Welcome to A bend in space-time! This fic revisits The Umbrella Academy, introducing an original character (OC): Rin, one of the 43 children. One of those… Reginald Hargreeves didn’t adopt.
The masterlist :
- Season 1 (complete): Table of contents
- Season 2 (complete): Table of contents
- Season 3 (complete): Table of contents
- Season 4 (complete): Table of contents
- Prequel: Snippets of Memory (one-shots): Table of contents
Also available on AO3, Wattpad, FFN and Inkitt.
I make it a point to respect canon, weaving Rin’s story into the series in the most coherent way possible. She mainly exists as a lens through which to re-explore the characters we already know. This fic isn’t centered on her: it’s centered on them, and on The Umbrella Academy universe.
My challenge - throughout all four seasons - is to make her appear only in deleted scenes, with clear time markers showing exactly where they slot into each episode. That way, anyone can rewatch the show if they like, with a fresh perspective.
I deliberately chose to write in the first person: it forces me to analyze the Hargreeves family from Rin’s outsider point of view.
Like the series itself, this story is steeped in music. Each chapter comes with suggested tracks to listen to. I also try to keep the balance of tone - serious yet funny - that the show is known for.
I hope you’ll walk alongside Klaus and Rin for a while! ♡
A bend in space-time Season 2 - [Chapter 1: Are you lonesome tonight]
Summary: With a crash, Rin is released by the time vortex. After escaping the 2019 Apocalypse, she soon realizes she's alone… in Dallas… in 1961.
Chronological markers: this scene fits like a deleted scene from season 2 episode 1, around 01:41 (about a year after the beginnings of Klaus's cult).
Suggested soundtrack: Elvis Presley - Are you lonesome tonight?; The Doors - The End; Frank Sinatra - My way.
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January 07, 1961 - 08:52 pm
Life is tough for street cats. Big cities - with their increasing density of cars - are far from being hospitable habitats. Luckily, there are rats, even if they're dirtier than those in the countryside. Winter - here in the South - is not as biting as in other places. And fortunately, their eyes are able to pick up even the faintest glimmer of light. So - ragged but resilient - they rummage through the garbage cans, even in the corners of this alleyway that the street lamps struggle to light. Between the high brick walls, they scatter garbage, rolling a few foul-smelling cans. No doubt they'll be chased away, and maybe even pelted with stones. For the moment, they are still eating, undisturbed, in the silence of this January evening. But suddenly…
Wooshhhh
Their dilated pupils open even wider, shining like lasers below the aberration that has just ripped open above their heads. First a crack, then a blindingly blue well of pure energy, huge, crackling with electric arcs. A light the likes of which - as far as cats can remember - has only been seen once before. "Again?" the cats probably wonder. And without a second thought, they leave their meager supper in the lurch and start to scurry away.
A thud and a clatter of bottles accompanies my fall to the cold, rough floor, scratching my wrist. The time vortex dumps me, I roll against the garbage can and the lid falls off, nearly knocking me out. I have the reflex to pull myself away, so as not to stay beneath the energy breach. To avoid being crushed by Klaus or - even worse - by Luther. I grab my calf, which has just painfully recalled itself to me. I curl up on myself, waiting for other bodies to tumble, not far from where I fell myself.
But nothing comes and…
Swwwwwwwwip
The bend in space-time is now closing in.
Suddenly, the sounds of the city take over. The irritated hiss of a particularly bold cat staring at me from the wall, the sound of car engines at the end of the alley, even noisier than Hermes's. Muffled retro music, footsteps of passers-by and cries of children. God, my head aches, even more than my calf. I'd forgotten how unpleasant time-travel sickness could be. My side itches, my thigh…
"Damn it".
Painfully, panting a little, I sit down against the garbage can and try to clear my vision. At the end of the street, the neon lights on the blue façade of the Avon movie theater force me to squint again. On the bill is "The Marriage-Go-Round", an adaptation of an old Broadway classic, white panels proclaiming the names of Susan Hayward and James Mason. I blink a few times, trying to get rid of the headache. I pull myself to my feet using the garbage can, trying to breathe.
I'm alone. No Klaus, no Ben, even if our matter and energy were still merging two minutes ago. No Five, even if our wills were fully combined on this goddamn vortex. No Diego, no Allison. No Luther… and no Viktor. I run my hand over my eyes, as if this whole horrible day was gliding over me again. I try to take a step, fully tensed: I'll have to grit my teeth, but I should be able to walk. Hobbling, but to hell with dignity.
I quickly realize that I'm going to be stared at. As soon as I reach the end of the alley, I'm met with intrigued, if not downright frightened glances. Wage earners in trench coats and hats, mothers in heels and flared wool coats. Pastel colors that contrast with the blackness of my jeans with their half-ripped leg. With my oversized leather perfecto, right up to my tousled haircut. Here, I'm a timeless anomaly, myself.
The music becomes clearer, coming from the half-open door of a second-hand store labeled 'Rosati and sons swap', still open in the evening. 'Are You Lonesome Tonight?' Dear Elvis Presley does have a sense of irony. Behind the window, there's a Ouija board, and it almost makes me want to cry. And one thing is certain: if the Plan B Five had in mind to save us from the apocalyptic flames was to send us back in time, then our attempt kind of worked.
Kind of. We knew there was a risk of ending up scattered. Because we were two people, combining our efforts to take us all away, and more so after having used so much energy to fight. It was a theoretical risk. But now that I'm here alone, in the middle of this street in the early '60s, reality hits me hard. The truth is, I'm not used to being alone. Not at home, not at work, certainly not at Hargreeves Mansion: I've never really been. Where are they? And I know the question isn't as much ~where~ they are, as ~when~. My head still hurts, and my chest weighs a ton, just like an overwhelming jetlag. I gasp. I…
"Dang! This sidewalk's already taken, kiddo".
Kiddo? I'm almost thirty. But what a Texan accent. I turn around, scratching my forearm until it almost bleeds. There, against the wall of the Dallas Southern Bank, closed at this hour, a miserable guy is downing a bottle of hooch in shabby clothes. A balding forehead, scaly skin, stringy gray hair… and the look of someone who just stayed here when he didn't know where else to go. I've always attracted bums. But I think it's mostly because of my tendency to legitimately see them as people.
My leg's killing me, really, so I crash on the floor next to him, and never mind if he wants to charge me a fee for occupying his private corner of the sidewalk. He looks at me as if I'm an alien, or as if he's deciding whether my facial features are acceptable or not. But eventually he shrugs. After all: he's an outcast too.
"What year is it, dude?", I ask him.
This question makes him burst out laughing into his bottle. Exaggeratedly, as if he wanted the whole street to enjoy it.
"I've known a lot of weirdos, but you're a corn-fed one."
"Answer me. Then you can decide if I'm mad as a hatter."
He shrugs and takes a swig.
"1961. And in an hour, you'll feel it's January."
"It's not cold. I'm from up north, you know."
My accent betrays me as well.
"East coast, huh? Y’all are really not like us, up there. I like your airship shirt by the way".
I look at what his cataract-white eyes are looking at. I'm sure he's not even that old, but his life must have been hard and it shows.
"Oh. That's Led Zeppelin."
"They stopped making those in the '40s."
He's talking about the airship. That makes me smile through my exhaustion. Actually, it'll be '68 before the band comes together, but he doesn't need to know that. And it's fine with me, if he thinks that - if I'm weird - it's because I'm following fashion from the other side of the country. I rub my leg over the bandage Klaus put on me, which has already partly torn off. The guy whistles.
"Say, did you clean up that shit?"
It's obvious that he's already had a bunch of wounds, some of which must have festered.
"Let’s Git-R-Done".
With a flick of his wrist, he turns his bottle upside down and sends a shot of bad whiskey to lick the wound inflicted by the Icarus Theater gunmen. In another time, another world, now pulverized. I hold back a scream, let the pain fade away. But I'm grateful to him, because I know what it's like to sacrifice a little of that expensive liquor when your hard-earned fortune has been drained to pay for it.
"Thanks, man," I say.
"Mark."
"Rin."
"You're a strange bird, aren't you. What'd you come for, from up north?"
I sigh.
"I just… escaped here."
That's not such a lie, and he takes it at face value, starting to booze again.
"Bless your heart. Well, Rin, you'll still have to get a spot of your own. Because this place is already busy, see, and this isn't my first rodeo, so if you know what I mean, you're going to get the hell out and… Shit, the cops."
I look toward the end of the street, which a car is crisscrossing.
"They don't like me hanging around. Shit. Shit."
All of a sudden, he's on his feet, packing up all his stuff, in a matter of seconds, as if he were used to doing it in a hurry on a daily basis. Probably even several times a day, before letting a little time go by and coming back to hang out once the patrol's over. He points a finger at me.
"This is my spot, get it?"
I struggle to my feet. My leg like my head keeps hammering at me.
"Okay, okay. I never intended to take it from you, you know."
He takes a step towards the crossroads, and the unlit shopfront of a butcher's, overlooked by a huge bovine figure standing out against the dark night. The cops sound their siren, and Mark mimics it with a demented laugh, before staring at me one last time… and then flying off. I make myself discreet, pretend to walk normally, and I blend into the shadows of the closed shops. The police car passes by. I might still be able to make myself invisible as a last resort, but I'm really exhausted. I should sleep. I really should. I've never felt the need so strong.
Sleep… As if the universe had heard this wish and didn't care, a fine drizzle begins to fall. I shove my hands into the pockets of my jacket and cross the street. I'm still wondering where everyone is. If any of them got there before me, or others will do so afterwards. I walk a little further along the sidewalk, eventually turning into the neighborhood, some of whose houses are lit up. I notice the atmosphere of Dallas, almost intimate in this neighborhood, at this time, so different from the immensity of The City in 2019. But it's not wonder, no. It's a kind of painful awe, and my stomach is somewhat knotted.
I hobble around the block, arriving right at the back of what I identify as the Avon cinema. The Rocky Horror Picture Show won't be released until fifteen years from now, I just can't believe it. I don't even know if Klaus is breathing at the same time as I do or not, in this year. What a weird feeling. I sigh. And then, a movement catches my eye. That of a cat - another one - escaping from a black window barred by boards and bricks intended to wall it off.
It's a small house with decrepit walls, certainly abandoned for some years. With a few vines invading a fence that's never been closed. I don't really have the strength to think. Even though I've bragged to Mark, the man from the South, I'm starting to shiver from the cold. I shake my head. Squats used to feel better when there were two of us crowding in, with a shamelessly pilfered dairy-free pizza. I don't even try to remove the firmly nailed boards, I gather all the strength I have left.
Crack!
Within a second, I collapse on a musty old mattress, where I close my eyes and let myself be carried away again. By sleep this time. Heavy, thick. Until the dreams seized me. Troubled dreams, like nothing I've ever had.
I see the street where I've wandered so much this evening: Rosati and sons, the butcher's shop which cow has fallen to the ground. The bank, and the Avon movie theater, devastated by tank fire marked with a red star. The dust of brick and bodies, the wrenching shrieks of fighter aircrafts flying low over the rooftops.
And in the midst of this chaos Viktor, sonically disintegrating the T-62 missiles. Klaus, who raises and materializes a dozen soldiers and civilians - who just happened to fall under the bullets. Just while bringing me back once more, and materializing Ben and the Horror in their deadly ambush. Luther, parrying flames from his bare skin, Five, wandering aimlessly. Allison, blowing brains with her own voice. Diego, tossing back bullets with a single salto. I have blood on my conscience as much as on my hands, and I'm turning myself invisible and intangible again, sabotaging bodies as much as machines.
Until I see them tear through the sky. The deadly warheads, the toys of Oppenheimer, the Destroyer of Worlds. A rain - again - even more destructive than that of Moon rocks: that of nuclear fire. Crack! I teleport away in the distance, where I can try to prevent the terrible chain reactions of fissions at the heart of matter. Maybe I can do it for one of those bombs. For two, who knows. But for so many? I teleport again, I exhaust myself, and the first nuke hits the ground. The second. Once again, the umbrella is useless.
And so I wake up gasping for air, I roll over on the cold mattress… and I fall painfully back to sleep. For many hours this time, eyelids and fists clenched, frightened and torn. Then and there, never and nowhere, for the first night I spend even before I'm born.
---
Notes :
And we're back in our bowling shoes, my friends, for the start of 'A bend in space-time' (and The Umbrella Academy) season 2. This is 1961 in Dallas, with all its inequalities and a situation that might seem distressing… Come on. It's already satisfying to be alive!
Remember the homeless guy who yells "Allisooooon" with Luther in episode 1? I've always thought he should be given more space. Since he's only credited as "homeless man", I allowed myself to name him. And I had to learn a bit of a Texan accent…
So what's Rin going to do now, once she's had a bit of a rest? We'll soon find out! And just like in the good old days of season 1…
Any comment will make my day! ♡
Season 1 - Season 2 - Season 3 - Season 4 - Prequel
Also available on AO3, Wattpad, FFN and Inkitt.
A bend in space-time Season 1 - [Chapter 30: Plan B]
Summary: Despite all the efforts of the Hargreeves and Rin, the apocalypse is upon them, and the only way out… is their Plan B.
Chronological markers: this scene fits like a deleted scene from The Umbrella Academy, season 1, episode 10, around 38:27 (just after the defeat of the Commission's shooters).
TW: deliberately inflicted physical suffering, end of the world.
Suggested soundtrack: Alex from Space - Apocalypse. End title: Simon and Garfunkel - A Hazy Shade of Winter.
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Sunday, April 1st 2019, 9:41 pm
Intense and genuine as it was, the euphoria that hit me after Klaus and Ben's moment of glory didn't last long. Could it have made me forget the reason we ended up inside the Icarus Theatre's splendid walls, under the beautiful glass roof where the full Moon keeps watch? No, I don't think I lost sight of it for a single second, and for one simple reason: at no point during the gunfight we just lived through - not one - did Viktor stop playing.
The melancholic notes born from his being swirl freely now, unimpeded, without a single burst of gunfire to compete with them, making him the sole soloist of his own grief and rage. He doesn't even look at his siblings anymore. And I can feel it rising further around him: his pain, the sound waves he's displacing making the matter of everything collide, lifting the energy itself. And yet to him, all of this is just a lullaby. I dread to think what would happen if he struck up a requiem.
Maybe he senses his family looking for a way to stop him, and for a moment I'm afraid his actions will outpace my thoughts. Because already his bow lingers, his phrasing shifts, and it's the entire structure of the Icarus Theatre I feel beginning to rumble. Like Hargreeves Mansion only a few hours ago: a terrible echo of what collapsed. The colonnades, the mezzanine, the balconies, the faces of Bacchus: everything shudders, as long vertical cracks tear through the plasterwork and concrete, all the way up to the gilding of the vault. I don't know whether the Horror's intervention weakened the load-bearing walls. But handfuls of dust are falling onto the carpets now, in the central aisle where I'm still slumped. All I'm hoping is that Diego - who hasn't reappeared - isn't in trouble.
"You're going to have to teleport for a bit," Klaus tells me, clocking my calf where the bullet went through. "Or alternatively, hop."
Laughing would be my first instinct, but a clench of pain replaces it quickly as he tightens a bandage around my leg, improvised from an abandoned silk scarf. I'd underestimated his combat first-aid abilities. Which is funny, when I think of all the times I've had to patch him up: wounds that generally healed in under a day. Most recently three weeks ago, when he tried to cut a bagel in half with his finger still in the hole. If Ben hadn't dissolved, he'd probably be smiling to see us switching roles like this, but it seems Klaus gave everything and can't summon him anymore for now.
Has something changed, after he demonstrated how he can bend spectral energy at that border that is his alone, where death and life collide? In his siblings' trust, maybe. Fractionally. If only. And if I weren't busy grinding my teeth, maybe I'd tell him how proud of him I am.
I don't even register Diego coming back: my eyes linger on Viktor's diaphanous silhouette, raising opalescent irradiations beneath the stage's arches. Pure and white. White? I didn't remember his costume or his violin ever being white. Is this a sonic alteration of matter, or a visual expression of the energy he's now lifting? Or maybe just a hallucination from the fact that my wound is screaming at me.
"Are we all in?"
Luther's voice pulls me from these thoughts, nearly making me flinch. A little further along, in the aisle where Klaus has joined him, he's proposing they surround Viktor. Rush him from every angle simultaneously, give one of them a chance to reach him. Again, I won't weigh in: it's not my call to make. And even though Klaus notes it's a suicide mission, the general consensus seems quickly sealed.
General? No, Allison's gaze has just found mine. She knows, as I do, what rushing Viktor will trigger. But even her, Luther doesn't listen to: he's already assigning positions, mapping who will converge on the stage from which direction. He dismisses entirely whatever silent feeling she might have, no doubt taking full advantage of her missing voice. And in almost the time it takes to teleport, he goes stage right, Diego stage left, Five and Klaus absurdly head-on, in the sacrificial position. And I stare at Allison in turn, who stands as frozen as I am in the middle of the aisle.
"If Luther spent one moment trying to understand his power," I say from the floor where - diminished - I can only sigh in the thrumming of the air around us, "…he'd know that Viktor will react to the slightest incursion into the aura he's built around himself."
As if sensing his siblings approaching, Viktor strikes up the ascent of a crescendo that goes straight through me. Because that's my read: it's no longer possible - as things stand - to breach his integrity, to enter the bubble of destruction he's wrapped around himself. Doing so would only force him to release the immense potential energy he's been accumulating.
Allison knows that I can feel it in my own body: this energy Viktor is lifting and concentrating. It resonates with my power, my nerves, my bones. And her voiceless gaze asks me: what would I do.
"Viktor is a tuning fork, Allison," I say, trying to push my words above the crackling of the air. "Sound waves are how he bends energy."
The difference between Luther and me is that I spent summers doing odd jobs in festival tech crews. My hand goes to my chest, and to the name on my t-shirt.
"To stop him playing… it's his feedback loop: his hearing that needs to be disrupted."
This isn't a musical metaphor. Just as Viktor silenced Allison's voice, it's his own hearing that would need to be taken from him: temporarily, at least. But on stage, that bloody Number One is already bellowing an assault order, sealing what's about to happen.
"Now!" he shouts, and the bellow makes me flinch.
Allison holds my gaze one last time through the falling dust, as her brother is rushed from every side, the echoes of his pain stoked again. In the immense, audible expansion of the blinding aura emanating from the magnificent laments of his bow.
SHHHHHHRRRAAAAA.
Both of us are thrown to the floor in the middle of the aisle, swept and blasted by this new detonation of Viktor's. I brace to see Five, Klaus, Diego and Luther in pieces among the seats, but that's not what happened. When my sight clears, it's to find Viktor holding them - trapping them - through the energy of their very beings. Lifted, paralyzed down to their smallest nerve. And he has that cold gaze that no longer holds anything human.
I push myself up on my elbows, Allison crouching nearby, and she watches my face fill with the purest dread. Because I can feel in the convections of matter and energy what Viktor is doing, my blood freezing at my core, all the way to nausea.
"He's about to drain them," I can only murmur, ashen.
To erode the very physical essence of what they are, now with the unshakeable will to kill them.
It takes Allison one second to grab a gun from among the lacerated bodies of the shooters, and I watch her disappear down the aisle, a thread of ice water sliding through me. I saw the conflict in her, and despite the 'don't kill Viktor' scrawled hastily in her notebook a little earlier, I just watched her doubt it. I don't know if she heard me. I don't know what she's going to try.
Crack!
I collapse again against the lip of the stage, right beneath Klaus's form, twisted with stunned pain. I close my eyes in a desperate attempt to assess whether my power can so much as slow the erosion Viktor is imposing. My fists clench, and if I had any breath left I think I'd scream. I can feel that if I let go now, they would be nothing but dust and radiation. So I fight, I fight, while despite my efforts I can feel them deteriorating. I won't hold long. Who could? My strength is running out, and the tears would come, if-
BANG!
At the crack of a single gunshot, Klaus's formless mass drops roughly three metres, barely missing me. Five rolls against the seats, Luther destroys an entire row going down. Diego doesn't even have the reflex that usually has him landing on his feet like a cat. All of them gasping, gulping air for a moment…
Until a beam of light like a laser splits the theatre. Pure, straight, powerful, it passes through the ceiling in the drastic release of all the energy Viktor had accumulated. The glass of the dome rains down in sharp hail around us, a final crash. Then the beam dies, the theatre plunged once more into the faint glow of the electric lamps. No note, no trill, no vibration of the air, not even a hiss. Silence falls: the kind that precedes everything, or announces the end. I drag myself to where Klaus rolled against the first row of seats.
"Jesus Christ," I hear myself say, grabbing him and checking he's in one piece, to which he retorts, the swamp-green of his eyes stunned but intact:
"Holy crackpipe!"
Like the others, he's on his feet in an instant. Because we all see Viktor collapse up on the stage into Allison's arms, the gun barrel still near his eardrum. She listened. She knew what to do to disrupt his hearing. The buzzing of relief floods my head as I register what we just escaped.
"We saved the world," Luther congratulates himself under his breath, and I barely dare believe it: I've hoped in vain so many times these past days. I slump against the red velvet, anchoring myself to the Moon's eternally steady presence through the shattered glass roof. Like so many chaotic, unhinged nights over The City in the past. Like…
"Klaus?"
My mouth falls open again, stunned. I call his name the way I almost never do, purely so he'll turn around.
"KLAUS!"
Toward the sky, I've just pointed a finger, and his expression quickly mirrors mine as he rises up on the stage. This is not a hallucination: not from my exhausted mind, not from his brain burned out by too many years of substance abuse.
Against the black sky, its jagged silhouette growing visibly larger with every second of its inexorable, vertiginous fall, an entire chunk of the Moon has just broken away.
What is your reaction, when the end of the world is finally, truly upon you? When it's no longer an abstraction, a prospect - even an imminent one - but an active reality? The truth is that every living being in the world right now probably has the same reaction as us: tilting their head back to look at what's coming down, in a transfixed terror.
The ground shakes. This time, it isn't the theatre's foundations: it's the structure of the Earth itself, rattled by the dozens of simultaneous impacts of what are, in comparison to the lunar behemoth hurtling toward the very point from which the beam tore it free, nothing but tiny fragments.
I think of Granny, probably asleep in front of her TV drama. At least, for her and the others, we will have tried everything. I don't know what the definition of failure is, which Diego's voice echoes back to me. But even if we're gathered here together, we're each utterly alone in this moment, in the face of the meteor shower beginning to fall.
No umbrella will protect against this. A laughable shield of fabric against a burning storm. We won't save everyone. We won't save even a handful. We can only - I've just felt Five's small blue eyes fix on me.
~We can only set plan B in motion.~
"It doesn't have to be the end," he murmurs, amid his siblings' disbelief, including Klaus's, who has just caught the look that just passed between Five and me, and who understands, even as Five's explanation unfolds, that we had considered a way out.
I don't know if we're still capable of opening a bend in space-time massive enough to carry all of us. We've given a great deal in the last minutes: Five has just been partially drained, and I'm wounded. We've each teleported half a dozen times. But his argument is clear, and in any case: what do we have left? Is there anything at all still left to lose, now that the electrical power of the entire city is starting to flicker?
Klaus has just managed to bring Ben back, which is in itself an acceptance of leaving. I know that this time, he doesn't hold it against me, not having told him about this possible way out. Having made an agreement with his brother again. Because it's not a question of trust this time. Because having people's backs has always been as much in my nature as keeping my own hopes. And because he, too, trusts that we can do this.
Crack!
I teleport to his feet, Ben close by, and try to get up. But I don't have that in me, and what's left I'd rather keep. Luther lifts Viktor, not without hesitating to bring him. Did he just commend the family being together at the end of everything, right before considering leaving him behind? I'd rather hold onto Five's proposal to try to 'fix' his power: I no longer have the time to be angry about it.
Klaus looks down at me on the stage floor as it begins to vibrate. In this moment, possibly from the impact of the great meteor, a terrible shudder makes us all stagger enough that we have to hold onto each other. Which is exactly what Five and I need: close contact between all of us, to take everyone along as though we were one.
As I grip Klaus's ankles and Ben's, the electric light of the theatre goes out: probably along with the rest of the world. Darkness falls over the neoclassical mouldings, opaque, as Five's full attention locks onto me again. Then he tilts his head back toward the darkness of the ceiling, narrows his eyes, and draws in all the air his lungs can hold. And then, like pulling together on two different edges of the same veil, I tear open the fabric of space-time alongside him.
Wooshhhh.
My part in it is modest. Five's power is the one that speaks directly to space-time. I'm logistical support, working through the fabric of matter and energy, doing nothing different from what I'd do if I were trying to teleport everyone at once by myself. The energy swells, joining with the terrible energy of a world catching fire. Every shred of my power crackles inside me. Inside us.
The anomaly opens above our heads in circular furrows of white and blue light. Narrow at first, tentative, widening as our wills converge. As agreed, I let him breathe the destination into it: to whatever extent a destination can be chosen. This jump will be into relative unknown, beyond the imprint the universe retained of Five, some five decades back.
I hold on to Klaus and Ben as hard as I can, fingers probably tight enough to hurt, as every nerve ending in my body resonates inside the space-time continuum.
"Hold on! It's gonna get messy!", Five shouts.
But suddenly I feel Ben's leg give way under my fingers, and I look up blankly at Klaus. He's fighting to keep him tangible, gaze locked on the immense vortex that will take us all the moment we choose to seal it. He gave too much against the shooters, he's at the end of himself: without quite realizing it, he's letting go. And if Ben were to dissolve now, I don't know if he'd be carried with us.
Part of my concentration slips immediately into Klaus's, down into the matter of Ben, through the spectral energy threading our beings. For an instant, I feel as though I'm made of nothing but energy, dividing my strength: in a way that is probably perilous, between the vortex and the two of them. But no one is being left behind. Klaus needs him at least as much as he needs me.
My head spins, and keeps spinning. For a moment, I feel like a child again. Like Bạch Liên, about to teleport onto the greenhouse roof to her mother's screams. Like the five-year-old who had to rebuild her life on another continent, and is about to do it again. Like Marine at thirteen, the day she shaved the sides of her head. Like Rin, drawing her first breath among the scattered papers in the antechamber of the town hall after being brought back to life. Like the one of police custody, sewers, squats, retro movie theater, concerts. The one of a few shames, but mostly of all prides. Like crying and like laughing, like blazing rows and long deep sighs. From the corridors of detox to the tops of skyscrapers. My head spins and keeps spinning, as a burning red light rises on all sides of the theatre.
I close my eyes harder than I ever have.
~Lock and trigger.~
ZAP!
In a single blink, as the flames of hell come roaring in, we no longer belong to this time. The words finally make sense: 'Ut Malum Pluvia', 'When Evil rains'. And soon, the rest is silence at last.
---
Notes:
It's not easy to find the words when you put the final period on a story. But this one isn't over, you know that, of course!
I genuinely didn't know what to expect when I started this fic. Choosing the risky path of a plot running parallel to the main story, trying not to fall into rewriting, adopting the present tense and first person POV. Knowing full well what I was getting into… I hope I've given you something good, in this anomaly in time.
If you've read this far - even if you've been silent until now - leave me a little note, even just a small emoji! And I want to thank everyone who gave me the desire and the courage to keep going, especially my dear ReiraLoxar, who knows how much she has meant to me since the two years ago when this adventure began.
Season 2 is available on my profile!
Season 1 - Season 2 - Season 3 - Season 4 - Prequel
Also available on AO3, Wattpad and FFN
Rin stayed at Hargreeves Mansion during Klaus's electrocutions and missed his departure for the bus-ball. In the morning, she meets Fei… then Allison.
Chapter 22: Warrior
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Just as she returned to the Obsidian Hotel to get away from Christopher, Rin received a call… from the Lakeshore Hills Grand Cemetery.
Chapter 23: Don't save the world
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Back at the Hotel Obsidian, amid the Kugelblitz apocalypse consuming The City and space-time, Five tells Rin about his future self… who advised him “not to save the world”.
Chapter 24: The time of my life
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At the Hotel Obsidian on the brink of apocalypse, during Luther's bachelor party, Rin converses with Diego… and then Lila.
As Klaus prepares to officiate at Luther and Sloane's wedding, he and Rin have one of their last conversations before the end of the world…
Chapter 26: Wedding at the end of the world
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In the reception room of the Hotel Obsidian, the wedding of Luther and Sloane is celebrated, while all around, the end of time unfolds. Rin chats with Ben for a few moments before slipping away… to explore Oblivion.
Rin has slipped away from the wedding and gone through the tunnel, beyond the pachinko. There she discovers a twin hotel of the Obsidian, in another dimension, and approaches the Oblivion machine.
Chapter 28: The Deal
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Rin hurries back from Hotel Oblivion, passes the pachinko again… and finds Allison in the middle of a deal with Reginald Hargreeves.
Chapter 29: Omega
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After Allison's Rumor, Rin is locked in the Omega console of the Oblivion machine, and understands her place in Reginald Hargreeves's plans.
Chapter 30: Reset
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After Allison's Rumor, Rin is locked in the Omega console of the Oblivion machine, and understands her place in Reginald Hargreeves's plans.
A bend in space-time S2 (part 2) || a TUA fanfiction
Part 1 is available here
---
Chapter 17: Oikade
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After the incident between Klaus and Lloyd, Rin takes refuge in the alleyway where she had arrived in 1961. There, Five finds her and talks to her about… "going home".
Chapter 18: The ache for what never was
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After spending the night at ghost Wayne Wilson's house, Rin returns to Glen Oaks… and meets Dave again.
Chapter 19: A river flowing through infinity
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Rin has finally decided to return to the Destiny Children's Mansion. There, she's gardening with Jill… while Klaus receives an unexpected visit from Dave.
With a clear feeling of anticipation, Rin attends Reginald Hargreeves's invitation to 'A Light Supper'.
Chapter 21: The lone wolf from Team Zero
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After their "light supper", Rin reviews the evening's events with Diego, while Klaus laments about Ben taking over his body.
Chapter 22: At the threshold of nirvana
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Just as she's about to leave to do some gardening, Rin runs into Klaus, who is coming down from the ' Destiny's Children' Mansion, and who turns out to actually be… Ben.
Chapter 23: Azure dust into the Void
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Rin goes to old ghost Wayne Wilson's house to complete her part of the deal that allowed her to find Klaus back in '61.
Chapter 24: Dedicated against all odds
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Returning to the Destiny Children's Mansion, Rin meets Luther. She realizes how lonely he is, and has an important conversion with him.
Rin was called urgently by Klaus to Allison's house to help her get rid of a 'bulky waste'. But Diego returns to announce Viktor's imminent involvement… in the threat of a new apocalypse.
Chapter 26: A conflict of interest
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Viktor's deflagration has been devastating, and Rin blacked out. She wakes up in a place outside space-time, where she remembers having been before… once.
Chapter 27: Children ride in the back
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In Eliott's little room, Klaus is slumped on the bed. He's lost Ben, he's lost Rin. But Rin's ghost… seems to have been successfully summoned.
Chapter 28: There were only seven of us
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At the Cooper farm, young Harlan struggles to control his emotions and the bits of power passed on by Viktor. Rin, too, strives to regain her vital energy and materiality. But suddenly…
While struggling to regain her materiality, Rin tries to comfort young Harlan, terrified in the barn's basement. But suddenly, gunfire breaks out upstairs…
Chapter 30: The end of something
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Time resumed its course, and night is falling on the Umbrella Academy's last day in 1963 Texas. For Five has obtained a briefcase… and soon, he'll bring everyone back to 2019.
A bend in space-time Season 1 - [Chapter 29: Now who's the lookout]
Summary: Rin is in charge of watching the corridors of the Icarus Theater. Unfortunately, the greatest danger comes from inside the concert hall.
Chronological markers: this scene fits like a deleted scene from The Umbrella Academy, season 1, episode 10, around 33:50 (while Viktor plays, Allison, Diego and Luther entering the hall, and Klaus assigned to keep watch).
TW: gunfire, physical violence and mutilation.
Suggested soundtrack: Led Zeppelin - Stairway to Heaven; Apocalyptica - Refuse / Resist.
---
Sunday, April 1st 2019, 9:21 pm
It strikes me as absurd that somewhere as beautiful as the Icarus Theatre could be the place where the apocalypse takes the stage. Edwardian-style theatres are rare in The City, but this one stands out for its neoclassical use of concrete and electric light. A jewel of the early twentieth century, originally built for vaudeville, now nestled between enormous buildings. A wide canopy, a handsome marquee, a small box office glittering under dozens of bulbs in the night. And these hushed corridors, muffling the sounds of the chamber orchestra playing in the grand two-tiered hall I haven't yet seen.
Nobody is moving between the colonnades anymore: Viktor's concert has already begun.
I stayed tucked in the shadows while the others decided what to do at the staircase. Luther still doesn't have a real plan, even if he's doing his best to give the impression he does. Ben, perched on a bin beside me, kept his usual silence: when Allison left in the vague hope of reasoning with Viktor mid-concert, when Luther - partly just to get rid of him - assigned Klaus to keep watch.
Ben and me with him. By extension.
So here I am, alone in this magnificent corridor with its empty red carpet, assigned to relay anything happening at the front of the theatre or through the side doors. Klaus hasn't stopped saying he's starving, and I'm worried he's genuinely too hungry to be usefully alert. I just hope Ben will somehow manage to kick his ass into gear.
The padded quiet under the wall lanterns has a paradoxically gentle softness, threaded through with the melancholic variations of the piece the orchestra has struck up. I can only make out its muffled echoes from here, but I can't help being moved: Viktor is an extraordinary soloist, the kind of prodigy that only comes along rarely. And I know now that his virtuosity echoes his power, the sound waves vibrating with his nervous system, down into the deepest part of his art.
"Aren't you going back to your seat?" asks a theatre employee passing by with a fur coat destined for the cloakroom. I shake my head with an apologetic smile. She can't understand. And I can't explain it to her. I don't like it, but I give her a small lie that could very easily have been the truth:
"I needed some air, don't worry, it'll pass."
She looks me over, from my Led Zeppelin t-shirt to my bowling shoes. Clearly not the Sunday-best style of the audience members she's used to seeing in these bourgeois walls. But she seems to respect my 'condition,' and moves off after letting me know to come to reception if I need anything.
I'm alone again in the muffled arpeggios, between the colonnades and mirrors, my eyes drifting to the historic lift whose walls of red and gold are probably treasures in their own right. I hope Allison can reach Viktor. That her presence alone, and the others', will be a clear enough message of reassurance for him. I hope it's not already too late, that he can still come back from his grief and his rage, that he-
SHHHHHHRRRAAAAA
A sonic blast tears through me like an auditory blizzard, knocking me back a step. A single wave, violent, designed to push away anything in its path. My eyes go wide as I register that Viktor's solo has stopped for a moment, but I don't have time to process it. Immediately, screams rise from beyond the walls. And the multiple access doors to the hall burst open, all at once, in a great crash of abused woodwork.
I press against a column. Within seconds, the corridor, the lobby, are flooded with an incoherent crowd dressed in velvet and pearls, screaming, running, shoving each other to be first out. The poor employee doesn't understand, and I don't know what to do either. I'm supposed to relay any threat coming from outside, but the chaos is now coming from inside.
"What's happening?" I grab someone at random by the arm as he surges toward the exit.
"There's an attack," he stammers, "an attack… two men stormed the stage and there was an explosion-"
I don't have time to ask him anything more. The crowd carries him away, and I look toward the hall doors, pulse beating at my temples. Holding my position here is pointless. In there is where I'm needed. So I walk toward the nearest entrance, fighting against the mass of panicked music lovers pouring against me. If I want to stay operational, if things get more critical than this, I need to save my teleportation, my power, my energy. No burning options on nothing. I push through, against the current, make it past the last stragglers who lingered for a look inside before giving up. I reach the doors knocked off their hinges…
Viktor is at the far end of the now-empty hall. On stage, in the middle of the orchestra that absurdly keeps playing with terror in their eyes. His gaze brilliant with a senseless clarity, his face expressionless. And his music sad, so sad, carrying all the pure and beautiful pain that the strings of his soul can express through the violin. I know I should be careful with what I have left, but I could teleport behind him. One clean strike to the back of the neck, send him under, just like I did with the gas-mask sniper at the bowling alley. If I'm fast enough… I hesitate. I tense…
Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat.
My eyes snap wide as I recognize that sound: precisely the sound of the bowling alley shooters' submachine guns, behind me. The Commission's snipers.
Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat.
I drop to my knees feeling an impact at my calf: the kind you know will precede the pain by a few seconds, the time it takes to travel up the nerves to the brain. I go intangible, but it's too late: they're already walking through me. Weapons raised. Agile, fluid, relentless, numerous. And as they open fire into the hall, I pass through the wall to discover, with a sickening lurch, that others have already taken over some of the upper balconies through every other access point.
Crack!
This time I don't hesitate. I teleport myself up above the bullet-storm, onto one of the empty balconies. Stage left, beyond the wrought ironwork with its Bacchus heads and grape motifs. There, I bring my hand and my gaze to my calf, slightly trembling, tearing away the shredded section of my trousers to assess the damage. The bullet isn't inside, but it has cut me properly. So I press on the wound, to stop the damn bleeding.
"Shit."
I knew it: the element of surprise was always what could catch me out against bullets, intangibility or not. They came up behind me while I was going against the crowd. I should have held my position… I'd have seen them… Where was Klaus? Is he even alright? Given the number of attackers coming from every direction, our ability to keep watch was laughably inadequate in any case… I seethe against the balcony railing, amid the detonations erupting everywhere, over Viktor's solitary musical laments as the orchestra begins to abandon him.
I force myself to move to get a view of the hall, the pain held at bay by adrenaline and the urgency of doing something, of not staying crumpled like this. The shooters are on the other balconies, in the stalls, their red eyes glowing in the theatre's low light. I catch a glimpse of Five appearing and immediately ducking down between the rows of beautiful red seats folded up over a scatter of abandoned bags and coats. Allison. Luther. Diego, hurling knives along the floor in a desperate attempt.
I close my eyes for a moment, trying to focus, still compressing my calf. I can feel the energy of hundreds of those damn bullets, right down to the barrels of the assault rifles. And like at the bowling alley, I open my eyes again and try to jam, to deflect, to sabotage. A drop of water against the hostile ocean of the gunfire. But it's impossible not to try. All the way to the end. Just as Viktor keeps playing, his movements growing broader and more resolute. There are so many of them. Always more…
"Aaah guys, it's Cha-Cha! It's Cha-Cha she's-"
Klaus has just burst into the hall through the side entrance Diego cleared a moment ago, vaulting over the railing, Ben at his heels. Recklessly, it has to be said, and quickly reminded of his imprudence by a shooter who charges down the aisle with the clear intention of shooting him point-blank. I watch him below, diving into a row of seats. I release the pressure on my calf, I'm about to teleport down, but Five beats me to it. Crack! He's on the bastard gunman's back, spinning him and making him riddle his own side. I could almost cheer, but the pain catches up: I compress my wound again, as Viktor's notes lift the energy around the broad movements of his bow.
How desperate is the situation? The thought crosses me. Something pushes me to haul myself up on the railing and look properly. I just caught Klaus and Ben reaching an understanding. Ben positioning himself in front of him. And as Klaus fails to materialize him a first time…
Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat.
This time I'm the one being targeted, by the shooters on the balconies opposite, and even though I'm still intangible, by instinct, I teleport to the next tier over. Klaus immediately spots the tear of blue light that comes with my jump. He's always caught them. I look at him below… he fixes on me one last time. And as the volleys of gunfire start up again with fresh intensity, he folds down between the seats, in a concentration effort that is unmistakably unlike anything he's done before. Of course I understand what they're doing, and Ben, for his part, gives me a resolute jerk of his chin. But I tremble at it. I tremble, because I know now what pain he'll feel if…
I don't know what stops the gunfire first. The immense spectral energy deployed above the red velvet seats, Ben's screams tearing through Viktor's melodic arpeggios, or the otherworldly roars of the Horror as its four tentacles pierce through his chest.
His suffering is immense as the creature tears through him at the will of his power, and I understand now what Klaus had told me: that Ben had faced this alone, so much physical pain, on top of everything else - more insidious, more diffuse - inflicted on all of them. He suffers, but he will not yield, and the Horror's first target is directly the shooters on the balconies: the ones who'd just been concentrating their fire on me.
Higher, higher than the mezzanine itself, the creature's tentacles rise in roaring that merges with Ben's screams. They unspool, rear up, relentless and terrible, like the appendages of something ancient and vast. Slash! They come down a first time, and the entire theatre shudders: they are material, more so than ever. Prehensile, they seize, sweep, slash, crush. And the scruples I'd had about triggering a heart attack in these bastards seem deeply small when I watch the Horror deployed by Ben tear one of the shooters in two.
What exactly is the Horror? What is the nature of this creature, whose very existence makes me feel as though space-time is trembling?
Klaus's eyes are vacant, I can't tell if he's looking at me or through me. I could help, materialize Ben alongside him, but I won't. Because one thing is certain, absolutely certain:
~He doesn't need me at all~.
He just needs to know I'm there as backup if it comes to that. So I stay, gradually releasing the compression on my leg, watching what seems to stupefy the others so much more than it does me. Because I never had any doubt. Not once. And I smile in the middle of the chaos, the violin trills and the blood. I know Klaus is capable of infinitely more than this.
One of the bastards still standing at the back of the orchestra fires again, toward Ben. Or toward Klaus, I can't tell. And it doesn't matter, because I deflect his bullets with every scrap of rage I have left: upward, one after another, volley after volley, as much as I can manage. Until the Horror's tentacle tears the shooter off the floor by the waist and sends him to come apart against the wall beneath the mezzanine. Now it's the turn of everyone in the stalls to meet the same fate as those on the balconies. One by one, in the roaring darkness and the spectral energy: vivid to my senses, blinding. Until the last one. And then, suddenly, Ben retracts the impossible limbs he'd unleashed, and the sound of the theatre returns to the pure sound of the violin.
I burst out laughing where I'm perched, and immediately regret it, the pain catching up with me. But I can't help it. Crack! In a blink, I'm sitting on the carpeted aisle below, amid the debris of bone, flesh, and metal. Smiling at the end of the world, as Klaus addresses the brothers and sisters who won't even thank him:
"Now who's the lookout?"
---
Notes:
I think I've finally developed a taste for action scenes: I no longer have the slightest difficulty writing them.
I've chosen not to try to explain why Klaus failed to hear roughly 350 people screaming their way out of the Icarus Theatre (which are admittedly harder to miss than snipers on a stealthy approach). If you're wondering, however, know that it was because of the noise from the coriander grinder. Which he hadn't asked for.
You'll notice that the one character who can go intangible against bullets still gets hit. Those with a fondness for 'butterfly effects' (or alternatively, 'the fall of a sparrow') will have noticed the causal chain. The one that runs from the name 'Omega' to anxiety; from a Valium tablet to Klaus's bitterness at not being heard; from that bitterness to a brother's punch, and then a waffle to celebrate it… and finally from the change kept in a pocket to a burrito bought across from the theatre… and a warning never given.
One of this chapter's lessons lies in the subtlety of what cooperation actually is. Sometimes it means doing nothing: showing you believe in someone, without supplanting them, without offering help that wasn't asked for. Just having their back. It seemed to me that was the only right choice for Rin toward Klaus.
Finally, you'll note that - yes - Rin is about to head off to the early 1960s in a Led Zeppelin t-shirt (a band that won't be formed until 1968). My friends, there is only one chapter left in this season 1. The final notes will be played soon.
And as always, any comment will make my day! ♡
Season 1 - Season 2 - Season 3 - Season 4 - Prequel
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A bend in space-time Season 1 - [Chapter 28: S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night]
Summary: The Hargreeves and Rin are trying to come up with a plan regarding Viktor, but a sudden shootout breaks out at Super Star Lanes bowling.
Chronological markers: this scene fits like a deleted scene from The Umbrella Academy, season 1, episode 10, around 25:48 (before Luther asks where Five is, at the bowling alley).
TW: sniper attack, gunfire.
Suggested soundtrack: Bay City Rollers - Saturday Night.
---
Sunday, April 1st 2019, 8:56 pm
I'd stepped out for some air after talking to Allison, in the Super Star Lanes bathroom. I walked around the block in the rain, and found a small neighborhood coffee shop serving something less catastrophic than the bowling alley's version. I needed it viscerally, maybe because, as Five thinks, caffeine sharpens our powers, makes us feel reactive. Ready. For whatever comes.
Klaus was looking a bit flat when I got back. Slightly apart from the others, on one of the bar stools by the popcorn counter, not far from the lane where everyone is still pretending to bowl, except for Luther, who went to call the Icarus Theatre to find out if Viktor's concert was still on. I'm trying to piece together what happened while I was gone, turning the cardboard cup between my fingers.
"Obviously it didn't work."
With a gesture of his 'Goodbye' hand, Klaus traces the arc of the bowling ball he'd thrown at Ben a little earlier. Without his brother managing to catch it.
"It nearly took out Five's slicked-back hair. And Ben just…"
He sighs.
"He just… poof. Like a soap bubble someone sneezed on."
Cheering goes up from the lane next door. I think that if my mother had organized my birthday at a bowling alley even once - just once - I would have gone invisible and stayed that way until it was time to return the polished shoes. I feel for young Kenny, celebrating his here, with cousins he doesn't even seem to particularly like, and a mother treating him like a baby chick on top of it all. Not exactly ideal conditions for Klaus to focus on materializing his ghost brother, it has to be said.
"And yet you managed it again, at the Mansion. That's what you told me."
Nearby, I feel Ben's energy nod in agreement, and Klaus confirms it.
"Yeah. When the ceiling was coming down, in the stairwell… Ben, it was Ben who pulled Diego. He's the one who saved his ass and kept him from ending up as a pancake. Not me."
It pains me to see him give himself no credit for this, that he even felt like a fraud when Diego thanked him, when he should feel the exact opposite. It's genuinely his power, his will - conscious or not - that materialized Ben. The first time, I probably played a role in the punch he landed, and I won't do that again: what Klaus needs is to get there himself, and absolutely not another layer of feeling like an impostor. Yes, it's him who made his brother's spectral energy tangible. Nobody else.
"It was a synergy, Klaus. You saved Diego together."
I mean it, but he's already shrugging it off, inside the worn fabric of his sleeveless military jacket, the one Granny had called a stylistic insult.
"I needed it to work again in front of the others, Rinny. So they'd believe me. Allison was already rolling her eyes when I so much as suggested I might be useful. Now I just look like the lame duck desperate for attention again."
As Allison sends a ball down the lane, I think back to the way she talked about him in the bathroom, and I get it. I understand what Klaus feels every time his siblings treat him that way. I know he's doing everything he can right now to try to rehabilitate himself in their eyes, and it genuinely hurts me to think the apocalypse might pass over us without him having managed it.
His mood has dropped a lot this evening, I can feel it in his posture. His sobriety is no doubt a big part of it, and despite everything, he hasn't even considered touching a single drop of alcohol, despite the options being plentiful in this dingy bowling alley. He won't give himself any credit for that either. Yet it's a considerable feat, at his scale. Still a fragile one, but one that sends his power rippling through all the spectral energy around him. I exchange a look with Ben: he felt it too. And he has no idea why their little attempt didn't work earlier.
"Your moment will come," I tell him, and he exhales slightly bitterly through his nose. He doesn't argue, though. When I try to give him a little reassurance, he takes what he can from it.
"I would sell one of my kidneys for tacos," he murmurs. "The hot dogs here are spongy, and the popcorn tastes like old styrofoam."
The worrying part is that he knows what old styrofoam tastes like, but Diego suddenly calls him from the lane, because it's his turn. Keeping the score going is our ticket to staying: the manager has his eye on us. So Klaus leaves me with Ben and goes to grab his favorite pink ball.
I stay quiet for a moment, watching him try to aim, while his hand-eye coordination will almost inevitably send the ball straight into the gutter. And then, after a moment, I say to Ben, the way I might have said it to myself:
"For now, he can only do it when the adrenaline's high, right?"
Ben nods silently. It's always under the force of one emotion or another that our powers evolve, and Klaus's subconscious seems particularly wired to urgency and danger. I wonder if Vietnam has something to do with that. He manages to hit one pin - just one - which wobbles but doesn't fall, while at Kenny's birthday party, the whole family cheers an equalizing score.
Luther comes back with a decisive stride, and Ben tenses, trying to gauge what's going to be decided. We exchange another look, because it sounds like Viktor's concert is going ahead. If so, we'll need to move fast. And without making a pun of it, get our act together.
"All right, so what's the plan?"
Luther stares at Diego for a moment, who just asked that.
"Well, I think that, uh…"
Drawing himself up to appear even more massive, he goes solemn.
"We go to the Icarus Theatre."
"That's a location, not a plan."
Fundamentally? Diego is right. But even if Luther objectively has nothing intelligent to offer yet, Diego is being contrary and has absolutely no intention of helping him find a useful way to intervene. He just lets him flounder and fail, possibly with the unhealthy pleasure of a Number Two about it, which seems particularly counterproductive and dangerous given what we're facing. These bickering matches exhaust me, and frankly I-
Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat.
Flinching at the first burst of gunfire is a primary reflex. What's less of one is everything that follows: whether you drop and take cover or not, whether you even know to, it shows exactly how much you've had to deal with this kind of thing before. It takes the Hargreeves less than a second to be at the bottom of the high bar table at the end of the lane, and Ben even less to disappear to wherever he knows to go. All around, Kenny's family, the Super Star Lanes employees, the panicked bowlers, everyone is running in every direction with no idea where to go.
What?
Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat.
My own blood runs hot: I'm the most exposed at the bar, so I go straight to what works for me. Intangible, invisible, I don't even have a reflexive movement to protect myself: the bullets are too fast for that. No doubt half a dozen have already passed straight through me. Only then do I turn my eyes toward the moving shapes that have entered with the careful, muffled footsteps of people who've practiced them. Silent as cats, precise as lasers: snipers in gas masks, their red eyes glowing with a surreal aura in this dingy old bowling alley.
Why here? Why now?
Unfortunately, I have no doubt about it. I've heard Five mention the Commission, and the means this organization is capable of deploying to make sure 'what needs to happen, happens.' In this case, a disproportionate strike force, aimed at stopping a handful of ordinary people from going to 'attend the concert' of Viktor Hargreeves.
Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat.
I told Five that if they were willing to go this far to make sure the Apocalypse happened, then we were genuinely capable of stopping it. So faced with these bullets, only one thought lands, crashing: if these snipers are here, it means we actually have a real chance of getting out of this alive.
"Maybe they're here for Kenny's birthday!" Klaus shouts, hands clamped over his ears the way he always does when sounds are loud and sudden.
Luther corrects him, not even registering it was a joke. But Diego has already sent one of his knives into one of the attackers, who goes down onto the bowling alley's turntables. Black lights replace the harsh fluorescents in an instant, as the first ectopic notes of the Bay City Rollers' Saturday Night blare out. And from there… it's nothing but chaos, against a backdrop from the top of the 1973 charts.
'S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night!'
Another knife flies. And as stupid as the thought is, I wonder how Diego's going to get them back.
'S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night!'
The submachine gun fire riddles the entire room, amid explosions of popcorn bags and gumball machines. How many of these people are there? There seem to be more of them every time I look.
'S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night!'
Luther fights by hurling bowling balls at the shooters, one after another. I watch more bullets fly past, another knife, and an entire birthday cake.
'S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night!'
I climb onto the bar table. After all, I've got nothing to fear: they can't even see me, and their bullets go straight through.
'Gonna keep on dancing to the rock and roll, on Saturday night, Saturday night.'
The energy released from the propulsion of their bullets through the barrels is strong enough that I barely need anything to knock them off course. One at a time, which feels pathetically small. But doing it, I notice that it's exactly what Diego is doing too, between knife throws. I realize this at our mutual expense, when we both go for the same shooter at the same time: our two actions contradict each other, and a bullet narrowly misses Allison.
'Dancin' to the rhythm, in our heart and soul, on Saturday night, Saturday night.'
Working on the energy inside the mechanics, I manage to jam the weapon of one of these absurd pro-apocalypse foot soldiers. I'm about to do the same to a second submachine gun when I see one of his colleagues approaching, trained on the side of the table where Klaus and Allison are barricaded.
'I-I-I-I just can't wait, I-I-I-I gotta date'.
Crack! In a blink, I'm behind him, my brain running through options at lightning speed. Intangible, I could easily plunge my fist into his chest and squeeze his heart until it gave out. I could probably block the electrical impulses in his brain and drop him where he stands. My own chest tightens at the thought, and I'm frightened of myself. But I don't have time to dwell on the kind of monster I could be. No time at all. He's advancing. Advancing with his weapon raised, and even if I jammed it now, he's close enough to do damage by hand.
'At the good ol' rock and roll folk show, I've gotta go, saturday night, saturday night!'
Thwack. With a dull sound, I've made my elbow tangible again and, one sharp hit to the back of his useless gas mask, sent him to sleep against the bar stool. Without him seeing it coming. And probably neither he nor any of his little friends will ever understand why. I crouch down in the corner of the table adjacent to the one Klaus is hiding behind, turning visible just long enough to signal that I'm fine.
'Gonna rock it up, roll it up, do it all, have a ball, saturday night, saturday night!'
Another of Luther's bowling balls sails over our heads, while Klaus is registering the brutal strategic reality closing off every attempt to get out of here. The shooters have meticulously covered every exit. And Diego challenges Luther again, who doesn't seem capable of anything beyond launching cannonballs.
'S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night!'
Allison points toward the lanes, toward the pit, beyond the pins. Where the pin-setting mechanism sits, and an access to the service corridor. Without being able to say a word, she's just been more useful than Luther, who nevertheless picks up the idea and announces it at full volume. Her, who had objectively not done much up to this point.
"The lanes!" Luther bellows. "Go!"
I think the smoke machine just kicked in. Without a second thought, everyone rises into the black light where colored reflections from the disco ball dance across everything. Launching themselves along the slippery lanes, between the gutters Klaus has cursed extensively, through the gunfire raining down like metal hail.
'S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night!'
We run, we run, Luther in front, quickly overtaken by Diego. Allison giving everything she has despite the residual exhaustion of her recent surgery. And Klaus, who turns around recklessly to check that I'm visible in his wake.
"Move, dumbass!" I shout at him through the music, taking the risk of making my top half tangible again.
'S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night!'
And he dives, without the slightest concern for hurting himself: straight into the pins at the end of the lane, scoring the only strike he will probably ever make in his life. At the pit, I slide in after him, my ridiculous bowling shoes first, straight into the narrow space leading to the service corridor. I have no idea how Luther fit through. And suddenly, the sound of the gunfire is somewhat muffled.
'S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night!'
Ben is there, amid the cables and piping of Super Star Lanes' decrepit backstage, watching us like he'd been eagerly waiting for us to make it to this escape. He's already clocked the emergency corridor door, through which we file out. The music fades into the distance as the corridor unspools, all the way to the emergency exit that spits us out of the building to the crack of our footsteps.
'S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night!'
Then the evening air bites at us, under a full and high moon. We run, run in our finest bowling attire, leaving our shoes behind, except for Diego.
Heading for the Icarus Theatre.
Which remains a location.
And not a plan.
---
Notes:
It is indeed in adversity that the powers of this ragtag (or just plain pathetic?) team are born and grow, and Rin has just experienced that again, realizing under fire that she might be capable of things far more terrible than disappearing. And I think she's starting to understand that she's not as useless in a fight as she'd assumed. And that what we become really does depend on our choices.
I enjoyed scoring this chapter as much as the show scored its own scene. I'd recommend reading this section with the track running on your player of choice… This time, I didn't struggle at all writing the action, and I think the soundtrack genuinely helped!
We are now on our way to the Icarus Theatre, where the action will end for this season… With a small pang at the thought, but also a great deal of joy!
Any comment will make my day! ♡
---
Season 1 - Season 2 - Season 3 - Season 4 - Prequel
Also available on AO3, Wattpad and FFN
A bend in space-time Season 1 - [Chapter 27: Rock and bowl]
Summary: The Hargreeves and Rin have taken refuge at Super Star Lanes bowling, where they're trying to collect their thoughts.
Chronological markers: this scene fits like a deleted scene from The Umbrella Academy, season 1, episode 10, around 15:30 (when the bowling alley employee intervenes), then around 17:30 (after Allison leaves, furious, following Klaus saying he like Luther more 'before he got laid').
I hate the racket in these places, the neon lights, the smell of poorly ventilated lanes and rental shoes, of carpet and cheap hot dogs. The balls that take forever to come back, and the scoring system I never understand. I also loathe stupid birthday parties, like the one being held at the lane next to ours.
Once the bowling ball is released, there's really nothing left to do but watch it: the score, from that moment, is already determined: a grim metaphor for everything we're living through right now. So yeah, I usually hate this kind of place, and I never play.
Sitting on the floor against the bar table Ben is perched on, I try - like everyone - to process what just happened. I think of Grace and Pogo, gone in the rubble of Hargreeves Mansion's collapse, with that feeling again of having missed a step. I push it away at once: I can't let my emotions incapacitate me again. And I take in our strange little group in the neon light.
Why did Luther choose Super Star Lanes Bowling as a rallying point, to think outside the wreckage of the house? On this, Klaus was able to enlighten me, his eyes fixed on the local paper announcing the recital Viktor was supposed to give tonight at the Icarus Theatre.
Less than a minute from Rainshade Square, this now fairly vintage hall was historically the only 'convivial' venue the Hargreeves children were permitted to visit 'as a family.' A more or less happy Sunday refuge, though the cameras were directly wired into the Academy's security system, allowing their father to keep his monocle trained on the scores. A calculated method for regularly injecting a little endorphin into the sibling group, through a pointless 'team-building' activity — competitive, in reality.
Tonight, nobody is playing seriously: the balls roll mostly to justify our staying here, sheltered from the downpour currently hammering the outside world. For the past fifteen minutes, our stunned conversations have overtaken the crash of the pins, and I'm watching the bowling alley employee making her way toward our group with the expression of someone who has bad news to deliver.
"Hello," she says with an awkward smile. "I hate to intrude, but my manager says if you're not gonna bowl, you gotta leave".
The poor girl is really just the emissary of the bald-headed Cerberus at the shoe rental counter, who is slapping a pair of shoes against the desk with some feeling, because Diego refused to put any on, rather than risk a fungal infection.
"Whose turn is it?" he asks, and I look up at the screen.
The third frame was in progress, and even if I genuinely dislike this game, I have to admit that bowling says more about people than I'd given it credit for.
Diego, for someone whose power depends on manipulating trajectories, is entirely average. Possibly because he refuses to put his fingers into the communal ball holes, but more likely - and this is a pleasant surprise - because he plays honestly. Five, whose name the operator entered as a numeral, is doing middlingly as well, as is Luther, who is actually doing rather poorly. Allison leads at 48 points through three frames. And you won't be surprised to learn that with his catastrophic hand eye coordination, Klaus is scraping the bottom of the scoreboard with a grand total of 2 points, though he is - with dignity - refusing to have the bumpers raised for him like a child.
It was his turn, but with a curse at the staff's remonstrations, Luther hurls a ball across the lanes, sending it bouncing like a rubber ball: scoring a strike for someone else's team through sheer, through sheer dumb luck. I sigh. It's obvious I'm not playing. So I get up and make my way, with some effort, toward the bathrooms.
They say the toilets are a reliable indicator of an establishment's quality, and - believe me - Super Star Lanes must rank very low on the Lonely Planet index. Fortunately, there is at least running water, and I splash some cool water on my face, attempting to freshen my thoughts along with it.
There is no longer any doubt that the Apocalypse can still happen - that it will happen - and that Viktor is very much the bomb about to set it off.
This situation is so much worse than anything I had imagined: because the end of the world hatched from inside the very core of those supposed to prevent it. Sadly, I've been able to watch the suffering that generated it, all week. A development that is, bleakly, almost the logical conclusion of the destiny line Reginald Hargreeves drew. Did he genuinely want to prevent the Apocalypse, or did he provoke it instead? I pass more water over my face. Probably, I'll never know.
What pains me most is what Klaus told me while we were running toward this absurd refuge: while I was at work today, Viktor came to Hargreeves Mansion looking for help. Possibly after having eliminated Jenkins himself, in the most terrible way. Klaus murmured, his throat tight, that Luther's response was not one of welcome and understanding: far from it.
He locked him up.
Without listening to anyone, not even Allison, who was silently imploring. Viktor was possibly on the verge of imploding, but perhaps one act of compassion from his only family - just one - could have stopped everything. Instead, all he received was an ego display from someone still trying to convince himself of his Number One status. I seethe inwardly. I regret having believed Luther had changed.
I felt Viktor's power all around me in the collapsing hall, right into my own nerve endings, his sonic power resonating with the energy of mine. I understood immediately that I would be incapable of containing it: in his grief, he has become like the billions of tonnes of water behind a broken dam, surging down a valley. At the stage I'm at with my own abilities, I could only be swept away. Was Reginald Hargreeves right to want to push us, to force us to grow in mastery? For this reason? The thought knots my throat.
I raise my head and look at myself in the chipped mirror. I wonder whether Viktor will actually go and play at the Icarus Theatre tonight. It meant so much to him. Yes. Probably, if anyone goes looking, that's where he'll be found.
I turn off the water and take a miserable paper towel with the texture of tracing paper. And as I'm awkwardly trying to dry my hands, I see a familiar silhouette come through the bathroom door in the mirror.
Allison looks furious, above the bandage crossing her throat: I can feel it in every line of her posture, still curved with pain that hasn't left her. Furious? That's an understatement. She's seething, without the means to express it. Outside the ladies' room, I can hear Luther calling her name. She ignores him magnificently, and not only because her vocal cords have been partially severed, and leans against the sink next to mine. I look at her, she looks at me.
"Something wrong?"
The question comes naturally: the way it would have if she'd been able to speak. She sighs with rage, pained and frustrated. Then she digs in her pocket, pulls out her notepad, and in a few quick strokes writes me an answer that is clear, precise, and irrefutable:
[Luther is an idiot]
I raise an eyebrow. That is an admirably concise summary of my own thoughts, from someone currently diminished in her means of expression. I stand there blinking, in the stormfront she seems to be generating around herself.
"I… Klaus told me, yeah. That he locked Viktor up. That otherwise maybe none of this would have-" But I can see her scrawling furiously again, and she shoves the notepad at me: [Slept with someone. Wasted.]
I'm even more taken aback by the rage-trembling hand holding the notepad under my nose. What? That's what's making her blow a fuse like this? She has clearly never had to pick Klaus up at 2 in the morning. I blink three times. And since I'd be surprised if Luther himself had volunteered that information, I can easily guess who put his foot in it.
"I must say, it was acoustically a nightmare," I admit, even though, underneath, I'm genuinely irritated. And I watch her eyes almost physically leave her head when she understands that I witnessed it too. It's remarkable, in the end, how much passes through people's expressions without needing words at all.
"I think it was just a bad day for him…" I say. "We've all had one this week…"
God, it irritates me to have to defend him, but it was objectively true. He found an entire pile of unopened correspondence from their father, he literally felt he'd been sent to the moon to get him out of the way. Allison knows that, surely, so I narrow one eye, wondering why, really, it's hitting her this hard.
"It was pathetic. And yes, a little funny," I say, with a degree of kindness, to see what my words do in her. Unfortunately, far from softening, she looks as though she's about to cry.
That stops me cold. Does she feel some kind of betrayal in what Luther did? I can see conflicting feelings jostling in her: adolescent memories from that closed-off house surfacing in her. I'm hardly well-placed to pass judgement on other people's emotional or sexual situations, but if there's one thing I'm certain of in this moment, it's that on the subject of her and Luther, I have no desire to know more. And besides, she's already writing:
[Klaus's fault]
No question mark. As a self-evident statement, just because Alcohol, Drugs, Klaus and Sex just happen to appear in that order in the universe's alphabet? That hasty, groundless verdict gets under my skin in turn, enough that the electric hand dryer beside us suddenly roars to life, blasting the scraps of toilet paper scattered across the old buckled linoleum.
"Hold on. Are you talking about the Klaus who tried to talk him out of it?" I say coolly. "The one who spent hours tracking him down through every shitty corner of the city while going through his own withdrawal? Or the one who got his head smashed in trying to pull him out of trouble?"
My eyes are burning, because enough is enough: I'm sick of watching him get treated like this too. And if the world ends in two hours, I have absolutely no problem telling Allison what I think of her prejudices and her navel-gazing, if it comes to that. She doesn't write anything, but I can see her hesitating, so I look pointedly at her pen.
"Don't you think what Luther did, locking Viktor up, is actually worse? Honestly, I’d rather he think with his arse than his head."
She writes something, and just as I'm thinking I may have gone a little hard, we reach the same moment simultaneously, as I speak and she turns her notepad toward me:
"Sorry." [Sorry.]
Our words cross each other, and I think this is genuinely the first time either of us has heard - or read - the other say that. I sigh as the hand dryer falls silent. The toilet paper scraps drift back down, almost gracefully, and I pass my hand over my eyes.
"Don't you think there are better things to do, maybe two hours before the end of the world? Don't you have your daughter's voice to listen to?"
I know those words will hit even harder, but that's all right. Several times this week she's repacked her bag without ever managing to board the flight that would take her back to Los Angeles and Claire. She can't speak, but I can see the full journey her thoughts are making: the return to reality, beyond all the feelings she carried from adolescence. I sense her posture change, becoming the sadder but more grounded one of the mother she is.
[You going home?] she writes, and I look at the floor. She can't know that - in a way - my goodbyes to Granny are already done.
"I have a part to play here now."
I fought against that, and she knows it. But I made a promise to Five that I'm keeping to myself. We have a plan B, a last resort, that feels more relevant than ever right now. Allison nods, with a kind of trust toward me that I hadn't suspected. My relationship with her is extreme ambivalence: she irritates me as much as she unsettles me.
She turns her eyes toward the now-silent hand dryer, then back to me. And she takes me in, as if evaluating me one last time, or giving some form of approval. Her expression turns serious, grave even, and she writes once more before turning her notepad toward me.
[Don't kill Viktor]
Reading this chills my blood. Because I realize this is absolutely one of the eventualities that exists before being ruled out. The raw reality of what awaits us is right there, set down in black ink, and I can't stop myself reading it again and again.
"Of course not," I say, almost horrified, but before I can say anything more, she adds, no doubt because she knows how few scruples Viktor might have left, in the state he's in:
[Be careful]
What happens tonight is uncertain, but it will inevitably be a seismic event in all our lives. I'm not afraid anymore, I said so. The bowling ball is already rolling, we'll see where it strikes: possibly well off the lane. Now, I just want to see it through to the end, once and for all.
Allison watches me as I nod, and in a final gesture, she writes one last thing that could change everything:
[We're still family]
---
Notes:
Despite the gravity of the situation, this scene also has lighter moments. It's a form of absurd breathing space, of the kind The Umbrella Academy does so well.
Honestly, the scoreboard in the bowling scene was an absolute goldmine of inspiration. The care given to detail in this series is always remarkable, and I simply couldn't resist making the most of it.
I loved imagining a 'conversation' with Allison… given that she can't speak. And I was surprised by how much came out of it, with an economy of words that was genuinely satisfying to work with.
Any comment will make my day! ♡
---
Season 1 - Season 2 - Season 3 - Season 4 - Prequel
Also available on AO3, Wattpad and FFN
A bend in space-time Season 1 - [Chapter 26: The Academy's last lament]
Summary: The apocalypse is supposed to have been stopped. But something terrible seems to be happening at Hargreeves Mansion…
Chronological markers: this scene fits like a deleted scene from The Umbrella Academy, season 1, episode 10, between 05:20 and 08:40 (at the beginning of the collapse of Hargreeves Mansion).
Suggested soundtrack: Peter Gabriel - Solsbury Hill; Youn Sun Nah - Lament.
TW: collapse onto a person.
---
Sunday, April 1st 2019, 7:33 pm
I will never stop being surprised by how quickly my brain flushes anxiety, even when it's nearly suffocated me.
It took only an hour for Diego's and Five's words to put the apocalypse behind me, for the stone slab that had been pressing on my chest all week to finally lift, for me to start making plans again for a day from now, a week, a month. I feel stupid for having believed I could be the cause of the end of the world. And I can't help wondering whether - in the end - it was ever certain it would happen at all.
I was nice to Rodrigo today. I didn't grumble about restocking the plumbing supplies aisle, and I managed to sell ten toilet float valves for a nursery school renovation. Klaus didn't call. I suppose he spent the day practicing materializing Ben, and that thought alone makes me want to hum, this time for free, no ghosts to chase. I sincerely hope they managed it, together.
It was with a particularly light heart that I got on the bus back to Hargreeves Mansion this evening, with the sole aim of collecting my things and going home for good. This week will probably have changed me. I'm not sure yet what that means. I could almost find it in myself to thank Reginald Hargreeves for finally deciding to kick the bucket.
Now, as the bus rolls along the straight avenues of The City in the early dark, I watch people. Those passing alone toward their destinations, those walking arm in arm, those dragging children behind them. We don't even look at them usually, but these lives depend in reality on all the others, and on the generations before them. The world isn't perfect, no doubt, but it exists in an unstable and beautiful equilibrium that can now continue.
The bus turns north, and traffic thickens, as it so often does at this hour. The red glow of brake lights strings out through the windows, and the driver is growing exasperated with certain people's driving. For once, I'm not in a hurry, I have no desire to push his engine. The growing congestion is almost irrelevant to me. I can take my time, because it is no longer running out.
I pull out my Walkman, pick up the track where I left it. The unruly rhythm of Solsbury Hill fills my ears, seeming to never want to end. Inspired words, calling you to embrace change. I watch a group of people hurry across the road just in front of the bus, and the driver keeps muttering. The transport authority has just radioed through a diversion order, and I silence Peter Gabriel for a moment to hear him read out which stops won't be served.
'Argyle Public Library, Argyle Park East, Rigel Street and Rainshade Square.'
My brows draw together. Those four stops are the ones that literally ring Hargreeves Mansion. I switch off the tape at once, stuff my headphones in my pocket, and stand up toward the driver, asking to be let out even though it's not a scheduled stop. Given the complete standstill of traffic, he lets me, and I watch for any scooters coming up on the inside before stepping onto the wet pavement. The night is opaque under a clear sky, but there's a strange smell in the air. Something unusual. Dust, maybe, or gas. Around me, people are now moving in the opposite direction.
Crack! I've gained a block, and I round the corner by the Central Bank annex, quickening my pace. The air hums against my ears in a way that makes me squint. Further along, part of the street lighting seems to have gone out. It doesn't matter: the night is clear, the moon is full. I don't care about not seeing well anyway: in this neighborhood, I could teleport with my eyes closed by now.
Crack! I'm only a few dozen metres from the back alley that runs along the side of Hargreeves Mansion below the bedrooms. What's worrying me now is the sound: low, resonant, vibrating up through the tarmac underfoot, like a demolition site. The dust in the air is heavier than ever. And my heart is beating hard enough to pulse in my temples.
Crack! Barely reappeared near the dumpster where Klaus has searched so many times, I freeze and step back on instinct, eyes wide. My gaze climbs the fire escape, which is shaking as if it's about to tear away from the wall. The lights are on even if they're flickering: Klaus's room is lit, Luther's too. I have no idea what's happening on the other side of the façade, but from the way the dust is rising, I'm afraid part of the far side of the house has come down. My breath is short, my legs unsteady, my thoughts stunned flat.
I don't have time to think: not about the undoing of the apocalypse theory, not about the relief I'd felt that has now painfully evaporated. It hurts to see these cracks, as though I want to stop them from opening in a building I shouldn't be particularly attached to. But I am, or rather, to those for whom and through whom it exists. The bathroom light flickers, and its ceiling seems to bow, tearing something in my chest. Did everyone get out? Shit, is Klaus still in there? One pinch of focus is all it takes to make me intangible. Now it doesn't matter: the stone, the plaster, the metal, the wood.
Crack! In the blink of an eye I'm at Klaus's bedroom door, which is empty, as is the rest of the corridor. On the walls, the writing he left behind is crumbling down, one word after another, onto his mattress, onto the rug, onto the overturned hookah. His words disappearing, every thought he'd ever let out of himself in this room: 'Years gone by without a word, now in ink that soon will fade', 'Everything must be reduced to dust to start again.' And the dust is taking them, taking them, as I back away. The bead curtain from the entrance has just fallen near the bookcase, and I step out into the corridor, choosing to abandon my things to the chaos of magazines and darts that was once Diego's room.
Crack! I reappear in the trophy gallery. For reasons I can't explain, the bedroom corridor I just left explodes, room by room. A section of ceiling tears loose, and my arms come up over my head on instinct, even though I can't feel it. It passes through me - my whole body gone intangible by reflex - and crashes to the floor, literally through my feet, and I look around me, unable to believe the devastation I'm actually watching.
Why? How is this possible? Outside, the rest of the world was intact. I saw it.
I can barely accept that I had that conversation with Pogo on this very balcony, a few days ago. I can almost see his posture in that armchair, his aching back beneath those incomprehensibly British manners. Eight days spent here come flooding back, and I stand still, my eyes searching everywhere for any sign that someone might have stayed behind.
Then the glass of the display cases explodes on its own, as though shattered by a high-pitched frequency. My hands come up again on instinct to shield my face from glass that cannot cut me, but through the thickening air, I catch a glimpse of Klaus at the far end of the gallery, moving fast with Diego, with Ben, toward a window giving onto the fragile metal of the outer fire escape.
Crack! Trying to reach them, I reappear on the main landing of the Grand Staircase, in the middle of the dust, with what sounds like only moments before it gives way. Disoriented, no longer sure which direction to turn. I'll barely manage one more teleport, maybe two: I've been covering long distances. A large section of the gallery floor collapses nearby, and I'm trembling where I stand, because I can see the night sky through what used to be the Moorish-style skylight I always found so hideous. I need to at least reach the lower level. I try to focus…
Crack! Around me, it's the entrance hall thundering now. The chandelier, on the ground, drowning in a chaos of rubble. I've always thought of Hargreeves Mansion as a kind of creature: one that grew, decade by decade, like a tentacular organism swallowing its neighborhood whole. A being of bricks and gilding, devoted to its builder, tasked in equal measure with mistreating and protecting. The only place Klaus has ever, against all reason, considered home. And before my eyes, this monster dies in its turn, gaping cracks devouring the colonnades vertically in an insane roar.
Above, what remains of the gallery gives way, taking with it the entire wall section it supported. Hargreeves Mansion seems to weep its full reserve of bricks, metal, glass, and trophy copper. Downward. Again and again. But I freeze, because I've just sensed something beyond the sound of the collapse itself. The air, all around… has changed.
A vibration: one I'd already felt faintly while walking in the street, without paying it proper attention. But now I feel it clearly, powerfully, close: a terrible sound wave outside the audible spectrum, its force making energy shudder through everything. Through every stone, every beam, and possibly through flesh and bone for anyone who isn't intangible. I'm trembling, my eyes fixed on the point from which these vibrations are spreading.
Then I see him. Viktor, in his blue shirt.
He's no taller than me, I really register that for the first time as he turns through the reception room doorway, which collapses behind him. The sofas, the display cases, everything reduced to dust. Our eyes meet, but I don't know if he sees me, even though I'm fully visible.
A beam passes through me and I don't even react. I just stand there, in the middle of the collapsing chaos that cannot touch me, looking into his white eyes that don't even blink anymore. If his face had once been gentle, sensitive, sad, now it holds nothing but a cold and disconnected indifference. And I can feel them around him now, those sound waves, as he sends them rippling outward like the living tuning fork he seems to have become.
I understand, in this moment. I understand that Viktor has always had this power, possibly suppressed by the anxiolytics I've watched him swallow so many times over these last few days. Shit, how did I not think of that, instead of taking them myself?
A power tied to the material waves of sound, I can feel it in my flesh and bones, through the energy. An immense power, far beyond his violin, one he has never had the chance to learn to contain, any more than his emotions. Five told me that the question had never been the nature of our powers, but the degree to which we can control them. Control ~ourselves~, in reality. In that sense, Reginald Hargreeves literally abandoned Viktor, after adopting him.
My eyes go wider as the entirety of the reception room gives way to a pile of bricks, wood, and glass, the vast sky above spreading moonlight over marble that was never meant to feel the wind come through.
Jenkins is dead. I don't know what he did to Viktor, or how. But I can see what it cracked open. This, and possibly the way everyone has treated him: his siblings, no doubt in ways even worse than how they've treated Klaus. I've witnessed it at moments this week, and it pains me to be able to say so. I saw his fragility, even when he smiled over it. But beneath that timid, trembling surface, Viktor was already simply primed to implode.
I don't believe he has any deliberate intention to cause harm: he is nothing but instinct now, and what is expressing itself around him is his emotions without filter or wall. He moves through the hall without looking at me, slow and detached, as if he were simply heading out to catch a taxi, as so many times before. Except that around us, everything is falling in a chaos of rubble and broken glass, in the terrible undulation he is generating. He disappears toward the main door with its stained glass umbrellas blown out, even as inside and outside dissolve into each other beneath the impassive moon.
And then the thought pierces me: painful, obvious, as though it had never been about anything else. Five was right this morning: Harold Jenkins was only the spark. Viktor might actually be the bomb. The rider on the Apocalypse horse. And no: it wasn't me.
That lands in my stomach like a stone, but there's no time. The steps of the Grand Staircase are collapsing in their turn, one after another, like a terrible line of dominoes reminding me we will never climb them again. Above my head, everything that remains of the upper floors of Hargreeves Mansion is caving in. Downward. Toward me.
A desperate impulse rises: get out. Around me, everything is dust now, and I can no longer make out the sky, nor the edges of the storm of art-deco debris inexorably burying me.
Crack! I teleport one last time, in a direction I believe to be the only thing I can still perceive: Ben's spectral energy, somewhere out beyond the chaos: possibly outside. Not far enough, probably, because I find nothing but incoherent rubble again - around me, above me, below me - and I crouch where I am, just pulling my knees to my chest, waiting for the blocks and the dust to settle around my intangibility.
The thunder that sounds is not the sky's. It is the Academy's last lament, in the collapse of what once stood with an oppressive kind of majesty. Gradually, the blocks of brick and cement, the shards of glass, Klaus's writing, the plumbing pipes, the woodwork, Five's equations, the wrecked furniture: everything seems to find a new resting place, without order, but still at last. I stay there, eyes open on the debris passing through me, hearing familiar voices just beyond. Diego. Luther. Five?
Trembling, I pull myself upright, push forward, step out of the rubble that never touched me, and become material again as the full scale of the devastation strikes my eyes. There is nothing left, and the rest of The City continues to stand: legitimately indifferent, untouched. I am without breath, without voice. The sound of sirens and helicopters overhead floods every inch of the air, and soon the sound of hurried footsteps.
"Rin, Holy glitters, you were in there… you could've ended up in pieces."
Klaus's voice pulls me back to reality, and already he's pulling me by the arm, while the helicopters train their spotlights on the smoking rubble of Hargreeves Mansion. I raise my hand to shield my eyes, and I can see the remains of the 'Kids’ Lounge' table, the red billiard cloth, the coffee machine. Shards of crockery on the ground, some fragments still marked with the umbrella. And he pulls me again, as I struggle to tear my gaze from what he has already put behind him.
"Come on, move!"
And then, on instinct, I start running too. Running, even though I don't know toward what.
---
Notes:
This scene was terribly sad to write, and yet so important. Writing the first part where Rin is positive, while knowing where her bus was heading, was particularly hard: the way she gradually understands that something is wrong, above all.
It is a farewell to Hargreeves Mansion, in this version at least, and I wanted to render it from the inside. Like Hermès, Reginald's Rolls Royce, this huge building was for me a character in its own right: one that now disappears along with Grace and Pogo. I feel a kind of sadness about it, because like Klaus, I'd nurtured for it as much resentment as affection.
Now, events are accelerating. Any comment will make my day! ♡
---
Season 1 - Season 2 - Season 3 - Season 4 - Prequel
Also available on AO3, Wattpad and FFN
A bend in space-time Season 1 - [Chapter 25: A manageable insanity]
Summary: Back at Hargreeves Mansion, Rin discovers that the apocalypse… won't happen after all.
Chronological markers: this scene fits like a deleted scene from The Umbrella Academy, season 1, episode 9, around 18:00 (at the moment Diego stops by his room to collect his things at 4:30 pm, then after Klaus tells Five he’s addicted to the apocalypse).
TW: reference to the circumstances of Harold Jenkins’s death, as depicted in the series.
Suggested soundtrack: Agnes Obel - The Curse; Smith Westerns - All Die Young.
---
Sunday, April 1st 2019, 11:02 am
Clean as a new pin and smelling of benzoin, Klaus finally left Granny and me alone just before ten. He headed back to Hargreeves Mansion, and I took Granny to the Warden fabric market, a block away. One last time, even though we bought nothing.
If the end of the world is really today, I wanted her to carry to the back of her worn retinas the colors and textures that have woven her whole life as a seamstress. The organized disorder of that hall of old brick and art deco ironwork with its patinated arabesques. The light through the high glass ceiling, fractured into colored patches.
As every time I’ve gone with her since childhood, I drifted through the aisles with no purpose other than soaking in the atmosphere: between the stalls overflowing with silks, wools, cottons rolled, stacked and hung. I ran my fingers along the spools of ribbon on the shelves that smell of old polished wood. In that context, colors have never bothered me. Perhaps that’s why I tolerate them in Klaus’s extravagance, even if I don’t want them on myself.
I couldn’t bring myself to hug Granny, when I left her at the apartment. I disappeared, the way I always do. My goodbyes, like my affection, I give differently from the rest of the world, and this morning I acted from the heart, despite my inaptitude for it. And still, I regret it. Because today - barring some cosmic surprise - the apocalypse is coming. Because today, I don’t know if we’ll see the sun set over The City.
Now, Diego’s little alarm clock ticks away the minutes on his bedside table, and I stare at it without really managing to think, in this room where I’ll probably never sleep again. I found no one when I got back to Hargreeves Mansion, except Luther still keeping watch at Allison’s bedside. My eyes drift without purpose over the silent walls for a moment longer. I think I’m just waiting for it to be time to go to work.
Is that what I’m going to do with this last day before the end of the world? Actually go to work? I already know the answer is yes. Maybe that’s just my way of facing anything: to keep going. Stubbornly. And since this morning, paradoxically, I’m no longer afraid. Not at all.
Suddenly, voices come from somewhere at the end of the corridor, in the Grand Staircase, pulling me out of my contemplation of the dartboard. Hurried footsteps, the rustle of a leather harness, and Diego comes bursting in, nearly startling at the sight of me sitting cross-legged and motionless on his bed.
"Rin," he says, already starting to gather the knives and whetstones he’s left scattered around all week, which I haven’t touched. "You’ve been here since this morning?"
I take a long breath, and sigh.
"I went to say goodbye to my grandmother. If the apocalypse is tonight, I wanted-"
"Forget it. The apocalypse is off."
He wipes one of his blades and slides it back into one of the sheaths built into his harness: neat, as if he has no intention of using it for a while. And I blink at him, dumbfounded.
"What? What did you just say? The apocalypse is…"
"Stopped. Aborted. Finito. The glass eye Five found has been returned to its socket, and its owner had already been neutralized by more sharp objects than I ever dreamed of."
"Harold Jenkins? It was really him? Viktor’s boyfriend?"
Diego dismisses the thought with a slight curl of his lip.
"A psychopath. Trust me, I know the type. Viktor apparently managed to escape: he may come back here."
I take a moment to absorb what Diego is telling me, my mind unable to process that the terror tightening my throat for days would suddenly no longer have any reason to exist. Is it really like this? Truly, it’s over? Five and his equations were right: all it took was eliminating that one link in the causal chain, and the apocalypse simply wouldn’t happen?
"So…"
I’m at a loss for words.
"That’s it? I just… go downstairs for a coffee, go to work, and we all pick up our lives where we left them?"
All at once, I feel like a vast emptiness has just replaced the terror of the End. Because for a week I’d stopped imagining any continuation to my life. Because I have to abruptly re-accustom myself to the prospect of living for years yet. Truly, spending time with the Hargreeves could drive anyone mad, and I pass a tired hand over my forehead as Diego puts away his blade-polishing cloth.
"As far as I’m concerned: absolutely. I’ve done my part. I’m going to say goodbye to Mom, then it’s ciao for me."
He bends down to re-tie his laces.
"I’ve got personal matters to deal with."
I know he’d even doubted Five’s word. That he was never entirely convinced he was fighting a real threat. And now he’s preparing to return to his vigilante work: to keep putting on this harness to protect ordinary people from being robbed, because it’s the only thing he believes he knows how to do. Because he can’t breathe without seeking out the act of bravery, shaped that way by his father. A lone wolf. About to go back to the woods.
"Diego, are you…"
I get up, I try to take a step toward him, but he’s already heading out.
"Aren’t you going to see them again? Your siblings? Will everything just go back to the way it was between all of you too?"
He grabs a bag in which he’d left a razor and some other toiletries.
"Every time I run into them, another piece of my life gets knocked sideways, and that’s not a metaphor."
His brown eyes burn: it isn’t. But he adds, lower:
"I've got a city to protect, and better shit to do than watch that family implode."
My shoulders drop slightly, and I reframe what actually matters to me.
"Will you stay in touch with Klaus?"
I should stay out of it, but I’ve watched him paradoxically come back to life this week, despite everything that’s happened to him, despite everything that’s happened to all of us, and for a reason that seems clear to me today: Klaus needs this family, as dysfunctional as it is. He loves his si lings, and Diego most of all.
His step falters for a quarter of a second on the threshold of the corridor, between two posters showing how to hit an enemy in the solar plexus. He narrows his eyes, looks at me, and before disappearing for good to find Grace wherever she is, he brings me back to the reality of the Hargreeves relationships, in spite of my hopes:
"I-I don’t know."
---
11:21 am
On my plate sits a slice of toast, its smell mingling with coffee in the ‘Kids’ Lounge.’ Perhaps it’s Diego’s news, but I’m a little hungry, and I feel the need to eat something before leaving for the hardware shop.
I feel almost drunk on possibility, now that the imminence of the apocalypse is receding, and I feel shaken. Do I actually want to go back to my old life? What would I really want the future to be made of, since it turns out there is one? I’d underestimated how much impact this reopening of possibilities would have. But then a familiar hiss cuts through my thoughts.
Crack!
This time it isn’t my own teleportation that tears the air: I already know who’s just arrived at the long table before I even look up. High socks pulled perfectly taut, movements as restless as ever, an expression paradoxically satisfied and unsettled. I arch an eyebrow. Five has just appeared, carrying in his arms the bald half-mannequin he drags everywhere, and is now installing 'her' in one of the wooden chairs.
Crack! He teleports to the coffee machine and fills two cups without ceremony. Crack! His hand seizes the sugar bowl from the middle shelf. Crack! He’s back at his mannequin, settling her with a kind of delicate attention. He sugars her coffee but not his. Then he sits, and finally deigns to look at me.
"You’ve heard about Jenkins," he says, without troubling himself with morning pleasantries, which doesn’t even surprise me from him anymore. Morning, evening: these are concepts that only mean something to people who experience time linearly, and he’s not one of those. I inhale.
"Diego told me."
I bite into my toast, watching the way he smooths the polka-dot blouse of his resin sweetheart. Or plaster, I’m not sure. And I ask, carefully:
"Five. Who killed him?"
A man’s death is never good news, and I don’t like the small guilty flicker of relief that grips my chest each time I think about the apocalypse consequently being stopped. Five narrows his eyes almost imperceptibly, because the question I’m asking is nagging at him too.
"I don’t know," he says, a little darkly. "Nothing in that vintage house led us to any trail. Clearly someone who wanted him dead in a fairly decisive way, with a passion for the cutlery drawer and anything sharp. But who? I don’t know, and that’s what worries me. That someone 'finished him off', when the Commission was trying to protect him."
I don’t want to picture his end. I don’t have the trained composure of former Umbrella Academy members when it comes to bloody outcomes. I simply blink, and Five adds:
"It wasn’t supposed to be anyone other than me who wanted him dead."
I’ll admit I feel a little uncomfortable around these homicidal considerations, but the result is in fact exactly what Five was hoping for, regardless of the killer’s identity, so I keep chewing and try not to spiral.
"Maybe he was killed by someone else who also wanted to prevent the apocalypse? Because you got what you wanted: now it won’t happen."
Saying those words, the euphoria of being allowed to keep living seizes me again, stronger still: to the point where the coffee machine lets out a hiss of steam, and the toaster goes haywire. But Five’s face remains impassive. Serious. Almost closed, and I frown slightly.
"Why… why aren’t you more relieved than this?"
I don’t understand this expression, these nervous tics running through him, the way he looks at his mannequin as though she understands and I don’t.
"Delores," he says to her. "I know you don’t like my equations. But do you think we should explain to her what happens if you kill the fly… right after it’s flown into the horse’s eye?"
I arch an eyebrow.
"What?"
Five places his hand on the shoulder of the mannequin he’s just named 'Delores', and rises slowly to lean toward me.
"Let me rephrase. Jenkins was the match. I was betting on breaking it before it lit. But what if, Rin, what if it had already lit the fuse?"
I sink back slightly in my chair. I think I’m starting to get tired of grim metaphors. Tired of the apocalypse, especially if the main factor has just been eliminated. Maybe I’m developing the same skepticism and exhaustion as Diego, because I want those damned hopes back, and that damned optimism that Klaus recently accused me of having lost. I can’t even figure out how Five made me forget them.
"Yes, of course," I say, a little sarcastically, "maybe there’s even a whole box of matches, lit in a chain by just as many flies. You can always imagine the worst, Five, but why this time?"
"Delores, I forbid you to agree with her."
I sigh. Really, he’s been locked onto the end of the world as his only horizon for too long, and can’t seem to detach from it.
"Five," I say, more calmly, "do you realize that’s a mannequin?"
With a speed that’s almost instantaneous, he fixes me with those small blue eyes as if they’re going to bore right through me. I’m aware that my question is very direct - blunt, even - and that nobody has certainly yet dared put it to him in those terms since he arrived. But that’s how it is: you only need ten minutes with Granny to understand where this ‘frankness’ of mine comes from.
I couldn’t say whether his expression is sad or relieved as he looks at ‘Delores’ again. And she stares straight back simply because she was molded that way: the same way a broken clock tells the right time twice a day.
"Her name is Delores," he reaffirms, as if that name had the power to give her the life she doesn’t have.
An ironic but touching attachment, from someone who himself refused to receive a name from his mother, who is herself a robot. I take a sip of coffee. Yes, truly, the Hargreeves will drive me mad. Maybe they already have.
"You’re genuinely attached to her."
It’s a fact. I can see it in him, and in the surprising tenderness he shows toward this inanimate being. From the way he narrows his eyes, I can tell he doesn’t like talking about it. But above all, there’s something more. Far more than the questionable fixation of a young old man on a synthetic being. He says nothing at first, looks into his coffee, then - through some form of trust he’s gradually extended to me this week - he finally concedes:
"Delores quite simply saved me."
I tilt my head, attentive, aware of how rarely he likely makes this kind of confession.
"I found her in the rubble of the Gimbel Brothers department store. She never abandoned me, through thirty years."
So, after the apocalypse, this mannequin was the only humanoid presence Five had access to. I can only imagine what that is. I already see the loneliness and suffering of people who appear, on the surface, to be very 'surrounded'. I can’t clearly picture what it means to be alone in the purest and most terrible sense of the word: the last human being among the rubble of a collapsed world. And Five slides his hand again onto her cold, rigid shoulder.
"She always looked on critically at the way I got lost in the physics books from the Argyle library: the ones that had been saved. Because I spent all my time there, calculating, over and over. But she knew why I did it. She disapproves of the booze too, but she always let me drink anyway."
I smile. Delores is living proof that Five has a conscience, behind his thick layer of obsession.
"You really love her, don’t you?"
It’s a strange question, one that might seem to be validating his madness, but it’s what I feel, from the sole way he smooths the bullet-holed fabric of her blouse. It seems to me that this consequence of his solitude is a price to have paid, but a beautiful and touching one in the end, a sign of his own humanity. I smile at him. But then, against all odds, he gives me an answer far from the one I was expecting.
"Yes, and I did it deliberately."
I stay a moment at a loss, over my coffee. Eyes fixed on him, then on Delores, as if she might illuminate me herself.
"What do you mean?"
Five sighs, as if what he’s about to say will break a kind of spell he’d cast on himself. As if he were at the end of something. And he looks at her, this time in a more detached way.
"When I found myself alone, after burying you all…"
My brows pinch. Each time, it gets harder to hear.
"…I understood fairly quickly that I was going to come apart."
I say nothing, and I can well believe that Five understood what madness awaited him around the corner of those smoking ruins. How long can a human mind hold out alone, in those conditions? Can it even be measured in days, months, years? Alone, with no hope of going back except a pile of half-burned physics books and an unstable power that guaranteed no certain return to his old reality. He leans back in his chair, looking at me now with something almost like calm.
"I went looking for her deliberately, at Gimbel Brothers. I carried her everywhere, I never stopped looking at her. I knew. I knew I’d end up loving her. I made sure it would happen."
He almost looks pained, saying that, but satisfied at the same time.
"Sometimes, you know, a manageable insanity can allow you to keep going."
I open my eyes slowly, with a small ache. Is that it? Rather than sinking into the dementia of eternal solitude, Five chose himself a moderate madness: one he could control? She is what allowed him to hold on, and to finally come back. I think I’m starting to love Delores too.
"I understand," I tell him, because it’s entirely true. "And I understand why you’re struggling to detach yourself from the end of the world now that it’s finally been stopped , because since you were thirteen, it’s been your only horizon, and your only reason to exist."
He says nothing, and I know from that silence that I’ve summarized things a little too accurately. He inhales, hesitates, then mutters:
"Klaus called me an apocalypse junkie just now."
"He said that?"
"He told me to let go. I hate falling within his area of expertise."
I laugh softly. In the end, Five really isn’t so different from Klaus in his survival logic. The difference is that he manufactures his own objects of dependency, and does so while giving the impression of holding three PhDs.
"Look on the bright side: your detox can start. What would it take for you to file this apocalypse away and free your mind to move forward?"
He thinks, genuinely, then takes a long sip of coffee.
"Having an ultimate backup plan in case we still get caught off guard. If I had that, then maybe I could think about something else. Maybe."
A quiet laugh escapes me. That’s certainly not what Klaus was hoping for, but it’s so very Five. He needs a kind of safety belt before he can drive in peace.
"What kind of backup?"
He thinks aloud.
"If the fly really did die after hitting the horse’s eye… if the match was broken after lighting the bomb’s fuse… if we happen to be in that in-between where the consequences are coming anyway…"
I roll my eyes, but he finishes:
"…we’ll need to escape. Leave the desolation behind, and find a way to fix things further upstream."
He goes quiet for a moment, looks at me, and suddenly - as if my face has triggered some eureka - I can see the cogs of his mind start turning again. He takes a long breath, his chin lifting the way it does when he has a brilliant idea.
"Rin, between the two of us…"
He sets down his cup and places his hands flat on the table.
"We could jump with the whole family. Combining your power and mine is the only way to create a bend in space-time massive enough to do it."
My hand slides along my cup and rests still on the wood of the table. Between the two of us?
"I… Five, you know that I’ve never-"
"I know, I know you’ve never done it. And I know what you think about time travel. But Rin, faced with the apocalypse? Isn’t it the only option worth considering?"
My mouth stays slightly open, because he’s right. I’d have nothing left to lose, if it came to that. Like Klaus when he picked up that briefcase to come back from Vietnam, with nothing left to care about regarding where or when it would take him. As a last resort… yes. Yes, I would do it.
"Together… with a novice… isn’t that even riskier?"
I can immediately feel my question lands, but Five’s eyes burn regardless.
"You’re right, with two of us there’s an even greater chance of ending up scattered. But alone, I simply have no chance of taking all of us: the compromise has to win out."
I’d almost tremble, but Five is determined to prove to me that this exit remains a possibility.
"You remember how you described our jumps when we first met: lock and trigger. I’d lock the destination and we’d trigger together. We’d just need to make sure everyone was in contact, like at the lake cabin when we moved Allison and Diego."
We’ve already done it. Only the temporal factor would change things drastically. And I sigh.
"How do you choose the arrival date? It’s so unpredictable: you said so yourself… especially going into the past."
He drums his fingers on his chin.
"I don’t think I can choose the destination. I’d need at least a week to calculate the parameters. But is precision truly essential? It needs to be in the past, to be able to act, and before our birth, otherwise a paradox will occur. If it’s earlier, the exact date doesn’t matter. Besides, I have a sense that space-time will have retained an imprint of the last era in which I existed, and will try to reinject me into those waters."
"What year was that?"
"1963."
"Wow."
The sixties. Kennedy. The first man on the moon. The civil rights movement. Vietnam: shit, again. Woodstock. The nuclear age, and those damn Beatles… My eyes say everything.
"I really do hope the apocalypse is cancelled."
I don't believe any era in history is worse than any other. But at least in the present, I’d had the time to get used to it.
"Right. No panic: after all, it’s only a plan B. To help you let go. We’re agreed, aren’t we?"
He stares at me, and I add before he can object:
"You’re still thinking about it too much. Find something else to think about. Something that doesn't end in fire."
He shakes his head.
"Stochastic calculus. And making my bed properly for once."
I sigh.
"For fuck sake, Five!"
He finishes his coffee in one go, then drops his shoulders as if finally conceding.
"Drinking a few margaritas, even if Delores will disapprove."
He looks at her, then at me.
"And returning her to her rightful place."
---
Notes:
I wanted to share here my take on what Delores is to Five. It seems too simplistic that he passively lost his mind under the weight of loneliness. Knowing Five, it strikes me as very likely that he could have calculated it.
I also wanted to include this chapter here so that the moment Five brings Delores back to the store, later in this episode, lands with a little more weight.
We all know how this season ends, which makes it both amazing and tragic to watch things inexorably unfold. We know what will become of this 'plan B'. Rin had better develop a taste for the sixties.
Any comment will make my day! ♡
---
Season 1 - Season 2 - Season 3 - Season 4 - Prequel
Also available on AO3, Wattpad and FFN
A bend in space-time Season 1 - [Chapter 24: The seven peaks Gao Yord]
Summary: One last time before the end of the world, Rin stops by the apartment to see Granny, along with Klaus.
Chronological markers: this scene fits like a deleted scene from The Umbrella Academy, season 1, episode 9, following directly from the scene in chapter 23.
Suggested soundtrack: Sleeping at Last - You Are Enough ; Simon and Garfunkel - Bridge Over Troubled Water.
---
Sunday, April 1st 2019, 09:07 am
We finally pulled ourselves out of our contemplation of The City, and came down from the heights of wind and drizzle without any more trouble than the ascent. A little dazed from the altitude and the gusts, with that strange feeling of standing at the threshold of something terrible, but also a paradoxical euphoria.
Klaus's mood is good now, admirably good, given everything that's happened to him recently. Maybe partly because - up there - we felt powerfully that we hadn't been obliterated yet. That we were still alive. That we hadn't said our last word.
We left the tree canopy of Argyle Park behind us and plunged back into the urban sprawl of the avenues in the full morning rush. Ben wanted us to catch the second-hand bookshop opening, which was full of novels he'd have liked to read over Klaus's shoulder, if the Apocalypse hadn't been today. We lingered outside the record store window, possibly closed forever, now. And then we took a bus toward the Warden fabric market district: where I grew up.
Klaus understood my need to stop by and see Granny: perhaps for the last time, we don't know. I try not to think about it too hard: my stomach tightens every time. He declared that her spicy temperament was exactly what we needed to get our legs under us for the end of the world. Though I suspect he mostly wants to make sure I won't go rummaging through the medicine cabinet again.
Granny appreciated us bringing cinnamon rolls, even if she called them stodgy and hipster. She may have found it suspicious, but she didn't ask.
She hasn't thrown Klaus out yet: she hasn't pinned any unflattering labels on him, and has even called him by his name. So, as by some self-evident chain of consequence, he made himself perfectly and shamelessly 'at home', to Ben's quiet despair from his corner.
After draping his socks over the back of a chair to dry, he helped himself to a large glass of Granny's chia seed smoothie. While we caught up on neighborhood news, he quietly ate half the cinnamon rolls while leafing through last month's TV guide. Then he went to take a shower, without even asking permission to use the bathroom. He's done it thousands of times before, always imagining Granny didn't know.
"I see we're making ourselves at home," I hear from the corridor off the bathroom, and I tilt my head to listen. Granny sounds about as pleasant as usual.
"At home? Oh, trust me, you really wouldn't want that. The haunting alone would tank the property value. Is that a colon irrigation machine?"
"It's a water flosser. You're not putting it anywhere near anything, including your mouth."
"Do I at least get a towel? Something that isn't a dishcloth?"
"Only the ones on the bottom shelf."
Granny grumbles as she heads to the kitchen for her tea, and I suppress a laugh, rolling my eyes. I'm alone here now, letting my gaze drift over the framed photographs in the bookcase: pictures of Granny in her youth, of my mother. I think Ben is watching the drama. A paradoxically peaceful silence settles in the morning light of our modest apartment. And soon the kettle begins its soft hiss.
"I remember that day," I tell my grandmother as she parts the bead curtain coming back in. "That was with Mum and the cousins at the Thảo Cầm Viên."
Mum loved that botanical garden, far more than the grim zoo in Ho Chi Minh City. And I remember that if she was holding my arm like that, it was in the hope that I wouldn't teleport myself into the middle of the orchid collection. I must have been six, my cousin maybe three.
"Do you remember how auntie kept shrieking 'Bạch Liên!' when they had to come and get me off the greenhouse roof."
Granny doesn't smile, but her eyes tell me she's glad I remember.
"You were unmanageable," she says, "before becoming even worse for a while. But perhaps you just wear your name well after all."
I laugh softly. Like many children from one diaspora or another, I carry a use-name and a name from the culture I come from. Mother to daughter, we pass down the name of the lotus: Liên. The flower of the homeland. A symbol of resilience, of elevation, of rebirth. The lotus blooms by pushing up through muddy depths and opening its beauty toward the sky: through adversity, as if it cannot touch it.
My grandmother, old-fashioned as she is, is simply Hoàng Thị Liên. Left alone and pregnant with her second child - my mother - she named her the more modern Hoàng Kim Liên: the golden lotus. And it was only natural that - without a father too, but inexplicably - I was born Hoàng Bạch Liên, the white lotus.
I use that name even less than Marine, even if it resonates somewhere deep. Paradoxically, Klaus has always known it, and for a simple reason: I couldn't hide it. I was barely eighteen when I had that lotus tattooed between my shoulder blades. A silent apology for all the harm I was doing to Granny, to my mother, that was never going to be enough. The news was taken as yet another affront at the time, read as a rebellious gesture, when it wasn't.
We recall other memories, drawing us westward, then back to The City. Echoes of my school, of the cleaning jobs my mother worked, of Granny's costume deliveries to society dinners. Do I feel nostalgia? Regret? Determination in the face of what's coming? In any case, for reasons I can't explain — I am no longer afraid of anything at all.
Almost.
It's Ben's posture and my grandmother's expression that tell me what's happening: Klaus's satisfied return from the corridor, 'wearing' a tiny violet towel under Granny's open dressing gown. The silk one, with its gleaming embroidered foliage.
"Your exfoliant is an absolute delight, Mme Hoàng," he says, stretching like a cat. "Thanks to you, I've just completed my grand spring cleaning: head to toe, inside and out."
He's raided her forbidden drawers dozens, hundreds of times before. But today - perhaps because he has nothing left to lose, and with a particular kind of affection - he allows himself to be openly, flamboyantly himself, one last time.
I don't have time to open my mouth, because Granny is already scrutinizing him, her eyes lingering on the skin he's shamelessly displaying. And rather than any of the remarks I'd have expected, she exclaims, loud and put-upon:
"Good heavens. A Gao Yord, and an unorthodox one at that. On the stomach, no less."
My eyes follow hers, and I understand what she means. I hadn't exactly had the headspace to linger on that tattoo when Klaus came back, even if I certainly noticed the broad motif inspired by the peaks of Mount Meru. Undoubtedly one of the most sacred designs in Buddhist tattooing, and for that reason alone, Granny's gaze is more rigid than ever.
They are rather beautiful, those lines that tremble faintly when he breathes: those ancient symbols, their ink reaching toward the sky. Like a personal temple, though one whose tremendous act of appropriation I can sense too, probably baffling to Granny.
"Seven peaks instead of nine…" she breathes. "Where did you have that done?"
Klaus sighs, and I'm afraid again that I'll regret having brought him here, as he answers with his eyes somewhere else:
"Not in some hipster parlour cashing in on the Angelina Jolie hype, if that's what you're wondering."
Granny fixes him with her sharp gaze, arms crossed, her high bun immovable.
"You didn't even use a mantra."
Klaus looks at me, then at the fringed rug, and shakes his head.
"It's a somewhat personal form of mantra. I'm sorry for that."
She lets out a tight little laugh and crosses her arms in front of her television, which inconveniences Ben trying to see the rest of the drama. And Granny continues:
"It's not me you should be sorry to: it's generations of monks and warriors of the Khmer Empire since the ninth century. But this only offends a quarter of my ancestors, and you young people corrupt everything anyway."
I know the foundations of Sak Yant tattooing only from a distance: essentially Thai in origin. But I know that today, bamboo still drives ink and mystic symbols into skin in the far reaches. Too often for a modest sum on street corners, rather than in the sanctity of temples. But I strongly doubt Klaus did this casually. And the question is as much 'when' as 'where', though Granny can't know that, and she shrugs, going to retrieve the tea that was steeping.
"Did you go to Thailand?" I risk asking.
Klaus nods slowly, as if summoning memories from another age entirely.
"It was a standard leave destination for a lot of us. But I… ~we~ went specifically for that."
I can almost see them moving behind his eyes: the streets, the noisy markets, the golden temples under a heavy, humid sun. So Dave went with him across the border, in search of ink capable of holding his demons at bay? Granny pours the tea, silent, her face unreadable, and Klaus keeps his head down.
"It was actually a monk who agreed to do it. I think he somehow understood… what I have to fight, and how."
Granny pushes through the bead curtain again and comes back with the teapot and three enamel cups.
"Taming the mind," she pronounces, "mastering cosmic forces… repelling the attacks of malevolent spirits… One doesn't choose the Gao Yord at random, does one, dear haunted junkie?"
"Really, Mme Hoàng, there's no need to be quite so flattering: call me Klaus, I insist."
I narrow my eyes, and ask, without pausing to breathe:
"You did this to hold your ground against the ghosts?"
Granny may find this unremarkable, but I remain stunned. Because - historically - this is the very first time I've seen Klaus make a deliberate choice not to simply endure, smother, push through, but to act, to stand. I see the symbolism in what he did, and above all the step he took toward himself and his power. And I'm grateful to Dave, because I am absolutely certain it was Dave who pushed him to do it.
Granny takes a cinnamon roll and dunks it in her tea, settling into her chair without knowing she's practically sitting on Ben, who shifts to avoid her. She glances at Klaus, still somewhat critical.
"You're not unaware that a certain number of commitments come with having done that."
Commitments designed to elevate the bearer of these marks as a better human being, including the promise not to intoxicate or numb oneself. Klaus looks at the floor, because he very nearly broke that this morning. But my grandmother's words seem to steady his gaze, as if he'd needed exactly this reminder.
"I wanted to gather here…"
He places his hand below his sternum.
"…everything that gives me the strength to hold on. What makes me safe enough to keep standing. I didn't do it in my back because… I suppose I need to see it daily, to remember what it means."
Granny studies him, just above the navel, but I feel her expression softening. And I know what her dark eyes are doing, moving laterally across the mystic squares where the power of the mantras should have been inscribed. She's reading what he had written there instead. Granny reads Akson, possibly as much Tai as Lao.
"I hope you won't regret those lotuses," she says, "but you know my Bạch Liên so much better than I do now. I don't want to know who David is, but…"
I smile quietly. One day I'll have to tell Klaus what I think about what he did, but from the way the cathode screen just flickered with my emotion, I suspect he already knows. And Granny narrows her eyes.
"…does 'UA' refer to what I think it does?"
Klaus says nothing, then finally nods, with something close to a smile. And I can picture them, those characters, right at the peak of the Gao Yord: a deliberate mention of the Umbrella Academy: by his choice, by his heart, without anyone forcing his hand. Faded and hollow, the umbrella on his wrist might as well no longer be there. Emptied of meaning, by comparison.
"That's also why I chose seven peaks and not nine," he breathes. "It was time to understand what actually matters to me."
Ben smiles quietly, the way he always does, and I feel the full complexity of these relationships. The paradoxical form of love Klaus carries for his family. I understand his resentment and his anger this morning so much better now, and the pain he feels when his siblings don't return it. I remain stunned by what he did: binding his world inside this seal of protection, to give himself the strength to fight.
Whatever Granny might think, yes: just like the Khmer warriors, like the soldier he was, and simply with the courage he has always had without realizing it. I believe he wears the Sak Yant ink legitimately. And if he believes the lotus can still help him, to the point of affirming it in his own skin, then I accept that: without reproach, without regret.
"Symbols are only worth the intention put into them," Granny breathes.
Her worn fingers finally close around the handle of one of the cups, and she holds it out to Klaus. And then, without another word about the borrowed silk dressing gown, she says to him, validating - in her way - everything he has always been:
"Yours come from the heart, and they deserve to bloom, even above troubled water."
---
Notes:
The question of the Gao Yord Klaus comes back with from the past is so rarely addressed in the series. And yet the symbolism of that tattoo alone makes it a powerful lens through which to understand how he subsequently manages to hold the ghosts at bay so much more effectively. I haven't changed it at all in this chapter: it is described exactly as it was designed by Trason Fernandes for the show, lotuses included.
I don't know what a monk who practices this centuries-old art would make of the motif without a traditional mantra as shown in the series. I chose to stay true to it for this fic, though it isn't necessarily a choice I would have made myself.
Cody Ray Thompson - the actor who played Dave - has said that the answer to addiction is not sobriety but connection. And I believe Klaus's Gao Yord is also an expression of that, as much as it is a seal of protection.
Any comment will make my day! ♡
---
Season 1 - Season 2 - Season 3 - Season 4 - Prequel
Also available on AO3, Wattpad and FFN
A bend in space-time Season 1 - [Chapter 23: It takes two to tango]
Summary: Klaus has decided that sobriety is overrated, and this realization sparks a strong reaction in Ben… and in Rin.
---
Chronological markers: this scene fits like a deleted scene from The Umbrella Academy, season 1, episode 9, around 07:48 (at the moment of Ben's punch to Klaus).
TW: reference to drug and alcohol use.
Suggested soundtrack: Arcade Fire - Wake Up; Marvin Gaye & Kim Weston - It Takes Two.
---
Sunday, April 1st 2019, 07:24 am
It felt like it took Pogo an eternity to pull that damned needle out of my arm. To stick on a bandage I didn't need, and to cross-reference with Grace about my case before transfusing Allison. To confirm my blood type, my history, and I understand better now why it was worth having his database so thoroughly informed on that.
Every scrap of my attention, though, was turned toward the medical room door, through which Klaus had just disappeared. Resigned to no longer trying to summon Dave, to spare himself more pain. Wounded at still not being heard, even sober. Full of resentment, of disillusionment. Having, in all likelihood, already given up on sobriety.
The moment I could, I vanished - I think I teleported twice - up to the floor and the bedroom corridor. Because I can't stand leaving that conversation where it is with him, and above all because he's not okay. The last thing I want is for him to do something stupid he'd regret, after all that effort. The only thing that reassures me is that Ben is with him. As always.
The combat-stance posters file past again along the corridor: by now they're so much part of the wallpaper I don't even see them anymore. Klaus's room is lit, and I can hear him arguing, ranting. Ben, I guess, is getting an earful.
Crack! I appear in the doorway, to find Klaus in a posture of defiant mockery, leaning toward his brother's ectoplasmic outline, crowing sarcastically: "PSYCH! AH AH AH!"
How many pills does he have in his mouth? Two? Three? My eyes go wide. He's not actually doing this? I can feel Ben's spectral energy, and every ounce of his will converging with mine. My blood runs hot, and his would have too, if he'd still had any. A long shiver climbs my spine. And then everything happens very fast: too fast for me to fully understand it.
In a fraction of a second, the punch lands, the tablets go flying, and Klaus's jaw swings him in the exact opposite direction from where Ben's fist just came down.
What?
My face, Ben's face, Klaus's face, all wear the same expression. Pure, literal, dumbfounded shock, while Klaus grunts, more from surprise than pain, and I stand frozen in the doorframe.
"Aow".
He looks Ben up and down, still with one hand on his chin.
"… You just Patrick Swayzeed me… How did you do that?"
Ben, completely lost, stammers:
"Uh, I… I didn't. You did. I think…."
He stares whith his ghostly gaze, wide-eyed. Since his death, Ben has always been in Klaus's wake, but never - never - had they been able to interact physically. Ben looks at his fist, as solid as Klaus's or mine, then back at his brother. And I realize I just heard what Ben said, for the first time.
Why? I certainly don't have Klaus's abilities in that department. But I can feel it, clear as glass: Ben is material right now, his vocal cords capable of vibration. I look at Klaus, Klaus looks at Ben, Ben looks at me…
"Okay, everyone," Klaus breathes, stunned, "rewind. What just happened."
"I punched you," Ben breathes, and I add:
"I wanted him to punch you. I'll own that."
I'm not particularly proud of it, but it was objectively the only fast option. And Klaus blinks three times, still working his jaw slightly.
"I didn't… if I did anything, I didn't do it consciously."
I shake my head. I clearly perceived what happened, even if it all piled on top of itself.
"You started to materialize him. And I…"
Klaus looks at me, because I think over the course of this week he's begun to understand that I've been picking up more and more on the convections of spectral energy. Because he's also gradually realized that he, too, hasn't yet discovered everything his powers can do: that he's capable of far more than being a magnet for terrifying visions. So he lets out a laugh, half sarcastic, half genuine.
"…you picked up the slack so he could finish demolishing my jaw?"
In truth, Ben hurt himself too, because I can see him shaking out his hand. Hurt? A ghost? At the same moment as us, he's starting to understand what a return to materiality might mean, and looks just as floored as we are.
"Klaus," I say, "do you actually realize what this means?"
He snorts.
"That we need to urgently take up sexy pottery?"
"That we can do it again! That there's a way to materialize Ben right here!"
At my words, Ben raises that gaze I'm seeing for the first time through my perception of energy. Intelligent, composed, but currently lost. He looks at his fist, opens and closes it. And then, in a shift of spectral energy, he dissolves and is gone.
"What," I stammer. "What did I say?"
Klaus grinds the tablets he'd almost swallowed under his heel. Then, grabbing his military jacket, he pulls me out into the corridor and breathes:
"I need something warm and doughy. Come on, let's go celebrate."
---
08:04 am
Above the trees of Argyle Park, the sun rises shyly behind a mass of clouds ready to drop rain. Even so, I can't help finding this sky beautiful: maybe because it's the last sunrise before the End.
Dew beads on the wooden benches, the dark lawns breathe out the smell of wet earth, and the trees throw long shadows across the paths. On Sundays, this place belongs to joggers and dog walkers. And I can't help thinking that - in a way - this is where everything truly began between Klaus and me.
He was squatting here when we first met: in the old groundskeepers' shed, decommissioned for a few years by then. A squat like so many others he'd known, among couches, flophouses, hallways, basements, and - in winter - detox or holding cells. This little shack was maybe one of the quieter ones, until the day he was chased out of it, after two years.
You might be tempted to cry over that, perhaps, but actually those were good years, because they were the ones when he started climbing the fire escape behind Granny's building. Here, we laid the foundations of what we are. Here, I understood for the first time that Ben was accompanying him in the spectral shadows, and had for three years by then. And here, we shared our first waffles, bought at the kiosk that's still standing there.
Have we spoken again about our argument this morning? Absolutely not: same as last time, we'll act as though it never existed. Except that this time, I want to apologize through action. Maybe also for where we're standing right now.
"I still can't believe the shed is gone," Klaus murmurs, looking toward the spot where the corrugated-iron structure used to be, squeezing his fingers slightly in his palm, the one that says 'Goodbye.' In its place, at the edge of the North Grove stretching away into a patch of woodland and meadow, there's nothing now but thorn bushes.
"Goes to show you don't need an apocalypse to leave things behind."
I know that recently he saw this place during one of his 'near-death experiences', the memory of it tangled up with what he lived through in 1968 at the Ap Bia camp. He glances at the nearby signpost as the waffle lady switches on her iron for the first morning batch.
"Look, bikes are prohibited," he breathes, thoughtful and amused at once. "Seems like Someone really does think the rules don't apply to Them."
I don't know who he's talking about. I assume it's connected to his 'knock on the head' again, but I won't press.
An incredible smell of batter cooking rises now in the morning dew, as the vendor sets out jam, peanut butter, and chocolate on her counter. We drift over. I order mine plain, it needs nothing else. Klaus, unsurprisingly, loads his with everything that fits. I pass him a bill to pay, a gesture repeated a thousand times: back then, he always kept the change to buy a burrito or something for lunch.
"Klaus," I ask, hesitating, while we wait. "Why… why did Ben dissolve just now, when I said there was a chance of materializing him completely?"
The vendor isn't really listening, she's humming along to the music from her little radio, which is probably just as well. Klaus looks at the ground, at the gravel between his feet.
"I imagine he's waited a very, very long time to hear those words."
I can imagine Ben's frustration, being unable to interact with his family, with the world. But there was more to his reaction than that, and Klaus knows it, so he adds:
"And at the same time, I think it terrifies him."
I tilt my head.
"What does? The idea of setting foot back among the living?"
Klaus sighs as the waffle lady finishes loading his and places it in his hands.
"No, no. He'd want that more than anything, believe me. But Benarino…" he breathes, as if he hadn't expected to say those words again. "He always had a thing about pain. Well, that's what Dad used to throw in his face. The Horror, when he'd unleash it…"
He takes a long breath.
"It was unspeakable agony, every single time."
'The Horror'. Everything I know about it, I learned from an old comic book left in the bathroom, one of the ones Luther used to leave lying around. On the glossy pages I saw the tentacles tear through his chest, I understood the violence of what that creature from another plane did: to its targets, but also to him. Psychological pain accompanies our powers, that's a fact for all of us. But Ben, undeniably, had to manage the physical suffering of his own flesh, on top of the carnage he caused.
"He hated going on missions," Klaus breathes. "Every time, Dad forced him, and he'd come back looking white as a sheet, eyes empty. Sometimes he'd still be sick hours later."
"So he's afraid of going through that again, if the Horror were to re-materialize with him…"
Klaus nods, and it pains me. I don't know how Ben died. I only know the epitaph inscribed on the statue, now in pieces in the storage room: 'May the darkness in you find peace in the light.' This day has already had its share of grief: I won't ask. The kiosk lady hands me my steaming waffle, its vapor curling into the cool air, and we set off down the path.
"And yet Ben has a desperate desire to live, you know. So much more than me. What an irony."
He lets out a nervous laugh, and I give him a sad look, because I know it's true, before lifting my eyes toward The City Broadcasts building, rising some two hundred metres above the first trees of the wood.
"Do you remember telling me he used to dream about going up there?"
Klaus smiles around a mouthful.
"He thought you could see the ocean. He'd be lucky to make out the far shore of Lake Ontario."
Ben loves the ocean, maybe because the scale of it is something else, when you've grown up near lakes, like we have. Klaus likes to object that what fish do in it is disgusting, just to wind him up. To which I usually point out that he does it in the air and keeps breathing regardless. Either way, I know Klaus has always wanted to go up there too: it was a kind of unreachable goal, back when he slept down here.
"We could go now," I say, biting casually into my waffle, and he turns his head sharply toward me.
"You're joking."
"No. I'm serious."
"Up to the radio antenna? Isn't that a bit far?"
I weigh the distance, chewing. These past few days, I've been going further and further, pushed mostly by the stress of rushing back to Hargreeves Mansion. Progress born from pain, from stress, from frustration, like the progress Klaus made this morning too, though it seems that's just how we're destined to discover what we can do. In adversity.
"Two jumps, I think," I say. "There's that balcony at mid-height…"
"Can we get back down?"
I laugh softly.
"Worst case, if I'm spent, we wait a bit. Hey, what happened to your own damn dreams?"
He laughs behind his waffle, not calling me out for echoing the words he used during our spat this morning. I don't do that often, but I'm going to need close contact to teleport him, so I lay my hand on his arm.
"I wanted to say, Klaus… you were right this morning."
"Oh?"
Surprise crosses his face: he's not used to being told he's right, and I try to be honest, to open up, for once.
"I should have listened to you. I'm sorry it escalated."
He shrugs with a quarter-smile, and draws me into a small step.
"You're forgiven, and the fault's shared. It takes two to tango."
I laugh softly. Perfect. That's quite enough for syrupy apologies, and my gaze sharpens again. I glance at the waffle lady, then at the undergrowth, then fix my eyes on the balcony, and then on the antenna platform, its metal painted red and white.
I visualize it, let it fill my mind, tighten my grip. What was it Five said when we met? 'Lock and trigger'. Fine. My hand closes around Klaus's forearm.
Crack!
In a tear of blue light, we are no longer there, and no one will have noticed.
---
Crack!
Metal rings under our soles as we appear. The wind, thick with moisture, hits us at once: it's cold up here, far colder than below. My hair spirals upward, and I feel Klaus tighten against me for a fraction of a second before I let go and he gives in to a small, nervous laugh. We're here. On the maintenance platform: right beneath the radio antenna, which I take in with wide eyes. A giant tangle of red and white beams, groaning faintly in the gusts.
"This is fucking brilliant," Klaus breathes, as on the far side of the antenna, Ben joins us, hands still in the pockets of his hoodie.
The rusted railing barely reaches our waists, and a streak of vertigo hits me. No, you can't see the ocean from here, even from this perch near the sky, but what stretches below us is no less breathtaking. The City unfolds like a grid of concrete and glass under the still-pale sky. Gnawing at the lakeshore, dissolving into residential neighborhoods and then countryside in the distance.
Directly at our feet, Argyle Park is a dark, irregular green patch, threaded with its paths and ringed by avenues. The waffle kiosk is tiny, with its awning, and the joggers are nothing but insignificant dots moving along the trails. Beyond, Crescent Boulevard gleams, and further still, Rainshade Square.
"We can see the Mansion," Klaus says. "The white observatory, over there."
From up here, you can truly take in the footprint of Hargreeves Mansion, and the extent of the various buildings that make up its many wings.
"The museum… the bank… the town hall… We spent so much time saving the arse of all those places."
I turn my head briefly toward Klaus as he says this, gripping the railing, but I say nothing. Yes, all those years of his adolescence, given over by someone other than him to the protection of those streets, that world. And why? I trace the city's arteries with my eyes, retracing the bus route, the one that's probably belting out its bossa nova right now. All the way to Granny's. Over there, in her modest living room, she must have already switched on her TV for a drama.
"Ben wants to feel the wind too, and the drizzle," he tells me, relaying his brother's voice, which I can no longer hear. "But I can't make him tangible anymore."
I wonder if I could, without Klaus's combined effort. Almost certainly not, and I have no desire to try. This miracle needs to come from him, and now I know he can do it.
"You two are going to need to practice at materiality," I tell them with an amused smile, as a freight train passes in the distance on the elevated track, thin as a snake. "I can't wait to see if it can take three to tango, now."
All three of us fall silent, eyes on the avenues, the office buildings, the gable ends and rooftops. On all those lives stirring soundlessly below, with no idea that this is the last day. The City's pulse is still beating, but what we're living through up here might be a goodbye.
We say nothing.
But all three of us know it.
---
Notes:
Far be it from me to take any credit away from Klaus for materializing Ben: it is genuinely Klaus who does it, even if Rin realizes she may be able to support him in that, through matter and energy.
When Ben punches Klaus, I didn't use the French translation referencing Chuck Norris (RIP!): the one with Patrick Swayze is so much more fitting. I genuinely don't understand that translation choice!
The final moments before the apocalypse are spine-tingling in their quietness: I really feel it here. I've become attached to The City and to the people who fill it. Writing this farewell to a metropolis, before leaving it to the desolation of this timeline, was moving, somehow.
Any comment will make my day! ♡
---
Season 1 - Season 2 - Season 3 - Season 4 - Prequel
Also available on AO3, Wattpad and FFN
A bend in space-time Season 1 - [Chapter 22: What can't be summoned]
Summary: As she donates blood for Allison’s transfusion, Rin can tell that Klaus has something on his mind.
---
Chronological markers: this scene fits like a deleted scene from The Umbrella Academy, season 1, episode 9, around 06:10 (between the moment Pogo asks for Diego to be restrained to give blood to transfuse Allison, and the moment Klaus looks for drugs in his room).
TW: reference to drug and alcohol use; blood transfusion.
Suggested soundtrack: Elliott Smith - Between The Bars
---
Sunday, April 1st 2019, 06:44 am
The countryside surrounding The City never felt so dark, so vast. Through Hermès's windows, black masses of groves and hamlets scrolled by endlessly, under a sky drowned in rain and night. The cone of the incandescent headlights raced ahead of us on the wet asphalt, never seeming to go fast enough.
I poured my power into the old Rolls's mechanics as hard as I could: into the very matter of her engine, right into the energy born from the combustion of her fuel. Faster, always faster, as much as I had left in me, jammed uncomfortably on Klaus's knees with my hand braced against the ceiling to keep from pitching into the dashboard. We had one single goal: get Allison back to Hargreeves Mansion. Before our efforts were no longer enough to keep her stable.
A dull wave of relief washed over me when we turned onto Rainshade Square with a wet screech of tires, when the Academy's austere façade finally cut its silhouette against the black sky, every light blazing. Spent, I couldn't help Five teleport Allison into the house. I let Klaus pull himself out of the car, and he helped Luther and Diego carry her.
In the hall, Grace was waiting, her hands folded on her apron. As though she already knew something would be wrong. As though she had anticipated that tonight, she would need to act as caregiver. It seems we moved fast enough to let her intervene in time.
She stopped the bleeding with quick, precise movements, her robotic hands never once trembling. Detached from any emotion the way only an android can be, when the one she was working on was programmed to be her own daughter. Yes. Watching her handle the suture thread in the kind of emergency that once defined mission returns, I looked at her differently.
Grace is a miserable mother, with the bare minimum of affection baked in. But she is a prodigy of mechanics: a machine built to protect, feed, heal. In that moment, I felt her magnificent machinery the same way I feel Hermès's: directly through energy. And it left me unsettled. Where does her technology come from? Certainly not from anything in Rodrigo's stockroom. I have no idea how Reginald Hargreeves designed her, or what he used. Nobody here seems to wonder about that.
Despite his needle phobia, Diego gave the first blood bag to transfuse his sister. There is something deeply ironic about the Lone Wolf going faint at the sight of his own blood, given that he spends every waking hour playing with sharp objects. He passed out three times, to the point where Pogo finally had to strap him down.
Klaus insisted on giving the second bag, hammering that he was clean, but Pogo wouldn't budge. With a robotically tender smile, Grace told him that 'beyond whatever substances might still be circulating, his last blood panel was far too long ago.' My single dose of Valium, on the other hand, was judged to be sufficiently metabolized, taken over twenty-four hours before in a single hit. So I stepped forward, and gave my arm.
The medical room in Hargreeves Mansion is huge, I'm realizing that now, pinned to this chair with a needle in my arm. All clean geometric lines and dark wood paneling, saturated with copper, thick glass, and vibrating gauges. Articulated arms hang from the ceiling and complex machines breathe slowly, in ways I can't quite identify.
Everything in here tells me it was designed to treat up to six people at once. At some point in another time, this room probably ran at full capacity, and I'd rather not picture that too vividly. The way nearly every Hargreeves bolted the moment they could says a great deal about their memories of mission returns. And now I'm watching Klaus, who is the only one who stayed.
I know him by heart. I can tell something's wrong just from the way he's folded in on himself on his stool, and from his already-bitten nails, which he's chewing at. His foot beats an erratic rhythm on the tile, but he's silent, which almost never happens. His gaze drifts over the machines without really seeing them, catches sometimes on the bag slowly filling with my blood, then looks away at once. No doubt: he's got something he needs to spit out.
I wait a little to see if he'll go first, but he doesn't, so my eyes move to the door. Even if I'm not sure I'm in any state to hear what he has to say after the night we've just had, I'd rather not wait for Pogo to come back before lancing this. So I ask him, from the chair where I'm stuck:
"Klaus, what's wrong?"
He looks away again, toward an unplugged ventilator to his left, where I can sense Ben's now-familiar energy signature through the room. His features are still diffuse to me, but I can almost guess his posture now. He crosses his arms - i think - and says something to Klaus. Whether he's trying to encourage him or talk him down, I can't tell. And Klaus sighs.
"I think I’m done, Rinny. Toast. Overcooked."
He said it very quietly, but my gut feeling is bad. That calm is just the surface of an in-between space where he's taking the time to look at the slow, steady anger rising underneath.
"Done with what?"
I don't raise my voice. Allison is resting not far from us, even though I know she can't hear us.
"This week? Me too, honestly, I-"
"No. I'm sick of being ignored. If I wanted to be treated like furniture, I would have been a very glamorous 'chaise longue'. Not this."
I stay very still in my chair, pulling my eyes away from Allison on the gurney. Slowly, my gut feeling is becoming as tangible as my body. Klaus doesn't usually voice the bottom of his negative feelings: as a rule, he'd rather drown them. Is sobriety, this time, pushing him to let them out?
"You mean…"
"I try to help, and even stone-cold sober, Pogo keeps treating me like I'm radioactive."
I swallow, checking the old chimp isn't in earshot.
"He's not up to speed, I guess-"
"It's not just him, Rin. Nobody gives me a shred of credit. Even when I have crucial information, even when I'm trying to be serious, they assume first that it's coming from my scrambled brain."
Sadly, it's been years since Klaus's word has been taken seriously. When he shares an opinion - even a relevant one - when he witnesses something, when he has an idea, people only ever see him through the lens of his toxicology or the voices he's answering the rest of the time. His requests get ignored, his hopes, but also his limits and boundaries, and the saddest part is that he's usually too wrecked to notice. Today is different. Today he's sober, lucid. And he's taking this reality full in the face, as though for the first time.
This morning I heard Five eclipse the information Klaus brought back from his summoning of Reginald Hargreeves, attributing the revelations to Pogo. Luther, until recently, listened to nobody from his Number One pedestal. Diego rides alone, under that permanently stormy forehead. Allison has every shred of her awareness turned toward her daughter, and Viktor would rather be anywhere but here. Klaus is right. They don't listen to him.
"I'm tired, Rinny," he says. "I feel like whatever I do, it can never change anymore. And let's face it: even you chose to follow Five's precautionary principle instead of listening to me. And you've known him all of a week, him and his hideous short pants."
A shiver moves up my spine, and not from the blood flowing steadily into the collection bag beside me. I understand part of what he's been chewing on. Yes, I did that: far more out of my own anxiety than out of any real conviction, but I won't deny it.
"Klaus, I know you tried to talk me out of it."
"Twice."
"And you were right: I nearly wasn't at full capacity today, and nearly couldn't help at all."
I'm aware of the consequences every one of our choices can have right now, and of how fragile the intersections of causal chains are. Without Klaus, I think I would have stayed inside a mistake I'd have regretted, so I add:
"I'm sorry. And it does hurt me too that your family won't give you the credit you deserve, even if I still believe you don't need their approval to exist."
His shoulders drop, and he rubs his hands over his face for a moment, making his eyes disappear. Despite my words, the damage is done, and it stacks on top of everything he's been through recently.
"It hurts, Rinny, having to face again that my siblings are strangers, and that they don't give a damn about me."
My brows pinch slightly, because this doesn't quite ring true. Diego is - by a long way - the one who worries about Klaus the most. Even if his impulsive nature tends to race back in. And above all…
"Ben," I say. "Ben is very far from not giving a damn about you."
From the equipment case he's perched on, Ben's energy just pulsed at Klaus's words, out across the anatomical charts hanging from the woodwork. At the same moment as Klaus, I turn my gaze toward his brother's spectral presence, and Klaus is far from stupid: he's understood perfectly well that I can locate him now too. He shakes his head.
"Ben always has some passive-aggressive comment about everything I do. A very unsolicited ethics board."
"Doesn't change the fact that he's always been there when you needed him most."
Through all the chaotic years of the Umbrella Academy, and after he ended up on the street. Through his disasters, his overdoses, his withdrawal nights. Even after he and I met. But Klaus keeps gnawing at his nails.
"He shows up when he feels like it, and dissolves the moment I start spinning, the same way you need to breathe. As for the others, I'm not kidding myself, even about Diego: if we survive this apocalypse, I give it less than twenty-four hours before they leave me alone again."
I sigh, because the real problem is here. Beyond his constant need for validation, Klaus can't stand being alone with himself. Out of fear of the silence: the silence into which the voices creep, yes, but also the affective silence, I think.
I've often wondered why Ben stayed after he died: whether it was his own will, or because Klaus craves that constant presence so desperately, while paradoxically pushing it away at the same time. In a way, my relationship with him was woven from the same foundation: the way he scratched at my window every night he was lucid enough for it these past years was also a consequence of that.
"Nobody can be with you permanently, Klaus. This week, you asked me to stay, but I can't do it indefinitely."
His brows furrow at my bluntness, which pulls his own out of him like a mirror.
"This week is different. I was there too, when your mother died."
I look down.
"You squatted in the building hallway for two weeks. The neighbors kept complaining about the constant smell of weed."
"Doesn't change the fact that I was there."
It's true. Our relationship has never been one-sided. I've never only been a source of distraction, comfort, care, or brusque punk affection. Klaus has always been there for me too, in his own way. And I've probably become a different person because of him: leaving behind the hard, angry-at-everything rebel I used to be.
"I haven't forgotten," I tell him. "I haven't forgotten that either. But don't change the subject away from the fact that you can't permanently lean on human crutches or chemical ones to bear yourself and your life."
"What's wrong with that? What's wrong with needing someone?"
I say nothing. On this, the two of us have always been very different: his ferocious need to hold on versus mine to be free, always giving me the impression I'm pushing him away. His eyes are bright now, and I can feel that what comes next will twist my stomach.
"Dave didn't have a problem with it," he breathes. "And he did it for me as naturally as breathing, for ten months."
I hold his gaze as painfully as he holds mine, the bag of my blood filling quietly beside me. I know he'd found that emotional safety with Dave, the kind I don't know how to give. I know it kills him every second that it's gone. But I need to say to him what's been refusing to leave me since I understood that those two days were ten months for him.
"You hadn't planned to come back at all, had you?" I say faintly. "You wouldn't have come back, if… if Dave hadn't been…"
I regret it immediately, stepping onto that ground, because his expression darkens more than I've ever seen it, contrasting with his rainbow T-shirt. Shit. I hate my inability to shut my mouth sometimes. Slowly, Klaus rises from his stool, and I sense Ben's energy descend from the equipment cases, as if trying to stop him from doing anything. Or me.
"Is that what you think?" he breathes. "That I didn't care? That I wasn't talking about you constantly?"
I can't move, I'm still holding my arm, but my eyes are burning. His expression, his posture, the lotus flowers framing the Akson on the tattoo he came back with. I should shut up. But even so, I can't stop myself from repeating:
"What were you about to do?"
The silence is heavy, reaching even the closed eyelids of Allison. I hope with everything in me she can't hear this. Klaus is trembling, and I can see he's desperately going to try to defuse the tension.
"Maybe I was scared of using that damned briefcase again and ending up like an idiot in the middle of the Cretaceous period, unable to get back to either him or you. Or maybe I knew you'd still be there whenever I finally came home."
Both are probably true, but he folds his arms against his chest, and adds:
"I think I just… seized the chance to live something unexpected, with some awareness that it wouldn't last, like everything else."
He opens and closes his 'Goodbye' hand, then looks in Ben's direction, as if he'd been waiting for his brother to witness this.
"He was so young. So full of dreams, even in the middle of that shit war. With so much hope. And you, where are your hopes now, Rin? You almost convinced yourself you could end the world. All I want right now is to throw back whatever pill comes first, and forget everything all over again."
My brows pinch with sadness. I know life has made me serious, and this week even more so. The last moments we laughed feel like they belong to another age. Klaus exhales sharply, like he needs to empty himself of all of it. And he adds, sadder than I've ever heard him:
"I'd like to bring you back, but it turns out I'm even less capable of summoning you than I am of summoning him."
He's just struck me in the chest without even looking at me. I want things to be different, want to make the journey back, but I can't find the way. And how do you, when we only have a few hours left before the apocalypse swallows everything? Will space-time even give us the chance to find each other again - as we always have - on the same couch or anywhere?
Then Pogo's footsteps sound again from the back door. Coming to collect the blood bag, no doubt, to transfuse Allison, who is still breathing slowly.
"Master Klaus," he says, without having fully understood what the exchange was about but having caught the edges of raised voices. "This is absolutely not the moment for childish behaviour."
Klaus exhales with a smothered laugh. Sarcasm, sadness, and disillusionment in one breath. He stands there trembling with rage for a moment. He clenches his jaw, hesitates. And finally, heading for the door without looking back, he throws over his shoulder, through the etheric outline of Ben who reaches for him in vain:
"Sobriety is overrated."
---
Notes:
This chapter lets the unspoken things that have been simmering explode. As with most arguments, it isn't easy to say who's wrong and who's right. Maybe neither. Maybe both. What do you think? Rin and Klaus's relationship is a complicated one, and it will take four seasons and as many apocalypses to untangle. But what both of them feel here deserved to be heard.
I also wanted to develop in this chapter the reasons that push Klaus toward wanting to use again. In the series, that logical thread is sketched very briefly. I hope it's now a little more fleshed out.
Gradually, Rin's general perception of energy is growing stronger, and through it, her sense of Ben. Soon, other things will be ready to change.
Any comment will make my day! ♡
---
Season 1 - Season 2 - Season 3 - Season 4 - Prequel
Also available on AO3, Wattpad and FFN
A bend in space-time Season 1 - [Chapter 21: When the wild wind blows]
Summary: Rin is dragged into a mission to rescue Allison, even though she isn't yet fully in control of her powers.
---
Chronological markers: this scene fits like a deleted scene from The Umbrella Academy, season 1, episode 8, and begins a few moments before 21:51 (when Five comes to find Klaus knitting).
TW: physical injury and depiction of blood; reference to medication use.
Suggested soundtrack: Skeeter Davis - The End of the World; Europe - The Final Countdown; Iron Maiden - When the Wild Wind Blows
---
Saturday, March 30 2019 – 3:41 pm
I have no idea how late I slept. I'm still struggling to tell the difference between sleep and drowsiness, if I'm honest.
It's a good thing I'm not working today: Rodrigo would have simply pulverized me. I heard Klaus shaking the bell in the corridor: I think I opened one eye, and then went right back under. He convinced me last night: and now I hate the idea of spending my last few dozen hours before the end of the world flat out in bed. So I forced myself to finally get dressed.
How long does it take to flush this Valium shit out of your system? Klaus couldn't answer: he metabolizes everything far faster than average. Faster than he'd like, even. It feels like I'll never be done with it. I had trouble aiming well enough to put on my socks, and I had to turn on the bathroom light by hand. And now that I'm back on the bed in Diego's room, fully dressed, I can feel how easily I could go to sleep again in spite of myself.
"Up. Let's go."
"Mmm?"
I lift my head with some effort. I think I forgot to comb my hair. In the half-open doorway stands Five, back in his uniform. The blue pajamas didn't last long: he appears perfectly back on his feet, exactly as Grace's clinical analysis predicted. He glances at me, then vanishes from the doorway again.
"Where? Where are we going?"
He comes back and finally steps inside.
"We have an apocalypse to prevent, on the agenda. Remember? Ahoy?"
He snaps his fingers in front of my nose.
"Your meds are doing great work. Can you walk?"
"I can… but Klaus and I agreed that today… it wouldn't be a good idea for me to-"
"Klaus."
As if he'd just remembered his brother existed, Five disappears down the corridor again, hands in his pockets, to go and fetch him. I sigh. Did he really think to come for me before going to get him? I grab my brush, my hair tie, and start trying to work out the knots.
From Klaus's room I hear Five mention their father, the apocalypse, the fact that he knew all along. His clever little manoeuvre of killing himself precisely one week before the expected date. Last night, Klaus had placed a lot of hope in finally having useful information to offer, in being able to make a visible contribution to the collective effort. But did Five just credit Pogo for those revelations? It almost hurts, not hearing Klaus protest. Witnessing him resign himself all over again.
Just as I hear them both coming back down the corridor to convince me to move, a dark-haired tornado in tight black leathers bursts through the door and practically flings his jacket in my face. Diego - smelling of unwashed man and police-cell detergent - is visibly wired this morning. In one swift movement he grabs his knife harness from the desk, barely spares me a glance, and heads straight back out. I tie my hair up, slide into my boots, and shuffle out after him, dragging my feet, just in time to hear him look for Luther and then announce:
"Allison's in danger."
Five's eyes narrow, chin tilting up toward him. His hands find his pockets as he sizes up the situation.
"You were both supposed to go and get Viktor last night. You and her."
"Yeah. But I'm still dealing with the fallout from what your little friends did, and getting locked up for a murder I didn't commit was not part of my plans."
His tone is aggressive. Pained. My eyes meet Klaus's: clearly we don't know everything, but we say nothing. Diego tightens his harness and continues.
"She went alone. To the address of that lunatic Jenkins's second place, near the lakes. I didn't think I'd be in that long."
"If they're serving you a bologna sandwich at half eleven, your custody's been extended. I'd say you're actually home early."
"I've got my connections."
I roll my eyes, because Klaus always has the police station lunch menu off by heart. Unfortunately, what's actually serious is having let Allison go alone to the home of a dangerous unhinged man: trained and armed with Rumours or not, that strikes me as a reckless risk. Diego digs in his drawer for another knife.
"We need to find Luther," he says. "And stick together from here on out. Where could he have gone?"
Five shakes his head.
"He talked about going to drown himself in a pub this morning, before coffee. But there are hundreds of watering holes in this blasted city: it's like looking for a six-foot-seven needle in a haystack the size of The City."
Klaus takes a step forward.
"No no no. Wait, wait."
Five rolls his eyes. Diego crosses his arms.
"In the state he was in, he won't have gone far. He'll have stayed in East Argyle: if we try McSorley's, Irish Republic and The Dullahan, I'm certain we'll find him."
He taps his index finger to his chin, thinking.
"No, the door's too narrow at McSorley's. Irish Republic first."
Good lord. Is Klaus's encyclopaedic knowledge of this city's drinking establishments actually about to point us in the right direction?
"We take the car," Diego says, already moving, Five at his heels.
Klaus grabs my arm to stop me missing the first step of the staircase. I haven't the strength to resist: I'm like a rag doll, even if I'm more or less upright. I follow them, barely registering where I'm going, until Diego says:
"We grab him as soon as we find him and make straight for the lakes."
---
4:03 pm
The plan suits me well enough.
Last night I told Klaus that I hadn't been trained for any of this, that I couldn't fight, and that's still factually true. That said, if it's a matter of staying in the back of Hermès, I'm still capable of that, and I'll be able to keep sleeping to boot.
It took Diego, Five and Klaus less than ten minutes to find Luther in front of a pint of Hair of the Dog, time I put to use searching for seatbelts in the back of the old Rolls Royce, only to discover there aren't any. Not in the front either, for that matter: this car comes from a time when people had a rather different relationship with risk. Risk? The apocalypse is tomorrow. No seatbelt is going to make a difference by then. Besides, I'm now wedged between Diego and Luther: I'm not going anywhere.
I can't even see Luther's face, his arm takes up so much room, and I make an effort not to bristle at the uninvited physical contact. Five settles behind the wheel, with his non-existent driving licence and his child's face. I just hope we don't get pulled over.
"Where exactly is it? Where Jenkins is staying?"
Klaus fusses with the car radio to try and get some sound out of it, but it's been dead a long time: all he manages to coax from it is inaudible static. Diego sniffs:
"His file mentions an address near Birchgrove Ponds. We won't be able to get there without filling up."
"Or before dark."
That simple observation from Five makes it land: I'm going to be stuck here for over an hour, barely able to breathe. A surge of despair flares through me, and briefly recalibrates the car radio's frequency band. Oh. Maybe I'm starting to flush out the Valium. My hands are tingling as well: a bit like when I trigger my intangibility.
And then, all at once, music floods the cabin: in total contradiction to Five's tense driving. Softly retro notes, luminous and cruelly indifferent, the opening bars of Skeeter Davis's 'The End of the World', which seems to be watching the apocalypse from the window of her nineteen-sixties kitchen.
"Change it," Five mutters, and Klaus protests.
"I like it!"
Five ignores him, already turning the dial, and lands - quite against his will - on the full-throttle blast of Europe's 'The Final Countdown.'
"For Time's sake-"
He changes again before putting both hands back on the wheel, the radio crackling and jumping, until at last the resigned, weary phrasing of Iron Maiden rises from the static, sadly dear to my heart.
'Have you heard what they said on the news today?
Have you heard what is coming to us all?
That the world as we know it will be coming to an end
Have you heard? Have you heard?'
"Today's radio selection is ironically on-point."
'He sees them in the distance, when the darkened clouds roll
He could feel tension in the atmosphere
He would look in the mirror see an old man now
Does it matter they survive somehow?'
Klaus laughs softly while pulling off his shoes and propping his feet up on the dashboard: these are all songs about the end of the world, but this time nobody reaches for the dial.
'They said there's nothing can be done about the situation
They said there's nothing you can do at all
To sit and wait around for something to occur
Did you know? Did you know?'
"Sitting and waiting for it to be over is certainly not part of the plan."
Five makes a noise of irritation, changes gear.
"The world doesn't even end in that song. They're wrong and they kill themselves for nothing."
Diego lets out an exasperated sigh.
"I swear, Five, if we're in the middle of trying to stop an apocalypse that doesn't exist, you can teleport yourself straight to hell."
'As he stares across the garden looking at the meadows
And wonders if they'll ever grow again
The desperation of the situation getting graver
Getting ready when the wild wind blows'
Those are the last words I hear. I feel myself sliding back toward sleep. If we've got an hour's drive ahead… I might as well… I can only hope I won't collapse onto Luther's elbow, but… I don't think… I can stop it.
"DAMN! Where's Rin!"
From the very depths of Morpheus's arms, that exclamation hauls me back toward consciousness.
"Did we leave her at the petrol station when we filled up?"
What? What is Klaus on about? I open my eyes. Outside, the trees stand black against the low clouds of an anthracite sky. Five is driving fast, as fast as Hermès can manage, her V8 engine well past its best. On the radio, plays a song I don't know. I turn my head and see Luther looking straight through me, in Diego's direction.
"No, she was right here. I swear she was here when we got back."
In Klaus's eyes I see pure panic, and I open mine wide, coming back to myself entirely and understanding in an instant. I can't see my own knees. I'm invisible: and judging by the way Luther has sprawled himself out, I'm at least partially intangible as well.
This happened so many times when I was a child: my powers used to trigger without my consent, back when my control wasn't solid. I recognise the feeling immediately: this sense of losing hold, this fear of what I am. I know it's connected to my powers coming back, like learning to walk again after being off my feet. But God, how I hate it: this impression that the slightest sneeze could send energy crackling out of me.
I try to focus, as hard as I can. And I manage, with some difficulty, to make my larynx tangible again, and enough of what I need to speak.
"Shit."
Hearing that word, Klaus lets out a long, slow breath of relief, realising I'm there all right, invisible between his two brothers. And Five glances in his rear-view mirror at the empty space where he supposes I must be.
"You're not taking your Valium anymore?"
His tone is firm: he hadn't expected me to walk back the decision he himself encouraged in the name of the precautionary principle. It was Five, in the end, who pushed me to sedate myself, and Klaus who made me turn back.
"I… I don't have any pills left," I say, to avoid putting either of them on the spot, which is partly true. Five says nothing, and veers down a narrow track through the wetland grass.
"Doesn't matter anymore: I'd say we've arrived."
In one movement, we all look out through the open windows on Hermès's right-hand side. There, in the half-light between day and dark, a wooden lakeside cabin stands among the birch trees.
Five pulls onto the gravel. Luther already has one foot out: he doesn't wait for the car to fully stop. I shift across the seat to get out on Diego's side, forgetting he can't see me: he pulls the door shut right in my face, and I pass straight through it before looking up at the house.
A slightly mossy roof. A terrace reached by a few steps, with two rocking chairs lit by dull lamps. A place like one my mother rented once, for a single summer. Far from everything. Very far from everything. I remember thinking that if anything happened to us, it would take an hour for any help to reach us, and another to take us anywhere at all. That thought sends a shiver through me, but beyond the windows set into the log facade, every light in the house is on.
Five bumps into me, and I realise I'm becoming tangible again.
"Let's go."
Everyone moves. Up the steps, across the terrace, through the door, unlocked. I never would have believed Luther could move that fast, nor Klaus, who is right at his heels. I feel the mass of Ben's energy entering at the same moment as Five and I, last through the door.
We stop dead, our already short breaths cutting off in unison.
I don't see everything at first, in this sea of living bodies and ectoplasm: only the red flooding an old rug. I shift sideways, even though I know I shouldn't. And slowly, very slowly, I feel myself return to visible. Tangible. All at once it's as though every particle of my body comes streaming back, from the roots of my hair to the base of my spine, like a trickle of the lake's ice-cold water under the force of the purest, most wordless horror.
What has brought me back to myself is the sight of Allison, on the floor. Alone. She lies there in Luther's arms, the front of her throat slashed open. She is gasping, her open eyes rolling back as though no longer capable of closing. She gulps for air, and every movement draws a fresh trickle of blood down toward her jacket. No one moves. No one speaks, not even Luther, who has stopped repeating her name.
"For fuck's sake, move!"
That just came out of me. Damn it, aren't they trained for exactly this? Or is it because she's their sister that they're standing there like stone? Klaus is white as a sheet, I can see him fighting against memories he'd rather bury. Ben's presence dissolves. I don't know what this brings him back to, but I think he'd rather not look.
"We need to apply pressure," says Five, stepping in and shoving Luther aside, because he's blocking the way in a manner that's actively making things worse.
"Diego, do it."
Luther protests he can do it better.
"You're n-not in a state to, Number One," says the man who used to be Number Two.
Diego nods, his eyes perfectly sharp again.
"I-I can do it. I only faint when it's my own blood."
He proceeds with speed and precision. He wants to say something more, but the words won't come out of his mouth anymore. He compresses Allison's throat with both hands, and Five shifts his pressure toward the side that's bleeding most.
"The carotid isn't severed," he says, "otherwise she'd already be empty. It's venous only, but we need to move fast. Rin, together, we can teleport them to the back of the car. I take her, you take Diego."
"But I've only just-"
I'm afraid it's too soon. I'm afraid of being imprecise and doing something that makes it worse. If only I hadn't taken that damn Valium. Klaus was right. He was right about everything, and I didn't listen. But I don't have time to think.
Crack! I teleport to the kitchen doorway. Groggy, the way you feel when you've had a drink or two but can still walk. A few seconds lost, but checking that my teleportation is working is worth more than an accident. Crack! I'm back beside Five, who physically pulls my hand and places it on Diego's neck.
"Are you sure-"
"We don't have time to run probability calculations. We need to go at the same moment, in perfect sync. Lock and trigger, remember."
I've only taken someone with me once before. Three days ago. Klaus. From the portrait gallery to the bedrooms, after talking to Pogo. Roughly the same distance. I breathe out, as Luther pulls Klaus toward the car. But Five is already counting, giving me no time to hesitate.
"3. 2. 1."
Crack!
All four of us materialise on the back seat of Hermès, Diego's hand still compressing Allison's throat, her eyes still blinking at nothing. I slide between the two front seats and into the passenger's, where Klaus also wedges himself in before pulling the door shut. Five has teleported straight to the driver's seat, ignition still running. Luther is already in the back, clutching his sister's hand as if that could do a single thing.
The car roars and protests, reversing up the narrow track to the small road that leads back to the main highway. Five has done a lot of driving in his life, behind the wheels of far older machines. He cuts a right of way, he runs a red light, then another. Klaus takes the time to wave a cheerful little 'Goodbye' to the driver of the lorry we nearly embedded ourselves in. I am, at this point, literally sitting on top of him, one hand braced against the ceiling. When I think that I went looking for the seatbelts earlier.
Hermès is at her limit, giving everything a very old Rolls Royce can give. In her wild youth she must have been able to push 118 mph, even if that life is long behind her now. But we don't have an hour to get back to The City. No, we don't — I can read it in Five's closed, grim expression, even though he says nothing.
I close my eyes. I breathe in. I channel my energy into the workings of the Silver Wraith II's ancient mechanics: into the power deployed by the combustion at the heart of her V8's arteries. The way I did, without meaning to, with the bus the day before yesterday. Feeling the matter and energy of this old banger as though it were my own. The way I do with the old vacuum cleaners people bring me to repair at the hardware shop.
Hermès rears up. She storms. She becomes intoxicated with herself. And Five accelerates, accelerates, as the rising wind does nothing but push us forward.
---
Notes:
Rin's power over the matter and energy of machines only grows as events press in on her. I use it here to shorten the time it takes to get Allison back, which poses a mild inconsistency in the series. Hermès, Reginald's battered old Rolls, is a character in her own right, wouldn't you say?
In the same vein, how Luther is found isn't entirely clear in episode 8. Here I propose a way to fill that plot hole, and give Klaus and his unparalleled knowledge of The City's pub landscape a moment in the sun.
This chapter was the first real action scene I had to write: an exercise I wasn't used to. Trained or not, Rin is in the same boat as the Hargreeves now. She'll learn that she's capable of being useful: unfortunately, in the heat of the moment. And that she should listen to Klaus rather than to Five.
Any comment will make my day! ♡
---
Season 1 - Season 2 - Season 3 - Season 4 - Prequel
Also available on AO3, Wattpad and FFN
A bend in space-time Season 1 - [Chapter 20: Ockham's Razor]
Summary: When he returns to Hargreeves Mansion, Klaus finds out that Rin has finally decided to silence her powers.
---
Chronological markers: this scene fits like a deleted scene from The Umbrella Academy, season 1, between episode 7 and 8.
TW: References to drug and alcohol use, description of a (supposed) near-death experience.
Suggested soundtrack: Tanita Tikaram - Twist in My Sobriety; The Verve - The drugs don't work; Rihanna - Diamonds.
---
Friday, March 29 2019 – 10:14 pm
Can a ceiling actually spin?
Lying on the bed in Diego's room, the crook of my arm over my eyes, I wait. What am I even waiting for? My head feels like an empty room. I'd be completely incapable of turning invisible right now, and it's like missing a foot, or an arm. I've slept, in fits and starts, and the rest of the time I float in this dreadful grogginess. Out of function, successfully. More successfully than I'd planned, actually.
Yes. I did it. I took the Valium from Granny's medicines. Was I genuinely convinced my powers could spiral out of control and grow into something like what Five described? I doubt it, but I no longer have any certainties. I don't want to know, I don't want to take any risks: that's why I've reduced myself to this.
The irony is that the Valium barely even touches my anxiety. The one upside, maybe, is that it muffles my awareness of everything happening around me.
Luther came home around half past nine. Without Klaus, but very thoroughly accompanied. I saw him pass in the corridor with a girl wearing a rave hoodie even furrier than he is: a cyberpunk yeti, a Cyberdog icon, impeccably made up and manicured. With a beautiful, very expressive voice that climbs easily into the high notes. Damn. Luther's room is at the other end of the corridor, but it sounds like they're practically in my bed.
I try to cover my ears with my hands and miss both of them. I should have gone home, but now I'm too out of it to manage. Even going downstairs to get a coffee feels completely out of reach. I turn from one side to the other while the room's soundscape builds to a crescendo. Is this what hell sounds like? Probably.
I press the pillow down over my head, pointlessly. And then, through my medicated stupor colliding with these operatic highs, I hear a light creak on the floorboards.
"Am I dreaming, or is someone doing squats in the cucumber patch?"
Holy shit. It's as though Klaus just dissolved whatever was left of my brain. I take a deep breath of warm air under the pillow. And despite myself, I plead:
"Please. Make them stop."
From the sound of his footsteps, I know he's stepped back out into the corridor to listen.
"Klaus…" I call pathetically, scared he's taken me at my word. But thankfully he comes back, and I drag my face out of the cushion.
"Unbelievable," he murmurs. "If someone had told me I'd witness this… But Ben confirms: it's definitely happening."
He turns his head, ready to dissolve into giggles in a way that would normally do me some good, but then he clocks my face, and I watch him fall apart.
"No…"
His shoulders drop inside his California-sunset tank top.
"Tell me you didn't. You too…"
He comes closer, looking me over, but the Valium box is right there on the nightstand, so there's not much mystery.
"Damn it, Rin. We'd agreed there was no need for it."
I roll my head, lifting it with some difficulty. I haven't been able to warn him, and I knew he'd disapprove.
"I'd rather not be able to do anything, Klaus. Five talked about a cataclysmic explosion of matter and energy. He was in his pyjamas. I've made up my mind. At least this way we can be sure I'm not the pony or the horsefly. That I'm not going to blow up the equivalent of a Tsar Bomba because of some sick collector with a glass eye."
He blinks three times.
"Do you hear yourself? That makes zero sense: it sounds like an ayahuasca hallucination. Minus the puke."
It makes more sense than he realises, but I don't have the energy to argue back, and I let myself fall onto the cushion again: I can't hold my head upright any longer. Klaus watches me, fingers clenching, his expression far too serious for the unrestrained soundtrack in the background. I have no will left, no mental or physical strength, ironically, not the slightest bit of energy. There's no question sleep and Prince Valium will carry me off before long.
"That's not you," he murmurs, into the silence that settles between us, rarer than rare. "Rinny. I've known ghosts with more presence than this right now, and believe me, I've seen a few."
Seeing me in that state hurts him. He knows everything I normally am. He knows better than anyone the engine that always pushes me toward people, toward understanding, toward fighting for what I believe in and for my life. His indignation grows in the silence. He can't stand what he's looking at on this bed.
"There is nothing - NOTHING - to suggest that YOU are responsible for any of this."
I sigh.
"Five said causality was always uncertain."
"And you're reading 'uncertain' as 'probable'? I am CONVINCED this has nothing to do with you."
I say nothing. I've understood perfectly well that Five's mode of thinking tends toward zero risk, which feeds my doubts and my anxiety. He applies it regardless of individual consequences, and factually, there are consequences for me.
"RIN!"
I almost flinch.
"You can't let this family's aura absorb you and make you think you're the problem too. Not you. Please."
He's hunting for arguments, because he feels like in a matter of days, the Academy is dragging me into the same quicksand that has swallowed all their lives. His fist tightens, he hesitates for a moment. Then - in one sharp, steadier movement than he's managed in years - he grabs the box of pills and hurls it out of the window onto the back alley.
"Klaus…"
Too late. I already hear the box shatter somewhere below at the level of the dumpsters, in the rain now lashing the pavement. His shoulders drop back down, sadly, with something pleading in his eyes.
"Remember Rihanna's pearl of wisdom, Rinny. You're a damn shooting star, you shine bright like a diamond. You can't just give up like that, let me down like that. Not when we were Moonshine and Molly."
Moonshine. Illegally distilled whisky on full-moon nights, with an ethanol content closer to surgical spirit than anything drinkable. And Molly, though I'm not entirely convinced Klaus ever had access to ecstasy that pure. A brutally effective combination when taken together. Like back in the days of police custody, concerts, sewers, and night lights over The City. His words move me, and not only because he's brilliant at persuading people with his favourite songs.
"Even if I'm not involved, Klaus. I'm not you, I'm not Diego, or Luther and Allison. I'm not trained for any of this shit, I'm not built for combat. I chill in my room listening to the Sex Pistols and I sell shower heads and nuts and bolts for a living."
There it is. The real bottom of it, beyond my fear of the changes in my powers these past weeks. I'm scared of what's coming, I'm paralysed by it. The apocalypse is eating me alive, and it's making me give up.
"And me, what am I good for? Nothing, since I was thirteen. We're all drifting around looking for the answer. Don't you see that we're all just as lost as you are, facing what's coming? Even Five, even if he scurries around in his wheel like a hamster."
I'm trembling slightly, but I'm listening, and I use every last scrap of muscle tone I have to sit up, letting my head fall back against the wall. The brick reverberates like a sounding board with the noise from Luther's room. That was a bad idea.
"I'm sorry," I admit. "I feel so, so rough. I should have taken half."
Klaus breathes out.
"You weigh as much as a German shepherd. If you'd waited for me, I'd have at least taught you how to dose properly."
He finally sits on the edge of the bed and kicks off his Converse, sending them flying across the room into the stack of lucha libre magazines. He's never been able to stand shoes. Clothes not much either, honestly, but he forces himself. So I force myself too, and I look at him properly, realising there's definitely something different about him as well.
"You look clean," I say, as a statement of fact, taking him in from the roots of his hair to the faint essential tremor that seems to have left him. "Really clean."
He raises both palms - Hello, Goodbye - and settles slightly.
"Squeaky clean. Time will tell if it sticks."
Yes. In ten years I've never seen him hold a gaze this steadily, while I'm the one struggling to focus. And he seems genuinely surprised by the way his withdrawal resolved itself.
"I had something like… a hard reboot."
A 'hard reboot'. Either that's shooting-gallery slang, or one of those comparisons that pop out of his brain without me always having the references. The important thing is that he got through it. I sigh, while the finale from the end of the corridor seems to subside into a little merciful silence. And even through the fog, I venture:
"Could you summon Dave?"
He shakes his head, staring into the void of the now-quiet corridor. Sad, but more for what he's about to say than for the question I dared to ask.
"No. I don't know. I'm not even sure it's a good idea anymore."
He blinks.
"If all it meant was watching him die again… I couldn't. I couldn't bear it."
I stay quiet for a moment. Klaus is sober now, far more clear-headed, and he's had a few hours to find his feet again, even if the grief will never end. I think I can follow his reasoning, but the Valium is still smothering the pain I should be feeling rise. I hate it. If there's one thing I genuinely cannot stand losing, even more than teleportation or invisibility, it's empathy: that connection to the world and to people that Grace was talking to me about earlier this evening. Yes. I'm beginning to really regret what I've done to myself.
"On the other hand…" he murmurs, and his breathing quickens slightly, which cuts through my stupor. "…I seem to have finally managed to summon a ghost I could have done without."
"Who?"
He takes a breath deep enough to fill his whole chest.
"My dear, devoted Papa."
My eyes would go wide, if they could.
"You summoned your father? For real?"
"He was right there, clear as I see you. He even gave me a close shave."
"Did you do it deliberately?"
"I don't think so. Everything was… very confused."
Under pressure from his siblings, he's spent the past few days trying to bring their father through to question him about his monocle. Without success. Has he finally done it without meaning to, as his sobriety returned?
"It wasn't like usual. Not like when Ben - or one or another Slavic grandmother - ectoplasm themselves to stalk me down to the bathroom or into a wardrobe. I was in… the wooded part of Argyle Park. You know? Where I used to squat in the gardeners' shack, when we first knew each other. Except the whole place was in black and white, and the shed had merged with the water tower shed at the Ap Bia camp."
Ap Bia? Dong Ap Bia, in Vietnam? Argyle Park? Keeping up with Klaus is a challenge at the best of times, so tonight, you can imagine. And now Luther is starting to snore.
"Dad was there. Inside the shack, which had turned into a barber's shop."
"A barber's shop. And you're the one lecturing me about ayahuasca hallucinations? Did you bang your head or something?"
"Yes, exactly. How did you know that?"
I pass a bewildered hand across my forehead, but I force my eyes to focus on his cheeks. Smooth, dotted only with a few beauty spots that form constellations if you look closely enough.
"Wait. Was it not metaphorical, when you said he gave you 'a close shave'?"
Klaus never does it this well himself. That was a virtuoso blade that did it, trimming his goatee with a master's precision. So he actually interacted with his father? For real?
"Why? Why was he in a barber's shop?"
Klaus shakes his head slightly.
"He used to go to Nite Owl often. He cared a lot about his appearance, spent more time on his moustache than on all of us put together. I have had such dreams while knocked out before, but this time, it was like having what I hold most dear right within reach… only to be suddenly thrown into his favourite place instead of mine."
He thinks. I can see him trying to make sense of what happened, concentrating to pull up the details.
"There were portraits of well-groomed men on the wall, the way there always are in those salons. Him. And then in order Luther, Diego, Five, Ben, Viktor. And Dave, in the spot where I should have been."
He sighs.
"That's all I got from him, when Dad was right there, tipping my head back to get better access to my retromandibular fossa."
I can feel how much he'd hoped to find Dave, and how much sharper his disappointment must have cut for it. Still, if I've understood one thing this week, it's that some ghosts are hungrier to come to him than others, and in this moment, Reginald Hargreeves certainly behaved imperiously, the way he did in life. Klaus passes his hand over his now-smooth cheek.
"I was woozy. I'm not entirely sure anymore what was symbolic and what was real."
I sigh.
"I hate dream symbolism. Knock-to-the-head symbolism even more."
"Do you know Ockham's razor?"
With a foggy movement of my chin, I admit that I don't. To be honest, Klaus has a level of culture I don't always have, and it shows, even when he's so high he's orbiting somewhere near the stratosphere. He was educated - however unkindly - and he's spent a lot of time at the library, in rehab. He almost always reaches for the books no one else touches: Marlowe, Sartre, Beckett, Herbert, and the complete works of My Little Pony. He takes a deep breath.
"The razor symbolises cutting away all unnecessary explanations. And that's… that's exactly what Dad did. He went straight to the point. Honest, like he never was."
"Did he give you the full story about his death? Can Luther and Diego finally stop going around in circles?"
My eyelids are heavy, but he has whatever's left of my attention.
"I'm still a failure," he says, letting out a sad, sardonic laugh. "That doesn't change, even under Ockham's razor."
He looks up at the ceiling, preparing to channel what he's about to say: a painful imitation of the paternal voice that reprimanded him so often.
"'Oh, Klaus, all the expectations I have of you. You are my greatest disappointment. You do nothing but poison your potential, you get the jitters in the dark, you only scratch the surface.' If he only knew where I'd like to scratch him."
I say nothing as he laughs, a brittle, nervous sound. Me too, I think Klaus has immense potential, barely grazed. I have every reason to believe it - more than Reginald Hargreeves ever did - because I've witnessed it personally: I know I brushed up against the other side the day we first crossed paths, and that, through him, I somehow came back from it.
My hands fall lifelessly onto my ankles, because I should seize this moment to talk to him. I should have done it long ago and never managed to. If I don't do it now, I probably never will… I'm trembling with it, and he notices immediately.
"Rinny, what's wrong?"
My teeth clench, but the words won't line up in my brain. I can't do it. My neurons are not capable of having this conversation tonight.
"Nothing. Nothing at all. What else did he tell you?"
I don't have the strength. And Klaus looks at his knees.
"He knew about the Apocalypse. He always knew, probably. He admitted that… everything he put us through was to prepare us for this."
His sarcasm sharpens.
"We are so, so ready. It's extraordinary. Really, what a success. But well, he wanted to bring us all together. He knew we'd never come, and neither would you, unless… unless…"
His face darkens again.
"Unless it was to bury him."
That's exactly what brought everyone back under this roof, including Viktor, including me. Klaus's eyes find mine under the weight of that bitter, inescapable logic. If - as Pogo says - Reginald Hargreeves's plans run on their own once set in motion, then killing himself was a pawn move like any other. But my words have an edge to them now too:
"So he also knew the first apocalypse would kill us? That Five would have to bury us with his own hands the first time, before coming back to stop it? That it would haunt Five for the rest of his life?"
Despite the Valium, I feel my anger rise, which reassures Klaus, because in some way, I'm coming back, with my goddamn stubbornness. He hadn't got that far himself, and it hurts him, so he tries once more to blind himself with humour, to hold it together in the face of what his father has done.
"Come on. It's just a handful of individual deaths and traumas, in a timeline that might not even be this one. Who are we to say the fate of the world shouldn't come first?"
The pain in his voice is immeasurable.
"He said it, and said it again: we were never just children. Nothing has changed: even dead, he is still convinced we are the only ones who can stop this wretched apocalypse. If there is one thing to take from all of this, it's that he killed himself to bring us together for that purpose, and the others need to know at least that much."
"Are you going to tell them?"
He turns his eyes toward the corridor, now rattled by his brother's snoring, thinks for a moment, then finally straightens up.
"Tomorrow morning, first thing. Ding-ding-ding, all hands on deck, except you, if you want to sleep off your Valium like a dormouse. I'll tell them I summoned him. They'll know everything."
He closes his eyes, squeezing his lids together as though he's been holding back what he's about to say for a very long time, and finally adds, with something that almost sounds like hope:
"Maybe, just this once, they'll actually be proud of me?"
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Notes:
This chapter is undoubtedly the culmination of Rin's spiral in the face of the Apocalypse, and of the chaos unleashed by Hargreeves and the Umbrella Academy. Her journey of doubt and anxiety is, all things considered, very human, and Klaus is the only person capable of pulling her back from it.
I found it interesting to show him already using songs to persuade and inspire. After all, he'll do it extensively in season 2, with the Destiny's Children.
Rin tried once again to talk to him, and the revelations of 'The day that wasn't' almost surfaced again (there's a paragraph common to both timelines, did you catch it?). Unfortunately, this time, the Valium pushed her to give up. It's a terrible thing, to watch her finally stop. Maybe Klaus will never know.
Since the previous chapter, I've adopted the hypothesis that Five buried his siblings after the apocalypse. There are many theories as to why Klaus didn't come back to life after the first apocalypse, all of them pretty cool. But the possibility that Five buried him before he had time to revive is both terrible and entirely plausible.
Any comment will make my day! ♡
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