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Chapter Text

Day 1 of the Apocalypse(™)

November 11th, 2002

“Not ready, my ass,” Five huffed out, each leap along the sidewalk bringing him further into the future. The feeling was a little bit like speed walking through an electric fence, energy warping around him, pulling him into a blue vortex and spitting him out in a different place. Not in space, though, as all his previous jumps had been, but in time itself.

With every warp, the trees bloomed, turned orange, then wilted in front of  him, the groups of passerby morphing into different people entirely, wearing tank tops and sundresses, then long sleeved shirts, then thick coats and boots. The buildings beside him changed their decorations, signs appearing in the windows of Christmas sales and ice cream shops closing for the season.

He broke into a smile. His father was wrong, like he always was. He was perfectly capable of time travel, just look at what was happening around him! Flakes of snow flurried around him, vanishing when he jumped again in a burst of adrenaline, then again, then again, then again, until the seasons whirred around him like a clock, like he was watching a timelapse in real time. It was beautiful, more than words could ever express.

It took his breath away. This was his doing. He did this. He had the skill, the smarts, the power, to time travel. Like someone straight out of a sci-fi, and he didn’t even need a damn time machine, it was all him. And now that he knew how to time travel, there was a whole new world of possibility opened up to him. Who knew the things he could do with this, if he perfected it. Could he reverse time, redo every scenario he was ever in until he got it exactly right? Go back in time decades, maybe even centuries, pull some strings and change the course of history? Theoretically, if he could, he might be able to go back in time to before the Umbrella Academy started going on missions, redo them all with his current knowledge, so that all the times they failed would be erased from history. They would have zero casualties under their belt, zero scandals, and if he kept this particular ability a secret, no one would be all the wiser, except maybe his other siblings.

That brought up the question of whether he would go back to earlier today at the dinner table, tell his siblings and father that his endeavor did, in fact, work. His first thought was, of course he would. But if he pretended that he just tried to time travel and it didn’t work, that gave him a piece of knowledge that Reginald didn’t know, something that he could possibly use against him without repercussions. And the fact that he could use it to mess with his siblings, at least for a little bit before he let them in on his secret, was just a bonus.

He sprinted along the sidewalk, his feet carrying him further away the farther ahead he jumped into the future. It seemed to be just the same pattern repeating itself. Season after season, year after year. So he jumped again. And again. And again. And again. Spring. Summer. Fall Winter. Flowers. Green leaves. Orange leaves. Snow. Flowers. Green leaves. Orange leaves. Ash.

Wait, ash?

He stopped in his tracks, smile slowly but surely disappearing. The sky was dark gray, smoke pluming from buildings reduced to rubble and flames all around him. The air was filled with an acrid stench. He decided not to think about the slumped forms on the sidewalk, in the buildings, driving stationary cars, lying on nearly melted metal benches.

He took a few more steps, grabbing a newspaper conveniently blowing in the wind. Half of it was burned off, but the date was still visible. He read it, deciding that this was definitely a problem.

Then he shoved it in his pocket and turned to run back home.

Day 1 of being Back(™)

November 11th, 2002

Forty five years– give or take a few decades– later, a blue vortex of energy spit him out on the sidewalk in front of the Umbrella Academy. Something felt a little off, until he looked down to see small, uncalloused hands, running his hands through his hair to see it was short, soft and well kept. A wave of annoyance came over him, then passed once he remembered that this was a good sign, a sign that his plan worked. That his calculations were right.

He took a few steps, walking in a slow circle to get used to his smaller center of gravity. It felt like a weight lifted off his… well, everywhere.

He debated grabbing a newspaper to check the date, but quickly dismissed the idea, since his siblings’ and Reginald’s reaction when he came back would tell him everything he needed to know. If it was the same day, he knew exactly what he was going to do.

The only problem with that was that, while he had been transported back to his presumably thirteen-year-old body, he was still wearing a blood and dust covered suit and tie from the commission that was much too big for his frame.

Standing outside the door, instead of going in, he warped directly to his room. It was in the same condition as he left it, the empty cup of tea from that fateful morning still sitting on his desk. That was a really good sign. Grace usually cleaned up messes she saw within the same day, and did sweeps of their room every night to make sure they were being hygienic, so surely she wouldn’t miss that, unless someone had been in his room drinking tea in his absence, which he thought was highly improbable. This meant he’d probably done it right. He’d gotten back. He was so relieved he could cry.

No, no time for emotions. Not now. He had stuff to do. He took a deep breath, opening his closet and taking a spare uniform into the bathroom to change into. Then he smoothed out his hair and looked into the mirror for a few seconds, trying not to look like he was storing all the horrors of the world behind his eyes. He shoved his dirty suit in the closet, wadded up on the floor. He’d have to burn that later. Once he took the stuff out of the pockets.

When he warped back onto the sidewalk, he wasted no time in pushing through the double doors of the Academy, walking through the halls and stopping when he got to the dining room. All of his siblings were there. And alive. Each and every one of them.

Six heads turned his way. He hoped he didn’t look like he just saw a couple billion ghosts.

He took his seat. The only physical reaction he got from Reginald was a glance in his direction, before he started talking. “Number Five, welcome back,” he said, his voice as disinterested as ever. “You’re done with your tantrum, I hope.”

Five nodded, trying to craft his body language more like the attempt at time travel didn’t work and less like it did work, but brought about more horrors than he could have imagined.

Reginald probably wouldn’t care either way. In both scenarios, he was right. Five shouldn’t have attempted time travel.

“Didn’t work, I assume? What a surprise, Number Five, what a surprise. I told you, you aren’t ready, neither emotionally nor physically. There are thousands, nay, millions, billions, trillions of ways such a thing could go wrong, infinite variables. It’s no ability for a mere child, especially one with your amount of arrogance. Whatever happened–” Reginald narrowed his eyes at Five, slowly turning his cane– “I hope you learned your lesson.”

Five swallowed. So his father was suspicious. Of course he was. He looked to his siblings, who had each gone back to their meals like nothing was out of the ordinary. He supposed that was true, for them. It had been forty five years, yet he still remembered exactly the two words he needed to say like the back of his hands. Or maybe that wasn’t a very good analogy, since his hands had aged back forty five years since he’d last seen them.

“Yes, Sir.”

“In either case, you know the rules. And you broke them. There will be punishment for your disobedience. No dinner tonight, you’ll be training in the gym until curfew.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Missing a meal and extra training wouldn’t be that bad. Before, he needed all the energy he could get to use his powers and skipping even one meal would leave him weak and dizzy, especially combined with extra training, and he hated that feeling. His father knew it, which was why his punishment for misbehaving was usually to be overworked. But he had enough of it in the apocalyptic future he time traveled to to get used to it, so it wasn’t that bad. And after years upon years of working for the Commission to become the perfect killer, his thirteen-year-old training regimen would be a piece of cake.

He looked over at his siblings. For the most part, they were still just focused on their food, but Ben and Viktor were looking at him with concern, probably thinking the punishment Reginald had given him was a bit too severe, since from their point of view, all he’d done was disturb mealtime, storm out and come straight back after, which was less than other times one of them had misbehaved and for a worse punishment. Reginald probably suspected he was gone for a lot longer than it seemed.

He gave the two siblings what he hoped was a reassuring glance before deciding to go back to his meal. He hadn’t had a home cooked meal in forty five years, so god help him, he was going to savor the rest of this one. He pulled the knife out of the table he’d stuck it in to get Reginald’s attention that morning, then froze.

Oh, fuck. He’d forgotten about the tracker.

He nonchalantly slipped the knife under the table, holding it in his hands above his lap so no one could see. It would be too risky to do it here, where everyone could see. Luckily, he was the mastermind of getaways.

“Uh, be right back,” he said, not even bothering to stand up before warping out into the bathroom next to his room.

He rinsed off the knife, put his arm over the sink so the blood would be easier to clean up. Then he sliced his forearm open, gritting his teeth, dropping the knife back in the sink with a clatter. Next came the hard part.

He braced himself against the sink, plunging his fingers into the wound, fishing around until he found a small microchip. He threw it onto the ground, stomping on it until it was in a thousand pieces. He could clean that up later, the real issue was the blood all over his hands and his currently bleeding wound.

He wasn’t exactly an expert at tending wounds. Back at the Umbrella Academy, it was Grace who patched them up when they got injured on missions, sometimes with Viktor’s help since he was at home all the time and ended up learning. And for when there was an injury that was too urgent to wait for Grace, it was Klaus who decided to learn beyond the basic emergency first aid “Just in case”. Five guessed the real reason was to convince Reginald to stop training him to hone his ghost powers and make him the group’s medic instead.

And now that Five had spent so many years working for the commission, he did his job so well that he hadn’t needed medical assistance in decades.

In the cabinet under the sink, he found a first aid kit containing gauze, band aids and other stuff he didn’t know what to do with. He was bleeding out, and this wasn’t the kind of booboo you could fix with smiley face band aids. So he took the gauze, wrapped it around his entire forearm, so tight it hurt like a bitch, because they always say to keep pressure on the wound, right? And in all the movies he’d seen that happen in, every time someone put pressure on the wound they started screaming, so the pain must be a good thing, he concluded.

After slapping a band aid on top of the gauze to keep it in place like a piece of tape, he cleaned the blood off his hands and the knife, pulled his sleeves back up, and warped back to his seat, waiting a few seconds before placing the knife back on the table when Reginald wasn’t looking.

Apparently he should’ve been watching for his siblings, too, because he felt a tap on his shoulder, turning to see Klaus giving him a strange look. Viktor too was staring at him, not touching his food.

Klaus mouthed, What was that?

Five mouthed back, What?

Klaus pointed to the knife, then made a gesture that mimicked what he just saw, then a bunch of hand movements that didn’t make any sense at all to Five, going on for a solid forty five seconds, probably going on a tangent as he was wont to do.

“Number Four,” Reginald called out.

Klaus froze in place, one of his hands currently making a peace sign and the other held straight out vertically, like a bunny jumping over a fence. Five wasn’t sure how that related to the situation at all.

“No talking during mealtimes. Do I need to remind you as well?”

“But I wasn’t-”

“Including nonsensical gestures.”

“So if I had a seizure while we were eating, would you say the same thing? You’d seriously punish me for having a medical emergency? Wow, you’re a horrible caretaker. Imagine what the press would do if they found-”

“Are you having a medical emergency?”

“Maybe. No. But I could be. And that says a lot about the state of the world these days, you know. Politics, global warming, everything’s going to shit and that’s because your first reaction to everything is to get mad, you don’t even question-”

“Do I look angry to you?” Reginald asked, leaning forward on his cane. “And I did question you, just a few seconds ago, and it looked to me like a teenager misbehaving. You’ll be joining Number Five in the gym. After dinner,” he added.

“What? Come on, you’re kidding. All I did was talk.”

“Correct. All you do is talk. You need to learn to be less noisy, it can be a useful tool knowing when to shut up, especially during stealth missions. Otherwise, what else can you do?”

Klaus threw his hands in the air. “Of fucking course you made this into a lesson-”

“Watch your language, Number Four,” Reginald warned. It was clear that Klaus had been messing around, but now he seemed a bit upset. From across the table, Viktor gave a subtle shake of his head that went ignored. Allison rolled her eyes.

“-Just like you always do!” Klaus stood. “I’m done with my meal,” he said, even though there was a considerable amount of vegetables left on his plate. He turned around and left, probably going to his room, and Reginald let him go since it was close enough to the end of the hour.

Within a few minutes, the rest of the children were done eating, and got up from their seats in unison. Five swayed a bit as he did so, putting a hand on the table to steady himself as a wave of dizziness came over him. His wrist still ached, so he attributed it to that. He looked around to see if anyone noticed, but no one did apart from Viktor, who was still staring at him with those big, wide eyes. He couldn’t remember if he was just always like that, or if it meant he knew something was up.

It was safe to say he wouldn’t say anything; he never did, since he would always get shut down no matter what he said, because that’s just how they all treated him back then– or, now, he should say. Time travel was confusing. Viktor stopped saying much of anything around when they were ten, except maybe to Ben and Five, and turned to music instead.

He hadn’t said anything, and then he said everything, in the form of a book. And that, in many ways, could be attributed to the end of the world as they all knew it.

That was one of the things he could change this time around: how they treated Viktor. He was sure that if he started to treat him less like an annoyance and more like an actual, real live person, that the rest of the Academy would catch on and eventually follow suit. Eventually.

And if he could help make Viktor a little less alone, he would grow up to be a little less bitter, and he wouldn’t have to write a book about how horrible his childhood was, wouldn’t be alienated from his family for doing so, wouldn’t have to rely on Leonard Peabody A.K.A. Harold Jenkins for support, wouldn’t turn on his family and send the moon crashing into earth in a manic attempt at revenge.

That was the key, it all started with Viktor.

The six siblings walked single file up the stairs to the second level, all of them sagging with relief that their vow of silence was over.

“Remember to always be on alert, there could be a mission bell at any moment,” Luther instructed from his place at the front of the line as they got to the top of the stairs. Five almost scoffed, then thought better of it; he meant well, but his “guidance” for the Academy had always been unhelpful and repetitive. He guessed it went to show that he never really knew any better than the others, despite being stuck with the responsibility of always knowing what to do.

“Yes, boss man,” Diego said, and Five could tell from the sound of his voice that he was rolling his eyes so hard.

“Hey.” Luther put a hand out, stopping Diego before he could go past the railing. “Don’t make fun of me. This is serious business.” He clearly didn’t like people speaking out of turn, though Five couldn’t tell whether he feared for their safety if they did so or was just tired of watching his siblings act out.

It was probably a combination of the two.

Diego huffed, pushing Luther’s hand out of the way. He clearly wasn’t trying to keep him there, because he just let him proceed and speed walk past him into his room, the sound of him closing the door behind him audible.

“Allison,” Luther called, still standing near the top of the stairs after Diego left. She’d been behind him, being third in line, and was now in the front. “Would you check on Klaus? I’m a little worried about him, after whatever he was doing at the table. Do you think he’s..?”

Allison shook her head. “I’m not his keeper,” she said, sounding annoyed. Then, less than a second later and before Luther could even open his mouth to convince her, she relented. “Fine.”

After his sister left for Klaus’s room, Five was next in line. He tried to push past without being lectured, but Luther stopped him the same way he did Diego.

“Five,” he started, “I don’t super like the stunt you pulled today, yelling at dad, disobeying his direct orders, running away…”

“Well, I don’t super like your stupid haircut, but we can’t all get what we want now, can we?” He didn’t bother trying to push past, just warping a few feet ahead in the hallway. He didn’t want to warp too far, he should save his energy for mandatory training later.

“Five, you can’t just-”

“Just what?” Five asked, continuing to walk toward his room without as much as turning around. “What do you want from me? I’m already getting punished, Luther. You know how bad that many hours of training is.” He gritted his teeth, not wanting to get mad about something this trivial.

“Just… don’t do it again,” Luther said, his voice softer.

Five kept walking.

“Wait, Five!”

He turned around this time, because the voice wasn’t Luther’s. “What, Ben? Gonna lecture me too?”

He knew it was unfair as soon as he said it, especially after the look Ben gave him earlier when Reginald gave him his sentence. It was a look of concern. He didn’t like people getting concerned about him, but it was better than a lecture.

“Uh… do you wanna hang out in my room? We could, I don’t know, do some math equations, read quantum physics books…” Ben fidgeted with his hands. He was past the stairs at that point, Luther behind him, self consciously running his hands through his hair.

God, his siblings were stupid wrecks.

“Yeah, sure, man. You mind if we, uh, get some background music?”

Ben blinked at him, his face unreadable. He knew what he meant; sometimes they used to hang out with Viktor, and he wouldn’t really talk, but he would practice the violin or the guitar in their presence, and it was nice.

They needed to start including him, and there was no reason not to start then and there. Years of trauma and exclusion needed to be undone, or at least lessened, and that was no easy task.

“Actually, I kind of wanted to talk to you.”

“You can talk to me with Vi– Vanya there.” He turned to Viktor. “Wanna hang out with us?”

He stared at Five for a moment before nodding quickly, eyes flitting between him and Ben.

“Okay, great, let’s go!” Five ignored the narrowed eyes from Ben and the wide eyed look from Viktor behind him on the steps, running to his room to grab some books on mathematics, then following Ben to his room.

A few moments after Five stepped in, Viktor appeared carrying a violin case. “I heard you mention background music. I don’t have to play it if you don’t want me to, but if you do…”

“Do what you want, Viktor. We’re just having fun. I brought books on quantum physics, but if that’s too complicated for you I’m sure I can find something else…” He trailed off.

Ben and Viktor had froze, and went silent, glancing from each other to Five. He followed suit, not knowing what he did wrong. Did he forget that Viktor had deep seated trauma related to math textbooks or something?

“Five…” Viktor started, then went silent again.

“Are you okay?” he asked, the same time as Ben asked, “Who’s Viktor?”

Shit.

In his endeavor to hang out with his brothers, he’d forgotten that one of them was a transgender man, or, more specifically, that he wasn’t. Yet.

“Okay, now I know I definitely need to talk to you,” Ben said. “What was that, at the dinner table? When Klaus got told off for making weird gestures during mealtime, he was making them at you. And before, attempting to time travel? And just now, you called Vanya by the wrong name.”

“Well now you sound like Luther,” Five said, setting his books on Ben’s desk. “Good job. I thought you weren’t going to lecture me about my actions. Looks like this whole family is filled with concerned teachers, after all.”

“We,” Ben said, putting a hand to his chest, “are not teachers. But we are concerned.”

“Yeah,” Viktor agreed. “You’re acting differently, are you sure you’re feeling alright?”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m feeling great.” Five picked his math books back up. “You two get to know each other. Bond, like actual siblings for once in your god damned lives. I’m going to take a nap, to get up my energy for my punishment that I got for acting out.”

He walked out of the room, slammed the door, and rewound time about a minute and forty five seconds. Back through everything that just happened, everything that was just said.

“I heard you mention background music. I don’t have to play it if you don’t want me to, but if you do…”

“Do whatever you want. We’re just hanging out.”

“Totally. Yeah,” Ben added. “But some music wouldn’t hurt.”

Viktor smiled, setting down the case, unlatching it, gently taking out the violin and beginning to play a soft melody. Five set the books he was now holding again on Ben’s desk, just like he’d done a minute and forty five seconds ago. He looked at Ben, who was sitting on his bed and bopping his head to the music. He didn’t recognize the song– had Viktor written it himself?

It almost felt normal, them hanging out. It should be normal. That was the sad part. But he could fix that. He could convince the rest of his siblings to hang out with Viktor once in a while, and to have fun once in a while. He didn’t want to get ahead of himself, but if he did this right, maybe they could grow up to be a semi functional family, instead of the bunch of losers he found the first time he tried to go back to this timeline, when he miscalculated and found them somewhere in their twenties, all lonely and sad about their fucked up childhoods and never in contact with each other.

And maybe, just maybe, none of them would die this time. It had nearly destroyed him, when he read Viktor’s book for the first time. When he learned about Ben’s death. He didn’t really know why at first, why it hurt so much. His siblings were all dead, either way. What did it matter that one of them happened a decade earlier than the rest? Then he realized that it was because they all had to grieve his death, the same way they all grieved Five’s disappearance so long ago. If all seven of them had died at once, it would be over in a moment, just like that.

But when Ben died, they had to process it– and feel it– and carry on after it– for years before the rest of them died.

And while he was never really gone in every sense of the word, none of the rest of the siblings believed that Klaus could really see Ben until it was far too late.

This wasn’t the place to think about that, though. He picked up a random book from the pile he’d put on Ben’s desk, but before he could even open it, he was overcome with a strong nausea. He tried to swallow it, but realized that he was in fact going to throw up.

Fuck, he hated when that happened. Why did having powers have to come with such stupid side effects?

He dropped the book, clamping a hand over his mouth and warping to the bathroom next to his own room, immediately puking up all his lunch into the toilet. Swiping his hair out of his face, he realized he was sweating all over. His wrist was hurting more by the minute. He pulled down his sleeve with a white knuckled grip to see that he’d bled through the bandage, the front half completely soaked with red.

That was going to be a problem for sure. He pulled the sleeve back down. It was slightly darker in some spots, but it wasn’t super noticeable since his uniform was black anyway. Unless someone was looking specifically for it, they probably wouldn’t notice anything.

He turned to the side, breathing hard through his nose. Damn, he’d forgotten how shitty this felt.

Whatever, he could walk it off.

He took note of the remnants of the microchip he’d stomped into pieces earlier, still scattered across the tile floor.

“Five?” he heard from outside. The voice was soft and hesitant, and a second later, the shadow of two feet appeared under the door.

Before anyone could come in, he swiftly swept up the pieces into his hand and into the toilet before flushing it down, hoping he got enough that no one would notice or ask anything.

He was struck with the thought that he could just tell his siblings the truth, before brushing it off. That was something he could contemplate later, and there was now a concerned Viktor outside his door, probably followed by Ben. Usually, when he suddenly looked sick and warped away, it didn’t take a genius to figure out what was wrong. This was something that used to happen frequently back when he was a kid and quite new to honing his powers; he’d get nauseous and lightheaded when he was overworked and/or underfed, which would oftentimes result in him losing his lunch, which only made the effects of said condition much worse.

Now, instead of skipping just one meal, he would be training for hours more than he was supposed to under the pretense of not eating anything at all, since everything he had eaten at lunch was now flushed down the toilet.

He forced his feet to take him to the door and open it, Viktor still on the other side. He could see that his brother’s shoulders had been tense, but relaxed a bit at seeing Five, a small smile– that was probably his attempt at being reassuring– appearing on his face.

Ben was right behind him, looking around the hallway, seemingly not as bothered by this as he was back in his bedroom before Five turned back time. Calling Viktor by a name he didn’t adopt until decades later was probably the catalyst that made Ben really concerned. Him getting sick probably wouldn’t add to it– on the contrary, it probably added to the sense of normalcy. Maybe Ben even took it as an explanation for why he was being weird, and why Klaus was making concerned gestures at the table.

As Five looked at him, he continued his silence, and didn’t even seem to notice the staring. That was probably a sign that there wasn’t a confrontation coming his way this time. He hated when that happened. And it tended to happen with his siblings. They never addressed things normally, they either cornered each other to have weird private “conversations” that felt more like interrogations, or they remained silent about something until it became too big of an issue to ignore, and called a family meeting where everything just… blew up.

Five had a feeling he would have a lot of both if he decided to keep his little trip through time a secret.

“Uh…” Viktor started when no one else said anything. “You okay?” His eyebrows came together, but his smile remained, so his expression took on a weird mix between concerned and optimistic.

“Yeah, man, yeah.” Five shrugged. “Just got a little… you know.” He wiped the sweat off his forehead with his sleeve– the one that wasn’t currently covering a festering wound, or else he would have trailed blood across his face, which would probably not ease anyone’s concerns.

“Oh… okay.” Viktor looked down. He did know. He’d seen the effects aggressive training had on all his siblings. But, Five realized, he’d never experienced it himself, having never been trained before.

He’d have to fix that one of these days. Not today, though. He was worn out enough already.

“Do… do you need me to get you some water, or something?” Viktor asked.

“Nah, I’m good, I just– failing at time travel drains the energy, I’ll have you know. God, I’d kill for a cup of coffee though. Literally, I would murder someone in cold blood.” He flashed a smile that was, admittedly, sharper than someone who’s joking would smile. Which was accurate, because for how many things he said without any real meaning, he was dead serious about this.

“Wait, but Dad never lets us have coffee. He says… that it’s bad for us, especially when we become reliant on it to have energy.”

Oh, right. Reginald and his stupid rules. Quick, think of an excuse. “You think that would stop me? Come on, Klaus sneaks out to replenish his booze stash all the time. You think I can’t get a decent cup of coffee once in a while?”

Viktor frowned, but Ben piped up: “You get coffee at the place you got those donuts?”

…Those donuts? Oh yeah, when he would sneak out and come back with a box of donuts to share with them all. Except Luther, after he tattled to Reginald that one time. “Yeah, that place.”

“Ha. Yeah, I don’t think running on nothing but an empty stomach and coffee is a very good idea.”

“So you’re a doctor now, huh?”

“...Picked some things up from Klaus. When you’re around him enough, eventually you’ll learn.” Ben smiled, which might’ve been the first time he’d seen that in a long time. “I also have this thing called basic common sense.”

“Noted. I’ll make sure to call you next time I need open heart surgery, or random unsolicited advice.”

“Well, what am I if I can’t do either of those things?”

“Hmm… an octopus?” Five liked this, his siblings having a sense of humor every so often. It made hanging out with them more bearable. It was made easier by the fact that Ben and Viktor had already been his favorite siblings, but… if anyone asked, he didn’t pick favorites at all.

“An Umbrella?” Viktor suggested.

“You’re right: I’m an Umbrella!” Ben laughed. “That sounds so weird out of context. Like, hey guys, I’m an umbrella!”

“I’m an umbrella!” Viktor threw his hands in the air, devolving into a fit of laughter.

“Oh my god, you do have powers!” Five called out, putting a hand on Viktor’s shoulder. “You can shapeshift into inanimate objects!”

Viktor laughed harder. Five didn’t think he’d ever heard such a sound from his brother. “What do I become next? A cup of coffee?”

Five pretended to stroke a beard that wasn’t there, in an imitation of their father. “Hm, that would be quite useful, Number Seven.”

“If you became a chair, or something inconspicuous, you could go on stealth missions, spy on people,” Ben added.

“Okay,” Viktor said, sitting on the ground and curling his arms around himself. “Guess what I am right now.”

“Washing machine?” Five guessed. “No, an end table.”

“A ‘thinking man’ statue?” Ben guessed.

“Close,” Viktor said, standing up. “I was a potted plant.”

“How was that ‘close’?” Five asked, crossing his arms and leaning against the wall. “A statue is nothing like a potted plant-”

“What’s going on out here?”

The three of them turned to see Luther leaning out of the open door to his bedroom, and Five then remembered they were in the open hallway, so everyone probably heard at least a little bit of their exchange. “What were you guys yelling about?” Luther asked, his eyebrows slightly raised, seemingly not very phased by his three siblings goofing off. It wasn’t an uncommon thing, but the sibling their father dubbed ‘Number One’ was a stickler for the rules, and Reginald hated when they did anything remotely related to normal child behavior.

Beside Five, Viktor froze, making a face that seemed to be stuck halfway between a grimace and a smile, teeth completely showing. “Nothing,” he mumbled through his teeth.

“What was that?” Luther asked, stepping all the way out from the doorway.

Five decided to answer for Viktor. “Nothing that concerns someone who hates joy and whimsy.”

Luther frowned. “I don’t hate joy. I just-”

“Dad does.”

“Huh?” Their brother’s frown deepened.

“That’s what you were going to say, right? You were just doing what Dad wants you to? Well guess what, Dad isn’t in the immediate vicinity right now. He’s not gonna punish you for not being the fun police for two seconds.”

“Oh, well…” Luther’s frown disappeared, replaced by what looked like an expression of guilt. “I’m not trying to be the ‘fun police’, I just wanted to know what you guys were yelling about. So uh, could you… let me in on the fun? I won’t be the fun police, I promise.”

Viktor looked at Luther, the same smile-grimace on his face, and sucked in a breath before saying through his teeth, “I’m an umbrella.”

Immediately, all three siblings standing outside of Five’s bathroom devolved into semi insane laughter.

Luther blinked in confusion. “I… don’t get it.”

Ben walked up to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “If I have to explain it to you, it won’t be as funny. But it’s because… we’re the Umbrella Academy.”

“S… so?”

“So if this is the Umbrella Academy, does that make us umbrellas?” Ben started giggling, then covered his mouth, took a deep breath, and continued. “I mean, like… imagine walking up to someone on the street and introducing yourself like, hi, I’m an umbrella.”

Luther let out a small chuckle, like he understood the joke, but just didn’t think it was that funny. “I guess that would be weird. It’s an odd thing to name an academy after if you didn’t know it was because Dad used to manufacture umbrellas.”

Five barked out a fake laugh. Luther’s insight only made it less funny, but he could sympathize. During his years with the Commission, he’d been bitter every time something fun or funny came up. To him, the only thing that was important had been his work, and if he lost focus for a second, he might not be able to get home again.

Maybe Luther was afraid of fun because that was the only way he knew how to survive. Fun was something Reginald particularly hated, and having fun in front of him was a recipe for a lecture and/or punishment. If Five was put in charge of a bunch of kids who would get hurt if they did anything fun, he’d do the exact same things Luther had done all their childhood.

That was something he didn’t realize until the fourteenth reread of Viktor’s book.

But goofing off with his siblings was something he grew to miss very dearly in those years, so if he wasn’t acting like himself, he was okay with that. As long as his long term goals were still to end the apocalypse, he could have some fun while he was at it– he had about seventeen years before the end of the world came about in the first timeline, anyway. He could handle a few minutes with his siblings. In fact, bonding with them was actually beneficial to his plan in many ways, since their bitterness regarding each other was the main reason why Viktor ended the world in the first place.

After so many tries at this, now that he finally got back to the beginning, he couldn’t help getting the feeling like he had all the time in the world, and nothing would go wrong. Like he had felt that morning he left.

Of course, he didn’t believe all that naivete, but the warm feeling still settled around him when he and his siblings acted like a real family around each other. For the first time in forever, it felt a little bit like everything was going to be okay.

He just wanted to be a kid again, and if everything went according to plan, there was the possibility that he could actually grow up.

Five looked around, thinking of something to say, before noticing Luther frown again.

“Are you feeling alright, Five?” Luther asked less than a second after Five noticed his expression. “You ah, look a little pale.”

Probably the blood loss, Five thought. “Yeah, I’m great. Just going through withdrawal since you banned our coffee runs.” He stuck his tongue out at Luther.

“Those weren’t ‘coffee runs’. You were sneaking out and stealing from that donut shop. Like a criminal. You know, the people we put in jail.”

“Whatever, it’s not like it’s the first time I’ve broken the law,” Five replied, then remembered it was Luther he was talking to.

Luther raised his eyebrows. “Oh, really? Is there something you haven’t told me?” For some reason, he looked genuinely surprised.

Five scoffed, deciding to roll with it. “It would be easier to list the things I have told you, man. Every time I talk to you, I see this like, big sign that says ‘SNITCH’ in all caps above your head. It’s really an incredible phenomenon.” He considered saying something about quantum physics, but decided that Luther was so dense it would probably make him think Five was being serious, and needed mental help because he was hallucinating giant signs.

“That’s… uncalled for.”

“It’s really not,” Ben said from his place next to Luther. “I mean, every time someone gets in trouble, it’s been ‘cause you told Dad.”

“...Surely not every time,” Luther countered, looking over at Ben. “Just this morning, Five got in trouble for talking during lunch, disobeying Dad, and leaving the table, and I wasn’t even involved in that at all.”

“Not the point, Luther.”

“Then what is, exactly? I’m confused.”

“Never mind. I’m going to go hang out in my room.” Ben turned to walk to his room, then stopped when he saw no one was following him. “You coming?” He asked, facing Five and Viktor.

Five followed him, Viktor nodding before doing the same.

“All right,” Luther said. He didn’t ask to be included, but Five wasn’t sure if it was because he just wasn’t interested or if he thought they wouldn’t want him there. “See you later.”

Luther disappeared into his own room as Five and Viktor followed Ben into his, and Viktor picked up his violin again, Ben picking up a college level math textbook from the pile Five had dropped on his desk and skimming through it.

Five did the same with a book about quantum physics, turning to Viktor as he did so. “Have you learned all the Phantom of the Opera songs yet?”

About an hour into his training sentence, Five heard the doors to the gym open and shut, turning to see Klaus. He looked about the same as he normally did; his brown hair ruffled, his eyes dark and slightly red, and his posture terrible.

“Hey,” Klaus said, his mouth turning into a worried smile as he looked over Five. “What’s my poison today, coach?”

Five glanced at the training dummies he’d set up in the room to recreate a hostage situation, complete with one of the bad guys holding their arm around the neck of one of the hostages. “It’s supposed to be a bank robbery or something.” Truthfully, it was based on something that happened during a mission for the Commission.

“Cool. Like our first day on the job. So what do we do?”

“I was giving myself a certain amount of time I have to kill all the bad guys by or else the hostages die, since a lot of our missions end up being pretty time sensitive.” Five held up a stopwatch.

“Oh, okay. How long?”

Five smiled. “Now why would I tell you that?”

Klaus pouted. “Really? I can’t know? Not even like a range of time? Is it closer to five minutes, or fifteen minutes? Or thirty seconds, knowing you?”

“When we’re on our missions, do we get an exact timer that tells us when things are going to get ugly?”

“...No.” Klaus blinked at him. “Sorry that you had to miss dinner, by the way.”

Five shook his head. “It was my fault.”

“Still, I got to eat but you didn’t, even though we both have to train until curfew. That has to suck.”

“I guess, but I’ve done worse. Now, let’s-”

“I tried to sneak you in an apple, but Dad caught me.”

“Oh. Well thanks for trying.”

“I got you this though,” Klaus said, bringing a crumpled napkin out of his pocket and tossing it to Five, who caught it and unraveled it.

Inside were two pieces of cooked broccoli. “Oh,” Five said. “How… moist. No offense, but I would rather eat a rusty nail.”

“Mom made steak and stir fry vegetables,” Klaus said, making a ‘chef’s kiss’ gesture, and giving Five a look that said, come on, you know you want to.

Five rolled his eyes, before shoving the broccoli into his mouth, swallowing them without chewing, and tossing the napkin at Klaus.

Klaus flinched, pretending to be injured when it hit him. “Wow, That was an interesting display. I’ve never seen someone imitate a snake so well.”

“Well then, you’ve never seen me in the bedroom.”

“What does that even mean?”

“You don’t want to know,” Five said, turning to the training dummy setup he’d created and looking down at the stopwatch. “Okay, it’s your turn to take out the targets. Go!” He clicked the button, starting the timer.

Caught off guard, Klaus broke into a sprint, tackling the first dummy to the ground. Then he jumped up, punched one in the face, knocked another to the ground by sweeping his leg under its feet, then kept going until eventually, all the “bad guy” dummies were knocked out of commission.

“How… was that?” Klaus asked in between breaths. “Did I get them all in time?”

Five made a tsk sound with his tongue. “Hm… nope, all the hostages were killed.”

Klaus hung his head. “Aww, seriously?”

Five backed away from the dummies, nearly tripping over his own feet with how light headed he was. They were all sitting in chairs in a circle, like something you’d see if you took a wrong turn– or in Klaus’s case, a right turn– and ended up in an AA meeting. Klaus had hidden something on one of them while Five was turned away, and now he had to find it.

He wasn’t sure which exact situation this was supposed to represent, but he could think of a few jobs he’d done for the Commission that ended up somewhat like this. Klaus, being as he was, was probably just making up random situations for these mannequins to be in on the fly, but Five had to admit this scenario was actually a pretty good training module, whether his brother intended or not.

The last time he did it, he found the item– a small pink barrette Klaus had brought into the gym by hiding it in in his hair– in sixteen seconds, but Klaus told him off for “scaring the children”. Apparently his methods had been too aggressive, and he was supposed to know– or care– that some of the mannequins were supposed to be kids.

It was his job to succeed on missions, not be friendly, but Klaus seemed to think his biggest weakness on the job was his lack of sympathy, empathy, and the ability to pretend he had either of those things. It was probably true, but Five didn’t see why it mattered that much. He didn’t know these people he was supposed to be friendly to.

He knew how to be friendly and have normal conversations with his siblings, but that was because they were his siblings, and he was friendly with them when he enjoyed doing so. And maybe because it would help prevent the apocalypse, but he could do both at the same time.

Even if he couldn’t treat the people he saved on his missions with what Ben and Allison called “common courtesy”, the other five of his siblings were perfectly capable of doing that on their own. So if they weren’t grateful to Five in particular, it wasn’t a big deal. What mattered was that they were safe and the criminals were incapacitated.

“Klaus,” he said before his brother could tell him to do it again, and be nicer this time, because he was about eighty percent sure if he kept going, he was going to pass out. His vision was already blurring.

“Yeah, broski?”

“I… need your help with something.”

“Okay, well. I’ll try man, but you know me, I’ll probably screw it up. What do you need?”

“Earlier, at the table…” Five saw Klaus’s eyes widen at the mention. “You did see something. I did something that was not very smart. Which isn’t very common for me, since I’m usually the smartest person in the room.”

“Well that isn’t very hard right now,” Klaus said, looking around as if to make a point that he was the only other one in the room. “What could you have possibly done that I could fix?”

“This,” Five said, and he rolled down his left sleeve down to his elbow, revealing the bandages wrapped around his forearm, dark red blood seeping through, thickening and covering the bandage.

Five looked up at Klaus to gauge his reaction. Klaus’s eyes were even wider, and he didn’t know it was possible for someone to go so pale so fast without being physically injured, but he was seeing it on his brother’s face right now.

“Uhm…” Klaus took Five’s forearm in his hands, looking over the injury as much as he could without taking the bandage off. “That’s why you did your little jumpy thing with that knife? You… did this to yourself?”

Five made a face. “...Yeah.”

Klaus’s face got serious, if it wasn’t before. “Uhh, can I ask why the hell you would do that?” He peeled off the band aid that was holding the gauze so tightly and started to unwrap it, the wound stinging as it peeled away.

“Can I ask why you drown yourself in booze every night?” Five snapped back, which he knew wasn’t fair at all. Klaus wasn’t even drunk at the moment, and he hadn’t started on drugs at that point in his life. Well, maybe weed. But none of the hard stuff.

And Klaus asking why was only natural, he was concerned for Five’s safety. Still, Five wasn’t used to asking for help, and hadn’t asked for help from his siblings on pretty much any of the other times he’d time traveled since ending up in the apocalypse, which usually ended up hindering them in the long run.

So if he was being a bitch about it, his siblings should be happy he was asking at all.

Klaus sighed. “It’s because… the voices, they’re so-”

“Hey, stop that!” Five called out, and Klaus flinched, frozen in place where he was in the middle of unwrapping Five’s wound. “Don’t actually explain, then I’ll have to explain and I really don’t want to do that. I said that so you’d just shut up about my thing. Jeez.”

“Oh, okay,” Klaus said, averting his eyes and going back to unwrapping the wound. “I guess you don’t have to explain if you don’t want to.”

“You guess? Are you gonna help me or not?”

“Yeah, I’m gonna help you. You know, I have no idea when I became the doctor around here, but this reminds me of when Allison came to me last month about an injury she got on a mission that was in a place she uh, didn’t want Mom or Dad to look at, and she knew that if she told Mom about it, she’d ask to see-”

“Ew, gross, stop. I don’t wanna know about that, man.”

Klaus had gotten off all the gauze by then, and had crumpled it into a ball along with the band aid and thrown it behind him without a care where it landed. He was now examining the wound, which, now that the gauze wasn’t compressing it, was streaming blood. It came to the edge of his forearm, then dripped to the sleek wooden floors of the gym.

“No, no, I didn’t look at it, that’s why she came to me, because she knew I could just tell her what to do.”

“Still. Stop talking before I stick knives in my ears.”

“Whatever, whatever. You need stitches, man. Not a bandage. You should go to Mom.”

“No.” Five pulled his arm away from Klaus’s grip, narrowing his eyes. “She’ll tell Dad. And I can’t have that, for reasons I can’t tell you, but I promise it makes sense. I can’t go to Mom or Dad. I need you to fix this. Please,” he added.

“Fine, fine, Negative Nancy. I’m just saying Mom can do stitches way better. But if you’re okay with a crappy and probably pretty painful job, I can do them for you.”

Five nodded. “Just don’t tell Dad. Or I’ll tell him about the booze under your bed, and the weed in that shoebox at the back of your closet.”

“Woah.” Klaus put his hands up. “So this is an ‘I tell, you tell’ situation?”

Five smiled, and it was the kind of smile that if he’d done it during Klaus’s training setup, he would’ve been told off for making the children cry. “Exactly. And that includes Mom, Pogo, or anyone else who would tell Dad.”

“Okay, fine. I just need you to do your jumpy thing again and steal some things for me, ‘cause I’m kinda not allowed to leave the gym until curfew.”

After being stitched up and re-gauzed by Klaus, they’d done a few hours of training they’d set up deliberately to look hard, but that wasn’t actually that draining on Five’s condition, because they both knew Reginald could come in at any minute, and if he saw them slacking, they’d probably be forced to do extra training.

“Well,” Klaus said, stopping his training and stretching his back as the bell rang to signal curfew. “That wasn’t too hard, right?”

Five didn’t say anything, aware that he was breathing too hard, before the doors of the gym were breached.

“Children,” Sir Reginald said, striding in and tapping his cane on the ground. “Your punishment is over. It’s time to get to bed.”

“Yes, Sir,” Klaus said, speaking for both of them. Five still couldn’t quite catch his breath.

“Number Five,” Reginald called, turning to Five. “You’re in terrible shape. You must work on improving your form, if an exercise this long renders you so winded.”

Very aware that he was borderline wheezing, Five fixed a glare at Reginald, since they’d never been punished for ‘looking at him wrong’. Meeting his father’s steady gaze, he found no expression behind his eyes.

He watched his father turn around and leave the gym without a care in the world.

A few moments later, Five was able to catch his breath and follow Klaus out the door. They rounded the hall, walked through the dining area where it all started, and started up the stairs.

Klaus came to a stop in front of his own room, tapping Five on the shoulder to signal for him to stop too.

“What?” Five asked. He was, frankly, very tired, and he wanted nothing more than to sleep, but he stayed behind for the moment to hear his brother out.

“Um, most people get stitches immediately after they realize the bleeding isn’t stopping-”

“Keep your voice down!” Five whisper-shouted. Klaus being loud in the hallway right where everyone’s rooms were centered wasn’t a great idea when he was trying to keep this whole thing quiet. They could be easily overheard.

“Right,” Klaus said, lowering his voice significantly. At least he could listen to instructions. He could do a lot of things, actually, if you took his powers out of the picture entirely. Five knew now, the reason why he hated using them. He wouldn’t ask that kind of favor of him unless it was absolutely necessary.

“Most people get stitches pretty quickly,” Klaus continued in a near whisper. “If you wait more than, like, six or eight hours, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll get infected, which will be super gross and make everything much worse, and I can’t really fix something like that, so you’d need to go to Mom and then everyone will probably know about whatever it was you were trying to do for whatever reason, and it won’t be my fault because-”

“Klaus, were you getting to a point?”

“Yeah, it’s that if you did… that,” Klaus gestured to Five’s arm. The wound wasn’t visible under his dark sleeve, but he got the point. “...At lunch, then you waited at least six hours before asking for my help. So uh, I’d keep the bandage on top of it, try as hard as you can not to get it dirty, and hope to hell it doesn’t get infected. Uhh, that’s all. Toodles!” He gave a one handed wave, opening his door and disappearing into his room before Five could even reply.

With that information in mind, Five went into his room, changed into his pajamas and climbed into bed.

Day 2 of being Back(™)

November 12th, 2002

Five was startled awake by a blaring bell and someone pounding on his door. He jumped out from under the covers and threw open the door to see Luther, dressed in his Academy uniform and mask, Allison and Diego behind him, also suited up.

“What are you doing?” Luther asked, clearly in a hurry and not very happy to see Five still in his pajamas. “Everyone else is ready, get your clothes on!”

“Okay, give me forty five seconds!” Five said, kicking the door closed, hurrying to his closet to grab a uniform and mask and put it on. He noticed the dirty suit he’d arrived in was still in a pile on the floor, but he could handle that later.

After getting changed, he rushed down the stairs to the living room where the rest of his siblings were sitting in a neat row on the couch, Viktor in the corner practicing the violin, and Reginald stood in front of them, waiting to debrief them.

Chapter Text

Day 2 of being Back(™)

November 12th, 2002

Five’s siblings, with the exception of Viktor, who was practicing his violin in the corner of the room, were sharing two couches. They were sitting by number, Number One through Three on the first couch, Number Four and Six sitting on opposite sides of the second couch to leave space for Five in the middle.

He strode over to the couch and took the spot left for him. He was quite aware of the fact that he was the last one there, the role of which was usually taken by Klaus, sometimes Ben, but nobody said or did anything that indicated they noticed. You would almost think Luther, Diego, and Allison hadn’t woken him up by banging on his door and greeted him in indignation at his un-ready-ness.

“All right, children, listen up,” Reginald was saying. “This mission takes place at a marina an hour’s drive from here. Someone is expecting an illegal drug shipment two hours from now. You’ll be expected to stake out the place, apprehend the criminals, and alert the proper authorities so that they can be placed under arrest. It’s simple enough, you should be able to handle it without failure.”

Five wasn’t sure he would call that “simple enough”, but he wasn’t going to argue with his father after his punishment yesterday. Plus, they were going on a mission, so there would be criminals there he could direct his aggression to.

“Yes, Sir,” Luther said. “Do you know which boat is carrying the shipment?”

“It should be a yacht called ‘Daisy’, if my sources are correct.” Reginald looked over the children. “Well, then? If there’s nothing else, you should be off.”

An hour later, they stood on the curb of the cafe across the street from the marina, the van that had taken them there driving away. They’d grabbed breakfast on the way out to eat during the drive, changing into ordinary civilian clothing afterward so as to not draw attention. If anyone involved in the drug shipment noticed a bunch of costumed children near the marina after their very public entrance into the public eye, they could get suspicious, and then… who knew what they would do.

They walked through the doors of the cafe, hearing the gentle ding of the bell on the door. The air smelled like cinnamon and coffee, one of which was Five’s favorite smell. Allison walked up to the counter and requested the booth in the corner, since it was the only one that would be able to fit all six of them. They were pretty small kids, but this was also a pretty small cafe.

They sat down in the booth, like everything else in their life, in numerical order.

“So,” Diego said, leaning forward on his arms on the table. “What’s the plan, Number One?”

“I say we stakeout two at a time. It would be suspicious if a group of six teenagers were loitering at the marina, but if it’s just two of us together, we won’t draw as much attention.”

“Right. Good plan.”

“Ooh,” Klaus piped up. “If we get to pick our partners, I want Ben!”

“What? Why?” Ben asked, looking confused. “Did I do something to you?”

“No, it’s because you’re my favorite sibling! Why, do you consider being paired with me a horrible punishment?” Klaus pointed at Ben accusingly. “Is it because I bedazzled your uniform that one time?”

“I wouldn’t call what you did ‘bedazzling’. I still find glitter in my hair every once in a while.”

“I said I was sorry!”

“And I said I forgave you.”

“So why? Because I put peanut butter in your shoes?”

“That, I haven’t forgiven you for.”

“Ha! I knew it. You hate me.” Klaus threw his hands in the air dramatically, pretending to pout.

“Yeah, whatever.”

“I was thinking,” Luther interrupted, “that we could just go by number. Me with Diego, Allison with Klaus, and Five with Ben.”

Five felt a sense of wrongness, hearing his name spoken alongside his siblings’, like it was a normal list of names, with a random number mixed in. When the others had decided on their names, they seemed to know, “yeah, this name is me.” But no matter how many names, from whatever gender, country, or baby name website had been listed out to Five, he couldn’t seem to find one that felt like him. “Five” didn’t feel like him either, but he guessed he’d just use it as a placeholder once he found a name that fit, if he ever did.

Maybe he never would find one that made him feel like himself. After how long he’d spent lost in time, maybe he didn’t belong anywhere at all.

“Me with you?” Diego scoffed. “Yeah right, pal.”

“What, do you have a problem?”

“Hell yeah, I have a problem. I can’t stand you.”

“How you think of me shouldn’t affect your ability to do this mission.”

“It’s not about me being able to do it, I just don’t want to do it with you. Me doing this with Allison, Klaus, Five, or Ben wouldn’t make me do any worse.”

“And being with me would?”

“Yeah. You happen to suck. So if we’re trying to keep a ‘low profile’ or whatever, us getting into arguments won’t help-”

“You mean you being wrong.”

“Well, we’re arguing right now, so I’m clearly right, ac-tu-al-ly.” Diego said each syllable like its own word, crossing his arms and leaning back onto the seat.

Luther hadn’t changed his position since he sat down, his only reaction to the argument being his exasperated expression. “Dad appointed me as Number One-”

“Right, how could I forget? It’s not like you remind us every five seconds!”

“Fine, it doesn’t matter who goes with who. Happy? Who would you rather go with?”

Diego shrugged. “Anyone but you.”

“I can go with you,” Five offered, before he even realized he’d opened his mouth.

“Great. Yeah, sure.”

“Perfect,” Luther said. “So if Ben and Klaus are going together, that leaves me with Allison?”

Allison looked over at Luther. “Sounds good to me.”

Everyone else was silent, so Luther clapped his hands together. “So we agree then. Allison and I will go out first. Can you four handle yourselves until we get back?”

“Oh, no,” Diego said dramatically. “Twenty minutes without you? How could we possibly survive?” He rolled his eyes.

Luther eyed Diego. “Well, there seems to be a trend of me leaving, followed by theft of some kind, usually by Klaus or Five. I would rather us not be criminals.”

“We won’t steal anything,” Ben said. “I promise.”

“All right, if you say so. But be on your best behavior, please. If I come back and you guys have stolen something, I won’t be very happy.”

“Oh, boo-hoo, man,” Klaus said, waving his hand like he was swatting away a particularly annoying fly.

“Shut up, Klaus,” Ben said.

“No, I don’t give a shit whether I hurt Luther’s precious little feelings.”

“I will tell Dad if you steal something,” Luther said, getting up from his seat and motioning for Allison to do so as well. Them being in a booth, Diego had to stand up to let her out.

“Okay, maybe I do care, just a teensy little bit. We won’t be criminals, okay, byeee!” Klaus waved to them as they left the cafe.

“Pathetic,” Diego huffed as soon as the doors shut. “‘I’m gonna tell Dad’, he sounds like a six year old. Fucking ridiculous. Why doesn’t he just go back into diapers if he’s gonna act like such a baby?”

“I agree,” Klaus said, standing up. “Let’s go commit some theft.”

“Could have been said without swearing,” Ben said.

“I swore once,” Diego snapped back.

Before his siblings could start any more arguments, Five had already warped out of his seat to the counter, scaring the daylights out of the barista. “Four coffees, please.”

“Uh…” The barista walked over to the register, looking nervous after being startled. “W-would you like anything in them?”

“I’ll have mine black.” He looked over to his siblings in the booth, gesturing for them to come over. “They can tell you what they want.”

“Okay…” She started tapping something on the screen.

When his siblings walked over, they gave their orders to the barista, who started making their coffees.

The four siblings had thrown away any trash before Luther and Allison came back, so there was no evidence that they’d ordered anything, or that they were planning to “dine and dash”, as the cool kids called it.

Except, maybe, for the fact that Klaus was bouncing fervently on the seats, his face alight and hair flailing around in the air. He wasn’t sitting down– he was fully upright, feet propelling him nearly to the ceiling with each bounce, the way one would do on a hotel bed or trampoline. Not that Five would do that kinda thing in the hotels when he worked for the Commission.

Okay, maybe he did. But it didn’t happen more than maybe seven times.

It was a wonder that the barista hadn’t told him off yet, but Five supposed kids had come into restaurants to do far worse, and more disruptive, activities. Plus, there was only one other booth occupied, and it was by a young blonde woman who didn’t seem to care. He assumed that, if she were to complain, Klaus and his siblings would get told off or kicked out.

“You look… energized,” Luther noted. “What’s up?”

“Just excited for my turn.” Klaus threw two punches into the air, then jumped one final time, higher than all the other jumps, landing on the ground. He threw his hands out to either side and bowed. “I’m so ready to fight bad guys.”

“We should probably let him and Ben go next,” Five suggested, “or he might actually combust.”

He looked over at Klaus with interest, the likes of whom had moved from turning the booth cushions into a trampoline to running laps around the tile floor. It was obvious that, while he could gulp down inordinate amounts of booze every night and appear fine in the morning, he couldn’t handle caffeine whatsoever.

Five supposed he should have known that; in this timeline, they hadn’t even had any kind of caffeine before this point, and here he was being irresponsible and buying them all coffee. If he looked over at the table at the other siblings, he could see that they weren’t really “handling” it either.

Ben was trembling in his seat from the adrenaline, keeping his hands busy– brushing his hair out of his face, scratching his nose, picking his teeth, et cetera– in an attempt to hide it.

Diego was shifting his position every few seconds, tapping his fingers on the seat with pent up energy. Five could tell his body wanted to be doing what Klaus was doing, if just to release some of that energy, but Diego wouldn’t be caught dead dancing around like a maniac.

Five, unlike the rest of them, was perfectly used to caffeine, and it didn’t make him feel any different than he usually did, except a little less tired. Despite what he’d thought yesterday about how his punishment was going to be a piece of cake, it had ended up being incredibly draining.

He hated to admit it more than anything in the world, but his father had been right. He was in terrible shape, and he needed to fix that before he wore himself out. Maybe it was the coffee; he’d heard of it having adverse effects on your health, but one of Reginald’s biggest rules was no coffee, and Five wasn’t gonna let him be right about this one too, so he was going to continue to drink it. If not to spite him, then because it was good, and it made him feel good.

“All right,” Ben said, sliding out of his seat. He didn’t have to maneuver past anyone because he was sitting at the end, so there was no one blocking his way. “Let’s go, Klaus.” He gestured his head toward the doors.

Klaus perked up at his name being mentioned, running over to Ben and grabbing onto his arm. “Yay! It’s because I’m super capable, right?” he asked as he skipped away, dragging Ben along.

“Yeah, sure,” Ben replied, and that was the last Five heard from them as they disappeared out of the door.

“Okay,” Luther said. “Five, what did you do?”

Five huffed in response, crossing his arms and resting his feet on the table. “Why do you think I did something? Am I the problem child now? Here, I thought that was Klaus.”

“Aside from the fact that Klaus was bouncing off the walls and Ben was shaking like… whatever things vibrate.”

Diego smirked.

“Shut up, Diego.”

“I didn’t say anything!”

“You were going to.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“Yes, you were. You have the dirtiest mind out of all of us.”

“You have never talked to Klaus for longer than thirty seconds.”

“He doesn’t need a whole thirty seconds to make a sexual joke,” Five added unhelpfully.

Luther waved a hand in the air. “Never mind that,” he said. “You obviously stole coffee again. And this time you gave some to them. You know Dad doesn’t like us drinking coffee, and you’re committing a literal crime because you never pay for it when you do.”

“I paid for it,” Five lied.

Luther raised his eyebrows. “Really?”

“Found some cash on the ground outside.”

“Enough for four coffees?”

“It was a twenty dollar bill.”

“All right… And what did you do with the change?”

“Well, I was gonna ask for it back, but Ben told her to keep the change before I could say anything, since he’s like… the total opposite of an asshole.”

“Wow, you really can’t compliment people,” Diego noted.

Luther sighed, face palming. “Five, I hope Ben says the same thing when I ask him once he comes back.”

“He will, because that’s what happened.”

“Right, sure. I will choose to believe that,” Luther relented as he sat down next to Diego. “So, nothing suspicious happened here?”

“Nope. You?”

“No sign of Daisy. There was this weird guy in a suit and tie, though, just standing there… suspiciously.”

“He was standing suspiciously?” Diego asked, incredulous. “What did he do, look at you wrong? Did he have a stupid haircut, like someone else we know?”

“Why do people keep saying that?” Luther asked, running a hand through his hair. “My hair isn’t stupid, is it, Allison?”

Allison, the only person in the room who hadn’t previously called his hair stupid, looked at Luther. When she opened her mouth, it was to say, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

She turned around and walked to the other side of the cafe where the restroom was, leaving Luther saying, “...Seriously??”

He looked at his other two siblings in exasperation. Five avoided his gaze, saying, “Me too,” and following Allison. When he caught up to her, he put a hand on her arm to stop her.

“What?” she asked. “I called the bathroom first, wait your turn.”

“No, I– can I ask you a favor?”

Allison blinked at him, expressionless. “What?”

Five looked at the tiles on the wall behind Allison. “I uh, didn’t actually pay for those coffees.”

“No shit,” Allison said, then looked around like she’d said something that would get her in trouble. “I mean, obviously. You’re pretty easy to read.”

“Really?” Five asked. No one had said that to him in decades, not after his years in the apocalypse, with the Commission, and his rounds through time to try and stop the apocalypse. He assumed he’d cultivated some pretty good lying skills by then, but apparently a thirteen-year-old Allison could see right through him.

It was a pretty small thing, everything considered. But if she could catch on to him not buying coffee, what else could she figure out?

“Yeah,” Allison said. “For me. When you have the power of suggestion, you learn to know what people are suggesting. You know?”

“Yeah. Well, no. My power… there’s not really anything you learn to find.” Other than unimaginable horror and tragedy, he supposed, but he didn’t say that part out loud.

“That makes sense. So what favor did you want?”

“Could you rumor the barista into thinking we already paid for our stuff?”

Allison raised her eyebrows. “And, what would I get out of it?”

“Uh… you could ask the barista to get you a coffee too?”

Allison shook her head. “I could do that anyway. What’s something you can give me?”

Five scoffed, looking away. Young Allison was a little bit of a bitch. Maybe a fraction of the little bitch Luther was, but even that was saying a lot. When he asked Klaus for a favor, he’d complied without asking for anything in return, though maybe that was because Five threatened to tell Reginald.

“I’ll let you paint my nails,” he offered. Allison would change a lot in the coming years, but the one thing she stayed true to was her love for all things makeup. She was always hunting down either Klaus or Ben to give makeovers and practice her skills on, the former of which actually enjoying it, and Ben only agreeing to be polite.

“And do your makeup,” Allison countered.

“And do my makeup,” Five said. “Fine.”

“Fine,” Allison repeated, nodding. “I’m just gonna pee first.”

She disappeared behind the bathroom door, leaving Five to wait outside, because it was going to look weird if he said he had to use the bathroom, then just talked to Allison and came back.

When she was done with the bathroom, Five waited until he could see Allison walking up to the barista before going in.

When he came back, Allison was sipping on a coffee and Luther was glaring at him.

“What?” Five asked, sitting down.

Luther pushed his hair behind his ears. “What did I tell you about caffeine, Five?”

Five shrugged. “Looks to me like Allison got that coffee of her own volition.” He wanted to say all the swear words he knew, as did come with speaking to Luther, but he didn’t, because he had an ounce of self control.

“After you talked to her outside of the bathroom.”

“I was just telling her not to use the soap dispenser. When you two were gone, I tried to use it, but it was broken.”

“Okay, if you say so. But you did give Diego, Ben and Klaus coffee they didn’t ask for.”

“They didn’t seem all that upset about free coffee.”

“Did you see Klaus-”

“Oh, gee, we’re revisiting this conversation.”

“I guess so, since you didn’t seem to understand earlier. He was practically bouncing off the walls. How is he supposed to be doing a stakeout– which is a stealth mission, if you didn’t know– if he’s busy running laps around the dock?”

“Luther, you fucking knucklehead. You underestimate how much people are suspicious of literal children. It’s one of our greatest advantages, actually. Being annoying and energetic? That is normal child behavior.”

“Klaus is thirteen, not six! And we were never normal children, we’re the Umbrella Academy.”

“Wow, I had no idea!” Five stood up, not wanting to deal with this anymore. Yesterday, it had felt good to just hang out with his siblings and goof around. But he’d forgotten how much they fucking argued. “Luther, are you a robot?”

Luther blinked. “What?”

“No, I’m serious. It’s like you have the same handful of pre-recorded phrases, and you can only say those phrases. ‘We’re the Umbrella Academy’, ‘Dad made me Number One,’ ‘Dad said’, this, ‘Dad said’, that-”

“Five!”

“What?” Five stopped, blinking a few times. He’d been leaning forward more and more for each argument he spewed out. One hand was on the table supporting his weight, the other pointing accusingly at Luther.

“Stop acting like a child!”

“You stop acting like an adult! News flash, you aren’t one, and you sure as hell aren’t any older than the rest of us, so shut the fuck up and stop being a rules lawyer before I do something about it!”

“Oh?” Luther stood up, and Five was suddenly looking up at him instead of down at him. “What are you gonna do about it?”

Five glanced at his other two siblings. They were staring intently, eyes wide; Allison’s mouth was hanging slightly open and Diego was whispering something to her, looking excited.

“I’ll stab you with the screwdriver in my pocket.”

“You don’t have a screwdriver.”

“Are you sure?” Five asked. “Would you bet your dignity on that, asshole?”

“Even if you did stab me, it wouldn’t hurt. I have super strength, remember?”

“Nobody likes you,” Five said, surprising everyone, including himself. “Did you know that? We all talk about you behind your back. About how you’re just like Dad. And I don’t know about you, but we don’t need another one of those.”

Allison put a hand over her mouth, eyes wider than they previously had been. Diego bit his lip, though whether it was to hide a smirk or a frown, Five couldn’t tell.

“Really?” Luther asked, and the question seemed sincere. No, scratch that. It was sincere, no doubt about it. He sat back down, his expression morphing from anger to hurt. “Okay, if you all hate me that much. You must be right.” He put his hands on the table, decidedly not taking his eyes off them.

When Ben and Klaus got back, everyone was eerily silent. Not a word had been said after Luther and Five’s argument. Allison would occasionally send worried looks at Luther and almost-glares at Five. Diego wasn’t looking anywhere in particular, especially not at Five. Luther was still staring at his hands.

“All right!” Klaus said. “That was a success! I think…” He looked around at Luther, Diego, Allison, and Five. “Uhh, what the heck happened here? Did someone let slip about last night? Because I promise I was just-”

“Klaus,” Ben interrupted. “Shut up.” He appeared to be the only one here with common sense. Maybe, once Five left, Ben would be able to fix whatever Five broke. It would be annoying if Luther hated him now; that would lead to more drama, which could lead to more complications, which could lead to the end of the world as they knew it.

The butterfly effect was crazy that way.

Five got up, ready to leave. Apparently nothing newsworthy happened during Ben and Klaus’s turn, because neither of them offered up information. Diego, instead of asking Luther to move, climbed into the booth next to theirs and onto the ground.

The two of them left, out of the cafe doors and across the street to the marina. There were only three docks, one small boat docked. It was unknown how long that had been there, but Five guessed it wasn’t the one they were looking for.

There was a bench at either side of the marina, one of them occupied by a guy in a suit and tie, wearing dark tinted sunglasses and having short, flat hair that had to have a bottle and a half of hair gel in it. He stared straight ahead, unmoving.

Diego and Five took the bench not occupied by the other person. Five looked straight ahead, not saying anything, Diego doing the same.

It went on like that for a good few minutes before Diego broke the silence. “You shouldn’t have said that.”

“Why not?” Five asked, leaning back on the bench so that his legs were stretched out instead of flat on the ground, and he was looking up at the sky. Fuck, it was so blue. Back in the apocalypse, he hadn’t seen one of those for years, smoke from the explosion of Earth coating the sky so deeply that all he knew was a muddy gray. The first time he’d seen stars, he cried. He really did.

“Usually when we pick on him, he knows we’re kidding.”

“You’re kidding? Are you sure about that? Because last time I checked, you hated his goddamn guts. What gives? What- what changed that you’re suddenly-”

“Nothing changed.” Diego scoffed. “At least, he thinks we’re kidding. You know, Five, there’s a lotta stuff we do when we’re goofing around that Luther doesn’t understand, so he just- he just plays along. And I think, when we insult him, he thinks that’s just us joking around too.”

“Or he just wants to think that, so he doesn’t have to face the fact that he’s a raging asshole.”

“That too,” Diego said, and by the sound of his voice there might’ve been a small smile on his face. “He doesn’t seem to understand why we don’t like him.”

“Well, he thinks Dad is a likable person, so I wouldn’t exactly run full steam ahead on his judgment. Or, in other words, he’s a fucking idiot, so no wonder he doesn’t get it. The only thing he knows how to do is exactly what Dad tells him to.”

“He is Number One,” Diego said, and then laughed out loud. “Oh god, I can’t believe I just said that. Do you know how many times a day he reminds everyone? Never thought I’d say that unironically.”

“First time for everything, I suppose.”

“Anyway, my point is, what would you do in his situation? I mean, what would- what would you do if you were Number One?”

“Probably tell Dad he can fuck off,” Five said, and he knew he was lying.

Maybe back then, when he was thirteen years old, before he time traveled to the end of the Earth and back and then some. When he was an arrogant child, and he believed he could make this world his bitch, he would have thought that if he was Number One, he would tell his father exactly where he could stick his stupid rules. But if he were born Number One, with the same personality he had now, the path of his life would probably be a little more similar to Luther’s than he would have liked.

But of course, in the point of view of his siblings, nothing had changed at all on November 11th, 2002, and Five was still the same arrogant thirteen-year-old he’d always been. And if his self important cruelty and egotistical arrogance was washed away, replaced by a rage at himself and the wrongness of the world, well, he could keep that part to himself. Either way, it was still an anger that resulted in violence, that resulted in him being a little mean.

Okay, maybe a lot mean.

So he would have to act like he always did. Or at least, like he used to.

Diego chuckled. “Typical.”

Five lifted his head up, leveling a look at Diego. “What does that mean?”

“Uh, I think you know what it means.”

“Yeah, whatever, I’m a big meanie.” Five rolled his eyes.

“You are.”

“I am not.”

“Yuh-huh.”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Yuh-HUH. So there.”

“You’re so immature.”

Diego stuck his tongue out.

Five rolled his eyes. “Get a grip.”

“That’s not what you said when Luther was worrying about Klaus being too hyper at the stakeout.”

“You mean when he was being a bitch.” Five raised his eyebrows. “Unlike him, I know how to make a joke, so-”

“You don’t feel bad at all, do you?”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“I don’t know. I feel the same way you do, but you just keep insulting him, even- even though you know you hurt his feelings. Like, really hurt his feelings. More… more than the usual amount.”

“Yeah, well, he deserves it.”

“Does he?”

“Yeah, he does, Diego.”

“You’re probably right.”

“And I’m not apologizing.”

“I expected as much. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you apologize in your life.”

“Nope. Not a genuine apology, anyway.” Five smiled. Yup, this was classic Five. The insensitive one.

“How much do you wanna bet Ben has already smoothed everything over?”

“I can’t bet anything, sadly. I already had to get Allison to rumor the barista into thinking we already paid for the coffee.”

“Oh? And what do you owe her now?” They both knew Allison didn’t do things for free.

She didn’t keep secrets for free, either. He’d have to stay away from her in case she were to find out anything she shouldn’t.

“She gets to use me as a model for her makeup.”

Diego snickered. “Aw, you get to join Klaus and Ben.”

“Shut up. It’s a one time thing.”

“Did she say that?”

“N… Not exactly.” Oh. Oops.

“Ha ha!” Diego clapped his hands together. “You’re stuck with this now.”

“Whatever, it doesn’t matter. There’s nothing wrong with wearing makeup.”

“I never said there was. Just didn’t seem like something you’d do.”

“I don’t have time for that kind of stuff.”

“Well, you do now. Or else Allison’s gonna tell Luther about your little theft, and Luther’s gonna tell Dad, and he won’t be very happy about that.”

“And he’ll let me know exactly how unhappy he is.” Five sighed. “Damn it.”

“Hey, it’s not so bad. I think you’ll look amazing.”

“Then why don’t you just let her do your makeup every once in a while?”

“Eh, not my kinda thing. I mean, if I had a daughter or something, I’d let them put their makeup on me, but with a sibling it feels kinda weird to me. I dunno. But she can just ask any of you anyway.”

“Yeah. And now she can ask me whenever she wants, because she has something to hold over me.”

“That’s the spirit! Hey, is that..?”

Five followed Diego’s gaze, over to a white yacht that was pulling into one of the docks, the word “Daisy” painted on the side in big, black cursive letters.

“I think that’s our target,” Five said, straightening in his seat. He looked over to the guy in the suit and sunglasses, who was staring at the boat. “I mean, A-plus for subtlety.”

“Yeah, a guy in a suit and tie meeting a yacht at a dingy little marina? That sure as hell isn’t a coincidence. We should probably keep an eye on him.”

“I’ll tell the others to come down. Don’t do anything stupid.”

Five warped into the cafe, right in front of the booth his siblings were sitting at. They all jumped, startled by his sudden appearance, but got over themselves quickly.

“Daisy’s here. Come on, let’s go!”

He waited until he could see that Luther, Allison, Klaus, and Ben were all rushing to get up from their seats before warping back to the marina, right next to the bench. He didn’t see Diego at first, so he looked around before spotting him talking to another man, who was tying down the yacht.

This man was the polar opposite of the guy in the suit and sunglasses, at least appearance-wise. He wore a white shirt stained brown with who knows what, faded and ripped blue jeans and a baseball cap. His face was round, yet harsh. Diego seemed to be having a civil conversation with him, just standing near him while he tied the boat to the dock, but who knew how fast the conversation would turn sour.

Five strode over, the conversation coming into earshot.

Diego was asking, “So, that your yacht, or did you steal it from someone else?”

“What are you saying, pal? That I look like a criminal to you?”

Diego lifted a hand to brush a strand of hair out of his face. “I don’t know. Kinda, I guess.”

The man finished tying down the boat and pulled the rope tight, letting it go in favor of putting his hands on his hips. “You don’t know anything, kid. What are you even doing here alone, anyway? Where are your parents?”

“Uh… long story. So what’s on that boat?”

“Why do you care?”

“Because I heard that you were bringing in drugs. Isn’t that illegal?”

The man’s expression morphed into angry surprise. “And where the hell did you hear THAT?” He took a step toward Diego.

“Hi there,” Five said, coming to a stop in between Diego and the man. “Why don’t we skip the small talk and get to the part where I tear you apart, slowly, limb from limb, and you tell me exactly what it is you’re doing here just to get the pain to stop? Because it was terribly boring scoping out the area for the last hour and waiting for you to get here.”

“Like you could even lay a hand on me, you scrawny–” The man paused, some sort of realization coming across his face. “You’re Number Five, aren’t you?”

“You recognized me?” Five put a hand to his chest. “Wow, you must be such a big fan of the Umbrella Academy! Which are right over there, by the way. They’re gonna hold you down for me.”

All three people looked behind them, to where Luther, Allison, Klaus, and Ben were running across the street. A few seconds later, they arrived at the marina, coming up to the dock where Diego and Five were standing.

“This is the guy?” Allison asked. “Who was driving the boat?”

Five nodded, but the man scoffed. “I wasn’t driving no boat.”

“Marty, what’s going on out there?” A head popped out of the cabin of the yacht, a woman with shoulder length hair. She climbed up onto the dock alongside the man– Marty, she’d called him– and put a hand on her hip. Her clothes were slightly less dirty than Marty’s. “Who are these kids?”

Marty looked back at the woman, his eyebrows dangerously close together. “They’re the Umbrella Academy,” he replied, sighing.

“Oh, shit. That’s really annoying.” She took out a gun.

Allison cleared her throat. “I heard a rumor– augh!”

Marty interrupted her with a punch to the face. “This bitch has mind control! Don’t let her say anything to ya!”

The woman turned to him. “Well, that’s great that you’re the ultimate fanboy, but what about the others?”

While she was distracted, Five warped up to her, wrenched the gun from her hand before she could react, and warped back to where he was standing next to Diego. “Nice gun,” he commented, putting it in his back pocket.

“That one teleports!” Marty yelled out.

“No shit! What does that one do?” The woman asked, pointing at Diego.

Diego blinked. “Uh– this.” He pulled a knife out of his pocket, since he didn’t have a tool belt with his ordinary civilian clothing, and threw it at the woman. She threw herself to the ground to avoid being hit, but its trajectory changed midair and it took a U-turn, embedding itself in her thigh.

“What the FUCK!” She yelled, rolling onto her side and pulling herself up using the side of the yacht as support. She gripped the knife in her thigh, pulling it out with a shout, ignoring the gush of blood from the wound, and lunging toward Allison.

Allison let out a yelp as she was tackled, but couldn’t fight back because the woman’s arm was around her neck, and when she steadied herself, her knife was at Allison’s throat.

“Nobody moves,” The woman said, backing into the yacht to hold herself up as she held Allison against her. “Or she gets it.” She maneuvered her head so that her mouth was up against Allison’s ear and said, “And don’t you try to control my mind. Speak, and this knife plunges into your neck, and your siblings get to watch the red stain your shirt, and the dock, and… well, everything else in the general vicinity.”

Allison let out a small gasp, her eyes wide and body rigid, probably trying not to provoke her captor. Usually, in these kinds of situations, the Academy would use Allison to rumor the bad guy into letting the hostage go. But now she was the hostage, and she wasn’t allowed to speak without getting her throat slit.

Well, this sucked.

At this point, all of the Umbrellas had frozen in place at the woman’s command, not wanting their sister to get injured or killed by the madwoman in front of them. Ben, Klaus, and Luther had all put their hands up. Diego had a hand on one of his knives, but he didn’t look like he was going to try to throw it. Five wouldn’t advise it, either.

Five had worked a good handful of missions like this– that turned into hostage situations– for the Commission. He knew that, in general, the odds were highly in favor of the hostage. But it got murky when the stakes were higher, and most of the situations for that data were a hostage being locked in a room or something like that, where the chances of the captor actually becoming a killer were low.

Right now, Allison had a knife right against her throat, and from Five’s experience in reading body language in settings like this, there was a high probability this woman was going to kill her if anyone took another step forward.

But Five had a gun in his hand. And it wasn’t possible to slit someone’s throat if you were dead.

“Hey,” Luther said, hands still up. “We can talk about this.”

The woman shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Listen, let’s just start with names. That’s easy, right? Mine’s Luther, what’s yours?”

“Sam.”

“Okay, Sam. Nice to meet you. Um… what will it take for you to let my sister go?”

“Hm, not much. Just that you get out of here and never come back. But… now that you know our names, and have seen our faces, I don’t think I can let any of you live.”

“And how do you expect that to go, Sam?” Ben asked next to Luther.

“Yeah, I really don’t think you can take us,” Klaus added, then went silent at a glare from Ben.

Sam made a movement that was probably supposed to be a shrug, but since her arms were busy holding a hostage, she ended up just moving her shoulders slightly and tilting her head. “You’ll report us to the police, get us arrested. We can’t have that.”

“We have a good business here,” Marty said. “There’s no way we’re trading this yacht for a jail cell.”

“Well, good news!” Five said. “You don’t have to do that either.” In one fluid motion, he took the gun out of his back pocket, leveled it at Sam, and pulled the trigger in less than a second.

The bullet hole appeared right between her eyes. She let go of Allison and the knife as her body went slack, careening to the side and falling face down onto the dock. Allison opened her mouth, and it looked like she should be screaming, but no sound came out.

She stepped away from Sam’s body, putting a hand over her mouth, and Luther approached her to wrap his arms around her.

Five turned to Marty. “Now, what do I do with you? I was thinking, maybe instead of tearing you apart, I could just cut off your eyelids. Far more painful, and much less… time consuming than the first option. Diego, can I borrow-”

Marty interrupted him by throwing a punch, like he’d done with Allison. Five warped out of the way before it could land, appearing behind him just in time to watch him stumble and correct himself.

“Don’t make a fool out of yourself, man.”

“You killed her! YOU KILLED SAM!” He aimed a kick at Five, which he easily dodged.

“Yeah, I did do that. With her own gun, too.” He waved the gun around. “How embarrassing for her. And you, because I’m gonna do the same to you. Honestly, I came to my decision. I’m not gonna torture you at all. Not worth my time.”

He shot Marty in the leg. He fell to one knee with a loud groan. Five aimed the gun at his head.

“FIVE!” Ben called out to him.

Five looked around. Sam was dead and bleeding on the floor. Luther was still hugging Allison, who was now using both hands to cover her entire face. Klaus stood back at the beginning of the dock, watching the combat, since he’d never been that good at it. Ben and Diego were standing at either side of Five, waiting to step into combat, but it wasn’t very necessary.

“What?” Five asked, gun still trained on Marty, who was making fierce eye contact and bleeding out from the gunshot in his leg into a puddle below him.

“Stop it, please,” Ben said, and Five noticed his face was pale. “We don’t kill people.”

Wait, what? They didn’t kill people?

Oh, shit.

They didn’t kill people.

This was back when the Academy hadn’t racked up any kills. And even when they had, they’d been accidental. The Umbrella Academy didn’t kill criminals, they just apprehended them for the police to arrest. They could be as violent as they wanted, as long as they didn’t commit murder. Five always thought it was a stupid rule, but it was a rule nonetheless.

It was one of the only rules that hadn't been implemented by Reginald, but that the Academy as a whole went by because of their moral code or whatever. Add that to the amount of skill Five had just used, and he understood why his siblings were terrified.

They’d only been doing missions for barely over a month at this point in time, and were still a little rusty at taking down bad guys. Or in simpler words, they were horrible at it.

And Five had just taken out both of these criminals nearly by himself within a few minutes of approaching them, one of which he’d murdered in cold blood.

Yeah, that was probably a little bit suspicious.

Five lowered the gun, instead hitting Marty over the head with it, rendering him unconscious, but not killing him. There, his siblings should be happy. Except for the part where he'd killed a woman just a minute before.

“I, uh… I’m sorry,” Five said stupidly, looking Ben in the eyes. He looked either concerned, sad, or scared, and Five couldn’t tell which one. Maybe all three. He walked over to Five, standing in between him and the unconscious Marty.

Before he could think of what to say, he was startled by an explosion.

He jumped back, expecting the world to catch on fire, but it didn’t. His ears were ringing at the sound. When he looked up and spotted the red dot appearing in the middle of Ben’s head, he realized it wasn’t an explosion at all.

It was a gunshot.

Ben fell to the ground, landing on his side, his head turned at an odd angle, staring sightlessly at the sky. One arm was outstretched, the other folded awkwardly under him, one of his legs bent.

When the blood started trickling out of the wound, it was obvious that he was very dead.

Standing behind Ben’s body was the guy who had been sitting at the bench for the last hour, dressed in a suit and tie and sunglasses and hair with a ridiculous amount of hair gel. When Diego and Five had been sitting on the bench across the marina, the whole getup had appeared silly, but now, to Five, it was ominous and threatening.

This person could murder a child in cold blood, and Ben hadn’t even done anything in the fight to deserve being killed. He hadn't hurt anyone.

The suit-and-sunglasses guy sighed, adjusting his sunglasses. “Must I do everything by myself?”

Chapter Text

Day 2 of being Back(™)

November 12th, 2002

Time travel was one Hell of a crapshoot. Five couldn’t deny that, as much as he wanted to. He had gotten that drilled into his head a long time ago, back when he fucked himself into spending forty-five years in the apocalypse and again after that, when he accidentally warped him and his siblings into the sixties. Screwing with the fabric of time always came with side effects.

The side effect of this particular feat was that, while he was reversing time and no one around him would remember Ben dying horrifically in front of them, he would. In fact, he had to watch it again, this time in reverse. When time flew in reverse, it was a strange feeling, as if he were riding in a vehicle that he could tell was going in one direction, but then he looked out the window, and it looked like they were going the opposite way. It was fast, like a whirling vortex, but at the same time, it was agonizingly slow. He saw everything, from the twitching of Ben’s body to the light returning to his eyes as his limbs lifted up into the air, followed by his body. The movement was unnatural, like he was a marionette being puppeteered to stand up. The blood splattering the ground floated into the air and back into the gaping space in the middle of his forehead, the bullet coming out of it and moving backward across the marina back into the gun. Then everything was smoothed over, like it had never happened in the first place, and Ben was breathing, blinking, existing, staring at him. Like he was an animal in a cage.

He hadn’t watched Ben die the first time, but now that he had, he would remember it forever.

“FIVE!” Ben called out to him.

Marty was still conscious, brought to his knees by the wound in his leg. He stared down the barrel of the gun in Five’s hand, and Five knew what he had to do.

“I’m sorry,” he said, a little less stupidly this time, and he pulled the trigger. Then he turned around to where the suit-and-sunglasses guy was. He’d just begun standing up at the sound of a gunshot. Five leveled the gun to right about where his head should be and shot him too, the bullet flying across the marina and finding its home in the middle of the bridge of his nose. He watched him collapse on the ground, looking back to double check that Marty was dead too.

He couldn’t leave anyone alive. Couldn’t take that chance. Not again.

“Five..?” Ben asked. His mouth was gaping. “What did you just do?” There was something in Ben’s voice that Five had never heard before. Something like abject horror.

“What I had to.”

“You really didn’t have to do that, man,” Diego said, still at Five’s other side. Klaus still stood at the beginning of the dock, not moving an inch, eyes wide. From where Luther was hugging Allison, soft crying could be heard.

Five balled his hands into fists to mask the trembling. He was feeling a lot of things, but they all mixed together into pure adrenaline. Stupid. How could he be so stupid? How did he let all that happen? How could he let Ben get killed again? How could he forget that the Umbrella Academy didn’t kill? Why did he remember that last minute, yet kill those three criminals anyway?

No, that last question, he had an answer to. He killed them because he had to. After that day he got stuck in the apocalypse for forty five years and everything that happened after that, he’d become desensitized to death and killing. Working for the commission, he’d racked up several kills a day on a good week. And if killing three people erased just a distant possibility that one of his siblings would get killed, he would take that chance no matter how much he rewound time.

So if his siblings were suspicious of him, if they were scared of him, if they hated him, he was okay with that. As long as they were alive and okay.

Five exhaled, putting the gun back in his pocket. This was going to be a long day.

The best thing to do in this situation was probably to pretend nothing happened at all. This wasn’t a thing people needed to remember or think about or be concerned about, because it was just a one-time thing. A freak accident.

“Um… Five?” Ben asked. He was looking at him like, Why are you just standing there? “Are- are you okay?”

Leave it to Ben to be concerned instead of angry with him. Luther would sure as hell be angry– that, he would bet on. Five looked over at Luther, who was still hugging Allison, his back to Five, as if nothing was happening. He probably couldn’t even bear to look at him now. If Ben had done anything to fix the rift between the two of them, it was all undone and more.

“Yeah, I’m good,” Five said. “I feel amazing, actually.” He rolled his eyes. “Come on, mission’s over. Let’s go.”

Ben paused, slowly blinking the confusion out of his eyes, then seemed to make an attempt at sidelining his concerns, at least for the moment. “Yeah, sure. Uh– where’s Klaus?”

Five looked around. Klaus was no longer at the beginning of the dock. Actually, he was nowhere to be seen.

“Klaus!” Diego called out. “Klaus, get out here! We’re leaving!”

Five looked at the cafe. That was probably where he went. Five started to walk over there, getting ready to warp, when Diego said, “Oh, there you are.”

When Five turned around, Klaus was jumping over the railing of the yacht onto the dock.

“You were on the yacht?” Ben asked. “Why?”

Klaus put his hands on his hips. “I had to go to the bathroom, okay? The drive back home is, like, an hour-”

“There was a bathroom in the cafe.”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot. Anyway, it was all the way across the street.”

“We were going across the street anyway.”

“Well, I figured the boat had a bathroom, and it was way closer, so that’s probably more convenient than going in the cafe if you think about it.”

“That boat was driven by criminals, Klaus. And they were bringing in a drug shipment. You had no idea what could have been in there!”

Klaus shrugged. “Anyway, what were we– oh, are we leaving? Great, let’s go!” He turned to the cafe where the van was parked and started running toward it.

Diego sighed. “Klaus, you are such a moron.”

The siblings followed him across the street and into the van that had brought them here, Pogo in the driver’s seat. After they all got settled and buckled in, he started driving.

“So, how did the mission go?” Pogo asked, adjusting the rear-view mirror.

At the children’s silence, he took a closer look, seeming to notice the semi-haunted look on most of their faces and the tears running down Allison’s. That was fair, Five supposed. They hadn’t witnessed death yet, and they were in the wake of watching the cold-blooded murder of three people.

Oops.

“Oh, dear,” Pogo said. “What’s wrong, children?”

Klaus laughed, and it was far too high-pitched to be genuine. “Oh, don’t bother with them, they’re just being dramatic. I mean, it’s just a little itty bit of death, I mean, what’s the big deal? Try having my powers, death is kinda just a Sunday brunch for me. I wouldn’t worry about it, they’ll get over it. Eventually. Probably. Maybe. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

“You don’t sound fine, Master Klaus,” Pogo noted, his eyes narrowing slightly but still looking at the road. He didn’t mention the “little itty bit of death” part.

Klaus was gripping the underside of his seat with such force that Five was surprised it hadn’t detached from the van altogether. “Me? No, no, I’m cool as a cucumber. Do you want me to make a pinky promise? Because I can make a pinky promise if you need me to.”

“One mustn’t distract oneself when on the road. I’ll just take your word for it.”

“Okay, okay, cool. So what kind of music do you-”

“Klaus!” Ben interrupted. “We are not changing the subject. Five, what was that whole… everything? What- what happened back there?”

“What happened back there?” Five repeated. “I don’t know. Seemed like a normal mission to me.”

“Normal mission?” Diego asked. “Five, you killed three people. You call that normal?”

“Yeah, whatever. It was a one-time thing.”

“Five,” Ben said.

“I swear. It was a one-time thing. I don’t know what came over me, it’s just one minute I had a gun in my hand and the next they were all dead.”

“Like you were possessed?” Klaus asked.

“No, not like I was possessed. I just mean it was really fucking easy. Look, it won’t happen again. I swear.”

“Are you sure?” Ben asked. “I’m just concerned about you. We all are.”

“Well you can take your concern and shove it up your ass. I told you, I’m fine. It was a one. Time. Thing.”

“Okay,” Luther said. Five was pretty sure it was the first time he’d spoken to him after their argument. “Well, Dad isn’t gonna be super happy about this. The Academy has a certain image to uphold, and leaving three dead bodies all of a sudden is going to put us in a pretty bad spotlight.”

Five scoffed. Did Luther ever learn? “I don’t care about your spotlights, Luther. So you can go ahead and shove those up your ass too. Not everything is about fame, and your reputation.”

“Yeah, I get that. But I’m- I’m talking about how Dad isn’t going to like this very much. And he’s going to find out. Soon.”

“So expect a punishment,” Allison added, sniffling through her tears.

“I wonder what it’s gonna be,” Diego said.

“Yeah.” Klaus leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and propping his head up with his hands. “I mean, none of us have committed murder before, so I guess we get to find out the fun way.”

“You mean the hard way.”

“Same difference. I mean, you could describe it as receiving a new and probably horrible punishment, or going on an adventure. Which one sounds better? Huh? It’s really just the way you look at it, you know. Positive vibes.”

“Nothing about this is an adventure, Klaus.”

“Yeah, whatever, it’s your choice to be a Debbie Downer.”

“Klaus…” Ben called gently.

“What? I mean, who ruined your Sunday brunch?”

“Klaus, you just watched someone get killed. You don’t have to be okay with that, you know.”

“Me? Okay?” Klaus scoffed, putting a hand to his chest. “No, no. In super seriousness, it’s Five we need to worry about.”

Klaus extended a hand out toward Five that morphed into a fist halfway through, and for a second, Five thought he was about to get socked in the face, not that he didn’t deserve it. Then Klaus stopped extending his arm, his hand in a fist hovering in the air. He wiggled his eyebrows, and it became apparent that he was, in fact, expecting a fist bump.

Five reluctantly obliged.

“You’ve got this, man,” Klaus said, smiling. Like most of the smiles Five had seen recently, it was more like a grimace. But Klaus was trying. So he pretended it reassured him.

“Sure. No need to get sappy.”

“Of course. Just remember that no matter what happens, a promise is a promise, right?”

Five frowned slightly, then forced his face to smooth back over before it became noticeable. That was an… odd thing to say in the moment.

“What?” Luther asked. “What do you mean by that? Five, what did he promise you?”

“Nothing,” Five replied quickly. Maybe a little too quickly. Nothing except the fact that Five would keep quiet about Klaus’s drug and alcohol problems if Klaus kept his mouth shut about anything weird he noticed.

He wasn’t surprised Klaus was suspicious– honestly, he wouldn’t be surprised if his entire cover was blown soon. Back when they were all thirteen, they tended to actually work together on things, so they might start putting together everything they noticed individually and realize something was wrong, or at least, more wrong than they originally thought.

This was the first and probably only time he’d say this, but he was kind of annoyed their family hadn’t fallen apart yet.

When they got home, Five was aware of everything. The slamming of the car doors as the siblings all exited the vehicle, the crunch of gravel as they planted their feet on the ground and started walking toward the manor. The wind whistling through the trees of the surrounding forest. The glow of the sun on the windows.

He had a very bad feeling about this.

Pogo reached the door first, holding it open for the children with an almost solemn expression. Luther went in first, then Diego, then Allison, Klaus, Five, and finally Ben. They made the rest of the journey through the hallways in that order; Reginald liked it when they did everything by number, and they didn’t want to do anything that would piss him off, especially not now.

As they made their way through the first hallway, it opened up into the dining room, with an archway leading toward the kitchen. Both rooms were empty, so they headed down another hallway into the living room, where they’d received their mission briefing that very morning.

Reginald was standing pin-straight in the center of the room, facing the children as they walked in. He’d positioned an old box TV on top of a metal table, somewhat resembling a coffee table, behind him. On it was playing a news broadcast.

3 Dead in Murder at Bay Marina – Suspects Nowhere in Sight

He was furious.

“Oops,” Klaus said, receiving a slap on the wrist from Ben.

“Care to explain, children?” Reginald asked, scathing gaze washing across all of them, no one else willing to speak. “Anyone? What happened here that caused you to be so idiotically reckless?”

The kids stood rigid in a line, in the order of their numbers from Number One down to Number Six. From their appearance alone, it was clear that something had gone down at the marina. Allison’s face was streaked with tears and blood. Luther looked over at her like he was concerned, but his face was livid, and if Five looked close enough, he was pretty sure he was shaking. The rest of the siblings looked afraid to move at all.

Viktor was nowhere to be seen. That was probably for the better.

All six of the kids pointedly stayed quiet, unmoving. They all knew that this was one of the worst fuckups anyone in the Academy had made– not because the content of the atrocity had been any worse, but because Five had done it in front of everyone, for the entire public to see.

“I trained you to know better than this. I offered you years of combat practice so you would know how to conduct operations out in the field before you were placed in the real world. You were instructed on publicity so you would be aware how your interactions would affect your reputation with the people around you as heroes.” Reginald walked back and forth in front of the row of children, scrutinizing each one as he went past. “You all should know the consequences of your actions. So what about today caused you to screw up so royally?”

Five’s fingers curled into a fist, nails digging into the meat of his palm.

“Answer me at once!” Reginald stopped short at the end of the line and shook his head. “Or there will be punishment.”

Five clenched his jaw. Saying anything at all would be against his better judgment. Part of him– no, most of him– wanted to stand up to his father. Belittle him, hurt him, kill him. Stop the Umbrella Academy altogether. But that would be an incomprehensibly large alteration to the timeline, the consequences of which would be unpredictable. Unfortunately, he still had to stick to his original mission, and that was to stop the apocalypse. So he shouldn’t make any changes to the timeline without putting thought into it first.

He just needed time to think.

“Sorry,” Klaus said, cutting that time short. Five’s eyes flicked over to him, widening as he made an expression he hoped was cautionary. Klaus didn’t meet his eyes at all. “It was just my horoscope. Said I shouldn’t work with any Libras today. I should have listened, but, you know, I’ve never been all that into astrology.”

Reginald’s head turned slowly toward Klaus. He repositioned his body slightly, stepped forward until he was directly in front of him. Klaus stiffened visibly at the closeness, but held his father’s gaze all the same. He even smiled, and it looked almost heartfelt. Five’s heart quickened. He admired the boy’s ability to mess with their dad, but it often got him into deep shit.

“Number Four,” Reginald said. “Your childish nonsense has always been exhausting. You’ll be spending tomorrow in the mausoleum.”

Klaus’s smile disappeared, replaced entirely by an expression of fear. His breathing became audible, but he didn’t move an inch. Didn’t say anything else.

“It was Five,” Luther blurted out. Five’s fists tightened until his hands shook. “He went crazy, killed them all. We tried to get him to stop, but it all happened too fast. I’m sorr-”

“Number Five,” Reginald cut him off. “Is this true?”

Five’s heart shot into his throat, not from fear but irritation. He needed more time to think about what to say, how this all would play out. Instead, he nodded wordlessly, gaze pinned on something random in the background.

“And you acted alone in this?”

“Yes, sir.”

Reginald nodded, then was silent for several long seconds. When he did speak, all he said was “What were you thinking?”

“I wasn’t, sir.”

“What was the purpose of your actions today?”

“I don’t-”

“You do know, Number Five, you just have to think. One doesn’t act out without possessing a reason for doing so, and you, for one, have been acting out on numerous occasions as of late.”

“I didn’t mean it.”

“You ‘didn’t mean’ to brutally end the lives of three people?”

“It wasn’t like that. It was self-defense.”

“He’s lying,” Luther said. Five could feel his gaze burning into him, but he didn’t give Luther the satisfaction of acknowledging his existence. “None of them were even attacking him. He could have helped the mission without killing any of them.”

As much as he wanted to, Five couldn’t prove Luther wrong. That would involve revealing his secret talents, because no one knew Ben and Allison could have ended up dead without the ability to see the future. From the point of view of the rest of them, Allison was the only one in danger, which made him crazy for overreacting.

Reginald raised just one eyebrow, gaze flicking curiously from one brother to the other. He lifted up his hand to stroke his beard. “It seems we have a difference in perspectives. It’s no matter, however. I’ll have access to the CCTV footage surrounding the incident in just a moment.”

Five had almost forgotten about Reginald’s mysterious ‘sources’ that he would never elaborate about. Back then, all the kids knew he had connections with people all over the place, or else he wouldn’t be able to do half the things he did. He would often disappear for indeterminable amounts of time, claiming he was “on a business trip” or “attending a meeting”. While Five hadn’t been around for a good chunk of their childhood, he still got a little taste of Reginald’s behavior when the kids went on missions. He was the kind of person to use all the technology he had available to him for the best results possible, and he had a ton of resources at his fingertips. All in all, it wasn’t the biggest surprise that he would be in contact with someone who could steal footage from traffic cameras so that he could go over exactly what happened on each mission that went wrong.

He supposed, in this new timeline he had created, this was now the first mission to go horribly wrong.

Reginald must have seen his face shift or go pale or something, because he said, “Oh, I requested it long before you arrived. We would have closely examined it together no matter which way this conversation went.”

“That’s reassuring,” Five commented.

Reginald didn’t reply. He looked at his watch, then at the phone in the corner between two extravagant chairs. Less than thirty seconds passed before it rang. He picked it up, greeted with, “Reginald Hargreeves speaking.” Ten seconds went by, then all he said was “Excellent,” before he hung up.

He didn’t need to tell the children to stay there while he left the room, because the majority of them were too scared to move an inch anyway. There was the sound of the doorbell, the door opening and closing, and then Reginald’s footsteps as he returned to the room. He was holding an unlabeled disc. He pushed it into the DVD player on the shelf of the metal TV stand. The screen changed from the news broadcast to grainy black-and-white footage of the marina from an aerial view.

“This is zoomed-in footage of a traffic camera that happened to capture the incident. This should tell us all we need to know.” Grabbing a remote from the top of the stand, he pressed play, fast-forwarded until Luther and Allison could be seen walking into the marina together, then let it play out at normal speed.

“It seems it was only Number One and Number Three at first,” he said, watching the Luther and Allison on the screen walk across the docks and sit next to each other on the bench. “Why is this?”

“We were doing a stakeout,” Luther answered. “We sent two people out at a time, just to look out if anything weird happened. I don’t know, I just thought it would look suspicious if we all went out at the same time.”

“And where were the other four children at the time?” Reginald asked. His eyes were still glued to the TV as it showcased Luther and Allison casually talking to each other on the bench, occasionally looking around the marina for anything interesting. There was no sound, so it was left up to interpretation what they were talking about.

“They were in the cafe, waiting for their turn.”

“You did the stakeouts in twenty-minute intervals?”

“Yes. But nothing interesting really happened until the end of Five and Diego’s turn, when the yacht got here.”

“We’ll see.” Reginald clicked a button on the remote, fast-forwarding through the footage until Luther and Allison got up and left, quickly replaced by Klaus and Ben. All six kids watched as their turn went by in four times speed. Ben looked like he was trying to stay as still as possible, while Klaus was fidgeting all over the place. Halfway through, he got up and started doing cartwheels. Then the two of them left, and Five and Diego’s watch started. Reginald slowed it down to normal not long after the two of them sat down.

“Number Four,” he said, and Five practically felt Klaus stiffen beside him. “You did twenty-six cartwheels in a ten-minute span. Why is that?”

“I was, um, really excited. To… fight crime.”

“You always fascinate me with your ability to be enthusiastic about your work at all the wrong times, but never when you are needed to be.” Five looked at Klaus in time to see him hanging his head, then back at the TV, where Reginald was watching him and Diego sitting on the bench beside each other on the marina. It was interesting watching a conversation he’d already had, just from a different angle. It would be silent for the first few minutes; that, he remembered pretty clearly.

“According to Number One, it was during this stakeout that the mission went wrong,” Reginald informed the children.

“Five,” Luther called out. Five looked over to see Luther gazing at him with an expression other than anger for the first time in hours. “Just admit what really happened. We don’t need to see all this again.”

“You mean you don’t want Allison to see all this again,” Five shot back.

“Regardless of whether Number Five lied, we will be viewing this footage in its entirety,” Reginald said. “It’s important to see exactly what went wrong in order to form a proper solution that can be applied to future missions.” It was phrases like this that made Five wonder whether it was actually Reginald who was the robot and not Grace. Most normal people didn’t speak like a rich scholar from the 1800s.

The conversation between the Five and Diego on the screen lasted for only three or four minutes before Diego pointed out their quarry on the docks. He hadn’t realized their turn had ended up only being half as long as the others because of the boat’s early arrival. He watched himself exchange a few words with Diego, warp away, then warp back. He watched himself engage in conversation with Marty. It would be clear to Reginald through the footage that he was taunting him, because with every word he said Marty got angrier. Then the rest of the Umbrellas arrived, and the fight played out until the moment Allison was taken hostage by Sam.

“I see,” Reginald said, watching intently as the rest of the Umbrellas tried to talk Sam down. “Number Three’s life was in danger. Is this what you meant by self-defense?”

“Yes,” Five said. Just fifteen seconds after the word came out of his mouth, the version of him on the screen leveled the gun at Sam and shot her dead. At the sound of gasps from more than one sibling beside him, he realized that re-witnessing a scene as traumatic as someone getting shot in the head and their brains splattering across the docks might have fucked them up more than anything that happened to them in the original timeline. Sure, there was the Jennifer Incident– and many other missions that would go wrong– but that wasn’t supposed to happen until years from now. By trying to create a timeline where they were all safe from the apocalypse, he might have just become the instigator of all their childhood trauma.

He watched himself taunt Marty, dodge a punch, taunt him some more, then shoot him in the leg. That’s when things got… significantly worse. The Five on the screen looked at Marty, a man already down on his knees in front of him, and shot him in the head. Then he pointed the gun somewhere off-camera and did the same thing. The body of the suit-and-sunglasses guy fell into frame. All that remained was the reaction of the rest of the Umbrellas. Then they all gathered together and walked off-camera, and the video ended.

“Interesting,” Reginald said, turning to the kids. If the six children could be any more tense than they had been when they entered the room, they were. “Your first kill could possibly be marked as a logical decision, since the life of one of your teammates was in danger. But the other two… There was no explainable reason to end their lives. Your actions today were incredibly irrational, Number Five.”

“I know. I’m sorry, sir.” It burned. With the content of his words, he might as well have been begging on his knees. That wasn’t his usual style, but it would be a huge mistake to make his father any angrier than he already was.

“This is not what the Umbrella Academy stands for, and you show a clear disregard for that as well as the well-being of your teammates. Do you know what the public would think of this?” Reginald didn’t give Five a chance to answer before continuing, “I managed to have the footage erased from any systems the police would investigate, so nobody will know it is you who’s responsible. However, don’t think you’ll be getting away from this without any consequences.”

He turned back to the TV screen, pointing the remote at it and rewinding the footage until it came to a certain point right after the murders. He paused it, then pointed to the Five on the screen, who was putting the gun in his back pocket. “In this footage, you can be seen leaving with the firearm in your pocket. Did you not dispose of the weapon?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Good. Hand it to me.”

A bolt of dread shot up Five’s spine, but he did what he was told. His father took the gun in his hand, turning it around and examining it.

“Being as unstable as you are, it would be unwise to allow you to go out into the field after an incident like this.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You will stay in the house until your injury is healed.”

“My… what?” Five asked. But his confusion lasted too long, because in the time it took him to get the words out, Reginald aimed the gun down toward him and pulled the trigger.

He should have warped away, but guns were fast. By the time he started, the bullet had already lodged itself into his knee. As soon as he appeared on the other side of the room, he collapsed onto the floor, his world exploding in pain. He cried out, placing his hand on the wound as he stayed in a somewhat kneeling position on the ground.

Allison gasped loudly, bringing both of her hands up to cover her face. Luther and Diego both appeared to be trying not to react, not looking at him at all but staring blankly at a random spot across the room. Klaus grimaced, looking away and closing his eyes. Ben, however, immediately started to run toward him. He was stopped by Reginald throwing out an arm in front of his chest.

“Number Six,” he said. “I suggest you resume your place in line unless you would like to end up beside him. Don’t feel sympathy for someone who doesn’t think the rules apply to him.”

Ben’s eyes flicked frantically between Five, Reginald, and the rest of the kids, looking lost as to what to do. Five met his eyes, and with his free hand, made a “go away” gesture, trying to signal that he should go back into line to avoid any unneeded punishment. His other hand was getting wetter by the second, and he didn’t need to look down to know the blood had spilled over onto the floor. Ben gave him a small nod, his face somehow paler and even more concerned than it had been on the marina. Slowly, and somewhat like a robot, he made his way back into the lineup, leaving a wide space between himself and Klaus for where Five would usually be.

Reginald turned to the Umbrellas still in the line, ignoring Five on the floor. Though waves of hot agony went through him when he put pressure on the wound, he tried not to make any sound that would indicate how much pain he was in past the initial shout that had left his mouth. He wouldn’t give his father the satisfaction, so he stuck to breathing hard through his teeth.

“You are all dismissed,” Reginald said. “Do not make the same mistake again.”

Luther was the first to break ranks, because of course he was. He left the room without even looking at Five, not a care in the world present in his body language. Only a few seconds passed before Diego did the same, followed by Allison and then a shaking, possibly crying Klaus.

“Five,” Ben said. He wouldn’t stop looking at him. “Are you-”

“If you ask me if I’m okay one more time, I swear to God.”

“I’m sorry, Five. I don’t know what to say.”

“You should get outta here.”

Ben still just stared at him.

“He said you were dismissed, damn it! Just leave.”

Finally, Ben’s gaze left him. He still looked concerned, but now he also looked defeated. Slowly, like each step took all the strength in his body, he left the room, not saying anything or looking back.

“God damn it,” Five said when it was just him and Reginald in the room. He pretended it was just him, that he wasn’t alone with his and his siblings’ worst nightmare. “Fuck. Fuck.”

“I hope you learn something from this, Number Five.”

He didn’t answer for a good several seconds. He didn’t want to answer at all, but part of him thought he had to. “What lesson is this supposed to be?”

“To think before you act. Lest you face the consequences of said actions.”

“Consequences that you made up?”

“Correct. If I do not create a pattern of misbehavior followed by punishment, you and your siblings will never learn what’s right and wrong. Sure, I have the ability to fix all of your problems for you if I so wish, but by doing that, I would create dysfunctional adults who don’t know better than to create problems in the first place. By correcting your behavior early, I’m thus ensuring that you will learn to prevent problems from occurring to begin with, which all makes you more effective in the field.” Reginald stepped forward so that he was slightly closer to Five, propping his cane against the TV stand and kneeling so that he was closer to his level. “Everything I do is with a future result in mind, considering every variable that exists in the present and may exist days, months, or years into the future. You would know a lot about this, with your ability.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m explaining this to you because I know you’ll understand. You are the most sensible out of the six, when you’re not attempting to rebel against me.”

Five just laughed. The sound was breathier than he’d hoped it would be, but at least he could laugh at all.

“You find this humorous?”

“You can be an absolute fucking moron sometimes.”

“So can you. At the end of the day, I suppose I’m not the one with a bullet in the leg.”

“Only because you just shot me. I could have done the same to you just as well.”

“Sure, you could. But you didn’t, even when you had the firearm in your pocket the entire time we reviewed the footage. I had my back to you, and you had a clear shot. But you didn’t shoot. That’s why I know you still possess some sensibility. Most of your actions are backed by some kind of logic, and you appear to have a plan of action at all times.”

“Yeah, and this one went super well for me.”

“Like I said, you have made many mistakes. Clearly, something was affecting your judgment during your mission at the marina, and I don’t care what, only that it did. I only said that you have a plan at all times, not that they are any good. Your strategy skills are mediocre at best, something you can greatly improve on in the field.” Reginald stood back up. He grabbed his cane, straightened his posture, and smoothed out the wrinkles in his suit. “You have incredible potential, Number Five. You simply need to learn how to harness it.” With that, he turned around and walked out of the room.

Chapter Text

Day 3 of Being Back(™)

November 13th, 2002

When Five woke up, sunlight was already shining through the window. His eyelids were still heavy, his body sluggish from the drugs Grace had given him before patching up his knee. He didn’t need to worry about hearing a bell soon, since even if he did, he wasn’t allowed to go out on missions until Reginald deemed that his issues had been resolved.

He wanted to kill his father. He really did. The problem was, something like that would be a gigantic alteration to the timeline. If he killed Reginald, he would be put in jail, and the rest of his siblings, left with no one to take care of them, would end up in the foster care system. They would more than likely be separated, and then it was anyone’s guess what would happen to each of them. Mistreatment ran rampant in the system, so the combination of being alone, abused, and not knowing what to do about their superpowers would probably cause some magical spontaneous combustion that would lead to the apocalypse. Unfortunately, and he hated to say it even to himself in the far corners of his mind, the best bet to stop the apocalypse would be to leave himself and his siblings in the care of Reginald Hargreeves, the most despicable person he knew.

He hadn’t known it back when he first time-traveled out of the post-apocalyptic version of this world, but their father had also been secretly working to stop the world from ending. He knew back when he adopted the seven of them what he was getting into and how their powers should be handled, so all in all, he was the best person to leave them with. Five was in a familiar, controlled environment, with the ability to turn back time if anything went horribly wrong. All he needed to do now was slowly change some variables, fix his father’s biggest mistake.

See, Reginald’s biggest fallacy was his distaste for what he claimed to be the Umbrella Academy’s biggest weakness: empathy. He drilled a certain concept into his children over and over again: that feelings were bad and they should only rely on logic when making their decisions. However, he had used this same principle when deciding to suppress Viktor’s powers, keep him separate from the other children, and borderline neglect him his whole childhood. And that, as he knew very well by now, would lead to the apocalypse.

Five had a plan to stop that, though. Or at least he used to, but it was falling apart a little as of late. He would take the emotional approach, bond with his siblings so that none of them felt depressed or left out, and they would grow up to be functional adults who knew how to regulate their emotions and not accidentally end the world. Unfortunately, he wasn’t an emotional kind of guy, and creating a new plan didn’t automatically endow him with a nicer personality. Bonding was hard, and he kept insulting, hurting, and killing people. That kind of thing made people angry at him, and didn’t exactly foster a friendly, nurturing environment.

The other problem was that he had a few loose ends to take care of, and he couldn’t do that very easily when he was hardly able to walk. Sure, the Harold Jenkins issue could wait a little longer, since he would be in jail for twelve years(for murdering his father) before he ever did anything that messed up the timeline. But there was a bloody uniform in the back of his closet with artifacts from the future in its pockets, and it wouldn’t be long before Grace found it while deep-cleaning his room.

That one shouldn't be too hard to resolve. He'd worked against time in far worse conditions when he worked for the Commission, and all he had to do was dispose of the evidence. He could disappear for a while, warp out of the house into a far away location, burn the clothes and things inside the pockets, and be back in time for lunch.

When he made a move to get up, his body decided not to obey his orders. His movements were delayed, as if he were watching them play out in slow motion, and his limbs were heavy. Dragging himself out of bed was like moving through a giant pot of soup. As soon as his feet hit the floor, he collapsed onto his side, not quite alert enough to catch himself with his hands. He lay there for a minute, side pressed against the cool hardwood floor between his desk and his bed, trying not to fall asleep. He wanted nothing more than to just stay there and slip back into unconsciousness, because that would be easy. But he had a mission to complete, unless he wanted his cover to be blown. He wasn't going to fail this one. He would only close his eyes for a second.

“Five, there you are, silly. Did you fall off the bed?”

Five's eyes shot open. With a deep, sharp intake of breath, he realized he'd fallen asleep again. Grace was standing over him wearing a floral dress and an apron, bending over slightly with her hands on her knees to be closer to his level.

“Shit.” Five groaned. “I need to be awake.”

Grace made a strange expression. “We shouldn’t use that kind of language. Don’t push yourself, you need as much rest as you can get.”

Five lifted his head and propped himself up with his arms. The side of his face where his cheek had been pressed against the floor felt especially numb, and he wouldn’t be surprised if there was a big red circle there where all the blood flowed down to. He was numb all over, actually, which was both a good thing and a bad thing. Nothing hurt, but at the same time, he was unable to feel any of his limbs. That made them pretty difficult to control.

Grace kneeled down beside him, and then there were arms under him, and he was being lifted into the air. He always forgot how light he was, being stuck in a thirteen-year-old's body. She carefully set him back on the bed, draping his blankets over him, smoothing them out, and tucking him in with care he was always surprised to see come from a literal robot. In two minutes, Grace presented more care for him than his father ever had in the eighteen years he raised him.

The next time he woke up, it was to pain so intense that he would have started screaming had he not possessed any self-control. He lifted himself up into a half-sitting position, propped up by his elbows behind him, gathering his blankets and throwing them to the end of his bed. On his right leg, a metal and plastic brace surrounded his knee, where he had been shot. Instead of a bullet wound, there was a sterile white bandage. He lifted it up, ignoring the bolt of pain that traveled up his leg as he did so, to see a clean line running up the length of the joint. The thread of the stitches was visible, and the memory of what happened after Reginald shot him resurfaced.

He remembered trying not to scream or yell or anything in front of his father, but after he left the room, Grace had come in, and she had to get him to the medical room somehow. It turned out that moving around while suffering from a gunshot wound to the knee wasn't an incredibly painless experience. The other five Umbrellas knew what was happening and had already been dismissed, but Reginald never told Viktor anything, so of course, little Number Seven had wandered over to see what Five was screaming about.

So all in all, he was berated by his father, shot in the leg, and had to be painstakingly moved into the medical room by Grace while reassuring Viktor that he was going to be okay. After that, he was given anesthesia, and that's when everything turned into a blur.

Everything was quiet now. There was no noise at all outside of the children running around or anything, just the dull clicking of the clock above his desk. Since Grace had last left him to fall asleep, the curtains had been closed so the sun no longer shone through them onto his eyes. On his nightstand was a plate of food and a glass of water, and resting against the end of the bed were a pair of crutches.

He was actually quite thirsty. He leaned over, trying not to move his injured leg, grabbed the water, and quickly emptied the glass. Then he looked around. What time was it? Wasn't he supposed to be doing something?

The clock on the wall said it was around 2:00, and judging by the fact that it was sunny out and was not in fact night, it probably wasn't in the A.M. (what an intelligent deduction). It was usually from after lunch until dinner time that the other Umbrellas would be training their skills– or doing homework of some kind, since Reginald at least valued their education enough to homeschool them. They must be downstairs then, in the home gym. He didn't hear anything from the other kids’ rooms.

Right about now, Klaus would probably be in the mausoleum.

He was interrupted in his thoughts by two soft knocks on his door. It opened to reveal Grace, who greeted him with a warm smile. It was almost unnerving how human she looked. All the other kids knew she wasn't human, but loved her all the same. Five wasn't like that. He could never think of her as his “mom”, even in the original timeline, before he time-traveled for the first time. It was just too weird.

“It’s nice to see you’re awake. Are you feeling better?”

“Much worse, actually. Whatever drugs you gave me are wearing off.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.” She gave him a sympathetic look that almost made his blood boil. “I brought you lunch in case you wanted to eat. You were still fast asleep when I came in to check on you during lunchtime.”

“Yeah, whatever. Can I get more of those drugs?”

“I’m sorry, your father advised me not to give you any pain relief during your recovery.”

“Why the Hell not?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know, but he must have had a good reason. I suppose you’ll have to ask him yourself.”

“Great. I don’t need them anyway.”

“Would you like me to bring you anything else? Hot cocoa? Tea? A box of-”

“No, I’m good.” Sometimes, Five wondered whether Reginald had in fact built Grace at all. She seemed far too kind to be his father’s creation. But she was, and he knew that on the inside, she was just metal and wires. No real emotions, just a convincing display. It disgusted him just looking at it. “You can leave now,” he said, biting his tongue. He felt wrong.

“All right,” she said, turning around and grabbing the door handle. “I'll leave you to get your rest.”

Once Grace left, he lay back down and stared at the ceiling. What a strange house to live in. Here he was with six superpowered siblings being trained to be child soldiers, a talking monkey that taught them how to fight, a robot mother with more of a heart than any human he knew, and a coldhearted old man for a father. He had traveled forward in time, then back in time, then back in time again, then back in time a third time, then forward in time, then back in time a bunch more times just to get right back where he started. And now, after trying and failing to crack some secret code hidden in the mathematics of time travel, he still needed to put his all into preventing the apocalypse so that he and his siblings could actually grow up. He was tired of being at work all the time, never being able to rest because if he did, the world would end. The wheels in his mind were constantly turning, thinking of a new plan every time something went different from what he expected along with five or ten backup plans in case shit hit the fan. And he was doing it alone, because telling people would add too many variables he didn’t have the energy to think about right now.

In the end, it didn’t matter whether they knew or not. As the oldest person in the house, it was his job to protect them in his own way and lead them all into a future of safety and peace. He was the one with time travel powers; he had intimate knowledge about the future nobody else did and nobody else ever would. It was okay that everything had to fall on his shoulders, though. He was used to it after all those years of doing things himself, sacrificing so many things his siblings had not even a fraction of an idea about. He knew what he was doing, how to do it, and how to cover his tracks. Speaking of covering his tracks...

That’s right, he had to get rid of the clothes before anyone found them.

He sat up straight, warping to the inside of his closet. Sucking himself into a vortex and getting spit out on the floor jolted him a little bit, sending waves of pain throughout his body despite staying in the same sitting position he had been before he warped. He had to sit there for a second, body tensed up, and hand around his brace. The whole thing really hurt more than he had expected it to. He supposed he had gotten used to being in his adult body for too long before being transferred into a body with a lower pain tolerance, stamina, and pretty much anything else that made him good at his job. That, he’d just have to make do with.

To his relief, the uniform was still there, stained in blood and dust and any other reminders of his time spent with the commission. The tie was askew, parts of the jacket had been burned, and the whole outfit was generally worse for wear after being on his body for what might have been years. In all honesty, he had no idea when the Commission had last replaced it. Looking at each scuff mark and bloodstain brought back old memories of a mission. A person he’d met, a hotel he slept at, a restaurant… a good, satisfying kill at the end of a long day filled with investigation and obsessive stalking that could only have brought him to one place.

Reaching into one of the pockets, he brought out a worn-down copy of Viktor’s book and a glass eye. It was good that they were still there, because it increased the likelihood that nobody had seen them. If one of his siblings, or– god forbid– his father, had read Viktor’s book or even looked at the cover, it wouldn’t be hard to put two and two together as to how he got them. Just two days prior, he had made a big show of trying to time travel. Everyone else was under the impression that it failed. At first, he’d thought he might need the things for something down the line, but now they were just a liability that needed to be destroyed.

He put the artifacts back into the pocket and folded the suit over his arm, careful not to let anything fall onto the ground. Warping back over to his bed, he grabbed the crutches and quickly teleported to a random forest he would spend some time in back in the apocalypse. Starting a fire while barely mobile, even with the help of crutches, was difficult, but he had loads of experience starting fires to keep himself warm while on the brink of death, so this was far from the hardest thing he’d ever done. By the end of the hour, the suit was in flames, taking all his bad memories with it. He stood there for a moment, warming himself up from the usual October chill. Something about it felt wrong, like he was erasing the only token of all the struggles that got him to where he was now. With nothing to prove he had been to the future and back, to the past and back, and essentially to Hell and back, all he had were his memories. And he didn’t like to dwell on those.

Expectedly, the first person to check up on him was Ben. He knocked on the door carefully, entered the room carefully, and sat on the bed next to him– you guessed it– carefully. Five had just been lying down and reading a book, something about theoretical probability, when Ben came in, sat down beside him, and greeted with an “Um… hi.”

“Hi yourself.” Five closed the book, setting it on the nightstand next to a stack of empty plates.

“We missed you at lunch and dinner. Breakfast, too, actually. Mom said she brought you up some food.”

“Yeah, she did.”

Ben looked down at Five’s knee brace and the bandage under it. “Does it hurt?”

“Only when I move at all.”

His brother winced. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I did this to myself.”

“Am I allowed to ask why now?”

“No. You won’t ever be allowed to ask why. You’re gonna forget this ever happened, okay?”

Ben’s eyes widened, and the distraught look on his face told him he would likely never forget. Leave it to Five to always get a Pyrrhic victory; all his siblings were alive and well physically, but he had inflicted far more emotional trauma in the process than he intended to. Hadn’t it been his goal from the beginning to take the emotional route this time? Scarring his siblings would only accomplish the opposite of that. But he couldn’t heal their trauma if they were all dead, and he had to take drastic measures to make sure they were alive. And if he took drastic measures, they would probably get traumatized.

He would be forever stuck in a catch-22, where no matter what route he took, he had to sacrifice something. He should be used to it by now; it was practically his life’s story. But it still frustrated him because of how often it left him with something that wasn’t perfect, something he could fix if only he had another chance.

In this situation, he had probably blown his chance at a perfect ending as soon as he killed all of the drug dealers at the Marina. But he could make it better, make it so that this incident was something they could get past. He just needed to put all his energy into not repeating the past. Or the future.

Ben looked around Five’s room, apparently searching for something to say, then took a deep breath. “Okay. I think Vanya wanted to see you too, she’s just nervous. Does she know what happened?”

“Yeah, she saw it. After.”

“Saw it? After what?”

“After you left. I was still on the ground, so her and Grace helped me into the medical room.”

“Oh.”

“So what do you want anyway?”

“Nothing. I mean, I just wanted to see how you were doing.”

“Well, you did that.”

“Oh, yeah, I guess. Do you want me to leave?”

“Do you want you to leave?”

Ben looked like he didn’t know how to respond. Admittedly, Five was being a little bit of a dick, but that was nothing different from how he always behaved in their perspective. He had to be mean to them in order to keep up the facade, because if he suddenly started acting super mature, reasonable, or nice to them, they’d know something was up. “I… I guess I do have some leftover homework to do.” Ben got up, and he looked reluctant to walk through the door, but he did.

“Wait, Ben,” Five called out before he could leave his line of sight.

Ben turned around just outside the doorway. “Yeah?”

“Tell Vanya she has nothing to be nervous about.”

Ben blinked at him. “Okay,” he said, and then he left.

Viktor stood in the doorway, just staring at him. Five had resumed the reading of his book, which might have given Viktor the impression that he couldn’t see him. But he could, just over the top of the page. He gave his brother a little time to say something, but it appeared he was more keen on watching him than starting a conversation, so Five flipped the book down flat and lay it on his stomach.

“Are you gonna say hi or what?”

Viktor looked surprised at being caught, but he didn’t cry or run away, which was a plus. “Sorry,” he said, looking down at the floor and letting his bangs cover the top half of his face.

“It’s okay. Come in.”

Viktor looked up slightly, taking a few steps inside the doorway. “I just wanted to… I don’t know. I can leave if you want.”

“I don’t want you to do that. Come here, sit down.” Five closed the book and set it on the nightstand again, pulling himself up into a position that was more sitting than lying. He gestured to the open space on the bed.

Viktor did what he was told, and then they sat in silence for a few seconds.

“I’m sorry you had to see that yesterday.”

“It’s okay.”

“How long did you stick around after I blacked out?”

“A while, I think. I helped.”

“You helped? With..?” Five looked down at his injured knee, Viktor following his gaze.

“Mom taught me how to stitch.”

“This is your handiwork? Really?”

“A little bit of it.”

“I couldn’t even tell. Must be really good then.”

“Why are you being so nice to me?”

“I’m always nice.”

Viktor huffed a breath out of his nose that might have been a laugh had he committed to it more.

“I have a wonderful personality.”

“Yeah.”

“Did anyone tell you why Dad shot me?”

Viktor’s smile, as small as it was, disappeared. He shook his head, looking scared.

“It was bad. You’re lucky you weren’t there.”

Viktor didn’t look like he thought himself to be lucky. He just looked sad, his gaze aimed toward the floor.

“Sorry. You probably feel bad being left out all the time.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” Five said. Maybe he shouldn’t be doing what he was about to do, but most of Viktor’s deep-seated childhood trauma that would end up leading to the end of the world came from being excluded from everything the other siblings did. They tended to baby him because of that, like he couldn’t handle the same things they could, because he never went on missions. So they never told him about the really bad stuff. But maybe they should.

Five looked at Viktor, who met his gaze so that both of them were staring each other directly in the eye. Five took a deep breath, then said, “I’ll tell you exactly what happened.”

Day 4 of Being Back(™)

November 14th, 2002

Nobody visited him for the rest of the day once he explained everything to Viktor. The others were probably either mad at him for the whole thing at the Marina, or just didn’t care to see how he was doing. He wasn’t too keen on going to see them himself, since teleporting all over took too much energy and walking was too painful. Instead, he just went to sleep.

The next day, he was startled awake by a mission bell. He almost got up and started getting ready before remembering they wouldn’t apply to him for quite a while from now. He just lay in bed rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, listening to his five other siblings scrambling to get ready and hurrying down the stairs. He looked at the clock to see that it was around 10. Depending on the severity of the mission, they might be gone past dinner.

It was weird staying home while everyone else went on a mission. While he skimmed through books and sketched out probability equations, he kept being bothered by a dull burning in his stomach, like he was forgetting something important. He knew he should be out there.

“Hi.”

Five looked up from his pile of papers and books to see Viktor standing in his doorway. It was a little before noon, and if he was being honest, he was surprised he hadn't been approached by him earlier. He'd seen him walk by a few times through his open door, holding small stacks of papers that might have been sheet music.

“Hi,” Five said back, giving a small smile. “What are you up to?”

“Nothing. Just writing a song.”

“What's it about?”

“There are no words. Just music. It can't really be about anything.”

“Sure, it can. All you have to do to make it about something is say it's about something.”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“What is there to not understand?” Five asked, and Viktor just stared at him, dumbfounded. “Never mind. You know, there's something you can make that has words without you having to sing. That's the problem, right?”

“I guess. I'm not good at singing.”

“Well, you should write a book. You'd be pretty good at it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure as shit,” he said. Honestly, he was probably far too sure.

“You could get in trouble for saying that.”

“What's Dad gonna do? Shoot me?”

Viktor turned his gaze to the wall, the floor, and basically anything else that wasn't Five.

“Right, I guess that's not funny. Or you just need to develop your sense of humor. Anyway, what I'm saying is you should write a story.”

“I don't think I could write a whole book. That sounds hard.”

“Then write a short story. Nobody said a book had to be long.”

“A short story about what?”

“Anything you want. Make up something crazy. We all have tons of notebook paper for homework anyway, just get a pencil and start.”

“Okay. Sure.” Viktor left the room, coming back less than a minute later with a pencil and an empty notebook. They only got a few minutes of brainstorming in before Grace called Viktor down for lunch, but he ended up bringing both his and Five’s meals upstairs into Five's room. They spent the rest of that afternoon coming up with the plot of a fictional story set in a world of fairies and dragons, creating wacky characters and their extensive lore.

He heard the van pull into the driveway about an hour before dinner. The sound of multiple car doors closing carried through the air and into his open window. Then it was the front doors opening, and the siblings all stepping up the stairs to the hallway where all their rooms were.

Five leaned over from his spot on the bed, looking through the door to watch his siblings file into their rooms. Luther, Diego, and Allison went straight to theirs without a second thought, which was a good sign. If Luther didn't feel the need to stop anyone at the top of the stairs and give them a lecture, the mission must have gone pretty well.

Klaus, on the other hand, stayed at the top of the stairs. Instead of going to his room, he put a hand on the railing and sagged to the floor right in front of the highest step. He hung his head in a way that his hair was blocking his expression, but his body language was slow and lethargic. Still behind him, Ben stepped over his legs to get past him, then leaned over, exchanged a few words with him, and left. Klaus's responses didn't appear to be all that flavorful.

“Fuck,” Five said, turning to the side and letting himself off the bed.

“What?” Viktor asked. He was in the middle of starting the narration, but he followed Five's gaze to the nearly passed-out Klaus in the hallway. “Is he okay?”

“I don't know.” Five grabbed the crutches and gathered them under him, making his way out into the hallway with Viktor behind him. “Klaus?”

Klaus lifted his head up to look at Five. He didn't really meet his eyes, just looked around in his general direction and flopped his head back to where it had been hanging beside his shoulder. 

Viktor kneeled beside Klaus, looking at his face. “Are you okay, Klaus?”

“I'm just tired,” Klaus said. “Didn't sleep last night.”

“Why not?” Viktor asked at the same time as Five asked, “Is that what you told Ben?”

Their brother just groaned in response, probably not having heard either question.

“Well, you should get some actual sleep then,” Five told him. “I would help you up, but I can't really.”

Viktor looked at Five's injured knee, his crutches, then at Klaus. He was next to Klaus on his left side, so he put his right arm around his and pulled Klaus's left arm over his shoulder. When he stood up, he held their combined weight.

“Didn't know you were that strong,” Five commented.

Viktor smiled, turning around and beginning to slowly walk Klaus to his room. “I have practice. I have to be able to carry any of you, just in case.”

Five followed Viktor. “Right. And you've done that a lot?”

“Once or twice. I do go in the gym sometimes, when Dad's not looking.”

“I should go with you sometime. Teach you some moves.”

Viktor opened his mouth to respond, but was interrupted by a fit of laughter from Klaus. “Those are pretty lights. Right, guys?” He lifted up his head, gaze going to some distant corner of the hallway.

“I don't see any lights,” Viktor said flatly, looking around in confusion.

“Sleep deprivation,” Five lied. The two of them had a deal, so he wouldn't blow Klaus's cover. Not when they would all find out soon enough anyway. “I heard him say he didn't sleep the night before last night either, or the night before that.”

“And three nights without sleep causes hallucinations.”

“That's right.”

“Diego ate a lizard,” Klaus said, looking over his shoulder at Five, or at least his general area.

“Sure, buddy.”

The two of them stopped in front of Klaus's room, and Viktor half-led, half-carried him to his bed. As soon as he flopped onto the fluffy blanket on top, he was out like a light.

“Should I put blankets over him?” Viktor asked.

“Nah, I don’t think he'd feel the difference. Wouldn't want to wake him up anyway.”

“Yeah. He probably needs a lot of sleep.”

They left Klaus in his room, closing the door and backing out into the hallway. Then it was just the two of them standing beside a row of seven doors. The only open one was Five’s, which they had only left to take care of Klaus. The lights were still on, spilling a golden-yellow ray into the otherwise dim space.

It was quiet for a few seconds, then he heard Viktor inhale. “Is he really okay?”

Five wanted to insult Viktor for asking such a stupid question. But he was supposed to be nice to him, so he could make him feel included and set an example for his other siblings to do so as well. So he bit back a remark, no matter how much it went against his usual demeanor, and just said, “I’m sure he’s fine.”

“I don’t know. He seems weird every time I talk to him.”

“He’s always weird. That’s just how he is.”

“Yeah, but… it’s like he doesn’t know where he is.”

Five bit the inside of his lip, deliberately ignoring the pit of guilt building up in his stomach. He was the only one who knew, for sure, what was going on and what it was going to spiral into in the future. But here he was, pretending it wasn’t happening for the sake of a deal they’d made. If he blew the whistle on his brother’s self-destruction, all his other housemates would find out about the time travel. This whole situation provided an infinite amount of variables he could easily screw up, sending the timeline careening into another apocalypse. He couldn't change something so large without putting a lot of thought into it. Sure, he’d already contemplated it while he was reading up on theoretical probability, creating timelines in his head of what would happen as a result of specific actions. However, nobody ever really took Klaus's drug problem seriously until he was already an adult, no matter what timeline he traveled to. Breaking that trend on a whim would make things… unpredictable, to say the least.

So he would keep that possibility in his back pocket, for if he had nothing to lose and no other tactics to deploy.

“It's okay,” he told Viktor. His grip tightened on his crutches, cool metal pressing against his fingertips. “He'll be good as new as soon as he gets some good quality sleep. Now, how about we get back to writing that book?”

Hours later, after Viktor had already headed off to bed, Five heard a knock on his door. It was odd so late at night, especially since the outside of the hallway was pitch-black and everyone else was probably asleep. Whoever it was must've seen that little bit of light under Five's door and known he was awake.

“Come in,” he said, because he didn't feel like getting up and dragging himself all the way over to the door with his crutches. He had been up and about enough that day just from following Viktor through the hall.

When the door opened, Luther was standing there. He didn’t say anything for a while, just looked at him. There must have been something going around, of just looking at him in silence.

“What's up with you?” Five asked. Apparently, he always had to be the one to start the conversations, or else all his siblings would just be standing in the doorway forever.

“I just wanted to see how you were doing.”

“Right. How long did it take Ben to convince you to talk to me?”

Luther looked away from him, choosing instead to focus on the bookshelf against the wall opposite Five's bed. “Huh? What do you mean?”

“It's been two days. The last time you saw me was when Dad shot me. If you were gonna approach me of your own volition, wouldn't you have done that already?”

Luther sighed. “Fine. But Diego and I were asking about you, and Ben said you were okay.”

“Ben has only checked on me once, though.”

“Yeah, I think maybe that's kind of the point. I asked about you today after the mission, but he said if I wanted to know so bad, I had to see you myself. I think he wanted us to…”

“To what? Form a complete sentence? You can do it, I believe in you.”

Luther rolled his eyes at Five's belittling, clearly annoyed at what he was about to say. “To make up. Apologize to each other, or whatever.”

“Oh. That's thoughtful of him. If we're gonna do that, though, I think you should maybe say it to me instead of that bookshelf. Because I’ve been looking at you this whole time, even though it’s physically painful to have that atrocious haircut in my field of vision. So just meet me halfway here.”

Luther did what Five said, even though he looked as though he was being tortured. “I’m sorry I threw you under the bus back there,” he said.

Five really wanted to yell at Luther for being the worst. But it was his mistake getting on Luther's bad side in the first place, and if he wanted all his siblings to get along, making up with Luther was a good first step.

Five was silent, leaving Luther in suspense for a good twenty seconds. “You didn't throw me under anything,” he said. “I did that on my own. If you hadn't said anything, the whole situation would have been worse. And I'm sorry for all that stuff I said about you. We do like you, you can just get on my nerves sometimes.”

“Wow. That was more genuine than I thought would come from you.”

“I can be genuine.”

“I see that. Well, when you get better and start doing missions again, let's just hope we can all stick to the rules.”

Ah, there was good old Luther. It was beginning to feel weird without him. “All right, man. I get it, I'm a rebel, and you all hate me. Now get out of here, I need to sleep.”

“Sure,” Luther said, turning to leave. Either Five's eyes were playing tricks on him, or there was a slight smile on his face. “I'll see you tomorrow.”

He flipped the light off on his way out, so when he closed the door behind him, Five was engulfed in darkness.

For some reason, that night was the best sleep Five ever had.

Chapter Text

Day 5 of Being Back(™)

November 15th, 2002

Five’s quality time with Viktor– which mostly consisted of the two of them sitting in the same room in silence while they each worked on separate projects– was interrupted by a shrill scream reverberating throughout the hallway. The door to his room was almost all the way closed, but not quite, so they could hear completely clearly as the sound rose into the air, followed abruptly by pure silence.

Viktor closed the notebook he’d been writing in, looking up at Five curiously. “Do we go look or no?”

“I don't know,” Five replied, lowering the textbook on theoretical probability he’d been working through the past few days. “Kinda sounds like her I-saw-a-spider scream, but who knows.”

“We could just check to make sure.”

“Fine, I'm curious too. Let's go.” He closed the book– not needing a bookmark, for he could remember the page number easily– and set it down on the nightstand for what seemed like the hundredth time in the last two or three days.

The two of them slowly made it out into the hallway. It was hard to be subtle with what was essentially two extra metal legs, but they managed to get within earshot of a conversation.

Diego and Allison were standing outside of Diego's room. Allison looked pissed off, Diego pleading with her.

“Just please don't tell Luther,” he was saying. They had clearly already been having quite the exchange, but without the context Five was lost.

Allison shook her head. “I told you-”

“What in the dumbassery is going on here?” Five called out, interrupting the two of them. He didn’t care for drama, but one look at the two of them told him that was what it was. The only real issue he could think of that happened around this time was Klaus’s drug problem, but this didn’t seem to be about that at all. So all that remained was something non-important he didn’t care for.

“Nothing,” Diego said far too quickly, glancing at Allison every half a second like she was a bomb that was about to explode.

Allison rolled her eyes. “I saw a spider,” she said. “No big deal. Diego killed it.”

Diego's shoulders visibly lost tension, relief flooding his face. “Exactly.”

“And you're super sure that's exactly what happened?” Five asked, just as the door to Klaus's room opened. Ben walked into the hallway, followed by a very tired-looking Klaus. They said nothing, just stood there in the hallway observing.

“Yup.”

“You made a deal with her too, didn't you?”

Diego shrugged. He made a strange expression, like someone getting caught in a lie.

“What do you have to do now?”

Diego opened his mouth to answer, but closed it when Luther came into the hallway.

“What happened?” Luther asked, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. He looked between all of the siblings in the hallway, confusion and tiredness both present on his face.

“Allison saw a spider,” Five, Viktor, and Diego said in unison. Allison just rolled her eyes.

“Oh.” Luther looked at her for a second, apparently unsure of what to say. “Well you don’t need to overreact every time.”

Allison glared openly at Luther, then shot an almost imperceptible look at Diego. “Whatever. You wouldn’t get it, it’s a girl thing.”

“Vanya’s not afraid of spiders.”

“Shut up.” Allison huffed and turned around, her hair bouncing behind her as she retreated to her room and slammed the door.

“Well that was something,” Five mumbled under his breath at the same time as Diego said, “Do you have to piss her off every time you talk to her?”

“Stop cursing,” Luther said, then he shrugged. “You made her mad too.”

“I was the one who killed the spider, so I dunno what you’re talking about. I saved the day, all you did was make fun of her.”

“I was just saying a fact.”

“Didn’t help. Just go back to sleep.” Diego took that opportunity to leave the conversation, going back to his own room and shutting the door.

“What’s their problem?” Luther asked. There were now only four people in the hallway other than him: Ben, who looked perfectly awake and was being leaned on by Klaus, who looked dead-tired but thankfully lucid, and Five and Viktor, who simply stood next to each other, taking in their surroundings. None of them replied to the query.

Luther sighed, turning around to go back into his room and shut the door like Allison and Diego before him. Now it was the four of them standing in a hallway full of closed doors, the only two open being Five’s and Klaus’s.

“Are you doing okay now, Klaus?” Viktor asked, now that the two of them had an opportunity to talk. Klaus had been in his room with the door closed and the lights off for nearly the entire morning, so everybody else just assumed he was still sleeping. Not that he didn’t need it. Ben must have just recently gone into his room to check on him, that being the reason the two of them came out of his room together.

“Just peachy,” Klaus said. His head was on Ben’s shoulder and his eyes were closed. He didn’t look like he was leaning on him because he needed to, more just out of convenience.

“Did you get enough sleep?”

“Yupperoo. The full eight hours, finally. I think my insomnia is cured.”

“Oh. Well, that’s good.” Viktor looked relieved, though Five knew there was a bit of concern that he was hiding, along with a suspicion that there was more going on that people weren’t telling him. Five and Klaus had both blatantly lied to him last night, and while it didn’t take a genius to figure that out, Viktor was still pretty perceptive.

The best way to keep up the lie was for Klaus not to use again, surely they both knew that. Five also knew that Klaus had been locked in the mausoleum just two days before, which was probably the reason he cracked open his supply. He’d learned, after traveling back in the future a few times, the real reason he ever took drugs in the first place. His brother was constantly haunted by the voices and phantoms of dead people, and the only way to quiet them was to be so unbelievably wasted that his mind didn’t work well enough to perceive them.

He hoped he could get rid of that fear, but it was a big ask, and certainly not something a single person could just decide to do. It would require meticulous planning, on top of the hundreds of things he was already planning when he was alone with his thoughts.

Put it simply, he’d take care of all that later. It wasn’t that big a problem yet.

“All right, enough of this,” Klaus said, opening his eyes and taking his head off Ben’s shoulder. “More sleep is on the menu. All of you, scram.” He backpedaled through his open door, closed it, and flicked the light off. Ben did the same, this time going back to his own room.

“What do you think Diego’s doing?” Viktor asked once the two of them were alone in the hallway again. There was a bit of mischief in his eyes, but most important was the curiosity that had replaced his concern. He showed no intent to go back into either of their rooms.

“I don’t know,” Five said for the second time today.

“Not anything good, right? Obviously he was lying about the spider thing.”

“Maybe Allison just walked in on him… you know.”

“That’s happened before though. But they didn’t lie about it, and Diego didn’t beg so hard for her to keep it a secret. It’s definitely something different.”

“Are you saying you want to go in there and see what’s going on?”

“I mean… how else would we find out?”

Five contemplated for a second while Viktor gazed at him expectantly, waiting for an answer. On one hand, he really didn’t care about their meaningless drama, and doing this might only be a detrimental distraction when what he needed to be thinking about was his plans. On the other hand, what if it was something bad? If so, there was no harm in checking. If they didn’t, it would only be stuck in the back of his mind for who knew how long, because damn it, he was curious too.

“Okay, fine,” he said, lowering his voice so nobody could hear him apart from Viktor. “On the count of three, we open his door without knocking. If he’s not doing anything weird, we leave. That’s the end of it. Deal?”

“All right, deal.”

With the secure knowledge that he could reverse time if this became a scarring incident for either of his brothers, he began the count. “One, two-”

Viktor jumped over and opened the door to Diego’s room before Five could make it to three. 

Diego was inside, bent over something in the doorway of his closet. When they barged in, he stood up with lightning speed, kicked whatever it was deep inside the closet and started smoothing out the wrinkles in his uniform and acting like he wasn’t doing anything. “Oh-! Hey guys… I mean, uh. What- what are you doing in here? Why didn’t you– why didn’t you knock?”

“That was a lot of stuttering,” Five said. Him and Viktor were still out in the hall. He wasn’t keen on having to maneuver inside Diego’s room, so he stayed where he was, though Viktor was beginning to move inside. “Not suspicious at all.”

“Why are you in my room?” Diego asked, backing away from Viktor as he stepped into the room and peered into the closet.

“I don’t know,” Viktor said, apparently eyeing what he was looking for. “What’s in that box?”

“Nothing. I mean what box? I don’t see a box.”

“The box right there.” Viktor started toward the closet, but Diego blocked his path. “Just tell us what’s in it.”

“It’s a shoebox, okay? There’s shoes in it.”

“So why’d you poke holes in it?”

“So the… shoes… can breathe.”

“So the shoes can breathe, Diego?” Five remarked. “Really?”

“Okay, okay. Fine. Just promise– promise you won’t tell Luther. Or Dad. Or pogo. Or Mom. Please, I need this.”

“Sure, man. You didn’t tell anybody that I stole coffee from that cafe, so I figure I owe you a secret-keeping anyway, right?”

Cautiously, Diego backed away, leaving Viktor room to walk toward the closet, lean down, and open the box. Five couldn’t see what was inside, but it didn’t escape him how Viktor froze as soon as he saw it.

“That…” Viktor started, then trailed off. “That is definitely not a spider.”

“What is it?” Five asked.

Viktor stood up, holding the box, and made a move to walk over to Five, but Diego stopped him. “Don’t! You can’t bring it towards the door, it’ll try to escape again.” He looked over at Five. “Sorry. I know your knee’s broken or whatever, but you have to come inside if you really want to see it.”

“Whatever.” Five’s curiosity again got the better of him, so he slowly got one crutch though the doorway, then the other, until he was able to carry himself into the middle of the room.

Viktor brought the box over while Diego walked to the other side of the room and closed the door, preventing the possible escape of whatever creature he was about to see.

His brother held out the box, and he looked inside. The bottom of the cardboard box had been laid out with pieces of moss that must have been torn from a nearby forest. A few sticks laid around, and in the middle was a tiny gecko, tail curled around itself.

“Diego,” Five said. “What the fuck?”

“Okay, I can explain.”

“Explain then.”

“The mission we went on yesterday… it was a robbery at a mall. One of the stores was a pet shop, and while we were subduing the criminals one of the lizard tanks broke. The owner was like, ‘oh it’s fine, there was only one in there and now it escaped, so we don’t need to repair it anyway.’ And then, while we were leaving, I saw this little guy on the ground. I figured, if the pet store didn’t want it, then I could take it home, so I put it in my pocket.”

“You… smuggled home a lizard on yesterday’s mission?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Why?”

“I’ve just always wanted a pet, but I could never get one because Dad never let us. With this one, I could keep it in the closet and no one would ever know.”

“And you think it’s gonna stay this small forever? You know this is a baby, right? It’s gonna need a bigger box when-”

“I know, I already thought about that. I’ll get one when the time comes. Just let me have this, please. Dad never lets us be kids, and all I ever wanted was this.”

Five stared at him for a second. He would have face palmed if that didn’t require him to take a hand off one of his crutches. Technically, Diego was right. Reginald had everything against any kind of joy and whimsy, especially if it involved them acting their age. Normal kids believed in Santa and the Tooth Fairy and didn’t know how grammar worked, but here in the Academy, they were taught nothing but truthful science and forced to speak with the candor and lexicon of a scholar, or else.

So maybe he could let Diego keep this pet for now. He never recalled reading about this in Viktor’s book, so clearly it didn’t become that big of an issue in the original timeline. If this was one thing that could help fix their relationship, one step in the direction of a normal, functional childhood, then…

“Sure.” Five looked away from the box, wondering if he would regret this. Sure, it was cute, but its existence could get his brother in big trouble. “Just remember you’ll have to hide it from Grace. She’s programmed to tell everything to Dad, so if she finds it when your room gets deep-cleaned, he’ll find out.”

“Okay, I’ll try super hard not to get caught, all right?” Diego smiled at him. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me,” Five said, turning around and painfully making his way back into the hall. “I haven’t done you a lot of favors lately.”

Day 6 of Being Back(™)

November 16th, 2002

He woke up to someone knocking on his door. “Yeah?” he called out groggily, rolling over toward the sound. A book fell off his bed and onto the floor as he did so.

The door opened, and Klaus came in with a plate of bacon and eggs. “Mom said I could bring this to you. She still doesn’t want you walking down the stairs. She said she’d come help you do physical therapy later.”

“Gross.” Five tossed the blanket off his bed, groaning as he slowly and painfully sat up.

“Does it hurt?” Klaus asked, walking over and setting the plate on the nightstand.

“Not much. Only excruciatingly all the time every day. Reginald doesn’t want me having any painkillers. Probably trying to drill in his lesson or whatever the fuck that old man is thinking.”

“Oh. That’s… that sounds like it sucks.”

“Well. It is what it is. I guess it’s what I deserve for traumatizing you all.”

“Don’t say that.” Klaus turned to leave, but ended up lingering. “I don’t understand why you did what you did to those guys at the dock, or to yourself at the dinner table, and honestly I don’t want to know. That’s why I didn’t ask. Because I was afraid of what the answer would be. I didn’t want to be… you know, I was afraid of it being too much like my answer.”

“Your answer?”

“To the same question. Why I do what I do. You know, I have a feeling you’re being haunted too, just in a different way. I can see it in the way you look sometimes when you think nobody is paying attention. The way you just… know too much. Act like more of an adult than any of us sometimes. Even Dad maybe, I don’t know.”

“We all act like adults. It’s called being too mature for our age. It’s because of the way we were raised. I know those drugs are fucking with your head, so don’t get it twisted, Klaus, please. Think about your homework or training or whatever else, just not me. It’s a waste of brain cells.”

“A waste, huh? You keep talking like that recently, like there’s something else in that little noggin of yours you can’t tell anyone else. Like you have a plan all the time for how everything should go and when. It’s weird, like you think you’re God or something.”

Five glared at Klaus. He didn’t eat his breakfast, pick up his book, get up from his bed, nothing. He just sat there and glared, not moving an inch. Apparently unnerved at the silence, Klaus turned around to look at him, but his face hadn’t changed.

“Anyway,” Klaus started, “can I hang out with you today?”

“Really?” Five asked, seething. Klaus had just insulted him in a hundred ways he didn’t know about and now he was asking to hang out?

“Yeah. Why not?”

“You know what? Yeah. Why not? Let’s hang out.”

“Cool. I just forgot to do something in my room, so I’ll go do that real quick first.”

“Sure.” Five rolled his eyes so hard it hurt when Klaus left his room, feeling stupid about how little he expected that encounter. Sure, he knew that Klaus was suspicious, but not that he had made that many connections this early on or that he would confront him about it so directly. It was typical of him, to be so unpredictable. He should have expected that.

Maybe Klaus was right. He was thinking too much of himself, putting everything on his shoulders like he was the only one who could solve his family’s problem. But telling them would change too many variables, bring on too much trauma from across every timeline. If they knew everything that happened to him…

No. He couldn’t tell them. Not when they were so young, so impressionable and full of hope. Ruining that would be his worst mistake. He was older than all of them combined, he could handle it by himself. It wasn’t just a selfish, emotional decision he had made on the spot, either. He had put days of thought into it, and had only come to one conclusion each time. He couldn’t do it.

Klaus came back less than a minute later with his hands behind his back and a carefully neutral expression on his face. “So… board games?

“We don’t have any board games.”

“Speak for yourself. You should know that just because Dad doesn’t want us to have something doesn’t mean I don’t have it. I’ve got a ton in my room. Come on, I’ll show you.” He shoved a hand in and out of his pocket, then walked over and helped stand Five up before handing him his crutches. “Here, you go ahead. I’ll bring your food, so don’t you worry your little head about that.”

“Okay, fine. Whatever you want. Not like I had anything better to do today.” He got out the doorway and shuffled to Klaus’s room, thankful both that it was right next to his and that Klaus had left his door open. His knee was hurting more by the second.

He stood in the middle of the room, and Klaus came in right behind him holding the plate. “Okay,” he said. “What do you wanna play?”

“Do you have Monopoly?”

“Yeah, but I could never really understand the rules.”

“I can teach you.”

“All right.” Klaus reached into his closet and came out with the box of the game. Five always wondered how he could hide stuff in plain sight so easily, without any of their caretakers ever finding it. There had to be a ton of other stuff strewn about Klaus’s room he didn’t know about either, but just hadn’t been brought up yet.

Klaus kneeled on the floor and set down the box, then seemed to remember he was still holding the plate of bacon and eggs. “Oh, right,” he said, standing up and handing it to Five. “You can eat this while I set it up."

Registering that he was being handed something, Five sat on the edge of Klaus’s bed and set his crutches to the side so he had a free hand to grab it with. Watching Klaus resume his kneeling position on the floor, he picked up the fork and started on the eggs. Some of his siblings liked to dip the bacon in the yolk, or toast some bread and use it to make a sandwich out of the eggs and bacon, or cut off the egg whites and eat just the yolk. But there was never any whimsy in the way Five ate; he did whatever would get the food into his stomach the fastest.

Twenty minutes later, his plate was clear and had been discarded on Klaus’s nightstand. Klaus, being who he was, was still poring over the instructions in confusion, mumbling to himself about how he didn’t understand it and littering the floor surrounding him with tiny game pieces. Five watched as he narrowed his eyes, looking between the booklet and the pile of Monopoly money next to his left knee, and seemed to realize something.

“Oh, you’re supposed to separate the money? Wait, hold on– no yeah.”

Five had just been watching him struggle for the past five or ten minutes, but seeing that his brother was clearly getting nowhere fast, he decided maybe he’d help. He barely even wanted to play anymore, but he wasn’t keen on hearing whining and arguments from Klaus when he canceled on him after making him go through twenty minutes of mental suffering just to set up a game for him. Plus, he really didn’t have anything better to do other than make plans for the future, and most of his plans involved bonding with his siblings anyway, so hanging out with Klaus in his room was actually helping the plan, despite what it might look like from the outside.

Not wanting to bother with using his crutches, he instead propped himself up with his arms on the edge of Klaus’s bed. Without moving his right leg, he planted his left foot on the floor and lowered himself to the ground. It hurt a bit, but after a minute he was able to find a position on the floor next to Klaus that wasn’t too entirely painful.

“Here, let me do it,” he said, taking the booklet from Klaus. He read through the instructions quickly, and within three minutes, the game was set up.

“So you’re the master of board games now, huh?” Klaus asked, looking in wonder at the game set up correctly in front of him. “When did that happen?”

“It’s not board games specifically. I just happen to be able to read.”

“Are you calling me illegible? I mean inaudible-”

“Illiterate. Yes.” Five picked up the two dice, shook them in his hand, and dropped them onto the center of the board. One was a five, and one was a six. “Eleven. If you get a twelve, you go first. If you get anything else, I go first.”

“What if I also get an eleven?”

“Just roll the dice.”

Klaus picked them up in two hands, shook them beside his head like a bartender mixing a drink, and flung them onto the board. They rolled to a stop at the edge of the board, and Five was surprised they didn’t roll off the board entirely and onto the floor. Two sixes.

“Yes!” Klaus cheered, pumping his fists into the air. “I’m the luckiest person in the world!”

“The game hasn't even started yet,” Five told him, leaving out the part where he didn’t believe in luck. “Pick your piece and start your turn.”

Five didn’t miss how Klaus’s eyes lingered on the ship, but he ended up picking the train. He rolled the same way again, but this time one of the dice flew across the floor and under his bed. “Please don’t be another two,” he said, standing up. The die that had actually landed on the board was also a two, and Five saw that four spaces away from the start was the “income tax” space, which he would lose two hundred bucks if he landed on.

He watched Klaus retrieve the die, so he could spot if he tried to change the roll. He didn’t, just came back and set it on the board next to the other one. Another two. He had to admit it was a little funny, even if he didn’t believe in luck.

“What are you smiling at?” Klaus asked sourly, moving his train to the space and depositing his cash into the bank.

“Just you eating your words.” Without any second thought, Five put the top hat on go and snatched up the dice. When he tossed them onto the center, they landed right next to each other. A two and a three. Klaus rolled his eyes as he watched the top hat go past his train and land on the space next to it.

Klaus groaned out a “Noooo,” when Five reached over to the card about the railroad property. “You can’t buy that. I’m the train, I was gonna buy all the railroads.”

“Too bad. I’m buying everything I land on.”

“Then I’m buying everything I land on too.”

“Copying my strategy? Not very creative.”

“Then I’ll buy Boardwalk.”

“Not if I land on it first.”

“Nuh-uh.” Klaus snatched up the dice since it was his turn, giving a glare to the new property card laying face-up on Five’s side of the board. Both dice landed on the board this time; not next to each other but they were still on the board, at least. A three and a four. “Seven, huh. Okay, one, two, three…” he counted out loud as he moved his train from space to space. “This property doesn’t mean anything to me. You can buy it for all I care. It’s your turn now.”

Five silently rolled a one and a two, landing on one of the three frosty-blue properties. “This one I’ll buy,” he said, repeating the process he’d done for the railroad. “Your turn.” His legs were beginning to go numb, probably from sitting in the same position for too long. He didn’t want to move, though, because it was the position that hurt his knee the least and he would like to keep it that way. Plus, if his legs going numb meant he didn’t feel the pain, he was A-okay with that. It wasn’t like he needed to get up and run a marathon anytime soon.

Klaus rolled a one and a three, landing on the second railroad property. “Yes! I can still buy all the other railroads, and I’ll still have more than you!” Eagerly, he searched for the property card, found it, and exchanged his money for it.

“I won’t promise to hold back from buying any I land on,” Five said. The game went on pretty much like that for the next few turns, and both of them passed go without landing on another railroad. His legs had gone all tingly in the time it took to do all that, and he dreaded having to stand up and shake it off when the game was over, but that wasn’t something he needed to care about in the moment. On his turn, he rolled the dice and got two sixes.

“Lucky,” Klaus said before watching Five land on the “go to jail” space. “Never mind, I take it back.” He smiled, picking up the dice and rolling them. “Hell yeah.” He brought his train over to the railroad closest to go. “I told you I’d buy all the railroads.”

“I own that one already. You owe me…” Five picked up the card between two fingers with some difficulty. He must be tired. “Twenty five bucks.”

“Damn it.” Klaus took out said money from his disorganized pile and tossed it at him, rolling the dice again with his second turn he got from Five being in jail. He landed on the electric company and bought it.

Five tried to scoop up the dice, but for some reason his fingers weren’t doing what he told them to. They went around them, but couldn’t grip them.

“Here,” Klaus said, scooping them up and placing them in Five’s palm. A strange expression crossed his face, and after a second, he asked, “Are you feeling better than you did this morning?”

Five didn’t answer. Instead he asked, “Why would you ask that?” As soon as the words left his mouth, he made the connection. His brain felt a little slow, like he was thinking through a cloud of static. “Klaus. What am I on right now?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“So I am on something?” He stared at Klaus, but didn’t get a response. “You didn’t deny it, so it’s true. What drug is it, Klaus?”

Klaus shrugged, despite the fact that he obviously knew the answer to the question he was being asked.

“What am I on?” Five asked again.

Klaus answered this time, but it was a mumble that Five didn’t quite catch.

“What was that? Give me a straight fucking answer, or I swear-”

“Ketamine. I said you’re on ketamine. I put it in your-”

“I know. I fucking gathered that you put it in my food, obviously. Why?”

“I… I don’t know. I just wanted to help.”

“Help? You thought this would help?”

“You kept talking about how much your knee hurt, and how Dad wasn’t giving you anything for it, so I…” Klaus trailed off, his face full of guilt. “Sorry, Five. I just– when I take it, I usually can’t feel anything. I thought…”

“Oh my fuck,” Five said. Going more numb by the second, he sank to the ground until he was fully laying down and rolled onto his back. “Whatever. I’ll wring your neck when y… when I can feel my hands again.”

He closed his eyes, not wanting to just stare at the ceiling. He knew Klaus was right next to him, but he didn’t say a word. Just breathed. The both of them breathed. His family pissed him off a lot, and he had wanted to wring each and every one of them by their neck several times in the past, but none more than he did now. His drug addict brother had no idea what he was doing. He already was destroying himself, there was no need to try and destroy somebody else in the process.

Time fell through a little bit. Usually he knew a lot about time. He had quite a good grip on the concepts, how to tell time even when he was nowhere near a watch. Now, he didn’t. Minutes could have passed, or hours. He was sleeping, and then he wasn’t, or maybe he wasn’t sleeping at all in the first place. At some point, he had sat up and resumed the game of monopoly. Or at least he thought he did. Klaus landed on Boardwalk and bought it, like he said he would. Five didn’t buy any more properties; he wasn’t ready for the commitment of owning even one piece of land, let alone several.

He was pretty sure he lost the game, because then a loud, shrill bell rang. Klaus stood up fast, panic written all over his face. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“What is it?” Five asked from his position on the floor.

“The mission bell. But that won’t wear off for a few more hours, maybe. Give or take. I don’t know, just stay here. Please. Don’t go anywhere. Don’t leave this room until I get back.”

“Okay,” Five said.

“Promise?” Klaus already had on his uniform by the time he crouched in front of Five. Someone knocked on his door, to which he looked over his shoulder and yelled, “Coming!” before whoever was on the other side of the door could say a word.

“Fine.” Five hoisted himself up into a sitting position against the bed, though his head almost immediately fell to the side. “I promise.”

Without saying anything, Klaus nodded, his eyes filled with worry, and left the room. The last thing Five heard was the door shutting and his other siblings scrambling into the van outside before it pulled away and he was left in silence.

Almost nobody was in the house now. He didn’t hear anything, didn’t see anything. Whenever he tried to move, the whole world swam, and his limbs didn’t do what his brain told them to do. He was outside of his body, watching himself in third person as he struggled to exist. For a while, he hovered between unknowing and unconsciousness, and then, like his perception of time, he slipped away into a dream.

The first thing he noticed when he woke up was that he was finally lucid. He could move his hands, his arms, his legs, his feet. All the sensation that hadn’t been there previously had returned to him: the pain in his right knee, the soreness in the rest of his body, and the cooling of the air in his lungs as he breathed in and out.

The second thing he noticed was that he was in his room again, not Klaus’s. Somehow, someway, he had gone from room to room without his crutches apparently, since he doubted he would have the motor function while wasted to move around using them. But he was there. His head was pounding and he could hardly keep his eyes open, but at least he could feel things.

The third thing was the mannequin next to him on the bed. It was one of the training dummies from the gym, but it was dressed up to look like Delores. None of the clothing items were from this house, meaning he must have teleported to a store and stolen them at some point during his trip; he only hoped he was in and out quick enough that he didn’t cause a ruckus or end up on the news. Because if him killing three people would have been bad publicity, surely shoplifting would be too.

He didn’t ever think he’d see Delores again. After years and years, he thought he’d gotten past the hallucinating-objects-as-people phase of his life, so he must have been pretty wasted to go back to that place in his mind again.

His fourth and last observation– which was arguably the most jarring– was that he wasn’t alone in the room. And no, he didn’t mean Delores. She didn’t count, as she never had been human no matter how much Five used to think so. Instead, he was referring to the child sitting at his desk. He was leaning over a notebook, and seemed to be pretty engrossed in whatever he was writing. His long bangs fell into his eyes, clouding his expression from Five’s view.

Apparently he noticed Five’s gaze on him, because he looked up at him after just a few seconds of him staring. His eyes became visible, but his expression was neutral. “Oh,” he said, putting down his number two pencil and shutting the book. “You’re awake.”

“How long have you been in here?” Five asked, maybe a little too quickly for someone still hungover from their first experience with drugs.

Viktor stood up and walked over to the bed. “A while,” he said, observing him. “Are you doing all right now?”

“Sure,” Five said. “You didn’t have to stay here.”

“I did. You were doing and saying some pretty crazy stuff. I didn’t want to lose track of you again.”

“Again?”

“I went looking for you after everyone else left for the mission. I couldn’t find you for an hour, but then…” the first spark of emotion flickered onto Viktor’s face, but Five couldn’t tell what it was. “I found you in the gym. You were hugging that…” Viktor pointed to the mannequin, which Five scooted further away from at the mention. “And calling it Delores or something. I don’t know how you even got down there, but you were walking around perfectly fine like you never even hurt your knee. I still can’t find your crutches.”

“Oh,” Five said. He went silent for several seconds before he spoke again. “What exactly did I say?”

“A lot of things. None of them made sense, so I couldn’t tell you.”

Five didn’t say anything to that, so they sat in silence for several seconds. Well, Five sat. Viktor stood. Same difference.

“Are you gonna tell me what you were on?” Viktor asked.

“Oh, I… my knee was hurting a lot and Dad wouldn’t give me any painkillers, so I stole some from the medical room. I guess I gave myself too high of a dose.”

“I would like it if you stopped lying to me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Mom trains me on medicine almost every day. None of the stuff in her cabinet has any of the effects of whatever you took.”

“I guess you’re right. You caught me.” He didn’t say any more, but Viktor looked at him expectantly. He supposed he owed it to him to explain. “You remember how I told you about that ship that was bringing in drugs at the marina?”

Viktor nodded.

“Well, when we were there Klaus decided he wanted a little tour of the boat, and so he snagged some ketamine from off the yacht. That’s what he was on yesterday… or the day before yesterday, or whatever. When I told you he was just sleep deprived.”

“So Klaus gave you some today?”

“He spiked my food. I wouldn’t willingly take something like that.”

Viktor sighed. “You knew Klaus had been taking drugs the whole time?”

“It’s only been a few days.”

“That’s long enough for a problem to start. And apparently it has, if he’s taking it and spiking people with it.”

Five didn’t know what to say to that.

“I know you like to keep things to yourself. But this is not one of those things.”

“I know.” He didn’t apologize. Instead he started to get off his bed, because he needed to be somewhere other than locked inside his shitty room being interrogated by another sibling he’d let down. All it did was remind him of how badly he was already failing his big plan.

Instead of doing that, his body decided it would much rather collapse as soon as he put weight on both of his feet. He didn’t crash to the floor, however, as he was caught in Viktor’s arms before that could happen. He held him upright so that Five could take the weight of his right leg, which was immediately overcome with a strong bolt of pain at any sign of being made to bear weight.

His stomach turned at all the sudden motion, and before he knew it, he was gagging, and Viktor had one arm around him to drag him into the bathroom so he could crumple to the floor in front of the toilet and spew up all his guts.

“Jesus,” he heard Viktor say under his breath, backing away from Five as he heaved the rest of that day’s breakfast out of his body.

Hoping he was done throwing up, Five dragged an arm across his mouth and realized he was shaking. He got deja vu when he looked over to Viktor, who was standing outside the doorway staring at him with concern.

“I think I’ll stay here for a while,” Five said, taking a sitting position on the bathroom floor. “You can go back to whatever you were doing before. You don’t need to worry about me, I’ll be fine.”

Viktor crossed his arms, expression not changing. “I guess I’ll find your crutches in Klaus’s room?”

“Probably,” he said, and Viktor left his view. He heard the door to his room open, then Viktor knocking on Klaus’s door. After that, he didn’t hear much, but he knew it must have been more than ten minutes before his brother appeared again in the doorway. Wordlessly, he dropped the two metal crutches next to Five on the floor.

“Did you talk to him?” Five asked.

“Don’t worry about that.” Viktor no longer looked concerned or irritated, just tired. Maybe stressed.

“You were gone for a while. Obviously you had some kind of conversation.”

“Just get some rest. Dinner’s in an hour.” With that, Viktor turned around and disappeared from the doorway once more. When he heard the door to his room shut, he knew he was alone again.

He had a lot of things to fix.

Day 7 of Being Back(™)

November 17th, 2002

Five had been thinking a lot the past twenty-four hours. About his family, the world, and his intricate plan that was ever-so-quickly falling apart. He didn’t come to many conclusions, just dead ends and repeated impossibilities that left him with nowhere to go, no path to take that wouldn’t require him to sacrifice something.

He knew he would have to make a decision on a lot of things soon, and that no way to go about any of the situations he was in was entirely good. With that in mind, his next step could only be to weigh the consequences of each action against each other and– accordingly– the possible upsides that would arise from them.

All that to say, one variable had changed that day. Grace would let him go downstairs, and now he could eat with the rest of his family. Everyone had been silent so far, as it was always required to be during mealtimes unless any of them were specifically spoken to by Reginald himself. As he took the last bite of dinner and set his fork down on the plate, he assumed no words would be exchanged during the entire meal. Apparently he was wrong.

“Number Five,” Reginald started, and Five tried to cover up how quickly he froze at the sound of his father’s voice. He knew he was in for something, just not what that something was. “We welcome you back to the table, however, do not think this means you’ll be going on missions any time soon. You still have a long way to go by means of learning.”

“Don’t we all,” Five said. His voice was calm, and he met his father’s gaze directly. It was, so far, a normal conversation.

Reginald smirked. “Alas, some do more than others. You, for example, could use some improvement to your critical thinking skills. You are ‘book smart’ as they call it, but you don’t possess the same wisdom some others do.”

Five wanted to tell his father just how wrong he was, but he remembered the front he’d been putting up. The clueless, arrogant little kid who acted without thinking. He needed to continue to be that person in his father’s eyes or else he’d blow his cover. So instead, all he did was smirk and say, “Sure. Whatever you say.”

“Trust me, your lessons here are not done. There are many things about all of you, not only Number Five, that can be fixed with the right nurturing and training. And they will, in the years to come.”

Five’s stomach twisted at the reminder that he would have to go through all of this for years. Again. He swallowed the nausea, reminding himself it was necessary. The whole world was at stake, what was a few years of Hell compared to the dozens he’d already been through?

Reginald looked across all of his children, seeming to notice everyone was finished with their food. “You may be dismissed,” he said. He turned around and left, walking away toward his study.

Five stood up using the crutch under his right arm. He’d found the other one to be unnecessary, since he could walk perfectly fine with just the one, so he left it in his room. It wasn’t like he was going to walk down all those steps anyway, even though Grace had cleared him to do so. Teleporting was still something he was perfectly capable of.

He picked up his plate in one hand and made it over to the kitchen, where his siblings were putting their dishes in the sink. Moving around was still tiring, so he was focused more on getting into the kitchen than his surroundings. Which was probably why he ran into someone.

“Watch it,” the other person said, and he looked up to see the back of Klaus, who had already started to leave the kitchen.

“Shut up,” he said, though Klaus showed no intent to look behind him or acknowledge him any more than he did. “You’re already on thin ice.”

“So are you,” Klaus said, not turning around but still flipping him off as he left. He almost asked what his brother was referring to, but he had a feeling he already knew. He was coming closer and closer to breaking their deal.

Day 8 of Being Back(™)

November 18th, 2002

“Five. Wake up.”

Five’s eyes flew open, immediately registering the hand on his shoulder. A thousand combat maneuvers ran through his mind before he realized it was just Viktor, leaning over his bed. Like usual, his expression wasn’t easily readable. He just stared at him with those wide eyes. Through his closed curtains, he could see that it was sunny out.

“Sorry,” he said. “I just thought you’d wanna see this.”

“What?” Five asked, bringing up an arm to rub the sleep out of his eyes. “What is it?”

“The others. They’re on the news.”

“The news?”

“Yeah. If you wanna see, it’s on the TV downstairs. I can help you down-”

“No, no, I got it.” Five threw off the covers, getting himself onto his feet and grabbing his one crutch before teleporting down to the living room. The box TV was on the metal stand in the middle of the room again, and on it was another broadcast.

Potentially Fatal Holdup at Jewelry Shop – Could the Umbrella Academy Help?

Above the tagline was a reporter in front of a jewelry shop surrounded by police cars. The scene was familiar, and by that he meant he’d seen a similar situation a hundred times before, just with different buildings, on different street corners, and with different people in the area. A holdup– or any kind of hostage situation for that matter– was a breeding ground for timeline alterations because of how many variables they created. There was the possibility for all matters to go wrong. Sudden, unexpected deaths being at the top of that list. He had been there, on the other side of that screen more times than he could count on behalf of the commission.

The reporter was talking: “-situation could become extremely volatile at any moment, as many of us already know. It seems like the police have it under control so far, but they are a little baffled at the sudden arrival of the Umbrella Academy, who have recently emerged as a sort of vigilante group.” The camera zoomed into an area to the left of the screen, where all five of their other siblings appeared to be talking to some of the police officers. “Police usually don’t let civilians into scenes like this, especially children, but could this be a special case? After all, these children shocked the public by revealing the existence of what we can’t deny as being superpowers. Could they possibly be able to provide the kind of assistance your average officer couldn’t?”

Viktor appeared in the doorway, sitting down on the closest couch to him. Five sat down next to him, not having even realized he’d forgotten to sit down. “How’d you even notice this?” Five asked. “It’s not like you have access to the internet.”

Viktor shrugged, looking from him to the TV. “I usually look on the TV every so often when you guys are on missions. Just in case.”

“Huh,” Five said in response, turning his attention back to the screen.

“It appears that another child has snuck into the scene. But is she part of the Umbrella Academy as well?” The camera zoomed in yet again, to where a little girl had appeared out of nowhere and joined the conversation between the Umbrellas and the cops. From what he could see from the grainy footage, she had brown skin and a bob cut. She looked a little familiar, but Five couldn’t place it. “No, it can’t be. It doesn’t look like any of these people recognize her, and she isn’t in the uniform the Academy usually wears. Either way, she has now inserted herself into the situation. Maybe she’s a fan, and wants to join the academy like that one little boy that happened to be born on the same day as them and thought he too had powers. If that is the case, it could prove to be dangerous-”

The reporter was cut off by a shout from one of the officers as the door to the jewelry shop opened. Out came a man in a suit and tie holding his hands up, followed by another man in all black who was pressing a gun into the back of the first man. “Oh dear,” the reporter said, looking behind her at the situation. “It looks like there has been an escalation to uh– to the events. A gunman has walked outside with a hostage, and is now threatening to shoot him if anyone comes close.”

On the screen, both men began to slowly walk away from the jewelry shop. The man in the black clothes must have been threatening to shoot if anyone blocked off their escape either, because the surrounding cops were backing off as the captor shoved the captive along. Slowly but surely, they were making it away from the jewelry shop.

Suddenly, the figure of the familiar little girl cut across the screen as she ran in front of the captor. He shouted something at her, but she kept running, so he fired. However, the girl flung her hands out in front of her as if she was expecting the shot and the bullet made a sharp turn to the left, then stopped. Without touching the bullet at all, the girl gave a small flick of her hand and the bullet tunneled downward, burying itself in the ground. It hadn’t even touched the captive.

Looking down at his gun in confusion, the captor abandoned both the weapon and the captive, opting instead to run away at full speed. Apparently deciding he wouldn’t get away that easily, the girl jumped over to him and tackled him to the ground with surprising ease. Then she leaned down and whispered something in his ear, and he went completely still. She stood up and walked away, but the guy still just laid down in the grass, hands behind his back. When the cops approached him, he simply let them cuff him.

Five stared at the screen in disbelief. The Umbrella Academy had done nothing, and the cops had done nothing. The situation was defused and the criminal was apprehended by what looked like a tween girl. “What was that?” he asked Viktor, who was looking at the TV with a similar expression.

“I don’t know. Another kid like us?”

“Apparently. Didn’t think we’d ever find one.”

“Me neither,” Five lied. Unfortunately, he had, and he had a feeling he recognized the girl too. He hadn’t been able to get her to leave him alone lately.

The broadcast ended, concluding that the bad guy had been caught and would be brought to justice. Five picked up the remote and turned it off, and the screen went dark.

“They’ll probably be home before lunch, right?” Viktor asked, looking at the clock. “We can ask them then.”

“Yeah, probably.” Five teleported back to his room, wondering why he even watched that broadcast in the first place. All it did was fill him with dread. This definitely didn’t happen in the original timeline, or he would remember it. He did recall hearing about a jewelry store holdup, but the man was talked down by Allison, not subdued by the girl who shall not be named.

Her involvement in things couldn’t mean anything good, certainly not for his plan. She was just another wildcard, a variable he needed to factor in that only made everything more unpredictable. That wasn't ideal.

Two hours later, Viktor and Five sat at the table eating sandwiches Grace made for them. No one else could be seen. They just sat in silence, looking between each other and the door every once in a while, eating, waiting. Five didn’t miss how Grace had set an extra plate.

Ten minutes into the meal, the main door opened. Reginald came through and stood in the center of the room, followed by Luther, to whom he gestured to go sit at the table. Diego, Allison, Klaus, and Ben did the same, sitting in the seats in order of their numbers. Behind them was a sixth child, as Five expected. The same one that had been on the TV screen.

“Children,” Reginald started, having the girl stand next to him, “I would like you all to welcome Number Eight into the Academy. She has showcased her talent and skills on today’s mission, and will be training with you for the foreseeable future.”

“Hi,” the girl said. Now that Five could see her in person, the resemblance was uncanny. It was her, just many years younger. She wore a hot pink T-shirt and jeans, and her dark hair came down almost to her shoulders, but not quite. “You already told me all of your names, but for you two I haven’t met, you can call me Lila.” She looked from Viktor to Five, and either Five’s eyes were playing tricks on him or she winked at him.

“Hi, Lila,” Viktor said, looking from Five to Lila in confusion. “Uh, I’m Vanya.”

“Vanya. What a lovely name. So girly.”

“Thanks. Um– I think.”

Lila gave Viktor a big grin, so fake it was disgusting, then walked over to the table. “I assume this is my seat,” she said, sitting down. “I have a feeling the eight of us are going to have so much fun together.”

Five rolled his eyes, internally facepalming. His day had already been ruined.

It was night. Past when all the Umbrellas were supposed to be sleeping, or at least have their lights off and pretend they were sleeping. He didn’t know why he teleported down to the kitchen or why he expected her to be there, but she was. Just sitting on the counter, looking into the doorway so that she caught his eye when he entered. He figured they both owed each other an explanation, and they couldn’t talk in the light of day where anyone could see them. So they settled for the kitchen. Where they usually talked things out (i.e. fought).

“Howdy, Five,” she said. The darkness shrouded her face, but he knew she was smiling. “Didn’t expect me to show up, huh? Guess I threw you for a loop.”

“How’d you get here?”

“Well, it was hard. But I figured, most kitchens are somewhere near the dining room, so I just reverse engineered-”

“Don’t start that shit with me. You know what I mean.”

“Do I?”

“How’d you get here, now, back in time? You weren’t a thirteen-year-old last time I saw you.”

“Neither were you.”

“Well, you know why that is. It’s kind of your fault to begin with. So now it’s your turn. How’d you do it?”

“Same way you did.”

“Really? I find that hard to believe.”

“Briefcases can be copied, you know. With the right equipment.”

“And you have all the equipment now, don’t you?” Five sighed. He looked at the floor again, then back at Lila’s thirteen-year-old self, still just a silhouette in the darkness. There was no reason to turn a light on and risk drawing attention to their little conversation, so he kept the two of them in the dark. He had a feeling his guest didn't mind. “That’s just great, Lila. So, uh, why did you do that?”

“That one’s pretty simple.” Lila hopped down from the counter, walking a little closer to where Five stood in the doorway. “I was worried about you.”

“Bullshit.”

Lila laughed out loud. “You’re right, that would be pretty stupid. I don’t give a shit about your wellbeing. Honestly, I was just curious.”

“Curious?”

“I’ve been keeping tabs on your little academy. I noticed they’d been going on a lot of missions without you, and I wanted to know why.” She gestured to the brace on Five’s knee and the crutch he was leaning on. She shrugged. “Now I know.”

“This might be slowing me down, but I can still strangle you just as well as I could before. So you were curious, and now you’re not. That means you can leave now, reverse time so you never showed up. See you later.” He turned to walk away, but was stopped by Lila speaking again.

“Not gonna happen, Five.”

He turned around to face her again. This time he wished the light was on so he could gauge her expression. “Why the Hell not?”

“I have to keep tabs on you, like I said. I gave away something very important in our deal, all so you could go back in time and fix everything to satisfy your little God complex. So forgive me if I want to see what you end up doing with all that. And I suppose the best way to monitor that is to be right where the action is. Don’t you agree?”

“You being here messes up the plan. I can’t save the world if you’re here screwing it up.”

“I never said I would screw up your plan. Just that I’d be here, that’s all.”

“You being here throws the plan off the rails already! It’s creating new variables that deviate this timeline from the original one.”

“I thought you wanted to avoid repeating the original timeline, not recreate it.”

“I know, but the original timeline exists as a frame of reference for all my future actions and plans. If I don’t have the original timeline as a base, I have nowhere to start and no existing knowledge of what variables cause each thing.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have a reference. Create a new base, new variables.”

“Stop it, Lila. You don’t know what you’re talking about, this timeline stuff– the apocalypse– this is really dangerous. You can’t be here. It’s not what we agreed on.”

“Isn’t it? Has it been so long that you’ve forgotten?”

“What are you talking about?”

“All those years ago, when we negotiated the terms of our deal. I added in that I had the right to pop in and check on you whenever I please. And you accepted it, did you not?”

“I didn’t think this is what you meant.”

“Well, that’s on you then, for taking out the tracker as soon as you got here.”

“The tracker. Seriously? That’s what this is about? I was under the impression that would only be active while I was working under you.”

“Did I say that, Five? Did I explicitly state, in clear terms, that you were allowed to remove it?”

“You can’t do this. We agreed that I’d be able to do whatever I wanted once I got here.”

“And that stays true. I’ll just happen to be here, watching. I won’t interfere with anything you do unless you tell me to. We can even have a safe word, if you want. A whole library of code words if it tickles your fancy.”

“Stop screwing around, Lila. Why would you want to be here under my father’s roof? You know he’s a psycho. Is this fun for you?”

“Not really.”

“Then why are you doing all this? Why are you here?”

“It’s time you learn people have their own reasons for doing things, Fivey. Often ones they don’t tell other people. Trust me, I’m not doing this for you.”

“Then who?”

“I think you know who.” Lila sighed, and for the first time in a long time, she looked tired. He couldn’t see her face, but it was apparent in her body language. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve had a long day. I should get to bed before someone realizes neither of us are in our comfy beds.” She brushed past him on her way out the door, and that was the last he saw of her that night.