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“Hey, um, guys?”
“Luther, take your hands off of me,” Five commanded, his voice carefully level. Even Ben could feel the rising tension as his gaze darted between the hilariously mismatched duo.
“No, not until you tell me what the hell is—”
“Really, seriously, love what’s happening here you two, but can I draw your attention—?”
Klaus didn’t even manage to finish his sentence before Five was hissing furious threats at Luther like a feral cat, drowning out whatever it was he was trying to say. Ben flicked a quick look in Klaus’s direction, but couldn’t tell what had caught his attention; he was turning in slow circles, his eyes fixed skyward, and Ben was too entranced by the fisticuffs he was sure were about to break out to investigate further.
Look, just because he liked Klaus better than any of the rest of these assholes didn’t mean he was going to buy tickets to his sideshow. They had bigger problems right now than some funny shaped cloud that had Klaus captivated, or whatever it was he was going on about.
When Ben returned his attention to the Luther v. Five showdown, he saw Five had a constipated-looking expression on his face and Luther looked befuddled—or at least more befuddled than usual, Ben thought uncharitably, though with some amusement.
“My powers aren’t working,” Five said dumbly, and a ripple of confusion went around the gathering of Underwhelming Umbrellas that Ben had found himself saddled with.
Luther released Five and squinted uncertainly down at his hands, and a few feet away Diego pulled out a knife and immediately almost sliced his hand open when he fumbled a twirl. Viktor was staring into the distance with a look of intense concentration, his brow furrowed, presumably also trying to use his sonic-nuclear abilities. Ben searched inside himself for the steady tide of his own powers and found it absent.
“What the hell?” Lila muttered, but Ben still wasn’t 100% certain what her powers were, so he paid her no attention.
“Something’s wrong with this world,” Five said gravely. “Something is very, very wrong.”
Ben resisted the urge to fidget, clinging to the appearance of jaded unflappability that he’d spent the last couple of decades perfecting. A brave new universe where they were all inexplicably alive and well was one thing, but the sudden loss of his powers left him reeling, teetering on the edge of something awful like a 50-story skyscraper whose foundation had just vanished. He could see from the shocked and uneasy expressions on the others’ faces that they felt the same.
“Yeah, cool, normally I’d be thrilled to finally be rid of the ghosties,” Klaus interjected, his faux-cheerful voice cutting through the tension like a bull in an antique shop. “Like, hooray! Only been trying to do that for thirty years, awesome, but can I draw your attention to the other completely wild and unnerving new feature of this world?”
Diego was still staring in wounded astonishment at his knife like it had personally betrayed him and the others didn’t seem any more inclined to listen to Klaus now that they had yet another problem to worry about, but surprisingly Five seemed willing to bite.
“What, Klaus?” Five asked wearily, turning to see what Klaus was looking at. “Did you find another catastrophic spatio-temporal singularity or rip in the fabric of the universe? You seem to be getting pretty good at that, lately.”
Klaus gave a strained laugh and gestured skyward. “I mean I wouldn’t say it’s on the same scale as a glowing orb of malevolent energy in our basement eating all of reality, but a second moon seems pretty significant?”
There was a minor cacophony as everyone else suddenly began paying a lot more attention to Klaus. Ben followed Klaus’s gaze finally and saw that, sure enough, there was a second, larger moon hanging in the sky just a bit to the side of the one he was familiar with.
It glowed cheerfully down at them, seemingly unconcerned by the impossibility of its existence.
“Son of a bitch,” Five muttered.
( O o )
“Look, all I’m saying is we definitely only had one moon before!” Luther insisted in a sotto-voce as they all crowded around the dusty box-shaped computer monitor at the public library where Five was picking at the keyboard with two fingers. Ben felt his eye twitch and resisted the rising urge to kick his chair out of the way and take over. It would be faster than watching this old man try to use a computer, but he didn’t want to be the one in charge of figuring out this mess, so he tried to ignore how painfully obvious it was that Five had only a theoretical understanding of what a computer was.
“Are you sure, man?” Diego countered mildly. “Maybe you miscounted.”
“Mis—miscounted? Diego I was on the moon for four years, I think I would have noticed if there was another moon up there!” Luther puffed up indignantly.
“Maybe that was the problem. You could have just kept missing it, crossing paths like ships in the night,” Lila piped up, blowing a bubble with her gum and popping it obnoxiously. Ben was certain she hadn’t had that at the hellscape hotel, and he wondered when she’d found time to stop for candy. He also wasn’t sure what to do with Luther’s assertion that he had lived on the moon, but the others didn’t seem phased so he kept his mouth shut and filed that away in his growing mental filing cabinet titled “What The Fuck Is Wrong With These People.”
He was already running out of room in that thing.
Luther drew himself up like he was about to launch into an explosive rant about how impossible that was, or defend his observational skills. Ben kept a straight face only through sheer power of will and long practice.
“Got it,” Five interrupted. He would have seemed oblivious to the byplay if Ben hadn’t been standing close enough to see the amused curl of his lips.
Impossibly, everyone scrunched even closer over the computer screen in anticipation of whatever Five was about to share. He himself hadn’t felt the need to step closer, but he was dragged in anyway by the crush of bodies, and he felt someone’s elbow introduce itself to his kidney.
“Okay, so apparently in this new universe, the Earth has always had two moons,” Five announced, squinting at whatever he was reading on the screen. “The old one, the one we had, is still called Luna, and the new big one is…”
When Five paused long enough that it was obvious he wasn’t planning to continue, Klaus squeezed forward to prop his hands on Five’s shoulders and look over his head at the computer himself. “The big one is what? C’mon, don’t keep us in suspense.”
“The other one is called Archibald,” Five said flatly.
For a moment, no one spoke. Klaus rocked backwards from the screen as if physically repelled, and Luther blinked rapidly like he could change what his senses were telling him.
“You’re shitting me, right?”
That was Viktor, though his tone was so quiet and disbelieving Ben could almost convince himself he hadn’t heard anything.
“Archibald,” Diego repeated, and Five nodded shortly in confirmation.
“I don’t like this new universe, and I would like to leave now,” Lila declared, tucking her hand into the crook of Diego’s arm and appearing ready to lead him away, as if it would be that easy to just opt out of this weird bizarro-world. “I am not raising my child on a planet with a moon named Archibald.”
Was this how they all had felt when they landed in an eerily-familiar world that was just similar enough to their own that the differences felt like nails on a chalkboard? For a very, very brief moment, Ben felt a stirring of sympathy for these assholes who crashed into his life and had been fucking things up since the moment they arrived.
Then he remembered that they were assholes and had been fucking things up since the moment they arrived, and he pushed that brief moment of weakness firmly away into that handy mental filing cabinet that was getting just a bit too full.
“Huh.” Klaus tilted his head consideringly and swung an arm out to catch Ben around the shoulders, like he somehow knew Ben was moments from making a break for it. Dammit. “Archibald. Archie. Y’know, it’s kind of growing on me? Like a fungus, but I could probably appreciate it with time.”
Luther let out a sound like a cat whose tail had just been stepped on. “No, no way, you can’t like Archibald. That’s an insult to our real moon, the moon we’ve had all along, who is perfect all on her own and doesn’t need some ugly kid sibling playing at being a celestial body.”
Five made a considering noise, still scrolling through something on the computer that might have been a Wikipedia page. For the second fucking moon that this version of Earth had.
What the hell.
“I mean, it looks like plenty of people here think Archibald is actually the better moon,” he said mildly, as if that wasn’t an insane assortment of words to string together. “Bigger, brighter, closer to the planet…Lots of people think Luna doesn’t pull her weight quite as much as Archie, they think she’s superfluous.”
“Wait wait,” Viktor said, placing a soothing hand on Luther’s arm before he could voice his opinion on that. “So if Earth has two moons, has always had two moons somehow, doesn’t that…change things? Like tides, and the Earth’s rotation and stuff?”
“Excellent question, Viktor.” Five started pecking away at the keyboard with two fingers again, his tone sounding much like Pogo’s had during their childhood lessons when he was impressed with how well they were engaging with the topic of the day. “So obviously the people on this Earth have never known a world with only one moon, so there isn’t a handy way to see all the differences between our planet and theirs, but it does look like the layout of the major coasts are different. New York City doesn’t seem to exist, and the Great Lakes appear to be even more of a major shipping industry now.”
While the rest of them were still digesting the fact that New York City didn’t exist, Five had apparently continued digging. “So these Great Lakes have bigger tides and a much greater mass than ours did—Huron, Erie and Ontario are just one big lake called Ontario and the Ontario Peninsula basically doesn’t exist past Toronto, although there is a Huron island.”
Diego glanced toward the bank of windows across the main floor of the library as if he’d be able to see across the city to the lake shore from here.
Five hmmed in a dissatisfied way. “Well the good news is Detroit is pretty much the same as we remember, though it's now the largest port city in America and quite the central hub for industry and commerce even now in the 21st century; apparently it replaced the non-existent NYC as the economic and cultural capital of the Eastern United States, so that might be useful. The bad news is it’s named after Dad.”
The matching grimaces of disgust on everyone’s faces revealed what they all thought of that.
“And I suppose the next thing you tell us is that instead of Umbrellas or Sparrows, Dad’s got a Mermaid Academy here?” Klaus asked.
Lila made a retching noise. “God, don’t even joke about that. If that man managed to get his hands on and fuck up another set of kids, I’m moving back to London, I don’t want to be anywhere near here.”
“I think London went the way of New York City, actually.”
“Oh fuck this place,” Lila muttered, thumping her head against Diego’s shoulder repeatedly.
( o O )
“So if the whole thing at the hotel was to reset the universe according to Dad’s specifications, why did he give Earth another moon?” Viktor asked wearily once they were all squeezed into a sticky vinyl booth at an all-night diner a few blocks away from the library.
It had been the first place they passed that promised the possibility of coffee, which was apparently the only criteria Five had for selecting their next destination. Watching the way he was white-knuckling the mug that held his third refill and staring at it like it was the only thing keeping the mania at bay, Ben could understand why the others hadn’t even tried to protest.
“Maybe it wasn’t on purpose,” Luther said dubiously. “I mean, how specific was he when he was programming that thing? Maybe the imposter-moon was just a side effect.”
Klaus heaved a sigh and slumped sideways in the cramped booth so that his head was propped against Luther’s side and his legs were draped over Ben’s lap. “We should just find Allison and ask, she obviously had more information going into that fiasco than the rest of us did.”
Diego let out a snort. “Yeah, sure, because that sounds like a good idea. We don’t even know where she is.”
“She’ll be with Claire,” Viktor murmured, slowly shredding a paper napkin into smaller and smaller pieces.
Ben made a mental note to find out who Claire was.
Lila was steadily making her way through a plate of waffles covered in ketchup, but she seemed to have no problem chiming in with a mouth full of food. “So we find Claire, we talk to Allison, and we figure out how to get back to a universe without Archibald and Hargreeves City. We’ll be home before you know it.”
“There might not be a way back,” Five groaned, slamming his now-empty coffee mug down on the table like a shot glass and reaching for the carafe for yet another refill. His hand seemed to be trembling, but no one commented. “Whatever reset button Allison and the old man hit on the universe has completely changed the course of this planet’s existence. This isn’t a case of us causing a stir in the 60s and altering the trajectory of a few decades, we’re talking about billions of years of history rewritten to somehow include a second moon and whatever else led us to this current timeline. And, might I remind all of you, we don’t even have our powers, so we’re basically helpless.”
There was a long silence as they all digested that.
“I miss when our biggest moon-related issue was Luther thinking all our problems revolved around Dad sending him there for purposes unknown,” Klaus said glumly. He paused, then hummed consideringly. “Though to be fair, the inexplicable presence of a second moon after Dad had a crack at designing his perfect dollhouse universe does seem to suggest that he had a vested interest in the moon at least at one point, I guess.”
Luther perked up a bit, but Diego shoved a milkshake into his hand with a warning look and he (mercifully) refrained from saying anything.
Viktor let out a tiny huff of laughter. “Sorry guys, guess I jumped the gun on blowing up the moon. Maybe if I had saved it for Archibald instead, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
The overstuffed filing cabinet finally toppled over with a mighty crash.
“Is this how you people live your lives?!” Ben exploded, unable to take it any longer. “Living on the fucking moon for years, shrugging off the complete reset of the universe as we know it, careening through apocalypses like they’re an amusement park ride and joking about blowing up that weird celestial abomination out there—is this just normal for you people?”
“Aww, it’s alright Ben, let it out,” Klaus crooned, sitting up so he could run a soothing hand down the back of Ben’s head like he was petting an anxious animal. Infuriatingly, it actually helped, the touch grounding him and reminding him that at least he wasn’t facing all of this completely alone. “Sorry to say this actually is pretty normal for our lives anymore, but hey! It’s not all apocalypses and lunar lunacy, sometimes there’s cults and giant balls of twine and a stolen ice cream truck careening out of control on a nearly-deserted stretch of road at top speed!”
“None of that made any sense,” Ben managed in a strained voice, but he found himself relaxing anyway.
Diego was fighting a losing battle against a grin. “I forgot about the fucking ice cream truck,” he said nostalgically, as one might fondly reminisce about staying out all night past curfew or some other youthful misadventure. Ben had a sinking feeling the ill-advised ice cream truck adventure was too recent to be blamed on teenage impulsivity, though.
At some point, Five had evidently left the table to collect another pot of coffee, because he returned at that moment with a carafe in one hand and a box of assorted donuts in the other. He set both on the table with the careful deliberation of someone so far past the end of their rope that they had nothing but the barest fibers under their fingernails to cling to.
Distressingly, Ben found himself developing a sense of shared camaraderie with the only other person here who seemed to be half as upset about recent events as he was. Wasn’t Five the one who had been stranded past the reaches of time for decades before making it back to his family? It was probably not a good sign of Ben’s mental state that this was the person he found himself relating to.
“Okay listen up,” Five said calmly, after gnawing his way through a Boston cream donut and swallowing down another mug of coffee; he spoke with the kind of unshakeable confidence and expectation of being listened to that just screamed of natural leadership, and the table fell silent in response. There was a strange twitching thing happening around his eyes that Ben hoped was just a result of the caffeine and not anything more serious, but nevertheless he found himself almost leaning forward in anticipation of whatever solution to this madness Five had landed on.
“It’s the only way to fix this mess,” Five announced solemnly as he made eye contact with them all one-by-one. “We’re going to have to destroy the moon.”
Ben let his head drop to the sticky formica table with a dull thunk.
Fuck this place, fuck these people, and fuck his fucking life.