Consider; an AU where it's Reginald who pushes Five to time travel rather than Five deciding he's ready, this simultaneously changing everything about the childrens lives, and yet it also changes nothing about their future and the impending apocalypse.
oh man you say it changes nothing about the future but actually?? i feel like it would change EVERYTHING and here’s why:
When Five left he was made an example of. Reginald commissioned that portrait that loomed over them every time they were in that room, and reminder of the folly of disobeying their father. If they disobeyed, then they might also disappear etc. etc.
but in this au it’s OBEYING reginald that makes Five vanish. It’s the infallible Reginald Hargreeves who makes a mistake and that mistake costs them their brother
and that would get the little gears turning in their heads - because any one of them could be next. Maybe Reginald will pile on too many weights while training and crush Luther. Maybe he’ll leave Diego in a tank holding his breath for too long and Diego will drown. Maybe he has Ben train with them and Ben accidentally kills one of his siblings with the Horror. Maybe maybe maybe
Reginald would lose something very important: the kids trust. Because in this au Five and Vanya are close, he tells her about his training sometimes when they’re sitting together quietly attempting to avoid the wrath of their father together. He tells her that dad wants him to try time travel, and Vanya smiles and tell him she’s sure he’ll be great at it (because even though they hate him they trust him in a terrible sort of way, they believe him in the way that children believe their parents can never be wrong)
So yes, Five would become an example. But not in the way that Reginald would want. He would become a symbol, whispers in the night of ‘what if we become the next Five? what if Dad makes us disappear? what if Dad pushes us too far?’
so in this au, they run away, ben lives because they run away because they know exactly what following their father’s orders could do to them - even Luther’s faith is shaken because it’s one thing for Five to run away and Luther to place the blame squarely on his brother’s shoulders, one thing for Five to disobey and Luther’s faith in his father to be solidified, and it’s another entirely for Dad to write Five off as “no great loss”
(what are they worth to their father if Five, whose ability was so incredibly useful, was no great loss?)
and Luther feels responsible because he’s the team leader, right? His job is to protect his team, and the house has become a danger to them. Staying puts them in danger. Puts Allison in danger, because Luther has seen their father’s disdain for his sister. Has seen his father’s lip draw back in a sneer as he called Allison narcissistic, but he hadn’t worried about it before Five vanished, before he realized that all of them were expendable
so they run, together, they run. (run boy run)
Luther doesn’t go to the moon. Allison doesn’t become a movie star. Diego doesn’t join the academy. Klaus doesn’t become an addict. Ben doesn’t die. Vanya is included.
They need to keep a low profile or else they’ll be sent back to their dad. They look after each other, put Klaus’s sticky fingers to good use (Klaus can’t use the money for drugs, it has to go towards getting them all food, to putting a shitty motel roof over their heads when the weather is bad, to bus tickets to get further and further away - but he isn’t going to the mausoleum anymore, and when the nightmares are bad, well, they sleep in a pile of warm bodies and restless legs and that fends off the worst of them anyway).
And then there’s Vanya, who is the forgotten child, the only one who isn’t immediately recognizable. They’re the Umbrella Academy, their faces are on television and magazines, people know who they are. But they don’t know Vanya, so she becomes the face of their little band. She’s the one who buys them food, she’s the one who talks to the seedy motel owners, she’s the one who has to smile at concerned adults and make up stories on the spot
she’s the one who runs out of her medication not long into their escape
so the siblings learn she has powers. They DON’T learn about the dead nannies. What they do see is that Reginald took one of them, one of their own, and destroyed her. Made her ordinary. Took away her powers (and their powers are so much a part of them they all shudder at the thought, like losing a limb - and their dad did that to their own sister) and so that means he probably had back up plans for all of them. They’d thought dad valued them for their powers, but Vanya is powerful and he still locked her powers away
so maybe it wasn’t about power. It was about control. And they think about Five, and the way he would talk back, the way he would cheat and squirm through loopholes and the way he would smile so wide when he thought he was going to get away with something. And they think maybe he made Five disappear on purpose, because he couldn’t control him
trying to think of a way the apocalypse could happen in this au hmm. maybe leonard peabody still shows up, still smiles at Vanya where she’s playing her violin on the street corner with her case open for people’s change. Maybe he befriends her, because he was obsessed with the umbrella academy and no one else would recognize her but he does, because he dug deeper
and he still wants revenge, maybe in this universe Leonard Peabody manages to kill the others. Lays traps, plays their protective instincts against one another
(Klaus dies first so the others ghosts can’t warn him about what Leonard is doing, picking them off one by one. One by one they all… die.)
but Leonard only knew what he could find out about them before-they-ran-away. So he thinks Vanya is ordinary, thinks she’s powerless. He gleefully shows off what he’s done to her siblings, confident and cocky and terrible and Vanya looks at the only people in the world she’s ever cared about, looks at the snake she invited in the door, and she thinks the world doesn’t deserve to live, and her power bursts out of her and destroys the world
because in this universe, Reginald dies and the siblings go cautiously to his house - half worried that this is a trap to lure them all back even though they’re all 29 now and it’s been so long they’re still afraid-afraid-afraid but Diego breaks in and finds the coroners report and confirms the death and he really really wants to see Mom again and so they go home
and there’s a temporal anomaly in the courtyard, and they go out, and they see little Number Five appear from the blue and they’re shocked and speechless and so very very protective because Five is a symbol to them. He’s why they left. In so many ways, he saved them, got them out, got them moving before something could befall them
this Five speaks of the apocalypse, and they believe him. They’ve been relying on each other for years, there is trust in one another built into their very bones, formed from the absence of Reginald there to pit them against one another and of surviving the streets together. They believe him and they accept him and they want to help
and Five is surprised and alarmed and so very very traumatized and he isn’t sure how to handle his siblings who are so much more confident and sure and competent than he remembers (they are still broken, but in different ways, and they support each others broken pieces and that’s enough)
Five doesn’t know about his siblings. He doesn’t know them anymore. He doesn’t know they ran away. Vanya never wrote her tell all book, he never found it in the apocalypse. All he found was a bundle of bodies arranged like they were being presented, umbrella tattoos dark on their wrists as thirteen year old Five sobbed and cried and wished that his Father hadn’t pushed
(this is a Five who doesn’t blame himself as much at the very least, this is a Five who curled up in the cold arms of a corpse and sobbed and sobbed because he hadn’t been there to help them, to save them, and he blamed his father for sending him away, for telling him to jump)
(Five can tell the bodies were moved at least, can tell this isn’t where they were killed. He’s a child and he has faith in his team, in his family. His siblings were picked off and then arranged together, and he tells his family that when he gets back)
and so obviously no one is allowed to go off alone, even Five. They’re protective and they have each other’s backs. Allison goes with Vanya to the park when she goes to play, and Allison watches Leonard Peabody with suspicious eyes. But she needn’t be so concerned, because Vanya doesn’t care one lick about some random guy in the park when her brother is back with them and she has to focus on the fact that if they don’t prevent it, her entire family will die
Vanys doesn’t let the snake in the door, and the Commission take issue
So the siblings have to deal with Commission clean up crews, have to deal with Hazel and Cha-Cha. The Commission know that the apocalypse was triggered by the deaths of Vanya’s siblings, so that’s who they go after. They want to kill the rest of the Hargreeves and leave Vanya alive to cause the apocalypse
but the team is flawless after years together, and they aren’t about to split up and be lured off alone. They’re presenting a united front, even if they have to bearhug Five or hold his hand at all times to prevent him from going off alone
Five does wriggle out and go to the commission to learn more. He sees the Handler and blows up her office and he learns about the orders to eliminate all the Hargreeves except Vanya, and Five remembers two things: a) the bodies all so nicely arranged and b) the fact that apparently his sister has very powerful powers now and put two and two together and when he gets back he’s like “i know what causes the apocalypse!! you all die and vanya goes off and that’s what does it!!” and then he collapses because of shrapnel oof
(if he thinks he’s going to get away without a scolding and like 10x more protectiveness after that stunt he is incorrect)
so that’s the game. make sure they all live. kill the people the commission sends their way. Vanya isn’t nearly as explosive because she’s had years upon years to learn control and fine tune her powers, they didn’t get as much build up as they did when repressed for 25 years at the very least
and you know what?? they fucking manage it. gold star team. April 2nd dawns upon them all and it’s emotional as all fuck and yeah, they still have to deal with commission crews and at one point they have a confrontation with an extremely frustrated Leonard Peabody/Harold Jenkins but they’re alive and they get to live and!! they get to all be together again and adopt Five into the fold and re-assimilate him into the family
Basically, the apocalypse is averted because Reginald Hargreeves loses the children’s trust, the apocalypse is averted because they all know how to trust and rely on one another, the apocalypse is averted because once upon a time a child went missing trying to obey their father and spent decades trying to get back to them
The apocalypse was caused by and saved by the most powerful force in the world: love
