Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"You look like you've seen a ghost," Klaus says from where he's lying on the ground, a second after he returns to the land of the living.

Sitting beside him on his left, his brother stares.

"What?" He pushes himself up on his elbows, and immediately falls back down. "God, I feel like I've been hit by a truck."

"It was a bus, actually," Ben says, nodding to Klaus's right, where, as Klaus rolls his head to look, there's an old-timey bus, in front of which a busload of old-timey people are standing, gawking at him. "You were dead."

"What?" Klaus asks again, retrying to push himself up, this time succeeding. "Where are we?"

"Texas," says a brown-skinned girl with glasses. "You fell from the sky, before getting hit by our bus."

Klaus diplomatically ignores her, all the onlookers, really, turns back to Ben, who seems absolutely lost in the girl's almond-shaped eyes but manages to shake himself off and ask, "What's the last thing you remember?"

That's a tough question. "A rooftop party? I-- fell...? From the roof?" Klaus racks his brain. Something's not quite right about what he's seeing. "Are you-- bigger? Somehow?"

"It's my après-death growth spurt, we've been over this," Ben says, making eye contact but not making any sense. "And I'm pretty sure you're the one who's smaller, if your over-sized getup is any indication."

Klaus knows he needs to stop asking 'What?' at some point, so. "$#!+."

.

They take the bus driver's offer for a free ride to the nearest town and stumble straight into a diner, where everyone continues to be rude and not acknowledge Ben's existence.

"It's just weird, like. You're here. Totally and undeniably here!" Klaus says, kicking at Ben's feet to prove his point, before moving on. "Anyway, I'm starving. Do you have any money? Because as you've kindly pointed out, I don't even know what I'm wearing. I mean, an army jacket and leather pants combo? And dog tags?"

"Whose?" Ben asks, leaning across the table as Klaus holds them up.

"Katz... David..." Klaus starts to read.

"David Katz?" asks a voice from the booth behind him.

Klaus swings around to look and, holy menudo, is met with the most beautiful person he's ever seen in his life. "Yeah?"

"You're David Katz? Because I'm David Katz," says David Katz, stunningly. "Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, or listen in, for that matter, but you were pretty loud and talking to yourself, so..."

In awe, Klaus is. For about five more seconds. Before forcibly reaching out for a handshake. "Klaus Hargreeves, but you can call me whatever you want." Smiling his best smile. Or maybe his dopiest smile, he's too awestruck to keep track of his own facial expression.

Fetchingly, becomingly, and more stunningly, David Katz blushes, as their hands meet. "David Katz. You can call me Dave."

"Dave," Klaus says dreamily, wondering if it's at all realistic to hope that a handshake can last forever.

"And you laughed at me for getting lost in Jill's eyes," Ben says, rolling his non-almond eyes.

.

"It's destiny," Jill says, back from calling to let her parents know that her trip towards higher education just got extended indefinitely. "You fell from the sky and got hit by the bus that took you to the town where the first thing you did was walking into this eating establishment to find the very person whose dog tags you weren't aware were around your neck. We have to see where the course of fate is going to take us."

"You got hit by a bus?" Dave asks, having reseated himself as well as his plain hamburger with two pickles and looking concerned.

Klaus swallows his bite of funeral potatoes and bacon, his hand sadly holding a fork. "Only allegedly, which reminds me. Did you get hit by the bus, too?"

Ben shakes his head. "It went right through me."

When Klaus looks back, Dave is looking much more concerned. "You're genuinely not kidding? Like, you really see someone sitting there?"

Frowning, Klaus takes a moment to look between them, frown some more, then says, "Ben, my dearly beloved brother, pass me the syrup, would you?" and after Ben doesn't, "Just humor me, please? Pretty please with cherries on top?"

It's not until they're done experimenting with "assisted flying" and Dave's uncle comes back from a lengthy sojourn to the latrine to disapprove of Klaus's entire existence that an extraordinarily charitable lady makes herself known and offers to fairy-godmother their ineffable mission, whatever it may be.

.

True to the lady's word, their afternoon slides by in a shopping montage. Like everything else in this town, everything about the lady's late husband's tailor's haberdashery is impeccably authentically exhilaratingly retro, and so is the mall Dave leads them to after Klaus courteously says thanks but jeepers creepers no because he sure does need clothes that fit but tailor-made suits are kinda overkill.

"But that's mathematically impossible. Because your uncle would have to be a septuagenarian to have fought in the Korean War," Klaus tells Dave as they walk out of a vintage clothing store with a totally reasonable amount of vintage clothes, only to find Ben next to Jill by a pay phone, pale as an actual ghost. "What's wrong?"

"I've kept trying the number you gave me and searched the phone book, but to the best of my knowledge, the Umbrella Academy does not exist," Jill says, rueful and dispirited. "However, I've found a D.S. Umbrella Manufacturing Co., here in Dallas."

"Good! That's-- something, right?" Klaus tries to cheer her up, looks to Ben. "Right?"

Ben doesn't get less pale. "Klaus, it's 1960. The Academy doesn't exist because we're not born yet."

.

So they're in the wrong decade, century, as well as millennium. Which is not good. Except Klaus and Ben can't agree on what year it's supposed to be, either.

"I died a year ago, and I'm still dead now even though you can't seem to remember," Ben keeps on not making sense during their tactical frappé break. "Which makes sense because you're obviously younger than me physically and mentally. Dad always says we're meant to save the world. My best guess is that it was Five who for some reason took us back in time from different years, and he knew we would suffer short-term memory loss as a side effect so he gave you the dog tags to clue us in, but why would he not drop us straight off in town unless-- That's it! We've been brought here now so we can save the world, and we need both Jill and Dave but especially Jill to do it!"

It's pretty concerning that Dave looks progressively less and less skeptical as Klaus relays the wildest guess in all of history, while Jill, true to form, remains faithful and game as ever. "Does this mean I should enlist right out of high school? That's what the dog tags are about, right?"

"No. If anything, I believe the dog tags have been purposefully chosen to dissuade you from enlisting. If Klaus and Ben's time-traveling brother's only goal was to guide them to you, he could've simply given Klaus any form of ID or even a piece of paper with your name on it. Instead he specifically chose your dog tags so we would know that you will have enlisted in the future and therefore in order to change the future you should not enlist this time around," Jill says over her untouched caramel mocha frappé, which-- makes sense?

"Man, I wish I could smell her hair. Don't tell her I said that," Ben says over his also untouched caramel mocha frappé. "Or anyone, ever. I mean it."

Klaus tells the whole world, naturally.

.

"My mom was very confused when she got the call from the police chief, but said I should see this through irregardless," Dave says that night after a lavish dinner/soirée at the charitable lady's banging luxurious house/their base of operations for the quasi-foreseeable future, stepping out to join them on the roomy patio. "Um."

"Our family's a messier mess since I died, Klaus. So, again, it makes sense to opt for bringing you from before that point. As for why I'm here as a ghost, I guess it must be because what we need to do to save the world can't be done if I was still alive?" Ben says, carrying on holding Jill's hands "for practice". "In any case you should get ready for bed. Training resumes tomorrow at six."

And with that, it's official, right then and there where Klaus has finally started to get the hang of how to corporealize his power-mad self-proclaimed big brother.

Time travel is freaking confusing. Childhood trauma is the worst.

Chapter Text

It's the clamor of changes calling and the old ways falling. It's the stinkiness of unknown perils and the sweetness of unfulfilled hopes. It's the gloom of early morning in the summertime and the weather report says it can get as sweltering as eleventy degrees as the day carries on, with a slim chance of mild to severe thunderstorms. Screw Dallas.

"We already know the world will have survived for at least forty-seven more years because Ben is from 2007. Then again, it could be that humanity's survival will have been owing to divine intervention and time travel has already been involved. This is, of course, assuming chaos theory is kept to a minimum and no reality-breaking paradox is at play. I've pored myself over everything you had on your person multiple times and yet found no definitive evidence as to what sort of doomsday scenario it could be that you'd need half a century to save the world from. There were a good deal of people on the bus. Perhaps it's not my help you need after all," is the line of reasoning Jill posts on her way to caffeine intoxication, all while Klaus catches his breath on a mushy patch of grass after running his umptieth lap around the property, all before breakfast.

"I've been theorizing about it all night, too," Ben says, doesn't even need to breathe, the bastard. "Now hurry up and make me more corporeal so I can talk to her."

In contrast to the surplus of brotherly tyranny, Dave, having handsomely collapsed halfway through his umpteenth lap and recovered, pours Klaus a glass of orange juice. "You're smart and good at figuring things out and stuff. I'm the one who hasn't been any help."

Clearly, being conscious before noontide is extremely detrimental to the mind, body, as well as soul, and so Klaus rolls onto his back, takes the orange juice, before raising it inspiringly. "Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war, for ye today who shed your blood with me shall be my brothers. You're here, both of you, and that, to me and Benerino, counts for a freaking lot, so. Today, I say we drink to the greatness that's been recklessly thrust upon ourselves!"

Which is, expectedly, when rain starts pelting down so heavily any sane person would know to head indoor. Except Ben, expectably, declares it nothing but a little breeze and drizzle, then entrusts Klaus with a loaded barbell and strongly recommends he do some weightlifting under the natural shower before washing/warming up under an artificial one.

.

Klaus jerks awake to a crack of thunder, expectantly in time for brunch. "Is it just me, or does it smell like burnt death around here?"

"It's you, burnt to death from getting struck by lightning," Ben says, as contradictory a statement as any since Ben's stated on record that he can't incorporeally smell anything. "Also while you were dead, Dave was freaking out so much he found another clue hidden in the heel of one of your over-sized shoes."

"It's a check stub for three thousand dollars, dated 1989 with a name and an address in Pennsylvania," Jill corroborates, holding said stub up for Klaus to peruse.

"Three grand?" is the first question that comes to mind, followed in short order by "And does this mean you can finally hear Ben's haunting whisper?"

"Do you-- not care at all about the fact that you've died and come back to life?" Dave asks, observably not whelmed, like he's seeing a ghost, or ghosts, at the same time as Jill reverently answers, "Only just now, most certainly because you've substantiated his existence. You're truly a miracle."

Having no idea how to respond, Klaus blinks. He really needs to eat.

.

"Is this all you do, all day everyday? Training, preparing for missions, always giving your all for the sake of the world?"

Klaus pauses mid sun salutation. Ben did look growingly hangdog the more he helped Klaus scrub off the dead skin from his quote-unquote deadly electric burn, which Klaus attributes to why he's doing light yoga instead of post-brunch amphibious drills. "Pretty much. Except on Saturdays between noon and noon thirty, that's reserved for fun and games."

Dave frowns, looking saintly in his stripy shirt but yet to master the corpse pose. "I mean, it's the summer. All I had on my calendar was to loaf around doing nothing, maybe help my uncle at the hardware store for a bit."

Closing his eyes, Klaus inhales, opens his moon chakra. "Well, you weren't just doing nothing. You were also thinking about enlisting, and given today's political climate, odds are our military'd send you to Vietnam. And that, Dave, that would be... Let's just say people still heatedly express criticism of it in the 21st century when I'm from. Most modern liberals, conservatives, libertarians, socialists, communists, anarchists, all consider this war a senseless waste of human life. Fifty thousand American soldiers and a million Vietnamese, all died for nothing,"

The optimist proclaims they live in the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears that it's true. Ben is still tight lipped about how he became a ghost. To be fair, Klaus hasn't asked, doesn't know if he can handle knowing. When his brother told him their family got messier than they already were, Klaus could hear the "You, in particular" just fine. He just wishes Five had saved Ben from whatever happened as well.

Outside, the wind howls.

.

"It's at least a twenty-hour drive," Jill says from where she's got a slew of maps systematically laid out in the war room. "Longer by rail, since there's no direct train from here to Pennsylvania."

With a mouthful of lunch meat chili con carne, Klaus grins. "Road trip?"

"Road trip," Ben confirms with a firm nod.

.

It's heartwarming to know what the governor is willing to do for his wealthier benefactors, like arranging for Klaus to have a driver's license that is valid now instead of forty-five years in the future, plus one for Ben even though it takes a bunch of people the better part of the afternoon because Klaus can't spontaneously learn how to make Ben photographable. That and a lifelike portrait can't be painted in great haste. By the time they're back at their base of operations, the sun is setting and there's another super exclusive soirée, at which Klaus and Ben perform some more small miracles for the lively crowd before a grieving power couple ask if Klaus can help them commune with the spirit of their patriotic son. And it's not that Klaus can't, per se, but he has this morbid fear of ghosts and really doesn't want to. Except the crowd is raptly watching and Klaus is self-aware enough to admit that he's a pathological attention curator at heart.

"So can you conjure any dead person at any time, or does there have to be some sort of unfinished business, or...?" Dave asks later while uncomplainingly helping Klaus pack, himself ready for the road on account of having largely not unpacked since his trip home yesterday.

"I don't know the specifics?" From the way things are going, Klaus might need a bigger suitcase. "And on that note I'm not well-informed on the non-specifics, either?"

Ben sighs, still a little flushed from "going to see if Jill needs any help" earlier. "You said you were the expert on the dead."

"When?" Klaus turns to make meaningful eye contact with his technically older brother. "All I remember from my training is Dad locking me in a box full of shrieking, face-eating ghosts and calling it training."

"Your dad did what?" Dave sounds striking outraged.

Uncharacteristically, Ben looks away. "Right. How could I forget."

.

Not wanting to attract unnecessary attention, they say no to the police escort and yes to a conscientiously nondescript car. Given all the extraordinary events that have happened, it's not unsafe to assume that the reason behind Five not being here to boss them around despite the ability to instantly teleport through space and time at will is because Five's been busy evading a person or persons with the same or greater ability, meaning there's a high chance they, too, may be targets for kidnapping or worse.

"Right. We have everything we need?" Klaus asks, hands at ten and two on the steering wheel, Dave hot in the shotgun seat, and any and all touching of body parts during the driver's seat optimization process committed to memory.

"With the amount of money people keep throwing at us?" Ben rhetoricizes from the backseat, clandestinely ascertaining the closest distance he can sit next to Jill without being creepy. "I think we're good."

Chapter Text

They take turns driving, sunshine and open road and wind in their hair. Which is a nicer way of saying that it was scorching when Klaus stuck his head out to the desolate highway and immediately got usurped from driving duty.

"Aliens?" Dave asks, every organ dutifully inside the car.

Klaus props his feet up and pushes his new seat back as far as it'll go, in part for ergonomic reasons and in part as an act of civil disobedience. "The space race stopped not long after we walked on the moon. Who knows what cosmic horror we missed because we chucked up the sponge too soon."

"You walked on the moon?" is Dave's follow-up as Ben retaliates.

"Not we us, we humanity." Klaus clarifies, strenuously wrestling out of his brother's stranglehold of doom. "The point is maybe we're supposed to be getting the world ready for when an extraterrestrial race of sapient space squids shows up. That would explain the half century prep time, right?"

"I'm adding it to the list," Jill says from her peaceful seat behind Dave. The list in question is reasonably all-inclusive, with potential contenders for the cause of the apocalypse ranging from earth-shattering asteroids to subterranean leviathans. Having taken into account the lack of curated news articles with the details of whatever will have happened, the end of the world must be pretty abrupt.

Ben is quiet for several seconds before letting out a contemplative breath. Klaus can't begin to fathom how ghost metabolic processes work. "I've been trying to puzzle out why Five didn't just write us a note, you know, as an infinitely more efficient alternative to gathering various objects from different time periods and hoping that we'd put two and two together. At this point I'm starting to think maybe Five has no idea what we should do, either. Like, maybe he has some ideas of what could be the turning points in history, but no real way of knowing the actual outcome except by trial and error."

"Do you think--" Dave catches Klaus's eye in the rearview mirror while more desolation passes them by. "It's just, given what you can do, maybe your brother knew that he was about to be dead soon, and hence would be available for questions later?"

.

A hundred and eighty miles from Dallas and they're in the town of Texarkana, the one in northeast Texas and not its counterpart in southwest Arkansas. That said, the federal courthouse does straddle the state line, is and will continue to be the only federal office building to be located directly on a state line, as well as will have been the place to host on its steps not one, but two future past presidents during their campaigns for presidency, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and JFK later this very year.

"It's adorable that you can rattle this collection of facts off the top of your head, oldest brother, but how does it have anything to do with anything whatsoever?" is what Klaus wants to know.

Ben, on the other hand, has other priorities. "I guess this means you haven't been resting in peace after walking into the light?"

Five scowls, squirming away from their reunion hug. "As wholesome as I may seem in this masterfully crafted suit, I died a one-armed nightmare inside a bureaucratic hellscape of my own design, all the while waiting for a Kugelblitz that never came. So to answer the questions both you morons failed to ask, no, I don't know how or why you ended up here or now, yes, I intend to find out who's responsible so I can kick the living daylight out of them, but in order to do that, I need to go back to my eternal damnation, and last and most importantly, whatever you do, don't save the world."

"Kugelblitz... I believe is German for ball of lightning?" Jill says three tumbleweed rotations later, to the empty air where Five isn't anymore.

.

"Yes, Kugelblitz is German for ball of lightning," Five says after Klaus called him back. "Now if you'll stop wasting earth's supply of oxygen. Please and thank you."

.

Lunch transpires in a quaint little greasy spoon just west of Philadelphia, because Klaus is not a moron and called Five back again to blink them straight to the neck of the woods where they're going and save their road gang eighteen hours of driving.

"The main conclusion of what I'm saying is, the Five we've just met is only one Five from the potentially very many, perhaps infinitely many exponentially divergent branching points in the timeline, the same way there's been the you who's lived longer than me, and you who have not."

Klaus stops chewing his award-winning schnitz pie for a moment. If that's true then that Klaus is probably going out of his mind missing the hell out of Ben. At the same time albeit on the less dreary side, they've just reunited with their long lost brother as a grumpy ghosty gramps. Who's to say this Ben won't find that Klaus in forty-seven years to pick up right where they left off. "So what you're saying is, the Five we've just met is indubitably not the Five who supposedly brought us here, and we shouldn't take him too seriously even though he emphatically told us not to save the world, supposably from the cougar bliss thing?"

"Kugelblitz," Jill corrects helpfully, followed by a diminishingly helpful systematic interpretation of what it could mean that Klaus guesses is a testament as to why Five might be right to consider it a waste of whatever ghosts breathe to stick around and explain.

"But how in the world can anyone save the universe from something like that?"

"I don't know, but if anyone can, it's you," Dave says, all confidence and not a hint of interrogative inflection.

"What?"

"I believe so, too," Jill says with all the more confidence. "From what I can tell, Mister Five's powers are based purely on science, and that fact alone has influenced every aspect of his existence, be it his world view, who he is as an individual, up to and including how he's approached every problem he's ever faced. In other words, the antithesis of you. Since the moment I screamed at the bus driver to look out, I've witnessed you break so many laws of nature and defy reality as we know it without even trying. And now that you are, I believe with all of my heart there's no limit to what you can accomplish."

When Klaus finally stops gaping incredulously at the twin votes of inordinate certitude and turns to look at his dark cloud scold of a brother, Ben doesn't say anything, simply very pointedly gnaws another bite off his cheese blintz.

.

As it turns out, Klaus is Amish.

The Herschbergers are hospitable, god-fearing people. The whole community, really, ghosts included. At least before Klaus liberated them from the worldly plane, but not before they bade farewell to their loved ones.

"In hindsight, more attention could've been paid to the fact that it's dated two days after we'll have been born. You alright? You look deep in thought. It's disconcerting."

Klaus braces himself. "Did you stay because of me?"

"Obviously," is Ben's studious unflappable response after a long poignant silence, presumably for dramatic effect. "No one knows what they have in store for them on the other side, and here I have you."

Maybe this is the real purpose of the check stub, not to have them organize a baby shower for Klaus's unborn birth mother, but to remind them that despite everything their childhoods were missing, they wouldn't've had their family if not for Dad.

"So are you two gonna hug or what?" Dave asks from beside Jill by the horseless carriage. If only things weren't so messed up all the time.

.

To say good old Five doesn't appreciate a good cuddle session when he gets smothered in it would be an understatement. In other news, Dave and Jill are both superb huggers. Oh, and rumspringa is German for running around, or more accurately, jumping around.

"Anyway, since we're already within a conveniently close distance, we may as well go check out the Academy for clues, see if something pops out of the Cow Henge and other roadside wonders along the way. There is also this hotel, presently in her heyday, that plays host to world leaders in present tense. Who knows who we might run into? Maybe we'll end up having a chat with Gorbachev about ending the Cold War early, or Castro, who as you know, recently led a band of guerrilla fighters to overthrow a dictatorship and established a socialist state in Cuba, or maybe even Elvis!"

The World's Largest Ball of Twine could stand to be larger, but Hotel Obsidian never disappoints.

Chapter Text

No matter what some people may say, it's not gatecrashing if they're invited.

"I thought things were making sense when they showed us the dress code for entering this banquet hall, but we've eaten their exotic food and swung their ceremonial hammer and I gotta say I still don't know what the Valhalla kind of party we've gotten ourselves into."

"Might be a Nordic wedding, might be a Viking funeral. What's important is that everyone's invited."

"But why?"

"Peace and love? Pretty sure they're setting that sizable boat at the front on fire with flaming arrows at midnight. What could possibly go horribly wrong. The horny helmet suits you, by the way. Very, um... horny."

In the face of Klaus's ex post facto mortification of what his mouth just blurted out, Dave laughs. "Yeah? Well, you're basically donning a teddy bear rug. Beary rugged."

Above them, the disco balls spin. Because alongside fake snow and real crows, there, too, are disco balls at this berserk Scandinavian party, not to mention some serious karaoke. Who's anyone to judge anyone by society's rules and norms.

Also, they're dancing.

Not like, slow dancing or anything. The dance floor is a pulsating constellation of boisterous revelry and the vaguely familiar songs are sung in Norwegian, maybe. The music itself, while being blasted at a considerate volume that they can still hear each other, features deep throbbing bass that is absolutely conducive to pelvic thrusting. Klaus would be utterly amazed if this all turned out not to be an elaborate prelude to a ritualistic orgy.

Someone bumps into Dave then. A mysterious, dark-spectacled, sword-carrying lady, whose equally mysterious dark-attired lady friend winks at Klaus from behind Dave, who's now in Klaus's arms. "Hi?"

"Hey," Dave says, up close and impossibly personal. "Sorry."

Fighting a losing battle to suppress his vastly naughty thoughts, Klaus does his damnedest to keep everything suitable for the general public and platonically helps Dave upright. And like, Klaus is aware he might be dreaming or hallucinating or experiencing a delirium of hormones and neurotransmitters or whatever, but he could swear that for a split second, Dave's eyes actually flicker to his lips. "I..."

Dave, still in Klaus's arms, one hand resting on Klaus's shoulder, face so close Klaus can't read his expression comprehensively, smiles. "Yeah?"

Klaus opens his mouth, closes it, reopens his mouth again. "I don't know what's gonna happen, and I'm scared of losing everyone."

He can't find the friendly mysterious ladies anymore, but this is probably not what they had in mind.

And Dave, with his other arm curling around Klaus's waist, does the opposite of pulling away.

.

What could possibly go horribly wrong? For one thing, the boat should burst into flames at midnight and not a minute early, let alone hours, and definitely not before it's scheduled to be externalized outdoors to the open air courtyard outside where it's not so crowded as opposed to the inside of the banquet hall. For another thing, the boat's less than stellar burnability is probably a design flaw, like, whoever built Hotel Obsidian clearly spared no expense on the top of the line sprinkler system and thank God no one's hurt and all, but a design flaw nonetheless. Lastly, someone for sure spared some expense on the overall structural sturdiness of the boat, because oh boy, does it break into pieces.

.

Their hotel suite has an en suite bathroom, which is unexpected. Disembodied specters of freelance hunters Dad hired to gun down some guardians guarding the seven magic bells in a sacred cave, sure, but an attached private bathroom? Totally unthought of.

"So Dad's been the owner of this fine future flophouse since the roaring twenties, are we supposed to warn him about the treacherousness of real estate investment? Or something? It's been tens of years and these guardians never pop out to party on this side, right?"

"That we know of," Ben says, always the optimist. "These gentlemen have only been keeping an eye on the threshold since the hotel's grand opening but the portal has been here for God knows how long, plus there's no guarantee that the guardians won't come out one day and drive humanity to extinction without anyone ringing any bells."

Dave frowns. "But what if the guardians are just protecting the magic bells from falling into the wrong hands, like your dad's, whose real plan for the Umbrella Academy might ultimately be to use you guys as sacrificial teenage super soldiers like he did these soldiers of fortune."

"And are you suggesting going in to assess the situation? Because there's no guarantee that a mere reconnaissance mission won't trigger an apocalyptic domino effect, either."

"Have to agree with your lass there," says the kilt-wearing member of the gentlemanly club, motioning at Jill. "Best to let sleeping dogs lie."

.

"I still think we should at least go check out this White Buffalo Suite," Ben continues in the en suite after the meeting's adjourned. "And have you noticed the way Jill tugs on her earlobe? I think she might need a cream for it."

Klaus pulls a face and makes chupacabra noises. Trust Ben to waylay him while his mouth is cram full with dental floss and fingers.

His brother sighs. "Earlier, before we had to save the day, Jill and I were playing kayaks and krakens with the kids and she called me dorky."

"Oh," Klaus says, throwing the floss into the trash and stamping down the urge to ask about ghostly dental hygiene. "That's good. She thinks you're cute. And short of a full-blown resurrection, isn't it neat that you can spend one-on-one quality time with other human beings with your annoying little brother only functioning as a part-time all-purpose unobtrusive omnidirectional long-range medium?"

"I guess," Ben says to the trash can, before looking up. "Okay, enough about my fantasy puppy love. What about you and Dave? You two seemed pretty cozy on the dance floor."

"Sure. I mean, you know how I've been using 110% of my mental, physical, and metaphysical capabilities to keep my cool around him even though he's rainbows and wet dreams and je ne sais quoi all wrapped in beatific goodness and I'm..." Klaus takes a moment to gesture at his own reflection in the mirror, "me. A druggie and an alkie with a life history of truancy and larceny and arson-y and you know what else in the two years you got on me and I just-- Did you know non-straight sex won't be decriminalized until 1962? And even then only in Illinois? We haven't met Dave's mom but Dave's uncle's a small-minded bigot and I can't be the reason Dave's family doesn't talk to him. We have the summer, but then Jill has to ride her full ride at Berkeley and Dave has to conquer senior year of high school and we don't even know if we have to go back to the future to avoid some sort of universe-breaking paradox, you know?"

There's a hefty silence before Ben says, quite tactfully, "We've been here less than seventy-two hours and you sound like you're buying a family plot with the guy already," sidling to envelop Klaus's bathrobe-clad body in a side hug. "But yeah, I know."

.

The unanswered questions about spiritual self-care are at the backest of Klaus's metaphorical back burners when he gets out of the bathroom to find Dave, sitting on one of the beds, turning to lock eyes with him. "I didn't mean to listen in."

"Um..." is all Klaus's mouth can manage to intelligibly utter, and by the time Klaus's brain catches up to what's going on, Dave has gotten up, walked over, and is standing in front of him.

"I've been thinking a lot about the kind of man I want to be, about duty and honor, war and peace, about feeling like an outsider and wanting to fight for something, prove something, to my family, to myself. I saw you tonight, jumping in when the burning sail was falling down on those little kids and saying no to being knighted by the King of Norway afterwards. Your brother's dead and still doing everything he can to save everyone. Maybe in another life, I joined the military, ended up wishing I hadn't, and the dog tags are all that's left of me. Maybe in that other life, you also traveled back in time, found me, and made my life mean something. I have no idea what the heck I should be doing or what's the right thing to do, but in this life I wanna be real with me, with you, even if this is all we'll ever have, if you'll have me."

Alas, words have never been Klaus's strong suit. But living in the moment? Holistically unifying the human carnal bodies and immortal souls? Kissing? Swords scream louder than pens anyway.

Chapter Text

"Here it is, the Umbrella Academy. One entire square block, forty-two bedrooms, nineteen bathrooms, zero Zen garden, and innumerable daddy issues."

They are, of course, on their mandated morning run. Or in Jill's case a jaunty joyride on a horsey chariot, courtesy of period-typical chivalry. "I will get in contact with the local government and current owner during office hours today, but for now it should be perfectly legal to survey the exterior without breaking and entering."

"And that's my cue," Ben announces, testing his incorporeality with an arm, before disappearing completely through the front door.

.

"This is where you grew up?" Dave asks at 8:15 am after a couple of quick showers and an abundance of fluffy omelets and pancakes, because Jill can work miracles.

"I've been hoping for another growth spurt, but narratively speaking, yeah," Klaus replies as he lets his eyes roam over the artless wall. "One day this blank space will be filled with paintings, so Mom can enjoy the views while she recharges her battery." The thought tickles something funny in his guts. Pogo, the mission alarms, the closet full of lethal weaponry, this place won't be home for twenty-nine years yet. "There's just nothing here."

"I can't find anything, either, so. Seconded," Ben adds, crawling out of the woodwork. "It's been almost sixteen hours. You think Five got any better luck?"

.

Klaus drops down from his latest headstand. Three hours have flown by and they've migrated all over the house, meditating, geomancing the feng shui, laying down coffee grounds. He's even recalled his departed biological ancestors to this sinful earth to make sure his powers aren't on the fritz. Great Great Grandmama has been in high spirits despite having not found God and promised to reach out if anyone who fits Five's description shows up. "It could be that he's being his stubborn centenarian self, though I have to say it feels more like Five doesn't exist anywhere anymore. Like, ethereally, what the mochaccino fudge?"

"Perhaps Mr Five has gone to gather intelligence from the future," Jill suggests from her position at one point of the caffeine-laden hexagram. "But if that's the case then he may as well have come back to the time of departure as if he never left."

"Unless he can't." Ben shakes his head. "Five's been gone for years and this Five is dead and still hasn't told us why he never came back to the Academy. He didn't even tell us why he told us not to save the world."

Thoughtfully, Dave puts down the coffee cans he's been using as séance bells. "What about the rest of your siblings? Not that-- I don't mean that they're dead, too, God forbid, just... At the end of the day, when it all comes right down to it, aren't living people just ghosts with flesh and blood?"

.

The results are provenly consistent and reproducible. Find a securely bolted-down swivel chair, lube it up the optimal amount, throw in some hunky-dory sensory deprivation and bondage, then eureka! The answer to the question of whether they're alone in the time period!

"So, all signs point to Dallas?" Klaus asks, still blindfolded and bound to the chair for various and justifiable reasons. Good thing breakfast was ages ago, or an indeterminate portion might've made a round trip back.

Ben hmms. "We'll have to do some triangulation to be sure, but for now it definitely looks that way."

Today having been nothing but a pleasant sun's-out-guns-out-no-body-count day so far, it almost makes it seem a tiny bit like destiny that the portable TV set they've been shuffling around the barbershop as a control experimental variable then switches to a live newscast from a hostage situation at a bank, and not just any bank, the Capital West bank that is merely a short stroll away.

Not that Klaus can see what's happening, thanks to the blindfold, but that's an easy fix. As soon as he's cut loose, Klaus grabs onto Ben, whose tentacles squelch out and speedily take them to the scene, scurrying over traffic, buildings, and people alike. No time to waste, no plan whatsoever, they storm through the front, the tentacles do their massacring, and everyone makes it home safe in time for lunch.

Except all the dead bank robbers, obviously. Klaus just expedites their souls straight to their new eternal home.

"That was-- Are you okay?" Dave asks, him and Jill having rendezvoused with Klaus and Ben at a nearby park.

Klaus is in need of roughly a dozen showers and a few good baths. As it is, he's wiping the worst of the blood off his corporeal body in a fountain with Dave's now bloodstained I HEART The City t-shirt because Klaus's sun's-out-guns-out-no-body-count apparel is beyond salvation and this formerly comparatively pristine-looking fountain happens to be here, a location that's much closer than Hotel Obsidian's Oasis Spa. "We're okay. Ben does this all the time. I'm just not used to getting caught in the splash zone."

"This is why Pogo always brought clean changes of clothes when we went on missions," Ben says wistfully. To be honest, Klaus is more wistful about the fact that the cops, like always, are in total agreement that bad people will think twice before doing bad things if they know they'll get beat up to unrecognizable pulps for it. "Also we need to get going or the peeping birds peeping at us won't be the only peepers peeping at us."

.

Their first vehicle having been left back in Texas because Five couldn't blink heavy machinery and their second vehicle being from the Pennsylvania Dutch Country and unsuited for long-distance high-speed commuting, they acquire yet another vehicle, this one a fully stocked recreational vehicle, so that they can not only take turn driving but resting as well to save time, which is of the essence, particularly since the Umbrella Academy doesn't have the best track record when it comes to sensible decisions and self-preservation instincts, so.

Road trip, for real this time.

"Still no Vanya?" Ben asks at a gas station in Columbus. The sun is not out anymore and the interstate at night is gonna be the same as it's been during the day, nothing but miles and miles of asphalt.

Klaus flops back on the roof of the RV. "No. Granted it might be for her own safety, but Five wouldn't not bring her, would he?"

"I guess it depends."

"On?" Klaus asks, doesn't disoblige when his brother unceremoniously scoops him up with his tentacles.

"Whether he's planning on dropping us back where he picked us up," Ben replies as he gingerly deposits Klaus on the ground. "And what kind of hold Dad's got over him."

.

It's pitch dark outside when Klaus is roused awake, sadly not by a late night snack in bed, or better yet a good morning kiss, but apparently, they're about halfway between Louisville and Nashville and Dave and Jill just saw an unidentified flaming object fly over their heads.

Naturally, this calls for a reevaluation of plans.

"I've read that Sir Reginald Hargreeves is an inventor, industrialist, as well as Olympic gold medalist. I didn't realize he is a rocket scientist as well," Jill says, nursing what appears to be two thirds of the recommended amount of caffeine per day in her I HEART The City mug.

"How can we follow someone with that kind of transportation?" Dave follows through with his head turned towards the sky. "What if he flies to the moon next?"

"We can't," Ben concludes, matter of fact.

Klaus yawns. "Good news is Luther, Diego, and Allison probably don't have interplanetary spaceships lying around and will continue to be in the same general direction as they heretofore have been. I'm going back to sleep."

.

True to form, his brother insists on a half-hourly heading check after that. And no, being on the road isn't a reason to go easy on the workout program, either, even if it means pedaling a non-stationary bike upside down while lying on his back and getting hit in the nuts from time to time because roads have potholes.

As much as Klaus hates to admit it, Ben's compulsive obsession pays off when they almost drive past the unassuming town of Jackson, Tennessee, where Luther is presently working, out of all places, at a traveling circus, as an errand boy.

At least that's what Klaus thinks, or rather hopes, is the case. He doesn't really want to know.

On second thought, "How come you're wearing a bed sheet and a winged headband?"

Chapter Text

It's not a bed sheet. It's a toga, fashioned out of a bed sheet. Or so Klaus is told as Luther proceeds to squeeze the life and death out of him and Ben, to which they reciprocate in kind.

"Ben! Oh, God, Ben, we were never the same without you!" is another one of the plethora of things that continue to get said, the others being, "I'm from 2009 and the world has not ended yet," and "Thought you got a psychokinetic power up when I saw you on the news. Good job taking care of those bank robbers," and "I'm not Hermes but Hercules doesn't have any signature accessory, thus the winged headband but not winged sandals," and finally, "This is Sloane. She ran away from her evil adoptive mother to join the circus!"

"Hi, I'm Sloane. Super pumped to meet you all," Sloane says, seeming genuinely pumped. Klaus's teeth ache just watching the way Luther is smiling at her. Strangely enough, three of the inaugural class of the Umbrella Academy have all met someone. What are the odds?

.

They catch up over barbecue because the sun is out again and their stomachs demand barbecue, which is a helluva lot messy but lip-smacking delicious. The downside of it is that points are harder to get across around mouthfuls of pork ribs. Case in point.

"I mean, airmen during World War II did fly heavy bombers from England to destroy targets deep within Nazi Germany before landing in North Africa," Dave says, licking his fingers distractingly. "And it'd be plenty faster than driving."

"See? Dave gets it," Luther says, not really chewing.

Ben's eyebrows knit together to a greater extent. "So instead of going back to Dallas to find Diego and Allison who have a decent chance of being there and might need our help, you want to fly a plane to find Dad, who owns a supersonic jet and could be gone before you even find a plane let alone get on one, without any means of locating him or confirmation that he's even in the City?"

Luther shrugs. "Maybe Dad also saw the news and is there to find you, Klaus, right now as we speak. Still think it's weird that you don't show up on cameras, Ben, by the way." There's a pause for a big gulp of soda, by necessity to wash down the inadequately chewed food. "It's not like I can locate either of them anyway. And Allison and Diego can take care of themselves. Or Allison can, which is why you guys should go find Diego ASAP. Plus if we split up, you can give me the phone number of your base in Dallas, and me and Sloane will stay at Hotel Obsidian so we all will be able to contact each other. Divide and conquer, am I right?"

And that, incredibly, makes actual sense. Who would've thought?

.

It is a long-established and more often than not true fact that circus people know all sorts of people. The strongman whose job has been under threat since Luther's hitchhiked with the circus, in particular, happens to know where they can find an ultrahigh-speed aircraft. The catch? Situated among rolling hills and fertile valleys and surrounded by electric fence and razor wire is a colossal top-secret underground air base full of experimental air force technology, smack in the heart of Alamo. Not the Alamo, just Alamo, a town northwest of their current position.

"As much as I like the idea of an all-American flying saucer factory, I'm afraid I'm gonna have to side with Benihana and say no to storming a fabled government black site, Lulu."

"Fine," Luther makes a sad face as he admits defeat. "What about this moon rock I found on me when I arrived, though?"

"May I?" Jill says, and after Luther hands it to her, "How do you know it's from the moon?"

"Sloane," is the short answer, whereas the long answer is the brief introduction to earth's nearest celestial neighbor Sloane passionately regales everyone with that goes on long enough to get cut short by the circus's ringmaster who, having been informed of Klaus's spirituality, appears with an engaged couple who want the bride's late father to walk her down the aisle at their madcap shotgun wedding, followed by a human cannonball with an amigo whose innocent hermano is about to get wrongly convicted of murder and an animal tamer who happens to know a family in mourning with a will and testament to settle, and when all that's taken care of, Luther and Sloane have gone and come back from the car rental place with a widower who wishes to bid proper farewell to his late wife and baby who died during childbirth, and no car.

It doesn't end there, not by a long shot, yet somehow after the avalanche of brotherly-sanctioned spiritual muscle exercise, they touch down in Dallas before sunset because Luther ends up getting half his aviatory wish after all.

.

"I'm gonna need more knives," Diego says, emerging out of a straitjacket and glaring at the box that contains his confiscated stuff. Honestly, white looks plain wrong on him. "It's way past visiting hours. How are you getting me out?"

Klaus never gloats as a rule, but. "Well, our first and well thought out plan was we'd try talking to the people in charge before going over their heads when they inevitably refuse to listen, but then we were about to walk in and all these ghosts came charging at me with a united war cry and it turned out that the people who died here are generally not fond of the people who work here and-- Look, I know straitjackets can be especially suffocative to certain body parts but you should stop staring and put on pants before we go meet up with everyone, okay?"

.

Allison being Allison, she's dressed to the nines and hosting a charity gala to celebrate equality and inclusiveness for all when they find her, complete with a date in her arms.

"She seems lovely. I'm happy for you," She tells Luther once the introductions are made. Before Klaus can explain to Sloane and Marcus that their hypothetical babies wouldn't've been genetically challenged, however, Ben makes himself known.

"So what year are you from?" which, as anticipated, sets off another round of jubilation that Ben's been trying to avert that eventually gets segued into "Wait, you've met someone as well?"

"I wouldn't put it like that," Diego says shiftily. "I met Lila in the nut house and she's been balls to the walls obsessed with me."

Ben nods, slow. "Right. Significant others aside, Allison and Diego are from 2013 and 2011 respectively, and that means all five members of the Umbrella Academy present have been brought from the future at a biennial interval, presumptively by Five, for some unknown reason."

"I think the moon is our best bet. Why else would Five give me a moon rock if he didn't want us to go up there? Like, okay, the check stub turned out to be a dead end for now, but Klaus found Dave from the dog tags, which has been a very fruitful encounter," Luther says through a mouthful of buffet, gesticulating all the while. "And Diego doesn't know much but he knows knives and even he agrees these are just regular, non-clue knives," is then added with an encompassing gesticulation at the many, many knives.

"Watch it," Diego warns, also through a mouthful of buffet. "What about you, Allison? Any lead?"

The deceptively simple question proves to have a complicated answer when Allison produces a notepad from her classy yet utilitarian evening bag, the pages of which read

I NEED TO GO ALONE

I NEED YOUR VOICE

SHE'S OUR SISTER

MY FAULT

LET HER GO

and

VANYA POWERS

all in Allison's own handwriting.

Which is like, the clueiest clue in the history of clues, hands down.

"What are we looking at?" asks a lady who crashes into their circle of speechlessness, and is now hanging on Diego's back.

.

It figures that Ben wouldn't let Klaus have a full eight-hour sleep, but regardless Klaus didn't expect his brother to sneak onto Klaus and Dave's bed in the middle of the night, Jill in tow and stolen property in hand.

"We've been suspicious of Sloane since she knows too much about the moon to not be from the future," is Ben's excuse.

"So you decided to steal her briefcase?" is a rhetorical question that for all intents and purposes should call attention to how unhinged sleep deprivation can make people, dead and alive, except Ben then launches into how he stayed behind to snoop around the palace wherein Allison's shacking up with Marcus and found an identical briefcase in the vault in the master bedroom before having to flee because the two started to get frisky and winding up running into Diego and Lila doing it on the stairs, which, by unspoken agreement, is the reason Luther and Sloane came to sleep together here at their base of operations, i.e., so that everyone could have all kinds of sex without all kinds of awkwardness, Klaus thinks, reaching for the briefcase. "What's in it, anyway?"

"And this," Dave starts as they suddenly find themselves in the middle of a smoldering, nuclear winter-y, potentially post-apocalyptic wasteland, "is why I didn't want to fall asleep naked."

Chapter Text

Their states of undress is blown right out of Klaus's mind when he stands up to look around the rubble and blinks his eyes open to a girl on a bicycle. "Um... Hello?"

The girl rolls her eyes and turns away. As he follows her gaze, there's this giant buffalo sculpture made out of menudo, and--

Klaus blinks his eyes open again, this time to Five who looks about eighteen and is looking at Klaus with tears in his eyes.

.

The thing about Shoot First, Regret Later policy is that not everyone can come back from a gunshot to the head like Klaus has, allegedly.

"Everyone has bad days? That's your brain matter right there! I haven't seen you in five years and the first thing I did was kill you dead!"

The year is 2024, exactly sixty-four years from 1960, and sixty-four, as everyone knows, is four raised to the third power. Five's said the apocalypse happened in 2019, and 2+0+1+9=12 equals four times three while also being halfway between 2+0+2+4=8 and 1+9+6+0=16, which are both multiples of four and powers of two, which may or may not matter mathematically or transcendentally or whatever.

"Missed you, too." Klaus hugs Five tighter. And Ben. Like a snuggle sandwich. "Now is it just me, or does anyone else see a floating cube, watching over us?"

.

It's not just Klaus, but Ben as well. Everyone is unanimous on the decision to learn everything they can about the apocalypse before messing with the briefcase and possibly getting sent to an armageddon or worse, including the haunting sentient cube, whom Dave tries to teach Morse code to but gets stuck at the Glow Once Yes, Glow Twice No stage. And it may be the cumulative lack of sleep, or the reassuringness of seeing Hotel Obsidian a lot worse for wear but still standing tall among the ruins of the City, or half their sixsome braving the elements in their sleepwear, or Five having not showered in half a decade and smelling it, or discovering that the White Buffalo Suite is perfectly apocalypse-proof, but no one vetoes the decision to walk through the psychedelic tunnel towards uncertain death, either.

"Can't believe I'm saying this, but you're right. This is not the worst thing ever," Five says with a groan, sitting on a small stool and not quite scowling at the ceramic tile mural of Mount Fuji as Klaus scrubs his back with a soapy wash cloth, a task that could be multitasked by tentacles if not for Ben's reasoning that due to being a phantasm and therefore fantastically untouchable, he should be the one to go explore their new area of operations while the rest of them hunker down here in Hotel Oblivion's chiefly Japanese Onsen Spa where Klaus and Five can embrace the Japanese spirit on one side of the low separating wall and hear Dave and Jill try to decipher what secrets the cube holds on the other side and vice versa. "I kept searching, clinging to the hope that you guys somehow made it out alive the more I couldn't find your dead bodies, never strayed too far from the Academy in case any of you ever came back. I thought I've been fooling myself this whole time. In retrospect, it's pretty clear I was going mad, not so much as to start a conversation with an inanimate object yet but enough that my first instinct upon seeing another living human being was to put a bullet through your cranium."

"If it's any consolation, we found Diego in an asylum. Padded cell, straitjacket, the whole shebang."

Five snorts, drastically turns to contemplate the wooden shower caddy for a moment before grabbing the shampoo bottle and handing it to Klaus. "Can you get my hair, too?"

Their little heart-to-heart then takes a detour to what other architectural wonders of the world might still be standing as Five reaches for another wash cloth and starts assailing himself with it. The inconvenient truth of the matter is that they are nowhere closer to figuring out what caused the apocalypse even now that they're in the aftermath of said apocalypse. The dust and smoke in the atmosphere blocking out sunlight and giving rise to cold weather can be the secondary effect of an all-out nuclear world war or an asteroid impact or a super volcanic eruption. Both the last City Paper on earth and Vanya's tell-all memoir are dead ends according to Five. The cube might be an extraterrestrial life form who came in peace to forewarn humanity of the impending doom and died in the process except Klaus is no expert on astrobiology, much less xenolinguistics. He's just the so-called expert on the dead, which--

Oh, right.

.

"Granted most of the Umbrella Academy were brought back in time, it's only logical to assume that none of your other siblings died in the apocalypse. Having considered that, they should have still lived out their lives as time continued to advance in the past which means that you should be able to locate or conjure them now. The fact that you can't leaves two possibilities. Either they've used the briefcases to jump forward in time further than us, or the ontological alterations made to the timeline need time to propagate from the breaches in the time continuum before they can eventually reach us," Jill reasons over her empty place setting.

"Where did you find her?" Five asks, notably having swallowed his mouthful of tiramisu mochi before doing so.

"We were dropped onto traffic and Klaus got hit by the bus Jill was on," Ben supplies, tearing his eyes away from the takoyaki croquembouche. "Which reminds me. What about your birth mother?"

"What about whose birth mother?" Five bears on, impales another morsel with his metal chopstick, singular.

Having given up a while ago, Dave picks up a truffle tempura with his hand. "We found a check stub, which might have been a clue left by you. Not you you, another you from the potentially infinitely many yous from the exponentially divergent branching points in the timeline, supposedly."

Above the enchilada ramen, the cube warbles, which could mean anything, really.

"I don't know. What if the tender memories of being sold as a nine-pound infant boy come rushing back?" Klaus laments into his teriyaki burrito. There's conveyor belt sushi in the lobby that they don't dare step near. Luckily, there's a wider arrays of Japanese fusion cuisine in Hotel Oblivion's banquet hall that they can partake in the colorful yukata bathrobes they got from the cashless vending machines outside the Onsen Spa.

"Then I'll provide emotional support, like a schnauzer," Five deadpans. "Come on. This place might be running out of its supply of oxygen as we speak."

In a flash, Klaus can see the proverbial light bulb practically go off in Jill's head. "Perhaps we could speak with the other Mr Five, the century-old spirit who warned us not to waste earth's supply of oxygen?"

.

"You've been watching me all these years?"

"Since the twelfth hour of the first day of October 1989, the moment you were born, knowing every stupid mistake you'd make and having no way to change anything."

It's a pretty mind-blowing exchange to follow. There's a secret commission overseeing the timeline from a place out of time but also the fifties, aka the bureaucratic hellscape that Five founded, stocked full of briefcases and guns, as well as outfitted with something called the infinite switchboard that is essential to the protection and maintenance of the time continuum. More pertinently, Dad killed himself, Vanya killed Pogo, and Vanya again destroyed the world, but it's all supposed to happen, the deaths, the tragedies, the end of the world, VANYA POWERS, because if they don't, if someone or something somehow succeeds in preventing any of the events that are supposed to happen from happening, the totality of reality will unravel and there won't have been a timeline for anyone or anything to have existed in at all, retroactively speaking. Everyone and everything that has ever been or could ever be, gone, never is, never was, never will be. All that will remain is...

Oblivion.

"If what you're saying is true, am I correct to assume that you've already had this confabulation once from my side?"

"No, the timeline may be fickle, yet it's malleable enough to allow for minor changes."

"But then how--"

"Because I've seen it, a Kugelblitz, a cosmic garburator that would've ground up time in its entirety, forward and backward and sideways to sundae had things been left unchecked."

"So you're saying that either we let the apocalypse happen and kill billions of people or we save the world and all the people who've ever been born will cease to have existed altogether? What an ethical clusterfuck. Fine."

"What do you mean, 'Fine'?" Klaus asks, as a person who's not Five, which-- Despite both Fives not showing any symptoms of the seven stages, no one is too sure paradox psychosis can't cross different planes of existence.

"I mean get back to the sixties before anyone does anything they're not supposed to," is Livelier Five's non-answer.

Resignedly, Ben elaborates, "He means he's not coming."

Chapter Text

"What? We can't leave him!" Klaus says, then turns back to Livelier Five. "Can't you come with us for a bit and come back here in... 2064-2024=40 years?"

"Sure, and we might as well go to 2019 and pick up thirteen-year-old me, how about that?"

"Yeah! Then onwards to 2006 to save Ben's life and we're in business!"

Both Fives facepalm. "Paradox, you moron, universe-breaking paradox," Ghostier Five says.

"Isn't that the point?" Dave asks. "You've done things your way God knows how many times already and look how it turns out, all the people who died, all the people who won't ever even get to be born. You just said it yourself that the timeline is malleable. Isn't that why one of you sent your siblings back in time? To break out of the rut?"

Jill puts down her bowl of miso turnip vichyssoise. "If I may, ending the world to save the universe is a solution, but far from an ideal solution. As the founder of the Temps Commission and the only person who is capable of time traveling by natural means, had it not been for you, there wouldn't've been the risk of a Kugelblitz to begin with, since there wouldn't've been anyone to tamper with the timeline in the first place."

In the silence that follows, the cube twinkles, which, again, could mean anything, really.

.

Some more give-and-take and well-deserved rest later, Ghostier Five teaches them how to use the briefcase, then off they go to 1960, they as in everyone excluding Ghostier Five because "Old dogs never change" but including the cube because why not and Livelier Five whose mind's set on the warpath to decommission the Commission.

"Wait," Ben says as Livelier Five, now the only Five, heads straight for the droning dimensional door. "Last we checked, we weren't sure if Luther, Diego, and Allison are still in this time period, were we?"

.

And they are, or technically were, grammatically? "As ironic as it may be for the person who got shot in the noggin immediately after traveling to the future to ask, we've been gone for less than twenty-four hours, how are you guys all dead?"

The question incites a disorderly outburst of responses, expectedly, but the gist of the parts Klaus can make out is that Diego woke up to Lila talking on the phone about some briefcase, Allison woke up to Lila barging in to pilfer Marcus's briefcase, Luther woke up to Lila pressing a razor to his carotid artery and asking about Sloane's missing briefcase, then Five showed up, harangued everyone about showing too much skin, the clock struck twelve, a huge murder of crows flocked the house, the bed blew up, stuff caught fire, music swelled, a dance battle broke out, the world burned.

"The world burned?" Livelier Five asks, because there are two Fives again, Livelier Five who looks and is eighteen, and New Ghostier Five who looks thirteen but says he's fifty-eight, or was fifty-eight, because he's dead.

"I know how insane it sounds, but one minute I was retrajectorizing the cawing hurricane, then boom! Death. Sunny, fiery, the solar system gone in its entirety death," Diego says, making explodey gestures with his gauntleted hands.

"How--?" Dave swallows. "Everyone's dead? Everyone?"

"The briefcases went dead first. Fried," Luther says, having appeared in a tuxedo for some unknown reason. "Sloane has a theory about what happened. We should bring her here."

"After she almost got you murdered?" Allison asks, incredulity radiating sharper than the stylish battle gown she's wearing.

"It was Diego's crazy girlfriend who threatened to slit my throat while Sloane tried to talk her out of it, and that was before your boyfriend handed my ass to me," Luther fires back.

"Only because you took a swing at him first," Allison counters, then, less exasperatedly, "You're all right, though, right? I mean apart from the obvious?"

"Lila's not my girlfriend," Diego indignantly corrects. "And they're all clearly in cahoots with each other. We can't trust any of them."

Dramatically, Luther gasps. "I trust Sloane with my life!"

"You're dead!" Diego and Allison contends in unison.

"We're all dead," New Ghostier Five points out, at which point Klaus tunes them out, because.

"As you can see, with us it's not about who should lead, but who wants to," Klaus says, turns to Dave, Jill, and the cube, who looks distinctly doleful. "We'll fix this, somehow."

"Somehow," Ben echoes, looking at Sloane's stolen briefcase. "We can go back to fix this. We just need to figure out what went wrong."

.

"Man, you're right. This enchilada ramen is to die for."

Allison arches both her eyebrows. "You can understand it? Them? Whatever the pronoun is?"

Keeping chill and munching said enchilada ramen, Diego shrugs. "His name is Christopher and everyone was so afraid of him he never got to not fight for his life, never mind learn proper English."

"Can't you, you know, rumor him into speaking normally?" Luther steamrolls the would-be moment of extraordinary poignancy, slapping wasabi butter onto his barbecued poitrine d'agneau.

"I heard a rumor your genius knew no bound."

In the meantime, at the self-proclaimed grown-ups end of the art nouveau Japanese dining table, the scowling contest continues. "It'd be much easier to find out how the sun went supernova if we could get to this legendary infinite switchboard, which would be easy had someone not staffed the Commission with a literal army of time-traveling assassins."

"You said that like it was my fault. Well news flash, junior, if what you keep reiterating is true then everything is as much your fault as mine," New Ghostier Five says to his older-looking livelier self. It's been documented that people don't get saddled with the states they died in for eternity, except apparently no one gets to choose how they appear in the afterlife, either. The suit looks dapperly swanky, though.

"I'm sure everyone at the Commission is doing everything they can to fix this as well," Sloane says, looking dashing in a wedding dress. "I know there are places that exist outside of time. I didn't know there are places that exist outside of space as well. Has anyone tried to go beyond the courtyard?"

"This place is a test and a trap and a means of salvation, all at once," Ben recites. "That's what Dad told the men he sent in here to fight the guardians. Anyway, I think our best shot is to go back to Dallas, because whatever made the sun go supernova should've been there at the same place we were all brought back in time, or why brought us there at all."

At that, Klaus lifts his head from Dave's shoulder to look at Livelier Five. "And once we're then and there, you, Dave, and Jill will stay here with the briefcase while me and our ghosty family members go scavenger hunt for clues, capisce?"

"Who died and made you--"

"I did, Cinco, when you aerated my encephalon. Allegedly."

"Touché."

"Maybe you shouldn't go, either," Dave says, squeezing Klaus's hand. "We don't really know if you're immortal. What if you got nine lives, like cats?"

"It's what I signed up for. Or not signed up, but." Klaus squeezes Dave's hand back, searches for words. "This is not like going to war. We have powers. No one else can do what we can do."

"Actually, anything we can do, Lila can do as well." Marcus weighs in, having been conjured, too, because Allison. "And I didn't get a chance to say this before. It's truly a great honor to meet you, Mr Five, I-- This is kind of embarrassing, but would you sign this trading card I somehow still have on my person after death?"

"How will I ever measure up," Livelier Five rolls his eyes. "Speaking of, how did you know where to find them?"

New Ghostier Five points towards Klaus with Marcus's ghost pen. "Found a newspaper with World Renowned Teenage Superhero's bloody face on the front page. Asked a random passerby and got the address."

"'A woman came to me one day, said she could take me to a place I'd be understood, even without a face. I was too messed up to trust anyone. She had me killed right there and then.'"

All eyes turn to Diego, whose eyes are on Christopher.

It's Sloane who breaks the silence. "Platinum blond, lavender perfume, spider motif?"

.

Knowing is half the battle, and if they're lucky, there won't be any battle. New Ghostier Five's said his intention was to project his consciousness into a suspended quantum state version of himself from the grassy knoll in 1963 forward to the Academy in 2019 but somehow he screwed up so badly he not only ended up backward in 1960 on a random bench in his thirteen-year-old body but also managed to lose the prosthetic eye that was the one single clue to stop the 2019 apocalypse, which Livelier Five's assured him that they already found out from Old Ghostier Five that in order to stop that all too familiar apocalypse, they simply need to take good care Vanya. And as Livelier Five stays with Dave, Jill, and the briefcase in Hotel Oblivion and New Ghostier Five blinks Klaus, Ben, Luther, Diego, Allison, Sloane, Marcus, and Christopher to the alley across the street from the random bench as planned, immediately, there's a problem.

"Correct me if I'm wrong, Five," Allison starts with a heavy sigh. "But you wouldn't happen to know the man with the briefcase who just took that other you away to God knows where and when, would you?"

Chapter Text

"Okay, so. Klaus, according to you, the living Luther, Diego, Allison, Sloane, Marcus, and Lila are currently in the general direction of your base of operations, and as I may cease to exist well before the clock strikes twelve as well as have no idea why Hazel looked twenty years older or what he said to my past self that would convince the squirt to moronically go with him, I say we--"

"Consult the Complete Commission Guide to Temporal Anomalies."

"Cut our losses and come up with a more foolproof plan."

"Face insurmountable odds with unblinking perseverance and pull together against the reign of evil."

"Meet up with our lesser copies and take over their bodies."

"Question Sir Reginald on everything he knows about the extradimensional hotel."

"See what's up with that sky beam."

"Try again but blink straight to the bench right off the bat."

"?@$&^:\(+_-)/;*%#=!"

"-- stick to our mission," New Ghostier Five finishes. "Hold on. What did you just say about what sky beam?"

"It was there but it's gone now," Klaus expounds with a substantiative arm motion. "Oh hey, friendly mysterious ladies from the Valhalla party. What a serendipitous happenstance!"

"Is she holding a Commission briefcase?" Ben asks.

"Christopher said he saw it, too," Diego corroborates. "A thin white column of light that shot up for a couple seconds."

"Were there bath salts in the kelp kombucha?" Allison demands. "And how the daifuku do you know them?"

"We haven't officially met. This is Jayme and I am Fei. We were supposed to keep an eye on you from afar but someone decided to get a closer look," Fei says, composedly adjusting her glasses. "Marcus, Sloane, I thought you two were with Lila, subjugating these three." She gestures towards Allison, Diego, and Luther. "Not attending a shotgun marriage."

"Our past living selves are," Marcus replies as Sloane fiddles with her ring. "We came back in time from hours from now to stop the sun from self-destructing and laying waste to everything in the solar system."

Taking her eyes off Christopher, Jayme glowers. "Say what now?"

.

"Before I forget, were all the crows we saw in the City your seeing-eye crows? There were so many," Klaus says as they wait on the roof of the movie theater next to the diner they first met Dave, which is, of course, next to the hat store next to the children's clothing store behind the not so random bench. "Right there! See?"

"No crows were mine, as mine are ravens," Fei supplies. "If I'm not mistaken, it would seem the beam's originated from Dealey Plaza."

New Ghostier Five lowers his ghost rifle scope. "Show of hands, who here thinks it can't be a coincidence that it's in the same direction Klaus just said Vanya is?"

Coming on extra schoolboyish in his Academy uniform, New Livelier Five raises his hand. "Show of hands, any of you heartless delinquents feels bad we haven't talked about timid little Vanya as anything but a suspect world destroyer since you 'rescued' me?"

"New objective confirmed. Lila said they'll meet us there as soon as everyone's got their knickers on," Sloane announces, floating up from the phone booth on the street.

"Am I the only one who thinks we should be more worried that Hazel didn't show up the first time then showed up the second time and didn't show up again this third time around? Or that we haven't run into ourselves?" Marcus asks, looking between three of his four sisters.

"Not in the mood for your OCD protocols today," Jayme says, fiddling with her briefcase. "Let's just go deal with whatever the hell that was and pick up some pizza on the way back."

.

"It's hard, being Number One when no one actually gives a shitake." Luther's patting Marcus's shoulder when they reappear.

"If anyone's our Number One, it sure as fugu is not me," Marcus replies, gazing up. "Who's that?"

"Vanya," both New Fives say. "Maybe five years older than her book cover photo," New Ghostier Five adds.

Diego squints. "So it's true? Vanya's more powerful than all of us put together?"

"I think a much more important question is why our sister just flew out of a federal building," is Ben's two cents, then, "Oh, for-- Klaus! Get back down here!"

"Vanyaloha!" Klaus hollers, hanging on to Christopher as they rocket towards his possibly-thirty-year-old sister. "Ohana meega nala kweesta!"

As soon as their eyes meet, some kind of white energy tentacle comes out of Vanya's chest and would likely go into Klaus's own if Christopher didn't aerobatic dodge and strike back with some sort of red electric-y energy that seems to have mild to moderate effect before New Livelier Five blinks onto Klaus's back and blinks them back to solid ground.

"Take cover!" Diego shouts as he backbreakingly deflects the lamppost Sloane's launched at Vanya that comes flying back away from Allison. Indubitably, the incorporeality crash course needs work.

"Why is Vanya attacking us?" Ben asks, having secured Klaus, New Livelier Five, Fei, and Jayme in his tentacles and rounding a corner to relative safety.

"I don't know! But something tells me this is the future Vanya that supposedly tried to drain the life out of future us and ended the world!" New Livelier Five bellows after an earsplitting shock wave shattered all the glass and pancaked every car in the vicinity.

"Is that a human torch, streaking across the sky towards Vanny?" is Klaus's burning question.

"That's our other, soon-to-be dead brother Phil," Jayme supplies, presumably because the conspiracy of seeing-eye ravens was pulverized and Fei is temporarily blind. "Also known as the hotheaded pyro who set fire to the Viking boat."

True to Jayme's prognosis, Phil instantly gets swatted away and goes splat on the side of a clock tower, arms' length away from where Lila's powering up a force field before levitating and propelling herself through the air to where Vanya is holding Livelier Allison, Diego, and Luther captive with energy tentacles. The resulting clash is violent enough to shake the very earth.

"And the blazing aurora in the sky?"

"Must be the solar super storm Sloane told us about," Ben hedges, "judging from the sputtering briefcase, that is. Five, can you--"

They land in a heap in some building. Everything outside is flooded with yellow and orange. "Evidently yes. Got a destination in mind?"

"Hotel Obsidian! Blink to the City first and--"

.

It's dark.

"No. No no no no no not this again," Klaus says to the damned mausoleum he presently finds himself in.

"Experiment Number 64, reanimation after cessation of life function, seventeen hours, twenty-six minutes, thirty-five seconds. Welcome back to the land of the living, Number Four," Dad's voice says.

"Um..." Klaus starts, staring at a kid version of himself whom Dad's studying. "What did you--"

.

It's still dark, but Klaus now finds himself at the rooftop party, again, in more ways than one.

"Klaus! Klaus! Klaus! Klaus!"

"Tonight we drink, to childhood trauma!" He watches himself toast before falling, then--

.

It's not dark. It's so bright, in fact, that he can barely see. He's outside, looking in on himself, Ben, New Livelier Five, Fei, and Jayme inside some building as the sun consumes absolutely everything.

.

"Klaus! Where did you go? Where are we? Where is everyone else?"

"I was with Dad, at the party, then the sun went all-devouring," he tells Ben. "We are at an alfresco library by the ocean, your dream staycation. Everyone else is... around."

His brother gawks. "What?" Klaus waves at the girl on a bicycle. "Klaus! Focus!"

"All is fine. Death is not the end."

"You're dead, too? Dead dead? You've used up all your nine or whatever lives?"

"I-- don't think so?"

"So we can go back? You can go back?"

"I can try."

.

Klaus can't breathe, among other life-discontinuing things.

.

"That was painful. You have no idea."

"Well, can you not go back to where you died? Go to Hotel Oblivion, where Five, Jill, and Dave are waiting for us?"

.

Klaus is in Dave's arms when he blinks his eyes open next. "Dave, Jill, where's Five?"

"He said he'll be back before we know it," Dave replies, helping Klaus sit up. "What happened? Where's Ben and the rest?"

"Oh, right," Klaus says, concentrates. Energy warbles. There's a whoosh.

"I'm back," Five announces, looking between them. "How did you two get here without my prepubescent facsimile? And in stealth mode, no less."

"Vanya shot an energy beam to the sun. Everyone's dead. Klaus died. We were in the afterlife, I think, already geared up like this," Ben answers. Klaus didn't even notice what they've been wearing. "Where were you?"

"Went to follow a lead. Turns out there were forty-three of us." Five holds up some kind of scrapbook. "Your birth aunt is an exceptional woman, by the way."

Chapter Text

"What I don't understand," Ben begins, looking over Jill's shoulder as she flips through the pages, "is how an Amish non-billionaire, however exceptional, compiled this in two days when even Dad managed to find only seven of us."

Five clears his throat. "I may have almost run into the devil, exercised precaution, and detoured to 2006."

"You mean you panicked and pressed buttons at random?" Klaus translates, shifting his head in Dave's lap just enough to make covert eye contact with Five before whispering, "Did you save you know who?"

"The thought crossed my mind, but no."

"So like, I think I can wrap my head around the fact that you can materialize yourself back to us in magical combat gear," Dave says to Klaus's shoulder flashlight he's holding in one hand. "But how the heck is 2006 happening when 1960 is done for?"

Jill spares a gander from the scrapbook. "Our definition of temporal paradox is based on the assumption that causes and effects are connected via time that always progresses strictly forward in the posited linear continuum. The fact that we are having this discussion here and now uninterrupted by our past selves coming back from 2024 should suggest that our theoretical framework upon which we rely as we try to understand and navigate through both the temporal and spatial facets of our reality is--"

"Pathetically trivial," Five cuts in. "There are too many goddamn unknowns. Sing in me, muse, and through me tell the story of the man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer, harried for years on end. My future self spent four and a half decades in the depths of freezing waters and still has yet to acorn. I don't know how you do it, Klaus, coming back from the dead and to a different dimension to boot."

Letting his eyes drift shut, Klaus says, "You know how Dad used to record our brainwaves in our sleep? I just found out that Dad also kept a journal of all the times he put me to death, except I don't know if he knew if I'd be able to come back to life to begin with. My point is we're not Lila. You should've seen her go energy blast to energy blast with Vanya with instant mastery and little charging up."

Dave's other hand that's been absently tracing the line of Klaus's collarbones stops, and when Klaus reopens his eyes to sneak a peek, everyone's giving him a weird disconcerting/disconcerted look.

Klaus conjures the rest of their extended family, if only for variety.

.

Allison, Diego, Luther, Marcus, and Sloane come in sets of two. There are three Fives present, two of whom are dead. Paradox psychosis is highly debatable.

"I don't know if there's a reason for everything, but I strongly recommend we have words with Dad while he's readily conjurable," Livelier Five proposes.

"No," all their ghosty siblings bar Luthers veto.

"I don't know about you lot, but I'd like to continue to exist, even if it means I'd have to assassinate and/or take over my own blooming self," is Lila's vote.

"Okay," Klaus declares, rubbing his hands together. "Not last and not least, Vanya!"

"Maybe we shouldn't--"

.

They make arrangements for a picnic lunch on the grassy knoll while they wait, they as in Allison, Ben, Christopher, Dave, Diego, Five, Jill, Klaus, and Luther and wait as in for Sloane, Phil, Marcus, Lila, Jayme, Fei, and Alphonso to make peace with Vanya as soon as she appears in the FBI building in hopes that she won't attack people she has no beef with or cause the sun to expire prematurely. If the last however many eventful hours have taught them anything, it's that violence is not always the answer. Sometimes a person and their Ben, Livelier Five, Dave, Jill, and Christopher have to leave their ghostly kindred behind as they flee from their Vanya's extradimensional hotel rampage back in time to their base of operations and call an emergency family meeting. Sometimes a person only gets a couple short hours of rest before their Luther firefighter-carries them out of bed for a 6:00 am joint training session. Sometimes a person's not even allowed to take a power nap because the world is non-figuratively ending and they're the only person who can sixth sense the causal agent's whereabouts or whatever.

"Nope," Klaus shakes his head as the clock strikes twelve and there's still no sign of Vanya or Newer Livelier Five.

"This is very strange," Sloane says as she floats over to join them. "Herb just triple rechecked the infinite switchboard. Something must have changed between then and now because doomsday is no longer happening today, or any day in the next week. Even Dot is stumped."

"Meaning what?" Diego asks, stress testing Klaus's magical gear because he's Diego.

Five grins over his thermos of coffee. "Meaning it's high time we check out this Commission ourselves."

"I'm afraid I cannot let you do that," says a platinum blond woman with a briefcase and spider motif, flanked by Lila and the rest. "You may not know who I am yet, but you're too smart not to know that no one is supposed to change what's meant to be. The timeline is our lifeline, that's the universal truth, the reason existence continues to exist, our raison d'être, and we at the Commission take our responsibility seriously and work unflaggingly to protect the integrity of the time continuum. I'm sure you, like everyone here, want to live a simple unfettered life and not die a horrible death, but we all have our parts to play in the grand scheme of things, which is why my children have been specially tasked to make sure you and your siblings don't jeopardize, well, everything, while our capable analysts back at headquarters locate the appropriate time and place to return each of you to. And that means you, Number Five, need to go back to 2024 to live out another forty years in the apocalypse before I come offer you a job you can't refuse, understood?"

Taking a pause from laying out tiny sandwiches, Allison scoffs. "I don't care who you think you are, lady, but I heard a rumor--"

"... you all stopped b--" Lila doesn't get to finish, cut off by Christopher's red electric-y energy, at which point ravens, spits, fireballs, and people start flying except Christopher then shoots at Fei, Jayme, Phil, and Sloane to keep them at bay, too, as well as Marcus and Alphonso for good measure. That is, until Luther tries to tackle Christopher in defense of Sloane but instead ends up landing on the tiny sandwiches because incorporeality 101, except then Lila starts mimicking Klaus's spirit liberation wave but gets thwarted again by Five who transports them away via one of the briefcases Ben has advisably snatched up.

.

"I know it's a hellscape out of time, but didn't the other other other you also say the fifties? Not the glaciated Pleistocene?"

"This is the Commission before it's staffed full of morally dubious personnel," Five says, scratching his neck and sweating in spite of the blizzard. "I need to find and put myself out of his misery."

"Loyalty is not a choice, it's a lifestyle," the public address system announces.

"You're not murdering your one-armed nightmare self," Ben says, handing out the spare briefcases. "We need to find the paradox-proof operations bunker and put you and your one-armed nightmare self in it so you can explain what we've learned to him without psychosis side effects. Decommission the Commission so time can heal and sort everything out, remember?"

Holstering the knives in one hand to take a briefcase, Diego asks, "What are you guys talking about?"

"We didn't mention this in front of your minders, but we met the ghost of the founder of the Commission in the future," Dave says as they voyage deeper into the bureaucratic labyrinth. "He said the timeline is broken, and in order to fix it, everything needs to happen as they always has, or a Kugelblitz might grind reality into oblivion."

"So in order to fix things, things need to stay broken?" Allison asks, then, "How does that make any sense?"

"Which is why I need to snuff him out!" is homicidal rage talking.

"Time is only supposed to happen once," Jill says, eyes on the map she drew from Old Ghostier Five's description. "And by eliminating the Commission from the equation, we're hoping to put fate and free will back in the driving seat. Lila, for example, should be able to grow up in her childhood home without the Handler sending Mr Five to kill her parents."

"What about Vanya and the apocalypse?" Luther asks, wrangling Five in his arms without squeezing him to death. "Or Ben and the Jennifer incident? Sloane and the others? Or Christopher here?"

"Don't you get it? It's not about us," Diego says, scanning the corridor before signaling the all clear. "And you're thinking too far. With these briefcases at our disposal, I can save JFK and swing back to slit Hitler's throat off with a butter knife, all in an afternoon's work."

"For a second there I thought you wanted us to play God or something," Klaus laughs, knocks on the vault door. "Anyway, lunch?"

Chapter Text

Klaus wakes himself up falling. Or not himself, exactly, seeing as there are two of hims. Or maybe he's dreaming, who can even say at this point.

Also he's suddenly very horny, in a non-Viking sense of the word. Both of hims are, tangibly, which-- combined with the ostensible fact that they're in bed, odds are this is not only a dream but a wet dream through and through.

"I don't know what's going on," Klaus's other self breaks the silence, sleep rumpled yet hot and bothered. "But we're doing this. Right?"

.

Too little time and not nearly enough self-love later, Ben breaks down the door with his Bentacles. Uncalled for, really, given that none of their bedroom doors have locks. "There are two of you? How are there two of you?"

"Dream logic?" Klaus shrugs as their other siblings congregate at the now doorless threshold, and would go back to self-loving if they weren't then summoned to Dad's office by Pogo's ever so solemn voice.

.

The horniness doesn't go away, but lets up some in the presence of parental authority figures. As always, though, no one believes anything Klaus has to say, especially not the part where he's met his siblings' older selves in the past, not helped by the authentic truth that the last thing he remembers is watching Allison try to rumor open the Temps Commission's operations bunker, and that was after Luther, Diego, Five, Ben, Christopher, and Luther and Diego again had failed, of course. "It's 2005? Awesome! Ghostier Ben died an unspecified death in the Jennifer incident next year, so you all be on the lookout for that. Five's okay, by the way, just stuck in the apocalypse Dad knew would happen in 2019 and premeditatedly killed himself to bring us back together to stop as a team. Oh, that reminds me, Vanya has powers and ended the world twice. Or three times if we count the 1960 do over, too. But the first was in 2019!"

At that last bit of spoilers, Dad doesn't second guess or cut Klaus off or anything, not verbally, just wordlessly produces a gun out of his desk drawer and starts shooting.

.

"Are you guys seriously gonna lean back and relax after helping Mom cremate that doppelgänger Klaus's body?" Ben is asking from where he's strapped to a weird-looking torture chair when Klaus rejoins them in the sub-basement in a brand new body. "Klaus?"

"Yeah?" Klaus's other self says from where he's strapped to another weird-looking torture chair before following Ben's gaze. "Hey, you're back!"

And that's when Dad brandishes his gun once more. Except this time Ben's Bentacles intervene. Except Pogo chooses that moment to turn on the weird-looking torture chairs. Except Ben's Bentacles then go berserk mode and Klaus takes that as his cue to turn off the weird-looking torture chairs. Except Mom timely walks in with a flamethrower, presumably the instrument she cremated Klaus's previous body with, and would likely cremate Klaus's brand new body as well as the control panel if Dave didn't fall out of a portal and shield him.

"Holy hell, Dave! I'm the one who's empirically immortal!" Klaus yells, doing his best to put out the fire on Dave's clothes.

"About that," Dave says calmingly as Klaus remembers to check if Mom's done with the flamethrower, which she is, on account of her having seemingly melted. "I might've been hit by some of the magic particles?"

.

They regroup at Griddy’s Doughnuts because it's the middle of the night and the hardworking lady who keeps the business open 24/7 is super kind and serves them lunch no questions asked despite only taking a fraction of the biggest wad of money Klaus still has on his person. As it happened, Dave'd found himself back in 1960 at the diner where he then found Fifty-Eight-Going-On-Thirteen Five on the not so random bench. Fast forward to ten to fifteen minutes later when Dave was almost finished briefing Five about the goings-on and there was breaking news that a group of superpowered terrorists had been wreaking havoc at Dealey Plaza where Five decisively blinked himself and Dave to because Five didn't know their position relative to the place he was supposed to assassinate JFK in 1963. Once there, there was this growing golden gargantuan sphere of swirling magic particles that was categorically not a Kugelblitz but definitely a result of the superpowerful arms race between Vanya and Lila that had caught Sloane, Phil, Marcus, Jayme, Fei, Alphonso, as well as many ravens and even more things including the briefcases Ben didn't snatch up, any of which Five would be beside himself to get a hold of so he could skedaddle and start over. And so Five cavalierly blinked in, got hit by Jayme's spit, a few of Fei's ravens, and Phil whose flames were fortunately not on thanks to the maelstrom, at which point Dave courageously went in, got hit by Marcus and Alphonso on top of an astronomical stroke of luck that somehow enabled Dave to grab hold of Five before getting flung out with a briefcase, which Dave cleverly used to get the hell out of there, back to the diner on the day Klaus, Ben, and Jill first met him but alas, no one showed up, not even Dave's past self, though Ben might have but neither Dave nor Five would've been able to see him--

"Oh, right," Klaus realizes it's slipped his mind to try and conjure Ben yet again, does try, forebodingly feeling quadratically hornier by the second, before being met with the most impressively unimpressed gloom ever.

"Took you long enough, and just in time, too," Ben says, pointedly doesn't ask where they are or what's going on, then turns to the storefront where the door opens and their other selves stumble in. "Remind me to tell seventeen-year-old you he was right about the light, by the way."

.

There are lots and lots of questions in dire need of answers. Two of the most pressing ones are "Where's Fifty-Eight-Going-On-Thirteen Five now?" and "One-armed Nightmare Five can freeze time?" As for how horny Klaus and his other self are, the answer is mind-bogglingly so, which Ghostier Ben attributes to paradox psychosis, which is inconvenient nonetheless useful considering Livelier Ben's figured to successfully utilize it in the search for Klaus not unlike how diviners divine underground water, Klaus imagines, which Klaus gives him props and donuts for regardless of how much more practical it would've been to use Klaus's other self's divining power instead.

"He didn't say, just dropped me in the sub-basement after making what he called a desperation move and October-2006 you told him he must've been the one who dropped me in the sub-basement today," Dave tells Livelier Ben who's restraining Klaus's other self with his lively Bentacles, all while Ghostier Ben restrains Klaus with his ghosty Bentacles, counterintuitively to keep paradox horniness at bay. "He said he'd come back for us, though."

"You know how I died?" Ghostier Ben asks, looking particularly pensive.

"You mean you don't know?" Klaus squirms. "Also what if you lethally end this torture now and I come back as a ghost? The psychosis side effects can't cross planes of existence, right?"

Things don't improve, however, as they're then joined by the rest of the resident Umbrella Academy, some of whom still skeptical as to whether Klaus is a lecherous doppelgänger whose despicable goal is to pollute their impressionable minds with carnal pleasure, but that's before another portal opens, from which Sixteen-Year-Old Five leaps out and blinks Klaus, Ghostier Ben, and Dave to some cabin in the woods somewhere.

"Sixty-one going on sixteen, actually. Your friend found me when I landed in 1960. Imagine my surprise when she told me she'd been at the Commission with most of our siblings before suddenly finding herself back in Texas--"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, you met Jill? Where's she now?"

"As I was saying," Sixty-One-Going-On-Sixteen Five continues, taking off the disguise that most certainly hasn't fooled anyone. "The 2019 apocalypse was my priority back then so my plan was to blink forward in time a little at a time to a point where I could prevent it which should theoretically retroactively prevent you all from being brought back in the first place, but that hit a snag in 1989. Paradox psychosis, though mine was less hormonal more homicidal. So I kept blinking nonstop until I landed in 2002, at which point I could've picked up where my thirteen-year-old self left off--"

"So you're saying you're not any of the Fives we've met so far? Does this mean we'll get to meet all the potentially infinitely many yous from the exponentially divergent branching points in the timeline eventually? And Jill! You still haven't told us where she is!"

"Jill is at peace, Klaus, in the afterlife where she's been for the past forty-five years," Ben says, sighing. "One-armed Nightmare Five froze time when we were outside the operations bunker and Christopher and I watched him sent all of you back to when and where you belonged. Or when and where he thought you belonged, anyway. Then there was the light, but Chris didn't go because I told him I'd stick around. And stick around both of us did. Saw everything in the meantime. One-armed Nightmare Five locking himself in the bunker. The Handler bringing in Fifty-Eight-Year-Old Five from 2064 and bringing up her adoptive children through the years. Dave turning up at the diner with Fifty-Eight-Going-On-Thirteen Five and a briefcase. Jill meeting this Five days later, before going separate ways and she became one of the many casualties of Vanya and Lila's fight at Dealey Plaza. Jill, Christopher, and I then got to watch Fifty-Eight-Going-On-Thirteen Five and Dave get the briefcase as well as Vanya, Lila, and the rest cease to exist afterwards. Then there was the light again and we were gonna stick around in the land of the living some more but Jill remembered Stop-Wasting-Oxygen Five telling us about doing research in his eternal damnation so the three of us went into it together. Fun fact, they have all the channels in the afterlife, but no infinite switchboard for some reason."