Chapter Text
Vanya was used to being alone. God, what an understatement. She knew loneliness like another arm, like a second skin. She knew the smell of being alone, what it tasted like, what the air felt like with it.
It was two weeks since being transported back to the present from the 60’s, and perhaps it was the grief that seemed to plague everyone, or the feeling of purposeless now that the apocalypse seemed, at least for the moment, diverted—but the Hargreeves siblings had fallen away from each other, first slowly, then all at once.
There was a half-hearted attempt, at first, for them to stay connected. Of course, almost all of them stayed in the old childhood mansion to tend to their wounds. There was a lot of sleeping on the couch as each respective sibling found their childhood rooms too much to bear. There was also many attempts at conversation, both serious and casual, but it fell short. There was too much to say. Nobody could escape their own head, their own pain.
It was Allison who left first, almost immediately. She wanted to find Claire, and though she promised to call, the phone never rang.
Diego left next. He did not say goodbye, and nobody seemed to expect him to. He packed away his things, his knives, and left in the night, an indent on the couch left behind.
Then it was Klaus, who left with a considerable amount of clattering and announcing. He reassured them all of his sobriety, even kissed Vanya on the cheek before darting out the door. Vanya wondered if she was the only one that noticed the sadness in his eyes, the way he paused on the street, looking left and right, as if waiting for someone to tell him where to go. She felt the ghostly memory of Ben’s arms around her shoulders and shuddered with guilt.
Vanya was not long after him. She couldn’t stay in that house another day with only Five and Luther to keep her company—a strong word for what they were really providing, which was next to nothing. Five barely spoke to anyone, preferring to lock himself away. He even took the coffee maker from the kitchen, and the sound of its bubbling emanated from his room, mingling with the sound of a pencil scratching. Luther tried his best, shuffling around the house in an endless litany of apologies. He asked how Vanya was every other hour, and she knew that it came from a place of guilt just as much as it came from a place of fear.
She couldn’t take it anymore, and spent an afternoon searching for apartments until she had found a place suitable enough for her needs: small, simple, plenty of natural light from one window, cheap, empty. She called the orchestra as well and was shocked to hear the familiar voice of her director on the other end, who accepted her back readily. She asked, “are you sure?” more than once, and eventually had to conclude that whatever the events of the previous apocalypse were, they had not transferred over into this timeline. Or was it the same timeline? She didn’t know, and didn’t want to pick up the phone to call Five about it.
The issues that took up most of her brainpower, in the darkened evenings in her empty apartment, included not only her still erratic powers, but her physical well-being.
There was something wrong. Well, there was more than something wrong—there was a lot wrong.
The problems started cropping up not long after returning to the present, beginning with her balance. More than once she rose from bed only to fall to the floor in a jumble of limbs, confused and more than a little alarmed. It took many minutes of laying on the hardwood to finally be able to stand and walk. Her legs began to hurt all the time, a fiery pain that emanated from the electricity scars on her feet.
Then, her memory became funny. There would be entire conversations with her siblings in which she would leave not remembering a thing she had said. She began to journal constantly, terrified that she’d forget something important, like where she’d left her violin, what Sissy’s face had looked like, what had happened to Harlan.
Once, late at night, she had forgotten that Leonard was dead, that she had killed him. She had paced her room, sobbing quietly into her hands in fear, convinced he was right outside her door.
Panic attacks began to become her daily life. She often felt tempted to return to the medication of her youth. The dampness, dimness, de-saturation it provided her shielded her from the torment of her own wrongdoings and the harshness of the world. She missed it desperately.
And, weirdest of all, she stopped being able to recognize herself in the mirror. Every time she tried to study what she looked like, the image would distort, and a dreadful sinking feeling would fill her chest. It was similar to embarrassment, akin to shame, but stronger than both. An overwhelming feeling of wrongness.
Vanya tried her best to furnish her new apartment in accordance to her developing needs. She bought a bedframe with handles on the sides, and a cane for at-home use—she felt too embarrassed to bring it out with her, even if it would do her good. She put a bench in the shower and found some old furniture she could easily reach if she felt tired. She left notes to herself everywhere, and clearly labelled places for her keys, violin, cane, etc. She put important phone numbers on the fridge, and wrote a list of essential knowledge:
You have powers. They are dangerous.
You ended the world twice.
You have siblings that love you (?)
You loved a woman named Sissy and a boy named Harlan. They’re gone now.
You were tortured by Russians.
A man named Leonard once tried to take advantage of you, it can’t happen again. He’s dead now.
You were forcefully medicated by your father.
You’ve hurt a lot of people.
She never really had to read it, but it was nice to know that she would always be holding herself accountable even if she forgot something important. The guilt she felt, she told herself, was only a fraction of her penance.
Her apartment had no mirrors.
She tried to halfheartedly thrift-shop for artwork to liven up the walls. Everything seemed to fall flat. She tried to take up writing again, but to no avail.
Orchestra rehearsal became her only reason to leave the house, and on the days without, she laid in bed until her legs felt like they were on fire, and her eyes itched from the darkness.
Nobody knocked on her door, or called her landline, or sent a letter.