She suspects that Diego’s probably enjoying this and he confirms it when he mouths, “You’re kinda badass” at her, offering her a thumbs up. Allison grants him a grim smile back- She is kinda badass, and in this moment Diego at least gets that. Before tonight Allison would have said that if she’d had to choose between him and Luther there’d be no choice at all; Diego is her brother, and she loves him but up against Luther he simply wouldn’t factor in as an option. In spite of that, in spite of the weight of necessity that Luther’s presence carries in her life, Allison isn’t going to waste energy explaining that being done with everything includes being done with him being their Number One.

It can’t be that simple, though, because Luther’s not done, and because it’s Luther who knows her more deeply than any of them he also has the tools to cut her down the most efficiently. “Do you even have a plan, Allison? Do you know how to live in the world when you’re not part of the Academy? Are you just going Rumor your way into getting by?” 

This has, in fact, been Allison’s plan to the letter but hearing Luther say it makes it sound ridiculous, childish. She hadn’t prepared an argument for this and she hates that she doesn’t have one but then Diego -fucking Diego- comes to her rescue. “Look, we turn eighteen next year. After that the old man doesn’t have any hold over us so all we’ve gotta do is find somewhere to lay low until then. You think we can’t handle hanging out somewhere, killing time? Pretty sure even Vanya can’t fuck that up.” 

Vanya is far from Allison’s closest sibling but she still recognises when the emotional distance between her sister and whoever else happens to be around begins to expand; there’s no physical gesture that accompanies it but she’s grown up with Vanya, she knows her. She assumes they’ve lost her for the remaining duration of this discussion but then Klaus leans over from his position on Allison’s bed, gently touching Vanya on the shoulder as he says something in her ear, his voice a low, even murmur. Allison can’t make out what’s being said; she thinks she hears Ben’s name but it’s impossible to be certain and whatever it is seems to stop Vanya from drifting; she nods and turns around to climb up and sit, facing Klaus. He continues to whisper; Vanya says something that sounds like it might be a question and Klaus answers, no more than a single word, then produces a flask from under a nearby pillow. He unscrews the top, drinks, then hands it to Vanya, who takes a sip, motions to pass it back to Klaus, then thinks again and takes a much longer drink before finally relinquishing it. Klaus closes the flask then places his hands on Vanya’s shoulders and then they’re hugging each other and crying and Allison is torn between a surge of resentment at these two wasting time when she’s trying to accomplish something and the stab of shame that comes with the feeling lurking deeper still, the wish that she could be part of whatever this is.

Allison is unaccustomed to being excluded from things whether by design or mere carelessness and she’s promised herself that she won’t cry any more tonight, that she’ll maintain her composure, but watching Vanya and Klaus causes her to just shatter and to her horror ugly, undignified tears begin rolling down her cheeks. She wipes her eyes with the sleeve of her pajamas hoping no one will notice but of course they all do, and Vanya looks at Klaus, who nods, and then back to Allison, and reaches out her hand and says “-Allison? Do you want-?” and she hates that it’s Vanya, Vanya who’s reaching out to her, but suddenly she’s just so, so tired of thinking, and she climbs up next to Vanya and Klaus and they each place an arm around one of her shoulders, drawing her in as though she does belong here, a natural part of their shared grief and their desperate need to receive and provide comfort from one another. Allison wasn’t expecting this to make anything better and it doesn’t (of course it doesn’t), but it does free something in her and she begins sobbing in earnest.

She can’t see Luther getting up to sit beside her but she knows the sound of his footfalls, the gentle, steady feeling of his presence as he settles down on the floor next to her bed as he places a hand on her back. “Hey,” he says.

She manages to stop crying just long enough to say it back.

Luther’s voice is heavy with regret when he says, “You know why I can’t do this, don’t you?” and she shakes her head, no, no, no, she doesn’t. 

“Allison," he says, then: “So you’re really going to…?”

“Really.”

Luther sighs. “The best I can do is promise not to try to stop you, but I wish you’d think about this," and then he doesn’t say anything else but he remains where he is, his proximity oh so achingly temporary. 

When Allison looks at Diego she sees that he’s still sitting in his corner, feigning disinterest in the way three of his siblings are clinging to one another and fourth is sitting beside them, his hand on Allison’s back. “Come here,” she orders, nodding to the empty space at the foot of her bed, and to her surprise Diego does as he’s told, sitting half-off the edge of the mattress until Vanya moves to make room for him between herself and Klaus, resting her hand on top of his arm with all of her usual hesitancy. Instead of shaking her off he allows it to remain there, struggles to get out the words “I’m s- I’m sorry. What I said before-” but Vanya cuts him off, shaking her head and saying, “Later.” She sinks into his cautious hug and Diego’s bravado finally cracks as he begins crying into Vanya’s hair.

And one day, one day, Allison will recognise this as the moment that she began to wonder if there might be more to Vanya than she’d appreciated, that her choice to offer kindness and comfort to Diego might indicate its own kind of strength, something that is lovely and mundane and necessary. 

That’s later, though. Now, she just sobs, holding onto her siblings and letting herself be held and thinking Ben, Ben, I will do better, I will be better, I promise, Ben, I promise, I promise.

Chapter Text

Diego loves his siblings. That he loves them is one of the few unwavering certainties that accompany him through his often painful, always confusing existence. Whether he likes any of them at any given moment is a more complicated matter. 

He likes Klaus, mostly, though more and more often his affection for his brother is accompanied by incomprehension and worry. Allison, he's fond of on rare occasions but more than he likes her he feels a grudging respect for her, a respect that’s grown marginally less grudging over the last hour. He doesn't like Luther, doesn't like him in a way that’s satisfying to hold onto, as if by owning his dislike he’s reclaiming something his own second-best status doesn't afford him.

(And Ben. Of course he likes -liked- Ben, without complication or caveat. Everyone did.)

Vanya, he's never bothered to classify. Thinking about whether he likes his quiet, ordinary sister would be like thinking about whether he likes the carpet in the dining room; he'd notice if it was gone but what impact would its absence make, either on Diego’s own life or on anyone else's?

Except. 

Except. It's because of  Vanya that Diego's now enveloped in this little cluster of grief in the darkness of Allison's bedroom, exhaustion and rage having worn through him to the point where he cannot deny that he needs to be part of this. It was Allison who ordered him to join them but Vanya was the one who made space for him, picking up where Allison's willingness to reach out trailed off, and she's a warm, solid presence as she cries into his shirt; Diego’s least thought-of sibling in this moment the centre of his awareness. He clings to her and sobs in a way that he hasn’t since he was a small child, since before he learned that such an outpouring of emotion was unacceptable. 

None of this is physically comfortable for any of them (except perhaps Luther, on the floor, connected to the rest of them via his hand on Allison’s back); everyone has someone else's knees or elbows jabbing into their side, but eventually an odd pseudo-tranquility manages to descend and Diego is almost drifting off when Luther ruins the closest thing anyone's had to peace since before that final, awful mission, his voice low and steady, saying; "If you're gonna do this, you need to do it now."

Allison jerks up. "What the hell do you mean?" she demands in a whisper. "We haven't even talked about how we're going to do this, we need time," but Luther's shaking his head saying; "No, no, remember your blanket fort? You know Dad finds out about everything that happens in this house; if you're gonna get out, get out now while he's asleep. The longer you wait the harder it's gonna be; I'll cover for you as much as I can but you need to do this now."  

Diego appreciates a good blanket fort as much as anyone but he doesn’t think he knows about whatever occasion Luther is referring to. He glances his curiosity at Klaus, who shrugs; evidently this is new information to him as well. He doesn’t have time to get annoyed with how even now Allison and Luther’s shared secret history is drawing a ring around the two of them, setting them apart from everyone else, though, because Allison swears and then begins whispering orders: Get dressed, grab what you need, be careful, be quiet, for fuck's sake, be quiet, meet by the bathroom window in half an hour. Diego’s prepared for missions with less warning than this and he knows how to prioritise carefully on insufficient information, but when Allison adds that no one is to engage with Grace (”Don’t forget who made her”) she looks directly at Diego and he almost tells her to go fuck herself.

(She catches his arm on the way out of the room and says, “I don’t like it either.” It’s not an apology, it’s not enough , but it’s still more than he would have expected from her.)

Diego gets dressed, checking that his various knives are strapped in their proper places on his person taking more time than anything else, shoves clothing into his bag without thinking, rechecks his knives, rechecks them again, wondering why there's not more of a sense of finality about his actions; surely packing up the essentials of his life should feel more… Anything, than this?  When he slips into the kitchen to leave a note -I’ll miss you, Mom. Love, Diego - he jumps when he realises that someone is already in the room, but relief and gratitude wash over him when he realizes that it's Vanya, Vanya who hates being noticed, Vanya who won’t ask questions or want them asked of her. He sees the sandwich she’s left on a plate on the counter at the same time she notices the paper in his hand, and they look away from one another then leave the room in opposite directions without speaking. 

Diego and his siblings have snuck out of the house through a bathroom window on the ground floor without incident since they were children (though the last time all of the Hargreeves siblings present at the Academy did it together must have been before Five left); Diego’s most recent such excursion only having been two weeks ago, accompanying Klaus to some party in some windowless basement apartment. He didn’t care about the party but he and Ben had quietly decided that wherever Klaus went when he snuck out he shouldn’t be going alone, had agreed that at least one of them should tag along in case…? Neither of them were sure what that ‘in case’ might encompass, and that void of possibility was in itself cause for worry. 

At the party, Klaus disappeared into a room off the kitchen while Diego lurked outside of the closed door, trying to look menacing, feeling awkward and off-balance and seventeen in a way that was heavy and suffocating and made his stomach clench. After reappearing ten or so minutes later Klaus called out a round of good-byes to people he apparently knew by name and they walked to a park where he retrieved a bag from his jacket pocket and held it up reverently, saying this was going to be the one that worked, it had to be, his new connection was a good guy, he wanted to help, he wouldn’t screw him over like that last asshole...

Diego wonders if he’s up to the task of looking out for Klaus without Ben. Surely his sisters know that something’s wrong, surely they care, but Allison’s method of caring is officious and off-putting and likely to make Klaus back further away from her, while Vanya’s so frightened of the people who know her best that it’s hard to envision her being any use among strangers in grimy basement apartments.

He’s so wrapped up in thinking about this that he barely registers that he’s jumping out the window until his feet hit the ground. Surely this has been too easy, surely they can’t just get out and walk away and…? But they do, the four of them moving down the street in silent unison, their breath visible in the air of the late November not-yet-dawn. At first they just walk without saying anything, glancing at one another to assure themselves that yes, they’re all here, they’re doing this, that none of the hundreds, thousands of things that could go wrong have, at least, not yet. It feels too simple, Diego’s brain persists; if it really was a matter of opening a window, climbing out, and walking away, why did none of them ever-

“OK,” Allison says, interrupting Diego’s thoughts. “We’re out, now what’s the plan?”

“Fuck,” Klaus sighs. “We’re gonna need one of those, aren’t we?” He keeps rubbing his gloved hands together for warmth, fidgeting with his scarf and the buttons on his coat. Diego can’t help but notice that it’s looser on him than it was only a few weeks ago.

“We are," Allison affirms. "I know we’ve all been awake for close to twenty-four hours but we need something we can work with for now, even if we decide it sucks later and we need to change it. Any ideas?”

“Distance,” Diego says, because he’s still annoyed with her but she’s right; one of the key features of being Allison's brother has always been that being annoyed with her and her tendency to be right when it really matters coincide with frustrating regularity. 

Allison nods. “Put as much space as we can between us and the Academy before we figure out what’s next?”

Diego and Klaus both murmur their agreement.

“Good,” Allison says. “Vanya? You get to have an opinion, you know.”

Vanya, hugging her violin case to her chest as she walks a half-step behind the others, startles at the sound of her name. “Sorry. Yes. I mean- yes, that sounds good.” She looks so uneasy at being addressed that Diego wonders if she's been hoping they’d forget she was there and leave her out of any discussion altogether. 

Allison keeps talking, keeps asking questions, and as she does Diego begins to notice the way she’s collating information, refining the rough material her siblings supply into something workable, distracting everyone from their growing exhaustion and anxiety in the process. He only recognises it because Luther’s attempts at doing the same thing have always been so heavy-handed; while Allison does share Luther’s tendency of assuming that her opinions are worth listening to merely by virtue of them being her opinions, she's undeniably competent.

They toy with the idea of air travel but quickly reject it; airports are too full of security cameras and chances to be asked for ID, they're still minors, and Allison can only make people forget that they saw them if she knows they've been observed in the first place. They do have a vague idea that bus stations are the refuge of travelers with something to hide, people who won't notice you if you allow them the courtesy of failing to notice them in return, so with no better plan in mind they orient themselves in the direction of the local Greyhound depot. It’s within sight when something occurs to Diego.

"How are we going to pay for stuff? Is Allison going to-"

"I've got it covered," Klaus says immediately. 

Allison raises her eyebrows. "Do you want to share with the class?" Her tone indicates curiosity, rather than judgement or disapproval, but either this doesn’t register with Klaus or he’s so loathe to provide detail that it doesn’t matter; he just says “Not really,” scowling and picking up his pace a little, walking ahead of the group until they’re inside the bus station.

They acquire schedules, half-heartedly debate the appeal of various destinations that they know almost nothing about, then abandon that discussion when they realise that there’s a bus leaving in fifteen minutes. Tickets acquired, they claim the back row of seats and to Diego’s relief no one looks at them beyond a cursory glance- maybe their hunch about bus stations was correct, or maybe it’s simply too early for anyone to care enough about their surroundings to pay attention to four unaccompanied teenagers in matching jackets, eyes raw and red from recent crying.

It's as though they've all suddenly remembered why they're here, why they're doing this, and they end up slumped against one another, promising that they won't fall asleep, they won't; that to fall asleep here would be to make themselves vulnerable and to make oneself vulnerable is foolish, selfish. Diego’s not worried about himself, Allison, or Klaus, all of them having been trained in withstanding sleep deprivation, but if Vanya's going to be part of whatever this is then she's damn well going to need to try to keep up with the rest of them. That she won’t be able to is inevitable but- what else could they do, where she's concerned? Leaving her behind at the Academy with Luther, the contrast between Number One and Number Seven more apparent than ever with none of the integers between them there to obscure Reginald's view of her deficiencies, would have been abject cruelty.

Diego leans his head back against his seat, closes his eyes, hears Allison asking what time it is and Klaus answering that it's just before six o'clock in the morning, then the two of them groaning to one another about how in fuck's name it's been less than an hour since they left, how, how?

"It was fucking cold of Luther to not even find us to say goodbye before we went," Diego mutters, and immediately, he feels Allison tensing on one side of him, hears Vanya's breath hitch on the other. It takes a moment for his understanding to catch up with his sisters' reactions and when it does he says, "Right. Got it. Were you just not going to mention that? Or?"

"We weren't... Not going to," Klaus says from Allison's other side. "It just didn't come up."

"Right."

"Would you have wanted us to?" Klaus persists. "We kinda figured you wouldn't give a shit."

"I don-"

Diego is cut off by Allison, jabbing both him and Klaus in the ribs with her elbows. "Don't start,” she warns.

"We weren't starting -" he protests.

"Yeah, Diego, you were, and I'm not in the mood for it. From any of you." At that, Vanya closes her eyes and presses against the window, clutching her violin case against her chest.

"Anyway," Allison continues, "I don't want to talk about Luther. At all."

"Fine."

"I'm serious, Diego. The rest of you can say whatever you want about him, just don't say it where I can hear you."

"Great,” Diego says. “I'm glad I have your permission to say what I think, Allison. That means a whole fucking lot."

"You know what? Don't talk to me at all if that's how you're going to be." Allison’s voice is starting to waver. 

Well, shit.

Diego honestly can't remember a time he and Allison have stood in solidarity against Luther, or when Vanya's inclusion in anything has been anything beyond an afterthought; they’ve been doing well until now but it's hardly surprising that the cracks in their defiance of the natural structure of their family have taken so little time to form, that what they’ve accomplished together without fighting essentially amounts to having gone for a walk. 

Diego wishes Ben were here. 

Ben wouldn't be here, though. If Ben were alive, they wouldn't be doing this and things would be… Well. Not OK, never OK; Klaus would still be unravelling and Allison and Luther would still be united in their cold, insufferable superiority and Diego himself would still be grappling with the gaping, angry recklessness gnawing at the edge of his awareness, always demanding that he do something, always refusing to tell him what that something might be. So, not OK, no, but not OK in a way that includes home, familiarity, his mom, Ben.

Allison has stuck her bag in the space between herself and Diego and now she's leaning against Klaus, not even bothering to hide that she's begun crying again. Klaus puts an arm around her and hisses; "Dude, freaking apologise" over the top of her head, and Diego crosses his arms and maneuvers so that he can lean into his seat, facing away from Allison.

Facing away from Allison means facing Vanya, who releases one hand from its grip on her violin case and reaches for his, but if anyone touches Diego right now, talks to him, he’s going to start crying himself, and he jerks his hand away and hisses "I don't understand what makes you think it's OK for you to do things like that," and Vanya recoils away from him, pressing herself against the window. As quiet as she is, she’s still close enough that Diego can hear her when she begins weeping softly.

Over the next few hours Diego can hear Allison and Klaus whispering to one another, and Vanya doing her best to cry silently and not entirely succeeding, but no one talks to him and he doesn’t attempt to talk to anyone in return. They disembark from the bus in the middle of a town that Diego forgets the name of seconds after the driver announces it; the kind of place with roadside produce stands boarded up for the winter and giant red barns next to snow-dusted fields aligning the sides of the roads, the likes of which Diego’s seen in paintings but never really thought of as something that exist in reality. It’s all so fucking idyllic, and he immediately hates it. 

Allison disappears briefly and returns with coffee that no one wants but that everyone drinks anyway, trying to force energy into their systems so they can keep going a little longer, a little farther. It fails to strip away any of the exhaustion from Diego's body but it dulls the edge of the anger he’s feeling toward the world at large and his siblings in particular, so when he notices that Allison and Klaus have begun positioning themselves between himself and Vanya his only thought is whatever.  

They change busses, not paying attention to where the next one is going, then repeat the process again, and again, and it’s dark when Allison suggests that they’ve covered enough ground for one day and everyone concurs. What none of them say is that they can’t take anymore, that they want to stop; they’re not allowed to just be exhausted, frightened children who want their home and their mother and somewhere safe and warm and comfortable to sleep without interruption. Allison suggests: "Let's- I don't know, let's find the best hotel we can and I'll get them to give us the most stupidly expensive room they have for free?" Klaus murmurs agreement and Diego and Vanya nod, but the nice part of town, if it exists, isn't in easy walking distance from the bus station and after fifteen minutes they spot a motel under an overpass, half the letters in its 'Vacancy' sign struggling to stay alight, and as they all look at each other Diego knows beyond a doubt that in this moment they may be as unified as they’re ever going to get and that the thought they're all sharing is: ‘Fuck it.’

Diego doesn't even take his shoes off once they’re inside their room, just collapses beside Klaus on one of its two double beds, but in spite being so physically spent that moving any part of his body feels like some distant, theoretical concept, his mind is too noisy, too cluttered, and it’s a long while before sleep claims him.

He wakes up the next morning to the sound of Allison and Klaus talking softly to one another on the other side of the room, and sees by the clock on the nightstand that he’s been asleep for over fourteen hours. It still doesn’t feel like enough, but he sits up anyway, muttering a half-coherent “Morning.” 

“Good timing,” Allison greets him. “Vanya’s gone out and we need to talk before she gets back.”

“Vanya’s gone out?” 

“We need supplies and there’s a grocery store down the street. She volunteered. Go shower, we’ve got maybe half an hour and you smell like Greyhound.” Allison picks up a scratchy motel towel, folded on a bedside table, and throws it at him.

“Yeah, and don’t fall asleep with your shoes on again, dude,” Klaus calls after him as he disappears into the bathroom. “You fall asleep with your shoes on, it’s fair game to draw on you. You’re lucky I’m feeling nice; next time you’re gonna wake up with dicks on your face.”

“You made that rule up,” Allison says, and Diego knows from her tone that this isn’t the first time they’ve had this discussion this morning.

“I did not,” Klaus insists. “It’s like, literally the law or something.”

As he stands under the lukewarm spray of water Diego processes the idea of Vanya volunteering to do something necessary in strange surroundings, tries to think of all the ways it could go wrong. He comes up with nothing, largely from lack of knowledge about how mundane errands actually work, and he for the first time he wonders if his ordinary sister might have somehow acquired at least the beginnings of an ordinary skillset, one that his own status has afforded him the ability to do without. 

He gets dressed in his Academy uniform because he doesn’t have anything else. They’re going to need to do something about this, soon. Diego’s not sure how recognisable he, Allison, or Klaus are without their masks, but the crest proudly announcing his affiliation with the Umbrella Academy to the world can, frankly, go fuck itself. At least, Diego thinks, one advantage of no one knowing or caring who Vanya Hargreeves is is that anyone who notices her coat probably takes her for a sad fangirl.

Diego returns to find Allison and Klaus sitting with forced casualness on the bed where Allison and Vanya slept last night, watching cartoons on the room’s ancient, boxy TV set. He flops down on the opposite bed, arms spread wide. “OK. Let’s talk.”

Allison mutes the TV, once again all business. “Are you gonna take this seriously?”

Diego sits up, grinning insincerely at her. “Look, Allison. This is my taking this seriously face, OK?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. As entertaining as watching you two eviscerate other is,” Klaus says, “we don’t have long and this is important. Both of you, please just chill. Come on now. Take a deep breath, and hold, one, two-.”

“Klaus.” Diego rolls his eyes.

“Do as you’re told.”

It’s so rare for Klaus to take charge like this that Diego feels the only valid response is to comply, and he and Allison take deep, deliberate breaths, eyeing each other warily.

“Good!” Klaus praises. “Another. And another. OK children, are we ready to play nicely now?” Without waiting for an answer, Klaus turns to Diego and says, “Dude. You gotta stop being an asshole to Vanya.”

Oh. 

Diego starts to argue that he hasn’t been an asshole but before he even manages to get any words out, Allison says, “Yeah, we’re not doing that. Klaus and I really don’t wanna spend another day running interference so our sister doesn’t have a panic attack whenever our brother gets near her. It’s not fair to her, and it’s not fun for anyone else.”

“Is this the ‘we all need to get along’ talk?” So much for Klaus’s breathing exercises; any semblance of calm has once again begun to dissipate. “I was wondering when this was coming.”

“No,” Allison says. “It’s the ‘We’re all in this together and we’ve gotta have each other’s backs and I have serious concerns about whether you understand that’ talk.” After a moment, she adds, “Asshole.”

“Since when are you so protective of Vanya, Allison?” Diego counters. “It’s not like you've ever gone out of your way to be nice to her.”

"I am protective of her,” Allison says, and from the way she’s almost spitting out her words, Klaus’s efforts at diplomacy were wasted on her as well, “since she was brave enough to take off with us, just like how I'd be protective of Klaus or even you if I needed to be. Jesus, Di."

Allison has a point, damn her, but Diego’s not done arguing. He turns on Klaus -Klaus, who probably doesn’t deserve it, but who can’t be allowed to escape Diego’s anger unscathed, now that it’s been activated. “Hey, what about you? Maybe you haven’t been that shitty to Vanya but you’ve always seemed pretty happy to let it happen when someone else was being an asshole without getting involved.”

Klaus shrugs. “You’re right,” he says, simply. “And now I am getting involved. What are you gonna do about it? Like, listen to yourself dude. Are you arguing for the right to be as much of an asshole to your sister as you want? Each one of us has exactly three other people in the world we can count on right now, and for Vanya one of those three is someone she’s scared of, and who isn’t doing anything to make her any less scared of him. Is that what you want?” He stares at Diego, waiting for his answer, but for once, Diego doesn’t have one, and his silence trails on for an uncomfortably long moment. “Anyway,” Klaus continues at last, “Vanya’s pretty OK, in her own way. You’ve gotta be willing to meet her halfway is all.”

Diego doesn’t necessarily have trouble believing this. What he’s not sure of is what meeting Vanya halfway would look like, whether it’s worth the effort of going even that far to meet in whatever middle ground exists between them. 

Allison nods at Klaus approvingly, leans across the gap between herself and Diego, placing her hands on her knees as she looks him in the face. "Also," she says, "don't tell me you've forgotten what started this already. Do you think Ben would be impressed with how you're acting right now?"

Allison’s right, again, and she knows it, and Diego knows that this won’t be enough for her; she's always been willing to hold being right over people until they're exhausted into submission. And then there's the other thing about Allison, the aspect of being her brother that makes arguing with her ultimately pointless-

"Why haven't you just, you know, made me stop?"

At that, Allison just sighs and rolls her eyes up toward the ceiling as Klaus laughs. "Oh, believe me, I wanted to. Someone asked me not to, though." She prods Klaus in the shoulder. "Someone has this idea that you and I can both be better than that. "

"I mean." Klaus shrugs. "It's what I think Ben would have thought. I may or may not be convinced, you’re both pretty terrible when you wanna be.”  

Well, fuck. 

"Also-” Allison begins to speak in a rush, as if she’s resolved to say something that she doesn’t necessarily want to say and needs to get out before she talks herself out of it. “I’d kinda prefer if we could get along?” She bites her upper lip and looks at Klaus in a very un-Allison like way, as though asking him for validation that she’s not being stupid, being childish, and he reaches out and squeezes her hand, nodding reassurance.

Diego’s spared from having to say anything in response by the click of a key and a rush of frosty air as Vanya opens the door. Klaus jumps up and hugs her before she’s even had a chance to close it or put down the plastic bags she’s carrying. “VANYA! You survived your trek through the frozen wasteland and we are oh-so-grateful for your heroic efforts. Did you get Pop-Tarts?” He releases her and takes the bags from her, setting them down on the floor while Vanya takes off her coat. 

“Yeah, I did.”

“Oh my GOD Vanya. Blueberry?”

“Blueberry, yeah.” Diego notices how she’s resolutely not looking at him, how she hovers behind Klaus until he moves closer to where Diego and Allison are sitting.

“And did you get the permanent marker like I asked?”

“The permanent marker wasn’t on the list,” Allison says, as though that settles the matter.

“Oh well if it wasn’t on the list.” Klaus begins rifling through one of the bags. “Come on, Pop-Tarts- OH FUCK, Frosted Flakes, Vanya, you are the best.” Klaus’s exuberance over refined sugar is sincere but lost on Vanya, who still gives off an air of frightened prey, knowing that the best she can hope for is that these predators will get distracted by something else before they pounce on her. 

Allison pats the spot next to her. “Come on, Van. We need to have a family meeting.”

“I thought we just-” Diego starts, but Allison aims a kick at his shin that’s more painful than it strictly needs to be to get his attention and mouths “Shut up, dumbass.”

Klaus sits next to Diego and stuffs several handfuls of Frosted Flakes into his mouth before passing the box to him, and despite Allison’s insistence that they need to talk the four of them spend a few minutes ripping into boxes of preservative-laden cereal that tastes like nothing short of pre-packaged, overly-processed salvation, eating it with their bare hands. 

“OK so,” Allison says, finally. “Meeting time. Unless anyone has any objections?” Her eyes flick over to Diego, who pretends not to notice. “Cool. So like- first order of business. Is anyone planning on taking off and doing their own thing in the immediate future? Because now that we’re out there’s no reason anyone who wants to can’t.” She looks at Vanya, Klaus, Diego in turn.

Diego hasn’t really thought of this until now. Does he want to be done with his siblings, all of them? He loves them all, yes, but is that love enough to make him want to be around them for an indefinite amount of time?

“No,” Klaus says vehemently.

“No,” Vanya echoes.

“Good,” Allison says. “Me neither. Diego?”

Everyone’s looking at him, now. “No pressure, Di,” Klaus says gently. “No one’s making anyone do anything else.”

What Diego said in Allison’s room the night before last still holds; he’s spent most of the last few days not wanting to be around anyone and the idea of not having to be still feels like a luxury, a luxury that’s gone from distant and theoretical to one immediately his for the taking. He could just walk out the door, severing his last links to the Academy, to Reginald, to that final, horrific mission that took Ben.

But that’s it. Diego may not want to be around any of his siblings a lot of the time but in his moments of weakness he needs to know that he’s not the only one who feels the way he does, the only one who has his reasons for feeling this way. He’s second, in this as in all things, to Luther, who’s made it clear that he doesn’t need the rest of them, but Luther’s not here to observe his defects and neither is their father, and so (just this once , he swears to himself) he gives himself permission to surrender to mediocrity without a fight. 

“No,” he says. “I said I was in, I’m in.”

“Good.” Allison’s smile is surprisingly genuine. “Next order of business,” she continues. “If we're done with the Academy we need to be really done. No more numbers. No more rankings. None of us have any idea what we’re doing anyway but we’re all on the same team, OK?” 

Vanya’s starting to fade, to shrink into herself in that way that Diego’s not sure is really deliberate but that nevertheless makes it so easy for people to gloss over the fact that she’s there, but- “All four of us,” Allison adds deliberately, and she moves closer to Vanya to link her arm with hers, but it’s Diego she stares at. “We’re all here, and we’re all any of us have got- agreed?"

Klaus and Diego mutter their agreement. Vanya doesn't say anything, and Allison reaches with her free hand to touch her on the shoulder. "You belong here, Van. OK?"

Vanya nods, without breaking her stare from where it’s fixed on some point on the floor.

"Good." Allison resumes addressing everyone. "I gotta say- how awesome are we? We made it this far, I think we're all kinda badass." She's echoing Diego's own assessment of her back to him, and he recognises it for the peace offering that it is.

Fine. He’ll play.

"Super badass," he agrees, and Allison smiles to herself in satisfaction.

No one says anything for a few minutes, their focus returned to passing junk food back and forth, and when Allison begins to speak again Diego braces himself; there's only so much forcefully earnest encouragement he can tolerate in the space of a single morning.  

"Is it bad," she asks, then stares at her fingernails for such a long moment that Diego thinks she's changed her mind about whatever she's going to say, but then she speaks again and he's struck by how she suddenly sounds younger; as though she’s no longer monitoring anyone for their reaction, not performing at all. "Is it bad that I kind of feel like I could fall asleep again right now?"

Diego doesn't always like Allison but since, as she said, they're all here, they're all any of them have got, he gives her what she needs to hear from someone else in an effort to prove that he’s capable of doing more than stirring up conflict. "Nah, it's not bad. We don't have anywhere we need to be. If you wanna sleep, sleep.”

"OK." And with that Allison releases Vanya's arm and curls up on her side, leaving Diego, Klaus and Vanya looking blankly at one another. 

That makes it easier for the rest of them. None of the Hargreeves siblings have ever had such an expanse of unstructured time facing them, and overwhelmed by the unfamiliarity, it’s simply easier to not be conscious of the world around them. The four of them pass the rest of the day drifting in and out of sleep, sustaining themselves on supplies from Vanya's grocery run, promising each other that once they get through today they’ll move somewhere more comfortable, more luxurious, take advantage of Allison’s power because if they have no idea what they’re doing from here, surely it might as well be somewhere with room service and a jacuzzi? But they wake up the next morning to discover that the initial momentum of leaving the Academy has not replenished itself, that now that they’ve allowed themselves time to pause the act of moving on from this dreary little safe-haven is, for the moment, too daunting, that no one wants to do much of anything beyond sleep and watch TV and whisper, "This still feels too easy."

Living in such close proximity to his siblings brings to light details that Diego’s never had occasion to notice before. He learns that when Allison makes the abrupt shift from poised and collected to sounding like she’s about to cry it means that it’s imperative that someone gently guides her to the conclusion that she needs to rest, and that if that someone is him it’s usually an abject failure, culminating in harsh words and sulking on both sides. From Vanya’s interactions with Klaus, less precise and guarded with him than with anyone else, and very occasionally with Allison, Diego begins to realise that her mind is quick, observant, and restless, and that she has a sense of humour that she rarely exhibits but which is pointed and fluently sarcastic. He notices that once a day, at least, Klaus disappears, refusing to tell anyone where he’s going, that he’s never away long, and that when he returns his eyes are glassy and unfocused and that he cannot or will not answer questions. Once, slumped onto the floor against the door after coming back from one of these excursions he buries his face in his hands and says, “This was supposed to work. I don’t know what to do, anymore.” Diego and Allison, half-watching some nature documentary that neither of them really care about exchange looks- surely someone should do something, but what? But it’s Vanya who puts down the book she’s reading (one of Ben’s favourites, half the pages still sticky with orange juice he spilled on it one careless morning just a few weeks ago) and slides down on the floor beside Klaus, not speaking, not touching him, just quietly existing at his side until Klaus collapses against her and says, “When does everything stop being pointless bullshit, Van?” 

Allison and Diego look at Vanya who nods at them; her message clear: Be here with us, please. A few seconds later they’re down on the floor, Diego on Klaus’s side opposite Vanya, Allison facing him, awkwardly patting his knee. 

The last time the four of them ended up like this was pure instinct, desperately clinging to one another in the darkness of Allison’s room, still sick from the bile of Reginald’s speech at Ben’s funeral in the back of their throats. This time it’s deliberate; one of their number is hurting and though Diego and his sisters may not understand what Klaus needs, it’s unacceptable that he should suffer alone.

Taking things on faith has never been one of Diego’s strengths and until now, if pressed, he’d have said that he didn’t have much faith in the four of them as a team. Perhaps there’s a way to work around that, though- like Allison said, they’re all they’ve got. There’s no other option than for that to be enough, and so Diego decides that that’s going to be enough, with all of the inelegant brute force of someone who lacks faith but possesses stubbornness in abundance.  

After an hour or so of sitting without speaking, without anyone making any sound at all save for someone occasionally shifting to a more comfortable position, Diego realises that Klaus’s and Allison’s breathing has become deep and regular, Klaus still half-laying against Vanya, Allison using his knee as a pillow. Vanya’s eyes are open but she won’t be able to move without disturbing Klaus and though her position isn’t overly cramped or awkward she’s still closest to the door, and consequently the icy draft coming in from under it. “Just getting blankets,” Diego whispers as he stands up. “Want a pillow?” Vanya nods, and he returns a moment later, passing her a pillow before he drapes a blanket over her and Klaus, then another over Allison. He makes another trip back, grabbing a towel, then comes back to stuff it under the door.

He could go now and be marginally more comfortable sleeping on the shitty motel mattress, and it's not like he'd be doing anyone any favors by putting himself through unnecessary discomfort, but when he's honest with himself, Diego just doesn't want to separate himself from his siblings right now. Besides, there's a conversation he wants to have. If Vanya will have it.

He stretches out in the remaining space between Vanya and the door. "Van?" he whispers. "Can we talk?"

Vanya takes so long to answer that Diego thinks she's fallen asleep, that the moment may have passed, but finally she whispers back, "Yeah, OK.”

He shifts, trying to get comfortable on the floor. ”Th- This is gonna-” He sighs, tries again. “I'm sorry, Vanya. Re- really, I am. For everything. I get it if you d- don’t want this, but it'd be good to have a shot at really being your brother. If y- If you want."

As soon as the words are out he feels stupid, disgusted with himself for his sentimentality, but he forgets that when the answer comes in the form of Vanya's hand reaching for his, the soft simplicity of her "OK," without hesitation, without condition.

"I'm glad you're here with us, Van," he whispers.

The last thing Diego is aware of before sleep takes him is Vanya whispering: "I'm glad you're here, too."

Diego wakes hours later to Allison yanking his blanket off of him, saying: "I swear, the next time any of you let me fall asleep on the floor when there's an actual bed nearby I will end you." She punctuates this by leaning down to jab Diego in the ribs before she pulls the pillow out from under Vanya's head.

In retaliation, Diego reaches out and grabs her ankle and yanks, pulling her to the floor, saying, "Be prepared to get on my level if you're gonna fight dirty like that Al" and she shrieks and launches herself at him, pulling at his hair, grabbing his ears and twisting, using every obnoxious sibling trick in her repertoire. Vanya backs herself into the corner near them, maintaining her distance from Diego and Allison’s half-playful fight but giggling cautiously.

"Hey Di?" Allison asks.

"Yeah?"

"I heard a rumor that you went outside and stuck your head in the snow- oh my God put your shoes on first you dumbass."

He’s aware of Allison, Klaus, and Vanya’s faces pressed against the window as he does as Allison’s ordered, and he’s going to destroy her for this, really, he is, but he’s still laughing when he comes back inside and keeps it up through the requisite round of mutual assurances that there will be no apologies ever, on either side.

“Anyway,” Allison says. "I was thinking we've been here long enough. Let's get out of this shithole?"

And in the end that's what it takes to break the stagnation that was threatening started to settle upon them, like the four of them no longer need to take great care to move past one another lest they risk shaking the foundations of what they've begun to build in a way it can't recover from. 

"Yeah," Diego agrees. "Yeah, let's do this."

Chapter Text

Later, Vanya remembers her second week of freedom as time mostly spent following Allison and Klaus around an endless, exhausting array of clothing stores, unsure which of them is worse to go on these excursions with. Allison traverses malls with the same brutal efficiency that she uses to approach anything once she’s decided it’s necessary; Klaus is more patient than Allison is but the questions he asks are more intimidating; at least 'which one do you like more?' when presented with two jackets, identical except for colour, means Vanya can simply point at random, but Klaus insists on saying things like: "You get to have an identity now! What do you want it to be?"

"I don't know. Do I have to?" she asks desperately, and Klaus looks at her with a mixture of confusion and concern that Vanya doesn't entirely understand and says, "Oh, Vanny." A second later she’s overwhelmed by the smell of old leather and stale pot smoke as Klaus hugs her, her face mashed into the shoulder of his thrift-store jacket, hugging back through her surprose.

(Aesthetic, image- they’re important to Klaus in a way Vanya doesn’t really get, but when Diego corners her and Allison and says; “If anyone gives Klaus a hard time for the skirts or makeup or anything we destroy them, got it?” Vanya had nods fervently, so caught up in this sudden unity of purpose that she doesn't even think to be intimidated by the idea of confrontation. Allison just looks at him and says; “Duh?”)

They stuff their Academy uniforms into a garbage bag and fling it into a dumpster behind a McDonalds. Allison raises her middle finger and Diego spits on top of it, and Klaus is halfway through an impassioned eulogy when a uniformed employee sticks her head out the back door and yells at them, and suddenly, Allison is clutching Vanya's arm and saying, "Move, come on!" and Vanya's letting herself be pulled along- she's the slowest runner in the group but that doesn't matter when Allison starts giggling and it spreads through the rest of them, forcing them to slow down to catch their breath two blocks away. Sunlight is glinting off of the snow on the ground and it’s so iridescent, so bright that it hurts to look at it and the world isn’t safe or easy or kind, it might never be, but for the moment they’ve won, they've won, and her siblings are being loud and obnoxious and undignified and the entirety of existence is hilarious. 

Maybe being their sister is always going to feel like this, Vanya thinks, being pulled along at a pace she can’t quite keep up with, unsure where they’re going, but right now it feels good, it feels like they want her here, and isn’t that enough? Ever since the morning they slipped out of the Academy she’s been bracing herself for the moment when they realise that they’ve made a mistake in including her, and it hasn’t come, and it’s kept not coming, and it’s only now she begins to allow herself to think that maybe, maybe, it hasn’t come because it’s not going to. 

It's been nearly a month since they left now, and sometimes a stranger will double-take and nudge whoever they’re with, their conversation inaudible but obvious all the same- “Isn’t that…?” as they try to pretend that they’re not staring, but then they always seem to shrug and walk away. Even though Vanya has the least reason to fear being recognised she’s poured so much of herself into never committing the cardinal sin of being noticeable that she’s primed to be on the lookout for it happening, so when she spots a gaggle of boys whispering feverishly to one another as they eye Diego, oblivious to their presence while he judges the merits of two different brands of microwave popcorn, she feels the panic that never lets her get very far from its reach trailing its feather-light touch across the back of her neck, not drawing her into its embrace yet but reminding her that it’s there, it’s there, did you think that if you were quiet enough I’d overlook you, you naive child? When has that ever, ever worked?

Except, except, of all of the things Vanya’s afraid of -and there are so, so many of them- anything that could result in Reginald finding out where they are is at their apex, and this is the catalyst she needs to achieve something she’s never been able to do before: she tells her encroaching panic: no, and she imbues the warning with so much force that it listens. It’s temporary, Vanya knows, any respite is only ever temporary, but all she needs is for it to retreat long enough that she can arm herself with an air of vitality and confidence that she does not feel while she bounces up to Diego and says, loudly: “Michael!”

Diego gapes at her and just this once Vanya wants to snap at him, to tell him to keep the hell up, but instead she grins with so much force that it makes her face hurt as she repeats: “Michael! Remember me? Kate? Kate Ferris?”

“Kate?” Diego echoes blankly.

“From art camp?” Vanya prompts, and finally, finally, Diego gets it and says, “Oh right, Kate," his voice so saturated with artificial surprise that Vanya is grateful that they’re only trying to fool children who can’t be older than ten. 

Diego laughs as he recounts the incident to Allison and Klaus back in their would-be-expensive-if-they-were-actually-paying-for-them set of adjoining hotel rooms. “I mean,” he finishes, “next time maybe pick something cooler than art camp, Van? But other than that, you kicked ass.  

She holds onto this praise for hours, only half-wishing she could stop turning it over and over in her mind, and it wouldn't hurt, she thinks, it wouldn’t, but there’s something about the way anything complimentary Diego says to her, about her, always carries with it an air of revelation…

She doesn't say anything. Not then, anyway. Somehow, the impossible has begun to solidify into reality and the four of them as a unit have begun to make sense, and Vanya’s not willing to be the one to break that.

The easy comfort in each other’s presence that’s been forming is threatened one afternoon when Allison comes back from what she vaguely referred to as 'errands,' exhibiting that telltale bounce in her step that indicates that she's pleased with herself. "So we're basically rich," she announces, and any peace that may have been developing between herself and Diego shatters when she explains what she’s done.

“I’m not saying-” Diego says from the next room, for at least the fifth time, an hour later. “I’m not saying I have a problem with you going out and using your power to -what was it you said the guy was?”

“A corrupt pharmaceutical executive,” Allison says, sounding politely bored. “He’s a piece of shit. Look, I can show you, check out this magazine arti-”

Again, for at least the fifth time, Diego cuts her off. “The point isn’t how shitty the guy is, the point is that if you’re gonna pull something like that you need to talk to us first. You don’t get to-”

Klaus turns up the volume on the TV, which doesn’t drown them out but at least gives Vanya another sound to focus her attention on. “You OK?” he asks.

Vanya shrugs. She was always aware that Allison and Diego's tolerance of one another was flimsy, even before Ben's death, and maybe it was naive to hope that it could be fortified by a few weeks away from the Academy. "Should we…” she gestures at the next room where a fresh round of arguing is beginning, hoping that the answer is no even as she says it.

Luck -or at least Klaus’s lack of willingness to involve himself in what he refers to as ‘Diego and Allison bullshit’- is Vanya’s side. “Oh, fuck no." Klaus shakes his head. "Sometimes those two have arguments where it’s better to intervene, but trust your dear brother when he says that no good will come of trying now.”

“But they’re so-” So what? Angry, bitter, repetitive? 

Klaus tilts his head and scrutinises her, and Vanya tenses. “OK," he says, after a moment. "Thought experiment time. Let’s say I go in there and tell them to break it up. What happens?”

“They stop fighting?”

“Oh, Vanya.” Klaus shakes his head. “Sweet, sweet Vanya, no. Trust me when I say that no good will come of getting involved in their bullshit now. It's not that martyrdom wouldn't look sexy on me -because it absolutely would- but it's not worth it."

"But-"

"Look." Klaus shifts closer to where Vanya's sitting on the floor, placing one hand on each of her shoulders and looking her square in the eye. Part of her wants to bolt from being at the focus of his attention, even though she finds Klaus as non-threatening as she's capable of finding anyone, even though she has nowhere to bolt to. "The best that would happen is I’m stuck listening to Allison bitch about Diego, or Diego bitch about Allison, and you’re saddled with the other one, and they haven’t gotten it out of their systems and they pick up where they left off and it's lather-rinse-repeat ad infinitum. No, dear Vanya, better to let them get over themselves while we enjoy one another’s delightful company and catch up on cultural milestones that were denied to us for so long.” He gestures at the TV where series of cartoon landscapes begin to display on the screen while a young girl narrates their history in voiceover. “Let’s see what wisdom Uncle Iroh has for us, shall we?"

In the end, it's as Klaus predicted and Vanya feels a stab of guilt for not giving him more credit. The argument burns itself out; to Vanya’s astonishment Allison and Diego come back into the room and Allison stands in front of them, rolling her eyes but saying, “I’m sorry. I should have talked to everyone before I did that."

Later that night, lurking around the door of their ensuite while she brushes her teeth and Vanya digs through her bag, Allison says; “I said I was sorry for not talking to everyone first and I am but I’m still not sorry I did it to the guy."

Vanya's not certain whether Allison's confiding this in her because she trusts her or if it's because she correctly assumes that Vanya isn't brave enough to repeat what she’s saying to Klaus or Diego and risk restarting the argument; she's not even sure how much of a problem she should have with Allison’s actions, but she’s just realised that she’s down to her last dose of medication and that now isn’t the time to start pissing her sister off. She waits for Allison to come back into the room, holds out the bottle, and says, “I’m going to need more of these. Can you- will you help?”

Allison reads the label, and as she does her frown of confusion metamorphosises into concern. “OK,” Allison says. “I don’t know what this is, but-”

“It’s for. You know. Anxiety.”

“Hmmm.” Allison continues to scrutinise the label. “Look I don’t wanna overstep, but…" She looks back at Vanya, and at any other time the kindness in her expression would be welcome, but somehow even acknowledging the medication is prodding at something that Vanya’s mind long-ago labeled untouchable, and she just wants to stop talking about it. "Are you sure these help?" Allison asks. "I mean… you’re so jumpy all the time. If you wanna talk to a doctor or something to see if something else might be better…”

Vanya shakes her head. “If there was anything better, Dad would have had me on it.”

Allison makes a contemplative hmmm noise and frowns. "Do Klaus and Diego know about these?"

"Maybe? No? I don't know, really. It's never come up. I mean, I've always been on them…"

"... Always?"

"For a long time, I mean. I was maybe four when I started?"

Allison swears softly, and the only thing Vanya can think of is to say, "...sorry."

"What? Why are you apologising? Look. I'll go out first thing, but if you wanna keep talking to a doctor on the table…"

"...Maybe," Vanya says again, not because she thinks it's likely that she'll change her mind -she can barely deal with people she knows, involving a stranger in something that feels like she’s committing an act of heresy just by acknowledging it is out of the question- but in case this is one of the times when it's easier to let Allison think there's a chance of things going the way she wants them to go. "You don't have to be part of this," she says in a rush. "I mean, I do need more pills, but-"

"What if I want to be part of it?"

After a moment in which Vanya just looks at her sister, unable to answer, feeling overwhelmingly stupid and dull and sure that once again, she’s disappointing someone, Allison sighs and retreats to climb into her bed. 

She’s not sure how much time passes before her sister's voice disrupts her descent into sleep.

"I get it," Allison says. "I wouldn't trust me, either, if I were you."

Allison goes out the next morning and returns before anyone else is awake, with a full bottle of Vanya’s medication and the news that she’s found their potential next destination through overhearing a conversation between a couple in line in front of her in the Starbucks where she stopped for coffee on the way back; some minor celebrity’s assistant’s weekend getaway, newly on the rental market thanks to its owner's realisation that using it required time and the desire to be there that she simply didn’t have.

“All ours, if we want it,” Allison says, after finishing her pitch. “It’s not like I love the idea of being out in the middle of nowhere but it’s got a lot of space and there aren’t many people around so Diego can do whatever he wants with knives without traumatising innocent bystanders and Vanya can play her violin, and… Look, I wouldn’t mind not freaking out about being recognised every ten seconds? And maybe it’d be nice to be somewhere quiet. Have a break from, you know, people.”

“I already told you,” Diego says. “Without the stupid-ass uniforms and stupid-ass masks nobody pays attention to us. You don’t need to freak out; you’re not that interesting.”

And so, two days, a train, a bus, and a fifteen minute walk from what could charitably be called a town later and past the only neighbouring house, a comfortably ramshackle white one with a mailbox bearing the name ‘Cooper’ at the end of the driveway, Vanya and her siblings find themselves standing in front of it; a weathered little two-story home with a wraparound porch and pile of firewood leaning against one of the outdoor walls. It’s barely warmer inside than out, at first, and it’s dark, and quiet; it feels like it’s been still and silent for too long, but after half an of turning on lights and heat and and claiming bedrooms, of locating a stereo in a cupboard and desperately searching for a radio station, any radio station, that’s playing something other than Christmas music, Vanya looks around, takes in the old, mismatched furniture, the fireplace where Diego is prodding at a pile of logs and swearing to himself, of the last dregs of winter sunlight illuminating the trees outside, and for the first time it occurs to her that it’s possible to feel affection for a house and not just think of it as a place to exist in.

They realise belatedly that they’ve forgotten to make plans for Christmas, forgotten to decide if they wanted to acknowledge Christmas at all, and so on their first full day there they barely do anything and it’s still one of the best days of Vanya’s life. It’s so hard to be afraid of her brothers and sister when they’re like this; wearing pyjamas well into the afternoon, sprawled on a pile of cushions stolen from couches and bedrooms and closets, watching endless rounds of the same holiday specials until they know the words to every last godawful song in all of them and eating nothing but Nutella straight from a jar passed around between the four of them. The thought Ben should be here hovers in the back of her mind -it’s loudest whenever Vanya’s most at ease with her brothers and sister- and it’s not fair that he’s not here, it’s not, but just now she loves the family she has left with less complication than she thought possible, and when she falls asleep that night her entire being permeated with woodsmoke and songs about reindeer and snowmen and grinches swirling in her head, her last thought is that maybe she can make peace with holding onto both of those ideas at once.

Without a schedule beyond Allison’s occasional benign bullying about whose turn it is to wash the dishes the days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve blend together with a warm, sleepy contentedness. Vanya returns to her violin with something approaching a feeling of penance, at first -she’s barely had a chance to play, since leaving the Academy, and before that she can’t remember the last time she went a day without practicing- spending a few minutes running her fingers over it and whispering, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” before launching into playing with joy; keeping it up for hours and stopping only when Diego knocks on her door and asks if she wants dinner, saying, “You know, I don’t know shit about music, but you’re good.”

How can you say that I’m good when you don’t know shit about music? she wonders, but she follows him down the stairs humming to herself, and she says nothing.

Later, she's reading on the pile of cushions that seem to have become a permanent fixture in front of the fireplace, with Klaus a few feet away, unsure whether he’s awake, when he resolves the question by rolling over to face her. “You know," he says, as though he's continuing a conversation rather than breaking a half-hour's silence, "sometimes I wonder if you don’t hate all of us and you’re just really good at hiding it.” 

Vanya's not bothered by Klaus's conversational idiosyncrasies; there’s generally a sort of internal logic to the things he says and does and he's not so very hard to understand with proper context and with willingness to make an effort. She thinks she's begun to feel something forming here; a silent accord between the two family disappointments to look out for one another to the best of their dubious abilities that started on their last night at the Academy, when they drank to Ben’s memory and whispered to one another in the darkness of Allison’s bedroom.

The looming spectre of her father's ridicule speaks, then: You've never been capable of offering anything of value to offer your siblings before, Number Seven, what on earth has possessed you to think that that can change? but she looks at her brother, hollow-cheeked and perennially exhausted, the remnants of yesterday's makeup making his eyes look enormous, almost ethereal, and- 

She's not brave enough to tell Reginald, even the idea of Reginald to fuck off (no matter how much she wants to and oh, God she wants to) but while the thought of what he'd say if he could see her is almost enough to paralyse her, Klaus is here and Reginald is not, and a protectiveness that's been lying dormant for years, for her entire life, maybe, begins to bubble under the surface of her ever-present fear and hesitation, as though having something to feel protective of is all that was needed to activate it. 

"No," she says, "I don't hate any of you."

"You could, though,” Klaus says. “I'd hate us, if I were you."

This isn't a new consideration, and the thought that follows, that she's not sure whether not hating them is a matter of conscious choice or lack of conviction, isn't new either. Still, the casual way Klaus is offering up the possibility of hating their brother and sister, of hating him, makes something inside of her twist in a way that she can’t overlook, and she says, "Well. I don't."

What she doesn't say, doesn't see the point in saying, is that she was close to hating them, all of them, on the day of that wretched excuse for a funeral, close to indulging in the satisfaction of something she'd flirted with but hadn't yet committed to. Five was gone, Ben was dead, and her relationships with the rest of them were marked with indifference, at best. Hating them might be easier than the confused blend of affection and gratitude and resentment she feels now, but they’d looked at their situation, her situation, and they had said enough, and they’d folded her in amongst themselves, and here she is: hiding from the world, mourning one brother and keeping up her vigil of silent worry for two more, and still, somehow, feeling safer than she ever has in her life. Vanya knows that Allison's regular reminder - we're all we've got- is meant to be cautionary but to her it feels like reassurance; the three of them, these siblings she was so close to despising but who threw her off-course just when she was about to cross that line, they're the only people she has to contend with. 

Something about laying here, the lazy warmth emanating out of the fireplace, the knowledge that there are only three people around for hundreds of miles who know or care who Vanya Hargreeves is and that none of them are her father makes it easier to speak candidly about something that’s been weighing on her mind. “I thought Diego hated me, for a while. But…” 

This is still uncharted territory, though, and she only feels safe enough to take a few steps into it. Her siblings complain about one another freely, to each other and to her (Diego in particular seems determined to bond with her by bitching about Allison), but she’s shied away from anything that could even accidentally be interpreted as doing the same thing herself; for all of their insistence that she’s one of them none of them feel the need to offer that assurance to anyone else and that in itself marks her as other. She turns her head to look at Klaus, trying to gauge how badly she might have misstepped, but he just says, "Oh, Vanny,” and reaches out to tuck a loose piece of her hair behind her ear, smiling fondly as he does it. “The thing about Diego is that the dude’s not that complicated. Once you’re in with him, you’re in.”

“And I’m in?” she asks, wondering where the fine print is, the inevitable no, you are not, and you never will be.

“Yeah, you’re in. You have been for a while. Doesn’t mean he won’t throw a tantrum at you sometimes, but he does that to everyone.” Vanya’s mulling this over when Klaus adds, “Doesn’t mean he has to be in with you.”

Klaus never goes long without initiating physical contact with someone if they don’t do it first, as if he needs a counterweight to the things that only he can see, needs to tether himself to the physical world. Vanya rolls over so that she’s close enough to rest her head against his shoulder, closing her eyes as she feels his arm go around her, drawing her close enough that she can hear the rhythm of his heart, wondering, idly if she’s not as touch-starved as he is.

“I never said thank you,” he says, after another period of sleepy silence. “For that night. At the motel. I guess… This is me saying it now. Thank you.”

“How’s it going?” Vanya asks. “With everything not being hopeless bullshit?”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

Klaus starts to say something, then goes quiet, but then he starts again: “Enh. You know how it is. At least no one’s ever gonna lock me in a mausoleum again, so how bad can anything else be?”

For a second Vanya wonders if this is one of Klaus’s typically tasteless jokes, but no, there’s none of his bouncy bravado overlying what he’s saying, just subdued, vulnerable honesty. “Holy shit,” she says, then, “holy shit. I’m- I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“How could you? I never told you.” 

“OK, but- in a mausoleum? Klaus, why?”

“Exposure therapy," Klaus says.

“You mean-”

“Mmmm.” Klaus moves one of his arms, adjusting their positions so that he can play with Vanya’s hair. “Well-adjusted, pleasant people don’t tend to stick around as ghosts, see. A lot of them just want someone to scream at, and they don’t give a shit if that person’s only eight years old.”

“How was that supposed to make you less afraid of them?” 

“Fuck knows. Maybe the entire point was to just make me stop whining about them.”

This makes an appalling amount of sense considering Reginald’s need for his children to be competent, or, at the very least, compliant, and Vanya feels her understanding of her brother’s existence begin to rearrange itself. She’s never had any illusion that Klaus’ power is anything less than horrifying but she’s also always assumed that having a power, any power, being part of the team, would have made up for that. 

Surely.

It’s too much to think about for now, so she focuses on holding onto Klaus, trying to convey the message with her presence; I am here, you have me, you have all of us, he won’t hurt you again, I’m here, I’m here. 

Hours later, Vanya extracts herself from the pile of cushions and the tangle of Klaus’ limbs as carefully as she can. It's so early that the sun hasn’t yet risen and the embers from last night’s fire are casting a peaceful glow over her brother’s face and she sits there, watching him, last night’s promises still playing in her mind; I’m here, I’m here.

Klaus doesn’t refer to this conversation again, and so neither does Vanya, but the desire to anchor him, protect him, doesn’t diminish, nor does she try to convince herself that it’s futile.

On the last day of the year, Vanya returns to her room, violin in hand, after playing on the porch until the temperature, dropping steadily throughout the day finally drives her inside. The sound coming from across the hall is so soft that she wonders if she heard it at all, but only for a second- Vanya’s no stranger to trying-to-be-silent crying.

Allison's given no indication that she's in a crying mood, either today or any day at all, since the day of that first, hateful Greyhound trip, sobbing against Klaus even as the two of them formed a barrier between Vanya and Diego. It’s none of Vanya’s business, though; Allison does things on her own terms and if she's shut herself off from the rest of them it's because she wants to be shut off, but-

Really? something in her says. How many times did you cry alone in your room, wishing someone would give a shit?

That's me though, Vanya argues desperately. Allison's different she-

-She’s stronger than you are? Is that what you were going to say?

Isn't she, though?

Then how bad does whatever this is have to be?

It's a strange feeling, Vanya thinks, calling bullshit on her own thoughts, and she doesn’t want to do what she’s about to do, but- It’s not as if she has a choice, is it? And if she does, how can she let herself be the kind of person who’d make any choice other than the one she knows she’s going to make?

When she knocks on Allison's door the answer comes before Vanya even has a chance to speak, a vehement "No."

"OK," Vanya says, and moves to retreat to her own room, but then Allison's door opens.

"Vanya?" 

Vanya turns to see Allison, half-visible through the crack in the door. "Hey."

"Can you…" Allison's voice falters. "I guess you can come in? If you want?"

Vanya's not sure she does want to come in, but she knows things about Allison now that she didn't a month ago, and one of these is that this is the closest her sister is ever going to come to asking anyone for anything when she's upset. "Yeah, sure," Vanya says. "If you want me to?"

Allison doesn't say anything, just moves back from the door, leaving it open. Vanya takes this as an indication that she should follow, closing the door behind her.

Allison looks terrible. Her hair's in the same ponytail it was in yesterday, judging by its unkempt deterioration, and her cheeks are shiny with tears and snot, her eyes puffy and red. She sits down on the floor, halfway between the door and her bed, hugging her knees to her chest as she takes a deep breath, and- "Sorry," she blurts.

"Why?" Vanya asks carefully, choosing a spot on the floor, close enough to reach out but not so close that she feels she's encroaching on Allison's space, hoping that she’s calibrated correctly.

Allison shrugs. "I don't know?” she asks. “I'm not supposed to be… Like this?"

"Like what?"

"Oh God, I don't even know." Allison exhales, a pent-up breath of confused frustration. "You'd think if someone chose Dad over us it'd be easier to just hate them?"

Oh.

"I mean." Vanya is suddenly very conscious of Allison's edict that no one is to mention Luther in her presence and so she aims to remain within the realm of the hypothetical. "You'd have to have cared about that person a lot to have it hurt that much. And I’m pretty sure you can’t just turn hating someone on like that, just because it’d be easier."

Allison just stares at a fixed point on the wall. Her voice is still wavering but now there’s an edge of anger as well as she says: "I shouldn't even be... I said I didn't want anyone to talk about… You know. It's stupid if I can't stick to that rule."

"If you want to talk about, you know. Anything," Vanya ventures, "No one else needs to know."

Allison’s silence stretches for so long that Vanya begins to wonder if she missed some kind of signal, if she's been dismissed, but at last she says: "Fuck him, you know? Fuck Luther. What the hell kind of leader doesn't stick with his team, after what happened? How could he agree with Dad? I know you weren't there but what happened wasn't because we didn't try hard enough, Van, it wasn't."

Comprehension begins begin trickle in, filling the cracks in Vanya's understanding of her sister. Until now the thought that it was apparently so easy for Allison to cut Luther off frightened her; the two of them had been a unit unto themselves, elite, unencroachable. "I don't know," she says. She doesn't understand why Luther made the choice he made, but nothing about Luther, the most distant of all of her siblings, was ever for her to understand. He was always the one who neither showed her any particular cruelty nor offered any notable kindness; she was afraid of him but only in the general sense that she was -is- afraid of most people most of the time. She's worried about him, since leaving -the idea of anyone being alone under Reginald's authority is enough to make Vanya panicky if she thinks about it for too long- and she remembers the desperation, the sadness in his voice the last night they were around each other, the way he said "There's probably no point in asking you to-" before Allison had cut him off, saying, " Don't," as he'd hugged her goodbye. Vanya would say she was disappointed in him, but the idea of her, Vanya, being disappointed in Luther, is absurd; the last thing that could matter to him would be her disappointment, and the last thing he could ever need would be her concern for his wellbeing.

(Is Luther  OK, though? Is he? Does it matter, should it?)

"Fuck this," Allison says. "Fuck this. I've been like this all day; I need to do something else.”

“What do you want to do?”

Allison hesitates.

“I can go, if you-”

“No. I mean, please don’t.” Allison bites her lower lip, then seems to come to a decision. “Hey. Wanna help me dye my hair?"

"I can," Vanya says dubiously, "but I've never dyed hair before. I'd have no idea what I was doing. Wouldn't Klaus be better for-"

"You'll do fine; between the two of us I think we're smart enough to follow instructions on a box."

"Do you have dye?"

Allison jumps up and begins rifling through the top drawer of her dresser. She triumphantly holds up a box a moment later. "I've always wanted purple hair," she says, and for the moment she's just so… Un Allison-like, so unconscious of the image she’s projecting, cautiously inviting Vanya to share her excitement, and Vanya begins to feel herself getting caught up in it in spite of herself.

"OK," Vanya says. "But if I fuck this up-"

"If you fuck it up you can blame me for asking you in the first place. Look. Maybe this is stupid, but- do you ever feel like you're still there? Even though you know you're not? Or like, you're just doing whatever and suddenly you're terrified that you're gonna end up back there even though you know that's not going to happen?"

"Yes," Vanya says, because she has. 

"I need to not feel like Number Three right now, OK? Number Three didn't get to do what she wanted with her hair because Number Three didn't get to have a personality."

Vanya nods. “In that case,” she says, “I would love to help you not feel like Number Three.”

She’s applying developer cream to Allison’s hair when Allison, lulled into a meditative silence and maybe, like Vanya, feeling a little light-headed from the chemicals in the air, says, “Hey Vanya?”

“Hmmm?” 

"Can I ask you a question?"

Allison doesn't usually ask permission; she acts and apologises later, if it occurs to her, if it's convenient.  "I… Sure."

Allison fidgets in her seat, stares at her hands, then asks, “How do you know if you’re a good person? I mean, not you specifically, how does anyone know if they're a good person?"

“Hmmmm," Vanya stalls. 

"Hmmmm?"

"I guess maybe I haven't thought about it all that much?" Vanya asks.

Allison stares at her own reflection in the mirror, at Vanya, fussing with her hair. "I've been thinking about it,” she says.

"Yeah?" 

"Yeah. I can’t really come up with anything. I can’t let it go, though.”

Vanya continues applying developer, waiting to see where this is going. Instead of continuing the thread, however, Allison veers off in another direction entirely, "When was the last time we hung out? Just us?- Oh God," Allison grimaces at Vanya’s reaction. "OK. I know that look. That's the Vanya Hargreeves 'I want to say something but I don't think I'm allowed to' look."

"...Am I that transparent?"

"You're not transparent at all, really," Allison says, "But you can't live cramped up in hotel rooms with me for a month and expect me to not recognise it.”

She doesn’t want to talk about it, but she’s more-or-less stuck here, she thinks, having committed to helping Allison with her hair and not having finished the job yet. "We were twelve," Vanya relents. "We painted each other's nails. Diego found me later and told me that you'd only asked me because you were mad at everyone else, for some reason, and you really wanted to drive the point home. Make them feel bad, you know, because you wanted to hang out with me and not them."

"Oh. Oh shit,” Allison says. “I remember that.” She hesitates, then- “Is it too late to say I'm sorry?"

"...I don't know. We were twelve, so…"

"No, you know what? I'm sorry." Allison shakes her head. "Oh, you wouldn’t know what happened after that! I couldn't find my nail polish remover and Dad saw my nails were bright pink and the chewing out I got about image... “if you put half the effort into training that you do into such frivolities, Number Three…”

“Yeah,” Vanya says, because why not continue to be honest, now that she’s started? "About your nail polish remover. Five stole it for me. He said he wouldn't blame me if I, you know. Happened to misplace it before he could get it back to your room."

To Vanya’s relief, Allison just laughs. "That little shit!" She shakes her head. "You know what, good for him. Good for you. I totally deserved that."

"...Maybe,” Vanya allows, even though at the time she’d thought exactly that, had held onto her satisfaction at getting Allison into trouble to the extent that even Five had seemed unsettled by how gleeful she was.

"Maybe? Vanya!”

"OK, you absolutely deserved it. But… I knew what was gonna happen so that probably wasn't a great thing to do?"

"It's what I would have done."

"Mmmm." Vanya doesn’t doubt this but she doesn’t want to say it, she doesn’t think they’re there, not yet.

"You were always his favourite," Allison says. "Five's, I mean."

Vanya shakes her head, trying not to blush. "I wasn't allowed to be anyone's favourite."

"Vanya. Do you think Five gave a shit?"

“...That's a fair point,” Vanya concedes, then; “Do you ever think about what happened to him?"

“I like to think he's off having adventures. 1920s Speakeasies. Dinosaurs. Seeing the Beatles live. I mean, it's Five so it'd probably be something way nerdier and angrier than anything I'd come up with; I loved him but I don't know if I ever really got him like you did, you know? What do you think?"

Vanya frowns. "Honestly?"

"Honestly.”

"It's not something I like to think about. It just doesn't make any sense that he wouldn't come back to us unless he couldn't."

"Mmm." Allison appears to turn this over in her mind. "He always thought Dad was full of shit. Drove Luther up the fucking walls, but he was useful enough that he could get away with things some of us couldn’t. And he knew it."

Vanya's been scraping the sides of the plastic container, but she’s finally run out of developer. "I think I'm done. Or as done as I can get. We've gotta wait.”

“OK,” Allison says. “Oh Jesus, this stuff smells awful, doesn’t it? I’m having fun, though.”

“Me too.”

“Yay sisters?” Allison asks.

“Yay, sisters,” Vanya agrees.

At the end of the process Allison has purple hair that she can’t stop touching, even when she’s not near a mirror, and somehow, despite all of the precautions they took with gloves and vaseline Vanya’s hands and Allison’s neck and forehead are stained with dye, and they’re trying futilely to scrub it off in the bathroom sink and laughing about it when Klaus’s voice carries up the stairs. “One hour left in 2006, bitches! Time to say auf wiedersehen to this motherfucker of a year!”

When 2007 dawns Vanya is giggling, dizzy from the wine that Klaus unearthed from a cupboard in the kitchen and from Diego impulsively picking her up and spinning her around, shouting, “Fuck off, 2006, fuck off!” She laughs, and laughs, and drinks more and shouts along to the music Klaus has been playing “- I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me!” when everyone else does. She brings out her violin, at Allison’s request, and stumbles badly through a few classical pieces before switching over to even worse renditions of the pop-punk songs Ben had loved and that she'd learned for the sheer pleasure of having at least one skill that could be called upon to make someone else happy, and Klaus and Allison dance, wild and uninhibited, half-falling over one another, and somehow, they manage to coax Diego into join in and then Vanya herself, once she puts her violin down in tipsy defeat and Klaus resumes his DJing duties.

At three o’clock in the morning they’re drinking hot chocolate in the kitchen, copied from Grace’s recipe as best their memories will allow. They toast to 2007, to their newfound teenage delinquency, to themselves, and finally to Ben, growing quiet, then, and Vanya knows without having to be told that they’re all thinking the same thing; he should be here with us.

"I have a theory," Diego says, eventually. They’re winding down; every few minutes someone yawns or says “Fuck it, I’m tired,” but no one’s willing to break their little circle apart to go to sleep, not yet.

"No," Allison says cheerfully. "A theory means you thought about things. Try again."

"Fuck off, Allison,” Diego says, but there’s no sharpness there, no venom, just a tolerant, affectionate sort of annoyance. “Just when I was starting to think you weren’t a completely insufferable bitch…” Allison, sitting between Diego and Vanya, elbows him. “Ow,” he complains. “Anyway. Look, it's about Vanya, and… I swear I'm not trying to upset you, OK, Van?"

"Did you know that you can just not say stuff?" Allison asks. "Especially if you know it's going to upset people? Like, are you aware that that's actually an option, Diego?"

"Allison," Vanya says. 

Everyone looks at her in surprise. She doesn't like it, being at the centre of attention like this, but she squares her shoulders and sits up to her full height, though this only serves to make her aware of how tiny she is compared to the rest of them. Still, she doesn’t shrink back down into her seat.

"So like. Dad… bought all seven of of us because he thought we were gonna turn out special, yeah? So why would he bother keeping one kid who was ordinary around?” Diego asks. “If that kid didn’t fit into the plan, why not ship her off somewhere else as soon as that became obvious?”

Vanya sits very still. .

"Think about it," Diego continues. "You've got a bunch of kids who hate their lives but at least they're not ordinary, and you make sure they know that being ordinary is the worst thing you can be by keeping another kid around and never really letting her be part of the group but making sure everyone can see that she's miserable. You threaten the other kids, like, ‘Oh, you find your training excessive? Perhaps Number Seven’s position in our family is one you find enviable?’ You make her life something none of the others want so whatever you do to them, at the end of the day they tell themselves that at least they're not like-"

Vanya inhales deeply. Klaus moves his chair closer, places a hand on her arm.

"Diego," Allison says. "Diego shut up. Can't you see you're upsetting her?"

"Stop," Vanya says, an edge of hysteria rising in her voice. She turns to Allison. "Stop talking about me like I can't hear you."

Allison looks down at the table. "Sorry, Van, I-" she shakes her head. "Sorry."

"Go on," Vanya tells Diego. "I want to hear this." She looks at Klaus, then hesitantly moves to rest her head against his shoulder. His arm goes up around her.

"What I'm saying is," Diego begins again, "what if Dad always knew you were ordinary?"

"You mean," Klaus says, "what if he kept one ordinary kid around and made a big thing about how terrible it was that she didn't have any powers so the rest of us would be like 'well that sucks, guess I better try as hard as possible to not be like her?' You think Vanya was just… A living example of his godawful manipulative bullshit?"

"Yeah," Diego says. "Yeah. Look, Vanya, you're smart and you're good at thinking on your feet and you get shit done without needing to stand around arguing about it for six hours first" (here, Allison snorts and mutters "that's rich, coming from you") "and a lot of the stuff dad made us learn wasn't stuff you need superpowers to be able to do. If you adopted seven kids hoping for powers and made a big deal about needing to adapt, why wouldn’t you adapt by having the one kid without any still be part of the team? There were ways it could have worked. Unless you were really never meant to be one of us at all and being disappointed that you didn’t turn out to have a power like the rest of us was all an act.”

This is, Vanya thinks, something akin to blasphemy, and part of her is worried that their father is somehow going to know what Diego's saying and that the repercussions will be dire. She was never part of the team because she was ordinary, that was the point- No matter how smart she was, no matter how hard she worked, it wasn't enough, could never be enough, and to suggest otherwise is dangerously close to saying that her lack of powers is irrelevant, or that she has assets that make her as valuable as any of the others, and if those things are true then what other foundations that she's always trusted as being unshakeable are more precarious than she realised?

"God," Allison says, then, "that's fucked up."

"It is fucked up," Vanya says. Her eyes are closed tightly, and maybe if she doesn't open them it won't be as obvious that she's struggling to not cry. She feels Klaus’s hold on her tighten so it's probably obvious anyway, and she’s grateful for the gesture, furious that it's so obviously called for.

"Look, I'm sorry, I'm- It was just a thought," Diego says.

"No," Vanya shakes her head. "It's fucked up and I think it's probably true. It would have been so easy to find an ordinary baby that someone didn't want and-" 

This hurts. The idea that someone wouldn't want to be part of whatever giving birth to a child they hadn't been pregnant with hours earlier entailed makes sense to Vanya; it's grotesque, the idea of buying children -Vanya can't really picture what a normal upbringing in a normal family would like but she's confident on this point- but for all the distaste surrounding it the glamour of being part of the Umbrella Academy was meant to be more compensation than any child could reasonably ask for, regardless of their origin. Vanya wasn't entitled to that compensation, and it was her responsibility to ensure that she didn't make that -or any other aspect of her existence- anyone else's problem. 

"That's-" Klaus sounds a little stunned. "That's actually evil."

"Klaus,” Vanya says, “He locked you in a mausoleum. This is what makes you think that he's actually evil?"

"He what? " Allison asks, incredulity rising along with volume. "He fucking what?"

Vanya is aware that she's said something she shouldn't have by the way Klaus goes stiff and then withdraws from holding her. When she opens her eyes she sees that he's closed his own and that he’s drawing in long, shallow breaths. His hands are shaking.

“Klaus-” Diego says.

"Not now," Klaus says. 

“Klaus-” Vanya tries.

"Not now. We can talk about this later, OK? I'm not mad. I just… Not now, Vanya, OK?" 

"OK," Vanya says.

Klaus stands up and announces, “I'm going to bed," but on the way past Vanya he stops and presses a kiss to the top of her head. "Love you, Vanny," he says quietly, before disappearing up the stairs.

Left alone with Allison and Diego, Vanya says; "Did you really not know-"

"No," Allison says. “I think maybe it's just easier for Klaus to talk to you about... We never really... I mean, Talking about some stuff that happened at all? That's not something we ever really did.” 

"Hey Vanya?" Diego asks.

"Yeah?"

"D- Don't go beating yourself up about this, OK?"

Vanya just laughs fatalistically. God, she thinks, Klaus must be rubbing off on her. 

"L- Look, I didn't want t- to upset you with what I said about Dad. Just-"

"You didn't. I mean, I'm upset but it's not your fault, OK?"

Diego offers her a weak smile. "Blame Dad?" he suggests. 

"Sounds good to me. Blame Dad for everything, forever. Look, I'm tired. I'm going to bed."

She can hear Allison's and Diego's voices in the kitchen as she brushes her teeth, the odd word filtering through- "Mausoleum, Dad, fucked up, " from Diego, "I swear, never-ever-ever," from Allison, and she can still hear them once she's in bed, cataloging the sounds around her as she falls asleep -the wind outside, an owl calling into the night, the soft creaking as the old house settles, her brother and sister talking softly- just talking, their voices fierce and insistent but without the animosity or bullshit dominance posturing that so often characterises Allison's and Diego's interactions.

When she finally stumbles down the stairs morning is verging into afternoon. Her brothers and sister are gathered around the TV, Klaus slumped against Allison, resting her chin on top of his head, Diego sprawled on the couch sharpening one of his knives. Whether they really need as much care as Diego devotes to them or it’s the ritual itself that’s the point of the exercise, Vanya’s never been sure, but he’s more at peace when he’s performing it than he is at any other time, and she’s grateful to see it now. 

Diego jerks his head over, a come here motion. Cautiously, she joins him on the couch as he moves to make room for her. “Hey,” she says.

“Hey,” Diego says and Klaus, without looking up, raises a hand in the air and offers a wave that’s lacking in energy but encouraging nonetheless; at least he’s acknowledging her. 

Allison tilts her head back so that she’s looking up at Vanya, above her on the couch. “You doing OK?”

Vanya shrugs.

“Yeah,” Allison says, “I figured. But what we talked about last night -Diego’s theory- if it’s true, it doesn’t change anything, OK? You’re our sister. We need you.” 

Vanya just nods, not trusting herself to speak. 

“I had an idea,” Diego says, “about you. Being dangerous. I think you could, if you wanted to.”

“What?” Vanya says, finally trusting herself to speak without crying. “I’m not dangerous.”

“But you could be,” Diego insists. “I could help. If you wanted. It’s fucked up that Dad didn’t even let you learn to defend yourself, you know? Maybe…” his burst of energy seems to falter. “Maybe let’s talk about it when I don’t feel like a rat is trying to claw its way out of my skull.”

“Mmmm,” Vanya says. In theory, she feels like she should be intrigued by the idea, but- not now. She should get up, she thinks, she should do something about the pounding in her head and devote some time to her violin, to talking to Klaus about last night, but for now, the company of her siblings, riding out the wretchedness of their own hangovers while they hide together from the world, is enough.

Chapter Text

"...So Timmy, right, he can feel thousands of people in the audience waiting to see what he's gonna do- It’s the most important moment of his life, and he’s been waiting for it for thirty years and he knows that this is his one chance to get it right. So he looks the clown dead in the eye, and he takes a deep breath, and he says," Klaus pauses to ensure maximum dramatic tension before lowering his voice to growl: "Fuck you, clown.'"  

Diego, facing away from Klaus’s position at the kitchen table as he fusses with something on the stove, puts his spatula down, turns around, and, without preamble punches Klaus squarely in the shoulder.

"Ow," Klaus complains.

"Ow?" Diego asks. "Fucking ow? That's thirty-seven minutes of my life I want back, asshole.”

“Fine,” Klaus says. “I’ll just find someone who appreciates me and leave your philistine ass here by yourself. Vanya!" 

Klaus is a little keyed up and it’s making him rambly, scattered, as he tries without success to not think about the dwindling supply of pills upstairs in his dresser drawer or the way Allison flounced out the door an hour ago, saying “I’m going out, you’re not invited,” before either Klaus or Diego had a chance to ask where she was going or why.  Not that Klaus would have wanted to go with her; what started as a gentle dusting of snowflakes has steadily accelerated into a outright defiance against last week's official start of spring. The snowfall isn’t yet thick enough, and Allison hasn’t yet been gone long enough for anyone to worry, but the moment is drawing close.

Vanya appears in the doorway, and Klaus notes that that strained, hunted look that she used to exhibit whenever someone addressed her making an appearance for the first time in weeks. “You called me?” Her voice is audible, but barely, as if in concession to her old habit of never allowing herself to be more noticeable than she had to be. Between this development (regression?) and Allison’s hurry to be out of the house, an ugly uneasiness begins to take form in Klaus’s mind. 

He’s got to stop doing this; he's got to stop encouraging the idea that there’s some kind of solidarity between himself and Vanya as the two family disappointments, an unspoken understanding that’s led to them looking out for one another. Klaus has been telling himself this for weeks, though and somehow he never quite gets around to doing the work of dismantling the trust she's placed in him, and now he asks: “You OK?”

“Yeah don’t take this the wrong way Van-Van, but you… Aren’t looking so great. Wanna tell your favourite brothers what's up?" Diego says, circling the table to pull out the empty seat beside Vanya. 

From across the room -Klaus doesn't think he was there a second ago but true to form he's here now, just in time to be unhelpful, just in time to be an asshole- Ben snorts. "Her favourite brothers that are alive and accounted for maybe." Vanya's either too polite or too distracted to acknowledge Diego's faux pas; she leans into the half-hug he offers while he positions himself so that he can still keep an eye on the stove. "I mean, it's good to see Diego making an effort," Ben continues, "but he acts like he invented the concept of being nice to Vanya. It's gotta piss her off." 

Klaus wouldn't give Ben the satisfaction of a response even without the agreement they have in place, but he wishes there was a way to communicate that he's ignoring Ben extra hard right now. Instead, he shoves his knitting out of the way and reaches out to touch Vanya’s hand.

“What happened?” he asks. 

Vanya shakes her head, mumbles something that ends with "...not important. You called me?”

“...It can wait,” Klaus says.

“It really, really can,” Diego affirms, just as the pot on the stove begins to boil over. "Shitshitshit," he mutters, jumping up. "Fuck it all, Mom made this look so easy." He cranks the heat down on the burner and grabs a spoon, stirring frantically.

Klaus stands, moving his chair so that he can plonk back down in it directly next to Vanya. "You can talk about it," he says quietly, "if you want to." She will talk to him, Klaus thinks, with enough encouragement, even with Diego in the room. Vanya's visibly distraught but she's here, with them, quietly asserting her right to exist, to be a person rather than as minimal a presence as possible, and God, he's so proud, but he can't say it because just acknowledging it could be enough to make her shrink away from him. Vanya’s frowning, biting her lip as she traces a looping pattern on the tabletop with her fingertip when suddenly, she says, "Did you know I take medication? For anxiety?"

Klaus doesn't think he did, Vanya volunteering any information at all about herself being a relatively recent phenomenon. After a quick, shame-ridden catalogue of his pharmaceutical knowledge he accepts that whatever she takes is likely to be neither interesting nor useful where his own needs are concerned, not if it's been prescribed to treat anxiety in a minor. That may be for the best; Klaus would like to believe that he could trust himself to not help himself to his sister's medication, but he is at heart a realist.

"Holy shit," Diego says from his position at the stove "Is that why Allison stormed off? Was she an asshole to you about it? Because if she was, I swear-" 

Klaus tries not to roll his eyes, tries not to look at Ben, who he just knows is doing the same thing. Despite the very welcome decrease in Diego and Allison bullshit Klaus often suspects that Diego is still on the lookout for reasons to pick a fight with their sister. And, yes, Allison can be pushy, and unyielding, and fights between herself and Diego, despite being blessedly rarer than they once were certainly aren’t unheard of, but a fight between Allison and Vanya would be…

Well. It wouldn't be. It’s Vanya.

"It wasn't like that, Diego, I swear, it- Don't be mad at her? Please?" 

Being a peacemaker doesn't come naturally to Klaus -that would require him to care a lot more than he does about most of the conflicts that happen in his vicinity- but no one else is here to do it and if he doesn’t act now Ben will be insufferable later, so Klaus says; "No one's mad at anyone. Right?” When no one says anything, he prompts: “Right, Diego?"

Diego rolls his eyes. "Sure. Fine. No one's mad at anyone now. But I'm gonna reserve the right to be pissed off at Allison once I know what she did. Fair?"

"Fair," Klaus says, because -fuck it- it's easier that way.

"Allison knew about the pills,” Vanya says. “I wasn’t- It wasn’t meant to be a secret from you or anything, I just didn’t- It didn’t- I wasn’t sure if you-”

“Hey, hey, Vanny. Look at me.” Klaus adjusts his position so that he can place a hand on Vanya’s shoulder and another on the side of her face, gently guiding her to meet his eyes. “Hey, you’ve got stuff you don’t wanna talk about, that’s cool,” Klaus says. “You get to decide what you tell anybody, OK?”

“You’re doing good, Klaus,” Ben says. “Keep going.” God, Klaus is going to have so many fuck off, Bens saved up for when they’re next alone. 

Vanya nods. “OK.” She looks at Diego, as if waiting for some contradiction to materialise, and after a moment she seems to decide that it’s safe to continue. “I told Allison about them ‘cause she can get me more when I need them; it's not like… Well, I can't just go to a doctor on my own, not without a parent or ID or anything. She doesn’t think they’re helping. I mean, I think maybe I’m less anxious than I was before- Before, you know, everything, but I’m still. You know.”

Klaus and Diego exchange a look, shared understanding passing between them without the need for words: There’s no denying that Allison had a point. 

"...What do you think?" Klaus asks. 

Vanya shrugs. "I mean. It’s probably not worth worrying about. Dad monitored everything about all of us, right? Even me. If there was something better I'd be on it already." 

Except, Klaus thinks, there must be something that can be done for Vanya; there must be. Oh yes, human brains are delicate, finicky things; between the education Reginald inflicted upon all of them and Klaus' own, rather more practical experimentation, his understanding of neurochemistry is superior to that of most seventeen-year-olds. He also knows that it's going to take more than a few months away from their father to undo whatever psychological damage Vanya has suffered in her life, but if she is better now, however minimally, than she was, then that means that the suggestion that she can't improve is solidly, factually incorrect.

"Soooo," Diego prompts. "Where does this come back to Allison?"

Vanya sighs. "She asked me if I wanted her to, you know. Do something about it. The anxiety. So I didn't need the pills anymore."

Klaus and Diego exchange another look.

"Anyway," Vanya says. "I kind of. Um." She looks from Klaus, to Diego, back to Klaus. "Sorry," she says. "I feel like I'm talking a lot. Am I talking a lot?"

Klaus moves his chair closer so he can wrap his arms around Vanya, resting his head on top of hers. She’s shaking. He wouldn’t have noticed it if he wasn't been so close; Vanya’s so good at not letting what she feels be noticeable, not making it anyone else’s problem; it’s really no surprise that they’ve lived in adjacent bedrooms for more than seventeen years now and he’s only just now finding out that she’s undergoing treatment for anxiety. "You are talking," and Klaus feels the agitation in her body mount, then release a tiny bit as he says: "exactly the right amount."

Vanya shifts uncomfortably in her seat. "I had a panic attack," she says into his shoulder. "I mean, I've had them before but this was- I dunno, it came out of nowhere? There’s usually some kind of build up. It was weird; I was fine until Allison brought up Rumoring me into being less anxious and then-” She shudders and takes a deep, shaky breath. "She got upset and she freaked out and took off. I think she thought it was her fault."

Diego lets his wooden spoon fall to the countertop with a loud clatter, and turns the burner off. “Fuck it. I wasn’t gonna get this right anyway.” He goes to the table, drags a chair away so he can sit an equal distance from Klaus and Vanya, placing a hand on Vanya’s shoulder.

“OK, Diego gets points for trying,” Ben says. 

Vanya gently pushes away from Klaus, extracting herself from his arms. "Look, look, we can talk about this- Let's come back to this later? Please? There's something else I wanted to talk about before Allison gets back." 

Klaus glances at Diego to see if he's noticed the way Vanya's posture has stiffened again, the way little indentations from her teeth are visible on her upper lip where she's bitten it as she waits to see how he and Diego take this. She's about to say something that she's afraid someone won't want to hear; she used to look like this before she said anything to anyone. It wasn't until… Oh, around the beginning of the year, maybe, that she began to relax into this new permutation of their family. Klaus thinks that the real turning point had something to do with her revealing his history with the mausoleum to Diego and Allison, the realisation that she had divulged information that was never meant to be hers to share but that even if she had fucked up she was still loved, still wanted.

Klaus isn’t sure what this could be about but it can’t, realistically, be anything too objectionable -this is Vanya- but then Klaus says, “Sure, what’s up?” and Vanya responds with: “Luther, I wanted to talk about Luther.”

Diego’s response is immediate and incredulous: “Vanya, what the fuck?” and Klaus is inclined to agree with him. It’s not as though he hates Luther like Diego does (and sometimes he thinks that refusing to take off with them was the most generous thing Luther’s ever done for Diego, giving him the excuse he always wanted but never quite had to despise him openly), and it’s not as though Luther’s decision came as such a shock to Klaus as to necessitate refusing to acknowledge his existence like it did for Allison. Klaus can't see what Luther did as a betrayal; that would have to mean that Luther's loyalties were something other than exactly what Klaus had always assumed them to be to be anyway. Whatever’s going on with Luther these days is the result of a decision he made, his stagnant, unyielding faith in their father and his vision of saving the world tethering him to the Academy when the rest of them were able to walk free. Is that really such a problem? 

Well. 

OK, Klaus allows, Luther’s wellbeing is a problem but it’s not Klaus’ problem, and he very much doubts that Luther himself, whatever he’s doing right now, sees it as a problem at all. When all of the factors are added together, worrying about Luther more-or-less equates to what’s the point? 

It would be a kindness, Klaus thinks, to dismiss Vanya, to cut her down with casual cruelty now, spare her the inevitable, exponentially more destructive disappointment her poorly-judged comfort in him will bring later. Somehow, Diego and Vanya are both looking at him, and it’s not fair, it’s not fucking fair that he should be caught between them like this, the deciding vote in the matter of whether Luther can, as Diego puts it, get fucked and go to hell or whether whatever it is that Vanya wants to say is worth hearing out. The problem here is that Klaus has come to like having one person in his life that he hasn’t managed to let down, one person who isn't always glancing over his shoulder at the looming spectre of his capacity for fucking up.

For fuck’s sake, Vanya.

Fine.

“What was it you wanted to say about Luther?” Klaus asks, and Vanya’s smile is so full of warmth and gratitude that it makes him feel that much shittier, knowing that the longer he puts off the collapse of his sister’s confidence in him the more destructive its aftermath is going to be.

And so Vanya begins to lay out her plan, and Klaus and Diego listen. 

It would be easier if it wasn’t so solid, so sensible. Aside from Vanya’s failure -or refusal- to recognise that Luther is as not their problem as it's possible anything to be, Klaus can’t really find fault with it. 

“Just-” she finishes. “He should have a way to contact us. Just in case. Even if he doesn’t want it, he should be able to."

“He won’t,” Diego says.

"You don't know that," Vanya persists. “Besides. No one should have to be alone in that house if they don't want to be.” 

Diego’s look of incredulity peaks; in another moment he’s going to start getting angry. For an absurd moment Klaus wonders if a fight is about to break out; the kind of fight that can only happen between people who know one another well enough to really hurt one another. Vanya doesn't involve herself in that kind of fight, Klaus thinks, but then, Vanya also doesn't shatter the status quo by dredging up situations or people they've gotten by for months without worrying about, so...

The potential in the air for this to turn into a real conflict fizzles when Diego says, with a softness that Klaus hadn't anticipated: "He's not alone, Van. He's got Mom."

"Diego," Vanya says. 

Diego looks at Vanya; a little taken aback. Klaus wonders if anyone's ever heard her say their name with such force.

"I miss Mom too," Vanya says. "But you were never there with just her and Pogo and Dad around. I was. I know what I'm talking about."

Oh.

Klaus doesn't think that Vanya is manipulative, but it occurs to him -perhaps belatedly- that that doesn't mean that she couldn't be, if she so chose. All of that time -all of those years- in which she was left out of everything must have been time spent listening, observing, formulating thoughts and plans and strategies, stockpiling them in the event that her confidence ever caught up with their potential for use. She's got to know that there are cards at her disposal that she can only play for the first time once, when they'll have the most impact; she's got to know that this is one of them. 

And she's using it on Luther.

Luther.

"But I won't go through with it if you don't agree," Vanya adds. It feels like a post-script, a perfunctory afterthought tacked on for form's sake.

"I'll agree if everyone else does," Diego says, and Klaus is kind of impressed; Diego's found the option that allows him to seem amenable while not actually having to be at all, since  everyone else includes Allison, and Allison will never agree, even if Vanya could somehow get as far as explaining the plan to her in the first place.

"I mean," Klaus says, "It's… You have a point, Vanny. But what about Allison? If anyone even says his name around her she freaks out."

"You don't need to worry about that," Vanya says.

"Oh," says Diego. "So you can talk to Allison about Luther?"

But Vanya doesn’t get a chance to answer, because front the door opens and Allison’s voice carries through the house: “Thank you for the ride! It was so nice to meet you!” Bright, wholesome, Number Three cheer, mostly artificial but indistinguishable from the real thing to anyone who doesn’t know Allison.

She enters the kitchen a moment later, pausing in the doorway to assess the scene, eyes lingering on Vanya, who offers a hesitant smile. “Hey,” she says, and without a word Vanya stands and walks to the doorway to meet Allison, and then they’re hugging, talking over one another as Klaus and Diego look on.

“Are you-” Allison asks. 

“I’m fine,” Vanya says.

“I don’t believe you.”

“I mean. OK, I’m not fine but it’s not your fault, OK? You didn’t have to leave- ”

“I know. It was stupid. I’m sorry-”

“I’m sorry-”

“You don’t have anything to be sorry for!”

“I ruined your day-”

“You absolutely did not. And we’re blaming Dad for everything now, remember?” 

Vanya laughs at that, and Allison places one hand on each of her shoulders. “Look. You had a panic attack, I met a dog. I think it’s pretty obvious which of us had the worse day, OK? OK?” she repeats when Vanya doesn’t answer.

“OK,” Vanya relents.

“What’s this about a dog?” Diego asks. 

“Oh! Yeah, I met the lady down the road. It was her dog. I… Look, before you get pissed at me for going off and talking to people it was starting to snow really hard and… I was upset when I left -not your fault Vanya- and I wasn’t really thinking about how far I was going and she was driving past and saw me asked me if I wanted a ride, and it would have looked weird if I’d said no, OK?”

Diego shrugs. “That’s… Fair,” he says dubiously. 

“Yeah,” Allison says, “She’s nice, I think? Went on about how she’s sorry she hasn’t been very neighbourly and dropped by but she’s been busy with… Something to do with horses? I'm pretty sure horses are a lot of work? She didn't ask too many questions but she kinda seemed like she wanted to. Her name’s Sissy. The lady, I mean; the dog’s name is Tilly. She’s sweet." Allison frowns at her jacket's sleeve. "And drooly.”

The thing about hiding out in (not even in, outside of) a barely-there town is that there's constant paranoia of the locals noticing that something's up. Klaus couldn't do this forever -the tedium would get to him- but having finally settled in a place that feels like it’s theirs after a month of places that came wrapped up with the constant awareness that they were temporary (and seventeen years, before that, of a place that was only ever going to belong to their father), none of them are in a hurry to give it up.

“Look,” Diego reasoned, about a month in, when the uneasiness of asking should we be here? started to seriously bump up against we don’t want to leave. “Small towns mean people talk because there’s fuck-all going on. Big cities mean tons of people around and sooner or later someone's gonna be creepy and obsessed enough to maybe recognise one of us. There’s a chance we’re fucked no matter what, so… Why not just do what we want and deal with whatever happens when it happens?” And no one had been able to think of any real arguments -though perhaps they didn’t try as hard as they might have- and so instead of continuing the discussion they had ordered pizza and watched cartoons and talked and talked and talked about all of the ways they could fill their time now that all of it was theirs to fill however they wanted, pushing themselves to stay awake until they were half-delirious with exhaustion, going into hysterics at anything any of them had said.

It had been a good night, in part, Klaus thought afterward (and not without guilt) because Ben had made himself scarce. It’s hard to really enjoy anything, to be really present when Ben is hanging around, offering increasingly bitter, increasingly unhelpful commentary, and that night he had been… Wherever he goes, if he’s anywhere at all, when he’s not close to Klaus.

“I mean, I could Rumor her into forgetting she ever saw me?” Allison is saying. “I don’t really know if it’s, like, OK to do that but if she becomes a problem…”

“Let’s wait until she becomes a problem,” Diego says, and Klaus wonders if he’s noticed the way Allison’s begun offering the use of her power as a reluctant possible solution for problems, rather than the de facto solution that’s presented with no need for discussion at all. 

Allison accepts this with an absent “Mmm,” before she pulls Vanya out of the room into some private sisterly conclave (“Come help me figure out which setting I need on the washing machine, that dog chewed on my sleeve, look, you can see where she slobbered on me- Oh hey I got us more chocolate covered raisins!”) leaving Klaus and Diego alone in the kitchen. Klaus isn't sure if Ben's still lurking somewhere within hearing range, but he doesn't see him trailing out of the room after their sisters so there’s still the chance that he’s nearby. He assumes that Vanya is going to be reporting back to Allison on how the presentation of her plan for contacting Luther went, and Ben is conscientious about not eavesdropping on private conversations, as long as it’s convenient for him.

"Have you noticed," Diego asks, and Klaus sighs, preparing himself for another Diego-flavoured round of Diego And Allison Bullshit, but then Diego surprises him saying: "I- I mean. Vanya and Allison. They're both pretty cool?"

Klaus has to take a moment to recalibrate (maybe, maybe it’s time to start giving Diego more credit for his growing ability to not hold stupid grudges, or at least, to not hold stupid grudges against people who aren’t Luther) before he responds. "Yeah. I mean. Yeah? They really are. Figures you'd be the last to realise that.”

Diego rolls his eyes, then continues. "I mean. Allison's actually OK when she's not around Luther? Like, he brought out the worst in her?" Diego has a knife in his hand, now, one of his throwing knives, not one of the kitchen implements that he was fussing with earlier, and he’s twirling it in his fingers as he chews on his lower lip, frowning as though what he’s saying feels off but still needs to be acknowledged. 

Klaus doesn't believe that Allison has fundamentally changed aside from outward adjustments, like her wardrobe and her purple hair. If anything, she's become more of what she always was; protective, fierce, blending flares of warmth and caustic coldness in equal measure. More likely, he thinks, Diego's perception of Allison has evolved past viewing her as being inextricably linked with Luther. It's not as though the two of them don't grate against one another's sensitive spots anymore -Hell, it's not as though half of their arguments aren't unnecessary, ego-driven bullshit- but at least now, when Diego is angry with Allison Klaus is reasonably certain that he's directing his anger at Allison herself rather than viewing her as an extension of Luther, a proxy for his resentment of someone who isn’t here.

“She’s OK,” Klaus agrees. “She has monstrous taste in candy, though. Vanya, too.”

“You mean the chocolate covered raisins?" Diego shakes his head. "Who the hell likes those?”

“Vanya and Allison do. Apparently.”

“I think they buy them because they know they won’t have to share.”

“Why are we tolerating it?”

“Good question.”

“It’s high time we resisted their tyranny, Bruder mine.” Klaus balls his hand into a fist, clutches it against his heart. “Our sisters’ reign of confectionary-based terror is over.” Turning to shout through the kitchen door, he calls: “Do you hear that Allison? Vanya? You’ve had it far too good for far too long. Diego and I are fighting back, starting now.”

“Shut up, Klaus,” Allison yells from the other room. 

Diego laughs and throws the knife in the air, and Klaus watches the way it catches the gleam of late afternoon sunlight cutting between the clouds, beaming through the window. “How’s your project going?” he asks. “You know, making Vanya dangerous?”

Vanya’s taken to Diego’s training schedule without complaint, but because she's Vanya that doesn’t mean much. When Klaus asked her, a few days ago, if she actually enjoys this new regime of running and weight training and Diego entering a room where she’s peacefully engrossed in reading or playing her violin demanding that she name five things that she can she see right now that could be used to kill an intruder, all she would say was, “It's important,” an answer that wasn’t really an answer to the question Klaus had asked at all.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              Diego grins as he catches his knife. “Really good, actually. She learns fast. Like, she’s never gonna be super strong, but she’s good at thinking on her feet."

“Good for her.”

“It’s fucked up that she didn’t get to at least learn self-defense with the rest of us.”

“Just one more fucked-up thing in an endless litany of fucked-up things,” Klaus says, as he picks up his knitting, and Diego snorts in agreement.

Later, hours later, he's sitting up in bed, staring at a bag in his hand as he counts the pills left in it, then counts them again, and again, coming up with the same number each time. He curses under his breath, wills the number to be different, and counts them once more. It isn’t. Of course it isn’t. Again, he swears.

“Klaus,” Ben says.

Klaus ignores him.

“Klaus, this doesn’t have to be a problem.” Easy for Ben to say, Klaus thinks; Ben's entire existence having been reduced to one problem that's so unsolvable that it barely merits thinking about, leaving him with endless free time to find ways both novel and tedious to irritate Klaus.

"I'm not doing this," Klaus tells Ben.

“Not doing what?”

“Having this conversation.”

“Why not?” Ben asks. He’s sitting on the end of Klaus’s bed, legs crossed, head resting in his hands. He’s so infuriatingly calm, and reasonable, and Klaus wants to punch him, and it’s so unfair that he can’t retaliate, can’t even enjoy the satisfaction of complaining about Ben to Diego, or Vanya, or Allison, because they don’t know he’s here and because the moment someone dies seems to be the moment everyone who loved them conveniently forgets about what a judgemental, nagging asshole they could be. 

“Because," Klaus says. "It’s very boring, and I don’t want to.”

“The guy in town you got these from isn’t around anymore.”

“I am painfully aware of that fact, Ben.”

It had, in fact, required a walk into town and two bus rides, three towns over, to track down what Klaus had been after (Diego trailing after him, shutting down Klaus’s objections with, “Look man, I know you’d rather not have me along for the ride, but if you're gonna do this I'm coming with you and I don’t actually give a shit if you like it or not.”). It’s not like in the city, where both the sheer number of people around and the ability to flash his umbrella tattoo afforded him access to whatever he desired; people in smaller towns are more closed, more suspicious; it’s that much harder to just walk up to someone who looks like they’d be in the know and start a conversation and if the kinds of parties Klaus used to go to happen around here he has no idea how to go about getting invited to them.

“This could be good for you. You said you don’t know where he went or if there’s anyone else around who can-”

“Again, Ben, you’re not saying anything I don’t already know. If you’re not going to be helpful, please shut up.” He’s already feeling on edge as the last effects of the pills in his system loosen their grip on his mind and his body, the nervousness compounded by the dwindling number in his stash. 

“You know,” Ben says, “I thought maybe giving you some kind of incentive might help.”

“What? You mean your little offer where if I get sober, everyone else gets to find out that you’re here? Are you starting to have second thoughts?”

(He can't remember what made him agree to this in the first place. Maybe he thought Ben would get bored and give up sooner than this; maybe it was guilt over remaining as wretchedly alive as he had while Ben was forced to look that made Klaus give him what he'd asked for.)

“I just think, if you wanted-”

“Ben. Ben. I’m getting bored again.”

“But you said it yourself, Klaus. There aren’t even any other ghosts here, so there’s no reason-”

There’s no argument to be made against that, and Klaus has heard everything Ben’s about to say before, so this is where he stops listening. Unfortunately, obnoxiously, Ben is right; this house contains precisely one post-mortem inhabitant and he’s currently lecturing Klaus like he’s come straight out of some godawful after-school special- Don’t do drugs, kids! 

Oh, it stands to reason that there had to be some places that don’t include any occupants who’ve been hanging around, steeping in their misery for years on end, but it’s not as though Klaus or any of his siblings, were actively looking for one of them; Klaus because he didn’t see the point, his brother and sisters because he hadn’t asked them to make this concession and they wouldn’t have thought to make it on their own. 

Despite that, they’ve found it. 

Maybe (Klaus thinks dubiously) everyone who’s ever lived in this house has been happy; maybe they haven’t had a reason to hang around after dying, just in case some kid with the ability to see them turned up decades later for them to scream at. Maybe this house’s history has simply been too mundane for any truly gruesome deaths to have occurred here. Either way, here it is- The sanctuary Klaus didn’t know he was looking for, that he didn’t recognise for what it was until a few weeks into being here, when he didn’t drink, smoke, or ingest anything that could dampen his power for an agonising half a day, just to prove to Ben that if he wanted to he could.

Rationally, Klaus knows that it’s probably for the best that his options for company have narrowed down to the four people who actually give a shit about him. All the same, for a fleeting moment he misses the Academy, or at least what  the Academy allowed him access to- The closest town to this little sanctuary contains nothing wilder than a struggling Blockbuster and it's intolerable on nights like this when his body and mind are aching for a nameless something more. There's nowhere to go to dance, or at least, not the kind of dancing Klaus needs -a room full of sweaty strangers pressed up against one another, moving to the pulse of music that fills the awareness of every last person in it until it melts their individual minds into a unified entity. No strangers wanting the privilege of telling him what a pretty, pretty thing he is, to be close to him, to touch him, the potential for the encounter to evolve into a transaction always hovering just beyond what was being said. 

And from there? The chance of blissful reprieve from the things that clustered around him, or the funds by which to procure it. Klaus preferred the former for its efficiency but there was something to be said for walking away with cash in his pocket, providing the illusion of security, the promise of a more definite escape from his life if he chose to pursue it. 

So, yeah, he misses aspects of his life before leaving the Academy. Of course he does.

“I’m going to see if Allison’s awake,” Klaus tells Ben. “Don’t follow me.” Before he goes, he swallows one of the pills from the bag dry, looking Ben in the eye as he does it. 

The light is on in Allison's room across the hall, and he nudges the door open to find her sitting up in bed, frowning at a book.

"Hey," he says.

She looks up. "Hey. Couldn't sleep?"

Klaus shrugs. "Mind if I…"

In answer, Allison moves toward the wall, making room for Klaus to join her. "I've already told you," she says as he shoves cushions out of the way. "Open invitation. You can't sleep, you come in here. You have nightmares or you just don’t wanna be by yourself, you come in here. You don't need to ask."

Klaus sits down, leaning against Allison. "Whatcha reading?"

Allison reaches over Klaus to retrieve a bookmark from her bedside table, marks her place, then closes the book, running her fingers over the title printed on the cover- Be Just And Fear Not. "I found it on the shelf downstairs," Allison says. "The guy who wrote it-” she runs her thumb over a name printed below the title: Dr. Raymond Chestnut. “He was a civil rights activist, back in the sixties. It's his autobiography." 

"Sounds heavy." 

"Kinda," Allison says. "I dunno, I don't always mind heavy? I've been trying to figure out what I think about a lot of things.” She places the book on the table. “You… Probably don’t wanna hear this right now.”

Klaus shrugs. “No, it's good. Just… Talk to me?"

"What about?"

"About anything. I don’t care what it is.”

“Mmmm. Well there's- I dunno how much sense it’s gonna make.” 

“I never let that stop me, and you're nice about it. Mostly." The pill is starting to kick in, thank fuck; the raw nervousness he felt before is easing, and Klaus takes a moment to praise whatever higher powers exist for the creation of hospital-grade painkillers and the existence of people eager to profit off of their illicit distribution.

“Mostly.” Allison laughs as she reaches for the lightswitch above her bed to flick it off, then tugs on Klaus’ arm to pull him down to rest beside her. “OK,” she says. “So fair warning, this is about Dad.”

Klaus closes his eyes, relaxing against Allison, welcoming the warmth and the sense of life that always accompanies another person’s proximity. “Allison, darling, I think the fact that we’re here,” Klaus lifts his arms to wave them around “indicates that anything you have to say about that dried-up relic is something I’m going to welcome hearing.” 

“Relic? Doesn’t that mean, like, something valuable?”

“It can. It can also mean, you know. Outdated. Irrelevant.” 

“Oooh.” Allison closes her eyes and exhales; through the sliver of moonlight beaming in through a crack in the curtains Klaus can see her smile. “Irrelevant. I love that.” 

“Thought you would.”

Allison shifts so that she’s hugging him, and her elbow is pressing into his stomach but for the moment Klaus doesn’t care. “What’d you wanna say about the old relic?”

"Mmmm.” Allison sighs. “Just. Do you ever feel like all of Dad’s saving the world child superhero bullshit was really… I dunno, performative ?”

“Performative how?” 

Allison doesn’t answer right away and Klaus wonders if there was a right answer to her question, one that he should have had at the ready. "Like. OK” she says at last. “We stopped a lot of bank robbers.”

“I mean,” Klaus says, “We did.” 

“You know what else would have stopped them?” Allison rolls over onto her back, staring into the dark expanse of her bedroom ceiling, but then she reaches out for Klaus's hand, maintaining contact, transmitting the unspoken message: I’ve got you, I’m not letting you go. 

“What?”

“If the banks had had better fucking security. But you know why that wasn’t an option?”

“Why?”

“Because a security system’s just there to do a job and nobody ever wants to drag it out to smile for the cameras or throw a parade for it.” Allison goes quiet for a moment, the steady rhythm of her breath the only sound in the room, then- “It was always ‘I heard a rumor you shot your friend’ and never ‘I heard a rumor you decided to give up crime and devote your life to working for a nonprofit,’ you know? That book I’m reading, it’s really got me thinking- If the whole point of your existence is supposed to be to make the world better and you don’t actually reduce the number of people suffering, you’re not really improving anything. Soooo,” Allison says; “maybe Dad really did believe in the apocalypse or whatever; I don’t know. But he sure as hell didn’t want us to care about people.”

“Like Vanya,” Klaus says, recalling New Year’s Eve, Diego’s revelation about their sister’s probable purpose in their lives, in the Academy. “Adopting an ordinary kid just to drive home the point that being ordinary sucks- ”

“And to make sure your other kids resent the only ordinary person they know so they’ll work as hard as they can to not be like her,” Allison finishes. "He really didn't want us to give a shit about her." 

What Klaus thinks, but doesn’t say, is that it had almost worked. Oh, he would have claimed to have felt sorry for Vanya if it had ever come up, but the truth was that he hadn't felt sorry for her so much as he'd occasionally felt a vague sense of guilt in her general direction: Hey Number Seven, sucks to be you, would love to help but I can barely hack being Number Four. You understand.

“I should have done better,” Allison says. “I could have made things better for all of you, and I didn’t.”

"It's not your job to be our protector, Alli."

"It's all of our jobs to look out for all of us."

"I think we do OK."

"We do now," Allison says, and Klaus doesn't know how to answer so he squeezes her hand, and she squeezes back.

They don’t talk anymore, that night- Klaus can’t think of anything more to say, and if Allison can, she keeps it to herself. Eventually, he falls asleep, and when he wakes up the problem of his dwindling stash of pills is still there, and he tells himself that he’s not thinking about it throughout the day and into the evening, when he finds himself sitting against the outer wall of the house on the back porch, listening to Vanya practice. The melody is simple; sad but still vital and energetic, and Klaus doesn’t think it’s part of the Reginald-approved classical repertoire that Vanya used to play almost exclusively; it’s too wild, too, uninhibited.  

Eventually, Vanya puts her violin down and sits beside him, slumping easily against his frame as he encircles his quietest, once barely-thought-of, now-indispensable sister within his arms. 

“I have a question,” she says, and Klaus waits, saying nothing but “Mmm?” to indicate that she can continue when she wants to, if she wants to. 

"...Actually,” Vanya says, “two questions."

“I have answers,” Klaus says. “Whether they’re at all relevant…” 

Some of Vanya's hesitance seems to release, then, as she laughs. "What's up?" Klaus asks.

"I don't know which one to ask first."

"Which one's harder?"

"Mmm." Vanya's breathing hitches again, and Klaus knows that the next words she's going to say are some variant on "Maybe this isn't important," and so he makes a preemptive strike.

"Hey, Vanya? I listened to Diego bitching about Luther for twenty minutes this morning and Luther's not even here. I promise, whatever you wanna say, it's not gonna be as obnoxious as that.”

Vanya laughs again, self-consciously this time. "He really hates him, huh?"

"Vanya.”

“Yeah?” 

“Do you really wanna talk about how Diego hates Luther or are you just trying to back away from whatever you wanted to ask?”

For a second Klaus wonders if he’s gone too far- He can feel it when Vanya shrinks back into herself; not so much a physical gesture as a mental shift (she used to be like this all the time), but even when he’s not sure what’s going on in her head Klaus can tell when she’s pulled herself out of it, and he thinks that it takes less of a fight for her to do it than it used to.

“Have you…” she asks, then inhales deeply, finally releasing her words in a rush: “Have you ever tried summoning Five?” 

She doesn’t look at him.

Klaus doesn’t know what he was expecting. Not this, though; not this.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I have.”

“And?” Vanya begins to pick at the skin around her thumbnail.

“Nothing,” Klaus admits. “I’ve tried it a few times. And, nothing.”

“What does that mean?”

On the surface, the answer to this question is easy: Klaus’s failure to summon Five means that either their years-missing brother is alive, or that Klaus is as useless as Reginald had always said he was. The times he’d tried, though- Those were some of the few times that he’d really sat down, cleared his head, concentrated, because those were the times when his power mattered. No one has asked him to -Reginald certainly wasn’t going to waste time on a wayward protege who had the audacity to leave then add insult to injury by proving himself either unwilling to or incapable of returning home, a thought which has reassured Klaus repeatedly throughout the months following his and his siblings’ own departure from the Academy. 

(Somehow, Klaus doesn’t think there’s going to be a portrait of him above the fireplace, nor one of Vanya- Under other circumstances there might have been one of Allison, or of Diego, but there won't be now, leaving as they had, turning Reginald’s advice about ensuring their was never a next time on its head the way they did.)

He doesn’t think that’s what Vanya’s asking, though; if there’s anyone he can count on to never inflict certain questions upon him (why aren’t you more competent, why aren’t you better at controlling your power, better at working as part of a team, better at meeting expectations, why aren’t you better, Klaus?) it’s her. And he knows what she’s thinking because he’s wondered the same thing himself often enough- God knew, Five wasn’t the easiest of his siblings to get along with, but Klaus knows that how tolerable someone is and how loyal they are to the people they love can’t be measured against one another. No , what Vanya’s really asking is :If Five is alive, why hasn’t he come back to us? And then, under that, because Five had loved Vanya the most of all of them and because even Vanya herself couldn’t fail to have realised that: Why hasn’t he come back to me?

“I don’t know,” he admits, and he shifts so that he can rest his chin on top of Vanya’s head, as they stare into the darkness that’s gradually enveloping the woods behind the house. It’s getting chilly but Klaus knows that if they wait long enough Allison will swoop in with piles of blankets, so he doesn't suggest moving. Eventually, when Vanya says, “OK. Second question,” Klaus's mind has begun to wander and has to spend a moment reminding himself: I’m here, on the back porch, in a house in a town no one’s heard of. I’m with my sister and I’m safe, I’m safe.

“Lay it on me.”

Klaus can feel agitation rising in Vanya’s body, though she doesn’t move away, and he hears the little crk sound of her biting her lip, then releasing it. For the second time tonight she surprises him as she asks: “How did you know you liked boys?”

Klaus sits up, arms still around Vanya, and looks down at her, and she doesn’t shrink into herself, doesn’t pull away. “I’m guessing,” he says slowly, “that you’re not asking me that because you think you might like boys.”

“...No.”

“Because if you do like boys,” Klaus leans in to whisper conspiratorially in Vanya’s ear, “It’s OK Vanny. Really, it is.”

“Klaus!” The rigidity in Vanya’s shoulders releases as she leans against the outer wall of the house, and she laughs a little. “I don’t know if I like boys," she says. "I mean… I don’t think I- But maybe even wondering about it is stupid, it’s not like I really even know anyone I’m not related to so I haven’t had the chance to-” Vanya cuts herself off.

“That hasn’t stopped some of us,” Klaus points out.

“Klaus!” Vanya hisses, jerking up to look behind her, at the house. Allison’s and Diego’s voices can be heard through the open windows but they’re indistinct enough that he’s confident that Allison couldn’t have heard his reference to whatever-the-hell was going on between her and Luther and, more importantly, his reference to Luther. 

Klaus raises a hand in the air, a gesture of surrender, see, I’m taking this seriously! and says: “I don’t know if I can tell you how I knew I liked boys because I don’t remember ever not knowing that I liked boys. Or girls. Or anyone who’s anything else. There are just… A lot of pretty people in the world, and I'm into that, in general.”

“So… Do people usually know?” 

“Not always. Like, some people just always kinda know and some people take forever to figure it out. Someone I met at a party last year, he was almost thirty and he’d only just figured out that he wasn’t really into anyone, at all.”

"Is that… A thing a person can be? Not being into anybody, ever?"

"Sure. It's, like, a whole spectrum. On one end there's, you know, me, where you're just into people, and then on the other end there's not being into anyone at all and between there's, like… All of the different combinations of being into guys or girls or anyone else and maybe you're only into certain people in certain ways or at certain times but they're all…Things. You know?"

"No?" Vanya shakes her head, and her hair falls across her eyes. Her bangs are in dire need of some kind of attention, Klaus notices, of trimming or pinning back or something, and he makes a note to talk to Allison about this because maybe, just maybe, suggesting to Vanya that she might prefer to be able to see could be the gateway to getting her to commit to some kind of image beyond whatever makes people least likely to notice her. "God, this is complicated."

"It really is," Klaus agrees.

"But you have it figured out. Is it weird that I don't?"

"No."

“But-”

“Vanny. Look. I met someone, once. ” He doesn’t specify that he’s sure the club's staff knew who he was and thus that it was illegal for him to be there, or that he’d gone home with someone more than twice his age, or that he'd been paid generously for the night he'd spent with the guy. “This girl in this club, she told me that if the question is ever is something wrong with me? when it comes to who you’re into or who you love, or whatever, the answer is always, always, no." 

“But I’m not even sure-”

“Doesn’t matter. The answer is still no.” 

Unbidden, a memory springs to the forefront of Klaus’s mind. Age fifteen, standing in formation with his siblings in front of their father after a mission; a successful one. The burglars were packed off to prison, the Umbrella Academy lauded by the papers, and Number Four, in preparation for a photo shoot with the mayor, had been caught with contraband eyeliner in hand.

The aftermath was the same as it always was, at first: What will the media say, what kind of impression will this give the world of the Academy? Reginald never saying any of these things himself, never directly. Facing him head on, trying not to react, Allison beside him, cool and poised and as defiant as she dared to be, looking at their father but reaching for Klaus's hand and holding it until they were released.

She'd been punished, made to run extra laps for the crime of supplying Klaus with makeup, I expect better from you than to encourage him to walk the path of debauchery, Number Three. Klaus had been at the door with Grace while she hovered with towels and hot tea, waiting for Allison to come inside; it had started raining while she ran, bitter, unforgiving torrents that Klaus knew would only have made Allison run faster, harder, a kinetic fuck you against their father, against the Academy.

"Don't stop," she'd said as he sat beside her while she dried her hair. 

"Don't stop what?"

"The makeup. Flirting with boys. Any of it."

“Allison…”

She’d finished drying her hair, turned to him. “Klaus. Do you care what I think?”

“Alli…”

“Klaus. Do you care what I think?” 

He did. Whether or not he wanted to, he did. Allison was bold enough, daring enough, what-the-fuck-do-you-think-you’re-going-to-do-about-it enough to be fun, really fun. Sometimes it felt like she was the only other person in this damn house who didn’t make the air in any room she walked into feel stagnant from how seriously she took herself, and although she outranked him Klaus suspected that her proximity to Numbers One and Two gave her a vantage point from which to observe the kind of bullshit caring about rankings lead to. 

“Yeah.”

“Well I think,” she’d said, “that you’re beautiful, and I will not be the reason you stop doing anything that keeps you sane. I’m positive Dad knows I didn’t give you the eyeliner, but he knows you care what I think about you and he thinks he can use me to keep you in line, and we’re not going to let him do that. So don't stop; don't you dare."

Now, two-and-change years later, Vanya curled against him, Klaus mounts his remaining defenses in a battle that's already long lost: Vanya trusts him, and he likes having her trust him, and he should probably disillusion her but he's not going to; he's always known that he's not going to. And maybe that's OK, because -just this once- he's not the worst person for someone to come to for help.

"You don't need to have anything figured out," Klaus tells Vanya. "Keep talking to me about it, whenever you want. Or not. But, like. You're OK, you know that, yeah? Whoever you're into, or not into, you’re OK. And you don't have to tell Diego and Allison but if you want to… They're safe. Allison took a lot of shit from Dad because she wouldn't back him up when he tried to un-queer me."

"Diego made me and Allison promise we'd destroy anyone who gave you shit for your clothes or makeup or whatever."

“He did?”

“Yeah.”

Klaus laughs. “I guess those two have their uses.”

"I guess," Vanya says. "Klaus?"

"Yeah?"

"Thanks."

"Any time, Vanny. Any time."

As if summoned by Klaus and Vanya discussing them, the back door swings open and Allison emerges, holding a large mixing bowl, followed by Diego, clutching a fistfull of spoons in one hand and a small plastic container in the other. “Fuck, it’s gotten cold,” Allison says, and sets the bowl on the ground then returns a minute later with -bless her predictable, bossy competence- an armload of crocheted blankets. The house is full of them; the repository for unwanted gifts from some beloved relative with lamentable taste, maybe. They range from ugly-cute to just ugly, and Klaus loves them; just unabashedly loves them. 

“So we had a revelation,” Allison says as Diego begins to pass out spoons. “Everyone knows that the best part of baking brownies is eating the raw batter, and we thought, hey, what’s to stop us from just not baking them?”

“I always knew,” Klaus says solemnly, “that if you two ever managed to set aside your differences you’d achieve great things together.”

“Fuck off, Klaus,” Diego says, and he unscrews the top on the plastic jar -sprinkles, Klaus notes- and turns it upside-down into the bowl of brownie batter. 

Eventually the bowl is scraped clean and everyone trails off to bed, and Vanya catches Klaus’s hand on the way up the stairs, saying; “I’m… Gonna have to think about some things. And I will talk to you more about… Everything. If that’s OK.”

“Always,” Klaus promises, and he means it, means it more than most of the promises he's made to most of the people in his life.

Ben is in his room, waiting for him, and upon seeing him sitting there on the floor Klaus feels his mood begin to sink. “Can we just not?” he asks. “Not now? I’ve actually had a really good night so if we could just skip the inspirational speeches-”

“Don't worry,” Ben says. “I’m not gonna waste inspirational speeches on someone who won’t listen.”

“You say a lot of things that you should know I’m not gonna listen to.”

“For fuck’s sake," Ben says; "for once in your miserable existence can you take something seriously? I’m trying to help you.”

Klaus rolls his eyes. 

“Look,” Ben says. “Sorry, that was- I shouldn’t have said that. I’ve been thinking. Maybe we’ve been going about this wrong.”

Klaus says nothing, but he relents enough to sit on the floor beside Ben, to hear him out.

“The getting you sober thing,” Ben clarifies, as if this is still a conversation with two participants, as if Klaus cares about his thoughts on the matter, as if the ‘getting you sober thing’ isn’t an infinite, bullshit cycle of Ben nagging Klaus and Klaus not listening, and-

“I saw you sitting outside with everyone else. And like.” Ben sighs. “You’re actually all pretty good at looking out for one another, you know that?"

“You had better not have been listening in on what Vanya and I were talking about,” Klaus warns, because fuck Ben, fuck him, that conversation was for him and Vanya alone and if Ben was listening-

“I wasn’t,” Ben says. “I was with Allison and Diego. They were fighting about that brownie recipe in the kitchen."

"Of course they were."

"They looked like they were having fun.”

“Mmm.”

“I miss them,” Ben says.

Klaus sighs. 

"Klaus?"

"Yeah," Klaus says. "They miss you, too.” He sprawls out on the ground, staring at the ceiling. "So. What's this about?"

“Look, I’ll just get to the point." For once, Klaus thinks. "I don’t think this is something you’re gonna do on your own. So, new deal: You can tell everyone I’m around, but Klaus, you gotta promise me you’ll ask them for help.”

“Great,” Klaus says. “Like, the three actually-functional people in this house need their junkie brother holding them back.”

“OK, we’re gonna come back to the actually-functional people thing, because… There’s so much to unpack there, dude. But… Do we have a deal?”

Klaus closes his eyes. “For fuck’s sake, Ben.”

“Klaus. Do we?” 

“Yeah,” Klaus says, and suddenly he's exhausted, too exhausted to argue with Ben anymore. “Yeah, OK. We have a deal. Whatever.”

“Cool.”

“Yeah, cool.”

“So…”

“So. When do I get to do this?”

“Whenever you want."

Klaus thinks about it for a while, theb sits up, nods at Ben, says: "...Thanks, Benny," then stands and walks to the wall that separates his room from Vanya’s, and knocks. She’s tapping on the door a moment later, and when he opens the door she says: “Hey. You OK?”

“Can I ask you to do something?”

“Sure," Vanya says. "Yeah, of course.”

“Can you.” Ben is standing beside him, now, nodding encouragement. “Can you go get Allison and Diego and ask them to come in here?”

Vanya blinks in surprise, but she just says: "Sure."

“Thanks, Vanny. Tell them…"

Vanya reaches out, touches his arm.

"Well," Klaus says. "Tell them there’s something I need to talk to everyone about.”

Chapter Text

As Lila tries and fails to find a comfortable position to rest her arm in, she reflects on how, all things considered, her situation could be worse.

Oh, granted, not by much. She's still going to reserve the right to complain as much as she damn well likes about the little bastard on the floor opposite her at the sad, mass-produced little coffee table in the sad little university dorm lounge they’re sitting in (or she would, if there was anyone left in the entire fucking timeline who cared enough about her to listen to her complain). He's regarding her with such blatant skepticism that's Lila's pretty sure she's meant to feel ridiculed, and- OK, the story just told is improbable: an organisation at war with itself, a sudden shift in her understanding of the how her own involvement with said organisation came to be, leading to her own spontaneous rejection of its protection and guidance, and the part that truly matters as far as he's concerned, the warning that he needs to cut out this joyride through the timeline if he doesn't want to come to the attention of those same people she supposes she's on the run from, now. Honestly, though, this kid’s existence is improbable, so it's a bit rich of him to be looking at her the way he is.

(Those people are also responsible for the pain in her arm, for the nausea bubbling in her gut and the way her skin is starting to feel both hot and clammy at once, all over her body. Oh, no one forced her to do what she did -without sterile tools, without painkillers- but- fuck that, she thinks, because what other choice did she have? 

She's not planning to tell him about that.)

"So you're saying," the kid says, breaking the silence (and Lila doesn't much care for the way he's somehow capable of looking down his nose at her even though he's both younger and shorter than she is, even though they're both sitting down), "that I need to stop time-travelling and go home, or these- what did you call them?"

"The Temps Commission," Lila supplies, and fuckfuckfuck her arm hurts and she thinks she's going to be sick. She spends a moment focusing on trying to keep as still as she can because even the pressure of her clothing against the bandage-covered wound releases waves of dull, reverberating pain through her body, and she would very much prefer to display no sign of how much pain she's in because there's no good reason for anyone to know that she's in any way vulnerable, particularly not this kid who really needs to fucking take her seriously if he knows what's good for him.

"Right, these… Temps Commission people," the kid says, pronouncing Temps Commission with a heavy, exaggerated tolerance, as though Lila is the one being stupid here. "You're telling me that if I don't stop what I’ve been doing and go home, they're going to come after me and stick me in the time-travel naughty box?"

Time travel naughty box sounds like something she could have come up with, and Lila’s not sure if his flippancy is unexpectedly endearing or merely infuriating. She settles on infuriating. Showing insufficient respect for the potential dangers inherent to telling the laws of physics to go fuck themselves is already kind of her thing. 

"Uh-huh," she says, trying to keep her voice steady, neutral (fuck, it’s usually so much easier to maintain her sense of confidence that she’s successfully making people see what she wants them to see in her); he seems like the sort who'd take her annoyance as a challenge, like he’d find it fun to see how much further he can push her, and Lila would really rather stay on track so they can just wrap this up and move the fuck on with their lives already, please. "Yeah. Basically."

"But you're not with them?" He settles back against the couch, crossing his arms, once again looking down his nose at her through narrowed eyes. He must have learned that expression from someone else; in Lila's experience kids his age rarely manage to display such cuntish behaviour without outside influence.

"Not anymore," Lila says. Not as of a week ago. "Fuck the lot of them." 

"Hmmm," the kid says, and that's when something occurs to Lila though at this point it's tantamount to locking the barn door after the horse has fled the country to start a new life under an assumed name in a tax haven beyond the reach of the authorities. "Wait, she says. "What are you, like, ten? Am I allowed to say fuck around you?"

He rolls his eyes. "I'm thirteen," he says. "And you can say whatever the fuck you want." 

This suits Lila, who knows that realistically she was always going to say whatever the fuck she wanted regardless of this kid's age. She's not even sure why she asked; it's not as though being propelled through pure spite against what more-or-less amounts to a common enemy between them to warn him about the dangers of unregulated time travel means that, beyond accomplishing her chosen goal, she's responsible for ensuring that he ends up back at his Academy uncorrupted. The way he swears is adorable, though, like he’s trying on for size something that he hasn’t quite grown into, like he’s hoping that no one will notice its ill fit or -worse- tell him oh darling, you really are getting so grown up, aren't you? in a way that implies that he’s really anything but. 

"I still don’t know your name,” the kid says. 

"I'm Lila," she says, then, because there's no reason not to, because the kid won't know or care why it makes a difference, because she wants to know how it feels to say it, just once, "Lila Gill.”  If she was hoping for… anything, it’s not there. Why should it be, though? She’s used any number of names that aren’t hers over the years, some of them rightfully belonging to someone else, some fabricated entirely, and anyway, what is using her murdered parents’ last name, a name belonging to people she can’t remember enough to feel any sort of attachment to them, meant to feel like? “You?”

"Five Hargreeves," he says, and Five is a weird fucking name but it's hard to concentrate when the effects of the painkillers Lila took a couple of hours ago is wearing off, and so she says nothing, reaching instead into her pocket to retrieve a little plastic bottle before she spends a moment grappling with the childproof cap, swearing at the annoyance of doing it one-handed. 

“What’s that?” 

“Tylenol.” Finally, Lila wins against the cap. She pours a few pills into her palm and throws two of them into her mouth, swallowing them dry.

“Is it normal to take four Tylenol at once?” 

It is not normal to take four Tylenol at once, a fact of which Lila is extremely aware, but pharmacies keep the really good stuff behind the counters and out of reach of homeless-looking teenagers without access to any of the bank accounts or credit cards that might exist in their names elsewhere in the timeline. Her liver is probably well on its way to being fucked but her everything feels like it’s well on its way to being fucked, and at this point Lila doesn't have it in her to spare too much of a thought for any individual organ that's refusing to step up in the face of adversity. “Well, my uterus feels like it’s trying to punch its way out of my body, so. Not that that’s any of your business.” 

"I have sisters," Five says. “If you want me to not ask questions, fine, but I’m not afraid of uteruses.” 

Lila rolls her eyes while she tries to swallow the remaining two Tylenol, but when one of the pills lodges itself in her throat it takes long enough to choke down that its outer coating begins to wear off and it burns, sending her into a fit of coughing. "Oh. Oh God. That is fucking vile." Five stares at Lila as she splutters but then he hops to his feet, takes a step and then- he's in front of  the vending machine in the corner of the room, as though he’s bypassed the distance between where he was a second ago and where he is now, hitting one of its buttons before he gives it a firm kick. A second later there's the sound of whirring and the thump of something falling and he reaches in to retrieve the object, then turns back toward where Lila's sitting, and then he’s in front of her without having walked back across the room, proffering a bottle of water.

"The problem here is," Five says as Lila awkwardly opens the bottle using only her right hand and then gulps down the chilled, plastic-tasting water, "is how do I know I can trust anything you're telling me?"

Lila stops drinking. "I- what "

Five cocks his head, looks at her in that way that's already growing to be a recurring annoyance. "I mean," he says, "you turn up out of nowhere saying you need to talk to me, you somehow know who I am and who the Umbrella Academy are, you’ve give me a lot of information that's more than a little hard to swallow, and then you tell me that it's really, really important that I do what you- hey," Five cuts himself off. "Are you OK?”

Breathe, she instructs herself, but she's moved her arm around too much and there's nothing for it but to wait, and to hope, and hope, and hope that the pain will subside, at least enough for her to focus on what's going on around her. Just breathe. You can do this, you’ve been in pain before -

“Lila?"

"I'm fine," she says. "Just tired. This is taking longer than I thought it was going to, and today's been one massive headache." Today, yes, and the day before, and - “You really like making things difficult, don't you?"

“You do look tired,” Five says (and no shit; she knows she looks tired. She also looks like she hasn’t washed her hair in over a week, which she hasn’t, and like she’s barely been sleeping, which is also true), and Lila wonders if that’s a hint of sympathy she’s detecting. Good, she thinks. She can use sympathy to get somewhere. 

“Look,” she says, because she’s always known that she can be pushed a long fucking way before she just can’t propel herself forward anymore, but she might have finally found that endpoint and its name is trying to get Five fucking Hargreeves to listen to anything I’m trying to tell him while battling what I can no longer pretend isn’t a raging infection. Can we talk again tomorrow? I can answer the rest of your questions but right now I need sleep. Let me to back to where I'm staying, and-" 

-and she'll curl up into a ball on the floor, she thinks, shifting every few minutes to try to find a position that doesn't exacerbate the pain in her arm, and if she's lucky she'll eventually shiver herself into unconsciousness, and if she’s luckier still, she’ll wake up feeling strong enough to walk the several blocks back here. 

"Does where you're staying have heat?" Five asks, and if it weren't for how utterly wretched Lila knows she looks she'd worry that he might be able to read minds on top of teleporting. "Or running water?” She bristles as he eyes her oily hair, her mud-and-fuck-knows-what-else-spattered clothing. "Because you look like wherever you're staying doesn't have running water," he adds unhelpfully. "How long's it been, for you?"

"A week. You?"

"Since I got here? Two weeks."

"What about since you left home?"

"A couple of months."

"You've been gone a couple of months and you've spent two weeks out of that time camping out in a shitty university dorm that’s closed for Christmas?" Lila asks. "Jesus. What possessed you to take yourself on a tiki tour of the entire fucking timeline and decide that the worst winter on record in the northeastern United States would be a good place to stop?"

"It hasn't seemed that bad, so far."

"It gets worse."

"You checked?"

Checking would imply a level of preparation for which Lila simply did not have the time or the foresight. "...someone told me," she says, but that's starting to get into none of your fucking business, you little shit territory, and so she takes another stab at appealing to reason with, "Look, I get trying to prove something to a shitty parent but haven't you made your point by now? Isn't going home a better option than freezing to death?"

"It's warm enough, here."

"Yeah and what are you gonna do when people start coming back? You’ve got- what, three or four days?”

"Look, I’m going to go home, OK?” He’s getting defensive- interesting. “I need to get back to my brothers and sisters, I just- I have some stuff I need to do first. And aren't you the one who said you needed to sleep before we talked more? How come you get to keep asking questions?"

Lila releases an irritated sigh. " Fine. You’re exhausting, you know that?”

“You’re not the first person to say that. Do you need somewhere to crash that isn’t whatever hole you’re staying in?

 “Is there space for me to crash here?" She doesn’t like the idea of leaving her briefcase unattended for any longer than she already has, but in the moment, being warm is too great a temptation to resist.

"It's an entire building full of empty dorm rooms," Five says. "You can take your pick."

***

He could very well take off once she’s out of his sight, Lila thinks as she follows him down the hall, and she needs to make it worth his while to not take off, needs to engage his curiosity just enough, then refuse to satisfy it any further until it suits her.

Fine, then.

She hasn't had much practice doing this -people like herself being in short supply and opportunities to be around them being rarer still- but she's had enough, and feeling out when the chance to use it exists is untaught, innate, like walking into a silent house and being able to tell whether or not anyone is at home by the way the place feels, like knowing soon as she wakes up that the weather is damp and muggy from the pressure in her temples, even without looking outside. 

And so she takes a step -it throws her, a little, how it doesn't feel like anything beyond the normal motion of walking from one spot to another- and then she's on the other side of the door to the room next to the one Five has claimed. 

"I'm not messing with you," she says, as she opens the door to an incredulous Five. “There are a lot of things I would rather be doing right now; you're the one making this difficult."

“How-” 

“I’m tired,” she says, and she knows from the way he’s still staring at her in disbelief means that she has the upper hand, now. “I need to sleep. Good night, Five. I’ll talk to you in the morning.”

***

It takes a few minutes of snooping to learn that the room Lila supposes she’s now squatting in is normally inhabited by two boys named Blaine and Matthew. Lila chooses Matthew's side of the room to sleep in- from the decor, his entire personality seems to be based on a love of football, but Blaine is fond of black-and-white photography and plays the guitar and Lila's limited experience with the various genres of boy leads her to the conclusion that while Matthew may be as dull as a fucking brick, Blaine is completely insufferable and it's not worth the risk of catching whatever made him that way on top of everything else that's wrong in her life.

The Tylenol is kicking in now, as much as it’s ever going to, which at least means she can risk assessing her surroundings. She's been wearing the same socks for six days and once her boots are off everything in her revolts against leaving them on for another second, and so she leaves them balled up in the doorway so she can get back in, later. 

Slowly, Lila meanders up and down three floors of dorm rooms, trying the occasional door at random in hopes that someone might have been careless enough to leave it unlocked. To her disappointment everyone who lives here seems to be responsible, but she finds a lost and found table at the end of one hall and digs through it, grabbing enough clothing that seems to be clean -or at least, cleaner than what she has on, it’s not like she’s in a position where she can afford to be picky- to get herself through a couple of days in case, by some misfortune, it takes that long to get Five to listen to her.

A short while later, curled under Matthew’s stupid football-themed blankets ( Christ, Matthew, would it kill you to branch out a little?) just before she falls asleep, Lila draws in deep, shuddering breaths, using her index fingers to place gentle pressure on the space below her eyes because she knows that if she does that she can stop herself from crying and she has to stop herself from crying because if she can't then that means that her mother, the Commission, the entire purpose for which she was raised are worth mourning, worth missing, and they're not, they're not, she will not let them be, they're not.

“Fuck you, if you’re watching,” she says out loud to the ceiling. “Especially you. You know who you are. It’s your fault I’m here, like this. I hope you’re happy.”

Her mother would think she’s addressing her; the person her vitriol is aimed at would know better, and here, now, in the quiet and solitude of someone else’s space, it’s impossible not to replay the events of the night she left in her memory. 

Lila had trusted him more than she'd trusted most people -which is to say, not much at all, but not much was still more than most people got- and everyone at the Commission, Lila included, had liked him. Even the Handler, who had otherwise preferred to maintain a monopoly on Lila's education had admitted that there was no one who was better with firearms and so he'd taught her, on the Handler's orders but with patience and good humor that people rarely granted Lila when they were engaging with her because of who her mother was. He’d never shown any sign of being afraid of either of them and if he was, he hid it well enough for Lila to respect him. 

"Did you kill my parents?" she'd demanded when they’d last spoken.

"Does it matter?" he'd asked and he was so gentle, so kind, that Lila wasn’t sure if she’d wanted to waiver and resign herself to the help, the protection that he was offering (even though she wasn't allowed to be someone who could need help, ask for it and expect to receive it just because someone thought she deserved it, just because she was young and vulnerable and frightened; that wasn't who she was, that wasn't what she was for) or just fucking stab him in the gut and leave him to bleed out in his office, because how fucking dare he sound like that? Instead she’d done her best to tamp down every emotion save for anger (did anger even count as an emotion, being the ever-present background ambience that it was?) as she faced him. 

"Yes it fucking matters."

"Does it though?" he'd asked, soft and patient and reasonable, and she hated him, hated him for it. "I'm a soldier, Lila. I follow orders. You know that."

“You’re not saying no.”

“No. I’m not.” She’d stared him down a moment longer until he’d sighed, softly, and said; “It wasn’t personal. It’s never personal; please try to understand that.”

"It is to me."

“Lila-”

Before she’d left, she’d turned and said; “Don’t try to stop me from leaving. If I ever see you again, I will kill you.” 

He hadn't tried.

Lila doesn’t wish that he had. She doesn’t. 

***

It's not fucking fair that Lila wakes up feeling worse the next morning, after the closest thing to a night of uninterrupted sleep somewhere warm and passably comfortable she’s had in a week. She swallows another go-fuck-yourself-warning-label number of Tylenol, takes a shower in the bathroom down the hall during which she spends five minutes with her forehead pressed against the wall riding out the waves of burning when she fails to avoid splashing hot water on the wound on her arm, and dresses in her lost-and-found clothing haul.

Back in Blaine and Matthew’s room, Lila stares at the box of crackers left on Blaine’s desk. She knows in theory that it’s not ideal that she hasn’t eaten since early yesterday, but she only gets as far as opening the box before she’s throwing up into Blaine’s rubbish bin, something awful and yellow that burns her throat. She spends several minutes after that heaving but nothing else comes up; there’s nothing left in her to come up.

A knock sounds on the door. “Lila?”

“Gimme a second,” she calls. 

She can do this. She can. 

She closes her eyes, manages to let gravity do most of the work of getting her back onto Matthew’s bed, and once she’s spent a moment laying there willing reality to stop spinning around her, she calls, “Yeah, you can come in.”

Five blinks through the door, and she doesn’t look up but she can hear his footsteps, the sound of him settling on the floor. 

“Cramps, huh?” he asks. 

And then, Lila has an idea. 

Here's the thing she’s starting to realise: she knows how to go off-script. People are unpredictable, assignments don’t always go according to plan; sometimes it’s not even her fault when they don’t- there needs to be room for improvisation, doing what she’s been raised to do. Going off script, though, means that the script is still there to fall back on, that the desired outcome was never up to her. 

She wonders if when left to her own devices the only decisions she knows how to make are terrible ones.

But whether or not the decision she's making is a terrible one, it's the only thing she can think of that might get Five to… oh, not trust her, (she wouldn’t trust her), but at least listen. 

She sits, battling nausea, and looks at Five coolly as she rolls her sleeve up, wincing at the way the bandage needs to be peeled away from where it’s adhered to the congealing mess of fluids seeping out of the gash on her arm. The wound is a jagged, imprecise thing, the work of someone with limited tools and a violent resolution to get the task at hand done before pain or fear or common sense got in the way, and now that it’s exposed to the open air she can smell it, a sort of sickly decay that should not come from anything living.

Five looks at her. "What happened?"

She's going to start dry-heaving again if she has to keep acknowledging what it looks like, how very, undeniably infected it is, so she rolls the bandage back around it and pulls her sleeve down. "Tracker," she explains. 

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

“The Commission?”

“Yeah.”

“They put a tracker in you?”

“They put a tracker in everyone.” She'd been seven when she’d gotten hers, right before her first solo mission. She'd cried around the lollipop she’d been given, collapsing into her mother’s arms when the last stitch was secured, and she remembers hearing; “ Now, that wasn’t so bad, was it, little one?” and then; “Lila, I’m going to need you to stop making all this fuss; you don’t want to get frown lines, do you? ”

"It looks infected," Five says.

"No shit." 

“You are sick.”

“I know."

“Wait-” Five frowns, as though processing something. “The pills. They really were just Tylenol?”

“What the fuck else would they be?” 

“I just thought-” Five’s eyes shift away, and he bites his lip, for a moment his mind is elsewhere. “Never mind.” He looks back at her. “You need more than Tylenol."

"I know I need more than Tylenol,” Lila says, getting annoyed. “I also don't legally exist and putting myself at the mercy of a system that’s going to want to know who I am and who’s responsible for me doesn’t sound like a great time so there’s not really much point in worrying about it, is there?"

"Then why are you telling me this?"

"Because," Lila says. "Think about it. If anyone was monitoring me this wouldn't have happened. Like, sure, maybe you might let an operative get hurt to make a cover story more convincing, but you wouldn't let it get to this point. You know as well as I do that it's important to keep your superpowered kidnap-babies in good physical condition. We're too valuable to take risks you don't have to take".

"I wasn't kidnapped."

Lila leans back against the cement wall and closes her eyes. Either the pain and the terror and the stomach-gnawing loneliness of the last week are finally catching up with her, or this all-encompassing exhaustion, even after she’s barely been awake for an hour, is just the natural effect of having a conversation with Five Hargreeves.  "Right."

"I wasn't," Five says. "My dad bought us." It's a weird fucking thing to get defensive about, but if pursuing this line of thought distracts him from what she's accidentally revealed about her own history, Lila's willing to run with it because she super doesn’t want to have the how I came to be part of the Commission conversation right now.

"OK, that's still fucked up though. You do realise that that's fucked up, right?"

" Yeah I know it's fucked up."

He knows it's fucked up, Lila thinks, and he still wants to go back. He must have had a miserable time, these last few months (but if he did, why didn't he just go home?), or maybe the pull of the sibling bond is just that strong. That idea is horrifying; would Lila's own clean-as-it-could-be break with the Commission have been messier if there'd been someone else, someone like her, to account for? Another person’s impulses and idiosyncrasies and weak points to work around? Someone she might be tempted to go back for, once she'd gotten out?

("You'd hate not being an only child, darling," her mother - the Handle r she corrects herself- told her once, when Lila had expressed the tentative thought that having a brother or sister might be fun. She couldn't have been older than six, she thinks, not yet old enough to fully grasped that oh, little one, you can always ask me for anything, mothers want their children to be happy really meant you can ask me for anything as long as I never have to contend with the inconvenient knowledge that my ungrateful daughter might want things that aren't what I want her to want- don't you know what I saved you from?

Lila had frowned, and a "but-" was forming on her lips, and then the Handler had swooped down, smothered her with a hug that Lila had submitted to -she knew better, at six, than to display resistance to shows of maternal affection- then told her, "there are other children like you, you know. That old nuisance Hargreeves adopted seven of them, and do you think they ever have any fun at all, locked up in that dusty old Academy? And there are far too many of them for one parent to give them the lives they deserve, the poor things. Would you really want that, little one? Having to fight someone else for your mother's love and attention?")

Lila is starting to realise that the list of things she thought she knew about the world that she needs to reexamine may be roughly the same length as the list of everything the Handler told her, but the way Five's upper lip curls whenever he mentions his father suggests that whatever share of parental affection he's managed to fight his way into isn’t satisfactory, and- not that it's Lila's problem, but- has no one ever pointed out the kid that he has such an obvious tell?

"Think, Five," Lila says. "No one sent me here; I wouldn’t be in this situation if someone were looking out for me. If you don't believe me, I don't know what else to tell you.”

For a moment, there’s silence. Then-

"Why? Five asks.

"Why?"

"Why come after me to warn me? No offense, but you don't know me, and I get the feeling you don't do things out of altruism."

He’s right. She isn’t. "This was supposed to be a quick stop before I fucked off to, I dunno. Live my best life on a beach somewhere."

"But something went wrong?"

"The equipment The Commission uses to time travel isn't as easy to figure out as I thought. The agents made it look a lot easier."

"You haven't answered my question."

"Why I warned you?"

"Yeah."

"Because. One of two things will happen if the Commission catch up with you and you’re not where you’re supposed to be in the timeline. You don't want either of them." 

"They'll kill me?" Five guesses.

"That’s one of them." If it had only been this, she might not have bothered with him- millions of people die every day and their deaths have nothing to do with Lila (except, of course, when they do). That he's just a kid won't stop them; they've done as much to children who are younger and more innocent than Five Hargreeves a thousand times over, then gone back and done the same and worse a thousand times again when the tweaks to the timeline hadn't taken hold exactly as intended the first time around. 

Of the two things that might happen, it's still the kinder option.

"What's the other?" Five asks.

Lila sighs and tries to rearrange herself into a comfortable position, her ever-more-useless left arm throbbing at her side. "They'd recruit you." And Lila's not sure how much investment she’s supposed to have in, well, anything really, but this is what it all comes down to, really: as much as she doesn't want to care about what happens to Five, she can't have someone else like her getting fucked over by the same people who fucked her over. She can’t let them win.

Five snorts. "They'd try."

"Yeah," Lila says. "And if that didn't work they'd go back to killing you, or they'd threaten your family. You've got the training to be dangerous and an ability that gives you an advantage over the agents they already have; I'm surprised no one thought of it already." 

(Although maybe, she realises as she’s speaking; they already have. Maybe someone's earmarked him, like the Handler earmarked her; if she’s thought of it herself, it’s not impossible that someone else could have.)

"Are they looking for me, now?" Five asks, breaking her out of the space she's momentarily become lost in, filled with loathing for her mother ( the Handler, she reminds herself), loathing for her old firearms instructor.

"This very minute? Probably not. They've got a lot of other shit going on what with the whole organisation collapsing in on itself, and you're keeping still. If you get back to where you're supposed to be you'll probably be fine."

“But they could be?”

“I mean, yeah, they monitor the entire timeline. They could pop up anywhere.”

For a long moment, Five is silent.

"So here's the thing," he says at last. "I want to go home."

"So go?" Lila says, but her stomach twists at the way Five hesitates.

"That's it,” he says. “I can't. Time travel is- it’s not easy. I can kind of… aim backwards, or forwards, but other than that…”

“You’re stuck here,” Lila realises.

“Yeah. I mean, I could try again, but… I got pretty far, in both directions. This is as close as I’ve gotten to somewhere where I even really know how anything works in… a while, since I- wait. ” Five sits up. “Couldn’t you use your briefcase to get me home?" Five hesitates for a second, then seems to decide that whatever he’s been thinking of saying is worth saying. “I'd owe you. I know you left in a hurry but if you actually sat down and looked at its-”

How fucking stupid, Lila thinks, must he be to ask a Commission assassin for a favour with an open-ended I’d owe you on offer in exchange? And if he’s not stupid, then, she thinks, how fucking desperate? 

She shakes her head. "I can't get it to work. I think I might have grabbed a broken one? Either that or I don't really understand them as well as I thought I did. EIther way, it's busted. It sort of fizzes if you shake it, but it doesn't do anything, and if I try to push it too hard then… I don't know what could happen. That's the thing about fucking around with time travel when you aren't sure."

Five says, more to himself than to Lila, "It's akin to descending blindly into the depths of the freezing water and reappearing as an acorn."

"What?"

"Something my dad said."

Lila snorts. "Your dad doesn’t make sense." 

" He’d say that you saying that means you're not ready to time-travel.”

"Yeah, well. I don't answer to your dad." 

Lila shifts so that she’s lying down; even sitting up as long as she has has taken a lot out of her. "Is that what you said to him? That it didn’t make sense?"

"Yeah."

Lila can't help it; she laughs. Weakly, but weakly is all she can manage, and he deserves the tiniest bit of approval for that.

“Where’s that briefcase you mentioned, now?” Five asks. 

“Where I’ve been staying.” Nice try, she thinks; just because she may not entirely hate Five Hargreeves as much as she might have thought she would, it doesn’t mean he gets to know everything. “Any other questions?”

“Actually,” Five says, “yes.”

Lila waits.

“You’re… like me,” he says. “Another October first baby.”

“Yep.”

"You're older than me."

"Did you somehow miss the whole time travel thing? For you, it's been thirteen years since you were born. For me, it's been sixteen."

Five lets this pass without comment. “So there were eight of us.”

Lila yawns. “Still waiting for you to actually ask a question,” she says. “Get on with it.”  

Five sighs heavily, really letting her know that she's getting on his nerves; as if it isn't mutual, as if he expects Lila to care that she annoys him. “My dad always said there were seven. So how-” 

Seriously? “Five," Lila interrupts. "Do I really need to explain to you that the kinds of people who adopt people like us also lie to people like us?" She knows as soon as she’s said it that it's a dangerous game she's playing, this people like us; the last thing she needs is this kid thinking they're… bonding, or whatever, and she orders herself not to say it again. "Yes, there were more than seven. Old, rich white guys don't always get what they want, even if they don't want you to know that that's something that can happen. I'm pretty sure he was trying to collect the full set, so he actually did pretty badly."

"How badly?" 

"Like, about twenty percent badly?"

Everything about Five has been guarded until now but upon hearing this he laughs, and for a second he's just a thirteen-year-old taking delight in his dick of a father's capacity for human fallibility, and… OK, Lila's not the sort of person who easily allows other people to endear themselves to her, but if she was? This might do it. "There were thirty-five babies like us?"

"Forty-three, actually."

"Forty-three? ” Now he sounds positively gleeful. “That's worse than twenty percent. I mean, that's better."

"So seven out of forty-three is… less than twenty percent?"

Five frowns as he looks at her. "Yeah, it's less than- how bad are you at math?"

Lila is so bad at math. So, so bad. Bad enough that if she'd ever been entrusted with a briefcase that hadn't had its coordinates pre-set by someone who knew what they were doing she'd probably have ended up in… Oh, roughly the same situation she's in now, she supposes. "I've always been more of a doer.”

"Noted,” Five says. “So. Forty-three. Where are the others now?"  

"Well, now," Lila says, "it's nineteen eighty-six, so I guess they're wherever human consciousness waits around before it gets stuck in an actual person. Which is a little philosophical for me, so." She shrugs, and immediately regrets it; the pain in her arm is now traveling upward toward her shoulder and any movement sends the warning signal to her brain: that was a mistake, but she tells herself to ignore it, press on, nothing's broken, you've survived worse (she hasn't, but what can she do?). "Can't help you there."

"Stop being pedantic," Five snipes. "You know what I mean."

Lila’s almost grateful, in spite of how obnoxious he’s being; her worry that she might somehow accidentally end up feeling real concern for this kid is going to quickly evaporate if he keeps saying things like that. "I'll stop being pedantic when you stop trying to intimidate me with words like pedantic. I know what pedantic means." 

(Pedantic: adjective. Overly concerned with minute details or formalisms. Darling, I'm going to need you to stop being so pedantic. You'll be perfectly safe as long as you've paid attention to what I've taught you and worked hard enough at your training. You have, haven't you?") 

She relents, then, because talking is a distraction from how she’s feeling like such, absolute shit and from the slowly encroaching terror that there may be no way out of this situation, for either of them, ever. “Most of them just end up living their lives. I figure at least a few figure out what they are; like, if you share a birthday with those tedious do-gooders who are always in the news and sometimes things melt if you look at them too hard, you would wouldn't you? Some of them probably have no idea; the ones that have powers that are more situational. Like mine.”

“What do you mean, like yours?”

“I can’t do anything on my own. I can only copy other people’s powers.”

“So when you’re on your own, you’re basically ordinary?” 

If he wants to call a highly-trained time-traveling assassin ordinary. “Sure.”

Five says, to himself, “Like my sister.”

“Hmm?”

“She’s ordinary. No power.”

Jesus, Lila is not having this kid draw parallels between her and someone he’s attached to, no matter how lonely he is, no matter how completely fucked they both are. "Your sister was born on the same day as everyone else?"

"Yes."

"Same situation? Mother wasn't pregnant, blah blah blah?"

"Yeah."

"Then that can't be right."

"Why?"

"Because that's not how it works."

"And you're the expert?"

"Um,” Lila says. “Which one of us didn't even know there were more than seven of us until yesterday? Think, Five. Why would all forty-two other freak miracle babies have powers and not your sister?"

"I don't know," Five says. "Because nothing about us makes sense?" It's bothering him, though -this kid is so bad at hiding his emotions- evidently Five can cope with things that don't make sense as long as they don't make sense consistently. "Look," he says, finally. "You don't know Vanya. I do."

"And?"

"And she's…the others kind of…" he shakes his head. "She's quiet. People don't pay much attention to her." People, Lila surmises, means the rest of our siblings, because how many people can someone raised in his little ivory tower of an Academy even know? "But I know her, and if there was anything going on there I'd have noticed. Or she'd have told me." Once again Lila thanks God, fate, the timeline, whatever, that she was raised without siblings; imagine someone else having this kind of pull on you, slowing you down, holding you back?

"Look," Lila says. "I don't need to know Vanya. If she's one of the forty-three she has some kind of power. It might not be as obvious as your other siblings, but it's definitely there."

Five takes a moment to process this. "Lila?" he asks.

"Yeah?"

"Stop talking about Vanya."

Five's damned lucky Lila isn't a full-fledged, active Commission agent, she thinks, because for all of the combat training she knows his father put him and his siblings through, all of his academic prowess, he's alarmingly deficient in other areas. This is, perhaps, where the difference between his upbringing and hers is at its most obvious: where Five is a foot soldier, Lila is a spy; here without even trying she's learned through a few snippy comments and forlorn expressions which of his siblings means the most to him, how she fits into the rest of their family (or rather, how she doesn't), and precisely how Five feels about that. If Lila needed to know who to threaten to ensure his cooperation, she'd barely have had to work for it.

It's just as well, she thinks, closing her eyes, that she's not responsible for him.