Chapter Text
The story goes like this. There is little Seven and she is nothing. She is what she is. She is on the outside.
Seven has always been nothing. She is last because she is frustratingly ordinary. She always has been and she always will be. She learned to accept it a long time ago.
(she's only just learning exactly how much she can be)
***
April
On the first day of the rest of Vanya Hargreeves’ life, she does nothing.
She does not go to work. She does not eat, or sleep, or practice. She makes a point to not speak to or think about her siblings. Instead, she sits on her couch inside her apartment that doesn’t feel like home anymore. Because he was in here, her mind whispers to her. He touched everything.
Vanya wonders if here has ever been home. The Academy certainly never was, and even though she had stayed with Sissy for a bit, that wasn’t either. Has she ever had a home?
That thought is almost too sad to stomach, though she doubts she could get nauseous again. After she’d gotten home from almost murdering 7.8 billion people in cold blood, she’d thrown up for around two hours. Now she just feels tired.
She can’t remember much about the previous day. Only collapsing after Five’s little time trauma and being carried out to the van and then back to the apartment. She woke up alone, or at least that’s what Five would have liked her to think. Vanya always noticed more than anyone thought she did.
The apocalypse has been averted multiple times, Vanya Hargreeves has world-shattering powers, and her siblings are now afraid of her instead of being uninterested. The void between them feels yawning.
What the hell does she do now?
For a while, she does nothing. She sits on the couch for almost nine hours and she stares blankly at the empty wall. There are no pictures on the walls, no photos of friends or family. She doesn’t even own a television. How sad is that? They never had one growing up either, so she’d never felt the need to have one in her own place.
And that’s when Vanya has her Big Personal Realization.
She doesn’t know who she is.
Everything in her mind, every decision she made, was dictated by her father. Not her.
He didn’t have a TV, so she didn’t have a TV. He said she had to stick with the violin to focus on something, so she played the violin, and now it was her job. The Academy had made her feel alone, so she had kept to herself and didn’t make any friends (until him, whispers that voice, and her. She pushes it away.) The damn pills. She’d drugged herself for fifteen years because he told her she had to.
“Fuck,” Vanya says out loud. It’s the first time she’s ever said it. Reginald had always detested swearing. “Fuck me. Okay. Well.”
A sudden bolt of energy zings through her body. She unplugs the landline, getting rid of all of Allison’s messages and the missed calls from the orchestra director. (She needs a cell phone. Or maybe not.) She grabs her keys and her purse and walks out the door.
Vanya hasn’t ever played hooky from anything. When they were kids, Klaus and Ben would sometimes sneak off from training. Of course, they had gotten yelled at every time, but the way Ben’s wide smile had lit up his face made her think of doing it herself. Naturally, she never actually went through with it until she left for good. Today, she does it for the first time.
Passing by the theater, she winces at the onslaught of memories flooding back. The white light, Allison’s gunshot behind her ear, the rest of the orchestra scattering. Too much at once. Instead of focusing on anything too much, she ducks into a store two doors down, breathing fast.
“May I help you, miss?,” a woman with perfectly coiffed red hair asks politely, gesturing around to displays of sunglasses.
No, Number Seven says in the back of her head, the desire to not want to cause anyone trouble persistently. Make yourself scarce.
“Actually,” she cuts in, making eye contact for the first time in awhile. “There might be something.”
***
Vanya sits at a Starbucks two blocks down. Her newly purchased bag of oversize sunglasses to hide her identity from anyone who saw something sits next to her chair. Being recognized now sounds like the worst thing to ever happen, and that includes almost destroying the world multiple times. She usually just gets a tea, but a large, whipped cream topped monstrosity is in her hand. Today is a day of many firsts.
Suddenly, a blue flash across the street catches her attention. Vanya hastens to pick up her stuff and go out the back door in case it is what she fears it is.
Breathing hard, she rests the back of her head against the wall. There’s a bulletin board across from her. Amid the thank you cards from a youth baseball team and an advertisement for an exterminator, there’s a small piece of paper. She anxiously looks both ways and shuffles across the small hallway to grab it.
The picture is of a cabin, painted a dark blue. The listing is a little desperate, slightly pleading and more whiny than anything else. The realtor claims it’s been on the market for over two years. It looks like there’s a hole in the roof and the lawn is intensely overgrown. Most importantly, it's away from everything else.
Vanya has never wanted something more in her entire life. The quiet is immensely tempting.
She’s avoided the entirety of her inheritance. It always felt wrong to use it. She wanted to stand on her own, and that meant abandoning every reminder of the Academy. But now, this seems like a good idea. A very good one. Could she really do this? Is she the type to upend her entire life on a whim? Pack everything and just-leave? Without telling anyone? She’d done it once before, but that had been an entirely different animal.
Instead of thinking about it more and spiraling, she gets a taxi home. Maybe she needs to stop thinking.
And so, twenty-four hours after she came two inches from ending the world (again), Vanya Hargreeves makes a cup of very strong green tea, plugs the godforsaken landline back in, and makes four phone calls. One to her landlord, to inform him she will be vacating her current living area within ten days. Another to quit her job. She leaves a message for Pogo, telling him she’ll finally be claiming her inheritance.
On the first day of the rest of her life, Vanya calls the first therapist on the list of ‘childhood trauma specialist’ and says, “I’d like to make an appointment, please.” She does not make the sentence sound like a question.
***
Sitting on the grass and weeds in front of her new home, Vanya writes “1. I like green olives on pizza” on the assignment sheet. Dr. Stan, her new therapist, had tried to get her to talk for forty-five minutes, then assigned her to use the time setting up her new place to get to know herself. The sheet reads “10 things I learned about me this week”. She's paying to be treated like a kindergartner.
She takes another bite and surveys her surroundings.
It only took three days to find someone to buy the apartment. The young woman who showed up to sign the papers at the closing ceremony reminded her of herself to a disturbing degree, down to the mousy hair and habit of staring at the ground. She’d had all her stuff packed up since the offer she’d made on the cabin had gone through. The realtor had sounded euphoric that someone had actually bought it.
The cabin itself is in even worse shape than Vanya had originally thought. The lake is green. The roof has a large hole in it. The only hint of it existing is a small arrow pointing down a dirt road practically hidden by the trees.
But the trees are lush and green. The sun shines through them just enough to warm her skin. And she is the proud new owner of the “Deja Blue”, according to the sign in the yard. It’s exactly what she needs right now.
Vanya closes her eyes and uses her contentment to summon the familiar jolt of power she needs to make a slight breeze whistle through her hair. She can't go too far yet, but this feels natural. This is something else that comes with the woods. She can teach herself bit by bit to control things, because she isn’t going back on the meds. She can’t now.
Satisfied, Vanya turns her attention back to her first assignment. She writes “2. My favorite color is blue”, because it is now. She never had one before, but it’s the shade of home.
As it often happens, her thoughts drift to her siblings. She hasn’t told any of them she moved, much less where she went. She wants it like that for now. Maybe that’ll change, but the solitude is something that feels like a long time coming. The strange sense of guilt is a testament to the asshole she called a father’s hold on her.
“Fuck you,” Vanya says aloud to the sky, intending it for him. It has a certain ring to it.
“That’s another one,” she mumbles, finding the pen on her makeshift picnic blanket and scrawling “3. ‘Fuck’ is a pretty good word.”
***
The next morning, Vanya knows she has to get realistic. She eats dry Cheerios out of the box and scrawls ‘to do’ on top of the only notebook she currently owns.
‘Patch roof’, she writes. ‘Mow lawn’. ‘Food’. She casts a look at the miserable state of the living room and writes, start looking for furniture. All of this will require going back into the city. ‘Car’ goes on the list too. Craigslist is going to become her best friend.
Vanya wraps herself in one of her most lifeless sweaters. Her wardrobe had always suited her. Now everything oddly feels a size too small.
Over the next few days, Vanya does what she can. She buys a lawnmower off of the nearest hardware store she can find with a pair of gardening gloves and spends eight hours digging weeds out of the mostly buried sidewalk. She pushes the mower up and down the lawn in swirls and whatever shape strikes her as appropriate. The effect is very mismatched. She loves it.
She doesn’t go out much out of fear of being discovered, by someone who recognizes her from that night or one of the others. When she does, it’s in the almost comically large sunglasses and sweater. She picks out a few paint chips on her forays into the city that could be options once she decides to paint, emerald greens, midnight blues, and light yellows, with some raspberry shades mixed in.
The newfound independence and isolation is wonderful. For the first time since Sissy, Vanya feels like she can breathe, like the weight suffocating her for thirty years has been lifted. She spends hours at the library reading anything she wants, like she used to do with Ben. She even starts to play a little, even though she has to stop the second she feels something start to wiggle. It's mostly scales, nothing much, but it feels good.
Sessions with Dr. Stan never get easier. The pace is intently slow, something she hadn't been expecting, forcing her to actually focus on her own feelings and consider her own actions intently. She hates it, but the 'coping strategies' list and the constant worksheets bring a sense of normalcy she never expected.
Vanya doesn't run into anyone for around three weeks, but her luck runs out when she makes an impromptu trip to get ice cream. Klaus, Luther, Five, and Diego, all arguing loudly, traipse in just as she's paying. She feels like an idiot when she ducks behind the Starbucks cup display, and the line at the checkout definitely sees her do it.
(She informs Dr. Stan about that recent development. He gently suggests extending her weekly sessions by forty-five minutes.
***
The next morning, Vanya wakes up at eight. She makes the bed. She uses her new vacuum and does the whole house, getting all the cobwebs out of the corners. She showers and eats a bowl of cereal. It feels wonderfully functional. A light rain has fallen the night before, and the grass is dewy as she makes her way out to the woods. It’s a good morning for practice.
Listening for the twittering of the birds and a slight whistle of the wind through the branches of the trees, she reaches it. There’s a clearing with a close to a complete circle of large oaks, her favorite practice spot.
She takes a deep breath of the fresh air, hearing the twitter of a bird in a nearby bush. That's her starting point.
Focusing intently on the noise of the chirps, the sound starts to reverberate in her head. She hums an additional sort of tuneless note against the waves.
The wind blows the two rightmost trees, which bend a little to the side. Eventually, the remainder of the trees start to dance, bending together in time with an invisible metronome.
Vanya spins on her toe, arms out. She feels like a kid. A few leaves fall into her hair. She doesn't brush them away. She adds the noise of a woodpecker a few yards away and the brush of her hands against her corduroys. A pile of leaves and sticks centrifuges into a tornado shape.
Finished, she relaxes onto the grass, staring up at the ceiling. Freedom pulsing through her veins, she laughs slightly and draws a flower shape in the air.
***
It’s a stormy evening, one entirely too dramatic for what her nights look like nowadays. Gone are the days of confrontation or gnawing dread at something she can’t remember. Instead, she cooks something small for herself and settles on the couch to crack open a library book. Sometimes she paints her toenails. The cabin came with a large claw foot tub, the kind Klaus’ HGTV shows used to have on, so if she really feels like partying she’ll soak for a bit.
Thunderstorms, unfortunately, are one of the things she has a hard time with still. Dr. Stan claims the link will dissolve with time, but that doesn't really help when she's sitting on the floor, rocking back and forth slightly like how anxiety looks in movies.
She's spent hours going over every detail of the night she almost killed Allison. Every little twitch, every breath she took, every word she said. The noise of the slash across Allison's throat, oh god, the noise-
A sound that is decidedly not a slash comes from just outside the door. Vanya stills suddenly. Thunder booms in the background.
It sounds again, still close. She stiffens further. The Commission can be ruled out, considering she can take most of them and time hasn't stopped yet. Who can't be ruled out, however, are any of the others, who will want to immediately take her back and regulate her. She can't let that happen, she's made too much progress to go back again.
The third time she hears it, it's less like a shriek and more like a yowl. Of an animal.
Vanya quickly gets up and shuffles to the door, making sure not to step on any of the creaky floorboards. The peephole reveals nothing, so she takes a chance and whisks the door open, ready for whatever awaits her.
It's a cat.
It's soaked to the bone, its black and white fur hanging limply around its body. Its blue eyes meet hers and it emits another window-rattling yelp.
And what can she do? An outcast can never turn away another outcast. She scoops it up and brings it inside. “I guess I have a cat now,” she mumbles. “Okay.”
***
Vanya names her new friend Domino (mask), because life has a sick sense of humor, so why the hell shouldn't she?