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When Reginald said he’d brought them all together to save the world, he’d meant it. But not in the way they’d all first thought. The bank heists, museum thefts, Eiffel tower, all of them; those had just been training wheels, preparing them for so much more.
When he brought out the shotguns and demon-hunting manuals, Allison renounced the family right there and then. Luther had followed meekly, and Klaus took that as a cue to leave and do whatever the hell he wanted.
“I’ll fight monsters or whatever,” Diego said with a scoff, the knife he’d be flipping between his fingers sliding neatly into his holster. “But it’ll be on my terms, old man. Not yours.” And with that, he was gone.
“Well then,” Reginald had said, regarding them coolly. Five, Ben, and Vanya, giving each other nervous glances before their gazes snapped forward. All three so, so young. Too young.
“Let us begin.”
---
Reginald trains them hard, leaving them bloodied and bruised more often than not. The three of them get good at hunting. And yet, they are never good enough. Always kept on a short leash, working at Reginald’s beck and call to dispose of low-level monsters that they could breeze through in their sleep.
They deal with it in their own ways. Vanya and Five pick up every weapon they can get their hands on and Ben watches everything with a keen eye. He watches as Vanya and Five hone their combat skills to a lethally sharp point, watches as Grace disappears and Reginald refuses to tell them anything, let alone go out to find her. He watches very carefully.
And then, on the night of Reginald’s untimely death, Ben makes sure to turn his gaze away very deliberately.
---
“So,” Five declares loftily as he falls into an armchair. “They read Reginald’s will.”
Beside him, Vanya tenses. “And?”
“Nearly everything was left to Pogo.” Five frowns. “Thought, we now have access to a sizable fund of money.”
Ben turns the page of his book, not looking up. “And?”
Five’s eyes glitter as he looks at Ben, gaze sharp enough to bore a hole in his skull. “And?”
“You’re hiding something good from us. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t.”
“Well spotted,” Five says, pleased. “I snagged our dear father’s journal before Pogo could lock it up. Surprise surprise, Reginald was holding out on us. There’s enough information in there that we might be able to track Grace down, maybe cut our teeth on some good demons along the way. If we play it smart.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” Vanya says with a tilt of her head. “Let’s get the hell out here.”
---
Their first real fight is with a demon. It sucks.
“Trap him, Ben, Jesus Christ,” Five screams, clutching the bloody wound in his shoulder.
“I know, I know, I’m almost there.” Sweat drips down his brow as he draws the last line on a Devil’s Trap with a shaky hand. “Done, it’s done! Vanya—”
“Fucking finally!” She levels both her revolvers and fires. The demon screams in pain, staggering, and that’s their open. Vanya rushes forward, ramming her iron knife into its side as Ben recites an incantation older than the ground they stand on. The air around them turns heavy, moving as slow as molasses, and the demon claws at its neck.
But it’s a strong one, and it begins to push back. A flick of its wrist and Ben is launched into the air, slamming against a tree.
“Almost—two steps back,” Ben wheezes, pushing himself up from the ground. He watches with bleary eyes as Vanya backs the demon into the trap. She grunts in pain as it grasps at her throat, mouth ticking into a malicious smile.
“Take the shot Five!”
“On it,” Five hisses, leveling his shotgun. It’s over in an instant, Five’s nearly perfect aim serving them well.
“God, we’re bad at this,” Vanya breathes out as she slumps to the ground, massaging at her throat. Ben drags himself closer, draping himself loosely over her shoulder.
“We’ll get better,” Five says quietly. “We have to.”
---
“Just one room for the night?” The motel clerk jabs the screen with her finger, voice somehow cheery despite how late it is.
“Two beds and a pull-out couch, if possible.”
“No can do, hon,” she says with a pout, leaning forward. “Only got rooms for two. But…” Her lips curl at Five, red and glossy. “Come to the back with me and I’m sure we can figure something out for your situation.”
Ben watches as Five’s eyes flick up, cool and sharp.
“That won’t be necessary.”
“I insist,” she purrs, gaze half-lidded as she smiles, reaching for his hand. Ben’s eyes narrow as he glances at the one-way glass behind her, a dark haze outlining her figure in the reflection. A succubus. Shit. In a moment, his gun is in his hand and pressed to the underside of the clerk’s jaw.
“Give me a reason why I shouldn’t blow your brains out right here,” he grits out, feeling Five shift beside him. The clerk laughs, lashes fluttering.
“Might be good for you kids to stop causing problems where you can’t fix them.”
“Message received,” Five mutters, hand resting on Ben’s shoulder. “Leave it. We’re in the wrong neighborhood.”
And it’s in that moment, walking away from a motel they wouldn’t have thought twice about bunking in days ago, that Ben realizes the weight of their choices. That they’ve chosen a path they can’t back down from. They’ve gotten a look behind the curtain, him and his siblings. They’ve fought a real demon, made themselves known, and now they can never go back.
The weird thing is, Ben doesn’t want to go back to how it was before. And he shouldn’t be as content as he is, sleeping in a dinky car most nights and battling monsters alongside his brother and sister. But out here, chalk dust between his fingers and the iron taste of blood on his tongue, Latin twisting behind his teeth and shooting towards his targets with vicious abandon, all he can feel is adrenaline and excitement and a firm sense of belonging. He belongs on the battlefield. All of them do.
That may not be enough for some people, but it’s a good life for them. They eat and sleep and drive and piss each other off and then fight monsters and make up because life is too short in this line of work to hold a grudge against the people you love.
Really, if you took out the part about the monsters, they’re just about as normal as siblings can be.
---
“So you’re the kids causing trouble out there.” An old man lounges back on his porch swing, cigarette clamped between his lips as he looks at him. His gaze glitters, unnaturally dark. It’s become a sight that Ben’s gotten a little too used to seeing these days.
“And what’s it to you?” Vanya asks with a tilt of her head, baseball bat resting against her shoulder.
“Would you lay off on an old man if there was something in it for you?”
Five’s eyes narrow. “Depends on how good that something is.”
“Grace Hargreeves is what you’re after, right? Head east,” the man hums, expression smug. “The harder it is the travel, the closer you know you’ll be.”
“What do you think,” Vanya muses, swinging her bat to tap the toe of her boot. “Good enough to spare him?”
Ben exchanges a glance with Five before shrugging, hand resting carefully on the handle of his gun.
“In our line of work, we aren’t really here to spare people.”
Five grins, licking his lips. “My thoughts exactly.”
The man’s eyes narrow, the air turning thick and heavy and that’s as good a cue as any that it’s time for a fight. A fight that’s dark and bloody and absolutely filthy because if there’s one thing for certain, it’s that fighting nice never gets you anywhere. And luckily for them, Hargreeves know how to fight dirty.
“God, that sucked,” Ben declares at the end of it all, spitting blood out of his mouth. Behind him, Vanya falls flat on her back, chest heaving as she stares up at the stars.
“Could have been worse,” Five says with a shrug, plunging his hunting knife into the dirt. “We could have died.”
Vanya coughs wetly, flipping Five off. “That’s getting old. Find something new to say.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you.”
“You’re both idiots.” Ben says with an exasperated but fond sigh. Siblings. Honestly.
---
“Are we sure about this?” Ben’s gaze flicks between Reginald’s journal, the map in his lap, and a book of Latin incantations, resolutely avoiding Vanya’s face. Behind him, Five snores gently in the back seat.
She shrugs, careful to keep her voice low. “The fights are getting harder. They said we’d be on the right track—"
“I meant about Grace. I’m…it almost feels like we shouldn’t be looking for her.”
“You feel it too then?”
Ben’s head jerks up, brow furrowed.
“Elaborate.”
“You know,” she says vaguely, gesturing out the window in front of them. “That feeling of doing something you shouldn’t even when the adults say no? Every time we ask about her, every time we travel closer, it feels…wrong. Like we’re walking into something we can’t get out of.”
“Didn’t know you fancied yourself a medium these days,” Ben hums, wary. Vanya huffs, finger tapping against the steering wheel.
“I don’t. If Dad hadn’t suppressed me when we were younger, then maybe. But these feelings are just whispers now, closer to intuition or gut feeling than anything.”
“Nothing to sneeze at.”
“Nothing concrete to go on,” she corrects quickly. “I could just be overreacting.”
Ben snorts, shaking his head. “Give yourself a little more credit. If you feel something, it’s real.” A beat. “Do you want to stop?”
“Stop looking for her? No, no, I—” she cuts herself off, frowning. “No. We should just be…careful.”
“Then we will.” He leans over, covering her hand over the steering wheel with his. “We’re gonna get her, Vanya. If anyone can do it, we can.”
---
“Hargreeves. I’ve heard much about you three,” a demon rasps from where they have him cornered against a wall, surrounded by a ring of salt. Five raises a brow.
“Then you know what we’re looking for, yes?”
“Perhaps,” he muses. Five scoffs, extending his hand to Ben. Ben dutifully pours holy water over Five’s hand, the hand that shoves up against the demon’s throat lightning fast.
“We can make this harder for you, if you really want,” Five murmurs calmly.
“A-ah. Would it be easier if…if we made a deal?”
Vanya laughs at that, a low sound devoid of humor. She nudges Five aside and presses the muzzle of her revolver between the demon’s eyes. “Go back to Hell.”
Five grits his teeth, shoving at Vanya once the shot stops ringing in their ears. “That was our best lead, V.”
“Don’t let a crossroad demon get to your head, brother,” she hums, wiping a smear of blood off her cheek with the back of her hand. “We’ve been chasing information for so long, it was time to send a message. Now let the information come to us.”
---
Information comes and it’s good. But good information comes at a price. And even though the three of them are good at negotiating, it doesn’t mean that they don’t stumble sometimes.
And that’s the nasty thing about Hargreeves. When they fall, they fall hard.
---
“A couple weeks,” Ben says wearily. “No activity for that long, and he’s cleared to hunt again. If he can sit still that long.”
Vanya sucks in a breath, shaking her head. She twists her necklace around her finger, a nervous habit she picked up a few years back. The necklace is pure silver with a little eighth note charm dangling from it, a gift from Five after their first fight.
“So they don’t try that shit again,” he’d said with a smirk. His eyes had lingered on the ring of bruises around her neck, gaze sharp.
“He shouldn’t have gone after that banshee without you. I told him not to,” Vanya whispers, voice launching Ben back into the present. He kneels carefully next to her on the pristine hospital hallway floor, hand on her back.
“He knew the risks. As we all do.” He pats her gently, ducking his head to catch her gaze. “C’mon, he’d be pissed to know you were making this much of a fuss over him. He’ll make it.”
Vanya gives a watery laugh. “Yeah, I know he will.”
---
“Do you ever wonder if we’re the monsters here?” Five asks one night when it’s just the two of them, Vanya out hunting down a wraith that’s been prowling the town.
Ben blinks. “This is very unlike you.”
“Fuck you, I’m allowed to be nuanced,” Five spits back, proud and bristling in an instant. But something soft still shows, a sliver of vulnerability that Ben rarely gets to see. The three of them may be tight, but the way they were raised was fucked up and anything that could be a weakness was always frowned upon. Five opening up is a rare thing and Ben knows that this question is genuine, something quiet and uncertain that he’ll probably never get to witness again.
“I don’t know,” Ben says carefully, “if there’s a right answer to that question. I think the best we can do is fight for what we think is right and pray the rest falls in our favor.”
The answer is just as uncertain as the question, but it must be what Five was looking for. He slumps against Ben, forehead pressed against his shoulder.
“I guess it doesn’t matter,” he mumbles, flinching as Ben puts his arm around his shoulder before settling into his grip.
Ben hums. “Not really.”
But that’s a lie. It really does matter. It always has.
---
“What if we’d told him to shove it all those years ago?” Ben asks, smoke curling from the cigarette clamped between his fingers and wafting towards the cool night air. He sits next to the half-open window in yet another shitty motel, their information having led them where they need. Now all that’s left to do is prepare for the battle ahead.
“Who, Reginald?” Five scoffs, cleaning cloth in his hand and the pieces of his shotgun laid out neatly before him on the bed. “Man barely had a backbone. If we’d left, he wouldn’t have stopped us.”
“But we didn’t.”
“But we didn’t,” Vanya echoes, aimlessly switching through TV channels. “We could have been normal.”
Five snorts. “You wanna be normal?”
“Sometimes.”
“You’re too soft.”
Vanya flicks one of her small knives at Five with a hiss, whip-fast. Five catches it between his fingers without looking.
“We’ll retire someday,” he says quietly as he extends his arm, handing the knife back to her. “Get a house somewhere quiet and do whatever boring shit normal people do.”
“I want a cat,” Vanya says petulantly, snatching the knife back. Five huffs out a laugh, picking up a cleaning rod.
“Fuck, sure. We’ll have a whole farm if you want.”
“A farm,” Ben says with a quiet laugh, head tipping back against the back of the armchair. The idea of Vanya wearing overalls and petting a cow as Five collects eggs from chickens is funny enough that he laughs again, smoke spiraling up to the ceiling. But he sobers up quickly.
Even if they live long enough to conceivably retire, they’ll never do it. That’s not the life for them.
---
Five and Vanya both get up in the middle of the night and Ben has the decency to pretend to be asleep as they wander outside to the balcony minutes after each other. He can see the glow of a lighter outside, hear them talking in low voices through the crack in the window. Nobody every sleeps the night before a big fight, especially one as important as this one.
“Are you ready to see Grace after all these years?”
“Yes. No.” Vanya huffs, scrubbing her face with her hand. “I don’t know. You?”
“No.”
Silence follows, and Ben almost turns over in bed before he hears Five sigh.
“If she’s alive, she’s gonna be one of them. A monster. I don’t think I’ll ever be ready enough to see that.”
“Maybe she’s smart enough to have survived all this time without being turned.”
Five exhales sharply, shaking his head. “You’re too soft.”
“No thanks to you,” she throws back easily, though her tone is gentle enough that the words don’t sting. Ben hears a rustle of cloth, watches as Five throws his arm over Vanya’s shoulder and pulls her close.
“Maybe she’ll be okay,” Five murmurs. Ben turns over in bed with a sigh, stomach rolling uneasily. It’s no use pretending; all three of them know that no matter how they walk into this, it’s not gonna come out as a happy ending.
---
Grace’s eyes are as blacks as night and twice as cold when Ben’s gaze meets hers. Her smile is even colder.
“That’s not Mom,” Vanya breathes, grip tightening on her gun.
“Oh sweetheart,” Grace sighs as the building around them begins to shake. “I haven’t been your mother for a long, long time.”
---
There’s a distinct hope rattling in Ben’s chest that this is just a training exercise, despite the years of Grace missing, the years of looking for her on the road, the countless demons and monsters fought to get to her. That she’ll turn and blink and she’ll be normal again, sweet and kind and loving like they were as kids. Their mother.
“Lost in your thoughts again, darling?”
Ben reels back at the burning touch at his neck, struggling as he’s hoisted in the air. Grace tilts her head, eyes boring into his skull.
“Remember we talked about this, Ben. Focus on the fight when it’s happening, dear.”
It’s the same words Grace would chide him with as a child, rendered hollow by her manic grin and the the unfamiliar echoing tone trailing behind her voice. Ben’s eyes narrow as he whips out his knife, slashing at her arm.
“Fuck off,” he snaps, catching himself as her grip releases him. She twists her head at an unnatural angle, eyes narrowing even as she continues to smile.
“Now, that’s no way to speak to your mother—”
She lurches forward as vanya’s shotgun blast catches her in the back, eyes widening before her face twists. The demon wearing her face flexes behind her skin, expression unfamiliar and unnatural and Ben knows, in that instant, that Grace is gone. She’s truly gone. He shoves aside the guilt that thrums in his veins, ignoring the panic as he dredges up his knowledge in a daze, searching for verses that can buy him some time before the final strike.
“Regna terrae, cantate Deo, osallite—”
---
Five’s shot is the one that ends it. A hollow victory, the three of them now officially orphans with their mother’s remains scattered around them. Ben can himself shaking in shock. The usual feelings of triumph and relief that follow a fight are gone, and his mind reels as he tries to collect himself. Now what? Now what?
Reginald’s words come back to him in an instant. Compartmentalize. You have no time to mourn, only time to survive. He was a terrible father, but sometimes he had the right idea in training them the way he did.
Ben hisses as he stands, pushing himself to straighten himself and herd them together, turning away from grace’s remains. He and Vanya limp to the car as Five tosses their things in the back. They don’t talk about the tears on Five’s cheek that he shoves away with the heel of his palm. They ignore Vanya’s quiet sobs.
“Fucking drive,” Five spits out. Ben punches it.
---
Carry on. You have no time to mourn, only time to survive.
But now it seems that all they have is time, nowhere to be and nothing to do. They move silently, listlessly around the tiny motel room. The ashtray fills. The TV flickers. The lights are never turned all the way off. Five turns into himself, and Vanya stares out the window, fingering Grace’s pearl necklace in her pocket. Ben had seen her swipe it from the remains and hadn’t said a word.
You have no time to mourn, only time to survive.
Reginald’s words hold a modicum of truth in certain situations. But he was never truly correct. Sometimes, there is time to mourn. Sometimes, that’s the only thing standing between recovery and true defeat; time to be human. To regret, to cry, to wish, to remember. To hope. They need that time, even as much as it hurts.
It’s a rough few days.
---
“Where do we go now?” Ben says warily, drumming his fingers against the roof of the car and squinting against the bright morning sun.
“Dunno. Who cares, really.”
Ben frowns at the familiar glint of metal poking out of Five’s bag. “You’re still carrying your weapons? I thought…”
“Thought what?” Five huffs, rolling his eyes as he closes the trunk. “I’m not gonna dump them, that’d be stupid.”
“I just,” Ben pauses, shrugging as he slides into the drivers’ seat, fiddling with the gears. “I don’t know, we did what we came here to do. And that last fight…I just thought this would be it. We would end it here.”
“There are still people out there who need our help, Ben,” Vanya says quietly. The bags under her eyes are deep, but her gaze holds his steadily as she looks at him through the rearview mirror. “We finished that job, but we have a lot more work to do before I wanna call it quits.”
“You aren’t going to get out of this line of work that easily,” Five snorts, though his gaze is thoughtful as he regards Ben.
Ben smiles, shaking his head. “Fair enough.” The car turns on easily at his touch and before they know it, they’re back on the road again. And yet Ben can’t seem to keep a smile off his face.
They’ve got the car, their guns, and each other. They’re gonna be alright.