An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
There’s silence, for a moment, and nobody breaks it. They all sit there together, bending under the weight of her apologies and the actions that she’ll never be able to take back.
No one has touched the snacks.
Vanya wakes up a day after the apocalypse, seventeen years in the past.
It is, she has to admit, a surprise. But now there are some decisions she has to make.
See My Future Coming (Like the Rising of the Tide)
There’s silence, for a moment, and nobody breaks it. They all sit there together, bending under the weight of her apologies and the actions that she’ll never be able to take back.
No one has touched the snacks.
Vanya wakes up a day after the apocalypse, seventeen years in the past.
It is, she has to admit, a surprise. But now there are some decisions she has to make.
Hi guys!
Welcome to my first fic for the Umbrella Academy!
My beta for this is my wonderful amazing friend m_class! She's absolutely spectacular and if you like Star Trek you should go check her out! Without her help this would be an absolute hot mess, so I thank her for her sacrifice!
Thank you for reading, and I hope that you enjoy!!
Chapter One: so this ain’t the end
Vanya wakes up, which is—well. It’s definitely a surprise, that she can admit.
What’s even more surprising is the fact that from what she can feel, even before she opens her eyes, she’s in a bed, not back on the floor in the vault. But it’s not her bed in her apartment. It feels like her bed at the Academy. Well, if her siblings knocked her out again instead of killing her like she’d expected, and haven’t been able to fix the vault, maybe they put her in her bed instead, to keep an eye on her. But—wait a minute.
Vanya’s eyes fly open, and she stares at the dark ceiling. She destroyed the Academy. She walked out and left it crumbled into ruins behind her. How is this possible?
Time travel; it has to be. Five must have brought them back to the past, before she’d destroyed the Academy. But how on earth did Five manage to bring all of them with him? And why did they bring her? The last thing she remembers is them trying to kill her!
She brings a hand up to her head, rubbing her face, and freezes when she reaches her forehead.
Are those bangs?
She hasn’t had bangs in literal years! Slowly, Vanya sits up in the bed, and turns to look over at her mirror. From what she can see in the light from her window, she’s a teenager again. Or that’s what it looks like, anyway. Did the same thing that happened to Five when he time traveled happen to them? Or are they back in the past?
Finally managing to look away from the mirror, she looks around her room, and instantly knows the answer to that question. She’s back in her old room, her first one, from before Dad moved her to the top floor with Ben, at which point Klaus had made it part of his. They’re back in their childhood; back in the past. But why would Five have brought them back this far? Did her siblings actually intend for them all to live their lives over again, or is this just a temporary thing, until they figure out what to do?
And what on earth happened, to make this necessary? The last thing she remembers is hearing Allison behind her; feeling the gun. But she’d refused to turn around—she had hurt Allison enough already. She’d refused to do it again. She’d been angry with her brothers—so angry, for so many reasons, and they were trying to kill her, anyway—and she was angry with Allison too, but mostly she was sad.
So she’d let Allison shoot her—only she hadn’t, had she? No, she’d shot the gun next to her ear instead, and the sound had been so loud it had eclipsed everything else. And that burst of energy, combined with all of the other power she’d been gathering, had been so powerful she hadn’t been able to contain it—it had exploded out of her—
What had it hit? What had she done?
Five had said the apocalypse was coming. In eight days.
Where had she seen the beam go, before she passed out? Out the skylight. But there was nothing there, nothing that could’ve explained—
The moon.
Vanya curls in on herself, tangling her hands in her hair. Had she hit the moon? But that was absurd! Even if she had hit the moon, there was no way that she was powerful enough for it to do anything. Unless she was? If the energy she released was powerful enough to destroy the moon, and it crashed into the planet—well. That would certainly be apocalyptic, wouldn’t it?
She can’t breathe.
Vanya scrambles out of bed, running to the window. It opens quietly, just like she remembers, and she clambers out onto the fire escape, staring up at the sky and heaving deep breaths in and out.
She had destroyed the world.
Five had been alone for forty-five years because she had destroyed the world. Because she’d killed literally every single person on the planet.
It had been her.
…
When she finally comes down from her panic attack, Vanya finds herself curled into a ball in the corner of the fire escape, tears still streaming down her face and hands in her hair. No one’s there, not that she expected them to be.
She learned how to cry silently as a child.
And, just from the fact that she was able to have a panic attack but not destroy anything while doing so, she knows it’s been a while since her childhood body has taken a pill. Her emotions were always the strongest before the next dose. Not that that means much, now that she knows what real emotions feel like. When she knows exactly what her father did to her.
Because he’d been afraid.
But hadn’t he been right to be, in the end? Look at what she did! She destroyed everything, and for what! Because she’d been mad that her siblings had interrupted her concert?!
But they hadn’t been alone, either. There had been those gunmen—but it hadn’t seemed like they’d been shooting at her. None of the bullets had come near her, even though she’d been out in the open on the stage. They’d all been aimed at her siblings, not at her, and she hadn’t done anything to help them, had she? No, she’d been so swept up in the music, in the sound, in the rage that she’d felt when her brothers had attacked her again, during her concert—
No wonder they were scared of her too.
But why had there been gunmen? Why on earth had they attacked the concert?
Were they only after her siblings, like the two masked intruders at the Academy? That couldn’t have been it, because they hadn’t attacked her too.
Had they known about the apocalypse?
And, if they’d known about the apocalypse, and they hadn’t been attacking her...had they wanted the apocalypse to happen? Had they been there because she was about to cause the apocalypse, even without Allison’s gunshot, if she’d gotten enough energy? Were they trying to ensure that she did?
She can’t think of another plausible explanation for their presence. Which means that somewhere out there, someone wanted—wants—wanted the apocalypse to happen. Wanted her to happen.
And now that she’s calmed down; has had enough time to get out of the cycle of rage and fear and panic; the question is—does she want that to happen?
No. No, she doesn’t. Her father being an abusive jackass and her siblings being idiotic self-righteous back-stabbing jerks and her boyfriend being a manipulative murderous asshole didn’t mean that she wanted everyone to die. She hadn’t even wanted her siblings to die, not really. She’d just… she’d wanted…
What had she wanted?
Attention, definitely. Proof that her father had been wrong about her; that she wasn’t ordinary after all.
For her siblings to have come to the concert for her, not just to stop her.
Love. She’d wanted to be loved.
But apparently that wasn’t allowed, or she’d cause the literal end of the world.
So. What does she do now?
Vanya straightens up, before she does anything else, and stretches a bit. She isn’t sure how long she’s been curled into a ball panicking, but it’s been long enough to make her stiff. Moving to the railing, she sits down, dangling her legs between the bars and over the ledge. Then she rests her head against the bar in front of her, closing her eyes again.
The apocalypse has to be stopped; it can’t happen; she won’t let it. Which, ultimately, means that she needs to be stopped. Her brothers had been trying, at the concert, but she hadn’t understood; had thought they were attacking her out of revenge for the house; for Allison and Pogo.
What are they thinking now? Why isn’t she dead already? She’s clearly been unconscious for a while, if it has been this long between doses.
Maybe they wanted to see if she’d come back with them. She’d been unconscious, after all. Maybe they were afraid that she hadn’t come at all, and hadn’t wanted to kill their young, still-innocent sister. Or at least had wanted to wait and see which one woke up.
Or is she the only one in the past? And if she is…what on earth will she do then? If Five sent her back, why would he have sent her on her own?
Or maybe they had wanted to drug her even more. Make her even foggier; less aware that she’d been in the future. Keep her under control in case they needed a last-resort weapon.
A few tears slip down Vanya’s cheeks.
No, she refuses to believe that. They wouldn’t do that to her. They’d lock her in a box until they decided what to do with her, they’d try to kill her for the good of the world, but they wouldn’t use her as a weapon.
Not to mention that it just wouldn’t be safe, not if she got free again.
So, they’ve probably just decided to wait to see who would wake up.
And if she is alone, by herself in the past? Well. She’ll deal with that in the morning.
Sitting on a fire escape under the cold light of a moon that still exists, a day after the apocalypse she caused and also seventeen years in the past, Vanya begins to plan.
