#He does care Vanya but also he care being alive

[gcldfanged]

♡ :3

Send ♡ to see what my muse thinks of yours [ACCEPTING] LOW | ●●●●● | HIGH

●●●●● | ATTRACTION

Incredibly so. Jae-hyo loves to be a proper gentleman and Vanya's classic Hollywood glamour is extremely appealing to him. Not to mention all the other fun aspects of her personality, like being a diva, her insatiable bloodlust- It just hits all the right buttons!

●●●●○ | AFFECTION

Very high. Jae normally isn't the type to be jealous to begin with, but I also think he'd look at Ivan and Volgin's dynamic and think it's disgustingly cute. Plus Vanya was born to be pampered and spoiled and honestly, isn't that what she DESERVES?

●●●○○ | INTEREST The interest is there, but I also feel like they probably established their dynamic quite quickly and stuck to it, if that makes sense? Like there's a comfortable routine there, and disrupting it would make what they have more uncertain- So it's a precarious balancing act. Jae both wants to know more about her over time, but also why ruin a good thing by pushing it.

●○○○○ | LOYALTY

This is a bit tricky- He is loyal to himself, first and foremost to begin with and always will be. If Vanya told him not to do something, normally he would not do the thing, but if it starts to go against his principles or what he feels is necessary for his mission or survival, he'd probably lie to reassure her and then do the thing anyway if it benefits him/them the most. Whereas Vanya loses his reason for living when Volgin dies, when Jae is lead to believe Vanya's dead, he IS angry and upset- But he doesn't suddenly take up arms to avenge them or try to continue whatever semblance of a legacy she and Volgin may have had, he simply cuts his losses and disappears- Reducing the scope of his attention back to pure survival.

●●●○○ | TRUST

Jae dislikes feeling vulnerable in general, but somehow being around her I feel would relax him enough to start being more okay with smaller intimacies. I think it'd take Vanya making that step first and sharing a bit more if she wants, but the gesture would make Jae reconsider what exactly he feels towards her and respond accordingly. They would probably get more opportunity to increase this trust and bond more once they reunite.

[ghysry]

okay but i seriously have been mulling over this for ages and have not voiced it whatsoever but imagine instead of them idk DYING i wouldve killed to have a season where they band together to assassinate their dad lols and redo everything so they end up great and alive and in their own timeline where the apocalypse never happened and vanya got her violin first chair fairly with christmas dinners and celebrations together andUGH

Saw the first and second part of your ask (if I'm certain that's the first and second part) and I think it's a pretty good idea (+ Angst easily flocks to us🙏)

Tagsies: FIVE ANGST....No reader insert for this one folks.

Diego & Five sibling fluff at the very end guys trust trust me it's not heartbreaking at all

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"Do you know who we are? Do you want to know who I am?"

It's a strange thing; his family. He doesn't know exactly what they are to him, well, no, he does - they're his family, the people he bared through the apocalypse for, the people he now rarely sees on Sundays. They agreed to it before, always meeting up on Sundays under the big old oak forest that replaced the daunting mansion they grew up in across different timelines. First, Viktor cancelled his plans sometimes, then always, then they rarely saw his face around anymore. Not that they blamed him, not really, all of them did it too. One by one, they'd cherry pick the best times to cancel their plans and make up varyingly worrying excuses on how they wouldn't make it to the outing this time, or next time, or ever.

Five likes to think he doesn't ask for a lot, he likes to think he doesn't ask for anything at all. Never once in his life, after the first time he asked for something, did he ever do it again. Because what he asked for was freedom, and when he first did he was thirteen. He came back to the present as a fifty-eight year old man stuck in a teen body, with a vow to never ever even think about asking for something, so when he felt the ever growing hole in his chest consume him whole and collapse into his chest when one by one his siblings kept cancelling, he kept his mouth shut and went to the big oak forest on his own. Sometimes he feels childish, because instead of growing up and compartmentalizing it like he always does, this time he solves it by curling up under a tree and trying to silence the world with a shut of both his eyes.

He also likes to think he blames his father for everything that happened. But he doesn't - not that he can't, he does have the ability to, and he should; that much he knows, but he won't. He carries the blame for everything that happened on his shoulders, and every little mistake goes straight into the ever growing black hole in his chest that has already consumed him. He can't blame his siblings, they act the way they act because of their father, but he can blame himself. He, of course, had the least problems out of all of them, just going through an apocalypse, being turned into a human weapon, hunting down and killing thousands of people..it doesn't phase him, not one bit. So why does this phase him?

Where'd all his siblings go?

It felt like they ran away from him. Blinked out of his life and got stuck in their own personal future where they have families to take care of and friends to meet up with, so he also buried himself in work, found a good job that accepted his face and appearance along with his skills, stopped visiting the oak tree, stopped curling underneath it, stopped asking where his siblings went; he was making progress. He thought. The good kind of progress where you're changing the world for good and all. He made friends, kind of. He'd rather stick to co-workers than calling them friends, but he talks to them and they talk to him so the world feels a little less lonely but it doesn't feel enough, either.

Now, surrounded by his siblings, he could stop asking where they went. The first thing he noticed was a scent in the longue they sat in, acorn, burns to smell, artificial. He's sure acorns don't smell like that, he's tried to eat plenty when he was in the apocalypse - it never worked. The only reason they were together again was because, against all conventional means, they needed to kill their dad and Five told them it would save the world. The wandering eyes convey a story, like they've definitely played this play before, heard this tune before, seen the show..they get it, no matter how many metaphors Klaus has to say to try and brighten up the room. Five is just glad they didn't bring any of their kids here, the look on his siblings faces was daunting.

Five, out of anyone, would know that his siblings, though they do blame their father, cannot kill him. No, the twitching in their hands and the sideways look they give to the plant in the corner trying to avoid the topic says so, it's loud, embarrassingly loud - so he comes to one conclusion. He kills the father, it ends. When he planned it out, it honestly felt better in his imagination, the bloodshed, finally killing the man who has plagued his siblings for so long, finally freeing them of their abuser, but for some reason it didn't. It just felt worse, and worse, and worse. Every time he looked down at his hands he'd see the blood, the blood of his father, the blood of the man who was supposed to raise his siblings,

Of the man who was supposed to raise him.

He sat on the edge of the chair this time, hair tussled with restlessness, eyes almost blurry from having stayed up so long, for so late, for how long? He doesn't remember, nor does he really care. He's been spiraling for days and he feels his insides turning out and his lungs expanding when he exhales - his hands are too still, too still, there's too much blood, too much, and there's someone behind him, and..

"Five?" Diego's voice rang out in his head, he takes a pause to acknowledge it, trying to figure out if it's actually his brother calling out to him or just a projection inside his head that feels too real. The hand on his shoulder and the jolt causing him to jump up only slightly, though, further proved his hypothesis - yeah, it's Diego. He doesn't respond, not yet at least, he has to try and come up with a reason as to why he's been staring at his feet and his hands for hours now, and why he jumped at the feeling of someone's hand on his shoulder. He doesn't feel real yet and it's troubling him, like a big cinder block has made it's way to the black hole in his chest but somehow, even with all his calculations about this kind of problem, the cinder block manages not to get sucked in, and instead of a hollow feeling, there's just something weighing on his chest and his ribs this time.

And Diego, instead of waiting for an answer, takes his time to slowly but surely wrap his arms around his brother. "It's okay, I know," does he? "I know." He does.

[bigassheart]

I’ve seen a couple posts about how everyone was wildly out of character and totally inconsistent this season and I’m just like... were you guys paying attention? 

1. Luther

Arguably the biggest shift in character between the two seasons, but it makes sense. Luther spent a year fending for himself and thinking his entire family was dead. 

This is the first time in his life that he had to hold down a job and actually live on his own. It was literally his first time living out in the world among anyone other than his family, and you can see in his reactions with the other characters from that life (the boss, his landlord, those kids that idolize him, and the waitress) that it has really mellowed him out. It has allowed him to be more normal, despite being very much not normal. You can see the way he’s so much more comfortable in his skin. Literally the only times he looks uncomfortable is when he’s fighting people, shirt off and body on full display. He’s still not comfortable with that, but he’s not trying to hide under huge overcoats anymore. He has people in his life who accept him for being a little weird, but really do treat him normal. 

So is he a little less uptight and mission focused? Yeah. Because he can finally see another life, and it’s the life that he honestly did want in season 1 but felt like he couldn’t have because he was number 1 and he had a responsibility to his dad, his family, and the academy to be the leader. Having a year on his own frees him of all that. 

But he also spent all that time thinking his family was dead and feeling so guilty about it. You can see in his very first interaction with Vanya, where he suddenly feels that responsibility again. He brings a gun, not knowing what’s going to happen and, despite what he told Five, he absolutely does still have that lingering feeling of responsibility. But then he sees Vanya and she’s not a threat and everything he has been holding in for the last year comes out. Because he does feel guilty as hell for what he did to Vanya, but also for the fact that his actions pushed her into causing the apocalypse. He spent a year with the knowledge that he did that and thinking that his family was dead because of his actions. 

He’s willing to listen now because he spent a year living in a world where his actions killed his whole family. And now he finds out that that didn’t happen and he has a second chance. Of course he’s going to take it! 

2. Diego

In the first season, Diego finally admitted that he wanted to be close to his family and that he cared about them and wouldn’t leave them again. He confronted the guilt about leaving, which he had previously denied. He realized the difference between revenge and honoring someone’s memory. But despite all that, he never confronted the reason why he, a grown-ass-man, wandered around the city as a leather clad, mask wearing vigilante. 

So when we see Diego show up in 1963, that’s still who he is. He wants to be that hero and he finds an answer for how to be that hero in the first several minutes that he’s there. So he takes it. I mean, what else is he going to do? His family is gone. Maybe they’ll show up again. Maybe this is it. Either way, he’s on his own like he was before, so he’s got a duty to be the hero he has chosen to be. 

And then he meets his dad again. Everyone keeps telling him he has daddy issues, and they’re right. He absolutely has daddy issues. He’s still trying to simultaneously prove that he’s good enough for his dad, but also doesn’t need Daddy’s approval. Except he does need it. He still desperately craves it and he feels gutted when his dad denies him that approval, even falling back into the stutter he had as a kid. 

Now, despite the way we joke, Diego is not dumb. He is so observant and he makes some of the most poignant statements about his siblings and the way they see the world. He sees the people around them and he understands them, but he has never been able to completely turn that gift inwards and see those same things in himself. In this season, Lila breaks through all that and he finally sees himself in her at the end. 

“Do you know how hard it is to trust people when your whole childhood was bullshit manipulation? Then why would you do that to me?”  

Diego sees himself in Lila, in her failure to break away from her mother despite the fact that he knows she wants to. In the final episode, he sees that she is just like the rest of the siblings, but she doesn’t have to be. None of them have to be stuck with their daddy issues, because they have each other. They can support and care for each other. It’s the last step of the growth he started in season 1, moving beyond his tendency to define his life and his family through their father. 

3. Allison

Throughout season 1, Allison struggled with whether or not to use her powers, but it was all centered around getting back to her daughter. When she appears in 1961, that motivation is effectively removed. She thinks everyone else is dead. She thinks that she is stranded in the past and that she will never get back. She finds a group of people to support her and before long... she finds her voice again. 

It’s no coincidence that Allison’s first spoken words in the series come right after she gives Ray that pamphlet with a bunch of added notes. She finds her voice in the civil rights movement. She finds her power there. She finds a way to help change the world, to change reality, and she does it without her powers. 

This is something she struggled with through the entirety of season 1, feeling inadequate for using her powers to get what she wanted, not knowing if anything was real or earned. Now she has the chance to earn everything without those powers and she is thriving. 

And then she is forced to use her powers again. It all turns out fine, but now she’s showing off and experiencing all over again how good it feels to have power. She spent two years in a world where she was denied equal treatment, where she could be arrested and assaulted for any reason those with more power came up with. And now she feels that power... She doesn’t have to wait for people to give her respect. She can demand it. But the pain is still there, and it’s not enough to just be respected, because these people have hurt her. They almost killed her husband. They have used their power to cause pain to her and all those who look like her time and time again and now it’s time to understand what it’s like to be powerless, to be hurt and to be unable to stop it and... 

And it’s scary. It’s scary to have that much power, to see how you could become the kind of person who uses your power to hurt others. And she knows that her power has hurt people she loves and suddenly she’s right back where she started. 

Only not entirely. 

She doesn’t shy away from her powers in the final fight. She is obviously still finding that balance and I would expect this struggle to continue for her in future seasons. Power can be addicting and Allison’s power is so strong. She knows the danger there, but she also knows that sometimes it’s needed despite the danger. 

4. Klaus

Klaus is an addict. He finds obsessions to bury himself in to avoid dealing with reality. In season 1, he buried himself in drugs and booze. When he shows up in the 60′s, he finds a new drug to bury himself in: adoration. 

Klaus is so impulsive and it’s not difficult to connect the dots of how one thing leads to another until suddenly everything is out of his control. Honestly, that’s the story of Klaus’s life, no matter where he goes. And then something changes. He gets tired of his cult and leaves. Except... that’s not really the reason. 

After all this time, Dave is still the love of his life, and he knows he has an opportunity. He knows where Dave will be at this one time and he knows exactly what he has to change to keep Dave alive. 

He also knows that Ben is going to have thoughts about this. 

I know some people were disappointed that there wasn’t more Klaus and Ben bonding this season, but it makes sense that there is tension there. I think a lot of that tension comes from Ben’s circumstances, which I’ll discuss later, but Klaus is also not responding to that tension well. 

They are fighting more than ever (not that they ever didn’t fight in season 1, where they spent much of their time being snarky to each other and Ben literally punching Klaus in the face for being an asshole), but the fighting is about something new this season. Ben wants his own life and Klaus is not in a position to give Ben what he really wants. We also learn that he has been carrying around this guilt for the last 17 years about forcing Ben to stick around as a ghost. He forced this half-life on his brother and now that it’s not enough for Ben, Klaus doesn’t want to deal with it. So he avoids and deflects and snarks and we see the toll on their relationship. We see it in the way he tries to deal with his plans around Dave entirely on his own. He focuses so much into that last ditch effort. He’s already in such a low place before this, so when that fails, we see him snap. We see him give up and crumble. And Ben falls back to his old role, trying to save Klaus from himself. 

But the tension isn’t gone and Klaus’s guilt isn’t gone. We see it again when Klaus finally agrees to let Ben possess him. Klaus has always been afraid of his powers and being possessed is just as terrifying a thought as being surrounded by the dead. And yet he gives Ben that chance. It’s the last good thing he can do at that point. 

I do wish we had gotten more closure for Klaus and Ben’s story. I think Vanya’s reveal could have been given a little more time, but that’s not really a problem with inconsistent characterization, so we’ll save that for another post. 

5. Five

OK, who would argue that Five was out of character or inconsistent? He’s obsessed with stopping the apocalypse, is willing to cross a lot of lines to save his family, and constantly frustrated by his family’s failure to go along with his plans. This is textbook Five. 

What I loved about this season was that we got to see Five finally meeting his father again. They interact as two adults, not as a child trying to find away to become his own person, frustrated by a lack of trust from his father. It allows Reggie to see Five in a different light and to actually provide advice in a constructive way, something he has almost never been able to do when viewing them as his children. But despite outward appearances and despite the fact that Five is a grown man, he still sees his father the same way he always has. He doesn’t register Reggie’s advice as advice. He hears that he’s striving beyond his abilities and that maybe he can only travel in seconds. He hears his father telling him he can’t handle time travel. That’s why he doesn’t try to actually take the very good advice until the very end.  

An old dog can still occasionally learn a new trick and Five proves that true. 

6. Ben

As I mentioned earlier, Ben is chaffing at his ghosthood. Maybe it’s because Klaus has been sober enough to keep Ben around solidly for 3 years. Maybe it’s because Ben is no longer spending all his time trying to keep Klaus alive and sober. Or maybe it’s the fact that he has finally found someone that he actually wants to spend time with. Whatever the reason, Ben wants to be alive this season. 

Again, as I mentioned, that’s causing some tension. Ben doesn’t want to be tied to Klaus, but Klaus is ignoring that because he feels so guilty about it. Ben doesn’t want to admit that he was too scared to go into the light on his own, so they’re at a bit of a standstill. 

And then Ben gets the opportunity to be alive again, if only for a while. And in a lot of ways, it’s wonderful! But it’s not the same as being truly alive. 

So when the time comes, when he’s faced with that light again... he’s not afraid. He knows that it’s time to move on. He knows this isn’t where he should be, but he also got the chance to be there for his family. He misses them, but he got to talk to Diego and Vanya. He got to save Vanya. He got to save Allison and Diego and Klaus and Luther and Five and the whole world! So while he would have stayed, he’s not sad about leaving anymore, and he’s not afraid. 

7. Vanya

OK, she was a little out of character because... you know. She had amnesia. 

But aside from erasing her past, the amnesia allowed us to see Vanya without the anger and resentment that plagued her for all of season one. Vanya was always someone who was kind and loving, someone who cares enough to leave peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches out for a missing brother for years. Someone who knows the pain of not being seen and who will always take the time to truly see other people. She’s someone who wants to love and to be loved and to protect those she loves. 

That was all here, with or without the memories. And as soon as the memories came back, so did the guilt and fear about what she had done, what she had become, terrified of what was inside her in a way that she was not when her powers first surfaced. But Ben is used to being afraid of what’s inside of him. He knows she’s not a monster and is the perfect person to explain that to her. And this time around, she has experienced the love and care and attention of her siblings (and Sissy) to back up those words. That’s how she finally accepts them as truth, how she finally accepts her power as a part of her. 

Overall, there are things that I wish this season spent more time with, but there was nothing that I felt was out of character or wildly inconsistent. The characters still struggled with all the baggage from their shitty childhood, their fear of their powers, and the guilt in their past. Some struggled in new ways this season and some continued old struggles that had never fully been resolved. The season felt very different than the first, but it still felt like the Umbrella Academy. It was a good mix of new and old and a good mix of feel-good moments we have all been waiting for and frustrating and sad moments that just come with having a complicated family. I loved this season. And now, I’m going to go re-watch every episode. 

[phoenixes-and-wizards]

now that s3′s been officially confirmed, here’s a couple of things i want to see

obviously the umbrella academy kids interacting with sparrow academy!ben 

will the sparrow academy kids be super possessive of their ben? or is he actually that much of an asshole that they all but yeet him in the original kids’ direction

the umbrella academy and sparrow academy kids duking it out at first, while klaus and his counterpart (if they do have counterparts) just sit back, smoke some weed, and talk about the finer points of life

reggie finally receiving his comeuppance, i don’t care how, just make it slow and painful

a vanya and reggie scene where she berates him for every single thing he did to her

a luther and reggie scene where he berates him for every single thing he did to him

a diego and reggie scene where he--you know what, you get the point

what happened to the last swede???? and klaus’ cult?

if klaus’ cult is still present in the new timeline, will they just worship klaus all the more for looking exactly the same as when he’d left them, or would they hate him for leaving them so abruptly and without a proper goodbye at that

vanya scaring the living crap out of reggie with her powers

honestly just give me all the scenes where reggie loses all semblance of control over his kids

battle scenes where the sparrow academy and umbrella academy kids have to work together

and surprise, surprise, their powers are actually complimentary instead of contradictory to each other’s!!!!!!

cue all the awesome battle move combo scenes

klaus, vanya, and allison sharing more time together

more scenes of diego and herb’s developing friendship

ben slowly but surely warming up to his “other” family

the umbrella academy kids each trying to protect ben in their own way, and when he finally snaps because he isn’t “a fucking child, alright, i’m number one here” and klaus--who up until this point has been holding up quite well--finally punching him and going “you asshat, in case it wasn’t obvious from the last 235213423 times we’ve saved your life, we don’t want to lose you again!!!!!” 

plus the sparrow academy kids just going *shocked pikachu face* in the background

GIMME MORE VANYA AND DIEGO BONDING SCENES PLEASE

the umbrella kids re-meeting pogo and having to introduce themselves all over again

and for fuck’s sake, just give diego the closure he needs with grace

also: considering it’s a new timeline and diego and patch had never met, does this mean she’s still out there

BUT DEAR LORD PLEASE DONT GIVE ME A PATCH/DIEGO/LILA LOVE TRIANGLE IM SICK AND TIRED OF THAT BS

instead, give me patch and lila ganging up on diego and bullying him at every turn for being such a stubborn little shit sometimes

SISSY AND VANYA REUNION

KLAUS AND DAVE REUNION!!!!

istg dave better be alive, because klaus cannot take any more pain, and so can i

I THINK WE’RE ALONE NOW

[in-tua-deep]

idk if you still do au ideas but what if delores was a real person in the apocalypse? how it woul dbe done i have no idea but i love all your aus and thought it would be cool

okay okay I don't tend to go for real!Dolores aus admittedly because I find her much more compelling as what she is: a reflection of five himself and a symptom of his crushing loneliness

but i started thinking about it and you know what?? i think five deserves a little socialization, as a treat

so say like, 0.5% of the population is resistant to abilities. Allison would really struggle to rumor them, Five wouldn't be able to jump with them, and, most importantly, whatever the fuck Vanya's ability does has like, reduced damage or something

and the og apocalypse isn't the moon apocalypse, so let's say that it was pure waves of Vanya's powers that fucked over the earth

so 0.5% of the population survives the apocalypse. though, let's be honestly, the real number is a lot smaller than that. People who might have survived Vanya's initial power wave (miraculously) did not survive buildings crushing them or survive the car/plane/bus/train/other transportation crashes or survive being left alone when they are too young to reliably look after themselves, or the variety of other problems that come with 99.5% of the population dying at once

So, Five arrives in the apocalypse and is met with ruin and fire and a whole lot of dead people. He finds his siblings, but it doesn't matter. They're dead. He doesn't even recognize them at first, these strange grown-ups who he identifies not by their faces but by the umbrellas on their wrists that match his own

As he realizes the full impact of his situation, he hears a voice that says, very succinctly, "holy shit!"

It's a girl a few years older than Five himself, maybe 15 or 16, and she is very excited to see another survivor.

And here's where I u-turn this au around bc i'm not all that interested in real!Dolores, but I would be down to talk about Five meeting survivors in the apocalypse, because if Dolores is real I don't buy no one else survived.

So Dolores shows up and see a Literal Child crying over the corpses of his family and assumes that Five is a fellow survivor, and she immediately grabs him up. Five is incoherent with grief at this point anyway, so he doesn't even protest when she basically hauls him away from the bodies. She's babbling at him, but he doesn't really hear anything she's saying

And then she takes him to her dad

(Why not, let's have the 1% potentially be a heritable thing)

and her dad, let's call him just some dad name. like Rick. it has been a fucking WEEK for him, okay. he had his daughter with him, his ex-wife is on the other coast for her work, and by some miracle he survived the apocalypse and so did his child, and he's been wracking his brains trying to figure out what the fuck to do next

and then his daughter shows up with a traumatized thirteen-year-old in tow

now rick is a good dude. he's a dad. they get out of five that his name is five ("what the fuck" dolores mouths to him over five's shoulder and rick can't help but agree) and the bodies he found were his siblings ("Dad and Ben and Vanya weren't there though," this child cries desperately and rick feels his own heart clench in response, "They might still be alive!")

"We can look for them." Rick assures his new adopted child, because he is an adult in a fresh apocalypse and this kid has presumably lost everything he's ever known (more than rick even knows at the time)

and they do. They each get wagons and they go out and find supplies and look for other survivors. Five is... surprisingly helpful and also surprisingly docile as he is able to rely on Someone Else to give orders while he attempts to (dissociate) process what the fuck has happened

and here's the thing: Five prides himself on being independent, sort of. He's independent for a child soldier, but he's used to taking orders from a male authority figure and Rick happens to be just that

The first time that Five does something dangerous and Rick yells is a revelation

(Rick isn't sure if he hopes that Five's dad is alive or not, because if they find that man alive then Rick might just kill the jackass himself. Also like, Five is bizarrely knowledgeable out survival skills, like way too knowledgeable about it, which is helpful for them but also very concerning)

they find a newspaper and Five finds the article that mentions his father's recent death ("Huh. Heart attack." Five says, and there is no emotion in his voice)

(Years later, years later, Five and Rick talk. "I don't think I wanted to find him, either." Five admits, softly because Dolores is asleep, "I think I was more scared of finding him alive than I was of finding his body. He would've been so mad at me, I think.")

this newspaper is how Rick and Dolores find out about Five being Number Five, Umbrella Academy Missing Person

"Dude, what the fuck." Dolores says, wide eyes, "You're like, thirty?"

"I'm thirteen." Five says, and then checks the date on the newspaper again, "Also I think I would technically be 29 if I lived through all of it, 'cause it's April and my birthday is in October."

"You... time travelled?" Rick asks, which is honestly the more relevant question, "Can you go back?"

And Five just,,, crumples on himself. Because he tried, he tried really hard. It didn't work. "I'm gonna figure it out. I'm gonna go back, I'm going to save them."

That, Rick thinks, is a lot of weight to put on one person's shoulders, but especially the shoulders of a child.

"Alright." Rick says, because what else can he say after finding out his new child has superpowers and is from like, 2004? "What do you need?"

("Oh my god I have so many memes to teach you." Dolores says later, reverently. Five blinks in confusion and Rick mentally prepares himself for the recitation of so many vines)

And it's easier, somehow. Five sometimes feels like it's a betrayal, but he settles into apocalypse life with an ease that surprises him.

He lets Rick fuss over him and help tie his scarf securely around his head every morning before he sets off on supply runs with Dolores. And they're kids! Five has never had a friend before, and Dolores is funny and smart and she's struggling just as much as he is.

"I don't know if my mom's alive." She says to him, in solidarity when he checks the face of every corpse to see if they're Vanya.

Five is practical in the way only a child soldier can be. He's economical with the room in their wagons, carefully examining what might and what might not be useful.

Dolores, on the other hand, constantly takes up space with what Five sees as useless shit.

"Excuse you," Dolores says, shoving a game of monopoly, the entire discworld series, and a pack of glitter gel pens into her wagon, "These are absolutely vital apocalypse supplies."

She challenges him, plays with him in a way no one ever has. "I bet you I can find more batteries today than you can," She grins at him, "Winner gets to pick dinner first?"

"You're on." Five says, directly before Dolores pulls two packs of 24 AA batteries from behind her back, like a cheat.

Dolores makes him take a ten minute break when they find a playground that has been mostly not-destroyed. They rummage around kids backpacks and mother's handbags for some good loot, too numb to corpses to even be bothered all that badly about the corpses they belong to.

"I'm getting on the swings." Dolores says when Five starts making noises about moving on, "I haven't been on a swingset in ages."

"What's the point?" Five grumps.

"Don't be sour because you can't swing as high as I can!" Dolores laughs, getting higher and higher as the swings creak ominously.

Five grumpily gets into the other swing and grudgingly kicks himself back and forth until Dolores takes pity on him and teaches him how to properly move his legs and body to get higher and higher.

Dolores jumps from the swing seat and lands with a flourish and smile. Five jumps out of his seat and then jumps, warping right in front of Dolores and making her yell and hit at him in outrage. Five smiles the widest he has all week.

This is how Five grows up in the apocalypse, with Dolores teasing him into taking breaks and leaning over his shoulder to look at his math and scandalizing him by stating that she'd only just started on matrices in her own high school math class.

Every night they huddle around Rick while he picks up whatever book Dolores picked out that day because it is a travesty that Five has never read hunger games or whatever, and then they read together because it would be a genuine blood bath if they all took turns. The first time Five accidentally mentioned a spoiler and Dolores genuinely considered murder was the birthday of this tradition

Some days the air is too smoky or there are dust storms or it's just plain too dangerous to go out, and they all stay in. Dolores regales Five with stories about public school, and Five tells them about his siblings.

Then they all cry

"I shouldn't be crying." Five sobs.

"Shut the fuck up," Dolores sobs back, "You literally watched me lose my shit over remembering my shitty eighth grade dance and listened to me sob-sing toxic for like four hours."

"In fairness I also wished you would shut up then."

"Let me hug you or I will start singing songs that I only remember the chorus for again you absolute fucker."

"I could always sing some -"

"No, Rick/Dad."

And Five grows up. Rick shows him how to shave very carefully in front of cracked mirrors. Dolores teases him every time his voice cracks. Rick tells Five in no uncertain terms that he loves and cares for him, and that Reginald was a little bitch. There are a lot of heartfelt conversations around that, honestly. Rick telling Five that he and the siblings deserved better, that they were children and deserved to have a childhood.

And that he has faith in Five. Rick and Dolores both do, they bring him back paper and pens and pencils and chalk and anything Five can use to write equations. They poke around any libraries for books on theoretical mathematics and quantum physics. Rick and Dolores go out scouting for food while Five stays home and can work longer.

They also make him take breaks, make sure that he's looking after himself.

They're a little better off than OG!Five when it comes to food, because some animals survive. Enough that Rick figures out how to hunt. Five is the first one to each bugs, and even though Dolores makes faces they all start eating bugs as well.

"Pretty sure there's loads of cultures that eat bugs." Rick says grudgingly, wondering if he should try stirfry the cockroaches and if that would improve the taste. "There's even, uh, cricket flour or whatever, right?"

"Plus you eat like, five spiders a year when you're asleep." Dolores says cheerfully, just to watch her dad's face scrunch up in displeasure.

"That doesn't sound true, but I don't know enough about spiders to dispute it." Five mutters, and Dolores gives him such a proud look that it makes him roll his eyes.

They're in their thirties when Rick dies. He's out foraging and hunting, and the rubble he's standing on gives way and he ends up with a gash in his leg. He manages to stop the bleeding, but the world is filthy and they don't have any antibiotics.

He gets an infection.

"It's okay." He tells both of his kids, "It's okay. I'm just so glad that you guys have each other, y'hear? I'm so glad."

"It's not okay." Five says, voice thick and choked, "It's not."

"Yeah, well, you're going to figure out how to go back, right? Go back in time and save everyone. Then I'll have never died, right?" Rick smiles, "And even if you don't, I'll be waiting for you on the other side and we'll see each other again anyway."

"I'm going to fix it."

"I know. I have faith in you, Five." Ricks says honestly, and that's more than Reginald ever said.

They sit quietly together while Dolores is out scavenging. They've been taking turns sitting with Rick.

"I won't remember you, in the past, will I?" Rick says rhetorically, but Five answers anyway.

"I don't think so."

Rick hums, "Well, doesn't matter. If you need help in the past, you come to me, y'hear?"

"You won't remember me."

"Doesn't matter. You come find me, and you tell me your crazy story until I believe you, and then I'll help you." Rick says firmly, "You're family. You're my son. Timelines? Don't matter. If you need help, with anything, even if it's just with - with filling out a bowling team or something -"

"I have never been bowling in my life and you know it." Five interrupts, but it makes him laugh just a little bit which was clearly Rick's intention.

"Well who knows what you'll get up to in the past! You'll be able to go bowling, you know. Get to wear those uncomfortable shoes. Hey, you go far enough back maybe you can go to Dolores's tenth birthday party and put me out of my misery."

"Was she bad at bowling?"

"Oh, she was wiping the floor with me. No contest."

"Honestly, that sounds absolutely accurate."

"Shut up, bowling just wasn't my sport. Regardless, the point was that I'm giving you a free pass to come and get me. Because I know you, I know how you think." Rick brings up his hand to tap his finger against Five's forehead, "You get it into your head that you need to go it alone, take it all on your shoulders. I'm telling you that if you do that I'll somehow manifest my memories and come smack you over the head for being stupid, you hear?"

"I'm not dragging you into anything." Five says firmly, "I'll have my siblings."

"Who were also children." Rick points out. "And dragging? Dragging is such a strong word for a volunteer."

"A volunteer who won't remember volunteering." Five shoots back.

Rick just shrugs, and then winces when the movement jolts his bad leg. "Five, I'm going to be honest with you here. And sappy. Can you handle a bit of sappiness for a minute?"

"No."

"Well too bad. Can't leave a dying man, you'd feel too bad. So you're stuck with me. But you listen good, okay? Because you aren't dragging me into anything. Whatever life you have, I want to have a part of that. Because you're my son. Wherever you are, whatever you do, I want to help because you're family. What you'd be doing by leaving me out of it is depriving me of someone I love, depriving me of knowing one of the best kids I've ever known."

"Shut up." Five says, choked.

"Nope, it's sappy time." Rick states, "Maybe asking you to come find me is selfish, but I don't care. No matter what version of me exists, I want to be in your life."

"My life is a walking joke, why would you want any part of that?"

"It has been my privilege to watch you grow up. To help you. To be here for you. Of course I'd want to be there to watch you grow up the rest of the way."

"But -"

"Shut up, just let me tell you that I am so proud of you. You never give up, and your heart is so big. You love so much and so loudly, and it's been the highest honor of my life to be included in your family."

Five pauses for a moment to collect himself before simply saying - "You're the best dad I've ever had."

Rick snorts, "Considering my competition, I'd sure hope so. That bar was so low old Reggie was practically limbo dancing with the devil. Now get over here and give an old man a hug."

They don't bury Rick, when he dies. They don't have time and the ground is too hard and they don't have the heart to move him. Instead the pack everything up and seal him in the shelter they'd lived in.

Dolores pulls out a bottle of ancient nail polish and painstakingly writes Rick's name on the wall with his birth year and an approximate current year. They aren't 100% sure though, since time blends together out in the apocalypse, but it's something.

They continue by themselves. They get older.

Dolores jokingly calls him her husband because the way his face scrunches up makes her cackle. They see other people very occasionally, usually passing through. Usually groups. Dolores and Five get to flex their hosting skills, though more than one group declines their cockroach stirfry.

("It's a family recipe." Five says with amusement in his eyes that usually manages to drown out old grief.)

"Jeeze, that kid couldn't have been older'n twenty-three." Dolores complains, "Makes me feels positively ancient."

"They wouldn't have known any world 'cept for the apocalypse." Five muses, pouring some boiled water into wine glasses because they might be living in the apocalypse but they can be fancy.

"Do you ever think about that?" Dolores asks, turning to him with no judgement, just curiosity. "When you go back, you'll be like, erasing them from existence."

Five shrugs, "Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe this place will just split off into an alternate timeline."

"Maybe none of this is real." Dolores says, amusement coloring her voice. "Maybe you aren't talking to a real person at all. Maybe this is just a symbol of your insanity and cracked mind."

"Dolores, I literally have a scar where you stabbed me. Did I somehow manage to stab myself in the back?"

"Scraped you, I scraped you. By accident."

"So you maintain." Five says haughtily, swirling his water in his wine glass like a pretentious prick.

"I could totally be fake. You don't know my life."

"I know way too much about you, Dolores. Like, way way too much." Five scoffs, because Dolores and him have literally no secrets from one another at this point. Five even knows the truth behind what happened at Janet Scranton's thirteenth birthday party. Like, he said, way too much.

"Maybe you made it up. Maybe that's why you know so much."

"Dolores, I'm going to be honest with you right now." Five presses the tips of his fingers to his chin, "If you were a figment of my imagination, you would be so much better at math."

"Hey!" Dolores squawks indignantly, "I didn't even get to finish high school you pretentious prick!"

"Neither did I!"

"You didn't even go to high school, you brat."

"I'm fifty-two I think I've outgrown 'brat.'"

"Tell that to your attitude." Dolores says haughtily, "You're still younger than me."

"Won't be when I go back in time." Five says cheerfully, completely ignoring Dolores's venomous look.

"That's cheating."

"Sucks to suck." Five says loftily, taking another sip of his water.

Sometimes they talk about The Plan, with capital letters. What Five is going to do when he goes back in time, depending on when he pops out. Is he going to adopt his siblings? What about Reginald?

"You don't think I could kill Reginald?" Five says, holding a hand to his chest in mock offense.

"I think you should let me do it. I'll even give you control of tonight's music if you do."

"What are you doing to do? Bite his ankles? What if you're like, seven or something?"

"All the better to get away with it since I'll be too young to convict or whatever."

"Pretty sure that's not how the law works."

"How would you know? Just for that I'm playing Istanbul on repeat again."

"I don't know why you think that's a threat. That song slaps."

It takes a few more years before Five is close enough that the Commission comes to interfere. Because that's what I think happened - Five was getting too close and they stepped in because they might as well distract the man as much as they can with missions, right?

So the Handler shows up. And she offers Five a job, telling him that they have the ability to travel through time. And Five - hesitates.

"Give me some time?" Five asks, and the Handler graciously gives him 24 hours.

And he and Dolores talk it over, because now that his goal is more in sight than it has ever been and Five is scared.

"What are you waiting for? You have the chance to see your siblings again." Dolores says patiently.

"Yeah," Five says, and what he doesn't say is clear. But I won't see you.

"Five." Dolores says, and she cradles his face between her palms like he is something precious, "I have had so much time with you already. More than I would have ever. We have been so lucky, to have this time. How can I demand more than what we have already been given?"

"When have you ever not demanded the world, Dolores?" Five asks, his own hand coming up to cover Dolores's own.

"We've had decades together, Five. We're getting old. I was always going to lose you, one way or another. Nothing lasts forever."

"I don't want to lose you."

"I know. But if I had to choose a way, if I could decide where our story ends, this would be it. Letting you go, because this way you get to live. You get to see your family again. You get to save the world. I could ask for nothing more than for you to get your happy ending."

Five removes Dolores's hand from his cheek so that he can cradle it between them, "I'm happy here with you. I've never been happier. Isn't that silly? That I was happier in the apocalypse?"

"I bet killing Reggie would make you happy." Dolores laughs rustily.

"One day you're going to see the mysterious disappearance of a famous billionaire in the paper and feel a twinge of satisfaction and now have a clue why." Five laughs as well, shaking his head.

Dolores pats Five's hands, "Five, look at me. We've had our time. And you're going to give me even more of it. More time with my father. More time with my mother. I'll never know it, but you'll have saved me."

"What if this is - what if this is an alternate reality? What if I leave you here alone?"

"Then you'll be saving a 15-year-old girl from the same fate as me. Because as much as I love you, as much as I have loved this time we have had together, this is still an apocalypse. This should never have happened, and if you have a chance to go back and prevent it, then I want you to take that chance with both hands."

"Even if it means leaving you alone?"

Dolores smiles at him, "I'm not going to be alone. Far too many creepy crawlies in the apocalypse for that."

"Shut up, I'm being serious."

"Hmm." Dolores hums consideringly, "Maybe I'll head North, to that new settlement that last group said they'd heard word of. Sure they'd find some use for an old woman who's survived this long in the wilderness."

"You can have my half of the record collection." Five says, pulling her against him into a hug that she easily returns.

"As if I wouldn't have stolen them as soon as you left." She scoffs, but it's a little wet, and Five pretends his own eyes aren't leaking tears.

When The Handler comes back, Dolores gives him another hug. She also slips something into his pocket - some photos. They'd taken it a year into the apocalypse, when Dolores had found an ancient looking polaroid camera and towed it home despite Five's protests about practicality. The photos are worn and faded at the edges, but the smiles on Five's little apocalypse family's faces are undeniable.

"You'll have to see if they magically fade when you change the timeline." Dolores whispers to him with a grin, "Like in the movies."

"Okay." Five whispers back.

"You have the list of movies to watch, right?" Dolores says. Five rolls his eyes and nods because he wrote the list last night into his Vanya-book while Dolores hovered over his shoulder and critiqued his handwriting.

"And you promise to try a proper non-expired twinkie at some point?"

"That I do not promise. I think even looking at one would make me lose my lunch. I have twinkie-trauma."

"Shut up and get going." Dolores says, because the Handler is starting to tap her foot impatiently.

And off Five goes to become an assassin. Though - he's much more gentle this time. He's careful, he doesn't kill children and he usually takes jobs that don't require killing at all. He distracts and manipulates events as much as he can without killing.

He's actually much more well socialized, thanks to Rick and Dolores. Less feral child and more determined man on a mission.

Which is why he's so frustrated when he finally, finally manages to get the equations to work and falls through and falls - directly back into his stupid thirteen-year-old body.

"Shit." Five says, loudly, and revels in the surprised look on his siblings faces.

He strides into the kitchen, and they all follow him like ducklings. They look exactly the way they did when they died.

"Wow this is actually way harder than I thought it would be." Five muses, looking at their dead faces. But as Dolores would say, life is hard but you have to keep on trucking sometimes. "Whatever, what's the date?"

"Five, where have you been?" Diego demands, looking irritated. It makes Five snort in amusement.

"The future. The past. If you want like, an exact list of dates you'll have to hold your horses. I spent like, two weeks in Peru once. No souvenirs though, unfortunately."

They look taken aback, like they didn't expect Five to have quite this much sass. Oops. That is definitely Dolores's influence. Or maybe he was always a little asshole. In fairness, what teenagers aren't tiny assholes? He has an excuse.

"What the fuck does that mean?" Diego's eyebrows are furrowed in anger. It kind of takes Five aback for a second, because he remembers a Diego who stutters when he argued.

"When did you learn the fuck-word?" Five asks, raising an eyebrow before her can help it, "Grace ought to wash your mouth out with soap."

Diego immediately goes red, "Shut up!"

"Wow you're so easy to rile up. Aren't you like, twenty-something? Actually, I could figure out for myself how old you are if you gave me the date."

"I'm twenty-nine." Diego growls, like that was the point.

"Haunting!" Five says cheerfully, because that means there is way less time than he would like, narrowing his time down to a six month window.

It's extremely funny how his cheer makes all of them make faces.

It's Klaus who leans forward, "Why do you need to know?"

Klaus's face is open and curious and - (looks exactly like he did when Five found him all those years ago) - and Five can't help but answer him. "The world end on April 1st, 2019. No it isn't an April Fools joke, yes I have heard that joke like a million different times. I just want to know how close I landed so I can, you know, start working on how to fix that."

"Woah woah woah, roll it back." Allison says, holding a hand up, "What?"

"The apocalypse occurs on April 1st, 2019." Five says, slowly. "I have traveled from afar to prevent this from happening, because like, everyone dies."

"Everyone?" Vanya says weakly from the side.

She's clearly expecting to be ignored, so Five turns his head to address her directly by wiggling his hand back and forth a little. "Sort of. Like, not too many people survive at all. A handful of the human population, you know."

"But you survived?" Diego recovers admirably, if bitingly.

"Well, no." Five says rolling his eyes, "Wouldn't you just know it, Klaus here has managed to figure out a new ability!"

Everyone turns to look at Klaus, who immediately holds up his hands like he's being arrested or something, "I did not!"

"Wonderful! Now that we've established that I'm alive -"

"Why should we trust a word you say?" Luther says for the first time, looking pensive.

Five blinks, genuinely taken aback. "Because... I'm your brother? Because I can clearly and obviously time travel? Like, yeah, it would have been more convenient if I'd arrived in like, my old-body for proof-purposes, but like. I mean. Thirteen is still a pretty convincing age to be to prove time travel considering if I hadn't, I would be like, almost thirty."

"Roll it back again." Allison says firmly, "What do you mean by 'old body'?"

"Great question!" Five says pointing at Allison and smiling. Everyone looks at him weird again, and Five takes a moment to wonder if they've ever experienced positive reinforcement. Knowing Reginald, probably not. "Wait! Is Reggie alive? Wait, no, answer that in a second. Uh. When I time traveled I fucked up my body I guess, I was like, old. White hair and wrinkles-type old from spending decades in the apocalypse. But I fucked up the calculations and got booted back to my thirteen-year-old body, I guess. How, I have no idea."

"What?" Vanya says, still equally weakly.

"You have no idea how fucked up time travel is." Five whispers conspiratorially to Vanya, loud enough for the whole table to hear, "There are so many ways to die. Or permanently tear a hold in space time. But like, with life as we know if ending soon-ish, I figured I couldn't possibly fuck it up worse than it already was, y'know? Speaking of, anyone have the date again?"

"Wait, what was that about dad?" Luther asks, very focused.

"Oh, you still call him dad? Big oof." Five says automatically, because apparently his verbal filter is shot to hell after living with Dolores. It does make Klaus bark out a too-loud laugh.

"What does that mean?" Luther asks aggressively.

"It means Reginald sucks and doesn't deserve the title of 'dad,' what did you think I meant?" Five asks, and now both Diego and Vanya and both cracking smiles, though Vanya is covering hers with a hand.

"Have some respect for the dead." Luther growls, standing up and looking very large and threatening.

Five sways back, craning his head up, "Woah there big buy, sit down before I injure my poor growing spine looking up at you. Jeeze, did Reggie force feed you steroids or something? I wouldn't put it past him but like, I just want to know he at least went over the side effects of the drug with you. Also like, thanks for narrowing it down. Also terrifying! Seriously though, exact date please because if I have less than 24 hours I am going to break down crying and that is a threat."

"I love this Five." Klaus says reverently.

"March 21st." Vanya offers, finally.

"Wow! Terrifying!" Five says, clapping his hands together, "Hate that. Ten days, huh? Well, who wants to get on board the save-the-world express?"

Klaus immediately flings his hand in the air, Five points at his brother appreciatively. "Yes, excellent! I'll take the volunteer in the lovely skirt as my first team member. Any other volunteers?"

"Danke!" Klaus simpers, grinning widely like this is the vest entertainment he's had in weeks.

"I'm not just going to stand here and listen to you badmouth dad and boss us around." Luther slams his hands on the table.

"Well not with that attitude." Five snarks.

Diego raises his hand, "I would like to join team fuck dad as well."

"We can certainly debate team names later." Five says, nodding wisely as Luther gives some sort of scandalized gasp.

"Honestly, I just want to see where this is going." Klaus confesses.

Five shrugs, because he doesn't really care about the reason. "Don't you want to prove me wrong them? Prove what a well-adjusted young man Reginald Hargreeves raised?"

"Shut up." Luther grinds out, looking a moment away from throwing a punch.

"If this is all true, I have to get home." Allison cuts in, looking concerned, "I have - I have a daughter."

"I mean, if you want to give Claire a world to live in then I'd stick around, but that's just me." Five shrugs.

"You know her name?" Allison asks, obviously taken aback.

Five is almost offended, "Uh, yeah. I have her photo as well. Y'all get on like, a bizarre number of gossip magazine covers did you know that?"

Allison manages to outdo herself in terms of being taken aback once more.

There's a beat of silence, and then Five turns, "Vanya? You in?"

"Me?" Vanya blinks, looking shocked. "What can I do?"

"Yeah, what can she do?" Diego asks, crossing his arms and suddenly looking grumpy.

It baffles Five, who scrunches his nose, "Uh, like, a lot? I assume? I mean. I'm going to be honest here, just looking at y'all right now is a lot. In more ways than one! Hashtag trauma and all that, but like, name a single one of you that wouldn't be the most obvious person in the room as soon as you walked into it. Except Vanya, who somehow manages to look like a well adjusted adult, by some miracle."

"Did you just verbally say the word hashtag?" Allison asks, looking so deeply confused.

"More concerned about the trauma he tacked onto there, but y'know, to each their own." Klaus immediately cuts in.

"You think I'm well-adjusted?" Vanya asks, looking oddly touched.

"I would like to direct your attention to Diego's leather pants-scowl combo and Luther's general aura of daddy-issues." Five says pointedly, "I can practically smell the tragic comic book backstory in this room. If I'd jumped back a decade earlier this would have been Batman's wet dream of orphan selection."

"Alright! Game plan!" Five says, waving Diego's knife in his hand.

Diego's hands immediately go to his weird harness looking thing, "Hey!"

"Give me just one moment to get the tracker out." Five rolls his eyes, "Then I'll give it back, I promise. Also if someone could ask Grace for like, some antibiotics that would be good."

"What?" Allison asks, directly before Five stabs himself and there is suddenly panic at the table.

"Relax!" Five says, allowing Diego to remove the knife from his hands. He doesn't need it anyway and his hand immediately drops down to root in the wound.

"Five what the fuck!" Diego yells, but Five just pulls up bloody fingers and waves the tracker into Diego's stupefied face.

"What the fuck is that, Five?" Allison demands, looking very shaken.

"I literally just said it was a tracker." Five points out, "Now, I think our first team activity should be voting on whether we destroy it or take it out to bumfuck nowhere and ditch it to confuse the Commission."

"What the fuck is the Commission?" Diego barks.

"Man. Maybe I should just hit up Rick." Five muses, "This is going to take so much explaining."

"Who is Rick."

"So much explaining."

[jasontoddssoulmate]

I made an account for the sole purpose of this TUA fic concept

I’m a sucker for those “the characters read the books/watch the series” fics and I’ve read a little for TUA but I just had the idea:

The Hargreeves kids watching the two seasons but instead of just the seven of them, their birth mothers are brought in to watch as well

Maybe have the birth mothers family (if they have any) watch it with them 

This happens before everything. Before Ben’s death, before Five’s disappearance, before they even have their names. The kids, One through Seven, are brought in. Maybe when they’re old enough to get the gist of what’s going on, but before they’re 13.

These 6 young women are brought in (because I adore that Luther and Five being twins is canon in the comics and I love the mention of it), and they’re confused because maybe The Umbrella Academy isn’t internationally well known so the kids are familiar but they can’t put the name to the face. Not until they introduce themselves, anyways, and suddenly they’re face to face with the baby that they gave away years ago.

Maybe a few of them regret it, maybe they tried to forget it, maybe they spend so much of their time thinking about it or maybe they’re overjoyed that their baby seems to be doing so well. 

But their names. 

There’s just so much about them that doesn’t feel,,, so right? Maybe that’s not the word for it but they’re too polite sometimes, their casually cruel treatment towards their sister isn’t normal and the way that they simultaneously act entitled and inferior towards each other isn’t suppose to be as normal as the kids make it out to be. 

All in all, the women are confused and maybe a bit wary of their casual usage of powers among each other that’s normal to the siblings as much as it is abnormal to the birth mothers. 

But communication is easy since each child learned their own mother language as well as the language of their siblings birth place and then some which only seems to remind the women that holy shit these kids are technically rich because of their father

The Hargreeves though? They’re confused and wary as hell. They may not have been introduced as The Inaugural Class of The Umbrella Academy yet (or maybe they have considering what your timeline is) but they’ve been training for most of their life and the situation is baffling. Here are these random people that they’ve never met before (at least to their knowledge) and they’ve never had to go outside to interact with others, not really at least. 

So it makes sense that they go for polite but threatening. They maybe decide unanimously that the weaker willed ones like Four, Six and Seven are discreetly protected behind their older (in spirit) siblings, One, Two, Three and Five. 

But they’re no real threat, its obvious in the way that the Hispanic woman uses such an endearing term like “mijo/a” and the way that the Russian woman has an ever present smile on her face and such a sweet disposition that reminds them of their littlest sibling and hey her eyes look just like Seven 

So after a while, they’re more open to being relaxed. Not Five though, he’s always been just a little paranoid and being a 58-year-old in a 13-year-old body never had anything to do with it. So he’s got a harsh personality but the Danish woman doesn’t seem to be deterred. He kind of reminds her of her older twin brother who acts so harshly, but who she knows loves her so much.  

So here are 7 siblings and 6 women and maybe family that was there for the women when they needed them the most. And maybe the person(s) behind this decide to be kept anonymous but they oh so want the children to get to know what being cared for is like. Maybe these women get to know the consequences of their actions or the children learn that the one who birthed them had their reasons. And it’s no excuse but it’s also not their fault. Both parties should be able to feel what they feel because it’s a complicated and maybe painful situation. 

The children lose their respect for their father every episode. Even One, who they all know cherished the favoritism but it doesn’t get in the way of his horror when he finds out that he used to lock Four in the mausoleum, still does if the flashbacks are anything to go by because not Four, not the kindest and brightest of their siblings. 

And when they learn of Seven’s powers and the reason why they are never present, they are understandably upset. They feel rage and disbelief that she had such a crucial part of herself ripped away at such a young age, because they know that their powers are like another limb. They’re born with it and they grow up with it and they were able to live their life with it so they feel rage. Rage that Seven had been so violated. Rage that the Seven they know isn’t really the Seven she was suppose to grow up to be. The Seven they knew as toddlers was sweet towards them but had a mean protective streak a mile wide that could never be controlled, not even by their father. The Seven they know now is so meek and desperate for attention. The Russian woman looks the most devastated as she thinks of the baby girl she got to hold for only a few hours before she was whisked away by a rich old man who is turning out to be the monster that one often hears about in television. 

But the women? They watch as the children in front of them, maybe a little damaged and emotionally constipated but so obviously protective and caring for each other, grow to be the grow ups in the screen above them that grow up and grow apart after so much tragedy. 

They watch as seven eventually becomes five. 

How Luther is sent to isolation for years and he goes along with it in a bid to continue to please their father.

How Diego continues to rebel because he wasn’t able to growing up but also maybe because he wants to spite his father, no matter how much he protests that he could care less what his father thinks.

How Allison goes through a divorce and loses her parental rights to even see her daughter due to her dependence of her powers that leaves her devastated. 

How Klaus is an addict who desperately wishes to get rid of the ghosts that have followed him all his life. 

How Five disappears only a little while after their current timeline.

How Ben was brutally killed by his own powers, never getting to grow up and become his own person. 

How Vanya can’t seem to do anything but go through the motions of her life, maybe having a little hope that she’ll be seen this time around, but is quickly squashed from Diego’s disparaging comments and the casual dismissal of her from her living siblings. 

They watch all this, and feel sadness and rightful anger that their babies lead the life of ex-child superheroes. The life of abused children. The life of children who had only each other. 

But was it really enough? Was it enough to know that they loved each other but had a hard time showing it and owning up to it due to fear of their father? Due to the constant comparisons and the way Sir Reginald had them turn on each other. 

But they knew it was enough. They see it in how Diego waits for Klaus to drive him around even after he had expresses annoyance beforehand, in the joy on Allison’s face when she sees Klaus again after so long, in how Five makes sure to check up on Klaus after his kidnapping, on Luther’s face when he apologizes to Vanya after realizing his own misgivings, in Ben’s task of continuing to follow his brother around even when it pains him and in Klaus trying to comfort Luther after he finds the unopened correspondents. They see it in the support they show Vanya as she goes to check on Harlan.

It had to be enough to know that after all they went through, they still care for one another and at the end of the day, would protect one another just as they were as One through Seven. 

So they watch what would be the Hargreeve’s kids misadventures, they watch as they grow together and grow apart just to grow together again, much stronger than before. 

They express sadness and disbelief when they see where Five ends up, they get mad when Leonard throws Vanya’s pills away, they grieve when they learn that Ben is dead, they’re embarrassed but find it hilarious whenever Klaus cracks an inappropriate joke, they become protective when there’s allusion to Vanya having sex, and are rightfully ready to throw down with Leonard as they watch their littlest sibling get gaslit into believing her family hates her as he nitpicks all of her interactions with her family. 

But just as they express their feelings over what happens to their family, they feel an immense amount of exasperation towards their older selves because so much could be fixed if they only talked to each other. 

They watch and despair over the missed opportunity that is Leonard in the same house as them just as they find out what his role is in the apocalypse.

Four tears up as he watched Klaus and Dave’s reunion be undone after all the heartache. 

Seven cringes when Vanya dismisses Five’s claims that he had been stuck in an apocalyptic wasteland and suggests that he’s gone crazy after his stint with time travel. 

Three feels her heart drop to her stomach as the flashback shows what becomes the moment that she faces the hard truth that come with her use of her powers.

Five feels himself flush in embarrassment as he watched two version of himself in the future, one that looks not much older than he does currently, go through paradox psychosis. 

Six feels frustration and a fierce grief that leaves him confused because he’s still alive he’s not dead, but I don’t have much longer. 

One feels horror as he watches himself hurt his siblings one after the other with a sense of helplessness because this isn’t me, I wouldn’t do this but I already did, why would I hurt my siblings, I’m Number One I have to be the one who protects them- 

The women, on the other hand, see themselves in their children. 

The French woman sees how her daughter and granddaughter, it seems, both look like a carbon copy of herself and her own mother. 

The Danish woman sees herself and her twin brother in Luther and Five. Sees her own personality reflected in Luther and her brothers personality in Five. Sees how her twins care just as much for each other and their siblings as herself and her brother do each other.

The Hispanic woman sees Diego’s fierce sense of justice that leaves others in the dust, and sees herself as she fought to keep her boy but ultimately lost him just as Diego loses Eudora. She thinks to herself like mother like son and bitterly laughs to herself but she’s so grateful that Diego had a mother who cared for him just as she cared for him because she often though about him and always made sure to commemorate his birthday. 

The German woman can’t help but see herself in her boy. Can’t help but see her little brother in him. Can’t help but see her older brother in him. Because Klaus is so joyful but he hides his pain behind a mask like her younger brother, he’s so loving towards his siblings like her older brother, and so nonsensical like herself. So like herself, down to the curly hair and the addiction. Even if she was able to overcome it with support from her family, it pains her and leaves her in despair to see Klaus and can’t find fault in those he had around him because she sees how much they try and sees how hard the Hargreeves find expressing emotion is to others. 

The Asian woman sees how sweet and shy her youngest is and thinks only of her oldest, who reminds her so much of him and can only despair in seeing that he didn’t live as long as her oldest had. She can only ask herself why her children don’t seem to be able to see themselves to adulthood but can only be grateful that even in death he has someone with him.

The Russian woman knows that her husband sees her in little number Seven, in Vanya, no matter how little that is. Maybe their personalities aren’t so similar because Seven is shy but she’s got the sweetest heart and so clearly loves her siblings. She has the same smile that she has and her little doe eyes remind her of herself when she was younger. She’s so small next to her siblings, just like herself. 

So they see themselves in these kids, these grown ups. But so do the Hargreeves. 

They see how Luther looks like what the Danish woman would look like as a man and how Five looks exactly like a younger version of the Danish man who introduced himself as the woman's older brother. 

They see how Two has the same skin tone and facial structure as the Hispanic woman. 

They see that Allison looks exactly like the French woman and see the same in Claire. 

They see Four’s curly hair and slim build in the German woman. 

They notice how Six shares the same dark hair and lower facial features. 

They see Seven’s eyes and smile and short stature in the Russian woman. 

So maybe they don’t know them well enough to see what the women see, but they grow to see it overtime because they spend so much time there, in this suspended room in time.

The women insist on getting to know them and vice versa. They insist that they have to talk about their feelings and assure them or gently scold them, depending on the reason, for what they feel because god do these children need to learn how to talk more about their emotions in a healthy way.

They get closer to the children and start to really see their childish side. They all fight over the silliest things, and become pouty when attention isn’t being drawn over to them. They crave physical affection, even Five who won’t admit that his maternal uncle patting him and One of the head made him feel all gooey inside. They make faces towards foods that they don’t like and still prefer junk food over real food. 

So maybe it’s harder to let themselves act like children because they’re being conditioned to not “be childish” but even then they have their lapses in control. Four enters a state of panic after being reminded of his time in the mausoleum. One feels overwhelming guilt when he sees how Luther hurts Klaus and reminds himself that he’s the one that needs to protect them, as the leader and self proclaimed older sibling. Five feels himself cry for the first time in a long while when he sees how his siblings act towards him in the future and realize it hurts him deeply because he knows that he’s messed up their lives a lot but can’t they see that he only want to keep them alive, he doesn’t want to see them die again, he can’t-

But instead of being shamed into controlling their emotions, they are comforted and reassured. Four’s birth mother helps ground him and counts his breathing with him to keep him from falling further into his panic. One get’s reassured by his birth mother that his future self isn’t his current self. That everyone in the room has seen just how much he cares for his siblings and knows he would do anything for them. The twins uncle gives into his urge and hugs Five, whispering in a hushed tone that it’s okay to cry, to let it all out. He whispers that his older siblings are being idiots and if they knew just how much their actions were hurting you, they wouldn’t hesitate to apologize and hug you too. His words only make Five cry harder. 

So they are cared for and allowed to be themselves fully and can be childish to their hearts content. And their birth families watch on in amazement and adoration. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have so much more that I’ll probably add later, but basically I want them to be cared for, allowed to care for each other and learn to express themselves better. I want to see them get to have a good relationship with an adult and if possible their birth mothers. 

Pls share links and stuff if you get inspired, I’m not much for writing fanfic but I really do want to see something like this. I’d read the shit out of it. I have so much more that I want to add but I’ll probably do something about it later. 

[thisisawonderfulusername]

feelings

klaus hargreeves x reader

requested: anon

prompts: 165- “this might hurt” 291- “is that blood?” 300- “i can take care of myself” and 302- “i can’t breathe”

summary: when trying to save vanya and the world, you get a bit hurt

warnings: cursing, tooth rotting fluff babyyyyy

word count: 2k

a/n: holy shit i uploaded something! anyways, the requestor gave me an option between five and klaus and i had to do klaus because i haven’t written anything for him yet and i want to so baaaad so thank you anon

also @generouswombyrat , yours is next i promise lol

it’s loud, and the flashing lights would have made you pass out if you hadn’t made it to the cover of the counter to protect yourselves while you thought of a plan.

“vanya’s in the room at the end of the hall.” diego has to raise his voice to be heard over what the woman was causing.

allison has her hands on the sides of her head, you assume to block out some of the noise that is threatening to rip your hearing away from you. “how do you propose we get to her?”

“you can count me out.” klaus says from beside you, defeated and with a flask held in his hand. when the two siblings look at him in disbelief, he tries to defend himself, “what? you guys should save her. you’re great at all the hero shit.”

after allison reaches over to slap him, he leans against your shoulder while you roll your eyes. “listen, listen, vanya would understand ‘cause she has realistic expectations of what i am. and what i am, is sexy trash!”

“you’re a big pussy, that’s what you are,” diego tells him in annoyance.

“guys, this is not the time,” you speak over their small argument.

“why, because i don’t want to die? who does?” klaus questions you, waving his hand around in front of you, “and martyrs aren’t around to enjoy the victory party, ‘cause they’re dead!” he ends his sentence with a shout and you roll your eyes.

diego crawls over to where klaus sits, grabbing onto his shirt, “you are going out there,” the other grabs at his arm to push him away, complaining, “or i’m gonna beat you!”

“that’s my cue.” your head whips away from the argument and to allison as she moves from behind your only cover. the others stop fighting and the three of you shout at her to stop, but she’s already began to fight against the wave of energy flowing from the room vanya was being held in.

after hearing her yell out for the woman, there’s a thump on the other side of your cover, and you suck in a breath.

“alright, i’m going.” diego tells the two of you after peaking out from behind the wall.

“no, wait, wait, wait, wait,” klaus grabs onto his arm to stop him from going.

the other looks at him in annoyance, “what?”

“if you don’t make it back, there’s one thing that i need to tell you.” diego was beginning to wave him off, since you didn’t exactly have time for a heart to heart. “you look like antonio banderas with the long hair.”

you slap a hand to your forehead as diego looked at him as if he told him the most sincere thing. “thanks, man.”

“my god,” you groan, crawling over klaus in order to peak around and watch as the man digs his knives into the floor. as he begins to slow, you bite your lip, “keep going!” you shout, “you can do it!”

“i’m not gonna make it!” he shouts back to you, and you shake your head as you look back to klaus, who was still curling in on himself. “you guys have to do it!”

he pulls on a tie holding some sort of rope coiled, and it comes flying towards you. a second later, you feel another thump against the wood.

you take a deep, shaky breath. you have to do this. “okay, klaus.” you glance over at him as you reach up towards the rope, “if i die, just know...” you think for a moment as you bite into your lip, wondering if it’s the best idea to pour your feelings out at a moment like this.

“no,” you sigh, “i’ll make it.”

“wait!” klaus yells as he grabs onto you, “what do i need to know?”

you shake your head, “it’s not important.” you make sure your grip is tight, enough for you to make it. “i’ll see you on the other side!”

“don’t die please!”

when you pull yourself from behind your protection, the force of the wave vanya was sending was much stronger than you expected it to be. your eyes were watering as you tried to look forward, into the flashing lights, but they were already giving you a headache.

you hear klaus shouting at you, but you can’t hear him over the energy. just as you were getting closer to the door, your strength was weakening, but you continued moving one hand at a time to pull yourself forward.

when you pull your eyes away for one second to look away from the lights, your hand misses the rope, and your eyes widen as you lose your grip and go flying back, straight into the wall.

-

your head feels like it’s spinning when you wake up, the lack of the whooshing energy making your ears ring. it feels like the air has been knocked out of you, and it probably was. “oh god, i can’t breathe.”

“are you okay?” the one who caused all of this runs to the four of you.

“vanya,” allison breathes out from beside you.

you groan as you push yourself up, ignoring the dizziness you felt. “physically or emotionally?” klaus questions as he holds himself up on his elbows.

diego pushes himself onto his knees, looking up to her with a smile. “you’re alive.”

“did we save the world or what?” klaus questions as he finally sits up.

you run your fingers through your hair, “i think so. the building’s still here.”

the ticking of diego’s watch catches your attention as you look to it. “kennedy’s a few minutes away.” he points out, quickly getting to his feet, “i can still save him.”

allison calls to him as he begins his way down the hall, following after him in an attempt to stop him.

“is that blood?” you look to klaus as he questions you, and it’s only then that you notice the metallic taste in your mouth.

reaching up to touch your lip, you flinch when you realize it had somehow split open. you cringe at the slight sting the contact brought. “nah, it’s ketchup.” you chuckle as you wipe the blood from your lip.

he rolls his eyes. “we need to patch it up. i’m sure there’s some sort of medical kit stashed away around here.”

“no need,” you wave your hand in the air, “i can take care of myself. we have some more important things to worry about.”

shaking his head, he pushes himself up off the ground before holding his hand out to you. “we already saved the world. everyone else can deal with diego.”

sighing, you take his hand and he helps you up off the ground.

after searching all nearby rooms, you eventually find a med kit. being in an office, it was easiest to hop up onto the desk to let klaus take care of the wound.

once he had opened the kit and grabbed everything he needed, he stepped in front of you. “that was an interesting experience.” he comments about the whole ordeal you just went through.

“that’s our lives.” you respond with a sigh.

nodding, he grabs a paper towel that had been soaked in water. you both decided it was the best way to clean it, at least a little bit.

“this might hurt.” he tells you softly, carefully grabbing your chin to press the paper to your lip. he’s right. it felt like it was burning from the slightly rough texture, but you were able to ignore it. you had gone through worse, after all.

after a second of dabbing at the cut, he pulls the towel away with a smile. “there we go. all clean.” he throws the towel to the side and grabs one of the surgical tape strips, carefully using it to close the wound. “hopefully that works.” he claps his hands together.

you smile, quickly stopping when you feel the tape and your cut trying to pull open. “thanks.” you hum, before you notice the blood that had poured from his nose.

without saying a word, you grab the wet towel. after folding it over to avoid the part covered with your blood, you grab his chin to pull him towards you. “what are you doing?” he questions.

“blood.” you tell him simply, wiping away at the already drying liquid. your eyebrows furrow as you tilt his chin, “how did you get some on your neck?”

he simply shrugs as you clean it up.

shaking your head, you look him over to make sure there wasn’t anymore blood on him. you still hold his chin as he looks at you, a small grin on his face. “checking me out?”

“for blood, yes.” you chuckle, releasing him and tossing the towel into a nearby trash can.

he’s still looking at you, and you let your shoulders fall slightly to release some of the tension in them, “why are you staring at me like that?”

“i’m glad you didn’t die.” he tells you.

you let out a soft laugh, “well, i’m glad you didn’t die either.”

he grins, glancing to the side for a second, “what were you going to tell me?” he asks.

“hm?” your eyebrows raise a bit.

“before you tried to make it to vanya,” he expands on his question, “you said you wanted me to know something.”

you knew exactly what he was talking about, but you thought about just acting clueless. apparently you didn’t think enough before sacrificing yourself earlier.

sitting up slightly, you shrug, “i... i don’t know. it doesn’t matter.”

“what are you talking about? of course it matters.” he hops up on the desk to sit next to you, his legs swinging slightly. “just spit it out. you know it will feel better.”

looking to him, your shoulders slump slightly. “it’s hard to say.” you sigh, running your hand down your face, and beginning to feel that your heart is beating just a little bit faster than before. “okay, i’m just gonna say it. i like you. i might even be in love with you, i-”

you’re not able to finish your rambling about your feelings, since the moment he had heard you admit to them he had leaned forward and pressed his lips to yours.

your heart felt like it was soaring as your eyes closed, and you could feel the slight sting in your lip but it didn’t matter because shit, klaus was kissing you.

you’re not sure how long it lasted, but it didn’t feel long enough once he pulled away. it took a moment for your eyes to open again, as you were relishing the moment. but a smile is on both of your faces when you look at him, and you know then that you are definitely in love with him.

taglists

main: @horrorklaus @megasimpleplan4ever  

tua: @rasberrymay @noodlextrash @atomicpillar @malfovs  @andreasworlsboring101​  

klaus: none yet

it was also requested that i tag @theumbrellaamattemy​

[itsthenovelteafactor]

Fall of the House of Hargreeves

So I mentioned a while back in my Superhero Gothic meta that there were a number of parallels between the season one finale of The Umbrella Academy and the Edgar Allen Poe short story The Fall of the House of Usher and that I could probably write a whole meta on that if anyone was interested. Shout out and love to the anon who requested that I do that! 

It’s been a minute since I’ve done one of these long form metas, but I am very excited to get back to writing about two of my favorite things: gothic literature and chaotic superheroes. 

Part I: The Fall of the House of Usher

The Fall of the House of Usher (which I’ll call House of Usher for convenience for the rest of this meta) is a short story by Edgar Allen Poe first published in 1939. It is considered a classic gothic short story, and deals with themes of family, madness, inheritance, and isolation. 

Since it’s in the public domain, I’ll go ahead and link a pdf to the story here. If you aren’t interested in reading, though, or just want a refresher, the story follows an unnamed narrator going to visit his ill friend, a man named Roderick Usher in his isolated (and very spooky) family estate. Upon arrival, he discovers that Roderick’s sister, Madeline Usher, is also ill, and has a tendency to fall into dreamlike trances.

Over the course of the visit, Roderick confesses to the narrator that not only does he believe the house is alive, but that it is connected to the fate of the family which, at this point, only includes Roderick and Madeline. He later comes and tells the narrator that Madeline has died, and enlists his help in order to bury her in the family tomb beneath the house. They do so, but for the next couple of days Roderick is suspiciously...on edge. 

Then, one dark and stormy night, Roderick shows up in the narrator’s room incredibly worked up, and throws open the window, and starts low-key (read: high-key) having a breakdown. The narrator is unsure as to why until he hears ripping and tearing sounds coming from somewhere in the house. These ripping and tearing sounds are revealed to be Madeline whom Roderick and the narrator buried alive whose appearance scares Roderick to death, right before she collapses, also dead from the strain of tearing through the foundations of the house.

The narrator decides this would probably be a good time to leave and is very much right about that because as soon as he leaves, the house (which was already in pretty bad shape) splits in two and collapses into the lake surrounding it. The end.

Part II: Umbrella Academy as Gothic

So, there are probably a couple similarities between House of Usher and The Umbrella Academy season one that stand out right off the bat, but I’d like to start by taking a step back to talk about thematic parallels between the two works. If you’d like to read a very long winded explanation of why I consider The Umbrella Academy to be a modern gothic tale, I have a really long meta about it. 

If not, here’s a quick overview:

Gothic does not have a clearly defined set of requirements as a genre, but its purpose is to explore the contradictions and the failing edifices of convention in a way that is dramatic and often fantastic. 

Gothic fiction plays with reality, but usually in a way that is representative of the characters and story. 

It often situates itself during times of great change, as there is something haunting about the irreversible passage of time, particularly for those that struggle to acknowledge it and hide behind conventions that have grown increasingly irrelevant. 

Poe is considered one of the classic authors of gothic fiction (though the genre significantly predates him), and is decidedly one of the best well-known examples of it. 

The Umbrella Academy is a family drama about former child superheroes dealing with their trauma while trying to prevent an apocalypse that their every move seems to set further in motion. It explores the messy and complicated relationships between siblings who have been abused and pit against each other for years. And yeah, it’s fun with great music and talking gorillas and dance sequences, but the premise is kind of hard for me to read as anything other than gothic.

Part III: Parallels

Like House of Usher, the first season of Umbrella Academy takes place in a massive, largely empty mansion where siblings gather with disastrous consequences. Both works explore a family that is past their prime and disconnected from the present. They also both explore the psychological toll of isolation, the consequences of tyrannical family rules, and why it is a really bad idea to lock your unstable sister in a basement and just leave her there. 

Let’s start with some thematics parallels. Everyone in House of Usher is extremely isolated, and the absence of anything resembling the modern world amongst the house full of relics is part of the horror. All of the siblings in Umbrella Academy are defined by their isolation as well, physically (Luther, Five, and Ben), socially (Vanya, Diego, Klaus, and Allison), and emotionally (legit all of them). It is this isolation that drives the conflict of the story, feeding into every characters’ choices. 

In both House of Usher and Umbrella Academy, the main characters are trapped in this isolated state as a direct result of their familial legacy. In House of Usher, the titular house is a character itself, a manifestations of the obligations Madeline and Roderick hold as members of an aristocratic family that is so far divorced from wealth and status that it keeps them from ever fully moving on and rejoining the real world. In Umbrella Academy, the characters are similarly trapped by their familial legacy, this time in the form of the specter of their abusive father, and the roles he created for them. Like the Usher siblings, the Hargreeves have no way of maintaining the roles their family left out for them – they were never given the tools to function in the real world and it cripples them – but are trapped in them regardless. 

Part IV: The Woman* in White 

*As of the time I am writing this, nothing has been said regarding Vanya’s gender identity being written to match Elliot Page’s. I am using she/her pronouns for Vanya, as that is what has been used for the character thus far. 

Aside from thematic parallels, however, the most direct connection between the short story and series, and in fact the reason I was inspired to write this meta in the first place is the way both of the stories end: with a sister trapped beneath the house clawing her way out to face her brother(s and sister) and creating a disruption of the family legacy so great that the entire estate crumbles.

Madeline Usher is described at this point as wearing a white dress, strained with the injuries she sustained from physically breaking herself out of the basement tomb her brother buried her alive in. Vanya, of course, becomes at this moment the White Violin, and though she has not yet had the epic violin-music-so-powerful-it-changes-the-color-of-her-clothes scene, the principal still stands.

As characters, there are also a couple of noteworthy parallels between Vanya and Madeline. The narrator at one point describes “the illness of the lady Madeline had lone been beyond the help of her doctors. She seemed to care about nothing” (Poe, 27). The reader never knows what illness precisely is the cause of Madeline’s apparent madness, but we see the effects. It dulls her emotional responses to situations and leaves her withdrawn and powerless. Similarly, we learn over the course of the first season of The Umbrella Academy that the medication Reginald Hargreeves prescribed Vanya for her anxiety is actually a power suppressor for her abilities that has much the same effect – because they are strengthened by extreme emotion, the drugs numb Vanya’s emotional responses and deprive her of the ability to access her powers.

Additionally, the final scene of the story story shows Madeline escaping her tomb during a great storm and going to face her brother who put her there, the storm itself being a metaphor for her anguish that tears the house apart. Vanya’s connection to the destruction of the house is a bit more literal, but it is similarly a manifestation of her anguish and trauma. She sees flashbacks of her siblings being distant and rude to her in their childhoods and the anger she feels rips the foundation apart. 

It is not entirely clear in the short story why Roderick buries Madeline alive – there are a lot of theories: he genuinely believed she was dead, he wanted her out of the picture, he himself was succumbing to the madness of the house, etc – but the guilt he feels for doing so manifests as him hearing her scraping her way out for several days preceding her escape. The justification for Vanya’s imprisonment is more clear in text, but the series of flashbacks make it clear that it is not just the imprisonment that has driven her over the edge. It it guilt for her sister, anger at her abusive upbringing that is much more easily directed at her siblings than her father, the newfound emotions experienced by being off her medication for the first time since childhood, Leonard’s manipulations, etc. 

In both cases, amidst a spiral of emotions and experiences folding in on themselves, Vanya and Madeline experience a single, cold moment of clarity that drives them to escape, and it is that moment of clarity that breaks the shadow of the family legacy. They observe the situation as it stands and realize that it is completely unacceptable, and it is the realization that leads everything to crumble. Because gothic literature is focused on the complexities of maintaining that which is out of date, the realization that things must change can break the spell.

Part V: Conclusions 

As per usual, I have no great theories on why this is or what it means. One of the reasons I love gothic literature is that it is rife with meaning that can be more easily felt than deciphered. I welcome any and all interpretations, theories, (politely worded) disagreements, and comments. 

Thanks for taking the time to read; I have a lot of fun doing these. Enjoy spooky season, y’all. 💛

[hermitreunited]

Give us the spicy Ben takes. You know you want to. Like putting too much Sriracha on your eggs, you want to tempt this fandom. Tell me, Roo

You are either the worst influence, or the best. You are both. Both of those things. 

Well shit, okay, it’s Spicy Ben Takes time!

So you know that thing in fandom where Ben gets credited as Klaus’ babysitter, the voice of reason that has managed to keep Klaus alive all these years? The viewpoint that Klaus is going to fall apart post-s2 without Ben there to help take care of him? I’m here to say that canon suggests the opposite is true.

Having someone watching you limits your freedom to make your own choices — or to put it another way, having someone watching you is an extra factor to weigh during the decision-making process. Unfortunately, people are complicated and messy and the Hargreeves are especially so, and so that extra factor is not always going to weigh in favor of making better choices.

And Ben and Klaus are siblings. 

There might be nothing more powerful than sibling-induced stubbornness. There was some musical artist that my older sister liked that I said was bad, and then when I realized they were good actually, I kept pretending to hate them until some time after we’d both graduated high school. In turn, because I listened mostly to movie scores, my little brother declared that any music without lyrics was bad and all sounded the same. He had to listen to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 and the opening track to The Dark Knight and tell us that they sounded so alike that he couldn’t tell them apart. 

He HAD TO do this. I don’t have a name as good as the Cain Instinct to describe it, but I submit that the inability to admit fault in front of a sibling runs as deep, if not deeper. It’s something to do with pride, probably, and more importantly the second part of this phrase: you can’t admit that you’re wrong or you’ll never hear the end of it. You aren’t going to fall out of touch when you graduate or whatever, this person will be around for the rest of your life reminding you of this fuckup whenever it benefits them, for forever.

(okay a read more because this is looooong sorrrrryyy)

So, to take a common fandom scenario, if Ben says Klaus should go to rehab and get clean? Klaus can’t just do that, especially if Ben has said it before and Klaus established that his side of issue was that he didn’t want to. If Klaus decides he does want to go to rehab after Ben has been on his case about it, then Ben can claim for the rest of forever that he’s the reason that Klaus is sober now, and that would be super fucking annoying when dealing with addiction is such deeply personal work. It’s a lose scenario however you slice it (which is very typical for sibling stupidity — it’s a fight that you lose as soon you decide it’s worth fighting over).

Now okay, let’s back up and be clear here. Klaus falling prey to sibling-induced stubbornness isn’t Ben’s fault. I’m not suggesting that Ben is actively standing in Klaus’ way, or that Klaus would have made the choice on his own to go to rehab had Ben not suggested it first. I’m saying that Ben’s presence simply makes it a harder thing to do, a larger mountain for Klaus to climb, on a journey that is already intimidating enough on its own.

And Ben is always there. There’s no space for Klaus to go off on his own and cool down and admit to himself that he is being stupid. Irritation can only build and build for years with no relief — irritation on both sides. 

So, yeah. Very unintentionally, Ben advocating for Klaus’ sobriety may in fact be a hinderance to that sobriety being achieved in actuality. Klaus might have more motivation to make good choices and less inclination to make bad choices when he doesn’t have a brother constantly watching over his shoulder.

But don’t just take my word for it! There are a few spots in canon that bear this interpretation out. I first got this in my head when I compared the ending of s1 and s2 — instead of leaving Vanya alone, Klaus comes out to join her in s2, which prompts the others to come as well and seems to turn out better than s1. No moons are exploded in the making of s2. Of course Ben is not the only difference in the situation, and of course we don’t know if Klaus would have made a similar choice if Ben was there advocating for it. What we do know for sure is that Klaus is capable of making good choices on his own.

We also see a couple of times that following Ben’s advice is not always a great choice. In s2, telling the cult the truth doesn’t do anything useful, and going after Luther in 1x07 gets Klaus killed. It seems like the time that Klaus was living his most well-adjusted healthiest life was when he was in Vietnam, without Ben. 

This is all to say that no, Klaus does not need Ben to be able to take care of himself. There’s more reasons to believe that Klaus will fare better without Ben’s constant presence. Surely there are aspects of his life that will be sadder, and emptier, without the brother that was such a fixture of his life for so long. But there will absolutely be parts of his life that are better, too. That’s one of those things that makes loss and grief so painful and guilty, isn’t it?

So actually maybe this is all to say, I would really love to see some more fandom takes that explore this complicated, flawed dynamic, and less of the one-dimensional ‘Babysitter Ben’ trope. Ben Is a Nuanced Individual With Flaws and Whose Actions Sometimes Cause Unintended and Unfortunate Consequences, and All of This Makes Him More Interesting and None of it Makes Him Evil 2k21!! (is that still a thing people do?)

[feralnumberfive]

The Rewatch Academy: Episode 2 of Season 1

“Run Boy Run”

I am in no way a good analyst so my little analysis and speculations probably sound a bit goofy or pretty wild and probably mean nothing at all. Everything I put into this post about each episode is purely what I noticed or thought, whether it's funny or serious. I will be making jokes, so please just leave it at that (in no way am I trying to make fun of an actor and or character!) I am also in no way saying I noticed this stuff first. This is just what I noticed while rewatching these episodes

☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂

1x01 | 1x02 | 1x03 | 1x04

☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂ ☂

☂ Ben is a tired boy leaning on his chair

☂ Luther and Allison please stop making googly eyes at each other 

☂ Five really woke up and chose violence that day huh

☂ Diego already knows shit is about to go down and it’s so funny

☂ I love that Reginald doesn’t even scold Five for stabbing the table

☂ Five: “I have a question.” blah blah blah Veggie is talking Five: “I want to time travel.” That’s not a question, Five

☂ It’s interesting to see young Five blinking/jumping compared to older Five. Even at this age, 13, he says that he’s still practicing his spatial jumps. Young Five needs to clench his fists and almost squeeze his eyes shut just to concentrate. Older Five simply just teleports without effort and is able to casually blink even as he’s just walking. Five probably practiced teleporting a lot in the apocalypse 

☂ Someone else pointed this out, but all of the other Umbrellas are frozen for a for a second as Five teleports next to Reginald. While that freeze is just editing, and possibly a small error, this is another example of how Five’s spatial teleporting doesn’t make a noise. Luther, Diego, and Allison only look at Five when he begins talking to Reginald. Grace notices Five right away because he is in her line of sight while Luther and Diego were looking at where Five was sitting and Allison had her head down eating

☂ “The effects it might have on your body, even your mind, are far too unpredictable.” Harsh foreshadowing 

☂ The “Run Boy Run” scene is one of the best musical moments in all of the show. It gave me chills when I first heard it, and the fact that all of the lyrics that play during that part match so perfectly with it make it even better. Tomorrow is another day being sung as Five travels into 2019 is just too good 

☂ Imagine how scared you have to be to call out to your p.o.s father

☂ The instant regret immediately falls onto his face and he kneels in front of the Academy

☂ I love how in the first few episodes Five’s hair is styled exactly as it was when he was an old man and when he was actually 13. Over the rest of the season and the second season it just gets more disheveled and floppier 

☂ “You think I didn’t try everything to get back to my family?” Ahhhh there we go, one of my favorite Five lines. This here is probably when I truly fell in love with his character. He spent 45 years just trying to survive and attempting to get back to his family. He would have spent more too if the Handler hadn’t taken him in

☂ Vanya is genuinely trying to understand what happened and Five was being a little asshole. C’mon, bud, she’s just confused and hasn’t seen you in forever

☂ This Five and Vanya scene melts my heart (simply as a sibling relationship!!) She doesn’t care anymore if she understands, she just wants him to stay because she hasn’t seen him in a while. Even Five understands that as his demeanor quickly changes from being frustrated to gently telling her “Night.” He watches her as she leaves, also partially realizing that he hasn’t seen her in a while too

☂ Why didn’t Five just teleport outside of Vanya’s apartment?? That would have been the stealthiest thing

☂ “All quick and efficient skills.” A little note on Five’s level of skill of slaughtering the Commission agents in Griddy’s

☂ Diego said he bought his police badge on Ebay, so computers do exist in the UA universe

☂ “By the way, this thing might look like a botched robbery, but my gut’s telling me something else is going on here.”  Yeah, and that something else is your brother

☂ I want Claire to meet her uncles and aunt so bad

☂ So Ben has a ghostly puzzle book and pen he can use? Because if they were real Pogo would have been able to see them just floating in the air. What other ghostly items can Ben summon? (I believe this is more so just an error but it’s fun to think about)

☂  “I-I found it at a playground, actually. Must have just *click* popped out.” An underrated Five line

☂ Five immediately becomes aggressive at the thought of losing the eye, something he found clutched in the hand of his dead brother and was a clue to what caused the death of his siblings and the end of the world

☂ Just now noticed that you can see Diego up on the second floor being led down to where Patch is in the police station

☂ I really like that they added in the little tidbit about a cold case Five created 81 years ago

☂ I miss Patch. She deserved better and more screen time

☂ Hey, Diego might have been thrown out of the Police Academy but at least he’s still in The Umbrella Academy!

☂ Hearing Patch talk to Diego really made me realize that the Umbrellas weren’t even necessary for helping with crime. It was just Reginald’s way of training them

☂ Love the shot of Luther looking at Diego’s cross-stitch and the camera lining it up so it’s like he’s wearing the mask

☂ Five lying just to keep Vanya away and to continue on with his goal hurts. His goal is saving the world and his family, but I don’t think he actually took in what Vanya was saying to him or maybe he recognized the offer but shoved all of his feelings down. She was reaching out to actually get him some help and he lied to her to avoid that. Maybe he doesn’t care and is just blinded by his ultimate goal. Save the world and family first, then process your feelings and genuinely communicate with your siblings 

☂ Don’t worry Klaus, I would have let you wear that outfit

☂ When Cha-Cha questions “Five” aka the poor tow truck guy, she asks him about “The London job in ‘66.” I believe she is referring to the Shepherd’s Bush murders where three policemen were murdered

☂ Hazel replying “Not from what I’ve heard.” when Cha-Cha asks if he thinks Five is a whimperer shows that Five definitely had a reputation in the Commission for probably being a cold and stoic guy

☂ Vanya is just trying to help, chill Allison 😭. You haven’t seen her in years, what do you know about her?

☂ Klaus would really slap his brother in the face to get drug money

☂ Another example of Five not making noise when he teleports is when he blinks into the taxi and Klaus didn’t notice that he had left until he turned to look where Five was. On the other hand though the taxi driver does jump as Five suddenly appears in the car. However, I believe that might be from the driver noticing Five in a mirror in the car

☂ I wonder what languages the Hargreeves siblings know. Vanya didn’t understand Leonard’s German. You think Reginald would have taught them multiple languages or maybe she forgot it if she was taught it

☂ I don’t know why but Luther just siting there and reading a book and almost getting hit by the knife is really funny to me

☂ Yeah Diego doesn’t have to prove his innocence, but it would have saved a lot of trouble

☂ Rewatching the scene with Leonard talking to Vanya about his father is just disturbing when you already know what happened to him and how he’s lying just to try to be more relatable

☂ I heard a rumor that smoking is bad for you ❌

☂ Vanya calling to make sure Allison is okay even though she hurt her makes me sad. She’s so nice and thoughtful

☂ The old man can’t even reunite with his wife before he gets hunted down

☂ The shot of Hazel and Cha-Cha putting on their masks in the dark with the music is 👌👌

☂ Again, Cha-Cha isn’t able to hear Five as he teleports next to her and slices her arm. She might not have noticed him though because he was very quick to attack her

☂ Five really went through all of that just to bring his wife home

☂ I think it’s an easily blocked out part because we already know what Allison has to say and it’s exciting, but Luther is apologizing about accusing Diego and causing issues amongst his siblings

☂ Five is just so defeated and emotionally tired that he doesn’t allow Luther to touch him. In fact, he very quickly and aggressively grabs Luther’s wrist. You can tell Five is a little out of it and I believe it was more so his subconscious stopping Luther. Five doesn’t want help, he’s going to carry the burden of figuring out who ended the world and killed his family as far as he can by himself

☂ “There’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing any of you can do.” Are such heavy lines. Five is so emotionally and mentally tired at the end of the day and he sounds like he’s about to breakdown. He’s replaying the moment he found his siblings’ corpses. They weren’t able to stop the person who ended the world. Luther is offering his help, but Five is denying it. Luther couldn’t stop the person who ended the world. None of his siblings were able to stop that person. He’s telling himself that they can’t help and he’s telling Luther and Allison that too. Five wants to be alone to figure out who this person is. His siblings can’t help him

☂ Five coming across the corpses of his siblings is just heartbreaking. He first stumbles across three adults lying in the rubble. One of them is holding an eye. He goes to shake the man in all black, having a tiny bit hope that miraculously he is still alive. He stumbles across another body only to back away with tears in his eyes as he spots the tattoo on the man’s arm and realizes who these people are

☂☂☂☂☂☂☂

Feel free to comment or reblog with things you have noticed too!

[qqueenofhades]

Your majesty, may I humbly inquire if/how you would imagine a reunion of Ivan and Fedyor after the events of season 1?

Also on AO3.

Ivan wakes up on the far side of the Shadow Fold with very little memory of how he arrived there. He lies flat on his back beneath the cold white sun, which drills into his head like a blade, and at last, after a great effort, he vaguely recalls sunlight of another sort, wild and fey, bursting from Alina Starkov’s hands on the deck of the skiff as everything else went to hell. He remembers the Zemeni brat getting a lucky jump on him and shoving him over the rail, and then falling. Swirling, hungry shadows, shrieking volcra, running with his arms flung over his head, knowing only that he wasn’t dying like this, that he had to survive. In that, at least, he has succeeded. His kefta is torn and filthy, his lips are cracked and bloody, his face is striped with an ugly wound that might scar, he reeks of monstrous ichor, and he may or may not have just witnessed the entire city of Novokribirsk being scoured clean off the map, but Ivan Kaminsky is alive.

After a while he sits up, retching and forcing down the reel of dizziness. He squats on his haunches and tries to focus enough to heal his own wounds. Healers and Heartrenders can learn each other’s craft, but Ivan got complacent with Fedyor always around to do it for him, safe in the luxurious privacy of their bedroom at the Little Palace after another hard campaign. As the general’s right-hand man, he is more often on the front lines, and it became an enjoyably erotic exercise for Fedyor to tenderly patch him up, even if the Second Army Healers had already seen to most of it. I do not mend things, Ivan thinks, looking at the rough results of his efforts. I break them.

With a groan, Ivan forces himself all the way to his feet, looks down at his hand, and discovers that his amplifier is still there, the bear claw that was a valued gift from General Kirigan. No, not Kirigan – there was something else about who Aleksander really is, something Ivan needs to remember, but he can’t. But the bear claw was how he took down all those diplomats at once, something that doesn’t bother him, exactly, but what he still needs to reckon with. So, in his usual tidy, methodical fashion, he does so. They were representatives of cruel, greedy, incompetent governments who all want the Grisha dead or exploited, and while they might have been unarmed civilians, how many unarmed Ravkan children have died cowering in the dark because of their soldiers? As for Novokribirsk –

Ivan closes his eyes hard. He knows that one is harder to explain away, but at the end, he still can see the cold, merciless logic of it. West Ravka was a nest of traitors, and General Zlatan wanted every single person on that skiff dead. There is a certain sordid sense, there always has been, in inflicting one strategically planned atrocity to ensure the compliance of the rest. He knows that Fedyor will be upset. He has a soft heart, and having grown up near Kribirsk, he will have heard stories of its Western Ravkan counterpart and the separated families who lived there, dreamed of visiting when the Fold was banished. That –

Fedyor. Ivan freezes.

He doesn’t know where Fedyor is.

He doesn’t know if Fedyor is alive.

Frantically, he searches out through the network of the world, the meshed echo of heartbeats and living creatures that has always been a Heartrender’s particular soundscape, the extra dimension of humanity that he learned to experience as a child long before he had a name for it. Of course he can’t find Fedyor if he isn’t relatively nearby, but Ivan has always believed that no distance, no matter how great, could truly separate them for long. He just needs to start in one direction and work it down. He can’t stop. In all likelihood, Kirigan is dead now. Someone needs to muster the Grisha and rally them against the Fjerdans, the Shu Han, the Kerch, everyone else who will be swooping in to take advantage of Ravka’s stunning weakness. No more Black General. No one to keep them all safe.

Cold panic twists into Ivan’s heart like a railroad nail. It’s not that he didn’t know that Aleksander has – had – that deep ruthless streak, but he understood it. He just wanted to keep safe what he loved, even if it has twisted and calcified into something else, something still darker. Ivan Kaminsky loves two things: Ravka and Fedyor. He doesn’t need anything else. And he too will burn the world down if it means keeping them safe. If that makes him the new Black General, though he would not presume, so be it. Someone needs to do the dirty work.

Ivan grits his teeth, and ventures into the unknown.

It takes a few weeks, searching painfully and slowly down the coast, pelted with wild rumors of Novokribirsk’s horrifying fate and what awaits them now, trying to shut his ears to all of it, until he finally makes it to Os Kervo, on the shores of the True Sea. There is a ship with the Grisha banner in port, and as he gets closer, Ivan knows with a searing jolt that this is it, Fedyor is here somewhere, he is here. He follows heartbeats, stumbling through the streets and pushing people aside, ignoring their dirty looks and their curses. Some of them halt when they catch sight of the black embroidery still faintly visible on his filthy kefta, but others don’t look twice. Until he staggers down to the dock, and –

There he is. It drives the scanty breath out of Ivan’s lungs at a blow. He could stand here forever, looking and looking. But eventually, in a whisper, he has to speak.

“Fedya?”

Fedyor whirls around and stares. He looks like a man who can’t believe his own eyes, who has not even allowed himself to think about the worst, has shut himself down to avoid the prospect. He looks older and colder and harder than Ivan’s sweet Fedya, the man he left behind not the same as the one that greets him now, but it is still him. He doesn’t bother with words. He closes the distance between them in three strides, throws his arms around Ivan’s neck, and kisses him savagely.

Ivan doesn’t give a shit that they’re in public, that everyone can see them, that he himself is weak in the knees and can feel tears running down his unshaven cheeks, the taste of the salt mingling in their kiss. They sway on the spot, unwilling to let go of each other in case they evaporate, until Fedyor finally whispers, “Below. Now.”

They stumble onto the ship and into one of the tiny berths, barely large enough for Ivan to stand upright, but he doesn’t care. Fedyor strips him out of the tattered remains of his kefta and sets to work, as Ivan closes his battered eyes and lets himself sink into the sheer, unbelievable joy of his lover’s familiar touch, the restored wholeness of their two halves. But of course, the illusion that nothing has changed cannot last forever. As he smooths his fingers over the deepest of the volcra gashes, Fedyor says, “Vanya, what happened?”

Ivan stares at the low ceiling of the bunk. He doesn’t know if he can put it into words, doesn’t know if he wants Fedyor to know everything, even as he doesn’t think he can justly keep it from him. He does his best to provide a terse, clinical summary of the events on the skiff, and reaches out to grab Fedyor’s hand before confirming the truth about Novokribirsk. “It’ll be all right,” he says urgently. “As long as there’s you and me.”

Fedyor stares at him. His dark eyes look huge and terrified. “You think that’s all right?”

“No. Not exactly, I just – ” Ivan has never been the best with words, and they are once more cruelly failing him. He puts his other hand on Fedyor’s cheek, turning his face back to him. “I need you to understand that we’re at war. War, Fedya, in a way we never have been before. All the others, they hated us, but Kirigan kept them at bay. Now there’s nothing. They’re all coming for us. Novokribirsk is only the start.”

“And whose fault is it,” Fedyor asks flatly, “that that happened? If Kirigan hadn’t gone mad with trying to expand the Fold, with Alina Starkov – things were stable before! Not good, maybe, but predictable! Constant! Now this – ”

“It was a stalemate before!” Ivan crawls out of the bunk and kneels in front of Fedyor, looking up at him imploringly. “They were trying to smoke us out, wait for us to make a mistake, so they could pounce on us and tear Ravka to pieces! Fedya – look at me, Fedya, darling, Fedya, my heart. Look at me. I will keep us safe. I will keep you safe.”

Fedyor looks at him mutely, tears running down his own cheeks, catching on the dimples that Ivan has always found so irresistible (even if he does an excellent job of pretending otherwise). Finally, with no other option, Fedyor nods slowly, his hands still knotted tightly with Ivan’s. He lets Ivan hold him, and Ivan does so ferociously, wrapping him in his arms and resting his head on Fedyor’s mussed hair and swearing in the dark that he will slaughter the Sun Summoner himself if need be, whatever needs to be done to keep Fedyor Kaminsky alive and whole and happy. Nothing else matters now. Not really.

After that, Fedyor lets Ivan tend to him, and opens up a little, and says that he found Nina Zenik in, of all places, a port city in the company of a Fjerdan drüskelle. She wanted to insist, improbably, that this witch hunter had changed for the better in the course of a few weeks, but Fedyor didn’t believe it. Ivan is comforted to hear him say this, that not all of Fedyor’s old certainties have totally dissolved, that he still trusts their enemies are their enemies. The drüskelle has been shipped off to Kerch, after Nina accused him of slaving in what Fedyor thinks was a calculated ploy to keep the big blond bastard out of the hands of the Grisha. “I don’t understand, Vanya,” he says, his head on Ivan’s bare chest as they lie together in the narrow bunk, naked except for the furs piled on top. “He hurt her, he captured her, he would have killed her as soon as he remembered. Why would she defend him?”

We all defend the things we love, even when they hurt us. Ivan doesn’t say this aloud. He doesn’t want to believe any more than Fedyor does that Nina improbably found the one good apple of an otherwise bad lot. It is easier to think of the Fjerdans as a faceless mass of ice-cold holy warriors, especially since they will be licking their chops at the downfall of the Black General, their archenemy and the king of the Grisha demons. “We do stupid things for the people we think we care about,” he says instead. “And Nina is young. Impressionable. She will learn the truth soon enough.”

Fedyor doesn’t answer, his fingers tracing light circles around Ivan’s collarbone. Finally, he shifts on top of him, his mouth finding Ivan’s with something close to desperation. After they pull back from the kiss, he says, “Promise me that we won’t lose each other again, Vanya. Whatever comes next. We have to do it together. Please?”

Ivan looks at the face of this man he loves so much and so well, who needs to hear this sweet lie no matter whether it is true. And with his own heart, closed and guarded as he generally keeps it, he wants to believe it too. He does. He does. He does.

If only it could make it so. If only he could be sure.

“Promise,” he whispers. “Promise.”

[majorsoapfan]

TUA Season 3 AU Fic

This is an fic idea for an AU from the end of season 2 onwards where Ben survived and travelled back with the rest of the umbrellas to the new Sparrow-infested 2019. Because there was so much potential there for an amazing fic:

Ben going ballistic at the mere appearance of his Sparrow self. Seriously he'd hate the guy. Of course Umbrella!Ben's antics and threats towards his alternate self means that Klaus is struggling to keep a straight face during their first meeting.

Oh, who am I kidding, Klaus is rolling on the ground laughing thanks to Umbrella!Ben trying (and failing) to strangle his alternate self.

And despite his brothers pleas Klaus refuses to give away that their Ben is present, going as far as to stop the rest of their siblings from mentioning his ghostly presence to Reginald.

Because, despite Klaus' appearance and most people's general in-universe assumptions of him being an idiot, the guy lived for more than ten years on the streets and for nearly a year in a war zone. You don't achieve that without being somewhat sneaky and he does have a manipulative streak to him as well. He also knows when to keep an ace up his sleeve. It's not a strategy he uses often, his personality isn’t the kind for it, but he knows now that he has too.

Reginald not knowing Ben is there as a ghost gives the Umbrellas a massive advantage against the Sparrows as Klaus is forced to explain to a very upset Ben and his confused siblings later. Because Reginald is aware of the living Umbrellas and their talents, but he was never aware of the seventh member hanging around as a ghost. Ergo, they have the perfect spy.

So Umbrella Ben goes back to the Academy and studies the Sparrows religiously. Gets to know the Sparrows as people, what makes them tick, how they fight, any weaknesses.

What nearly everyone forgets about Ben is that he's not some soft, innocent flower who never did anything wrong. Ben liked doing reckless stunts (he enjoyed the ice cream van stunt), and he could be insensitive, and kinda callous when trying to achieve a goal as well. But he is also very loyal to his family. And the Sparrows are a genuine threat to them. Probably the biggest.

For the first time possibly ever, Ben can do more to protect them than simply unleash the Horror which he hated doing and offering advice that often got ignored. He is the biggest factor that is keeping his family safe, he is their main shield by gathering information.

Of course the Sparrows have no clue just how the Umbrella's are dodging them and figuring out their plans. They've been trained their whole lives to take them down, but the opposite is happening here.

This of course would lead to infighting and suspicions as they all start to turn on each other.

But the Umbrella's are also being the Umbrella's, just because they have an advantage here doesn't mean that they aren't fucking things up for themselves, they are at times after all, their own worst enemies.

Five of course would be trying to figure out a way back to their 2019, possibly involving the Commission. Diego tags along because he's trying to find Lila. (I’m not a fan of the relationship, although I do enjoy Lila’s character, but personally I do think Diego needs some closure from the relationship)

I do see Luther and Sloane forming a cute relationship as unlike the rest of his siblings Luther would understand the Sparrows in a way his own siblings don’t as he gets the loyalty that makes you stay with Reginald even if that's not all you want out of life. (You can't tell me that all Luther wanted with his life was to stay at the Academy. The guy must have had a dream for himself once.) Whereas for Sloane, Luther's proof that it is possible for her to strike out on her own, even with nothing and build a life free of the Academy.

I do see Allison taking the lead here as unlike the others who either don't really have anyone in their timeline (Klaus, Vanya, Five) or if they had, they may already be dead, but Allison has Claire's existence at stake here and you bet that she's going to fight tooth and nail for her baby.

And maybe the Umbrella’s learning to work as a team for the first time in years. Because if they want to get home, then they’re going to have to learn to work as a team properly and trust each other.

Of course it’s not easy. Now the initial joy they had in season two that everyone is alive and safe, they still have to address the issues they have with one another. Unfortunately they don’t just disappear.

Things that should get mentioned: Vanya’s book (still kinda pissed that that was just brushed under the rug), Luther’s past treatment of his siblings (locking Vanya up, choking Klaus, threatening to drop Delores from a height), Klaus and Ben’s issues (they’ll need multiple chapters just for that), not noticing Klaus was kidnapped/tortured/killed, to name but a few.

Of course not everything is solved and hunky-dorey, there’s still massive trauma and decades of bitterness and repressed feelings but they’re exposed and have started to treat the wound properly instead of ignoring it and letting it fester.

I’m picturing a Luther/Sloane dancing scene now like Luther and Allison’s in the Day That Wasn’t (until I looked up Sloane’s actress and found out that she’s the same height as Emmy, I was picturing her to be slightly smaller. Slightly disappointed by that.)

Maybe then the Sparrows find out about her connection with the Umbrella’s and turn on her, thinking her to be the traitor?

I’m drawing a blank as to what happens after that, but for the big showdown, I’m picturing Klaus finally making Ben corpeal and the Sparrows seeing their brother/themselves as a ghost before Umbrella Ben . . . just completely knocks Sparrow Ben out with one good sucker-punch. (Maybe yelling ‘I’m the Alpha here!’ or something similar?) 

Ben absolutely kicks his Sparrow counter-part while he’s down too. Hard. Whether it’s his ribs or his balls it’s up to your imagination.

Well that’s all I have. Can’t believe that something that was originally intended to be a small post spawned into this, but I don’t care. If anyone wants to use this idea or even bits of it go right ahead, God knows if it was up to me to complete this won’t be written until season 10.

[michals]

(Ok this was supposed to be like, a couple of paragraphs but it turned into a freaking essay, so it’s under the cut haha)

On Klaus, Luther and addiction

So this is something I personally find to have a lot of great thematic potential for these two characters. The idea of Luther falling into the same trap that Klaus has for both similar and different reasons and Klaus dealing with Luther’s addictions while facing his own is such a great thru line for both of them. The show’s set them up with the building blocks for this plot point and it would be so easy for it to come into play this season, especially this season actually.

Luther’s build up to addiction is subtle but I think they’ve planted the seeds enough to make it into something. Him falling apart in The Day That Was and his first reaction is to turn to alcohol and drugs is pretty significant considering it’s obvious that he’s probably been very ‘straight edge’ his whole life, probably never having even drank before then. And he tells Klaus straight out that he wishes he was like him, that he didn’t care and that he could just ignore all his own feelings like he thinks Klaus does. (I’ll get into how the family deals with Klaus’s addiction in a minute.) He goes out and  does things under the influence he would never have done while sober, things that end up being self destructive (ie having sex that he seemed to really not want). But even then he’s gotten the idea that if he’s drinking/on something then he’s not thinking about all his shitty feelings.

Season two really sets it up because it’s not just one event but several. In the first ep at the bar he has a drink very casually, like he’s been doing it for years and not just because his life fell apart in the past how many months. The flask when he goes to Vanya’s is really telling firstly because he has a flask on him at all times at this point, that he uses it to get his courage up to go in the barn, and that he does it even when he’s driving. But it’s the nitrous scene that really cements it for me, again simply because he went from being basically a teetotaler to jumping at the first offer of heavy drugs. And he says he should’ve done this a long time ago. If I may get a little personal I know how easy it is to fall into this, the idea of ‘hey alcohol (or drugs) makes me feel better or at least I don’t think/care as much so why wouldn’t I do it?’. It’s such an easy slope to fall down and on the surface Luther has plenty of reasons to want to.

Now, Klaus: there’s plenty already been said about Klaus’s relationship with drugs and alcohol so I won’t get too wordy. Klaus is defined to us right away as a junkie and addict. Someone who uses substances to avoid dealing specifically with his powers and also his shitty upbringing. He plays very fast and loose with his own sobriety and even his mortality. Basically: he uses drugs to avoid thinking or feeling bad, or at least worse but he’s far, far past the point of entry into full blown dependence.

The scene between him and Luther in season 1 is a personal favorite just because it manages to deal with and establish a number of thematic ideas and the potential for how Luther and Klaus’s relationship can go from there. Luther, like the rest of the family, doesn’t understand Klaus’s addiction partially because they’ve all been estranged for 13 years and partially because Klaus doesn’t take it seriously and puts forth a very flippant persona, hell he doesn’t take anything that seriously. The world’s ending, they don’t have the time or inclination to humor Klaus’s story of chocolate pudding. Luther clearly misunderstands his addiction because yes, Klaus comes across as kind of happy and okay with himself but that’s because of the drugs. To Luther who’s been locked up with their asshole of a father Klaus seems to actually have a life of his own.

But Klaus doesn’t try too hard to walk that opinion back and here’s something I find important that tends to get left out when people point out that the family doesn’t take Klaus’s problems seriously: Klaus doesn’t talk about it or try and deal with it. Klaus really really doesn’t like dealing with things if he thinks he can avoid them. His powers, his childhood, Reginald, Ben, his cult – if he can run away from it or make a joke about it instead that’s what he’ll do. The one thing he ever really shows much initiative with is Dave. He’s self centered and I mean that in the most basic way – everything comes down to what he wants to do and he actually keeps his feelings close to the vest for the most part. Basically he doesn’t want to give the others an ‘in’ point to really address it (bonus they all heaps of problems of their own). And when he does get into it just the barest amount with Luther Luther’s high as fuck.

(Just to touch on Ben he kind of doesn’t count because firstly he can’t talk to anyone else and secondly he and Klaus have such a strained relationship especially regarding Klaus’s drug use that even if anyone else could hear him he probably wouldn’t be that supportive.)

So, actually getting into the whole season 3 thing: the siblings are about to face off with a whole lot of daddy and family issues in this time line and everyone’s got huge potential for emotional and mental shakedowns, but I think Luther’s gonna have the worst time of it. Don’t think I’m going to get into that BS of comparing traumas and saying anyone’s more ‘worthy’ of sympathy than any of the others, I’m saying specifically because it’s to do with Reginald not only rejecting him yet again and outright replacing him but that it’s not even ‘his’ Reginald so does that mean all the shit he put Luther through doesn’t count? I just see it as catalyst for a real breakdown for him.

Not to say this won’t mess with Klaus but Klaus hated Reginald long ago and has accepted that the guy was a douchebag and had no real love for his children, so personally I see his drug use as dealing with Reggie’s abuse but more so to deal with his powers. So yes, this’ll absolutely fuck with him but Luther’s the primo target here.

So what if we see Luther leaning even harder into drinking or even heavier things? Now he really has an excuse to because where’s he supposed to go from here? What’s he meant to do? He’s not the leader anymore, his family doesn’t always treat his trauma seriously (Klaus parallels there) nevermind he doesn’t even like to address it himself, he has no idea who he’s supposed to be and the one person who he thought actually cared about him not only doesn’t but never did and now he’ll never get back what he saw as his purpose in life. The whole Ben being alive thing is just icing on the cake. If he spirals in s3 it would make perfect sense because of all this and all the set up for it.

Klaus spiraled too at the end of s2 again becoming the fatalistic junkie he used to be, he’s gonna run from his problems again but it’s not just his powers this time. So he’s off the wagon but what if he notices Luther is too?

I can definitely see Luther trying to hide it from the others. He’s already given away too much of his weaknesses, he doesn’t want them to see their ‘leader’ continue to fall and I don’t think he’d want them to know he’s still that affected by Reginald. They want him to have dealt with it, like he seems to have at least a little in s2, if he’s completely fallen apart because of his dad again then that just makes him look pathetic. So he keeps his flask and finds excuses to get away with stumbling or slurring his words. But Klaus notices, because Klaus knows the signs.

In that scene in s1 Klaus very obviously doesn’t like seeing Luther like that or using drugs as an escape like he does. He’s self aware enough to know that this isn’t any way to live but is too pessimistic when it comes to himself. But, again, he tends to be pretty self centered. This is not a bad thing, this is a great character trait and it makes Klaus interesting. He does not know how to relate to his siblings on the whole, doesn’t know how to talk about his own traumas and addictions, so when he does hear them out it’s usually because he had was focusing on his own shit first. For instance: when he has the heart to heart with Allison in her kitchen he’s only there in the first place because he was falling apart because of Dave.

Luther having a problem will have to be something Klaus purposefully chooses to deal with because he’s worried about one of this siblings. And for obvious reasons Klaus is the perfect one to help him with it. He doesn’t want to see Luther like that but he doesn’t really have a leg to stand on if he wants him to stop. Hell, if Klaus won’t stop why should Luther? Klaus can’t use ‘do what I say not as I do’, partially because Luther has proven to have some self destructive/self harming tendencies and again, if it makes him feel okay or at least steady then why would he stop?

But Klaus stopping means that he’s going to have to confront his quite literal demons when it comes to his powers (I could go off on how much I don’t love that he was somehow sober for 3 years in the 60’s no problem but it didn’t seem to affect his powers at all but that’s another post). The number one thing he’s been running from his whole life, something the show hasn’t actually done a whole lot with. We knows he hates it, we knows he’s tortured by it, but we’ve seen no evidence that he’s ever really confronted it. He was traumatized by Reggie who did everything wrong so he went the opposite route.

But what if he has to stay sober for Luther’s sake? Even if he doesn’t want to help, even if he just enables it or joins him at first eventually he’d have to come the realization that he doesn’t like this, that he wouldn’t wish this kind of problem on someone he cares about. So he’s going to have to turn inward, he’s going to have to face up to both his addiction and his powers, maybe even finally try to tame and use his powers. And at some point he’d have to talk to Luther about it and stop hiding behind his glib façade.

So in the end we’d get to see Luther falling apart trying to deal with everything that he still very much needs to deal with and his subconscious tendency for self destruction, Klaus confronting his addictions, his own feelings and relationship to his siblings, and his powers and hell, maybe then we’ll actually get him using his powers to his/the group’s benefit.

[frecklesandstardust]

Let’s Talk About Klaus

Hi, friends. The Umbrella Academy’s second season came out recently. I finished it about twelve hours after. And I have feelings. We need to talk about Klaus. 

Now, here is my disclaimer. From the very first moment I saw him, Klaus was my favorite, but please read to the end before yelling about how Klaus-stans refuse to see his negative qualities. Thank you <3 (Also, this will involve spoilers for Season 2 and probably be an essay, so be prepared.)

Okay, first of all. Let’s look at Season 1 Klaus. 

He’s an asshole. Just like all of his siblings. They were raised by a narcissistic egomaniac and given hero complexes from pretty much the second they were born. Obviously they all lack empathy and healthy coping mechanisms. We can all agree on that. 

However, Klaus is also kind. So unbelievably kind. He makes crass jokes and looks out for himself first, but he is also so caring. 

When we first see him, he is encouraging people in rehab. He has a rapport with the EMT who brings him back to life. He hugs Allison as soon as he sees her at the mansion and seems genuinely concerned about her and her life. When the giant portal opens, he grabs a fire extinguisher and runs to the front to try and protect his siblings. Siblings who essentially ignored and belittled him for years. 

Fast forward and we see him helping Diego and Five and Luther. We see him caring, sincerely caring about his siblings. He breaks a snowglobe over his head to help Five get the answers he needs. He follows Luther to a rave and dies trying to save his life, even though he’s riddled with PTSD and freshly sober. We see him try so fucking hard to not give out any information about Five when he’s being literally tortured by assassins. He saves Diego from Hazel and Cha-Cha at the hotel, even though he could have stayed safe in the car. He risked his life to save a brother who didn’t even notice he had been kidnapped. 

We watch him die. We watch him get locked in a museum by his father figure and tortured by his abilities. We watch him be traumatized over and over again by ghosts that look just as gruesome as the day they died. We watch him be hurt and kidnapped. We watch him get thrust into a literal war, where he lost his soulmate after staying and fighting for ten months because he was just that in love with Dave. 

Out of every character, Klaus clearly has the most trauma. This isn't even including the fact that he was homeless for years and alluded to non-consensual sexual situations. Ergo, trading sex for a place to sleep and things like that. I am personally of the belief that Reggie was the reason Klaus broke his jaw, which Diego talks about in S1, but that’s my own opinion. 

Looking at all of that, Klaus has PTSD out the whazoo. Like, he is filled to the brim with trauma and no one cares enough to ask or help him. Five sees him after Dave dies and only cares about the briefcase. Diego hears that he lost someone and has the absolute audacity to call Klaus “lucky” because at least he can see them whenever he wants. Not one of his siblings understands Klaus’s powers and that’s terrifying because he had to deal with screaming, tormented ghosts completely by himself. Imagine that. Powers that you can’t control eating you alive and the only thing that helps dim the noise is drugs. 

And your family doesn’t care enough to ask. They just write you off as a useless junkie. 

Now, like I mentioned earlier, Klaus is not an innocent quote unquote soft boi. He is inherently selfish. But, he had to be. He had to be selfish in order to survive. He was on the streets. Alone. If he wasn’t selfish, he would have been dead ten times over. 

He stole things. He lied. He hurt people. He was an asshole. Just like they all were. 

But he was never cruel. 

His relationship with Ben in the first season was pretty awesome. We get to see the snark and the familiarity and the bond between them. And it makes sense, to some extent, why Ben is constantly trying to get Klaus to be better. If Klaus hasn’t seen his siblings for years, neither has Ben. I genuinely think Ben wanted to believe that they had changed. He wanted his siblings to be good, decent people. 

That’s why he told Klaus to go after Luther. Why he told him that his family would notice he was missing when he get kidnapped by Cha-Cha and Hazel. 

But it does not excuse the fact that Ben never apologized. He was wrong and he never said sorry for it. He inadvertently got Klaus killed and he never admitted that he made a mistake. 

He was there for so much of Klaus’s trauma and he just brushed it off. We never see Ben try to be there for Klaus or try to help him come to terms with everything. Ben can see the other ghosts. He knows that they’re terrifying and that Klaus’s powers are completely haywire. Why doesn’t he acknowledge that? 

Let’s move on to Season 2. 

For some reason, all of Klaus’s character development has been tossed out the window. He is a wildcard with no plot line to follow. He says random things and seems to act as comedic relief for the most part, except it rarely works.

For starters, his powers are completely gone, for the most part. We see him in a brief opening scene absolutely kicking ass with his ghost army. But, after that, we don’t see any ghost except Ben. We don’t see him learning to control his powers or talking to ghosts. We don’t even hear about his powers. It’s like they’ve been erased. 

That kind of trauma doesn’t go away. Especially when we find out he has been sober for three years. 

I’ve seen some people argue that he traded addictions. Swapped the drugs for the cult and the adoration that came with it. I don’t agree to that for a few reasons. 

First, he is very clearly uncomfortable with the cult touching him. And we see in the flashback that it happened completely by accident. Klaus was, again, trying to survive. Was it selfish? Yeah. Did he use that old woman to shamelessly find a place in a world he’s not supposed to exist in? Yeah! But, like I stated earlier, Klaus knows how to survive. He knows what to do to get by. All he is doing is trying to survive. Ben can scream all he wants about fairness, but he wasn’t offering up any options to get Klaus a place to sleep and a way to survive in the past. 

Second, we don’t know how the cult came about exactly. We don’t know what started it. We don’t know how it spiraled from whatever it started as into a cult. And Klaus hates it. He spends the entire season trying to get away from everyone. He used it as a means to survive and then wanted space. His entire plan was to get to 1963 and save Dave--probably from the start of 1960, to be honest. But to get to Dave, he had to survive. He had to get to a place where saving Dave was possible. He can’t save him if he’s dead or homeless. 

Third, Klaus very openly is touch-starved and desperate for attention. He spent his childhood being overlooked and his adulthood being treated like a disease. He just wants someone to take him seriously and care about him. The cult does. They love him for who he is, for his weird humor and mannerisms. They believe him when he talks. He’s never had that before, not since Dave. 

He finally has a group of people that genuinely care about what he has to say. Even if it’s all bullshit! They still listen to him. So, of course he sticks around. Of course he lets it grow. He thinks everyone he loves is dead! He’s holding onto the only thing he can. It just happens to be a cult. 

Next point: Ben. 

Ooh boy, this is gonna be a long one.

Ben is also not a soft boi. One tender scene with Vanya does not undo an entire season of cruelty and callousness. 

Before we get into that, let’s talk about the point everyone brings up: Klaus didn’t tell anyone Ben was there! 

Why should he? They never believed him the first thousand times he tried to tell them. What makes it any different fifty years in the past? 

But aside from that, I have two theories. 

One, I’m curious as to if he was subconsciously trying to punish Ben. Ben essentially got him killed at the rave with Luther. He also never apologized, as I mentioned earlier. He blows Klaus off, just like the rest of his siblings, even though, out of anyone, Ben should know better. From the very beginning of S2, Ben is saying some pretty nasty stuff to Klaus. Low blows that shouldn’t be brought up. If that’s been happening for 3+ years, it’s possible that Klaus internally is punishing Ben for being just like the others. 

Second, he’s scared of losing Ben. It’s been 17 years of only having Ben by his side. Constantly. And we know Klaus has watched the love of his life bleed out right in front of him. That’s PTSD. And PTSD doesn’t exactly involve healthy coping methods. So, it’s entirely possible that Klaus doesn’t saying anything about Ben being there because he is scared to lose him to his siblings. If Ben is corporeal, if they know Ben is there, what’s stopping Ben from leaving to go spend all his time with someone else? Someone that isn’t Klaus? Klaus could be trying to protect himself from losing another person. 

Does that make it okay for Klaus to hide the fact that Ben is there? No. But does it kind of make sense? Yeah. Ben deserved to reconnect with his family, but Klaus is traumatized beyond belief and clearly isn’t in the right state to make sound and logical decisions all the time. If we can forgive Five for murdering the Commission Board in cold blood and Vanya for blowing up the world twice, we can forgive Klaus for keeping Ben’s existence to himself (especially since he tried to tell them in S1 and was immediately written off as an attention whore.)

Now, let’s talk about the possession, aka my least favorite thing about the entire season. 

Ben possessing Klaus is assault. End of story. Non-negotiable. It’s not funny. It’s not cute. It’s not “payback.” It’s assault. 

We know that Klaus is terrified by his powers. We know that he has trauma in his past, involving non-consensual experiences. So does Ben. Worse, Ben was there for a lot of it. 

Ben flat out ignored Klaus’s discomfort for his own selfish gain. He was so hellbent on possessing Klaus that he ignored the fact that Klaus was terrified to go to sleep because he knew Ben would possess him without consent. 

And let’s acknowledge the fact that Klaus doesn’t owe Ben anything. He has no obligation to let himself be possessed. Ben is dead. And that’s horrible. It’s unfair and Ben did not deserve to die. But he. is. dead. The dead do not get free access to the bodies of the living just because they want to feel things again. 

Ben completely disregarded Klaus’s feelings because he had a crush on a girl who didn’t even know he existed. Klaus, who willingly accepted possession the second he realized it was important to Ben. Klaus, who laid out strict ground rules, showing he was clearly terrified of the idea, but still did it anyway because he loves his brother and harbors guilt for conjuring him the day of Ben’s funeral. Klaus, who had just been brushed off after failing to stop Dave from enlisting.

Ben possesses him and almost immediately starts to make out with a girl who thinks he is Klaus. That is sexual assault. If I have a twin sister and that twin sister sleeps with my husband, who believes she is me, then she has raped him. That is rape. 

Ben doing anything physical with that girl, who clearly showed that she was interested in Klaus, is sexual assault. She did not consent to sleep with Ben. She consented to sleep with Klaus, who was trying his best to break the possession and stop the entire thing from happening. 

And Ben fought him on it. We see them struggle in Klaus’s body for the next several minutes. Ben doesn’t care that Klaus is clearly uncomfortable, that Klaus wants him out. He selfishly wants to stay in control because of his own desires. He ignores Klaus’s rules and does what he wants without considering the consequences. 

This is the third time that Ben has used possession to control Klaus. We see it when they are fighting earlier in the season at the cult mansion. We see it again at the dinner with Reginald. We see Klaus essentially have a seizure (and we see none of his family members ask if he is okay. They just roll their eyes.) We see Klaus literally vomit once he forces Ben out of him in that alley with Five and Luther. Still, no one asks if he is okay. 

Worse than that, Ben says that he no regrets. And then reiterates the statement! Ben assaulted his brother and does not give a flying fuck. That’s crueler than anything Klaus has ever done. I would argue that it’s the cruelest thing any of the Hargreeves have done, to be honest. 

It doesn’t matter how much of an asshole Klaus is or how selfish or how flamboyant. His consent still matters. His boundaries are just as important. 

Overall, this season just gave Klaus more trauma while still leaving his PTSD and mental illness completely unaddressed. They essentially removed his powers and took away his bond with Ben. Like, in the first season, Ben is almost always with Klaus. That is Klaus’s power, after all. In the second season, Klaus’s entire arc is without Ben. All of his missions are without Ben present. 

There is absolutely no fucking way that Klaus wouldn't bring Ben with him to get tacos with Vanya and Allison. He loves Ben, more than anyone. We see that constantly in the first season, outside of a few mishaps. 

I love Ben. I genuinely love Ben and his story in the first season. But in S2, they took him and twisted him into a callous thing with no respect for consent or his brother. If those three years with Klaus in 1960 were anywhere near as bad as what we see in 1963, I can see why Klaus wouldn’t want Ben around his family. 

I was supposed to love Ben and cry for him. And don’t get me wrong, I did. I cried a lot in the last episode. But that scene with Vanya? Where he tells her she’s not a monster and that they should have done better and that they could help her control her powers? That’s the exact same damn speech he should have told Klaus. Vanya’s destruction was always outward. It always cost millions of people their lives. Klaus’s was inward. So why does Vanya deserve the help and love and support while Klaus gets tossed aside?

They both needed a family and only one of them got it this season. Sure, Allison and Klaus had some great scenes together. But she didn’t ask if he was okay when Ben possessed him at dinner. She didn’t check on him. 

Klaus deserved better. He deserved to work through is trauma and to have a family that takes care of him and supports him and helps him figure out how to deal with the ghosts. He deserved to control his own body and to say no when Ben wanted to possess him. He deserved a goddamn hug. 

Klaus was inherently selfish. However, he also gave up everything. He sacrificed his entire relationship with Dave to try and save his life. If he had succeeded, if Dave had never enlisted, they never would have met. They never would have fallen in love. Dave would never remember being with him. He nearly gave that up to protect the love of his life. 

Klaus is not perfect. He’s an asshole at best sometimes. But he’s also kind and compassionate and loves harder than every other character on that show. He deserved better. 

This has turned into a massive essay, but the bottom line is that S2 let Klaus and Ben down. So many things were handled poorly--from consent to mental illness. It could have been great. It could have been an opportunity to fix a lot of the mistakes made in the first season. Ben and Klaus could have talked everything out and figured out the ghosts and the war and the trauma together. They were never given that chance. 

There were so many good parts of this season, but the bad parts were so bad that it tainted the rest. I know the writers could have done better. They did it with Luther and Allison! They made their characters great this season and showcased some amazing relationships between the siblings. I’m confused as to how they let Klaus and Ben fall through the cracks so heavily. 

[ohmyitsfaith]

50 days of learning love/Part 4

Pairing: Five Hargreeves x Reader

Summary: Stressing is caring. Five is away and you’re afraid something bad is going to happen to him. Eventually, it does. Which is followed by a bunch of arguments.

Warnings: I guess angst and the usual swearing?

Word count: 2.9k

A/n: I know this took so long! I’m sorry... But I hope you enjoyed it!

You were pacing around. You didn’t know why, but you felt like something was going to happen. But you couldn’t do anything.

“Oh, Five. Please be okay...” you murmured.

Meanwhile our grumpy time traveler was walking around while talking to Delores about anything and everything.

“You know Delores, they’re not as bad as I thought before” he said, talking about you.

Delores was just looking at him.

“No, I don’t feel anything but friendly... I mean... I like them as a person. They’re friendly and they care about me. Well, us” he said, thinking. “And they’re the first person who hugged me. Other than Vanya. They’re the first person who ever really cared about me. The first time I felt loved. Well... cared for.”

Delores was still staring at him, without saying a word, but he heard her question: “Will you ask them to help you?”

“No, I don’t think I will. They never showed any potential for knowing such math and physics. I don’t mean that they aren’t smart...” he stopped, not knowing what to say.

“Why are you so defensive? They can’t hear you nor see you. Plus you didn’t say anything bad” Delores ‘said’.

“I’m not defensive!” he said defensively and then realized what he did. “I... I mean...” he stuttered, then his face hardened. “Why are we even talking about this? You don’t like them!”

“I don’t, but you do” Delores replied which shut Five up.

True he thought. I do like them. They’re the first person who I can call my friend.

“The question here is...” Delores started. “Do you like them more than a friend?” she asked.

Five stopped in his tracks. He looked at Delores, but only a mannequin stared back. For the first time in years, he saw Delores for what she was. Only a mannequin.

And so went the sixteenth day and night.

The next day you were mad. You didn't know why, but you were. Maybe the fact that Five was nowhere to be found. He promised he'd be there by the next day. But he wasn't. You didn't know what was going on with him and that kinda scared you. The day was lonely, and not knowing what to do, you just sat on the mattress, hoping the day would go by fast. You were trying to keep yourself entertained. And that’s when your imaginary friend decided to pop in.

“I thought you were done with me” they ‘said’.

“I mean I didn’t invite you. That was you” you pointed out.

“Yet here I am. And you’re talking to me” they sat down next to you.

“I forgot how annoying you were” you sighed.

“Oh, you love me. Anyway. The weather is nice today.”

“Seriously? You couldn’t come up with a better conversation?” you looked to where they could be.

“Hey, don’t blame me! Blame your head! I’m there” they smiled.

“I wish you wouldn’t be” you sighed, putting down the stick you were holding.

“Oh, come on. You like having me around” they said in a sarcastic tone.

“Just leave me alone” you rolled your eyes.

“But then you’ll be alone. Do you want to be alone, Y/n?” they pouted, acting like a baby.

“You’re just a voice, my brain made up so I don’t go crazy from the loneliness. I made you up and after the fourth year I swore to myself that I’m never going to listen to you again.”

“You’re lonely, admit it. You need someone to talk to” the voice said.

“Just because I’m alone, doesn’t mean that I’m lonely” you said lifting your head confidently.

The voice disappeared and you were left alone with your thoughts again.

“Five, when you get back, I won’t admit that I missed you” you swore to yourself and lay down.

Five on the other hand was dealing with the loss of Delores. For years, she was his only companion, the only person he could talk to and now the image of her kept flickering out. It hurt him, since he was losing something very important to him, but he didn’t know what to do. He tried not to think of you since that seemed to be the problem, but that turned out to be harder than he originally thought. He felt lonely again. But at least he found what he was looking for.

On the way back, he stopped at some point. He knew the time has come.

“I’m sorry, Five” she ‘said’ in a sad voice.

“I’m sorry too” he whispered, holding the mannequin close to him for the last time. “I wish things could be different-”

“Never wish yourself loneliness again, Five” she whispered.

A few tears fell down on his face, but climbed through the ruins and put Delores on top of it all. As he tried to climb back, his tears blurred his vision and he tripped on something and fell. His knees and hands hurt as did his face. He felt blood run down on his cheek.

“Oh no” he groaned.

He got up with a groan and started towards the place you were staying at. He tried to wipe the blood off without getting it infected. He was sad and hurt and he was unsure of what will happen once he saw you. Or you saw him. The sun had already set, but he knew he was close so he didn’t stop, instead he kept walking, hoping he’d reach the spot as soon as possible. He was getting very tired, his hands and knees burnt like hell, but he kept walking, determined to reach you and finally lie down on the semi-comfortable mattress.

And so went the seventeenth day and night.

You jolted awake as you heard a groan close to you. Opening your eyes, you looked around and saw a very tired, very annoyed Five. You literally jumped up and went to him.

“Five, Jesus, are you alright?” you asked immediately looking for injuries which you found right on his cheek.

“No” he groaned. “I just lost her, injured myself and also I’m stuck in a fucking post-apocalyptic world with literally not another being except for some weird, super-powered girl, who somehow survived the fucking apocalypse that no one else did” he ranted.

He was rude and you were taken aback by it, but you didn’t mention it. You saw how hurt he was, so you just let him let out his inner hurt. Without saying a word, you sat him down on the mattress and you took out a cloth and wiped the blood from his face.

“I can’t believe she’s gone” he murmured, looking down on his hands.

“What happened?” you asked softly.

“That’s none of your business” he snapped.

“Well aren’t you rude today?!” you asked, your patience snapping. “It wasn’t easy here either! You were gone, I was alone for days and you stumbled back in the middle of the night, injured! And I understand it. You lost a lot, but I did too!” you looked him deep in the eyes.

“You have no idea what I’ve been through” he spoke through his teeth.

“And what is your plan? Dying?” you asked.

“Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing” he murmured.

Seriously? When you’re so close to figuring it all out?” you raise your voice.

“Why do you care?” he asks in a voice that indicates he’s giving up.

“Maybe I like having you alive, ever thought of that?” you asked sadly.

He looked at you, shocked, but you shook your head and got up. You walked to the place next to the fire place. You lay down and turned your back to Five. You tried to sleep but to no avail. So you just lay there hoping sleep would come to you before the sun came up.

But that was wishful thinking as the sun came up whitin a few hours. You turned around and saw Five sleeping with him facing towards your way. He looked peaceful and you would’ve said cute if you weren’t mad at him for the evening thing. You turned away, got up and started practicing your powers like you’ve done in the few days. You figured it could be of great use any time so you just did that.

Hours later you heard Five waking up with a groan. You didn’t turn around even when he mumbled a ‘Good morning’. Five just sighed and worked on the equation in silence. In the middle of the day you ate in silence then you both went back to your own tasks. After a while you stopped practicing and started drawing in the sand. The day went by in silence without speaking to the other. You were upset with Five and Five... well he was just upset in general. He lost Delores, and now you with his rudeness. He felt awful but didn’t know what to do. Should he apologize? Probably. Could he do that? He never did that. It just wasn’t like him and he didn’t know how to do that. So he just stayed quiet.

And so wnt the eighteenth day and night.

Five was getting annoyed with your silent treatment, so he decided that he was gonna do something nice. Maybe he would break your silence that way. So he planned on helping with the dinner fire. He knew that it’s all your problem, it has been since you found each other. His best choice was this. And so he did that.

When you went on your daily walk around the small place, he waited until you were out of sight, he started on his mission. He got the wood and tried to start a fire. It wasn’t easy, but he managed to start it. After that he got the dinners and started to warm them.

The sun had set by the time you got back. You saw the fire and as you got closer, you saw Five sitting there with the two plates. When he noticed you, he got up and you just looked at each other for a bit. Then he offered you one of the plates and the place next to him. You took the plate with a silent thank you and sat next to him. You ate in silence, but you felt Five glance at you from time to time. You let it happen a few times, until you got really annoyed.

“Do you ever apologize or are you just that much of an asshole?” you asked looking at him, shocking him.

“T-this was my apology” he said, shocked.

“I can see that you weren’t taught saying sorry” you glared at him.

“Wha- I did this for you!” he said, getting annoyed.

“I didn’t ask you to do this!” you snapped back.

“Well you didn’t have to! I tried to do something nice for you so you would stop giving me the silent treatment, but it looks like nothing’s good enough for you!” his patience snapped and now you two were in a full on argument.

“The only thing I wanted was a sorry! Just one fucking word! A sorry for snapping at me for no reason!” you stood up and looked at the boy.

“Well sorry, that I was sad and hurt! I just lost the one thing that kept me sane for the last five years! I’m sorry that it was the worst thing that happened to me in a while and I couldn’t take it!” he stood up and looked you deep in the eyes. “I’m sorry that I went through my childhood only doing what my sorry excuse of a father said! Growing up like I was nothing but a machine, an experiment!” he kept shouting and tears ran donw his face. “And I’m sorry if after all that I snap at you! I’ve been through hell and I’m still living it!”

He fell down to the mattress, with red eyes, tears streaming down his face and sniffling. You felt bad for the boy and slowly sat down next to him. You tried to touch him, but the first time he flinched from under your touch. Then you softly put your hand on his shoulder, squeezing it reassuringly.

“I’m sorry” he whispered.

“I’m sorry too. I knew that you weren’t feeling well and a bunch of things happened to you. I was just mad at myself and everything that I was losing my friend. My only friend” you spoke softly, no trace of the previous anger in your voice.

He nodded and slowly you both continued eating. You stayed close to the other and processed all that just happened.

There are better and there are worse days in the apocalypse. The most important thing is that you keep going, keep hoping that the next day will be better.

And so went the nineteenth day and night.

Five wasn’t feeling too great the next day. His face was pale, well paler than usual. You were scared what was going to happen to him. You never lived through a sick day with someone in the apocalypse. Sure, you got sick every now and then, but you always got through it after some time. But you didn’t know how Five worked, how he goes through an illness. But his face was pale and it was worrying.

He was asleep for a longer time then he did ever before. And his face was all scrunched up like he felt uncomfortable. When he woke up a few hours later, you were next to him in an instant. You held the water bottle towards him.

“Here. Drink this. It’ll help” you said softly.

He went to take it, but his eyes widened in the next second and he jumped up and fell to his knees a few meters from the mattress. Everything came out of him. At first you looked away, but took a deep breath, kneeled down next to Five and put your hand on his back, stroking it gently.

“Just give it all out, you’ll feel better” you said as he let out a bigger part of whatever made him so sick.

When he finished, he was pantng, trying to catch his breath. You gave him the water bottlewhich he gladly took and took a few gulps of water, before leaning into you.

“Are you sick or did you eat something bad?” you asked, keeping up the weak boy’s weight.

“I don’t know. We’ll see” he sighed and got up with your help.

He tried to do his things but you always stopped him, saying that fter all that vomiting, he shouldn’t. So after the millionth time, he took it easy. Of course he wasn’t happy about it, but you wouldn’t let him do anything. So he had no other choice but to accept his situation. But not without grumbling about it.

“I feel completely fine! I don’t understand why I can’t keep doing my stuff!” he mumbled.

“You’re acting like a baby” you pointed out.

“No, I do not!” he pouted.

“What did you say?” you smirked.

“Leave me alone” he said and turned away.

“As you wish” you said in a sing-song voice.

By nightfall he was feeling much better, the color was back on his face. He looked better, felt better, but you still didn’t let him do anything.

“Are you sure you should eat this much?” you asked.

“Yes! I’m hungry!” Five mumbled as he ate.

“Five, you vomited this morning!” you said, worried about him.

“Y/n” he turned towards you. “I’m fine. Just let me eat.”

“I’m just worried about your well-being” you said softly.

“Well then stop worrying about me!” he said.

“Stop worrying about you?” you asked. “Stop worrying about you?! I can barely stop thinking about you!” you said, shocking even yourself.

Five looked at you shocked. He expected everything but this. He felt a blush crawl up his sheeks and slowly down on his neck. But looking at you, your situation wasn’t much better either. If anything, it was worse. You cleared your throat and took in a sharp breath. You opened then closed your mouth a few times like you didn’t know what to say (which was the case), then you stuttered out a few words.

“I- I mean... I-” you stopped. “I meant... um... I-” you didn’t know what to day. “I meant to say... uh... I’ll- I’ll just go” you said, standing up.

Five watched you walk to the other side of the fire, while muttering to yourself. He just blinked a few and decided teleave it at that.

“Stupid teenage hormones. You always mess things up, don’t you?” you murmured to yourself.

“I told you” you heard a sing-song voice from your right.

Your head snapped to your right. There was no one, just your imaginery... friend.

“Fuck you, I told you to leave me alone!” you spoke through your teeth in a hushed voice.

They shrugged and disappeared. You sighed and went to lie down. You peeked around the fireplace and saw Five sleeping peacefully. You sighed and lay on your back. You watched the beautiful sky and thought about the last few days and their weirdness. Slowly you fell asleep, dreaming about a nicer day, a nicer life.

And so went the twentieth day and night.

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[in-tua-deep]

au where five found out about vanya's powers in the apocalypse? Like maybe he found Reggie's book or he saw the eyes of vanya's corpse?

oh man like. that would be interesting to be sure, if Five managed to find Reginald’s book in the apocalypse

(He doesn’t read it at first, not for a few months after he finds it. He opened to the page that detailed Reginald’s experiments with how long Deigo could hold his breath in clinical unfeeling words and has to put it away while he breathed - not too deeply though, he didn’t want to breathe in more ash than necessary)

But he eventually does. He sits Dolores up and rages and vents to her, cursing Reginald’s name with every new sordid detail, every new terrible sin he now knows to hurl at Reginald’s feet. He reads no great loss under his section and he’s too dehydrated to weep but something breaks inside his chest nevertheless

(He’d never thought that dad loved them, not really. He might have hoped, back when he was little but he knew better now. He was thirteen, old enough to know better. But he’d at least thought that dad found them useful. 

Five had tried to hard, trained so much, been so adaptable. Even then he was no great loss.)

Five finds out from Reginald’s book about Ben’s death. Cold words that describe the way his brother died. Reginald seemed to care more about Ben’s death than Five’s presumed death, but that could be becuase Ben’s power was always bigger than Five’s. More violent. More efficient. Of course Ben was a greater loss, Five’s power wasn’t even inherently useful for fighting.

(Klaus’s power wasn’t useful for fighting either. Reading Dad’s dismissive words calling Klaus a failure makes him bristle. Reading about Reginald locking Klaus away in the mausoleum for days make Five want to hurl the book against the wall.)

Finding out about Vanya is - it’s weird. Vanya was always so ordinary. He loved her of course, for fucks sake he was the only one who cared to interact with her half the time. He loves all of his siblings but he has no illusions about how casually cruel they could be to one another.

But he reads about her powers and clenches his fists and wonders what Reginald would have done if Five had stayed, if Five had kept on his path of rebellion. Would Reginald have drugged him, too?

(Reginald had the power to take their powers away. Five wonders what Klaus thought when he found out, if he had cursed and sworn and raged at the man who watched his son suffer and turn to drugs to deal with seeing things no child should ever see. Reginald had the power to help, and he tortured Klaus instead.)

Because - of course Five assumes that they know. He reads Vanya’s books as well when he comes across it, tucking it into his wagon. He wonders when the truth came out, because the rage that drips from those pages is very real. Vanya doesn’t mention her powers in the book of course, but she would have been what, in her 20s when she wrote it? 

Vanya said in her book that she left home at 18, which means she’s had years to get the drugs out of her system and discover what their father had taken from her. Did she think that they knew? That they had kept it from her? Is that why the pages of her book drip with bone deep hurt, making Five’s fingers shake with the ache of them

(Or it could be the hunger, a now constant companion)

Five keeps both books close, even though he wants to vandilize Reginald’s book half the time. It’s strange to see the insight on them and their powers from the perspective of a scientist, odd to see the written results of the torture they went though

(He almost rips the page on the effects of electricity on his warping powers out on principle, but he just ends up curled around Dolores as he trembles involuntarily at the memories)

Five has so few belongings when he is recruited to the Commission, or at least has very few personal ones. He leaves Dolores behind in the apocalypse with a heavy heart but she’s too big to take with him. Too big to hide.

(Five always learned to only take what you can hide, because what you can’t hide will always be used against you.)

He tucks Reginald’s notebook in the waistband on his pants, the hard edges against his back a constant almost reassuring pressure. Vanya’s book gets pushed into one of his deep pockets. The glass eye gets shoved into his sock the same way he used to hide scavenged bills and quarters he would then place beneath the floorboards of his room

(He wonders absently if his money stash was ever found, but it doesn’t really matter now does it?)

He goes through the Commission with the knowledge that he has a bomb hidden away. As much as he keeps the notebook around out of a sense of sentiment he knows he doesn’t want it to fall into the hands of the commission, doesn’t want them to have this dissection of his powers on hand

(he has so little of his siblings left, just the bitter words of Reginald and Vanya both - the irony is that no matter how much Vanya extolled being excluded she had constantly been by Reginald’s side to write down observations, listening to his words, by his side more than any of them. sometimes he reads Vanya’s vicious words and hears the echo of their father in them. It makes sense. He still hates it, just a little bit)

He writes his equations into Vanya’s book instead of Reginald’s. He doesn’t like to read the red book, only opens it to look at the photos included so that he won’t forget what his siblings look like, tries to ignore the words that detail exactly how much force it takes to pop Luther’s bones out of his oh-so-durable joints

He solves them one day, or at least comes close. Closer than he ever had before, and he figures why not? Time for another little experiment. Who knows? Maybe he’ll add this one to dad’s book.

He pushes, and pushes, and then he falls and he’s in a courtyard he hasn’t seen in decades staring at people he hasn’t spoken to in just as long. He looks at them all with wide eyes

(He looks at Allison and hears his father’s clipped tone stating how Allison in improving at overriding survival instincts, he looks at Luther and hears Vanya’s childish voice accusing him of caring more about being a hero than anything else in his life, including his family, he looks at Klaus and sees a face covered in ash and blood with unseeing eyes)

He looks down at himself and sees smaller hands with smoother skin, absent of the burn marks from the variety of fires he’d set in the apocalypse, absent of the crooked knuckles from when he’d crushed two fingers in some rubble trying to get to a can of food, absent of the cracked and brittle nails from malnutrition and food issues

“Shit.” He says, with feeling.

He can feels the press of the glass eye against his leg, the solid weight of Vanya’s book in his pocket, the edges of Reginald’s notebook digging into his skin as he hauls himself off the ground and into a standing position.

They have a family meeting in the kitchen.

Sort of. Five flits about, snagging bread and peanut butter and marshmallow fluff from the cupboard to make himself a sandwich, trying to avoid looking too desperately eager. He hasn’t had his favorite food in so long that the anticipation is actually insane.

“What’s the date?” Five asks, and learns that he doesn’t actually have all that long until the end of the world. But hey, it’s doable. Probably. Unless the reason the world ended was like, political nuclear war or something? But there would probably be survivors of that somewhere, so it was more likely something bigger scale.

(It has to be something he can stop, or this was all for nothing. He refuses to believe he doesn’t have a chance.)

“Cool, so like, the world is ending.” Five says, because why the fuck not? He has all his siblings in one room (except Ben, he has failed Ben, will always have failed Ben because he’s a coward who couldn’t return to a time when Reginald Hargreeves was alive) and he has Reginald and Vanya’s words pressed into his brain, “We have eight-ish days to fix that.”

“Five, what the hell are you talking about?” Luther demands.

Five waves his hand, “Dad sucked, I time-travelled, the end is nigh. I figured even you could grasp that.”

(His eyes ghost over Luther, skittering about the room. He can’t look at Luther’s body without remembering the cruel diagrams pain stakingly inked into the book as Reginald grumbled about failed experiments.)

“You went to the future?” Diego says, voice full of doubt that make his voice harsh. It’s so much deeper than when Five left, no more of the cracks of puberty.

“No shit.” Five says, and he’s so tired. “I was in that hellscape for forty-five years.”

“Forty-five years?” Diego squawks, as though he’s personally offended.

“That would make you... fifty-eight?” Luther’s voice also has doubt in it, and Five can’t really blame him looking at his squishy little barely teenage body.

“Dad was right,” Five manages to get out without gritting his teeth, “Time travel is a crapshoot and sometimes your body does fun and wacky things on you, blah blah blah trees and acorns.”

“Prove you’re from the future!” Klaus demands, eyes bright as he leans across the table, “What’re the lotto numbers, baby brother?”

“I think they’re ‘fuck you the world had already ended by the time I ended up stuck there,’ Klaus.” Five says, mock thoughtfully before tearing off a chunk of his sandwich.

It tastes like ash and peanut butter. Only Five’s genuine trauma regarding food waste and the fact that most things tasted like ash in the apocalypse have him still chewing his food and swallowing.

“Rude.” Klaus says, making a ‘blat’ noise in disappointment.

“Dad’s rich as fuck, wasn’t him kicking the bucket essentially like winning the lottery?” Five points out, and this time it is Luther squawking at him in disapproval.

“Don’t talk about Dad like that!” He demands, and Five has some more uncharitable thoughts about the way Luther’s arms flex just a little unnaturally underneath that big trenchcoat.

“I like this version of Five better.” Klaus declares, looking like Christmas has come early.

“Dad was murdered and you guys don’t even care.” Luther spits out, looking very offended.

“You were murdered and I care very much about that.” Five retaliates, and the entire kitchen goes quiet.

“Can you elaborate a little, Five?” Allison says, ever the diplomat.

(That’s a lie. Allison started more fights than Diego, probably. She just got caught way less often.)

“Well. I mean, I dunno if murdered is the right word considering everyone was dead. You might have just been collateral damage, who knows? Does murder imply intent?”

“Everyone was dead?” Vanya says, voice very quiet.

Five shrugs, then nods, then shrugs again. He doesn’t like thinking about it. “Yeah, but that’s not going to happen this time.”

“I don’t have time for this nonsense.” Luther mutters, and Five valiantly tries to ignore him. 

“Five, are you - are you sure you’re alright?” Vanya’s voice wobbles and she looks like she wants to reach out and hold him or something ridiculous like that. She looks at him with big sad brown eyes, “Dad did say that time travel could... mess with you a little.”

Allison nods and oh, Five does not have time for this bullshit. 

“I have proof.” He says, and he reaches back and pulls out Reginald’s red notebook and slams it onto the table.

“Is that Dad’s - ” Luther cuts himself off, looking at the notebook with wide eyes.

It is very clearly beaten up to hell and back. Ash has stained the edges of the pages grey and there may or may not be a gouge across the front from a near miss with a bullet while working at the commission. It is a book that has clearly been through hell.

Five also dig’s Vanya’s equally beaten up book from his pocket to dump on the table as well, equally stained with ash and barely held together after being read over and over again for decades, including being used as a notebook in the final years.

(Vanya lets out a little gasp, hand flying up to her mouth with the knowledge that at least one of her siblings read her book. Certainly not the one she thought it would be.)

Five reaches into his sock to pull out the glass eye triumphantly, setting it down on his small stack of treasures.

“What the fuck?” Diego is the one to ask.

“If I time travelled from that day in 2002 to right now, how the fuck would I have Vanya’s book?” Five says triumphantly, “It came out in 2015.”

“Why do you have an eye?” Allison sounds slightly horrified.

“It’s the key to figuring out who caused the apocalypse.” Five says, turning it over in his hands, “It’s gotta have something to do with it at least.”

“Why does he have Dad’s notebook?” Luther demands, sounding equally outraged.

“Found it.” Five shrugs, like the little scavenger he is.

(Emphasis on little. His suit still almost fits, and reading the numbers in Reginald’s notebook versus seeing how fucking tall all his siblings got in person is frankly unfair.)

“Oh my god, okay.” Allison says, throwing her hands up in the air like they’re all nuisances. It’s a familiar Allison look, and Five actually feels a little soothed by the memory. “So the world is ending, Five is back from the dead, and our only clue is a goddamn eye?”

“I was never dead.” Five points out, “But basically, yeah.”

“I don’t have time for this, I have to get back to my daughter.” Allison says, shaking her head.

“I mean if you want Claire to live I would think stopping the apocalypse would kind of be a priority.” 

This draw Allison to a halt from where she’d been gathering herself to leave, “You... know her name?”

Five makes the executive decision to not mention the torn out magazine cover featuring his sister and niece that is pressed between some of the pages in Reginald’s journal. “I’d like to meet her one day.”

Just like that, Allison has been won over.

“Do you think it has something to do with whoever murdered Dad?” Luther asks seriously, even if the question makes Diego groan like this is an argument they have had before.

“Who knows?” Five shrugs, “But if we’re splitting into investigation teams, I call Vanya.”

Vanya startles from where she has been sitting quietly, “Me?” She asks, eyes wide.

“Yeah.” Five nods, “I mean, with Ben gone you’re probably the team’s heaviest hitter.”

“What?” Several voices ring out in confusion.

Five blinks, a little confused himself. Unless - “Wait, did you never train your powers?”

“Five,” Vanya says slowly, like she’s explaining a simple concept to a particularly dim child, “I don’t have powers.”

This was - this was unexpected. Why did he not think of this explanation? It’s just - he has now known about Vanya’s powers for like way longer than he hasn’t. It’s almost second nature to think of Vanya as having powers by now. And she doesn’t know.

“Oh boy.” He says, picking up Reginald’s notebook, “This debriefing may take a bit longer than I first thought. Oh, and at some point we should probably cut the tracker out of my arm as well.”

“The what out of your what?”

Yeah the day doesn’t really get much better from there.