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Weapons, freaks, monsters, abominations
These were just some of the names that were thrown at the Hargreeves siblings. But more than that, they were children. They were just fucking children.
***
The Hargreeves siblings were six years old, babies really. But they weren't stupid either, they knew they were different, knew they were being trained for something even if they didn't know what it was yet.
But they were only children, they still giggled and kicked each other under the dinner table when their father wasn't looking. They played chase up and down the Academy staircases, tried to turn their training into a game because they didn't know any better. How could they?
And Grace made them pancakes on Sundays and tucked them into bed at night and stroked their hair from their foreheads when they all came down with the flu. Because they were just children. Weren't they?
***
Then the Hargreeves siblings were ten years old, they were a little older, a little taller but still children.
The giggles at the dinner table turned into suspicious glances, eyes turned downwards- 'Who's daddy's favourite?'
But still they were children, they sneaked into each other's rooms at nights when their father was sleeping. Sometimes they whispered, told stories and very occasionally they smiled. But mostly they clung to each other and tried to hold all their broken parts together.
Klaus fell down the stairs in his mother's heels and broke his jaw. Diego found him in a crumpled heap at the bottom, and he was scared. But he yelled for Ben and together they took Klaus to the Emergency Room. They didn't tell Grace. They'd stopped trusting her to keep secrets a long time ago.
The Nurse at the ER stared at these strange children who sat alone in the empty waiting room, because of course it was empty at two in the afternoon on a Thursday.
'Where are your mom and dad?' She asked them
'We don't have a mom and dad.' They said
And it was then that the Hargreeves siblings became their own parents.
They walked home later, Klaus with his jaw wired shut and a bottle of prescription pain medication in his pocket. Ben held his hand and Diego walked slightly ahead of them, scanning for threats because that's what they'd been taught to do.
Reginald scolded them for being out of the house but he didn't ask Klaus about his jaw, just told them to get inside and eat their dinner.
They slept in Ben's room that night, all three of them pressed together in the tiny single bed, like they were trying to become one being if they could just get close enough.
***
Then the Hargreeves siblings were thirteen years old, teenagers and angry at the world. They bickered and squabbled and slammed their bedroom doors. They pushed, pushed, pushed each other's buttons until they snapped.
Then the day. The day everything changed. Five walked out of the door and out of their lives.
The others were out of their seats before Reginald could say anything, practically falling over each other to get to the front door. Five had been talking about time skipping for months. He might actually have been stupid enough to do it this time.
If someone had happened to pass the Hargreeves house, they would have seen six teenagers on the doorstep, yelling for their brother.
'Five!' they shouted. 'Come back, come home.'
They shouted until their throats were raw and they had no more words. Until the man who called himself their father, dragged them back inside and slammed the door.
'It's okay' they told each other as they went to bed that night. 'He'll be home soon. He won't leave us.'
But he didn't come back, not the next day or the next. Weeks turned into months and Five did not come home.
Reginald stopped talking about him, acted as if their brother, their snarky, know it all, precious brother didn't exist. Like he hoped they'd forget about him.
They didn't forget, they cried into their pillows at night so He didn't hear them. Crying was not allowed, especially not over the one who left.
But they cried still, because they were just children.
***
Then the Hargreeves siblings were sixteen and suddenly they weren't children anymore. Not really. Maybe they hadn't been for a very long time.
They didn't smile anymore, they were hard and bitter and all they focused on were the missions. It hurt less that way. If they didn't think about how much they'd lost.
They were already falling apart when it happened, they weren't a family anymore, barely even a team.
Ben died. Their sweet, soft, gentle brother, who's demons were literal and lived in his guts. And it was the demons that killed him in the end. They shouldn't have been surprised.
If they'd been holding their broken parts together, Ben's death made them shatter again, like it'd all been because of him. And maybe it had been.
The siblings who were left bit into their knuckles to keep from screaming. The blood and the tears dripped onto the floor, seeping through the cracks in the floorboards.
Luther and Diego (Numbers 1 and 2 if you care to count) masked their grief with anger. They got into fights, all bruises and black eyes and harsh words that stuck in their skin like barbs.
Their sister Allison (Ben used to call her Alli, he was the only one who could get away with that) yelled at her brothers, called them idiots (but they weren't, not really, they just didn't know how to handle pain like this.)
Then one day, Luther punched Diego in the face and broke his nose. It was a stupid stupid fight and Allison had enough of her brothers' nonsense. So she did what she'd promised them years ago that she'd never do. She used her rumour on them so they'd stop fighting each other.
She hated to do it, but she hated the boys fighting even more. She wouldn't let her family fall apart completely (even if that one little part of her knew it was a lost cause.)
Then there was Klaus. He took it so much worse than any of his siblings had expected. And they'd expected it to be bad.
Because Ben had been Klaus' shadow, it was rare to see one of them without the other. It was co dependent, unhealthy probably. But none of them knew any different, and Ben seemed to make Klaus better too.
So none of the others were remotely surprised when Klaus went off the rails when Ben died. They just didn't know how far off the rails he was going to go.
It started with the alcohol, hip flasks of vodka under the breakfast table that the others pretended to not notice. They didn't want to cause a scene. He stopped eating at some point too, none of them could pinpoint when. But when his skin started to stretch over his bones, they realised.
Then the drugs, and the others couldn't pretend they didn't know this time. The pills, the joints, the needles. Klaus was trying to numb the pain of losing Ben, but that wasn't what he needed. Not really.
He just needed his siblings to see him, but that was the problem. They were so wrapped up in their own grief that they weren't looking properly.
When Klaus overdosed the first time (was it even the first time? They didn't know), Luther found him outside in the flowerbed, half passed out and delirious
Luther didn't want to wake Sir Reginald, and he couldn't tell Grace cos she'd tell him too. So he scooped Klaus up in his arms and his brother weighed next to nothing now. He'd always been thin but now it felt like his bones were hollowed out.
Luther bit back his tears and gently tapped on the door of Diego's room. He didn't want to (couldn't) do this on his own.
Diego and Luther took Klaus to hospital in a cab, even though he was slipping in and out of consciousness, his eyes glazed.
When he was awake, he whimpered and asked for Ben. Neither Diego or Luther could answer him.
At the hospital he was whisked away by a stern looking doctor who didn't ask where their parents were and said Klaus was very lucky they'd got him there in time.
Diego and Luther sat on chairs in the same waiting room of the same hospital where Diego had taken Klaus when he fell down the stairs when they were ten.
It was six am when the doctor came in and said they could take Klaus home now. They'd got the drugs out of his system. He just needed to rest now.
They didn't go straight home, they took a cab to their favourite doughnut shop and squeezed themselves into a booth and plied Klaus with sugary doughnuts and sweet tea until the colour came back into his cheeks.
The waitress knew them, those strange Umbrella Academy kids who hung around the shop like they had no home to go to. She let them stay longer than she really should have.
They left eventually, when they realised they couldn't hide forever. So they went home. There would be punishment but it was worth it to see Klaus smile for the first time in months.
And then there was Viktor, number seven, the only one without powers. The others always treated him like the youngest, even if he was exactly the same age as his siblings.
Viktor dealt with the grief of losing Five and Ben using kindness. It was the only thing he could think to do that didn't make his heart shatter even more. He watched his brothers and his sister slowly fall apart around him. So he tried to help them, gods he tried.
He sat with Luther and dabbed antiseptic onto his bloodied knuckles when he put his hand through the plasterboard of one of the walls following a particularly bitter argument with Diego. Luther could have patched himself up but he seemed happy to let Viktor do it.
When he found Diego in the third floor bathroom one night with tears streaming down his cheeks and the start of a black eye, Viktor stole down to the sitting room and poured two tumblers of whisky. Then the two of them drank it sitting in the bathtub because the bathroom was too small for them to sit side by side.
They didn't talk. They simply existed together in the same space and somehow, that was enough.
Later, after he'd helped Diego back to bed, Viktor hid the bottle and tumblers under his mattress and hoped no one would come looking for them. No one did.
Allison was a different story. Viktor's brothers wore their grief loudly and viscerally. And in a way it was easy to comfort them. Clean their wounds, listen to them cry, drink whisky in the bathtub. Simple.
But Allison, her grief was different. It was quieter, colder, and Viktor didn't know what to do to help her. And she snapped at him when he tried.
So he took to leaving things outside Allison's bedroom door, things he thought might help her feel a bit more normal. Cups of tea with lemon, honey spread on toast, books they used to read together as kids. He left little notes tucked into the pages too, littered with inside jokes. Viktor wasn't sure it helped, but eventually when Allison returned the books, she started writing notes back.
The walls of the Academy were thin, paper thin and Viktor could hear Klaus' shouts at three in the morning from two rooms away. Ben and Five used to occupy the space between them but their rooms stood empty. And Viktor could hear everything.
So he sneaked down the corridor into Klaus' room to find him curled up in a ball on his bed, whimpering to himself and visibly shaking. He had nightmares, Viktor knew that much. And he also knew that Ben used to be the one to comfort Klaus when he woke up screaming in the middle of the night. So Viktor wasn't really sure what to do.
But it turned out that it was easier than he thought to help. Klaus apparently craved physical contact so Viktor crawled into his bed and held onto his lanky, scrawny brother until he stopped shaking and started talking.
They talked for hours, in hushed voices, bundled underneath sheets that felt like shrouds, unable to clearly see each other's faces in the semi darkness
'I didn't love him enough' Klaus said one night. 'He was the best of us but I never loved him the way he deserved'
They were talking about Ben, lying beside each other in the darkness, hands clasped under the blankets. They didn't actually talk about Ben very often. Klaus never seemed to want to.
And it broke Viktor's heart to hear Klaus speak that way, like he hadn't loved Ben so much and so fiercely. Like he wouldn't have thrown himself in front of a moving bus to protect him. They all loved Ben, but with Klaus, it was different. They weren't just siblings, they were best friends.
'No' Viktor said firmly, with more resolve in his voice than he'd been anticipating. 'You and Ben, you were always your own little team of two, like you had your own secret club that the rest of us couldn't figure out how to get into. You loved him more than enough.
'Thank you Vik' Klaus said and his voice sounded heavy with tiredness.
Viktor could have gone back to his own room but he didn't. He stayed, listening to Klaus' soft, even breathing until he fell asleep himself.
***
So, you see, the Hargreeves story went a little like this:
Once upon a time, there were seven children, all born on the same day, to different parents. But they weren't just any children, they were different, they were extraordinary. And they were adopted (for want of a better word) by a man who called himself their father but he wasn't, not by any normal parameters.
So the children were not siblings by blood, but they were family all the same. There was Luther who was strong, Diego who could manipulate the world around him, Allison who could shift reality just with the sound of her voice, Klaus who could talk to the dead, Five who could jump through time and space, Ben who could summon Eldritch monsters through a portal in his stomach, and Viktor, who was so powerful that he didn't even know it. So powerful that it scared Reginald Hargreeves.
And the children were moulded into weapons, pushed past the breaking point. And they suddenly didn't look like children anymore, they were broken and twisted on the inside and that started to show on the outside. They grew teeth and claws, and they looked like monsters, but they weren't. They were just children.
By the time they were sixteen, there were only five of them left. One had disappeared and one had died. And suddenly they definitely weren't children and they never would be again.
End.