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“Vanya! It’s so good to see you again! You’re looking great! So much more vigor since last I saw you.”
“Thanks, but first things first, it’s Viktor. He/him, all that.”
“Viktor! Wow. That’s a huge step. I want you to stop and just give yourself a pat on the back right now. When I think of where you started, holding everything in, struggling to assert yourself…to see you so confident about something even the most self-assured people have trouble asserting… you HAVE had a busy couple of months.”
“Would you believe me when I tell you that’s the LEAST dramatic thing that’s happened to me over the past few months…?”
“Oh. Well, come on in and get settled. I sense we have a lot to talk about.”
“To put it mildly. You’re going to have to just take lots of notes and save your questions for the end, I promise, we’ll never get through if we try to tackle every issue as I bring it up.”
“…Okay. I’m ready.”
“Are you? Because this is going to get weird. There is going to be SO much for us to unpack here and you’re going to have SO many questions…”
“Well, you’ve certainly piqued my curiosity.”
“You’re confused already! It’s only going to get worse. Okay. It all started when my dad died.”
“Wait…Reginald Hargreeves? He d— I just saw him on the news this morning!”
“Yes. You did. We’ll get to that. Eventually. But in my life, as I lived it, he died toward the end of March.”
“As you lived…Viktor, I’m not following you—”
“I know. Just write it down and trust me. It will make sense later. Well, no, it won’t make sense, but we’ll be on the same page about it.
“Anyway, you know there was no love lost between us, but I still went home to check on Mom and Pogo and, well, pay my respects to some extent— he was my father. Pogo was glad to see me, Mom was…malfunctioning. And my siblings— Diego was still very not over The Book. Klaus was a mess. Luther ignored me as usual. And Allison was…very politely kind. She was trying so hard to be a Good Sister but couldn’t help being condescending about it. But I guess she was in the middle of a custody battle, and would occasionally snap over how no one could understand her pain…”
“Custody battle? But Raymond Chestnut always seems—”
“Again, hold your questions. But definitely write this down, we will have a LOT to discuss about Allison eventually! It’s been— well. I’ll get to that. Back to Dad’s funeral. So it started off exactly like you’d expect: Luther flat out accuses one of us of having murdered Dad— it was a heart attack, we’d all heard— Diego flips out at him, Klaus gets high and steals Allison’s clothes, and then…THIS is where it gets weird.”
“THIS is?”
“A portal opens up in the sky, and guess who falls out?”
“Your…father?”
“Nope. None other than Number Five Hargreeves, looking not a day older than the day he left.”
“This is Five, the Long-Lost Runaway Brother/Best Friend we’ve spent so much time talking about, that Five?”
“The same. Except…not. He looked the same. But his mind was…well, he sounded like a raving lunatic.”
“Fell out of a portal.”
“He claimed he’d been gone 45 years and only looked like a kid because he messed up some calculation. He claimed he’d traveled through time and been stuck in the future. He claimed he only had a few days and had something important to do but he wouldn’t tell anybody what. He did tell me he’d read my book and liked it…which, may have been more evidence he was crazy, come to think of it. But that was all I could get out of him. Not so much as an ‘I missed you’.”
“And how did that make you feel—”
“Oh, we have so much more to get through before we get to that. Anyway, I left about then, I had rehearsal, our Spring Celebration show was coming up. Got back to my apartment after and there Five was, still doesn’t let locked doors stop him after forty-five years. He had a huge bleeding gash in his arm but he wouldn’t tell me how he got it. But he did…try to tell me his story. Knowing what I know now, I wish I’d listened better. He said he’d spent the past forty-five years of…his life struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. He said whatever cataclysmic event caused this apocalypse was due to happen in just over a week, the day of the concert, actually—not that he knew that, but not coincidentally, either…but I’ll get to that. He said he had to figure out how to stop it. And I said was he really sure about any of this, because Dad had always said time travel could mess up your mind, and he did not take that well and clammed back up.”
“I know you said No Questions, but just to clear this up for me— it sounds like you believed him about the time travel, just not about the apocalypse.”
“Well, yes. Clearly he had done SOMETHING with time, he looked thirteen again. Or still.”
“But you accepted the notion that he had traveled…through time…”
“Oh. I see what you’re…. Um, Dr. Miller? What did I tell you about why Dad adopted us all?”
“It was to be an academy for gifted children. Only he decided you weren’t gifted enough and made you a second-class citizen in your own home.”
“Okay. Well. For the purposes of me getting this whole story out, edit that in your head. In the original timeline, everybody’s ‘giftedness’ was superpowers. Five had the ability to manipulate space, and, it turned out, time, too.”
“Original t—?”
“I will get to it, I promise!”
“But superpowers?”
“Yes, The Umbrella Academy was for superpowered children! Doesn’t that make more sense than whatever this reset timeline has you believing?”
“Reset—”
“Later! …I’m sorry. It’ll just make more sense with context.”
“All right.”
“Anyway, Five was pissed at me, so even though I made him a place to sleep on the couch and promised we’d talk more in the morning, he was gone long before I woke up. And that was it! I barely saw him again all week. The one time I did he just brushed me off and said he was perfectly fine and didn’t need any help. If I had only taken him seriously, it all might have turned out… better. Instead I went on with my life as if nothing had happened, and then I met…Leonard.”
“Uh oh, I hear the tone of your voice.”
“If this was the only thing that had happened these few months, we’d still be working on him for weeks. But I was — god, I was so stupid. He played me like—like he couldn’t play the violin. The red flags— Allison kept trying to warn me, but she was such a condescending bitch about it I wanted to ignore her just out of spite, which of course Leonard played right into. And he was cute and seemed so nice and we had sooo much in common— which I can see now was— I mean my whole childhood is spelled out in an easily accessible published memoir, anyone could study that and make the connections—”
“Are you sure you don’t want to discuss this now? You haven’t even told me how you met this Leonard, yet.”
“Leonard— which wasn’t even his real name, it turns out— anyway, he was this guy who said he wanted me to teach him violin, but I could tell his heart wasn’t into it. But he was a charming flirt and we started spending more and more time together and it was great and I totally fell for it. Only he was doing that thing where he kept pointing out how uncaring and mean my family was and how he was the only one who truly understood me and I believed every word of it, and then he stole…. Dr. Miller. I’ve trusted you for years.”
“I’m glad. If you didn’t I’d demand you find a new therapist.”
“And I would have, if you were also the one prescribing my meds. But I just need to know for sure, because I know you and Dr. Lobo did communicate about me: how much DID you know?”
“About…what, your medication? You’ve been on…Ativan for years, isn’t it?”
“NO. I haven’t. That’s just what the records say. It turns out I’d really been on a powerful mood suppressant my father had specially formulated to keep me sedated.”
“…What?”
“Yes.”
“Well, if you’re not taking it anymore— that explains how much more energetic you seem.”
“That’s not the half of it. He sedated me because, get this, I had superpowers all along, just like the others, except I was apparently TOO powerful for him to deal with so he just…made me ordinary, instead. He even had Allison Rumor me, just to be sure, into …’thinking I’m ordinary.’ There is SO much we’re going to have to unpack about that, once I get through this story.”
“He had Allison…what?”
“Oh right. New timeline. I’ll explain when we start unpacking that. So anyway. Leonard. Or whoever he was. Turned out he was a psychopath obsessed with, I don’t know, getting revenge on the Umbrella Academy for not letting him be one of them or something? He went to prison for killing his own dad, spent that time stewing about revenge, and then, somehow, he got a hold of Dad’s private notebook, where he kept all his most important notes about us, and that’s how he found out the truth about me, and decided he could use me to take out the others. So he got all smarmy on me and I fell for it, and then he stole my meds. I thought I’d just misplaced them but it was him, he wanted to get my powers to come out again, which they did, after just a day without the pills.”
“So wait, you went cold turkey…off a powerful mood suppressant you’d been on most of your life?”
“Yeahhhhh. I would say it was not good, but in some ways… I mean, the euphoria of really FEELING music, I finally understood what Helen and all the others had said about the passion of it. It was so GLORIOUS to play like that. As it turns out, my powers were soundwave-based. I could take sound energy and…transmute it, use it as whatever other kind of energy I needed it to be. It was also very affected by my emotional state, which was pretty…out of control just then.”
“No wonder!”
“So those next few days were just— a roller coaster, to say the least. Leonard was all, isn’t this great? You ARE a real superhero! And we started practicing, trying to train it. But there were moments when he— when his sweet demeanor slipped, and flashes of— of DAD would come out. Demanding, ruthless…sick. Like, it turned out he paid some goons to attack him just to trigger me into using my powers against them. Which worked…way too well. But I was swept up in it. Then Allison came to find me, to try to get me to leave him, but I was like No, this is good, he’s helping me, I have powers, and that’s when she remembered having Rumored me when we were little and I felt so betrayed I just— whooshed with my powers right at her voicebox and…and it slit her throat. I slit her throat.”
“My god. What did you do then?”
“Well, for the record, she survived, but she lost her voice for awhile, which is kind of poetic justice but still, I felt horrible, and I just ran, and Leonard tried to make me feel better, but… but I found out. I found out he was using Dad’s notes, had been playing me all along to turn me into his own personal superweapon, and I blew. Just…consumed with rage. And this time it wasn’t an accident. Every sharp object in the house, right at him. I murdered him, Dr. Miller. With my powers.”
“Well. No wonder you didn’t want to stop and work anything out earlier. You had to get to this.”
“Oh I’m not remotely done telling this story, and the body count is only growing… sorry, didn’t mean to freak you out. Been spending too much time with Five, I guess.”
“Oh. Are…are you okay, telling all this? Do you need to take a break?”
“No, no I want to get it all out at once and get it over with. So, I ran home— Dad’s house, I mean— to check on Allison and beg her forgiveness, but Luther met me at the door. He told me Allison was alive and Pogo had told him all about my powers— Pogo had known, all along— and I thought he was giving me a hug but he choked me, and I passed out.”
“Oh no.”
“Don’t worry, we’ve made up, we don’t need to go too deep into that. But— everything’s a bit messed up in my memory from this point for awhile. I woke up in a literal nightmare, this room I’d dreamed of, empty and soundproof and creepy as fuck, except all those nightmares had been memories because it was real, this room, it was a cage that had been built for me when I was small, before I got put on the pills. And I don’t know if it was the memories haunting me or I was having a psychotic break or what, but, like, the ghosts of my younger selves were there whispering the angry truth, and I— and I lost it. I literally lost the rest of my sanity at that point. My younger selves started egging me on to get us out of there, because we were more powerful than all the others combined so who could stop us, and I busted out. And on the way out I…saw Pogo. And all I could think about was how he’d kept this from me, for years, pretending like he loved and cared for me when all along he KNEW, and he knew how it was hurting me…and I lashed out. And I…killed him.”
“Oh, Viktor, I— I don’t know what to say.”
“And I just calmly went off to get ready for the conce— OH, I forgot to mention! A few days before, Helen— our First Chair?— had disappeared. Days before the concert? So we had emergency auditions for her spot, and Leonard pushed me to go for it— and like I said, it was glorious, playing without the pills, feeling my control of the soundwaves, the energy in the room. So I got it. I was now First Chair.”
“Oh, um, congratulations?”
“Yeah, well. It turned out Helen had ‘disappeared’ because Leonard had murdered her.”
“Oh.”
“So like I said, things are jumbled in my memory at this point. I wasn’t me, not really. I was all my pent-up anger going off on a massive power kick. Just an all-consuming ‘I’LL SHOW THEM!’ taking up my brain. I guess at first I intended to show them by being the greatest principal violinist the world had ever seen, but then I, well…Anyway…long story short, I was the apocalypse Five had come back to stop. I had destroyed the world the first time around, I blew up with the force of all nuclear power on earth combined. But I don’t remember what actually happened, because I blacked out. Next thing I knew, I woke up sprawled in an alley, gazing up at the most beautiful blue eyes I’ve ever seen. I really thought she was an angel, until she spoke, with this Texas accent which, don’t get me wrong, was gorgeous in and of itself, but not really angelic.”
“You’re still going? That wasn’t the end of the story? You’ve already given me more than enough to discuss with you for years…”
“Oh, we’re nowhere near done! That’s why I told you, just take notes and we’ll work on unpacking it all LATER.”
“Wait, but, what did happen at the concert?”
“Well, I didn’t know this until much later, but apparently my siblings had stopped me from directly blowing up the world, but it was too late, because all that energy hit the moon, which broke off and came hurtling toward the Earth, so Five grabbed us all and jumped us backward in time, vaguely to where— or when— he’d last been before he’d come home, which happened to be Dallas in the early 1960s. Except it was too much for him to control and he ended up dropping us off there at different times.”
“I thought he said he’d come from the post-apocalyptic future.”
“Well he had, but he spent some time in the middle as a…time-traveling assassin or something.”
“Right.”
“But that’s not important now. What’s important is, I landed, alone, in the fall of 1963, and…there was Sissy. All I knew at the time was that I hurt all over and the most beautiful woman in the world was helping me up and asking me questions I didn’t know the answer to. I remembered my name. That was it. And it’s my deadname now, so even that was barely anything. I knew there was…something off about the level of technology, the clothing styles, the general…social understanding of things, but I couldn’t pinpoint why I thought so. The Coopers lived on a farm, maybe I chalked it all up to being a farm-thing. They took me in, took care of me (the amnesia wasn’t helped by what I now know was withdrawal from those pills), they helped me advertise that someone with no memory was looking for someone who might know them, and in return I became a nanny for Harlan. He was autistic, but no one seemed to get how he worked back then… I didn’t know it was ‘back then,’ but I did know— I mean, I couldn’t remember you, no offense, but all the discussions we’d had about autism and working through my own autistic tendencies, they must have sunk in, became second nature— I knew how to communicate with Harlan, which was something nobody else could do, apparently. I loved that kid, and he loved me. And I loved his mom, and she loved me. God, I loved her. She was…just so strong and sexy and loving. And she respected me like no one else ever. No one. Not that I remembered anyone else at the time.”
“You said her name was…?”
“Sissy. Sissy and Harlan. And Carl. Her husband.”
“Oh.”
“He was the sort of mediocre businessman who thinks he’s all that just because he is a businessman. Bought into the whole masculine superiority thing. The Breadwinner. The Head of the Household. He didn’t care about the actual lives of his family, just that they were HIS family, his possessions, basically. And it was just so wrong for Sissy, for Harlan. And I knew— I should have been Sissy’s husband. I should have been Harlan’s dad. I could do it so much better than he could. And yeah, I thought of it like that— like I said, all I’d remembered was my name, but the one thing everyone else could assume about me was that I was a girl so I just, like, nodded along and accepted that, but when I was with them, I felt specifically like I should have been the MAN of this household. I wanted it more than anything. But Carl got suspicious and turned me in to his brother-the-cop for being a Russian spy come to corrupt his All-American wife or something, and he turned me in to the FBI, who decided since I had a Russian name and could speak Russian—which I didn’t even remember I could do until they started speaking Russian to me! Would they have thought I was an Italian spy if they’d tried quoting Verdi at me? I speak a lot of languages!—so they thought I really must be a Russian spy, so they started torturing me for info—”
“How are you saying all this so calmly?”
“Because there’s too much to get hung up on any of it! We’re still nowhere near the end of the story! Anyway, did you know that in the early ‘60s, the FBI apparently thought LSD was like, a truth serum or something? Or an effective lip-loosening torture method at least? So suddenly I was tripping balls and stuck way inside my subconscious brain and everyone inside and out was screaming at me to remember, and I ate my own brain and remembered everything at once— everything, even things from childhood I’d blocked out, and that just broke me, again. I just—I can’t even describe it. I was just stuck inside my own head. Until, get this, Ben shows up.”
“Ben…Ben, your brother who died?”
“Yes, and I know what you’re thinking, that this was just part of my dream —hallucination, thing— but no, it was Ben, his—spirit or whatever. Because apparently he’d been haunting Klaus all along— you know how Klaus—oh, you don’t know— but back when we had superpowers, Klaus could see ghosts.”
“Of…course.”
“The ghost of Ben had been hanging out with Klaus the whole time, and he never told us! Or he never told me. Or if he did, he did it in some really esoteric way. It’s hard to tell with Klaus. Anyway, since Ben was a ghost, he could get into my head with me, and he talked me down, back to my senses. It was really nice to see him. But it sucked up all his, what, ectoplasmic energy or whatever, and he passed on, into…the light or whatever, so now not even Klaus can see him. But I was free and awake again, which was fortunate, because apparently my powers had been going out of control in the absence of my conscious mind, and if my siblings hadn’t intervened, I would have blown up the FBI building, inspiring JFK to declare war on the Soviet Union in retaliation, setting off the full-on nuclear apocalypse Five had been trying to stop since he’d gotten there. Then.”
“Where? When? When did your siblings get there?”
“Oh I didn’t even get to that! I got too hung up hating on Carl. Yeah. So, everyone had arrived in a different year. I was one of the last ones to get there, apparently, I was only there a couple of months. Klaus— and Ben— had arrived like three or four years earlier and started a cult. Allison had been there a couple years and she’d gotten into the Civil Rights Movement and married Ray Chestnut. Luther was working as a bouncer for Jack Ruby of all people, and Diego had arrived like a month before me and gotten thrown into a mental hospital for blabbering about the Kennedy assassination. Five got there last, saw the world about to be blown up again, and skipped back to get us all out of there. Because obviously whatever had happened was our fault, because we didn’t belong in the 60s. Anyway, Luther found me after about a month or so, because damn Carl had gone and left his wallet at Jack Ruby’s club, and when Luther saw me, he started apologizing for everything, for knocking me out and locking me up and all, except he didn’t say that, so I had no idea what he was talking about. I didn’t even understand who HE was. And then Sissy chased him off with a shotgun so that was that. She’s awesome.
“Anyway, then Five found me after…after these psycho Swedish assassins tried to take me out— for not belonging in the ‘60s? Apparently he used to work with them —anyway, it was the middle of the night out at the farm and I was scared shitless and even though I didn’t know what I was doing I used my powers on them to get them away from me, and that’s how Five found me, out in the middle of the field, and, he’s so weird, but I guess I could sense instinctively that he was telling the truth about being my brother, because it felt right, you know? We fell into conversation pretty easily, even though nothing he was saying made any sense. But when he got to the bit about the apocalypse…es, I could tell he was being cagey about it.
“Then we met up with Luther, and with Five to vouch for him we got to talk for real about everything that had happened and we’ve been good friends ever since. He even asked me— but that’s later. Anyway, I told him I knew Five wasn’t telling me the whole truth about the apocalypse, so Luther was who filled me in. And then I was pissed at Five so I told him to shove it and went back to the farm. This happened like two or three more times, Five would keep coming to get me, I’d tell him I’d rather stay with the Coopers, he’d convince me to come back with him anyway, I would but would eventually run back to Sissy. Not that I didn’t enjoy spending time with the people I’d been told were my siblings— had some great bonding time with Allison and Klaus, and then we all had dinner with our Dad, who didn’t know who we even were since he hadn’t adopted us yet, but it somehow managed to be exactly the disaster you’d expect anyway— and I loved it, because I was learning about my family even though we were a mess. But in the end Sissy and Harlan felt more like my real family, and I wanted— I wanted both families. And Five kept telling me I could only have the one, because we were in the wrong time, and if Sissy and Harlan came with us then they’d be in the wrong time, and it just wasn’t fair.
“So when— Oh wait, I forgot the most important part! After the thing with the Swedish assassins and me flattening a cornfield and leaving with Five for the first time, it was a little tense at the farm, so Harlan freaked out and ran, straight into the pond. Sank like a stone. But with my newly rediscovered powers I could…lift the pond out of the way, so I got him out, but he wasn’t breathing, so I gave him CPR and…well, I guess some of my powers got in there to help out? They brought him back to life, but apparently they also decided to stick around.”
“Stick around…in…Harlan?”
“Exactly. So after we escaped the FBI, the very morning of Kennedy’s ill-fated parade through Dallas, suddenly we were all Dangerous Persons of Interest Wanted In Connection With the Assassination of the President. I called the farm to explain in hopes they weren’t freaking out over having accepted a Dangerous Russian Spy into their family, but it was too late, ‘cause Harlan was already freaking out and now he had the power to flatten the county. Or even the world, maybe. But I’ve been there, and I knew I was the only one who could help him now. At first my siblings were like, No, we have to stick together and fight off all the people out to get us, but before I could drive away, they decided to stick together and help me help Harlan, instead.
“So we get there and Harlan’s floating in the barn setting off a freaking blizzard and Sissy’s about to shoot us all, but I go in and just try to talk Harlan down, like Ben had done for me the day before. Or, that morning. I don’t know, it was a long day. But before I can fully reach him, like, the entire Commission shows up to take us out? So I’m there trying to calm down this catastrophically terrified kid while hundreds of gunshots are—”
“This is the Commission to investigate the Kennedy Assassination?”
“Oh! No. The Temps Commission. Five’s Time-Traveling Assassins. We KIND of pissed them off by nearly changing history…or definitely changing history. So now, like, hundreds of highly trained assassins are battling five dumb superheroes outside while I’m trying to calm Harlan down, and I am actually making progress, but finally I’m like, shut up out there already, so I go out and just, boom, vaporize the entire Commission army with a sonic wave. Done. Great. Except now this freak woman, who turned out to be, like Five’s old boss and weirdly enough Lila’s mom?— oh, Lila’s Diego’s girlfriend and soon-to-be-mother of his child, I guess I forgot to mention her— anyway, so this bitch is in the barn trying to kidnap Harlan, and Lila’s freaking out because she just realized her mom is evil, and Diego’s trying to get Lila to join our family, and…and then?…then…”
“…Yes?”
“Okay, I’m not really sure what happened just then? It’s like reality just… blips or something. I’m guessing it’s a time thing because Five gets suddenly really untalkative whenever I mention it. So the next moment this Swedish dude-ex-machina is there, murders Lila’s mom, and just like nods goodbye at us and that’s it, the battle’s finally over. But Harlan was still struggling with my powers, so instead of trying to talk him down any more, I decided to take them back. My powers. I just— pulled them back to me. And Harlan seemed back to normal. For Harlan.
“So Five grabs a briefcase— um, the Commission used these briefcases to time travel, since Five’s the only actual person who can just, like, will himself through time, and he’s not all that accurate, so the briefcases you can actually, like, control? So he’s confident that with the briefcase he can actually get us home. I…tried to convince Sissy and Harlan to come with us. A queer couple with an autistic kid in 2019 instead of 1963? But…Sissy made the very good point that if people were always coming after me, that was hardly safer for Harlan, either. So I let them go. Or, stay. I said I’d try to find a way back if I could, but…honestly that was wishful thinking even before we lost all our powers.
“So we took the briefcase home. April 2. The world hadn’t ended at the Spring Celebration Concert. Dad’s house was still standing. And Dad was there. Only he was like, You aren’t my children, I hated you in the ‘60s, so I adopted different kids instead. Well, mostly. He hadn’t met Ben in the ‘60s, since he was dead, or, a ghost, so BEN he’d adopted again. Or, for the first time. I don’t know how timelines work—”
“YOU don’t?”
“And this Ben was ALIVE still. Only, he’s an asshole now. And there were six other people—well, five people and a floating, blinking cube— in this family now, and they called themselves the Sparrow Academy, and were all apparently still doing the superhero team thing— and they were still popular, too, like they had billboards and a gift shop and, like, Marcus had groupies following him around— Marcus was their Number One, and frankly better at it than Luther ever was. Anyway now they were like What are you freaks doing in our house? and we were like YOUR house? This is OUR house? And I don’t remember who threw the first punch or burst of superpower or what, but then everyone was brawling, and even with me fighting— which I really didn’t want to do, we could have just talked it out, there are 43 bedrooms in that place, it’s not like they didn’t have room for all of us to stay— well, they trampled us. Tails between our legs, out we went onto the street. Honestly, did we have anywhere else to go? Did I still have my apartment? Did Diego have his? This wasn’t the world we’d left, so, who knew? And Five had gone and forgot the briefcase somewhere in the house we’d just gotten kicked out of, so we couldn’t even go back in time to try to fix it again.
“So first things first, we needed a place to stay and regroup. Klaus found us this weird hotel— which turned out to be owned by Dad all along!— and we got two rooms and just naturally split off into ‘The Boys’ Room’ and ‘The Girls’ Room’— which didn’t fit even without me feeling like I was, since Klaus is enby— maybe if he stayed with Allison and I it could have been the Girl and Girl-Adjacent Room or something, it’s not like he didn’t always participate in our so-called Girls’ Nights anyway. And Allison kept saying stuff about sisters, and so I just went, you know what? We’re in a new timeline, let’s start over right now. Got my hair chopped and reintroduced myself to everyone as Viktor. Vanya may be unisex, but Viktor’s unambiguous. Plus, Viktor. The winner. It’s positive self-talk whenever anyone refers to me by name!”
“How did the others react to your announcement?”
“Great! Almost too well. They just went right back into arguing with me over what to do about the Sparrows as if nothing had happened. Even Five. But Luther, when he found out, later— he’d been kidnapped, or something, by the Sparrows?”
“Or something?”
“He ended up hooking up with this Sparrow chick, Sloane, so he was hardly suffering— anyway, he did want to throw me a ‘Welcome to the Brotherhood’ party, which was corny but adorable, and he did kind of pull it off in the end, by asking me to be his Best Man. I mean, can you imagine that happening six months ago, even? Never mind the ‘Man’ part! I’m not actually sure who of our brothers he might have asked instead— Allison was always his best friend. She could have been a Best Woman, but she wasn’t actually getting along with anyone then—”
“When are we talking about? I thought you said he’d ‘just hooked up’ with the ‘Sparrow chick’.”
“Well you see— okay we have a lot to get to before then. So anyway, speaking of Allison, she was all, I’m just gonna go check on Claire, now that we’re back in 2019, but of course, it wasn’t the right 2019, and Claire had never even been born! So that was it. We were clearly in a world that wasn’t ours!
“But this was still the most…ME…I have ever felt in my entire life. No more mood suppressants, no more amnesia, no more pining for superpowers I didn’t have— no more Vanya. I’d had enough of hanging in the background watching everyone else do stuff! And I knew that if we could just get the briefcase back, we could fix this, and if someone could have a proper conversation instead of jumping to fight at the slightest provocation, we could simply ask the Sparrows for it and they’d give it. Old Vanya would have waited around for someone else to figure this out, but I’m The Victor now, I met with Marcus and he agreed to bring the briefcase the next day. It only took a little threatening-to-go-nuclear on my part!
“My dumb brothers were all Why would you negotiate with THE ENEMY at me, but Allison agreed to go with me to get the briefcase, because she wanted more than anybody to get out of this timeline and back to our own. Except Marcus never showed up. But then Luther shows up saying the Sparrows had kidnapped him —no one had noticed, to be honest— because they thought WE had Marcus. And Five’s like Oh, Marcus has fallen victim to the Grandfather Paradox, just like all the lobsters and cows!”
“All the what now?”
“Have you ever heard of the Grandfather Paradox?”
“It’s a philosophical argument about time travel, isn’t it?”
“Right, but remember, we really HAD time traveled, so it wasn’t philosophical anymore. The argument is, if you go back in time and kill your grandfather before your parents are born, you won’t be born, either, so who’s there to go back and kill your grandfather?”
“But you didn’t kill your grandfather. Did you?”
“No, but we must have done SOMETHING, because in this timeline, all our birth mothers had died on the day we were supposed to have been born! And so, we didn’t exist! Except we DID exist! And this made the universe upset and it started eating up reality!”
“Eating up reality?”
“It’s called a Kugelblitz. A pocket of lightning. Except it’s actually more like an orb of black holes.”
“Right.”
“So anyway, Allison and I go to try to talk to the other Sparrows now that Marcus is gone, and— this is when I first notice that Allison is starting to lose it. Because we would need the Sparrows’ help to fix this, and they deserved to know exactly what had happened to their brother, but Allison’s all Just give us the briefcase and we’ll give you Marcus, end discussion. And I’m like, we can’t give them Marcus, and she’s like I don’t care I just want the briefcase, and I just know this is going to come back to bite us. And yeah, when the Sparrows come over they’re all Give us Marcus and Allison’s all Give Us The Briefcase, and they’re all Not until you give us Marcus, and it’s turning into another brawl again, but then poof! Half the Sparrows blow up, as if… well, as if I’D taken them out. And there’s this old man standing there. And you will never believe who it is.”
“Going by the previous times you’ve asked that—”
“HARLAN.”
“I feel like I should have guessed.”
“Fifty-seven years older, and verbal now, which is good because boy did he have a lot to explain. Apparently, I had not succeeded in taking all my power back from him. And it got out of control when his emotions got out of control, just like it did with me— he only killed those Sparrows because he was worried about me— but in other ways, he’d mastered it in a way I never had. He taught me to use my own power by listening. Deeper. Not just surface sounds, but energy waves. He’d found ME by following the…the energy of my power? Like bees, he said. Finding marigolds.”
“That sounds so much nicer than blasting people away does.”
“It really does! And I would have loved to really explore it, master it. But the universe was getting wiped out Kugelwave after Kugelwave, and, as I said, Harlan had had bad experiences with these powers, too. Most notably on the day I should have been born.”
“Wait—”
“Yeah. Harlan sensed me— sensed US—materializing, but it was kind of a freak thing, right? Our mothers weren’t expecting us so this was traumatic—”
“They weren’t?”
“Oh, I forgot, timeline thing— no, they weren’t— so Harlan is experiencing this huge thing on top of the fact that Sissy had just died, so he freaks, and in so freaking, sets off a psychic aneurysm in all these women around the world who should have been giving birth to us.”
“So HE set off the Grandfather Paradox.”
“No, I set off the Grandfather Paradox. By giving him my powers. If I hadn’t been there to resuscitate him— and let’s be real, if I hadn’t been there getting chased by assassins and federal agents, he wouldn’t have fallen in the pond to begin with— I did it. I was the apocalypse yet again. And this time I’d taken the whole universe down with me!”
“That’s an awfully heavy burden to place on yourself.”
“It’s true, though. There’s no getting around it. I’m cursed, or something. The Universe keeps on insisting I destroy the world, even when I think I’m doing something good, like saving a little kid’s life! Every…every time I try— we worked so hard, for years you tried to get me to speak out, to BE PRESENT in the world, to believe that I could make a difference, and every fucking time I do, it ends in disaster! Even just writing that damn book…well, at least Five appreciated that.”
“This…this will definitely go on the list of things we’ll need to unpack later.”
“But Harlan—I knew Harlan would take the blame. I mean, my siblings already wanted to turn him over to the Sparrows just to get them on our side so we could work together, because the Kugelblitz was in their basement. And at the same time my siblings were out for the blood of this Mysterious Mother Murderer. Who turned out to be the same guy! This poor guy who didn’t even know our mothers but just couldn’t control the power I unwittingly gave him! So I did what any compassionate person would do.”
“Which is?”
“I didn’t tell anybody.”
“Ah. No murder, this time.”
“Well, no, that’s Allison’s move.”
“What?”
“But not right away! I think that’s the craziest thing about this. While our brothers were all Let’s give Harlan to the Sparrows, Allison took my side. Allison was…so supportive! She helped us out to a deserted place where we, Harlan and I, could work together to take back my powers from him for REAL this time. And it was hard, excruciating, even, but we pulled it off. Harlan could feel it. He was free. A totally ordinary, sweet-tempered, absolutely harmless old autistic man. And Allison celebrated this with us! But later, when they were alone— he trusted her— he apparently let slip the truth, about our mothers. And, heel-turn. And it wasn’t just that she immediately went and turned him in to the Sparrows, it’s that she killed him first. She knew he was harmless now. She’d talked with him, knew he was gentle and innocent. If that really was the tipping point for her, that made her change her mind, she could have escorted him gently to the Sparrows and they could have talked it out. But no. She decided, and I quote, that he didn’t deserve to live.”
“Oh.”
“I’d thought the Sparrows had gotten him themselves, or even that one of our brothers had handed him over. I did not expect Allison. But she BRAGGED about it. In front of everybody, Sparrows included, because apparently now that Harlan was out of the way we were finally having a real sit-down meeting. And she just…the fury, the hatred she spewed at me, it’s like I’d personally gone and killed Claire in front of her while cackling, as if I’d done any of this on purpose, as if I hadn’t done the things I did do on purpose, trying to fix things the only ways I could—I mean, apologizing for slitting her throat, being SUPPORTIVE about Claire, yeah, those don’t FIX anything, but I DID try to get the briefcase back FOR HER— not that it mattered now, because according to Five all the briefcases in existence had kugel-shorted. I mean what did she WANT from me? What else could I do? I tried to say so, but she told me to shut up and… her powers went off? She didn’t even say ‘I heard a rumor,’ but suddenly I couldn’t open my mouth— I couldn’t breathe—”
“Oh! It’s some kind of mind control, this Rumoring, then?”
“Oh, yeah, sorry. Anyway, the others stepped in then to stop her, but I just had to get out of there. I hid in Ben’s room. Except this Ben was still alive and also an asshole, and a few minutes later he came in to yell at me.
“Anyway, I guess they needed me—”
“Ah?”
“I know, I suppose not everything I did blew up in my face— that was an unfortunate turn of phrase, but, later, again. NOW they’d worked out this plan to trap the Kugelblitz inside Christopher.”
“Inside…what?”
“Christopher. That’s the floating cube thing. That’s its name. So Sloane was going to use her anti-gravity powers and I was going to use wave manipulation and Lila was going to copy us— that was Lila’s power, to copy other people’s powers— and we were going to contain the Kugelblitz. And we did. Rah, rah, everyone cheers and has a party. Everyone except me, because I could tell everyone was still mad at me.”
“Mad that you’d kept Harlan’s secret?”
“Yeah, but— was that really so wrong? Did killing him really fix anything? I don’t know. Five thinks it was. Wrong of me, I mean. Well, everyone thought it was, but Five— guess I still care more about his opinion than anyone else’s. When he came to find me, while everyone else was partying, I’d hoped he was going to say something comforting, like Allison had no right to talk to me like that, or— but I mean, this is Five, he doesn’t do ‘comforting’ anyway. Maybe he wasn’t even looking for me, he was just trying to avoid everyone else, too. No, but…he was. He was worried about me, just not— he was worried I was turning into a villain. Because—because I was keeping secrets. Which, of all people who keep secrets, HE’S— but the more I find out what he’s gone through, the more I think that was his point. Maybe— maybe he had regrets and he was trying to work them out, with me— like he could stop me making his mistakes?”
“What do you think about his theory? That keeping secrets makes you a villain.”
“I…I mean, I guess he was…trying to impress on me the importance of working as a team, but there’s plenty of times heroes need to keep secrets. And just a few years ago, they all thought I was a villain for NOT keeping secrets! And there’s plenty of ways to be a villain that aren’t secrets at all. Like, killing someone out of revenge instead of defense. Maybe I should feel flattered that he was more worried about me than about Allison, but…somebody, besides me, should really have been worried about Allison! Who knows, maybe we would have gotten around to talking about her, except then Christopher blew up.”
“Who…what?”
“Christopher the cube. He couldn’t contain the Kugelblitz after all. So now The End of All Things is back and badder than ever, and Five— FIVE, who spent his entire life trying to save the world!— gave up. Told us all there was nothing left to do but see to our bucket lists.
“So that’s when Luther and Sloane announced they were getting married. That evening. Since the Universe was imploding and all. And—imminent demise and all, that was the nicest day I ever spent with my family. With my brothers at least. We had a bachelor party just drinking and doing terrible karaoke, and…I have never felt so completely loved and accepted as part of the family as I did then. One of the boys. The Best Man, even. But, I mean, everyone was— it was a big old love fest. It totally satisfied Luther’s wanting to throw me that Welcome to the Brotherhood party, but it wasn’t about me, it was about us.
“But then at the wedding proper, Allison was back with us, and she was— she was impossible. Her best friend’s wedding, and she spent it pouting and trying to murder me with her eyes. I tried— I really tried, if only for Luther’s sake— I genuinely apologized, again, but she wouldn’t have it.
“Meanwhile— we’re finally getting into the end game here— Klaus is going around trying to convince everyone that Dad—this timeline’s Dad— is so much nicer than our Dad was, and he had a plan to save the universe, and we just needed to trust him and do what he says, and— well, I mean. Trust Dad? But the next morning Dad shows up with breakfast— for me— to personally convince me to go along with his plan, which, let me tell you, was probably the most surreal thing to happen all week. And there was a Kugelblitz outside.
“Anyway, Dad said he owned this hotel because there was a portal in it that led to seven bells that could save the universe if we went and rung them, only there was a bloodthirsty guardian guarding them, so that’s why he needed us superheroes to go in there and do it.”
“Why not.”
“Exactly. But this is still Dad, and I could smell something fishy, and most of the others could, too. But Allison comes up to me and… apologizes! But then I realize it’s because she wants me to go along with Dad’s plan. So who am I supposed to trust, my abusive father and the sister who wanted to murder me yesterday? I don’t think so. I’m going to enjoy what little is left of my life, thanks! And nearly everyone else agrees with me! So we go about our business, but then we find Luther, dead—”
“Oh!”
“Stabbed right in front of the door to this portal thing, and Dad’s all The Guardian did this! And Sloane’s all We must avenge my husband! And of course Allison and Klaus had thought we should go already, and honestly, at this point the room we’re standing in is like the only thing that hasn’t been Kugelblitzed, so what could we do except run down this creepy-ass tunnel to the land of the Guardian of the Seven Bells or whatever. And we come out in this, like, mirror image of the hotel, except it’s also Japanese for some reason? And it’s deserted. And Klaus didn’t make it through the tunnel. It was just, let’s see, me, Five, Allison, Diego, Lila, Sloane, and Other-Ben left at that point, exactly seven, not counting Dad.”
“Hmmm.”
“I know, suspicious, right? Five was convinced right from the start that Dad had killed Luther and Klaus, and that Allison had made some kind of deal with Dad— I’m like, sure, now he’s worried about Allison? And come on, she would never kill Luther. Annoyingly, as usual, he was right on all counts though. Allison was not involved in killing either of our brothers, but she had made a deal with Dad. Five tried to get her to come clean about it, but next moment, we’re separated, and it’s just Allison and I, and here, at the end of the universe, she STILL won’t talk to me, until we’re attacked by this, this samurai made of bugs, and suddenly she’s all Just trust me, Viktor, all we have to do is get through this and we’ll all live happily ever after, just TRUST me!”
“Trust her now?”
“EXACTLY! But, like, the halls in this place keep shifting around, and it turns out there were actually THREE Guardians, and everyone is running into everyone else and it’s all chaos, and then KLAUS shows up because apparently he’s also immortal? And he manifests Luther to help us fight off the Guardians, too. And SOMEHOW we all survive this long enough for Dad to be like, look at these stars on the floor! It’s the Seven Bells! Everybody stand on one! Of course, now there’s eight of us because Klaus came back, so Allison is up with Dad while he runs this, this holographic computer, and whatever this thing is, it starts sucking out our— our Marigold, as Harlan called it. He’s using us, our powers, to fuel this computer. But Allison’s free, right, so she up and brains Dad to stop him sucking our life force dry, but then she just looks at me and goes Trust me again, and then she hits the big red button, and poof! We all fall out of an elevator into a garden.”
“What…happened?”
“And by ‘we all,’ actually, Allison and Sloane were missing, but Luther was there, alive and whole and even with his old, non-gorilla body!”
“His what?”
“Anyway, what happened was that Dad and Allison had used that machine to reset the whole universe. Dad is somehow now even more rich and powerful— and, alive, as you’ve noticed— and Allison is apparently living her dream life out in L.A. with BOTH Claire AND Ray, and the rest of us are just powerless schmucks now trying to make our way in a completely new world— everyone else had just decided to wander off and ‘live their lives,’ but, you know, I wouldn’t have it. I tracked everyone down again. Luther’s still searching the world for Sloane, and Klaus went after him. Diego and Lila are preparing for their baby. I don’t really care where Other-Ben has run off to, but I convinced Five to stick with me. Eventually. And we’re just— I mean what can we do? Just flip off King-of-the-World Reggie every time he shows up on TV? Stare jealously at his lovely wife as she plays my violin? Which, that was not a pleasant surprise, to find my violin now belongs to the richest guy in the world’s wife, who could afford to buy any other violin she likes, I mean why’d he have to write that in to the new universe, it was mine—”
“Wait, Abigail is not your mother?”
“No! Our Mom was a highly-advanced android named Grace!”
“…of course.”
“So, yeah. THAT’S the story. Phew.”
“…that’s…the end? Really?”
“Brings us up to today, at least. So! Where should we start? With the perils of living in a reset universe? Or the fact that I had superpowers for about two months? Or the fact that I actually had them all my life but was drugged and brainwashed into thinking I didn’t? Or the part that I don’t know how much of my chronic self-esteem issues are caused by a supernatural Rumor? Or how to repair my relationship with my Rumoring sister who won’t forgive me for IDon’tEvenKnowWhat, destroying the world I guess, even though I could forgive her for the Rumor that ruined my life AND for murdering my 65-year-old stepson? Or should we discuss how I’m becoming so desensitized to murdering now myself— hell, I murdered the whole planet in at least four different timelines!— that even my ex-assassin brother is worried for the state of my soul? Oh that reminds me—”
“Well, we’re out of time for today, so use this next week to—”
“—I’ve been trying to convince Five to make an appointment with you? Poor guy needs a therapist like twenty times worse than I do—”
“Twenty times?”
“—what with the forty years surviving in a post-apocalyptic hellhole, five years assassinating important historical figures, then coming back to us in the body of a teenager and all—”
“Yes. I see. Um, I’m not sure I have any room in my schedule for another— Nope! No room at all!”
“Aw. Too bad. Are you sure we’re out of time? Because now that I’ve been talking about it—”
“Just use the next week to think about what you most want to work on and we’ll go from there.”
“Right. I’ll do that. Well, thanks, Dr. Miller, it’s been good catching up with you!”
“You’re…welcome, Viktor. Any…any time.”